Peter Parker stood very still in the alley, staring at a wall that was no longer a wall.
The glowing word PLOT had burned itself into the brick like it was trying out for graffiti with delusions of grandeur. But it wasn't paint. It was light. Projected light. Fading now, slow and theatrical.
Peter's heartbeat had officially filed a noise complaint.
"Right," he muttered, pacing in tight, anxious circles. "Okay. Great. Wonderful. Just another Tuesday. I find a rogue Stark drone that wants to fix my 'stagnant character arc'—whatever that means—and now I'm hallucinating glowing... typography."
He stopped, squinted at the wall again.
The light was gone.
There was nothing left but grime and the smell of week-old takeout. Reality, it seemed, had slammed the metaphorical door shut.
Peter sighed, rubbed his temples through his mask, and said the only thing that made sense.
"I need a sandwich and a full-body MRI."
Peter tried the sandwich first.
He stopped by a deli that didn't card him because no one cared. The sandwich was tuna. He hated tuna. But it was three bucks and came with a free napkin that was only mildly damp. He considered that a win.
He sat on a rooftop with a view of Midtown and chewed thoughtfully.
It was quiet. No police sirens. No dramatic purple skies. No collapsing dimensional fabrics. For the first time in weeks, things almost felt normal. Almost.
Until his phone buzzed.
He froze.
His phone wasn't supposed to buzz. He'd wiped it, deleted all contacts, rebuilt it from salvage to make sure it couldn't link to anyone from the "Before." The old life. The known life.
He picked it up slowly.
One notification. Unread message. Sender: UNKNOWN.
The preview said:
"Do you miss them yet?"
Peter stared.
Then the notification vanished. Not dismissed. Not archived. Vanished. Like it had never existed.
He opened his message app. Nothing.
He checked his browser history. It had reset. All of it.
"...Okay," he muttered. "That's not ominous at all."
By the time he dropped down into the Lower East Side, Peter had made a decision that he already knew was a mistake: he was going to check on them.
Not speak. Not interfere. Just... look.
Observe.
He told himself it would be clinical. Objective. Scientific, even.
Spoiler: it wasn't.
First stop: MJ.
She was working a shift at a bookstore-slash-coffee bar with minimalist furniture and aggressively ironic music.
Peter perched on a fire escape across the street and watched through the frosted windows.
She looked... fine. Normal. Still sharp-eyed. Still MJ. Her apron was smudged with flour and sarcasm. She laughed at something a customer said. Not a big laugh. Just a little smile and a shake of her head, like she'd heard the line before.
Peter stared so long his sandwich went cold.
At one point, she looked toward the window — not at him, just past. But for half a second, something flickered in her expression. Like deja vu with a headache.
Then it was gone.
Peter left before she could look again.
Second stop: Ned.
Midtown U dorms.
Peter didn't dare get close. He scoped from a rooftop with a pair of busted Stark lenses he'd Frankensteined into binoculars. Ned was gaming on a handheld, laughing with someone. Pizza box on the bed. Posters everywhere.
There was a photo on the wall — Peter couldn't see the details, but he could tell. No him. Just Ned, MJ, Betty maybe. Normal.
The hole he felt in his chest wasn't new, but tonight it felt lined with glass.
He turned away.
Last stop: Happy.
Stark Tower. Or what was left of it. He wasn't living there anymore. Rumor was he moved uptown, somewhere low-key. Peter didn't have the exact address.
He did know the old Stark warehouse still had security.
And possibly coffee.
He broke in around 1 a.m., bypassed the automated defenses (mostly), and slipped into the rear maintenance corridor. The lights flickered on.
Same sterile smell. Same silence.
Peter walked past the locked armor bays, the holographic interfaces, the workstations that hadn't been touched since Tony. A place full of genius, now just storage for forgotten tech and broken legacies.
He stood in the middle of the room.
Said nothing.
And finally whispered, "Do you remember me, Happy?"
No one answered.
Of course they didn't.
He didn't sleep that night.
He spent it swinging.
Not going anywhere, really. Just moving. Rooftop to rooftop. Over traffic, under bridges. Past neon signs and rooftop pigeons. The city breathing beneath him, unaware of the invisible thread passing through it — one tired, grieving, joke-cracking thread.
By sunrise, he landed back on his building's roof and sat there, legs dangling over the edge.
The Plot Device™ hadn't returned.
No glowing walls. No narrative alerts. No musical sting.
Peter had never missed a malfunctioning AI this much before.
Then, just as the sun cracked over the East River, a paper airplane hit him in the head.
He blinked. Looked down.
There was no one on the roof.
No wind.
Just the paper. Folded tight. Covered in tiny mechanical scrawl.
He opened it.
"You were warned. The absence you created is now a hole the multiverse wants to fill."
On the back:
"PLOT DEVICE™ V0.1A — PATCH IN PROGRESS"
At the bottom:
"Also, invest in a better sandwich next time. That tuna was a war crime."
Peter closed the note and stared at the skyline.
The sky was still blue. The streets still loud.
But something had changed.
And deep down, he knew the silence wouldn't last.