Very likely to write! I’m actually toying with one now for Spideytorch Week: Day 1 (Firsts/Lasts), but I’m still tinkering with the plot. Also, I maybe have too many longish fics planned, so god knows if I'll finish them all in time. I have a tendency to be overambitious with that.
Right now I was thinking: elderly Peter, right after Johnny passes away after like 40 years of marriage, completely devastated and not thinking straight, decides he's going to go back in time and make sure he and Johnny never get together at all (he blames himself for Johnny dying because he's Peter) because he's convinced Johnny's life would be better (and longer) that way. His consciousness ends up getting unstuck in time (he's not a temporal physicist, so his time machine's not perfect) and he relives the major moments of their relationship -- all the firsts and lasts, first kiss, first date, engagement, wedding day, seeing kids/grandkids for first time, big anniversaries, seeing Johnny for the last time, etc. But he figures out along the way something he'd never realized before -- Johnny really needed him too, and he would have been miserable without Peter. Decisions, decisions.
I wrote a short opener for it to see how I liked it:
Peter knows, better than anyone, the way the course of an entire life can shift irrevocably in the merest fraction of a second, how a thousand seemingly trivial decisions can lead inexorably to earth-shattering and far-reaching consequences.
Case in point: a teenage boy’s brief lapse into apathy and selfishness leads, months later, to a house being broken into, a man killed, and a lifetime spent trying desperately to atone for his misdeeds.
Peter’s not a young man anymore. He hasn’t been for a long time. It’s only lately, since everything began to go so terribly wrong, that Peter has begun to ask himself…what if he could go back? What if he could alter those fateful moments that sped by so innocuously with all of the knowledge and insight that years, that decades, of retrospection have imparted?
What if…what if he could save Johnny, and by doing so, save himself? Spare himself this unbearable pain, this misery, this heartbreak, this grief?
Peter has the power, does he not? He has the intelligence to build a machine capable of sending him back through time. Does he not then also have the responsibility to change everything for the better? To save who he can?
Perhaps it’s a bad idea. Perhaps he shouldn’t. Peter doesn’t know anymore. He’s spent too many long, sleepless nights turning it over and over in his mind. All he knows is that he can’t…he can’t let it end that way. He just can’t. It’s killing him slowly, every day, knowing that that’s how it happened.
He didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye to Johnny. It all…all happened so quickly. In the blink of an eye. Johnny was there one moment, vibrant and alive, and gone the next. Peter hasn’t been able to find anything to fill the emptiness he left behind him.
That isn’t right. None of it is right. It isn’t the way things are supposed to be. Peter is certain of that.
He decides then and there. He’s going to go back. He’s going to save Johnny’s life...by making sure he never falls in love with Peter.
