Gone // Spider-Man: Far From Home [Book 4]

bonus chapter two {Peter's POV}

"Turn right here," Arya read from her phone and I nodded, smoothly steering her car around the roundabout and down the first exit. "You're getting pretty good at this." 

"I know, right?" I grinned proudly. Arya rarely let me drive her car, simply because I just wasn't a very good driver since I'd only had my licence for a little under a year and she'd had it for over four years now, so her hesitance to let me drive her high-tech, state of the art sportscar. "How much longer?" 

"Just a couple of minutes," she replied, and I noticed a sense of unease in her voice. 

"Hey, you okay?" I asked softly.

She released a breath and sank a little deeper into her seat. I reached out a hand, even though I was terrified to let go of the steering wheel, and took her hand in mine. She gave it a squeeze and relaxed a little. "You know, we don't have to-" 

"I know. But it's time. I've been stalling long enough," she cut me off. 

"Okay," I agreed softly, rubbing my thumb across the back of her hand. "Where do we go?" 

"Go left in two miles." 

The rest of the drive was silent and after I parked the car next to the muddy road, we got out. Arya's hand was firmly around mine as we walked up the road to the cabin. Arya hesitated for a second before she stepped onto the porch, her hand slipping from mine as she dug up the key from her pocket. Her hand trembled as she unlocked the door and stepped aside to let me enter first. 

The living room looked the exact same since I had been there last. I wondered how there was not a single fleck of dust in sight, but then I figured that Pepper Potts had probably hired someone to keep up the maintenance of their cabin in the woods. We were about an hour outside of New York City, but the quiet nature made it feel like I was in a different country.

"Ry? You okay?" I asked softly when I turned around and found Arya staring into the house with a haunted look in her eyes. She blinked and curtly shook her head before she looked up at me and nodded.

"There's just a lot of memories here," she whispered as she walked up to the couch and sat down, dropping her backpack next to her. She let out a shaky sigh. 

"What's wrong?" I asked as I sat down next to her. 

"I thought..." Arya started before her voice faltered. "I thought that being here would mean he would be too." Her eyes filled with tears and she quickly closed them, lowering her head. 

I was quick to wrap my arms around her and pull her close. "You know what?" I asked and she made a noise that I couldn't quite decipher, so I continued anyway, "He's here because you are." 

She sniffed and sat up, staring up at me with teary eyes. "Really?" 

I nodded. "Absolutely. You're so much like him, Ry, you have no idea." 

A watery smile made its way onto her face and she leaned into me again. "Thank you." 

"Of course." I pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "Can I ask you something?" 

She drew in a deep breath before sitting up, clearing her cheeks from any escaped tears. "Sure," she said, her voice a bit unsteady. 

"How did you guys manage to get everyone back? Like, I know you travelled through time, but how?" I asked, somewhat anxious to trigger something unexpected, but she smiled softly. 

"Well," she started, tucking her hands between her folded legs as she leaned into my side. I draped an arm around her. "Scott, you know, Ant-Man, got stuck in what was called the Quantum Realm during the Blip, so he knew some things about it. After he escaped said Realm, he came to the Compound, where Steve, Nat and I were at the time. He explained his theory on the possibility of time travel and we went to Dad with it. He shut it down, of course."

"Of course," I agreed. 

She giggled. "I believe the actual term he used was 'horse shit'." 

I laughed too. "Sounds like him." 

"And then Steve, Nat and Scott went to Bruce. I don't know what happened then because I stayed home. That night, we were washing the dishes when Dad nearly flooded the kitchen and ended up getting water on the framed photo of us after you supposedly finished the Stark Internship." 

"Oh, I remember that picture. Was that the one with the bunny ears and the upside-down certificate?" I questioned. 

"That's the one," she replied, smiling. "Anyway, so I guess that picture was the motivation he needed because we invented a time machine that night. With a little help from FRIDAY, of course." 

"That's crazy. What powered it?"

"Pym Particles. Scott had a couple of them left that we could use, but we each had enough for one round trip per person, so we had to be ridiculously careful not to mess things up." 

"Did anyone mess up?"

"Of course. Dad and I lost the Tesseract to Loki in 2012 so he and Steve went back to 1970 to get the Tesseract from Camp Lehigh and new Particles." 

"You went back to 2012 with them?" I gaped.

She laughed. "Yeah, I did." 

"What was it like?" 

"Time travel?" 

"Yeah." 

"Nauseating, if I'm being completely honest." 

I let out a laugh. "All right, fair enough. Did you meet anyone from the past?" 

"We couldn't, but I did see Dad and Thor from the past, so that was pretty cool. Oh, and Dad gave his past self a heart attack." 

I stared at her for a second, slightly bewildered. "I'm sorry, what?" 

"We needed a distraction, and he lived, so everything worked out." She waved off my question. "But everyone got their Infinity Stone from their destined timeline and Bruce snapped his fingers after we made a new Gauntlet so here we are." She shrugged weakly. 

"Here we are," I agreed. "Those five years must've been awful." 

Arya nodded slowly. "They were. It felt like I wasn't alive, but I wasn't dead either. I was just existing and surviving." 

I tightened my arm around her. "I love you, you know that, right?" 

She looked up at me, smiling softly. "I love you too." She reached up to kiss me, and after she drew back again, she muttered, "Thank you for coming with me, Pete." 

"Of course. I wouldn't let you do this on your own," I replied. "And can you promise me something?" 

"What?" she questioned. 

"Let's never do anything like what happened in Europe again, okay?" 

She laughed. "I've had my fair share of world-ending events, so yeah, let's never do that again." 

A bit of a shorter chapter, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless! I'm really excited about the last bonus chapter and I'm even more excited about starting Light & Dark. I have so many cool things planned that I can't wait for you guys to read, so I'll see you very soon with the third and last bonus chapter of Gone!