Chapter Text
There is a certain quiet that exists only after the Prowler kills someone.
It’s a red sort of quiet. The Prowler drowns in it.
The worst part? It never changes. It’s always the fat familiar, obtrusive silence, no matter how much the men scream and curse or how badly the women cry.
It is so fucking quiet.
The Prowler doesn’t realize that the quiet has become part of him, more than Miles, until he stares at someone who is not his dad but wears his face, and there are no words that could possibly break through.
–
When all is said and done, after Miguel lowers his head and shamefully apologizes for the new fear he taught Miles, after Uncle Aaron finds it in himself to do one good thing, after the weird, multi-dimensional black and white –holed?– being dissolves into nothing, the Prowler finally steps down.
–
He comes into himself in slow, choppy starts. First, he feels the air on his face. Then, it’s the ache of his hands, muscles screaming every time a finger so much as twitches.
There are sores lining his knuckles; they’re from the gloves. He knows they’re from the gloves.
But when he curls his hands into fists, and the skin tugs and pulls and splits open, he still finds himself wondering what happened.
“You okay?” someone asks slowly. They’re right in front of him; he can feel a familiar weight in the space around him. His legs. His arms.
The purple finally washes out.
Morales gasps. He takes in air like a man starved for it, mouth gaping until his brain tells him enough.
“Hey. Hey, man. What’s goin’ on?”
He pushes them away– their familiarity is disconcerting, so close to him. Something isn’t right.
It’s not his best idea, shoving out a hand and knocking it against the other’s shoulder. He stumbles, feet tripping over the broken ground underneath his feet, and it’s a weird, staticky three seconds in the air before he lands against someone who is himself but isn’t, and what the fuck is that supposed to mean?
“What’re– what are you doin’?” he manages to say, and despite the fact that it comes out mumbled and half-unintelligible, the other one, the weird half-insect, sticks an arm underneath his shoulder and heaves him upright.
“I’m not doing anything, man. You’re the one who just kinda–” Morales has to look up to see himself flop a hand over, a mime of someone eating complete and utter shit.
“No, I didn’t,” Morales says after a beat. “I’m fine.”
He– Miles?
Miles, the one out of the two of them wearing a black suit that does nothing for their general scrawniness, shakes his head. He grips Morales’s shoulder, pulling him into himself.
“Sure, dude. You’re doing great. Not passin’ out all over the place or anythin’ for sure,” Miles says. There’s a very tired smile on his face, dirt creasing over his mouth and eyes, but he’s sure of himself. Steady.
Most importantly, upright. Morales lets his knees give just a bit, and he hunchs over into the other's shoulder.
It’s not as if this is comfortable for either of them. Miles landed in this dimension –holy fucking shit; there are different dimensions– only two short days ago, and between then and now, Miles and Morales –what the fuck– have had maybe three seconds to exchange any words not immediately related to the current multi-dimensional crisis on hand.
In those three seconds, if Morales can trust any single one of his memories, he’s pretty sure they talked about Miles’ apparently shit taste in women.
It can’t be too bad, really. Miles shared a tense and somehow comfortable moment with another Spider-Person, this one in white and pink, earlier during the final moments of the fight; whatever it is that’s between them, Morales thinks it’ll work out.
If their big, freaky fucking eyes are anything to go by, they’re head over heels.
“Hey. Hey, c’mon. Don’t zone out on me,” Miles says, jostling him. There’s a bit more worry between his eyebrows now. Morales isn’t entirely sure why.
It’s easy to say, “I can do whatever I want, ass.” Assert. Reassert. Do whatever you need to do to make it clear who's in charge. Morales’s uncle has hammered home the lesson so many times that Morales is sure there’s a dent in his brain from the goddamn phrase.
“Sure, buddy,” Miles says, slowly walking them over to a piece of what was once probably the side of a building. There are still bits of plaster attached to it. “You’re so big n’ tough. What a big, bad, Prowler. Real mean guy.”
“Shut up.”
“Nah.”
They limp up to the debris, collapsing against it. Miles still keeps a hand around Morales’s shoulders. It’s not exactly helpful for either of them, but Morales…kind of almost gets it. A small part of him is ashamed to admit he doesn’t want Miles to let go.
Near-death experiences bring people together all the time. Who’s to say interdimensional copies of the same person aren’t the same?
In the distance, there’s a Spider-man with blue pants and admittedly cool white markings on his mask, helping civilians dust themselves off. He moves two-ton pieces of concrete out of the street like it’s nothing, ushering crows of confused, bright-eyed people out of the area into the held-open shock blanketed arms of police officers.
Morales would frown if he had the energy to. Sometime in the past two days, between near-death experience one and near-death experience two, Miles explained what happened and, more importantly, what should’ve happened to both of them.
It’s easier to ignore it. The Prowler and Morales were always going to be one and the same, and if he keeps telling himself that, maybe by some grace of God, it’ll become true.
It was true. He stole it from you.
They sit there for a few minutes, taking in the numerous heroes helping sort out the decimated street. Some of them barely do anything but kick gravel with their socked feet. Others are holding animated conversations with the police officer Morales really wishes he could stop looking at.
God, he looks so much like him. Morales is almost nauseous with it, seeing the new, older wrinkles gracing the corner of his dead dad’s mouth.
They shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be here.
He doesn’t entirely know who ‘he’ even is.
Miles must catch him staring. He clears his throat awkwardly. “That’s my dad,” he says. Morales says nothing, blinking away the memories of funerals and black clothes. “The one I had to save,” Miles adds unhelpfully.
Morales catches Miles’s gaze in the corner of his eyes. He’s not ready to stop looking.
If he looks away, part of him is scared that he’ll never see him again.
Miles nods once, twice. He’s stiff. Morales gives him nothing.
Maybe he just has nothing to give.
“I’d go say hi, but–” Miles starts and stops. His dad, not Morales’s, holds out another shock blanket to a father and his young daughter. She’s tiny, maybe around seven or eight. It takes everything in Morales not to shiver.
She’ll be fine. She has her dad. She’s not like him.
Not every fucking eight-year-old is the next mass murderer. That’s a sin that he alone has learned to tread.
“Why don’t you?” Morales asks tiredly. He twists the edge of padded leather near his elbow, underneath his gloves. “It’s all for him, isn’t it? All of this?”
Miles nods. It’s jerky. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
“So?”
Miles sucks in a breath. “So? So what?”
“Go say hi or some shit. Hug– give him a hug. Or somethin’.” It comes out a little raw, a little revealing. Morales tries not to bite his tongue– he’d practically crushed half of it halfway through the final confrontation, and it’s still leaking blood into his mouth.
“Or somethin’,” Miles huffs. His mask is still covering most of his face; there’s a small rip around his jaw, exposing an inch of the skin around his mouth.
It’s strange, staring at someone who is both him and someone else, but it’s even stranger seeing his own blood trickling out from someone else’s skin. His brain tells him to press a hand against Miles’s chin, sealing the cut. A smaller, violent part of him tells him that his gloves are sharp. There’s nothing stopping him from mirroring what he sees in front of himself.
“Do it,” Morales says. It’s a testament to his will that he doesn’t take Miles by the shoulders and scream at him how ungrateful he is; how fucking vile it is that his dad is right there, and Miles isn’t doing anything about it. “He’s your dad.”
Miles shifts. There’s a new, hard-line of discomfort in his shoulder. His grip finally falls from Morales. “He’s your dad too, I think,” he says. Then, again, more sure of himself. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s yours too.”
“Nah,” Morales says, pushing down endless amounts of grief. If there were room for anything else, he’d hate the soft, pitying bend of the mask’s eyes. “My dad’s dead.”
“We’re the same person,” Miles responds instantly. “We’ve got the same DNA.”
Morales smirks. “Weren’t you– glitching, is that what you said? Wrong atoms and all that? I sure as hell don’t do that.”
It’s true– until that creep of a Spider-Man, the one with the strange claws and ridiculously constipated expression came in and tossed the ugliest Rolex known to man at Miles, he’d been shrieking and glitching all over the place. When they’d lied to Rio about how the sound was actually the neighbors having a particularly interesting night, she’d threatened to call the police.
It wouldn’t have amounted to anything, considering the police were glorified pigs in cheap costumes, especially back in Morales’s universe, but– they aren’t the same.
Morales is an ugly and deformed puzzle piece perfectly molded to fit into the worst parts of his city. Miles is– good. Miles is good.
It’s deceptively simple math. The Prowler had taken hold of Morales. The Prowler let go of Miles. Maybe it was because of Spot, or because the spider took one look at Morales and decided that he’s just not good enough, but at the end of it all, at the end of the world–
Miles G. Morales, the one from Earth-42, is not anything.
“Technicalities,” Miles waves a hand, leaning back onto the concrete. “I am you; you are me. We’ve got the same dad.”
“My dad is dead,” Morales repeats carefully. Slowly. Reminding himself and Miles. “That man isn’t anythin’ to me.”
Miles tilts his head at Morales, bug eyes half their usual size. Morales can practically see the question marks floating around his mask. “Can I claim your uncle, then? Or is this some law of equivalent exchange type shit?”
Morales holds back a snort. “Please, take him. He’s fucking insane.”
“Didn’t seem that insane to me,” Miles says. “He helped keep the multi-verse from collapsing.”
Morales shrugs, tearing his eyes away from the police officer again. He hadn’t even noticed he’d caught sight of him. “Can’t make money if the world goes to shit.”
“Uh,” Miles starts. “I was kinda under the impression your world is already sort of. Shit.”
The police officer straightens, resting his hands on his hips. Morales wants to look away. The movements are so fucking similar.
It’s sickening. The officer is stealing away what little of his dad Morales has left. That isn’t him. That isn’t his face. The lines are wrong. The eyes are– too warm, too cold.
“Shit is different from ‘completely annihilated,’ isn’t it?” Morales asks. The officer swivels his head. Morales fights the urge to shrink back behind Miles. That’d be mortifying.
He isn’t a child. Aaron made sure of that.
“If you think about it, shit could be just like–” the officer looks at them. His brows furrow; Morales remembers what that looks like.
“Go say hi to your fuckin’ dad, dude. He’s staring at us,” Morales interrupts, looking at the ground between his boots. The cracks in the road snake between his shoes– he can feel each divot and dip.
He’s toeing it when Miles’s voice cracks, and he says, “He’s staring at you, probably.”
“What?” Looking up is the worst thing he’s done this century. The world goes blurry at its edges when he sees the police officer stalking over, stealing pieces of Morale’s memory with each step he takes.
First, it’s the hair. Morales’s dad wore it longer, kinkier. It had a fade.
The officer has nothing but a short military cut.
Miles repeats himself, a high thread of anxiety in his voice. “He’s staring at you. You’re like a weird, evil, doppelganger-every version of me. I think he’s–”
“You’re a fuckin’ bug. I can’t be that bad,” Morales murmurs, eyes tracking everything from the wrong jacket to the wrong fucking eyes.
It’s the wrong eyes. He has the wrong fucking eyes.
This isn’t his dad.
He’s still telling himself that when Miles squeaks, scrabbling at his mask too– what? Make sure it’s still in place?
“Miles? Miles? Oh, God. Are you okay?” The officer says, and Morales–
“Officer Morales!” Miles says, voice weird and distorted and far deeper than it has any right to be. Morales takes just a little bit of pride in the fact that his voice doesn’t break in the same Miles’s does. “Thank you for your work today.” Miles pumps a fist against his chest, right across the partially destroyed logo.
The officer ignores him. “Miles? Oh, son, thank God. What are you doing– what did you do to your hair?”
It’s not his eyes.
Morales’s dad had dark, dark brown eyes. Miles would look into them, and he could see the entirety of the universe. His universe. In the officer’s eyes, there is nothing but his own tired, slack face reflected back at him.
“Miles? What’s going on–”
“Mr Morales,” Miles says again, a bit louder, a bit more desperate. He drops the end of the name like he’s got no clue how to pronounce it. “I can’t have you interrogating–”
“Interrogating? That’s my son, Spiderman. That’s my boy–”
“Officer–” Miles tries to talk over him, hands held out, protecting Morales from– but–
“Miles, Miles, please. Look at me. I was so– we were so worried–”
That’s my son.
That’s my son.
He’s opening his mouth before he fully understands what he’s just heard. The mask slides over his face, closing around his throat like a vice.
“I ain’t your son,” the Prowler says, distorted by the metal panels. He hears an accent bounce back into his ears– it doesn’t sound like it belongs to him.
The officer’s face drops. Fast. “Miles?” He sounds confused—a little hurt. Morales hadn’t even known adults could sound like that. Aaron never gave him anything but cold, hard truths. “What are you– what are you talkin’ about, son? Of course, you are–”
The mask has always been hard to see in. Aaron said it was to block out all the extra shit– the stuff that no one, especially the Prowler, needed to care about— broken bodies, crying, ugly faces. They weren’t his to witness.
But here, now, on a street that almost tore itself to shreds because of multi-verses and Spots and Spidermen, the Prowler can’t see anything but the man who is not his dad through blotchy black spots.
They creep in from the corner of his vision– he’s not entirely sure where they came from, where they’ve ever come from.
Distantly, somewhere far away from himself, he hears Miles say, “Look, please. There’s a lot you don’t know or understand, and he’s– we’re–”
The spots steal away the last of his vision just as the officer turns to him, eyes wide and panicked, holding out two arms.
He can’t tell if it’s the Prowler that falls in his arms or if it’s Morales stealing away from him again.
–
When Morales exists again, it’s later. Much, much later. His phone tells him it’s a few hours past the last time he remembers being. He and Miles were sitting on the concrete block, wasting time away with empty conversation until–
He looks at his phone again. That had been three days ago.
It takes a moment before the pounding in his head lightens into something tolerable. It still thrums with his heartbeat, just behind his right eye, but his vision doesn’t swim when he stands, so. It’s good enough.
The Prowler sits somewhere just below his skin, right behind his ribcage but in front of his heart. Morales feels the pressure of him moving and shifting with each breath. After several, he finally dissipates.
Morales rubs at his skin, absently wandering through his bedroom and into the kitchen. It’s usually a gamble as to where he ends up after he…leaves, but more often than not, he ends up in his apartment.
He’s entering the kitchen when he feels it around his wrist. The unfamiliar, out-of-balance chunk of metal encircling his wrist.
It’s silver, with a small screen that blinks up at him when he stares at it.
Unassuming, and if it weren’t for the fact that Morales definitely did not have it when he went away, completely normal.
Fuck.
Miles had explained that it was used to keep the ‘glitching’ at bay. He’d said Morales was lucky that he hadn’t glitched at any pivotal moments in the fight against Spot. Some of the other, unluckier Spidermen had fallen many, many stories because of it.
Of course, they would’ve survived. Morales was the only one who had nothing to lose in that fight. His world, or his life– they’d been up for grabs.
The watch meant he wasn’t home. The watch meant that he wasn’t somewhere where he could disappear into the Prowler safely, hiding away from his own life.
“Oh, Miles– hey. You’re up.”
It comes from the entry to the apartment. When Morales looks over, it’s a woman who is not his mom. She looks like her, though.
The world goes green– it’s not as bad as it was with the officer, but it’s enough so that Morales has to blink away the image of his mother’s own, tired face.
“Hey,” he says. It comes out dry and croaky, grating against the walls of his throat.
This Rio, a Rio who still has her husband, giggles at him. Giggles. “You sound like your Uncle,” she says, covering her smile. “With that, cómo se llama? Move, of his.”
“Move?”
“The silly shoulder touch. Our boy, our Miles– he loves it. Uses it all the time,” she says. Her eyes crinkle at the mention of her son.
The frown that pulls at Morales’s mouth stings. When he licks the corner of his lip, he tastes a hint of copper.
She has every right to mention her son. Morales isn’t hers.
He has his own mother. She loves him just as much, he recognizes the look in this Rio’s eyes.
Still. It stings seeing her talk about some who isn’t him like it is.
God, it’s all so fucking confusing. Morales’s head is starting up that familiar throbbing.
“That’s…cool,” Morales says. “My uncle had something kinda similar.”
“Had?” she asks, nudging herself through the door. She’s carrying four different boxes of pizza, with a weird slogan written across the side of them. “El ya no lo hace?”
“No, not anymore,” Morales says, and his chest loosens. Her Spanish is familiar. “He decided it wasn’t good enough, at some point.”
She hums, leaving the boxes on the kitchen table to flit about the dining room, opening blinds, and sorting through the mail. “Shame. It was fun.”
Rio is distant. Morales stands in the middle of the apartment, aimless, until she gently moves past him to get to the mess of paperwork on the table to his right, and from there they circle each other until Rio claps her hands together, ignoring Morales’s flinch, and points at the couch.
“Sit. I’ll grab you some dinner. It’s early, but a quién le importa. Miles won’t care,” she says, shooing him away until he sits on the couch.
Morales immediately notes how this couch, in the same spot as his own, is far more broken in. It squishes down in the perfect places, and the sharp burning in his spine doesn’t ignite the way it usually does when he sits down.
His brain’s inability to ignore the difference is like a fucked sense of self-sabotage. Everything is similar, yet different. He can’t stop picking at it, prodding and poking at all the things that make him feel like this place is everything he needs and nothing he deserves.
Morales swallows down stinging spit, tracking where Rio shuffles about the kitchen, grabbing plates and shoving them into the microwave. “Where is, uh. Miles?”
“He’s out with his dad, at the station. They’re figuring out some technicalities,” she says, back turned to him. Her hair is longer and looser.
“Technicalities?”
“Yes. Jeff wants Miles to have some protection within the law– parts of the city really hate Spiderman, right now. Miles promised he’d agree to some sort of compromise. Just until it’s safe.”
The sounds of the city outside the window wash out into a dull ringing in Morales’s ears.
The officer knows?
He doesn’t know how to ask her why the officer knows. Miles had panicked the second they’d noticed him stalking towards them, tugging at the edges of his mask.
Hell, short of super gluing it to his head, it couldn’t have possibly been anymore stuck than it was.
A shuddering thought presents itself to him as Rio quirks an eyebrow at him.
Three days have passed. Three days have passed, and he is in a universe that is not his own.
Back home, in what Miles has oh-so-helpfully dubbed ‘Earth-42,’ the Prowler could do what he needed to do with no consequence. There’s nothing else waiting for Morales. No school, no responsibilities.
The Prowler, a sick, twisted, diseased limb, does the work it needs to to infect the rest of the city with its rot. Morales clings to the end of it, surfacing for air only when either one of them needs sleep.
But this isn’t home. This is Miles’s universe. This is the Earth that survived because a fucking spider had hated Morales so much, that it literally jumped ship.
What a joke, Morales thinks bitterly. Fuck that spider.
“Don’t you remember? You and Jeff had a whole argument? Told him that Miles was Spider-Man?” Rio asks, walking over to lean against the arm of the couch. “You caused a scene in front of the entire force.”
“Of course, I remember,” Morales says quickly, searching through his mind only to pull up a yawning nothingness.
She gives him a look, but says nothing. “Yeah, well. They’re dealing with that, for now.” The microwave rings into the silence that they start to fall into; she presents with a plate piled high with pizza. “Comer. You’re too skinny.”
Morales remembers when his mom used to say that. She stopped a couple years ago, after he got dropped from Visions Academy and started ignoring every one of her pleas to understand.
It’s nice to hear it again, just once more.
It’s only later that night when the officer returns, with his son in tow. Much later.
Morales is almost asleep when the door shoves open, and a loud, whiny voice fills the apartment with the complaints of supervision, and suffocation.
He twists up off the couch, trying to focus on the light pouring in from the hallway. It’s blocked by only one, skinny figure.
A hand grabs his shoulder.
He looks up— he knows it’s the officer, how couldn’t he, but the world is moving far too slowly and the officer was just at the door, and—
“Oh, great. You’re up,” the officer says. Morales is just about to respond when he’s pulled up by the collar of his undershirts, and they’re moving towards—
Miles waves his hands, but it’s—
The officer yanks him to a stop in the doorway leading out the hallway, and brings his face close to Morales’s.
“Get the fuck out.”