Chapter One: Dreams Don't Turn to Dust

A/N: I have no explanation for this fanfic. Read at your own peril. Includes some Judeo-Christian philosophy and theological problems. No other warnings except spoiler warnings. Chapter title from Owl City. Thanks to my beta-reader Khebidecia. Posted 7-31-2018.

It was two months since the Avengers' defeat at the hand of Thanos and Peter Parker was hiking on the outskirts of heaven with Ned Leeds. Peter's Uncle Ben had recommended the trail and Peter had to admit that it was different. For one thing, they were hiking straight up the side of an azure canyon. Ned had no problems keeping up and he hadn't even gained spider-powers – it was because of the wacky gravity they had here – virtually every surface had its own gravity so you could walk up and down sides of buildings and trees. Another different thing was the animals. They were all herbivores and because of this they didn't have the need to camouflage themselves and had more colorful pelts. Ned and Peter didn't know all the names of the animals, but every time Ned saw a particularly huge one, he'd walk over and greet it like it was a Golden Retriever.

"Hey, big boy, how are you?" Ned asked, reaching as high as he could to ruffle the ears of a giant neon green camel-ish creature.

The camel blinked twice and leaned over to start chomping on Ned's hair.

"Some things never change." Peter grinned.

"This is why I've gotta start wearing hats," Ned complained, trying to get away from the camel before more hair could be destroyed.

They walked up to the top of the cliff and started looking at the view.

"You can see all the city from here," Ned said, gazing up at the multi-story city in heaven that despite their trek into the mountains still towered higher than them. Each level was built with a different type of stone. Unlike other cities, this one had no smog, so you could see everything really well, from bakeries to ball courts to the throne of God.

Peter didn't say anything. Their lives had changed so much over the past two months, and although heaven was a place nothing bad ever happened, Peter missed his Aunt May, and saving people, and even school. His dad was helping them make their own robotics lab here, but none of the parts they used were the same, they weren't even the same elements! And then, he'd only began reading scrolls about energy sources, but from what he could tell, electricity – if it was even appropriate to call it that – behaved entirely differently.

It wasn't fair. He was working so hard to understand and save life and then it was all taken away. Didn't Thanos violate some sort of cosmic law? Why were things allowed to stay this way? Was it business as usual for Peter and half the universe to be killed with a snap of Thanos' fingers?

Then there were his parents, it was great to see them again, but it was like they didn't know if they should treat him like the seven-year-old they remembered or like an adult.

"Pete…," Ned said to Peter who wasn't listening. "Hey, Peter, Houston to Peter Parker. Do you copy?"

"Um, what, sorry?" Peter asked.

"What're you thinking about?"

"Uh, my parents," Peter said.

"They're really a lot like you," Ned said and grinned when Peter looked at him like he didn't believe it. "They like the same type of foods and talk the same."

"So… we're from Queens!"

"Uh-huh," Ned said. "At least you have family here. My family – even my grandparents – are still alive!"

"Remind me how that's a bad thing?" Peter said.

"I'm alone."

"Then… My family can adopt you!"

"That's not what you need to do, you need to go and make Thanos bring everyone back."

"How exactly? Am I supposed to haunt him until he changes his mind?"

"Yes! Exactly!"

"First, you've seen too many movies, and second, I never want to see that guy again." Peter looked away.

"You could've beat him."

"I tried. We've been over this, stop trying to guilt-trip me."

"It works." Ned smiled. "Guy in the chair."

"Whatever," Peter said.

"I'll take that as a yes," Ned said as he followed Peter back down the side of the cliff.

〇

The next day Peter and Ned were eating wheatcakes at the Parker house.

"So, six stones?" Ned asked, still wondering why Peter's Uncle Ben called pancakes wheatcakes.

"Yep."

"Time stone, mind stone, tesseract stone, power stone, soul stone…," Ned recited.

"And the reality stone."

"So, we make our own stones that we can beat Thanos with."

"How would we do that?" Peter asked, adding more syrup.

"We get pieces of the foundation stones from here, they're probably more powerful."

"If you want to go ask for all-powerful stones to be taken from heaven, go ahead, I'm staying out of it." Peter gulped a mouthful down. "Besides, I thought your plan was to guilt-trip him."

"It couldn't hurt. Besides, we can't get to him anyway, not without some sort of supernatural power," Ned said. Peter looked up from his plate and saw Uncle Ben staring around the corner at them.

"Is this what you've been so preoccupied about these past few days?" Uncle Ben asked.

"It was Ned's idea," Peter quickly said.

"Way to throw a guy under the bus, Pete," Ned said.

"I'm just practicing my guilt-tripping," Peter whispered.

Uncle Ben sat down with a plate full of wheatcakes. "So, let me get this straight. You want to go and defeat Thanos through guilt-trips?"

They stared wide-eyed as Uncle Ben calmly began eating.

"Yes, Mr. Parker," Ned said.

"That's interesting. Did you know that the Parker family has perfected the art of guilt-tripping others for the last two-hundred years?"

"Ah, I always suspected that," Ned said.

"But guilt-trips won't get you very far if you can't find anyone to pull them on," Uncle Ben said.

"Well, you see, that's why we need the stones," Ned said, waving his fork pointedly in the air.

"You wouldn't need the stones, you would need to go into the soul stone," Uncle Ben said.

"Go into a soul stone?" Peter asked.

"Thanos fused that soul stone with his own soul when he took possession of it. That's the easiest way to guilt-trip him."

"Why are you telling us this?" Ned said, eyebrows scrunching, Ned was sure that Peter's Uncle Ben wouldn't approve of the plan.

"Well, because, I don't really believe you'll be able to get to the soul stone," Ben explained. "I mean, I don't think it's possible… maybe it is…"

Peter swallowed, it made sense, then he looked up. "How do you know all of this?"

"I read the paper, son." He looked at Peter with a knowing look on his face. "Do you think that we don't care what happens on earth? I promise you, Thanos will get what's coming to him."

"Yeah, but when?" Peter asked.

"That, I don't know," Uncle Ben sighed.

I don't know. That I don't know. It didn't seem to help much. Peter supposed he could ask God instead, (God knew everything, right?) but it seemed a little too much of a slap in God's face. That growing void he'd known all these years, missing his parents, wondering what they'd think of him, wondering if they were even like him at all, had been filled. Sometimes he had wondered if he had forgotten too much about them. His parents' old friends had said he was like them, but then sometimes they had said he wasn't. He'd known that he looked very much like his dad, but it was a double-edged sword, because in one way he knew he was like his dad, but then that also made people annoyed that he wasn't emotionally like his dad. Finally being with his parents was a great gift, his parents didn't care who he was like, they cared that he was himself, and it was familiar and comfortable to find the traditions they still shared. To tell God, Yeah, Ned and I would really like to get back to earth, almost felt ungrateful. Ungrateful because finding his parents and uncle again was so… well it was… amazing.

Then, it wasn't really his idea to leave. No, he didn't want to be dead, but heaven was a good place. No one ever got sick or hurt, there was no crime – it wasn't even possible to do anything wrong, and he was surrounded by creativity. Everyone there was working on building things up or building others up. Architects built new buildings that were built to invite people inside rather than keep them out, engineers constructed bridges spanning through the city. Some went straight up, twirling from one level to the next (the proximal gravitational fields allowing citizens to walk up them), others were small, simply between one house to the next, and some went nowhere, like a rollercoaster but you ran along all the curves and loop-de-loops for miles and miles yourself, or maybe you might ride one of the animals around it, Peter hadn't been on one yet. Basically, you could build anything you wanted and had all the time in the world. The only people who were out of work were the superheroes, police, firemen, doctors, and nurses, but even they found new talents or spent time working on others' projects.

Thanos had made himself the most powerful person in the physical realm, and he'd spent time destroying everything. He could've built things, like people did here, but he hadn't.

He could've built up the universe, built more planets, removed pollution, and educated the universe so that they would've solved their famine problems on their own, but he didn't.

Maybe Thanos couldn't. Maybe being evil kept him from being creative.

Peter shivered. It wasn't just he who lost, it was Ned, it was the heroes he'd met on Titan, and it was everyone else who he didn't know who had died.

The thought crossed his mind that he probably should find out if his classmates and teachers were killed too, but then, it was much happier to assume that they'd all lived. He thought back to when he first died.

Uncle Ben had found him sitting alone in a field, face red and soggy from crying about how it wasn't supposed to end this way. At first, seeing Uncle Ben brought back all the guilt that Peter had tried to pay for by being Spider-man and made him cry more. He'd talked it over with Aunt May (after she found out he was Spider-man) and she'd been very grown-up and assured Peter that it wasn't Peter's fault Ben had been killed, it was the criminal's fault. But inside, Peter knew he could've stopped the killer.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Uncle Ben," Peter had said, clinging to his uncle's sleeves.

"Hey there, son, what's the matter?" Uncle Ben sat down next to him, calloused hands wrapping around Peter's shoulders.

"I – I could've stopped that thief, and he murdered you and then I could've stopped that giant alien – Thanos – I tried – but it didn't work and he killed half the universe and…" Peter shivered.

"Peter," Uncle Ben waited until Peter worked up the courage to look him in the face. "You don't have to apologize anymore. I forgive you. I forgave you a long time ago."

"You did?"

"Of course. Now the gunman… that was a little harder." Uncle Ben frowned.

"But… it doesn't make sense," Peter said.

"It doesn't have to yet, Peter," Ben explained. "But now what you need to do is forgive yourself."

"I – ," Peter began, abruptly caught off-guard by an shining man diving from the sky with a familiar figure in tow.

"NED!" Peter screamed, jumping to his feet and trying to shield his face from the shininess of the angel.

"Peter!" Ned looked him up and down. "Uh… You okay?"

"What? What are you… how'd you find us?" Peter stumbled over his words.

"I didn't know anyone here, so I asked him to find your Uncle Ben." Ned raised his eyebrows. "I didn't know I'd find you… You don't look so great."

"Yeah… I lost," Peter said.

"So it was the aliens with that flying ring over New York?" Ned said. "I knew it, and now our decathlon teacher's gonna kill us, remember how he said he couldn't lose another student on a school field trip again?"

"He'll have to wait," Peter said. "Are you alright?"

"I will be. The Avengers will find some way to put us all back together." Ned smiled.

"We, I mean, they will?" Peter asked.

"Of course, you're a superhero."

"That's not how it works," Peter said.

"But, Peter," Ned said. "We can't be dead. We can't stay dead."

"I tried to stop him, okay? I tried really hard, but we lost." And Peter felt like the bad-guy, crushing Ned's hopes, because even with them being "safe" in heaven, because how they got there was very, very wrong.

〇

Two months had passed. Weirdly, Ned still believed they could go back to life. Peter found a reclusive rooftop and looked up at the next gemstone level in the sky above. He wondered about what Tony Stark was doing – wondered if he'd even survived (his wound was pretty bad and surely had internal bleeding). He supposed that he should look for Mr. Stark and find out if he was here, but he liked believing that Mr. Stark had survived. He hoped Mr. Stark understood that even with what happened, Peter would've still gone to fight Thanos even if he'd known beforehand what was going to happen. He hoped Mr. Stark realized that Thanos would have killed him anyway and it wasn't Mr. Stark's fault. He also felt sorry for Mr. Stark because Stark would have to explain everything to Aunt May and that wasn't easy. Aunt May could be very intimidating. 'Serves him right for calling her hot,' Peter thought vindictively. He fell asleep on the roof and dreamed that he was back home in Queens chewing on Aunt May's overcooked omelets that were drenched in maple syrup to make them more palatable.