Chapter Text
Peter woke up falling. Off a roof, most likely, though his vision was blurry enough that he couldn’t rightly tell. He fumbled in the air until this foot hooked on a balcony of some sort and sent him spinning, the pain bringing reality crashing back.
Right. The Rhino, several hundred pounds more than the recommended amount of force applied to a human skull—concussion?—thrown off a roof, a snapped web, falling- falling. Peter fumbled for his web-shooters, click, click, empty. Ah, hell. Ignoring the throbbing in his foot and head, he tried to right himself in the air, tumbling, turning, New York smeared around him into a whirl of colors and nausea. How long had he been falling? The fight hadn’t been that high up—
Whistling air, someone’s scream, concrete, collision—
Wailing red and white sirens clouded around his head, he could feel himself leaking out onto the sidewalk and puddling away. Hands on his shoulders, wrist—clinical, brief, paramedics? Rolling, oh godd, there was the pain.
“Hey, stay with me, can you look at me—”
“-hospital-”
“—mask?”
“-lot of blood, tra—”
“Shit, man. It’s gonna be fine, come on, Spider-Man, stay with me here, stay with—”
Nothing. No light. No sound but a slow whistling build in the back of his mind. Was he falling again? Peter was numb, nothing remaining but the spider sense, which, oh, that was the sound. It was building quickly to a scream, and Peter couldn’t bring his dull mind to care.
Impact.
.:.
Peter snuffled. Sniffed. Crisp cold air and evergreens. Like those little scented trees in taxi cabs, or those smelly candles some relative had sent Aunt May for her birthday last year. The cold smelled like New York City winter, but cleaner, more raw. Ten times more powerful when he took another breath.
Peter opened his eyes. He remember falling, milling bystanders, and dirty concrete, none of which gave any clues to his current location. From what he could see—though much of his sightline was blocked by a huge mound of white and grey (snow?)—he was on a forest floor. The trees were green and brown; one non-evergreen’s clinging leaves pointed towards it being the edge of winter, which didn’t explain the snow.
He took a good long sniff, then stopped and did it again. His eyes tried to widen in reflex, and the tugging sensation as odd. Odd though it might be, the scents—and sounds, and sensation around him was even more so. The air carried the occasional bird call, and shift of wood and wind, as well as a rhythmic blowing like bellows from somewhere behind him. Attempts to turn and look proved futile, his body just too tired to complete the motions. The smells, though. He inhaled once more and on top of the evergreen he’d noticed before, was something burning of musk, weirdly, and hot stinky breath—sour. He smelled wet dog, and wrinkled his nose. It was hard to tell if he was cold or warm from his position, he felt heavy, like a weighted blanket had been draped over half of his body, and left the rest bare to the elements. He tried to lift his head again, and failed.
All his shuffling attempts had apparently gained someone’s attention though, and Peter froze as the bellows sound from behind him paused and then resumed, moving closer with a loud snuffling. Snuffling like his. He didn’t have a second more to think about it though, because suddenly the fur (fur?!) on the back of his neck as being roughly licked up, then his head and shoulders, with a truly massive tongue.
Peter yelped. Yelped. The indignity.
The new creature in the picture brought a new burst of frantic energy to Peter’s limbs, and he tumbled into motion, limbs flailing in a frenzy as he struggled to escape the blanket’s confines. It lifted—freedom!—and Peter struggled out, crawling valiantly away, spinning around to find his enemy—
That. Was one Big Ass Wolf.
Or maybe, thought Peter as he spotted the tiny lumps of fur next to it, he was just very small. Which, no. That couldn’t be.
Lungs heaving for air that wouldn’t come (he hadn’t felt this shortness of breath since his asthma before the bite—) Peter looked down at his hands. Paws. No, no this didn’t make sense, it couldn’t be possible. Panicked and disoriented, he stumbled backwards, the frantic energy of before failing and leaving him to fall in an ungainly manner on his rump.
The fear and panic crowded in, this wasn’t possible, Peter couldn’t be a wolf, he’d only just been a human! A human falling off a roof—was he dead? Was this reincarnation? But why was he a wolf, no, wait, that still wasn’t possible, he couldn’t be a wolf, what was going on—?
A low rumble sounded and Peter looked up in sudden fear. His mother(?) or not, the huge creature before him was still a threat. She lifted herself to her feet while Peter watched, frozen in terror (not frozen, shaking). Then she stepped closer, and reached down with huge gaping jaws— to pick him up gently by the scruff of his neck and deposit him with the rest of the fur bundles, and settle once more next to them.
Peter very abruptly began to freak the hell out. Panting short sharp breaths, he wriggled around his siblings—his siblings!—sleeping (and not sleeping anymore as he stepped on faces and tails in his haste) forms in another attempt to escape. This flurry of movement was met with a low warning rumble of sound from his new mother that hummed through his bones in a weirdly soothing vibration.
Peter tried to ignore the gentle feeling being swaddled in a mother’s protection offered and opened his mouth to frantically explain, or call for help, or do something— only to yip pathetically instead. He mewled in distress. Come on, wasn’t it enough that he was a damn wolf (or at least in the body of one) could he at least talk or something useful? Nope, Parker luck at its finest.
Peter groaned internally as his new wolf mother decided that she’d had enough of his squirming and lifted him by the scruff once more to lick him into submission. There was no escape. If a wolf could pout, Peter would be doing it with all his might. He supposed he was stuck with this—for now, at least.
Besides, the long strokes of his apparent mother’s tongue were… soothing. His jaws (and wow, he’d never had so much jaw) cracked open in a wide yawn. Now that he was looking, he could almost see the end of his wolfish snout and his wrinkled black nose. It might even be cute, he imagined.
Slowly, he began to drift. His mother eventually stopped her grooming to settle him between her massive paws (she really was one big ass wolf) and rest her head beside him. He wondered vaguely why they weren’t in a den—wolves have dens, right? Then he was gone.
.:.
Peter had a weird and kaleidoscopic dream when sleep came for him. Strange, but rather illuminating concerning his current situation, in its own way. Distant shapes and blurry sounds floated through his consciousness, coalescing into solid forms before sliding away into a mess of color once more.
The parts of the scene that he could make out looked a bit like an open-concept office of sorts, maybe a newsroom, or those rows of chairs and computer banks from old space movies where the astronaut would call down from space a confirmation of life and the whole room would erupt in spontaneous cheering—not very effective as a means of preserving that life, if you asked Peter, but no one did.
Snapshots of conversation filtered through his mind, the dream seeming to zoom in then track away to somewhere else like a camera focused on sound.
Peter caught bits and pieces:
“—catch the game last night?”
“Oh yeah, great shot, that Mulligan—”
And:
“Thanks for dinner! That lasagna was delicious!”
“Oh, Conard makes it, I’ll have him send you the recipe, if you want.”
“That would be great, I—”
As well as:
“Check that last line, Mary, we don’t want any mistakes like yesterday.”
“Oh go easy on him David, he’s just an intern, he didn’t mean any harm.”
“They don’t have to mean it.”
“Well there’s nothing to be done now anyway.”
As that snippet skipped away into the wall of sound and color, Peter wondered distantly about the intern and his mistake. He’d made plenty of his own when he was an intern at StarkTech too. As if listening to his thoughts—hell, it was in his head so it probably was—the dream sped off toward another bubble of conversation.
“I thought I checked them all though!”
“It’s alright Miles, no one blames you. Running on eight cups of coffee and seventy two hours with no sleep will make anyone a bit fuzzy.”
“…I know I fucked up Micheal, you don’t have to patronize me.”
“Little glitches in reincarnation coding happen all the time, kid, it’s really not a big deal. Do you hear the timeline sirens going off, cause I don’t. I’m sure it’ll barely do anything anyway.”
Something in Peter buzzed, and it wasn’t his spider-sense (which had been suspiciously missing, now that he realized it, but he supposed that made sense if this truly was a new life entirely). Reincarnation, he thought. Followed closely by oh, guess I am dead then. And what kind of cosmic coding error reincarnates someone with their memories? Doesn’t seem cool at all. Yeah you fucked up Miles, and three guesses says now I have to deal with it!
Then the sounds faded back to smears of kaleidoscopic tiltawhirl and the dream office blurred once more into places and words that left Peter as soon as they came.
.:.
When Peter woke, he moved. Once more wiggling out of his mother’s clutches, he scrambled for freedom in the open snow. The vivid memory of his dream was fresh in his mind as he shook his tiny furry body vigorously in the cool air. He wouldn’t usually be one to trust random dream shit, but as someone Avengers adjacent, he kind of dealt with this kind of cooky magic/dream/you name it stuff on a regular basis.
So if his dream were to be believed, he was indeed dead, reincarnated, and most importantly, stuck here. As a wolf (with no apparent den, or pack, or food source, which was concerning).
Damn Parker luck. Just had to be him, didn’t it?
Just… had to be him. God, he missed them all already.
Peter shoved aside the thoughts of home harshly, shaking his furry head in the snow. Something to dwell on later, for now there was exploring to do and survival to ensure.
A loud snort and a wet nose pushed under the thick fur of Peter’s flank had him yelping and spinning around, torn from his thoughts. Paws flailing and ears pinned back (and wasn’t that weird), Peter turned on his assailant, only to find another young furry face staring back at him, cute and bemused.
Peter stared. Was that… what he looked like? Ignoring his equally adventurous sibling for the moment, Peter turned to his own small body to truly examine and explore it. Holy hell, he was tiny; there wasn’t much to explore! He couldn’t weigh more than a few pounds, even!
It was as Peter was examining the body he’d found himself in that he came to a sudden and quite shocking realization. He was no longer a he.
Peter had nothing against the transgender community, in fact he regularly volunteered at shelters for trans teens and helped those who were on the streets—or, he used to. But he’d never personally identified as a gender other than male. LGBTQ, yes (gay, Peter was very gay, thanks for that realization, Keener), but not trans.
This was… so, so weird.
Peter sat down again (more fell on his butt, but who’s counting) from the sheer shock of it all (dying will take a lot out of you). His sibling decided that they’d had enough of his weirdness and came to investigate. An inquisitive nose and seeking paws assaulted Peter gently, prickly whiskers tickling where they poked through fur to his sensitive skin (he’d never really thought of wolves as having whiskers, but, well, you learn something new every day (Peter fought the growing urge to laugh hysterically)).
The nose his brother(? Brother.) pushed under his armpit drew Peter once more out of his thoughts, and before he knew it, they were tussling on the dead leaf-carpeted forest floor. Somewhere along the way, two more sets of paws and jaws joined the rolling and roughhousing, tails wagging and cuteness overloading.
This… Peter thought as he flopped over his sister’s back with a tuckered-out puppy grin, for once the good kind of tired after along day, this, he might be able to get used to.
Maybe.
.:.
Mother’s bark was a thunderclap of sound to Peter’s young ears. From what he’d heard in the last week or two that he’d been in this strange snow-speckled world, his ears were nearly as good as a wolf as they had been after the bite. Nearly. He could hear his mother’s strong rhythmic heartbeat and his sibling’s faint pitter-patter hearts beating in tune, but not the skitter of bugs beneath the dirt below them. The shuffling of small prey through the shrubby ground cover, but not the faintest whistle of wind through the tops of the pines overhead.
They’d been out in the elements the entire time he’d been here; Peter hadn’t yet discovered why they weren’t in a cave or den or something, but his mother had always made sure to shelter them with a combination of trees and her body when the cold night winds buffeted the forest, so they’d been alright so far. In terms of shelter, at least; food, not so much. Mother had left them for a short while a few days before and brought back a few rabbits when she returned much later. The pups had fed, but she had caught nothing big enough to sustain herself. They weren’t regular wolves, Peter had learned; compared to the rabbits (and hell, the trees and bushes too), they were far to big (well, mother was. He and the other pups were growing rapidly, but were not even the size of the average lapdog yet).
There’d been no food in days except mother’s milk (which weird enough as it was, Peter was reluctant to take anyway when the lager creature was already so weak from starvation) which she rarely offered in any case. Everyone was hungry. One of Peter’s brothers had taken to eating the bark off of trees—of trying to, before Peter caught him and made him cough it back up. He didn’t know the first thing about wolves, aside from the experience being one for a few weeks had granted him, but though he’d heard of vegan dog diets, he doubted eating raw plants was good for them.
Someone, namely Peter’s sister—who he’d arbitrarily decided must be younger than him wolf-wise purely because of her lack of responsibility—had gone wandering away from their mother as they moved slowly through the forest and gotten herself noticed by one of the area’s premiere authorities on territorial attitudes. That is, a big, angry buck, who was altogether rather displeased with their encroachment on his turf.
And while mother may be a certified Big Ass Wolf, she was still only the size of a small horse, and in her weakened state, not entirely fit to fight off a fully pissed off eight point stag. Thus the booming barks to warn her even more vulnerable pups away from the prancing foe. Peter snatched at his brother’s shaggy black fur with his teeth, catching a fold of skin along the pup’s spine and dragging him away from the stag. The smaller pup’s whining barks joined to volley of their mother’s, now turned to warning off the stag.
It must’ve been mating season or something, Peter thought, because the stag would not be deterred. He would fully admit that he had always been a city boy, and aside from one misguided family bonding trip disguised as camping when Ben was around, Peter had never really been out in the wild. If he knew next to nothing about wolves, he knew even less about deer.
Then, the buck charged forward, antlers lowered threateningly, and mother went on the defense. She got a few good swipes in, defending her pups to the last, but eventually her strength failed her, and Peter watched in numb horror has the main comfort to him in this new struggle for life died a painful, brutal death. She took the deer with her though, as Peter stood, frozen and useless. He didn’t even know if canines could cry.
He could shield his siblings from the gore of antlers stuck through their mother’s throat, if he had to, but Peter couldn’t keep them safe from the cold winds of night all on his own. With a chill in his heart and screaming in his head, he huddled his siblings against their dead mother’s side, to shelter through the night. He didn’t know what he’d do when dawn came, but he knew for sure that it involved getting them all far away from this ghastly scene.
.:.
Peter woke to voices. Human voices.
A thud-clop of hooves (horses?) and a jangle of metal. A snick of bared steel, and shouted conversation. Laughter.
Suddenly he was being lifted, up, up, up, and carried away to a new and different existence. He squirmed around in gloved hands (leather? Why were they all dressed like they were going to the Ren Faire—?) to look back at his mother. She’d loved her pups, he thought (he did too). He was going to miss her. She’d died to protect them all while he stood frozen and useless. It would not happen again. He was (isn’t, used to be, will always be) Spider-Man, for Christ’s sake, if he could take down super villains on the weekly, he could protect a few puppies.
Goodbye, mother. I will keep them safe, even when you can’t.
.:.
Sansa Stark, daughter of Ned, and protecting some puppies just got a lot more complicated. Peter wasn’t the world’s (his world’s) biggest Game of Thrones fan, but he was a professional Meme Lord. He knew quite well that winter, and all its unholy baggage, is always coming.