Chapter Text
The bite is itching again.
Miles groans, rolls out of bed and lands, feet hitting the floor with identical thuds. His ankles ache for it. Ganke is still awake, but has his headphones on: if the sting of his hand hadn’t kept him awake tonight, Miles is certain the glowing light of the laptop and steady clacking of the keyboard would’ve done it.
“Do you have any Neosporin,” he tries to say, but a yawn swallows the last word. He shuffles over to the closet.
“Hnn?”
“Nevermind.”
The clock reads 2:15 AM. Miles doesn’t have enough brainpower to calculate how much sleep he’s not getting tonight. The only thing in the world that matters right now is alleviating the sting of his hand. It has grown puffy and swollen from his frantic and frequent scratching sessions, each one hoping this time, this time will do it, he’s scratching the itch completely out of it this time and I’m not DOING this again, and what the HELL was that spider made out of?
His good hand finally finds the smooth corner of his mom’s first aid kit. She had insisted Miles take one with him when he moved into Visions. Like so many other things, Miles had begrudgingly agreed to it then, but is grateful for his mother’s foresight now. He pops it open and squints, hunting for the pink tinge of calamine lotion in the dark.
“Sorry to keep you up,” Ganke says.
“What?”
Ganke’s keyboard and mouse are tap-clacking in the familiar dance of the everyday multitasking student. “I’ve still got the lab write-up for Mr. Chase left so I’m gonna be a while longer. Also a Trackmagnet just caught onto me and I’m thisclose to wrapping up the final floor but I gotta go back and lose him cause I don’t wanna start this dungeon over tomorrow…”
Miles takes the whole kit and tosses it up onto his pillow before climbing back up the rungs. “You’re playing Underminer at two in the morning, man?”
“If you don’t keep your rank up for 3 days, it decays,” Ganke said mournfully, eyes never leaving the screens. His three monitors all display different things; even at low brightness, just glancing their way gives Miles a headache. “And I missed playing this weekend cause I was visiting my grandma.”
Crossed-legged on his bed, Miles finds the calamine lotion off the light of the many laptops, and awkwardly smothers it over the surface of his right hand. The puffiness has swollen to the size of a dollar coin. He finds a square bandage and awkwardly rips it open. Mami would chide him for wasting it on something as small as a spider bite, but then, his mom and dad aren’t here right now because the entire point of sending him to Visions was to turn him into a man who made his own decisions or whatever, and solving The Problem of the Itchy Hand that’s preventing him from sleep is feeling like one of the best decisions he’s had in a long while right about now. Certainly smarter than agreeing to this school in the first place…
He deserves to be awake and working like Ganke. Specifically working on that paper Mrs. Adler assigned, because she will not have forgotten about it in the next eight hours. She’ll pull him aside after third period and ask about his progress and he’ll have to come up with some excuse that doesn’t end in Sorry, but I snuck out of my dorm last night because thinking about the person I want to be just made me want to hang out with that person instead, not write a stupid paper about it.
Slowly, Miles drifts off to the sound of the keyboard. If this damn bite is still swollen in the morning, he’ll go to the nurse.
Blaring sounds. Miles spreads an arm wide, fumbling to hit snooze —
The crash of his alarm clock smashing on the floor jolts him fully awake. Squinting, he peers over the bed. Looks at the black plastic and cracked screen scattered over the linoleum below.
That’d been a gift from his dad when he went to middle school. Great. He flops back to the pillow and closes his eyes, willing himself back to sleep. He’ll remember to wake up in five more minutes.
“Holy shit,” Ganke’s sleepy voice mutters from across the room. “Sounded bad.” A pause and a grunt. “What timezit.”
“Seven,” Miles mutters without opening his eyes.
He had been dreaming about… something. The design he’d sprayed from last night? Something colorful. Something with red and blue, something with pink and yellow. He remembers liking it. Wants to sketch it out, but he can’t recall the details. A dream like looking through a kaleidoscope. An entire world colored in his artstyle…
Outside, the light sounds of car horns and construction across the street begin to rumble. It’s definitely been longer than five minutes, but he can’t bring himself to check.
Eventually, Miles hears a yawn and the sounds of shuffling. “Time to get up, Air Jordan,” Ganke’s voice says.
Miles grunts.
After another few minutes, he forces his weary limbs to the edge of the bed, and hops down onto the floor, into the same pair of pants from yesterday. Rubs at an eye and pulls them up his legs.
Blinks, clearing his head from the fog of sleep. Rolls the pants back down carefully and then pulls them back up again.
There’s a good two inches of space between the pant leg and his ankle. Hadn’t his mother hemmed these herself?
“Think I have your pants,” he says.
“I’m wearing my pants.” Ganke doesn’t turn around; he’s back on the keyboard, now fully awake. “Those are definitely yours. They’re too skinny for me.”
Ganke’s right, the fit matches him nearly everywhere else. Miles feels hyper-aware of his limbs in a way he’s never felt before: the hair on his arms raises, like goosebumps. His fingertips are numb. Is this the growth spurt Uncle Aaron told him to wait for? Maybe it’s like, late stage puberty. Is there a part two to this kind of thing?
“…I don’t know, dude,” Ganke says slowly. “But this relationship’s gonna get real weird real quick if you’re asking me to give you the talk.”
Miles is suddenly, horrifyingly aware that he has been speaking aloud.
“Sorry,” he says out loud, carefully.
Miles holds his nose and pops his ears, hoping vaguely that’s solved the problem. If that didn’t — he’ll figure it out later. He resists the urge to tilt his head and rattle it around, trying to shake out whatever’s trapped buzzing in his head, very aware that acting like a lunatic wouldn’t improve his image in front of his roommate. He and Ganke are friendly, but not friends. He’s already the awkward thirteen-year-old try-hard new guy who skipped a grade; he doesn’t want to be the babyfaced kid who had to have puberty explained to him too.
“Heading out,” Ganke says. He’s fully dressed, headphones around his neck, tie over his shoulder, and beanie smashed over his messy black hair, violating at least three school uniform rules. “You going to breakfast?”
“Nah, I’ve got a granola bar.”
“You can’t survive off of snack food,” Ganke says smugly as he heads out the door. “You’re a growing young boy, Miles Morales, your body needs nutrition.”
Miles employs a choice insults in Spanish that would make his mother very unhappy, and finishes dressing. He still feels vaguely odd, an emotional dizziness he can’t quite shake, but pushes it off for another time.
An hour later, after he has sticky-walked across the security officer’s ceiling, mortifyingly ripped half of Wanda’s pretty hair out of her skull, and thoroughly ruined his reputation in front of all of Brooklyn Visions, Miles lays on the floor of his room, half-naked and panting. The adrenaline and fear pumping through him is at odds with the chilly air drifting through the window, but the inside of his head is a wild storm of questions and nausea.
The surreal, stuffed-head feeling is worse than ever: his vision is dotting, he’s got a headache the size of Queens, and the closest explanation feels like, like —
Things just feel wrong, off. Physically, mentally. Miles pauses. Metaphysically? Like a three-dimensional figure trapped in 2-D space. Ceilings and floors have switched. Reality has changed.
This isn’t puberty.
Is his nose bleeding?
One of Ganke’s comics flutters onto his face, disturbed by the commotion that had led him careening through the window.
The sensation of pages touching his sensitive skin is one thing too many. He swaps it away, furious — and it sticks to his fingers, because of course it does. Frustrated and panicked, he tries throwing it at the wall, flicking his fingers, shaking his hands, nothing, nothing, nothing is working, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING! WHAT —
IS GOING ON?
He employs both hands, which will make the problem worse, he’s too desperate to care — and the paper rips. Now he’ll owe Ganke a replacement for his super-whatever comic, his —
Spider-Man comic?
The universe slows and centers around the pages in his hand. Miles stares. This comic book; this story of a teenage boy, with great power comes great responsibility. Is it an answer, or another problem? Is this a solution?
THIS IS SPIDER-MAN’S ORIGIN STORY.
Miles slowly rises, placing the ripped pages side by side in order across on the floor. Puzzle pieces of a story unfold across uneven comic panels and torn lines: the nerdy, high school-aged Billy Barker sticks to walls, loses his glasses, accidentally breaks the tap off his sink faucet, doesn’t know his own strength —
HE WAS BITTEN BY A SPIDER. YOU WERE BITTEN BY A SPIDER.
Miles runs fingers over the back of his right hand. The skin is smooth. The bite has vanished.
HE BECAME A SUPERHERO OVERNIGHT. YOU —
“Stop,” Miles says aloud. “Stop, stop, stop. You’re wrong.”
SPIDER-MAN WAS JUST AN AVERAGE KID. LIKE YOU.
“I’m a normal kid,” Miles repeats. “I’m a normal kid. I’m a normal kid. I’m — ”
I’M A NORMAL KID. IT WAS A NORMAL SPIDER.
Miles sprints through Prospect Park, vaguely aware that he’s running harder, faster, further than he has ever in his life, and he’s not even breaking a sweat.
“Uncle Aaron pickuppickuppickuppickup — ”
“Hey, it’s Aaron. I’m out of town for a few days, I’ll hit you when I’m — ”
MOVE!
The car comes out of nowhere. His legs move without instruction, propelling him out of harm’s way: if he had been a second later, his head would’ve been a smear across the pavement.
Dazed, Miles comes back to reality at the sound of people clapping. He had just leapt fifteen feet in the air to avoid a car. Had he? Yes, he had. Yes, he had. Oh my god. That just happened.
One guy whistles, laughing.
“I’m not — that wasn’t.” Miles gestures with his hands, frantic. The static in his head is loud again, his heart racing. “I, ignore you saw that — ”
“Hey, kid, you okay?” The cab driver is leaning out the window, but Miles is already gone.
He waits the entire day. For the buzzing in his ears to die, for his dad to find and lecture him for skipping school, for Uncle Aaron to return his calls, for Spider-Man to climb in through the window and say “Don’t worry, kid, there’s been a mistake — I’ve got everything covered. You can go home now.”
Nothing happens. Nobody finds him. Nobody is looking.
He scrubs at his ears again. The fuzzing in his head is better now that he’s stopped freaking out. He had spent the day curled up on his uncle’s couch, stomach in knots, alternating between ravenous hunger and feeling like he never wanted to eat anything again. After hours of distracting himself with Simon and Simpleton reruns, games on his phone, and sorting his uncle’s music library, he was feeling a bit calmer, though not at ease. He’d even tried directing all his feelings out on the punching bag, but just one hit had send it swinging back and crashing into the wall, chain rattling. He hadn’t tried again.
Nobody else seems different. The world hasn’t changed, but he had. Maybe he’s just crazy now. Maybe the spider bite is making him hallucinate?
The spider…
He hadn’t got a good look at it. The story always said Billy was bitten by a radioactive spider, but what kind of radioactive spiders lived in Brooklyn subway tunnels?
Miles picks at the mac and cheese he had made himself for dinner. As much as he wants to, he couldn’t call his mom; she would tell Dad. His biggest wish is for his uncle to return his voicemail. Uncle Aaron said he’d done engineering jobs down there; maybe he’d know what kind of weird goo the spider might’ve stepped in to make it radioactive?
Miles searches the living room for any sign of the contract work his uncle might have been doing, but can only find the remains of couple of incomplete projects and a welding torch. He almost works up the nerve to search the bedroom too — Uncle Aaron wouldn’t have minded at all, and yet he hesitates. One of his favorite things about his uncle is how openly he welcomes him; Aaron is his 2 AM call whenever he feels lonely or annoyed or just weird and bored. Whenever he was younger and stayed the night, his uncle would let him sleep in his huge bed with the head of the mattress that moved up and down. Aaron would laugh as he played with the remote, updown updown updown, and never told him to cut it out, always letting Miles play around on his own time. But standing on the threshold of his uncle’s room now, he couldn’t bring himself to go in. He’s been in here all the time, but it just feels wrong. This is wrong. Everything is so wrong.
Even if Uncle Aaron couldn’t help him, Miles felt like he would at least know what to do. Someone had to know, somewhere, what to do.
The real Spider-Man could help him.
Miles dismisses that thought as soon as it occurrs to him. Ganke’s the bigger Spider-Man fan, he would probably know how to find him, but…
Miles, where the hell did you go?
Miles, what did you do to the new girl’s head? Her hair looks like it got caught in a blender. You made her so embarrassed she started crying at lunch.
Dude, you’re so screwed. Mrs. Adler kept talking about how important attendance was and everyone knows she was talking about you. I can’t be your friend if you’re gonna be like this, man.
He can’t go back to Visions.
But he could go back to the tunnel. He could go back and see for himself.
He cleans the dishes and straightens the sofa before he leaves. Pausing on the way out, he takes his uncle’s spare key from the keyhook, just in case —
Just in case.
The Q drops him off at Delkab Avenue twenty minutes later.
Miles waits on a worn bench, fooling around on his phone until everyone on the platform has trudged up the stairs, before he drops down to the subway tracks. The display screen above says the next train is coming in three minutes, but knowing the MTA, he figures he has at least seven to find the tunnel again or risk getting smushed.
A short jog down the tracks later, and he finds the entrance by the light of the flashlight on his phone. Miles bites his lip at the sight of the gate again. He breaths, then takes a running leap. His foot hits the door panel and projects him up quicker than he expected — he grasps the top of the gate, swinging over easily. He lands quiet as a cat on the other side.
Miles takes the steps down cautiously to find the rotunda with his art. It’s colder down here, more than yesterday. Maybe they don’t turn on the heat in these old tunnels so often.
He tries the lights — they blink on to illuminate the room, flicker twice, and then with a faint hiss, die out.
He swallows.
He scans the dark rotunda by the light of his phone. On the opposite wall, his art is untouched. There’s the couch where his uncle had sat. Down one of the halls, he hears a faint rumbling of machinery, but everything here looks just as it did yesterday. He searches the center of the room with his light, and finds a black speck, too large to be dirt, lying innocently in the center in front of his mural, next to group of paint cans.
The echoes of machinery fade. There’s nothing but the sound of his own breath in the dark.
The spider is belly-up. He creeps closer.
It stays dead.
It doesn’t wake up, or speak to him, or turn into a monster spider. It’s just dead.
And Miles is alone.
“It’s a normal spider,” he says aloud. He’s suddenly furious and ashamed. It was a stupid, comic book scenario he had been concocting in his head; his wild, improbable idea that Spider-Man would be waiting for him down here to explain everything, that he could make everything better, was just that. “You came all the way to Brooklyn Heights to look at a dead spider, Miles.” He reaches down, grabbing one of the several old, forgotten paint markers littering the floor. “It’s boring how normal this spider is — ”
Miles nudges it with the edge of the pen, and the spider body — there’s no other word for it — glitches. It’s like looking directly at the sun; color spots flash directly in his eyes. Miles gasps, scrunches them shut, rearing back.
In the dark, the world settles. The lights fade behind his eyelids. He peeks one open. Haloed by the window of light on the floor, the black speck is still again.
A long, low screech sounds in the distance echoes, startling him. A slow grind of machinery picks up again, seconds behind.
Miles raises the light. It’s coming from the corridor on his right, down a flight of maintenance stairs. Pitch black.
His feet move slowly, acting for him. Creeping down the steps, Miles feels as though he’s being puppeteered, driven by instinct. A set of intertwining blue pipes run down the stairs with him, pointing the way. He follows the light of his phone slowly, like a moth to a flame, hand moving without his direction.
The light wavers when he reaches the bottom of the stairs. His head swims.
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME…?
The flashlight moves left, trailing off into a new room divided by a thick curtain. The blue pipes have grown thicker now, the size of tree trunks. They lead under the curtain. Miles follows, mindless.
Yellow and black hazard warning signs on the walls… RADIATION WARNING. ALCHEMEX. As he passes, they change colors before his eyes. Blue, orange.
A headache is forming, and a throbbing pain between his eyes. His skull is pounding, breath coming faster.
Center of the dark room. His steps disturb old dust from the floor. Control panels. An observation room?
The glass that lines the wall in front of him is filthy, dimly lit by whatever lies on the other side. He peers; can’t see anything through the grime. The room is… humming. His flashlight wavers. His hand is shaking. Spots in his eyes.
Where is he being led? What is he doing here?
YOU’RE LIKE ME.
I DON’T WANT TO BE A HERO.
LOOK OUT.
THAT’S ALL IT IS, MILES.
YOU’RE LIKE ME.
The pressure is overwhelming. Miles clutches his head, shaking. He can’t think. Blood dribbles down his nose. He sees spots behind his eyelids.
The hair on his arm raises.
LOOK OUT.
Miles ducks.
I DON’T —
“ — want to be a hero. I don’t want to be a hero.” His breath catches, panic clouding every sense. Tears are running down his cheeks. The rumble of giant machinery churns around him, reverberating in the chamber like a slowly waking beast. “Oh god. Oh god please.”
High above him, a red figure launches out of the tunnel and swings out of view.
Far below his dangling feet, Green Goblin lies unmoving where he had crushed an observation deck into a mess of steel pipes and shrapnel. The behemoth groans, hulking shoulders shifting, but doesn’t get up.
Miles dangles precariously, clinging to the chamber wall. His brain works in overtime, heart hammering. If he can stick to things, maybe he can climb too. He can inch back up to the tunnel. He’ll go straight home. He’ll call his dad and come clean. He’ll forget he ever saw this. Oh god. One move at a time.
He lifts one hand and reaches upward, sticking fast. His legs swing below him, searching for purchase. Okay. He lifts the other hand and —
falls —
A scream rips out of his throat. Green Goblin is coming closer and closer and nothing is slowing the fall, he’s going to die, he’s going to die, and —
twip —
Movement — he jerks sideways —
He’s flying through the air, but in the wrong direction. Someone has him by the jacket.
Momentum moves him upward, and above him, he catches a glimpse of a red and blue suit —
The mask looks downard. Sees him looking. One of the eyes winks.
Spider-Man has him by the jacket.
Eyes stinging, Miles closes his eyes against the wind, and forces himself to breathe.
Spider-Man tosses them upward, and Miles’s stomach jumps to his throat just before they land. Gentle hands set him down on the platform. He opens his eyes.
“Out for a nightly stroll in the beautiful Brooklyn sewers?” Spider-Man pauses, then mutters as if to himself, “Says something about my job that I could actually recommend a few, now.” His voice is very soothing, calm with an ambiguous age. Those tapered white eyes are so huge in person, so bug-like. And staring right at him.
“Uh,” Miles says.
“You know your shoes are untied?”
“Uh-huh.”
“This is a onesie,” Spider-Man continues, “so I don’t really have to worry about that kind of thing. Though the boots do get a little sweaty. It doesn’t really matter, but then, sometimes it’s just one thing that just ruins your day, you know?”
Spider-Man is handling him. Spider-Man is talking nonsense so Miles stops freaking out and calms the hell down. There are dried tears on his cheeks, and blood from his nose. And Spider-Man is crouching in front of him and being nice.
“Hey.” Spider-Man is talking to him again, leaning closer. A red hand gently touches his knee, shakes it slightly. “Just take it easy. You’re gonna be oka — ”
It happens again.
The headache pulses, overwhelming; Miles flinches. But it eases after a moment, not quite softer, but dulls, like a tolerable static sensation from earlier. He looks ahead — Spider-Man is still. Miles realizes that he’s staring straight at him, and he suddenly feels —
Seen. Understood.
The sensation fades, and Spider-Man is completely still. If it were possible for a mask to look thrown off guard… Finally he speaks, wonder in his voice: “You’re like me.”
Miles swallows. For all of the chaos today, the questions, that’s what it all meant. He has his answer.
“Did you know about me?” he asks wondrously.
“I thought I was the only one.” Spider-Man is talking to himself again. “If there are others out there — ” He pauses, and refocuses on Miles. This close, Miles can see the threads in the suit, the plates protecting his eyes. It suddenly strikes him that there is a real guy inside the suit, a real person who could lift trucks and fly across midtown in ten minutes and he could save millions, and that person is looking straight at him. Those white eyes don’t seem creepy anymore, just — curious.
Miles finds his voice. “I’m — I think it was an accident. Like, you’re already Spider-Man. I don’t need…” What is he saying? “Like, this is… I’m not sure what…”
Spider-Man listens. It seems like he’s doing some deep thinking. When Miles finally trails off, he asks, “Was it a spider bite?”
“Yeah. And — I just meant to say I think it was a mistake,” Miles says quickly, “and I don’t want… I don’t need to — it seems like you… have everything covered.”
Spider-Man is very quiet. A beat passes.
“Probably seems that way,” he says finally. “I suppose I get along. But we could all use a hand now and again.” The red head tilts. “You don’t always get to choose what happens to you, kiddo,” he says gently, “but you can choose what you do with it.”
Miles swallows.
Spider-Man shifts, rebalancing his weight. “But listen. You’re gonna be okay. I know how crazy it gets.” He holds his hands up, like he’s afraid Miles will get scared off if he moves too suddenly. “I can help you, if you want. If you stick around, I could show you the ropes. That sound okay?” He huffs softly. “Or too terrifying?”
The ropes of being Spider-Man. This is really happening.
He wants to say no. But this guy — whoever he is, this strange friend behind the mask — went through the same thing once upon a time, and he went through it alone, and now look at him.
Miles tries to imagine himself behind the same mask, doing the same things. All he can imagine is a slideshow reel of himself falling from buildings; adult passerby clucking and tsking when he can’t stop a bunch of criminals; his dad standing over him, yelling at him in the living room as Miles stands in a cheap Spider-Man suit looking at the floor, mask clutched in his hands.
But… something in those huge white eyes is eager, inviting. He doesn't want to disappoint whoever this is. And part of him — a very small part, the part that isn’t terrified of what his dad will say when he finds out — is curious, too.
Could he?
Uncle Aaron would tell him to go for it. He wouldn’t even hesitate.
He swallows down his anxiety and says, more confidently than he feels, “Sounds okay.”
Spider-Man doesn’t reply, but Miles can tell that behind the mask, he’s smiling.
NO! NO!
DON’T DO THIS! STOP!
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT CAN DO, YOU’LL
dont get what
en this weird thing happe
ill do it
dont have it ye
hes just a kid
KILL US ALL!
Miles wakes coughing, throat full of dust. Dizzy and nauseous, he opens his eyes. It takes him a moment to process the detached steel beam hovering dangerously above his head.
He gasps, scrabbling back on the dirty floor. His hands smart; he bumps into a collapsed wooden structure and sends steel poles rolling. Inhaling more dust, he coughs harder, throat burning, eyes watering. He wipes the blood from under his nose, the tears from his eyes with his coat sleeve.
Pushing onto his aching hands, he hisses when he realizes he’s bleeding: his hands are cut and his jacket sleeve is torn, revealing a shallow gash in his forearm. Miles glances up above, squinting in the dim light through the dust clouds and rubble.
He stands slowly, and when the vertigo doesn’t get worse, he starts to walk, head low, rubbing at his eyes. Vision clearing, on his left, he catches glimpse of an enormous clawed hand lying motionless underneath a mountain of collapsed steel.
He squints. Across a small clearing dotted with debris is…
He hurries forward.
“Hey — ” Tipping over his shoelaces, he reaches the prone figure half-buried underneath a pile of debris. “Mister uh — Spider-Man — are you okay?”
The red suit stirs.
“Sir?”
Spider-Man groans. “No formalities, kid.” His voice is hoarse; Miles’s own throat aches worse listening to him. “I’m fine… Just resting.” He coughs. It sounds wet.
“…s probably not a good sign,” Spider-Man says quietly.
With a burst of clarity, Miles realizes — Spider-Man needs him. He has a flash of inspiration.
“I can get you to help,” he promises. “My mom’s a nurse. Can you walk?”
Spider-Man groans, tries to move. Miles realizes that one of his legs is being pinned down by a heavy steel beam. That’s definitely a no.
Desperate, he offers, “I can try to carry you. Let me just move this stuff — ” He starts to shift some of the debris, but a glove hand stops his wrist.
Those big white eyes turn toward him. The mask has been torn; a real blue eye looks blearily at him through one of the cracked lenses. Miles can see bruised skin and pricks of blood where Spider-Man’s face been cut by the shards of broken eye plating.
Noises from behind them. Miles turns; shadows are moving, growing bigger.
“Hey — you ready for your first superhero assignment?”
Miles swivels back around. He’s making jokes?
“I need you to do something for me.” Spider-Man’s hand shakes as he raises something up — it’s a worn USB. Miles clutches the red hand in both of his own. “This override key will stop the collider.” He gestures with his other hand, pointing wearily to the ceiling. “Swing up there… use this key, push the button. Boom.” One hand gestures weakly, imitating a fake explosion.
He takes several breaths in a row. They sound shallow. “Sorry I didn’t write down the instructions. Don’t worry. I’ll grade you on a curv — ”
He breaks down into a worse coughing fit. This one sounds much wetter than the last. Terrified of the noise attracting attention, Miles looks back at the shadows. They move in the fog but haven’t come closer yet.
“Sorry man,” Spider-Man mutters. “I coulda warned you that restaurant was a black hole…”
Miles looks back at him. He’s staring off into the distance.
“Nice look, Gwen. Ahh now I’m jealous…”
Who is Gwen? Bewildered and horrified, Miles searches for words. Is Spider-Man hallucinating? No. Nononono, he needs him to do something, say something. He can’t do this he can’t do this he can’t
“Spider-Man?” he tries.
That blue eye refocuses back on him. “Yeah. Yeah. Hey, kid.” He seems to find himself. He clutches Miles’s hand weakly. “You need to hide your face. Don’t tell anyone who you are. No one can know. He’s got everyone in his pocket — ”
“What? Who?” Fear prickles the back of Miles’s neck. He has a sudden unshakable sensation that they’re being watched from every direction.
“If he turns the machine on again, everything you know will disappear. Your family, everyone — ” He squeezes Miles’s hand. “Everyone.” A pause. Miles waits for him to continue, agast.
“Promise me,” Spider-Man says finally. “Promise me you’ll do this.”
Miles swallows.
“I promise.”
“Your dad would understand,” Spider-Man says. Miles freezes, until he continues. “It served its purpose. You’ll make a new one, Pen.”
Talking to himself again. Miles feels his heart sink. He wants to cry. “Who — who are you talking to?” His voice chokes; speaking is hard. Do not cry. Do not cry here, not now.
Spider-Man finds his eyes again. “You,” he says. But he’s not really seeing Miles, not really here anymore. “You promised me. You’ll do it. I know you will.” He lets his hand fall, leaving the USB in Miles’s grip. “I’ll see you soon…”
Miles swallows his tears. Feeling embarrassed and childish, he can’t help but ask, wants to hear him say, “You’ll come find me?”
“Ye — ” A grunt, and his hoarse voice reassures, “I’ll find you, kid.” Quieter now, as if to himself: “I always get up.” He nods in the direction of the chamber ceiling. “Go.”
Reluctantly, heart in his throat, Miles leaves him, footsteps light. Before turning around a mountain of collapsed paneling, he stops and looks back.
Miles wants to say something else — something encouraging or meaningful that will get him on his feet. A proper goodbye, or a thank you. Maybe if he hadn’t been here tonight, Spider-Man would’ve destroyed the collider without having to stop to save him. This never would’ve happened. He grips the key.
Faintly, Spider-Man waves at him through the fog. “It’s going to be okay.”
Words failing him, Miles reluctantly does what he’s told, and leaves him behind.
And when Kingpin picks up Spider-Man with his bare hands and drives him into the ground, bones snapping, Tombstone laughing — this isn’t right, this can’t be happening — Miles can do nothing but stare in horror. If he hadn’t been here, if he had said something better, convinced him to get up, come with, maybe if he had just picked Spider-Man up and ran home…
He grips the key. Backing up slowly, he nudges into a metal railing. The thwang reverberates —
A voice below rumbles. “What was that?”
He runs.