Secret World

3

    Peter stood with his mouth wide open as Bucky swore under his breath, Sam let out a chuckle and clapped the other man on his shoulder. Bucky took a deep breath before standing straight back up, his eyes shooting daggers at the kid who slowly brought his hand over his mouth to cover the amused look that was slowly starting to form on his face.
   "Looks like she got the drop on ya Buck." Sam stated in a amused tone, Bucky's eyes whipped over and he glared at his companion, his lip twitched with annoyance.
    "Screw you, Bird Boy." Bucky grimaced with a roll of his eyes as he recomposed himself. "Any idea who she is?"
    "No, she just seemed really confused." Peter replied as he looked Bucky up and down. "Did that really hurt?"
    "Nah, it was quite enjoyable, or course it hurt, why would you even ask?" Bucky snapped, looking down the street that the mystery woman had went.
   "Well, I mean, it's just you're, like, a super solider and everything, I just assumed.." Peter trailed off with a shrug of his shoulders.
    "Super solider or not, a kick to the nuts is still a kick to the nuts and it does hurt." Bucky replied sharply, slowly he looked over to Sam who had a smirk on his face. "Kid, I think she'll be okay."
"I have to agree to him, she seemed pretty capable of handling this old man." Sam stayed, slapping Bucky on the arm which earned him a scowl. "You better get going, otherwise you'll be late to school."
"But, she." Peter started to say as he pointed toward the direction she had run off in.
    "Pete, she'll be fine. We'll keep an eye out, if she turns up again we'll find her." Sam told him, point in the opposite direction. "School. Now."
    Peter rolled his eyes as he turned and started back down the way he had originally been going, his shoulders slumped. He couldn't wait to graduate, that way he focus more of his time doing things to help people.
——-
     I kept running, dodging around people, trying to get away. I didn't bother to look behind me, this was crazy, there was no way I was in the future by four years. The kid had to have been messing with me, after all finding a woman half dead in the middle of the street would of been an easy target.
    Then you factor in Ice man and Warm man, which seemed to have come out of no where. They all knew each other, maybe some kind of street gang, blue eyes would certainly have been the muscle. The kid, maybe a runner? Maybe he was the one that kept his feelers out, would of made sense for him to call his bosses. Mocha man, definitely the smarter of the three, he was the brains.
    Who knew if there was more, they could be on every street corner for all I knew. I slowed down, putting as many streets and turns between me and them as possible. I looked over my shoulder, to my surprise I didn't see anyone. Well, I saw lots of people but not them.
    As I started to walk past one of the many street corner vendors I saw a newspaper paper stand and the headline on the New York Times cause me to pause. Post Snap, Five Years After Thanos. Post snap? Isn't that what the kid said? And what was Thanos?
    "How much for the paper?" I questioned the older woman sitting behind the table.
    "Two dollars." She replied, not bothering to look up, I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and handed my debt card over. I opened the paper as I waited for her to swipe my card.
    The year 2018 an alien being dusted half the population? Half of everything living gone within seconds, and then a couple months ago people who called themselves the Avengers..
    "Miss, your card is declining, do you have another form of payment?" She asked, interrupting me. I looked up at her a blinked hard a couple of times, how? I literally just got paid yesterday.
    "Uh.." I opened my wallet and just like any other day of my life it was void of any actual cash. "No, I'm sorry."
She handed the card back to me as I started to walk away leaving the paper on the counter top. 2018 was last year, those events didn't happen, the date on the paper though said it was 2023. I don't understand, how could possibly be four years in the future and the events of last year change?
I stopped at the street corner and looked around, my brain refusing to process the very real possibility that some how I was in alternate reality. An alternate world in which the world had been attacked by some alien creature, or creatures just as my vision had shown before I ran into the theater bathroom. How it happened, I have no idea, I didn't pay much attention to the possibility of timelines and realities that ran side by side. But the very little knowledge I did have would make more since that the years should run side by side.
Unless somehow in this world if there was a me, which could be a possibility, somehow got swapped with the me from my world. Or, there was a secret black hole in the bathroom that I just happened to stumble upon. All I knew is none of this made any sense, it was time to do some research though. Time to make some sense of the events that were surrounding me.
———
Peter watched the clock on the wall in his last period. He hadn't been able to get the woman's face out of his head, the look of shock and fear. Her genuine confusion about the snap, those who came back from the snap were always confused but she seemed more so then most.
She had said Spiderling, Tony had called him that in his bed room when they first met, right before asking him to go Germany to help fight against Captain America and his team. Nobody knew that, and until she said it he had all forgotten about it as well. Maybe she knew Tony somehow, if she was snapped then she wouldn't know that Tony was....
Peter wiped his cheek, looking down from the clock and took a deep breath. He needed to find her again, he knew that Sam and Bucky didn't seemed concerned by her but something in his gut told him there was something different about this woman.