—and honestly I think I'm projecting

Refer to the last chapter for Peter's recollection of the recent events

Previously:

Hiccup and Toothless relaxed with everyone in the tower after the battle, and witness Spider-Man reveal his identity.

Now:

The authors note at the end is kind of important, I'd love it if you'd please read it 😊
(Not edited)
Hiccup's POV

The Good Stephen reappears at midday the next day, after much of the night was spent partying and the morning was spent sleeping off the drinks and the injuries still carried from battle. Not in our rooms, no, we all crashed in the lounge room. Those of us that didn't drink—myself, the twins, Peter and Bruce— still passed out anyway, possibly from exhaustion.

"We figured it out." He stands in the middle of the room. I look at Toothless, who looks back at me in anticipation and a hint of wariness. I know that this Strange disappeared from the battle when Sam got hurt, only reappearing briefly to save our asses after we killed the evil him before vanishing again. He wasn't here when we got back to the tower at the end of the battle.

"You mean...?" I'm almost afraid to ask. I sit up. Everyone else is still asleep.

"You're going home." He gives me a smile, which is interesting considering I haven't seen him smile even once since I got here. It doesn't make me feel any better, though. The gravity of the situation still rests on my shoulders. Stay. Go.

I know he's been trying to get us home since we got here, but I also know I'm not as excited as I would have been a few days ago to find out I can go home. I take a second to think about his words. Home? Is that what I want? I glance at Toothless, who's already looking at me with rounded, soft eyes. Telling me that the decision is on me.

"Well, sir, I've been thinking..." I take a deep breath and look back to Strange. "I'm not so sure I want to... go home." I admit.

"And why is that?" He asks. He doesn't sound impressed.

"Well, I'm not sure there's going to be a home for us to return to. He said— he said that he'd destroyed everything." I rub my hand over Toothless' head as I talk, trying to keep myself grounded. "I don't think I could— I can't face seeing that."

He gives an exasperated scoff. "So you'd rather give up the opportunity to go home because of a chance that the other me was telling the truth?"

I give a thin smile, "Do you consider yourself to be a liar, Stephen?"

He doesn't answer to that.

"Hiccup?" I look over, hearing my name. Peter is looking at me from his position on one of the long soft seats. "Are you sure about this?"
I guess he'd heard us talking.

I sigh, dragging a hand down my face. "No, of course not, but I'm not willing to take the risk. I'd rather never see Astrid again then see her hurt. Or—or..."

"Will staying here help you?" When I don't respond he continues. "I noticed the... change. You're not you anymore."

I want to say You don't know that. I want to snap at him that he's known me for two days and that there's no way he is even remotely close to really knowing me. But I don't say that. Because I know he's right.

"Maybe I have." I respond simply. "Maybe I'll never be the same again."

"Hiccup, you don't know that—" Natasha is awake now, too, apparently. But I cut her off.

"BUT MAYBE..." I lower my voice, trying not to get frustrated. "Maybe I do. And maybe I want to help people... here. Maybe I could find a place in this world, this...city." I pull out my notebook and flip haphazardly through it, seeing flashes of memories. Old Berk. Dad. Mum. The gang. Astrid. Practically countless maps of the places I've been. I toss the notebook on the ground in front of us, with it flipped open to an old sketch I'd done of the village at New Berk. "That life is behind me. Gone. This here?" I gesture around us. "You people? Maybe this is our new life."

"You don't even know what you're saying!" Dr Strange snaps.

"But, wait, sir, maybe Hiccup has a point." Peter objects, turning to Dr Strange.

"You shut up!" Dr Strange exclaims and Peter steps back, holding out his hands in surprise. Tony jolts up from where he'd been asleep on a chair across the room, suddenly alert. "You have no knowledge on the multiverse!"

"Sorry, dr Strange, sir," Peter rambles, "but— no! I don't think him staying is such a bad idea! How could it be bad?"

"The last time you fucked around with the multiverse you almost ended it all!"

"Hey!" Tony snaps.

"Wait, what?" Peter has never looked more confused. "What are you talking about?" Tony has already stood up and is walking right up to Stephen.

"Leave the kid out of this. You know you're twisting your words."

"For once in your life keep your loud mouthed opinions to yourself!"

"Don't you forget I saw it too." Tony's face is calm and emotionless, which is a vast contrast to the tome of his voice, tense and strained. "I was right.there." He jabs his finger into Stephen's chest.

"Then you know how dangerous it is to fool around with the multiverse! You know just being here can result in destruction."  Stephen retorts. A quick glance around the room tells me that Steve, Sam and Kate are wide awake.

"I don't care what you think, you don't go hurling insults at the kid for no reason!" Tony snaps. "And don't you know that the other Peter is not our Peter? Or have you forgotten that, too. Because as long as we're pretending they're the same, this we may as well say that all of this is your goddamn fault."

I glance at Toothless. "I don't think this is about us anymore, bud." I mutter. He gives a low rumble of agreement, eyes surveying the situation. Tony doesn't stop talking.

"All of it. His aunt. The entire fucking world forgetting he exists. He is alone in that world. Not to mention that you, unlike me, are still alive in that world! You could have helped him with the whole Mysterio thing. Instead you stand by until it all goes to shit, then you go oh let's brainwash the entire planet and NOT EXPLAIN IT FIRST. But that's just that world. The jackass that just attacked us, the one playing god and trying to wipe us out, is also a Strange, funny enough. You know the one? Yeah, the one that got to Peter and made him flatline."

"What?!" A crash sounds and my head whips around to see May standing in the doorway, what was once a plate of mugs now shattered at her feet. "What did you just say?"

Peter goes into damage control mode. "No no no, May, it's ok, it's alright!"

"So as long as you want to pretend you're some so-called multiverse protector then you need to pull your head out of your ass!" Tony finishes. "I don't need magic to kick your ass!"

"What is going on?!" Kate exclaims. Steve is looking at each speaker, looking increasingly overwhelmed as it escalates.

"What do you mean it's ok?!" May is yelling in the background and Peter is trying to console her.

"It's not what it sounds like? It wasn't that bad? Uhhh, I'm sorry May I really didn't want you to find out this way!" Peter is scrambling for words, shrinking in on himself and expressing himself with wide arm movements— like I used to when I was younger and trying to talk my angry father down after I'd just screwed up.

"Them just being here risks it all!" Stephen yells, pointing over at me.

"Uh, hellooo? I'm right here, you know." Dagur raises his arm dramatically.

"I'll get to you in a minute." Stephen snaps, pointing at him and also the twins.

"Aaand it's back to being about us." I whisper to Toothless, then speak up. "Alright, look, I made my decision, we're staying. And if you don't like us, we'll just fly somewhere else. I'm sure this world is big."

"You don't get to make calls like that!" Strange yells at me. Everyone else is awake, not that I pay them any mind.

"Almost everything that I've done since I got here had been against my will. This is my life, it's my choice!" I retaliate. "If I go back, I'll break. Do you really want that on your conscious? Because it will tear me apart when I return to find my betrothed dead and my people massacred. There's no telling what I'll do! And if you have no problems with that... then maybe you shouldn't call yourself a hero."

"It's not that simple!" Strange shakes his head. "You staying here risks the very fabric of reality from tearing itself apart. You're not only risking everyone in this room, this country, this planet, but you're risking every other universe. It's a wonder you haven't been ripping apart at a molecular level."

"How can you know that?!" I throw my helmet across the room in frustration. It clangs along the floor and knocks a table leg, where a vase topples over towards the floor but encases itself in red magic and rights itself just in time. Wanda walks up towards the little group of us that is yelling.

"You can't get everything you want!" Dr Strange snaps at me, getting up in my face.

"Prove it to me. Prove it to me that we can't stay, and FINE! I'll go. But any blood splatter is on your hands."

"Everyone needs to Calm. Down." Steve protests loudly. "We're all adults—most of us? Whatever!"

"The Captain is right," Vision agrees.

"Look," I sigh. "I may not understand how this whole thing works, but I am sure there's got to be some kind of way Toothless and I can stay."

"Can we back up a minute?!" May exclaims. "I need to know what happened out there! We need to start from the top."

"May's right." Pepper sighs. I hadn't noticed her enter the room. "Let's just... take a breather, get freshened up, and meet back here and go through everything. Including Peter, Hiccup, and... whatever you two have been bitching about for the last however long." She points between Dr Strange and Tony on her last words.

"Fine. But I want the truth, ok?" May turns to Peter, rubbing a thumb on his cheek worryingly as he still tries to calm her down. He nods.

"Let's go, bud." I mutter, turning to Toothless. He warbles his agreement and follows me out of the room.

We return about twenty minutes later after I've bathed myself, changed into a fresh set of clothes, and made sure Toothless has been fed (I asked Friday to send someone up with fish). When we walk into the room the only people not there are Sam, Kate, Bruce and Peter. All the furniture has been pushed closer together, but I elect to sit on the ground against Toothless instead. Barf and Belch sit next to us while the twins follow Loki around the room absentmindedly babbling about their love for him.

"And-and we'll build a big statue!" Ruffnut exclaims.
"And lots of spikes! Everywhere! For you!" Tuffnut promises.

"Will you?" Loki hums disinterested, pulling out daggers one by one and examining them for damage, before sheathing them again. Not all of them return to visible places, some vanish in thin air.

Everyone soon takes a seat somewhere and Sam, Kate, Bruce and Peter all arrive within a minute of each other.

"Okay, how do we do this? 20 questions as we braid each other's hair?" Tony asks with a smirk. "Spin the bottle?"
"I could just read everyone's minds." Loki offers. No one takes him up on it, much to his disappointment.
"Let's just go one question at a time, one person at a time." Pepper responds and shakes her head as she mutters to herself. "God, why do I have to be the sane one?"

"Alright, I'll start." Rhodey claps his hands together. "What's the deal with you two? Why are you at each other's throat all the time? I mean, honestly. I'm starting to wonder what kind of tension there is between you."

"Honeybear, I'd never cheat on you." Tony responds, with a fake pout and all.

"I'm right here... right here." Pepper mutters.

"It happened about three month after Thanos," Dr Strange begins, actively ignoring whatever Tony was saying. "Stark and I were in the tower going over everything that had happened, because I'd felt a weird shift in the multiverse and was trying to figure out what happened. The next thing we knew we were standing in some kind of alternate universe, but not exactly physically."

"It didn't take long to figure out what happened because it was plastered all over the news there, but essentially in this world we won against thanos, but the dusting was five years long, and several of us died in the process of retrieving the time stones and using them."

"Who?" Natasha asks. The room is quiet.

"I don't know." Strange responds solemnly.

"Stephen." Natasha coaxes.

"You died getting the soul stone. Tony died snapping. Steve took the stones back to the past once it was all over, and returned an old man." Strange responds with a heavy sigh.

"I... stayed?" Steve whispers. "Didn't I? With Peggy."

"So much for the 'end of—' ow." Bucky cuts himself off when Sam elbows him.

"What else happened? In that universe?" Bruce asks.

"Well, from what we gathered, Mysterio revealed Peter's identity to the world. Peter went to that world's me for help because all of the colleges were rejecting him and his friends." Stephen responded.
"Wanted criminal and all that." Tony added.
"Criminal? But I HELP people!" Peter exclaimed. "Why should my friends and I be punished for that?"
"In the eyes of the public you killed Mysterio." Stephen explained. "So you went to 'me' to ask 'me' to make everyone forget you were spider-man, but kept tampering with the spell when I was casting it."

"Tampering? I don't know magic."
"No, not like that." Stephen snapped. "You just kept demanding that certain people remember you were spider-man, and the spell got out of control. It started bringing other people from other universes in that knew you were spider-man in their worlds, which is where we come in I guess."
"There was also two other Spider-men that showed up. As if one of you isn't crazy enough." Tony added. "You didn't meet them until after..."
"After what, Mr—Dad?" Peter stumbled over his words. Tony gave a small twitch at the word.
"After a man from a different universe got May killed. I'm sorry, there wasn't anything we could do."

Peter visibly froze at those words. I watched May grab his hand and squeeze. Everything Stephen and Tony were saying was confusing to me, but I think I get the basic idea. In another life Peter lost Tony and May.
"That's not all." Stephen adds. Peter jerked his head up, alarmed. "The universes were getting pulled together, colliding, so the you from that universe had an idea. To make everyone forget you. Not just as spider man. But Peter Parker."
"MJ, Ned?" Peter gasps. "Not even Happy?" Tony shakes his head. I can see from where I'm sitting that Peter has tears in his eyes. "I don't like this world."

"Okay, well, that's pretty shitty, but how does that explain what your little fight is about?" Rhodey asks.
"As that me started casting the final spell, I realised it wasn't working fast enough." Dr Strange responded.
"So?" Yelena prompts.
"So he cast a spell from our end." Tony crosses his arms, still unhappy.

"In this universe I'm still sorcerer supreme." Strange explains. "But in that one I wasn't. And I think that's why I was able to cast a spell to affect that reality and speed the process up."
"And I'm mad at him because if he could cast a spell, then he should have been able to cast something else. Something to help that Peter. Because instead of, I don't know, casting fairy dust to make sure the kid could at least keep his girlfriend, he shut him off from our universe."
"I had to do it! The multiverse—"
"Was at stake. Yeah, yeah." Tony rolls his eyes. "I don't care! It's not just about Peter, no offence kid, but the Avengers are in shambles in that world. They could have used something. It was a shitshow."
"We're not supposed to interact with other universes, it's a bad idea." Stephen snaps. But he just said he did?

"Well, if I may interject." Loki speaks up and everyone turns to him.
"What could you possibly have to say?" Stephen asks, annoyed. "You shouldn't even be on earth."
"Quiet, second rate clown." Loki rolls his eyes, "let me speak."
"Ooh, you gonna let him talk to people like that?" Tony teases, looking at Thor.
Thor raises his arms in surrender. "Actually, this is Loki being considerably nice. And besides, I've never been able to control my brother."
"The day you can means I've lost free will again."
"Again?" Steve asks.
Loki shrugs. "Well, yeah. My life hasn't exactly been my own, Captain. Living in my brother's shadow, clambering for the Allfather's attention, clambering for any attention, dying, fake dying, getting enslaved and mind controlled, manipulated. You get the idea."
"I feel like that's a lot to unpack." Kate says.

"Anyway," Loki ignores her, "I was going to say that anything you do or don't do to another universe or timeline can have consequences—unless it's apocalyptic, because then nothing matters anyway. Branches can— can sprout from one seedling, one choice. It's likely that there's billions of different outcomes alone, for the spider-child's identity getting exposed, so take solace in knowing that, out there somewhere, there's at least one branch where everything worked out in the best way you could wish."
"Wait, how do you know this?" Stephen asks.
"I've done my research." Loki responds cryptically.
"They did not teach us this in Asgard, brother." Thor says, confused. "I'm not even sure mother knew of this. Where did you learn?"

"I've taken a few trips to the TVA in my time." Loki responds, leaning back in his seat.
"Fine, I'll ask. What the fuck is that?" Bucky asks dramatically with a sigh.
"It's the Time Variance Authority. I spent some time there shortly after I ended up on Sakaar. Well, not that time exists in the TVA."
"What, like some kind of astral plane?" Strange asks.
"Not...exactly? it's somewhere existing outside of time, both at the beginning and the end. It used to be focused on maintaining the sacred timeline, but apparently another me put a stop to that." He waves his hand like everything was child's play and unimportant. "I didn't stay too long, just long enough to annoy a weird clock thing, spend some time with one of the workers."

"He knew that, well thanks to another me he found out, he was actually a variant. He wasn't born into the TVA. So all of them are variants, plucked from timelines that— anyway, I learnt about everything I could, pinched a tempad, and left. They caught up to me again after I'd visited, what, my fiftieth timeline? It doesn't really matter."

"Wait, slow down. What's a tempad?"

"I don't have it anymore. I gave it to a variant of myself. She called herself Sylvie for some reason. I don't get it, I mean, why change your name? I don't call myself anything other than Loki when I'm— whatever, I'm getting off track. But a tempad is a tool that navigates through timelines. Last I heard the TVA is in shambles, a lot of rogue soldiers trying to get the secret timeline back in line. So if you see anyone from the TVA, you're as good as dead the second they see you because they'll prune you— erase you from existence."

"Sounds cheery." Peter comments.

"They have... intriguing food. Most of the workers have sticks up their ass, though. It's not worth it."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Thor asks. "How did you have time to do all that?"

"Brother, I've always been the brains, haven't I." Loki sighs. "In between winning the grandmaster's favour and you showing up, I had a run in with a tva foot soldier. Stole his tempad, explored, etcetera. Time doesn't exist in the TVA like it would here, even less so than Sakaar."

"Oh." Thor responds.

"The TVA sounds like a cult." Kate comments. Loki shrugs, not disagreeing.

"Alright, so that's sorted, at least I think so. Maybe you two can move past it now?" Pepper asks hopefully. When neither in questions respond she rolls her eyes. "Seriously. It happened. We can't help that world, they're on their own."

"They always have been." Peter hums. "Sorry." He chuckles and says something about a tailor.

"Find, but any decision making should involve the rest of us. I don't want Matilda over here messing shit up."

Tony points to Strange, who rolls his eyes and mutters a non-committing, "Sure, whatever".

"Ok, I've been patient." May stands up abruptly. "What happened with Peter? I need to know this and I don't appreciate it being kept from me."
"It's not Mr Stark's fault, May! I made him not tell you." Peter quickly exclaims. He's dressed in casual clothes now, and I think is the first time I've seen him not in the costume. "Please don't blame him."
May sighs. "Fine, I'll let it go, as long as it doesn't happen again." she pauses and waits until Peter nods. "So, what happened and are you ok now?"

Please read!
(If not I totally understand, A/Ns are boring, and I'll see you next chapter lol)

Okay, so, I've mapped out a rather complicated ending to this fic. The way I see it, there's what I would consider the orignal main ending of this fic as a stand alone. Aka, mostly conclusive, sweet, no dramas, etc. (And with each ending comes a Hiccup and a Peter POV). But then there's also an ending I decided I kind of like better, which is more bittersweet in a "less answers" kind of way, but overall still good and leaving the book as a stand alone. And then there's what I'd consider the alternate branch, which sets up a sequel! That I would have to then write... one day soon, hopefully.

So, after another chapter or so, I think it'll be time to move onto the epilogues. And that's where the above comes in. I want you readers to understand what's going on.

I will post the epilogues, labelled as [Offical Ending!], [Alternate ending [1]! And [Alternate Ending 2]! I know this is probably confusing considering, unless I put them in one chapter, there will be two parts each lmao. But maybe I'll end up putting them together, we'll see.

In the event that I write a sequel, know that the wait will probably be a lot worse than it was for this fic, cause I'm nothing if not a procrastinator.

Okay, that's all I have to say on that. But please ask questions and I'll do my best to answer them without giving spoilers away. If you have suggestions I'm happy to listen, too!

See you next chapter!