Chapter 1
Disclaimer: If you recognise it, surprise, I don't own it.
Chapter 1– Rebirth
Edited: 27/02/2023
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Darkness.
Light.
Oblivion.
Life.
Memories spin like universes. Explode like suns. Chaos becomes order.
Formlessness.
It becomes form.
The urge to know rises from the silence, becoming a shout of being that echoes into consciousness.
There are no words. There is no language. One question resounds in the dark abyss.
Who am I?
The answer lies in dreams.
Dreams of a life still to unfold. And yet, paradoxically, a life already lived.
Faces. Places. Emotions. Events.
A collage of sounds and images drifting everywhere.
A hand reaches out. Yearning.
To hold them. Absorb them. Understand them.
But each time, the wave of understanding recedes into darkness. Each time, he is alone again.
He?
Yes.
A sense of maleness, of sexual identity forms. And with it, a surge of power that elates him, unbelievable strength.
With this strength, he reaches out again, and there is no resistance this time.
How fast he grows, weaving the web of self.
There is no time here in this dark world he inhabits, yet he seems to be moving forward with unbelievable speed.
As if rushing headlong toward an extraordinary destiny to an answer to the first question, the only question.
Who Am I?
He does not receive an answer.
Dreams of a life still to unfold. And yet, paradoxically, a life already lived.
And yet, paradoxically, dreams of another life already lived.
Faces. Places. Emotions. Events.
A barrage of sounds and images drifting everywhere.
Faces. Places. Emotions. Events. Faces. Places. Emotions. Events.
Too many faces. Too many places. Too many emotions. Too many events.
Memories spin like universes. Explode like suns. Order becomes disorder.
Contadictions. Paradoxes. Confusion.
Who Am I?
Two answers...
Neither is correct.
Yet both ring true.
Who Am I?
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The light, however dim, pains his eyes. The air, however welcome, burns his lungs.
He works himself to his feet, struggling as if he were a newborn. Maybe he is.
He stands on unsteady legs, tries to focus on erratic thoughts, and nearly crumbles back to whence he came.
He takes in his surroundings, searching for some measure of comfort, certainty, or assurance.
All he has is the dim light shining down from above. But, even then, he can barely make it out through all the smoke that clouds his sight, his everything.
Searching for something else, he relies on his sense this time. He reaches out his hands to his sides.
His hands make contact with smooth curved surfaces. He follows them around and spins in a circle.
Wherever he is, he is in a cylinder of some kind.
He can't go down, he can't go forwards or backwards, he can't go left or right. He can only go up.
Up.
Impossible for an ordinary man, and yet he is undaunted. Instead, he feels a sense of right when he places both of his hands on the curved surface in front of him.
He places his foot on the surface as well and then pulls himself up, and yet gravity has no effect on him, and he feels no strain as he sticks to the wall.
Placing his other foot on the surface, he ventures upwards into the unknown.
He moves upwards with ease, with agility. It is natural for him. It is second nature.
He smoothly moves up the cylinder, and with each step, he rids himself of the surrounding fog. With each move he makes upward, he sees more and more light.
As if ridding himself of the confusion and fog, he remembers more and more as he climbs, an intricate web slowly piecing itself together as if weaved by some higher power.
With each step he takes, he gains more fragments. With each element, he makes more connections, and with each link, he makes sense.
Sense of his mind, of his circumstances, of his world, of who he is.
It is only the last one that he finds a problem with, he knows who he is, and furthermore, he knows who he is. Which means he can't be sure of who he is.
Two different lives, two different worlds, two different families, all collided into a single being.
He knows who he is. he knows both of them.
He continues to climb, no crawl, upwards out of this dark pit he has found himself in.
He used to be human before he became more than human. He used to be weak before he became strong.
He used to be less. Now, he is more.
He reaches up again, but his hand hooks up onto a ledge instead of his hand going flat. Finally, he pulls himself up and out of the murky depths.
He sees the sun again for the first time, for the third time.
With the light comes clarity. There comes calm and understanding.
He is Peter Parker... Or at least he used to be...
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I remember everything and even more than everything.
Peter Parker, the little guy in the background. And sometimes, not even then, he was locked away in a locker most of the time.
Peter Parker, if there was one word to describe him, it would be pitiable. At least, that used to be the only word.
Born to Richard and Mary Parker, He went to stay with his aunt and Uncle just before his fifth birthday, but that was the last time he saw them.
They went on a business trip overseas, the plane went down in the middle of the sea, and the bodies were never discovered.
Since then, he lived with his Aunt May Parker and his Uncle Ben Parker, lovely, kind people who were there for him when he needed it most.
They raised him to be someone his parents would be proud of, and they became his mother and father in all but name.
Life wasn't the best in Forest Hills Queens, but it was all he ever wanted, even if he couldn't see that sometimes.
Things changed when he arrived at Midtown High. Things changed when puberty hit, and it hit hard.
He discovered new things, wanted those things, grew greedy, and grew selfish.
He wanted those things, but he didn't have the power to take them. Then the spider came.
The spider gave him the strength to take all he wanted and fulfil all of his desires.
It was a mistake. How he wishes he could take it back.
He can't. He lost his father once again.
This time it was his fault. He killed his Uncle, his father.
The least he can do is live by his words, some of the last words spoken by the man who raised him.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.
He would not let down his Uncle again. he would be someone his Uncle could be proud of.
And so the Spider-Man was born, don't forget the hyphen.
He used his great power responsibly to protect people and fight off those who wished harm to others.
He fought people made of sand, fueled by electricity, morphed by technology, and driven mad by power.
He grew up and matured. He moved on in his life, in both of them.
He graduated and went to university, where he met the love of his life. He was blinded by her brilliance and seduced by her wonder.
He loved her, could envision a life with her, wanted to grow old with her, and killed her.
He did it again upon the Brooklyn Bridge. The green madman may have been the one to push her, but he was the one who caught her. he was the one who ripped her life away from her and snuffed out her brilliant flame.
He wallowed, he despaired, but then he was pulled from his misery by someone who shone just as brightly as his first love. He was blinded by her kindness and seduced by her fire.
He healed and started to live, he couldn't forgive himself, but he could double down and continue to use his power responsibly. He could continue to live by his Uncle's words.
But she came back, his first love that shone so brightly until she dimmed, but the light came back again, but he knew what he felt, and he didn't dare to hope.
He was right. It was all a lie. A green madman, a different green madman here to ruin his life again.
He brought her back using his wicked science and morphed her into his own toy. He abused her to lure me out and devised to make me break again.
The Shea Stadium is where the madman chose for his final stage. when he arrived, he was struck from behind, and all he knew was darkness.
Wow. I feel like I've been stung by a hornet.
Two voices sounded out after he awoke, saying those exact same words, the same voice, the voice of himself and his clone's voice.
They both did the same thing they always do when faced with the unknown, and whenever they were scared, they used humour and made light of the situation, knowing deep down what had happened.
They didn't have time to think about the scary possibilities. A man's life was hanging in the balance. The madman had an innocent man trapped with a bomb and hung on the side of the jumbotron, and only the original specimen would be able to diffuse the bomb and save the innocent man.
The green madman laughed as they fought each other to get to the bomb, sure of being the original. Next to the angry green man stood the clone of his first love.
She may have been a clone, but she was still the same woman he loved, her heart shone through the madman's manipulations, and it shone so bright that she managed to reach past the madman's delusions and pull out his original self.
Gone was The Jackal, and Professor Miles Warren made a brief reappearance. Using that moment of clarity, he freed the innocent man just before the bomb exploded, devouring the man in its boom. The jumbotron collapsed and fell on top of himself and his clone, and then everything faded to black.
He awoke in the smokestack attached to a factory and crawled his way out, having more questions than answers, he knew who he was, but that was before he awoke. Who he is now is someone entirely different.
He knew the life of Peter Parker, of Spider-Man, having lived it himself. But he also knew of it through memories of watching it through a screen, but the life he watched through a screen is different from his own since he did not know Michelle Jones.
But that doesn't mean that the version of Peter Parker on the screen wasn't real. There were also two other Peter Parkers, one who married the redheaded love of his life and the other who felt the same heartbreak that I felt when losing our first love.
Different Peter Parkers, different Spider-Men from other universes. The Multiverse.
Admittedly those Spider-Men's lives seemed a lot simpler than his, maybe because they were stories portrayed by actors or just because of the lack of capable villains in their worlds. However, in the case of the youngest Spider-Man, the support of heroes much more experienced around him helps him. I would love a high-tech suit made by Tony Stark, but I have to do with the old underoos.
Most men would probably freak out after knowing that their entire life was just entertainment for people in another universe, and he probably would be as well. Still, he had other memories that came along with the viewings of the other Spider-Men played by actors.
The memories of the man who actually watched those movies, and while he watched them for entertainment, that does not mean they didn't have meaning. Even the fictional Peter Parker, Spider-man, gave hope and helped others by providing hope and something to believe in even when not physically present in the world.
Plus, he had already seen tons of wacky unbelievable stuff, so it would not be a stretch to see a universe out there where the superheroes of this world are fictional in another world. A calmer world but a world just as dangerous where these fictional heroes inspired people to be better.
Like the man these memories came from, who was just a common ordinary man, he had a life, a family, a job and most of all, he was content with all of it. He wasn't an evil man, but neither was he a good man. he was just a man. He lived a selfish life where he cared only for those around him and no one else, but being selfish does not mean being bad.
A life filled with tragedy and self-sacrifice in the service of others, a life lived in the service of one's self filled with contentment and satisfaction. Two completely different worlds merged into one body, the body formerly belonging only to Peter Parker.
He lost consciousness as Peter Parker and awoke as someone new. He was reborn in a smokestack and emerged as someone with quite a few differences from the man he was only a couple of hours ago.
Far out...
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He remembers the explosion at Shea Stadium, wreckage flying everywhere, and then he blacked out. He was a completely different man stuck in the smokestack of an incinerating plant in Brooklyn of all places when he came to. He had no clue what day it was or how long he had been unconscious for undergoing this strange metamorphosis, and exactly how he wound up in the smokestack.
After emerging from its depths, he just sat on the roof, absorbing everything that had happened to him and everything that had changed in him. he stayed until day turned into night. Then he looked up at that tower as it belched black smoke into a night that seemed too cold and too dark, and it chilled him, and he couldn't even say why.
He knew he had to get out of there, and so he lept off of the roof and into the night, swinging through the cold New York streets, yet even as he webbed away, he still could not shake the chill he felt, a deep feeling that something was wrong. A fundamental wrongness that was as if someone had taken the spine of his soul and twisted it as if the universe itself was somehow out of sync. It might have been embarrassing to admit, but he was the most scared he had ever been in his entire life, including the new one he suddenly gained.