Pain and Power

-__-Chapter 1-__-

Peter felt weird when he woke up, to say the least. He was in pain — a lot of it. He felt like his entire body was gluing itself together, after completely tearing itself apart.

His thoughts were hazy and unclear, and his head was throbbing painful, like a sensory overload.

The first thing that he registered, outside of the pain that he was feeling, was that he wasn't in the MedBay — which was weird enough, in itself. Whenever he woke up feeling like shit, he would be in the MedBay... but he couldn't hear any of the machines that would give his being there away. He couldn't smell the 'hospital smell', or the cleaning chemicals, or the telltale smell of coffee that always lingered after his mentor was dragged away from his bedside my Miss Potts.

Peter could hear some heartbeats — but none of them were Mister Starks. Or Mays. And usually, both of them would be there if he was hurt bad enough to be in the Med Bay.

He must have been hurt pretty bad to feel how he did... but he wasn't in the Med Bay.

What happened to him? Where was he? Who were these people?

"Quill?" Someone with a deep voice said. "Where's Nebula?"

"I don't know," Another male voice — presumably Quill — replied. "And the guy with the kinda cool goatee?"

A guy with a goatee — that had to be Mister Stark, right? Why would Mister Stark leave him if he was injured enough to feel like his whole body had just fallen apart?

Peter opened his eyes quite abruptly, blinking rapidly to adjust to the new light. He sat up, clutching his still aching head, and looked around.

Everything was orange. There was a broken — was that a spaceship? — something. It was something. It couldn't be a spaceship — surely.

There were a few... people around. It was seeing them that made Peter remember exactly what had happened to him.

Doctor Strange. He followed him to a donut spaceship thing, and then when Mister Stark tried to send him home, he stowed away.

Star-Guy — Quill. People invaded their runaway flying donut and held him at gunpoint to try get information about where some girl was.

Mister Clean. Bug girl. He didn't know their real names.

Everyone was there — except Mister Stark, and the blue robot lady... everyone that he had seen turning into dust was there.

He remembered getting all dusty when Mister Stark was there. He remembered... apologizing. And that was it — nothing else until he woke up feeling like absolute shit.

Strange was looking around the group, his hands starting to make the yellow sparkly things that he made all the time. Quill approached him first, offering him a hand up. "You alright, kid?"

"What?" Peter looked up at the man distractedly. "Oh, uh — yeah. I'm fine. What's going on?"

"It's been five years." Doctor Strange said steadily, definitely ignoring the shock that appeared on everyone else's faces. "Thanos is on Earth, and the Avengers need our help."

"What the hell?" Peter whispered to himself, before looking up at the wizard and speaking a little louder. "I don't — how had it been five years? It can't have been more than a few days, because I mean... that wasn't long enough to be years! And Thanos... he said he was going to Earth, didn't he? Surely it wouldn't take him five years to get to Earth, and —"

"This isn't the same Thanos that we knew," Strange said calmly, cutting off his ramble, and clearly ignoring the fact that Peter was freaking out. "Five years ago, we all died, along with half of the Universe. The Avengers found a way to bring them back but accidentally brought an alternate version of the titan from 2014 with them, and they're fighting with him as you delay us, so we need to go!"