Chapter Text
Earth had become a beacon.
Just another battlefield suspended in space waiting for the next thing cruel enough to claim it. A staging ground for a war no one had asked for, or a prize to be conquered, or if you were feeling particularly cynical on a Tuesday- both.
The consequences of greed and power are, by their nature, predictable. They breed suffering, which breeds fear, which breeds a desperate, animalistic scramble for survival. Dog eat dog. He thought earth was petty, had a way of making itself everybody else's problem or maybe it was the other way around.
Either way, the result was the same.
The invasions never stopped either. One enemy left and another arrived; Aliens. Gods. Empires, there was that too. Creatures from places most people could not pronounce. Earth turned into a beacon hanging in the dark, drawing in things that wanted to conquer it, study it, own it, or grind it apart just because they could. He couldn't really conclude if it was power, maybe it was resources. Maybe just wrong time and place.
Whatever the reason, Earth suffered for it.
Heroes vanished one by one. Invasion by invasion. One would fall, then another, then a whole team. A few held the line, stubborn. Then there were almost none. Hope hanging on almost like a dying flame.
Resistance, though.
Resistance had a funny way of hanging around anyway.
Peter Parker was eighteen and already tired in the way men twice his age never quite managed.
Someone once told him he was like a living poem. He couldn't remember who. He figured they meant it as a compliment, but lately he thought it mostly just meant his life looked better from a distance than it felt up close.
Peter had gained a lot.
He had lost more. Sometimes he thought that was what becoming an adult really meant.
Death came for everybody eventually. Heroes included.
Death had a standing invitation to knock on every door it wanted, and it had never once let him forget that.
The cell smelled damp and metallic, His back pressed against cold wall. His legs ached, his entire body ached. He didn't know how long he'd been here.
Days maybe.
Weeks.
It felt longer.
The lighting above him buzzed constantly, pale white and flickering just enough to make his worsening eyesight ache. He tried to focus on it, his eyesight blurring at the edges in a way it hadn't before they started the experiments.
The creatures- whatever they were; he called them aliens had come for the enhanced. That much he'd figured out. Why, exactly, was still above his pay grade. Some grand experiment, some resource, some sick entertainment. He'd stopped trying to work it out. His mind felt foggy and slow in a way that bothered him more than the pain did, because his mind was usually the one thing that kept up with him.
He almost laughed thinking about it. Aliens, five year old him would've loved this, then again he was think star wars not- this.
Earth was always being invaded by something. Thanos, it turned out, had not been the biggest fish in the ocean… just the first one big enough to make everyone finally look at the water. He'd grown almost numb to it at this point, which was either a coping mechanism or a personal failing. Probably both. The universe was bigger than anybody understood, filled with creatures and planets that looked at Earth the same way starving dogs looked at scraps thrown into the street and every year there were fewer heroes left to stop them.
One day, living by the books. The next, cell. Aliens. Experiments.
Classic.
He always seemed to be the last man standing.
“Hey... Peter... kid?”
Peter jerked violently at the voice, sucking in a sharp breath as pain ripped through his shoulder. His eyes snapped open, blurry vision struggling to focus while his heartbeat stumbled hard against his ribs.
When had he fallen asleep?
“Yeah- yeah, yes?” he croaked weakly. His own voice barely sounded like him anymore.
"How's that arm?"
Bucky.
The cell to his right. His eyes- blue, or brown, Peter genuinely could not tell anymore and wasn't sure if that said something about his eyesight or the lighting were watching him with worry. Even with his vision swimming, Bucky looked tired, bruised and beaten.
“Never...” Peter swallowed again, fighting through the exhaustion pulling at him. “Never been better.”
He tried not to think about how tired he was. He was trying to ignore a lot of things actually.
The pain in his shoulder.
The ache in his legs.
The way his thoughts kept drifting in and out like his brain was too exhausted to fully hold onto anything for long.
It was funny, in the way things that weren't funny at all sometimes were, that the man sitting in the cell next to him was Bucky Barnes. The Winter Soldier. The same man Peter had once stood on the opposite side of. Standing next to Mr. Stark, back when Mr. Stark was alive to stand next to. Then they'd fought on the same side against Thanos, and then years passed and then Mr. Stark died.
Then Aunt May.
Then Dr. Strange had no other choice, casting a spell because there was no other option left except letting the world forget Peter Parker existed at all.
Another thing taken from him.
Eventually Earth got invaded again because of course it did. Another war. That seemed to be how it worked now. Peter found Bucky again somewhere in the middle of the fighting, Bucky even had a team. He never did find out what happen to them…he didn't dare ask.
Peter shifted against the wall, the movement pulling something in his shoulder that made his jaw tighten. He could feel Bucky's eyes on him and it made him want to look somewhere else.
“I-I’m fine.”
Bucky deadpanned immediately from the neighboring cell. “You’ve been impaled, beaten, and experimented on.”
Peter shot him a weak dirty look. “Yeah... well so did you.”
He wasn't wrong. Whatever they had done to Peter over however many days, Bucky had taken a version of it too..and somehow he was sitting there like it was a typical Monday- Tuesday? He wasn't sure what day it was. Didn’t that thought just make Peter want to throw up.
He clenched his good hand into a fist against his thigh.
A sharp flash rolled through him suddenly, moving beneath his skin. His breath caught hard in his throat. Whatever they did to him during the last experiment felt like the worst thing yet. He could still feel it inside him now, heavy and invasive and impossible to escape from. He tried focusing on the pain instead.
On the throbbing in his shoulder.
On the sudden coldness he felt.
Anything except the awful violating sensation buried under his skin.
God, he was tired.
He could almost hear how much slower his heartbeat sounded now. He wasn't afraid of it exactly, but it made him sad. Sad in a specific direction.
Sad for Bucky.
“Do...” Peter swallowed thickly, his words slurring together slightly. “Do you think... do you think this will end... eever?”
Silence followed.
Bucky’s eyes moved slowly from Peter’s injured shoulder to his face.
"Are you okay?"
Peter nodded once. It took more effort than it should have. "Do you? Think it'll end?"
"I'll get us out, kid." Bucky's voice was even. "Just hang in there."
Peter laughed weakly under his breath before wincing from the effort.
“I think...” He paused, trying to steady his breathing. “I think they did something... irreversible.”
Bucky's expression shifted. "I think," Peter continued, the words coming slower now, "they did something to me and- and you need to leave. Before they do the same to you."
Bucky didn't answer right away. There was no chance he would leave. Even if he figured out how to escape this place somehow, the security in this place was something else entirely… high level, layered, the kind that made escape a project rather than a plan, and doing it with another person made it harder.
But there was no version of this where Bucky walked out of here alone and called it a win.
That wasn't how he was built.
It wasn't how either of them were built, if Peter was honest.
He just wasn't sure how much longer that was going to matter.
Still, Bucky’s expression never changed.
“Not happening,” he said flatly.
Peter shut his eyes tiredly.
Figures.
“Do you think...” Peter swallowed thickly, forcing the words out through the exhaustion dragging at him. “What do you think they want from us?” The question sat heavily between them.
Were they waiting for them to die? Collecting data on how long it took? He wasn't sure which answer was worse.
Weapons?
Soldiers?
Bucky opened his mouth to answer when a loud hiss suddenly echoed through the corridor.
Then came a deep metallic boom. Both of them went still at once, conversation dead. Peter’s head lifted sharply despite the ache protesting through his neck while both of them listened carefully.
Peter glanced toward Bucky.
Bucky’s face had gone grim and focused immediately.
Ready.
Usually when they came, they alternated between them. One disappeared for hours while the other sat trapped listening to distant sounds they desperately tried not to understand. Then eventually the doors opened again, and whoever got taken returned bloodied, exhausted, quieter than before.
The next day they would come for the other.
Peter grimaced faintly. He did not want whatever was happening to him happening to Bucky too. Each experiment seemed worse than the last. More invasive. More painful. The things beneath Peter’s skin felt different now in ways he could not explain without sounding insane.
Metal began clanking against stone.
The sound rang out in the corridor, eerie and rhythmic. Footsteps. More than one set.
Peter met Bucky's eyes.
Despite the sluggishness of his heartbeat, despite the heaviness sitting behind his eyes, he felt his pulse kick up fast and sudden in his chest. His body making decisions without him.
Through the outer wall of Bucky's cell he could see it first an alien, tall and terrible, grey skin beneath black armor, moving with a stillness that had nothing casual about it. Its eyes were intelligent. Cold in a specific way that Peter had been getting familiar with against his will. There was a second one behind it, both of them carrying spears strapped across their backs.
Peter's skin prickled all over. His wounds throbbed in chorus. They stalked down the walkway without hurry. This cell block used to hold more, other enhanced, other people from earth and other worlds but it was down to the two of them now. Peter tried not to think too hard about what that meant, about where everyone else had gone.
The aliens moved with a feline grace that would have been something to watch under different circumstances. Effortless. The kind of ease that came from knowing exactly what you were capable of.
Every movement smooth and controlled like predators who had never once doubted they sat at the top of the food chain. Peter had watched them fight before. Fast enough to rival enhanced humans. Strong enough to rip through reinforced steel.
Deadly.
Bucky was already on his feet. Weak, but steady. He always did that, always got up, always positioned himself to fight back even when fighting back was a long shot. It was the most Bucky Barnes thing about him and Peter had never decided if it was admirable or heartbreaking.
Peter pushed hard against the floor with his uninjured arm, trying to force himself upright too, but agony ripped through his side immediately. His knees buckled beneath him before he fully rose, sending him sliding uselessly back against the wall with a sharp hiss through clenched teeth.
The aliens slowed. Those terrible glowing eyes scanned over Bucky carefully first. Their expressions stayed hidden beneath black metal masks covering the lower halves of their faces, but Peter still felt the weight of their attention crawling across his skin. Like they were examining animals instead of people. Then both aliens stopped perfectly in sync between the two cells.
For one awful second, everything went silent and then, at the exact same time, both of them turned their heads toward Peter.
Peter felt every hair on his body stand up, his stomach bottomed out. The breath died in his lungs as every muscle in his body locked rigid.
No.
No, no, no-
The familiar clicking started. Reptilian sounds murmuring low beneath those face plates, a language that never got less unsettling no matter how many times he heard it. One of them pressed a clawed hand flat against the wall of his cell and the whole panel shot upward at its touch, and just like that there was nothing left between them and Peter.
“Hey!”
Bucky slammed his metal fist against the divider between the cells hard enough to shake the wall.
His face had gone dark with fury.
“Hey!”
Peter barely heard him. This was it.
He felt it clearly enough, this was how it ended. One experiment to the next until there was nothing left worth experimenting on. He didn't think he was going to make it out of whatever came next. Some part of him had already done the math.
But there was no version of this where he just let them take him.
They stalked toward him, unhurried, certain. His heart hammered against his ribs, adrenaline punching through his veins and cutting through the fog, through the heaviness, through all of it. He let them get close. He hooked his foot around the nearest ankle and pulled sharp.
It went down hard, hitting the ground on its side, and Peter drove his heel into its chest with everything he had, using the momentum to wrench himself upward. Pain exploded across his shoulder, white and immediate. He staggered but stayed up.
The second alien advanced immediately. That was frightening.
Bucky was hitting the dividing wall with his metal fist, over and over, a furious rhythm that rang down the cell block and changed nothing.
The alien lunged.
Peter threw himself left but felt the grip close around his ankle before he cleared it, locking him in place. The second one moved fast, dark eyes blazing, and its hand shot out and closed around his throat.
Peter choked hard in surprise. The grip felt like steel. Holding him exactly where they wanted him.
Harsh hissing language echoed above him while Peter clawed uselessly at the alien’s wrist, trying desperately to wrench himself free. Everything went soft and sideways. He willed his arms to move, his legs to push but his body had its own agenda now, slow and indifferent to what he needed from it.
“Let him go!”
Bucky’s voice cracked across the corridor
“Stop! Take- take me!”
The aliens ignored him completely, the way something ignores a sound it has already categorized as irrelevant. The one holding Peter began dragging him toward the open cell wall.
Bucky never stopped hitting the barrier.
Again.
Again.
Again.
No.
Absolutely not.
The thought arrived without words. Just the feeling of it, absolute and sudden, a pulse from somewhere deep and unfamiliar, something that had been sitting wrong inside him since the last experiment and had apparently been waiting for exactly this.
Panic surged violently through Peter’s exhausted body. He twisted hard against the grip around his throat, feet scraping uselessly against the metal flooring as another pulse of that horrible burning sensation rolled beneath his skin.
Peter's veins surfaced against his skin, visible, lit from beneath. His eyes snapped open and the light behind them flickering green, bright and wrong and entirely his in a way he didn't have language for yet. Bright lines flashed beneath his skin, glowing through his arms and throat like cracks splitting through glass. The pain became unbearable for one impossible second. He could feel the alien pause.
Peter’s eyes flashed bright green.
He didn't decide to do what happened next. It simply happened. Energy exploded outward violently. The blast came out green and violent and threw them apart. The impact flung him out the opposite side and he felt every inch of it, metal biting painfully into his spine as he hit the wall wrong. Pain should have followed sharper than it did, but instead everything felt strange.
His body didn't feel like his own. It felt weightless in the wrong way, like the connection between what he wanted and what his limbs did had been cut somewhere in the middle. There was a pit in his stomach that hadn't been there a moment ago, hollow and cold and getting wider.
He stood on shaking legs. Almost didn't.
Peter dragged in a weak breath that barely felt real as his body struggled upright, everything felt wrong. Peter stumbled immediately after standing, knees nearly giving out beneath him before he caught himself against the wall of Bucky’s cell.
Bucky get close to him on the other side, pressing up against it, his mouth moving. Opening and closing. Peter thought he was shouting something, but Peter could not hear him at all. Sound had dulled strangely, like the entire world had been shoved underwater.
Weakly, barely able to hold his arm steady, Peter lifted his hand toward the control panel embedded beside the cell.
The barrier hissed open.
Bucky shoved through instantly.
Peter slid down the wall before he could stop himself, a weak gasp escaping him as his body folded awkwardly onto the floor. He tried pulling air into his lungs again but breathing suddenly felt confusing, like his body had forgotten the rhythm of it. What a awful feeling.
He was in the corridor now.
He wasn't entirely sure how. It seems he was also forgetting things. His hands were in front of him, resting against the floor, and he was looking at the glow coming off his veins. Green. Still green. Fading at the edges but there, real, not something he had imagined.
He couldn't make sense of anything else.
Somewhere ahead of him there was chaos. Red light strobing across the walls, an alarm, he assumed, his brain offering that much and nothing more. He couldn't hear it. He could see the alien on the ground from here. He could tell it wasn't getting up. He knew that should mean something but the meaning kept sliding away before he could hold onto it.
Seeing the body of the other alien made him grimace as he was glad Bucky was saved from it.
The side of his head felt slick.
Wet.
He reached up without meaning to, touched it, looked at his fingers after.
Peter blinked slowly, confused. His healing had slowed so badly over the last few weeks. Cuts stayed open longer now. Bruises lingered, even breathing took effort some days.
He did not understand what they had done to him.
He didn't understand his own thoughts either. They arrived out of order, incomplete, like pages from different books. But in the depth of something that had nothing to do with thinking- in whatever part of a person sits beneath all of it…he knew.
He was dying.
Someone came to him fast, dropping down beside him, hands moving to find the wound, pressing down with the kind of urgency that meant they already knew how bad it was. Peter looked at them.
He wasn't sure who it was. The face wouldn't stay still long enough to read.
Bucky, maybe. He thought Bucky.
But then it was Mr. Stark, and then it wasn't, and then-
No, that was wrong too.
Aunt May.
Uncle Ben. Relief washed through Peter instantly at the sight of him.
Uncle Ben, who looked rough but relatively okay, all things considered. Peter was glad about that. He was so glad about that.
Peter wanted to tell him that.
He couldn't move. Couldn't get his mouth to form anything, not a word, not a sound. He could only watch as hands pressed against him, working at something, trying. He appreciated the trying. He understood, in the calm way you understand things when everything has already been decided, that it wasn't going to be enough.
The dark was coming in from all sides now.
He was afraid.
He was dying.
Really dying.
Of course he was afraid. He was eighteen years old and he was afraid and that was allowed, that was the most human thing left in him, and it turned out it didn't matter at all.
He had always been the last man standing.
He just hadn't known that was a temporary title.
For once- finally… death had stopped looking at everyone else.
It had its eyes on him.
There was another emotion weighing Peter down though and compared to fear, he thought it was far more overwhelming.
Regret.
More than anything else, Peter felt regret. Did he become the person Uncle Ben wanted him to be? He turned the question over in what was left of his mind and couldn't find an answer he felt good about. What had he truly done?
What had any of it added up to? So many people he loved had died- died for him, died because of him, died in orbits that overlapped with his- and for what?
For what?
He wanted to believe that at least this meant something. That for once he was the one giving his life instead of watching someone else give theirs. That even if he had never done anything he could feel genuinely proud of, that this…right here- counted for something Uncle Ben would recognize.
He wanted to believe that.
Peter blinked.
Uncle Ben- The world shifted strangely around him. Uncle Ben became Bucky.
Blue eyes. He remembered, Bucky had blue eyes.
Bucky's eyes were blue, wide and panicked, and he was shaking Peter with hands that were already pressed against the wound at his head, his shoulder, trying to hold the damage in place through sheer insistence. Peter could hear him almost. Sounded distorted and delayed.
“It’s going to be okay, Pete.”
Peter knew that wasn't true. Bucky knew it too. He could see it in the way Bucky's hands kept moving anyway, pressing harder, refusing to accept what they both already understood.
He was going to die here.
No matter how desperately he reached for peace with that- he thought he should have peace by now over that fact. Peter kept trying to accept it, trying to loosen his grip on life quietly and gracefully the way heroes in stories always seemed to do.
Maybe that made him selfish because Peter did not want to die.
God, he wanted to live.
Was that horrible of him?
So many people sacrificed their lives for him already. It felt unbearable suddenly, the idea that all those sacrifices might become meaningless if it still ended like this. If everything came down to Peter simply dying alone in a corridor somewhere no one would ever remember.
He didn't want it to be for nothing. He wanted another chance so badly it ached somewhere beyond the physical. A chance to do better. Be better. He made the promise to himself in the dark, knowing it was probably pointless he'd stop wasting moments, stop swallowing things that needed to be said, stop letting the good things pass by unacknowledged. Anger. Joy. Fear. Love. Whatever was there, he'd let it be there. He wouldn't waste a single moment pretending otherwise.
Just one more chance.
Please.
As if please had ever been enough. As if the universe had ever been that kind to him specifically.
Peter lay in the arms of the famous Winter Soldier, the man who somehow became something dangerously close to another father figure during all the months they spent surviving side by side. They fought together. Bled together. Endured together.
Not imagined. Not planned for. But here all the same, which was how most of the important things in Peter's life had arrived.
His breathing was shallow now.
He could hear Bucky calling out to him, voice cracking at the edges in a way Peter had never heard from him before, and that more than anything made it feel real. Bucky Barnes did not sound like that.
Bucky was-
The sound faded.
Everything faded.
Everything became terribly, unspeakably dark.
Cold came in where everything else had been. Peter felt cold, so cold and he was afraid.
He was still afraid, right up until the end, and he didn't try to talk himself out of it. He held onto the one thing left- that Bucky was here, that he was not alone, that whatever this was it wasn't happening in the dark by himself.
Even as he slipped further away, one thought remained painfully firm inside him.
Nothing was worse than having regrets.
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