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Don't you grow up in a hurry. Your mom'll be worried.
It was all part of the story, even the scary nights.
Thank you for all of your glory, you will be remembered...
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move.
move.
MOVE.
MOVE MILES, MOVE !
Salty, hot tears run down ashen cheeks, they muddle with the scarlet leaking out of every gash and scratch and bruise on adolescent features. The boy feels completely submerged-- in this liquid; sticky and light pink. In this duty. Accountability.
The blood and the pain; is all over him, he's practically soaked in it. It should serve as a jolt of reality, adrenaline, anything. But still, his limbs refuse to move.
It's like a bad dream, where you're stuck unmoving. Where you've suddenly forgotten how to run-- or fight back-- or protect. To jolt back awake after you've just fallen to your certain demise. Except he's awake, wide awake, now. Lucidity escapes him.
He is lucidity incarnate.
His lip is trembling and his tears are dusted pink from intermingling with open wounds as they slip between the crevice of his lips onto his tongue. It tastes like responsibility. Distinctly like shame and dissapointment. And, faintly, like an easier time when if a single hair on his head were hurt, his mother would simply beckon him: Ven mijito, shh shh, estoy aquí miles. Sana, sana...
All that juxtaposition gives him a nasty fit of nausea, he's polarized by pain and by fear, and by the interdimensional gravity threatening to rip apart his very being. But, and this is one important but, he made a very important promise. To his mother... to his father, to his fr-
The people who knew him. And most importantly, most volatile to break him: to himself.
The void of watercolor lavender light in front of him eases him, just the slightest bit.
He jumps.
He tugs.
He tips the balances.
and-
Gently, too far away for him to ever discern, he thinks, just maybe... a girl with too much to lose, who knows loss bitterly and intimately, shouts his name. A mentor, far too young and inexperienced within the unknown waters of paternality to bear the loss of a child-- a student-- pleads.
He doesn't allow himself the amnesty of listening. He can't afford to. Not when his limbs are threatening to rip at their seams like a rough-housed well-loved teddy bear. Like a spider at the hands of a cruel child with the wherewithal to disect (at what expense really? He is one of thousands, but still somehow significant enough to pin to a board and tear apart).
He scrambles onto his feat, frantically looking around the mirror maze- esque canvas of interdimensional existences around him.
Scenes spring to life all around him. Visions of lives, some lost, some slipping.
His consciousness is waning (SO IS YOUR EXISTENCE, something hastily ignored shouts inside of him, clawing out a space in his chest trying to escape). There is no time to miss or even to be missed. Duty comes first. That impossible burden, that burden that he cherishes and protects because for all the pain that came and went at its hands, its his and no one elses. Always, always his. He may become torn at his very joints. But his resolve will not be. Maybe loneliness and pride blends at the edges. He is singular, he is alone.
But he is also semi-living proof of the greater orchestrations it took to get here. Men playing god, teenager playing hero, none of that is linear or sensible. None of it. Canon is fodder for the desperate mind. Grasping onto the fleeting straws of sense when faced with the cruel machinations of the world's absurdist will.
Yeah, he thinks, he might be a phenomenon unbidden and unwanted; an anomoly, an incident.
But he is also a boy molded by the hands of circumstance. Not destiny, but singularity.
You're an anomaly, Miles.
Cool realization washes over him, it's true. But he could never resent that, not really.
If stitching the fabric of time and space and all of the other infinitely striking physics of the quantum realms he was once convinced he would uncover (and maybe that day came much sooner than he'd been anticipating) was impossible, he'd match that impossibility, word for word, verbatim.
Mend it.
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A mother's hand guiding a child's fingers through needle and thread. "It won't be perfect Miles, but that's okay! It's yours." It's mine. She chuckles fondly."Mind stitching up my shirts for a change? You're pretty good at this stuff mijo. He'd huffed then, at the teasing. But he'd secretly wanted to leave his own mark on his mother's everday garment. His mother shifts his palm. Finishing the last cross stitch on his furry toy but only setting it down in his hands after sewing a tiny v; just across where the torn arm had been reset. On his tiny chest. Oh, he thought.
"A heart." He observes. His mother smiles down at him. "Stitches arent a bad thing, mi niño. Osito is strong, see? No necesitas llorar, siempro lo puedemos areglar, cuando ya pasa. After things pass. That's when the work begins. But don't let that scare you off. Things can be even better than they were before." That's a nice thought. He clutches osito with one hand snd his mother with the other, not letting go until his hands fall limp. Miles let's sleep take him as his mother strokes his hair, singing a lullaby faintly familiar to him.
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Things can be even better than they were before
That is a nice thought.
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Nothing is in order, he isn't in order-- he's sure of that. He'd say his heart is thundering but suddenly he can't remember the last time he felt its rhythm. Blinding light clouds his vision gradually, he thinks he might hear a soft melody melting into his being. Strumming each nerve in his body as if he himself were the instrument. The burning becomes a dull hum and he doesn't remember what the distinct feeling of existing on a singular plane as opposed to existing infinitely felt like, but this isnt it. He might be screaming but he's not sure. Nothing else matters. His duty. He mends. His people. He mends. One then two then one then two again. Stiches. Mami, have I gotten any better? He stitches, and stitches.
and stitches
and stitches
and stitches
and stitches
and stitches
and
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Arachnea, the ageless space and time weaver is presumed dead-- or simply consumed-- there is no one truly left to hold together the presumed "canon".
This is why everything is falling apart, they'd pushed the web too far, not by altering its course but by disturbing its weaver, its entirely possible that she'd died of despair. Grief stricken by the actions of the people within the realities she'd mothered. But arachnea was only one of endless variants. This means that any one person is capable of taking her place.
Miles adjusts his watch one last time and jumps. Cold space and tearing agony overtake every sense as the world caves in around him and Miles is left to pick up the shards one by one for what feels like years but is probably only minutes as he witnesses millions of different ways that his loved ones might fall. He doesn't realize that all they see is blinking fleeting flickering instances of his hopeless haste, his swinging and pulling paralleled and mirrored right back to the world of those he works to save. Floating around an abyss, there he is one moment and gone the next. Like Lyla might appear to Miguel when the cross-dimensional connections are poor. Projected onto the dark blue oblivion of a childhood home during moonlit autumns.
A phantom at night. Bloodied son, haunting Rio's peripheral but never quite staying long enough for her to recognize any one feature she'd attended to her whole life. The birth mark beneath his right ear, the freckles dusting his nose and cheekbones, the curl that always springs out of his otherwise meticulously styled hair.
This goes on for minutes that feel like years. Like centuries.
Flickers of shouts, cries-- agony-- echoe throughout Brooklyn as Peter scrambles, frantic half hysteric, for a working watch to reach Miles, stop him, anything. But there is no long-limbed boy for him to carry away to relative safety. No clutching of chests, no goodbyes, no promises. Nothing at all. Nothing. Nothing.
Gwen has opted to freeze in her post on the top of the Morales' building, swaying occasionally as hot tears bead bloodshot eyes. She's muttering something, but Rio can't rally herself to listen. The girl holds her right arm, tight, to her chest. Blood soaking bandage. Her other hand clothes a polaroid, tiny flecks of red dusting the otherwise shiny white plastic.
Hobie, Pavitr and the others (Rio's not sure she can remember them all in the moment) swing from building to building saving those still on this plane of reality from crashing to the floor as the buildings around them flicker back to normality. But, she catches one of them in a state of stillness.
He's-- well. She's sure he's meant to be a Miles. Well, he is Miles, another miles. She's sure of that much. He looks... horrified, as if what has befallen the boy he momentarily envied and resented is nothing short of his fault. It was never meant to be you. He'd said in a moment of fury. Now, he's filled with an unfamiliar pit of uncertainty. Guilt. Survivors guilt... for myself? He doesn't have the gall to chuckle but it's a near thing.
(Rio might almost smile, the sight strikes a familiar chord in her heart, but it's only a false sense of security. My Miles isn't here now.)
And then everything stops. The breathe in their very lungs freezes, Rio's sure of it.
It's almost peaceful, but.
Everything comes back rushing in, Rio blinks her eyes-- once, twice.
Brooklyn is just as it was any time before 7 pm this afternoon.
Rio falls to the floor. Right next to where Jeff sleeps soundly, oblivious -- having been neutralized by a motorcycle bound spider woman earlier that day.
They're on the roof. Looking out as the steady Twighlight begins to illuminate what was once completely shrouded around them.
Rio clenches her fist, nails digging into flesh until the tacky wetness from penetrated skin grounds her somewhat.
The wind picks up, a breeze she hasn't felt in years, probably. It's sweet, but not cloying, refreshing, but not especially cold.
He succeeded. But of course he did, Of course my baby succeeded. Oh miles.
Things can be even better than they were before.
That's a nice thought.
But Rio's not so sure that it's true anymore.
You'd already left your mark, Miles. So why did you leave me?