The Weight of Us ｡ Peter Parker [3]

1 - Sign of the Times

I had a dream where the world was fading; dawn to dust, bone to ash, flesh to nothing. A nightmare that filled homes with guilt and despair, that haunted mothers and fathers and siblings and children. A dream where the world turned to darkness and the only light that remained was screaming babies that were not grown enough to realise the pain, the loss that had just occurred. A nightmare where my skin started to crumble; started to detangle and fade away like somebody had blown out a candle. But this dream, this nightmare, was anything but something that lived inside my mind. It was a vision. A prophecy that shared the sign of the times, the beginning of the end. A vision that I did not stop. 

That was the funny thing about my powers; they painted a future in my head, planted the seeds that would unravel the world, but despite everything, all my long nights sitting awake while trying to straighten out the web of predictions, sometimes there was no easy way to fix what would soon unfold. Sometimes there was no simple way to stop the inevitable. Sometimes, messing around with the hands of fate got friends killed. That was a lesson we had all learned the long and hard way. 

I had seen the event the world now called The Blip, where millions of innocent lives vanished from existence months before it was upon us. It had been a nightmare haunting the insides of my mind for a very long time. I had seen faces I did not know fade into nothing and I had seen myself blink from reality. I had seen my own death and there had been nothing I could do to stop it. Because most of the time, you could not stop fate. Even when you really wanted to. 

The day had started like any other; a delicate sun peaking through the clouds, the smell of burning bacon from downstairs and a text message from my boyfriend wishing me a great day without him. Peter Parker and most of the chemistry class were heading out of the city on a field trip and I was helping Mary Jane Watson hold auditions for the new musical. There had been nothing special about the day it happened; only that it was the day it all began. There was no tightness in my chest, no deep fear that today would be the end of the world. There had been nothing at all, nothing until a giant circular spaceship had hovered over New York. The start of all the chaos. 

I had been in the middle of my calculus class when The Blip happened, jotting down notes and rolling my eyes across at Clayton Cole, who was cracking some dirty joke. Mary Jane had been writing an answer to a question on the blackboard with confidence and Flash Thompson had been planning his new venture called Flashmob. Michelle Jones had been doodling away on her lined paper and our teacher was busy grading exams. We had all been so oblivious. 

Clayton Cole was the first. 

Then Flash Thompson. 

Doreen Green followed, her screams leaving a hole in my aching chest. 

I blinked once, twice, three times and half my calculus class was just gone. Mary Jane Watson had been pushing her way towards me in a mad hurry. Maybe she had seen the top half of my shoulders start to fade away, start to crumble into dust. Maybe she had just been too scared to be standing alone. Her hand had reached for my own but when my fingers almost touched her own, they vanished into the air around us. 

There had been a strange feeling crawling up my spine in that very moment; a fear that had circled around in my head for far too long. Suddenly, I was reliving the vision that had shown me the ending of time and before I could tell her everything would alright or even think about the boy who hadn't been answering my calls since getting off that bus in the middle of an alien attack. There was just me in the middle of my class and then, there was nothing. 

And then I woke up. 

Clayton Cole was still sitting beside me. Flash Thompson was still seated near the windows and Doreen Green was in the exact same position she had been before everything faded away. We were all in the exact same place, but in the future.