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Miles Morales shifted uneasily in his bed. Lying on his side, he looked at his bedroom window, gazing at the faint beams of moonlight that shone through the slits in the bamboo blinds. A low snoring cut through his pondering, and he looked down at the prone man lying on his bedroom floor. Peter was fast asleep, his head lying at an angle on one of Miles’s extra pillows. As Miles watched the young man sleeping soundly, he returned to his earlier ruminations.
There was something odd about Peter, the teenager concluded. Something unusual about this nerdy, kind-hearted scientist. Sighing and resigning himself to another sleepless night, Miles snagged his phone from the nightstand and slid under the covers, so as to not disturb Peter. The poor guy had been homeless for weeks now and this was probably the first good night’s sleep he was getting in forever.
Safely under the blanket, Miles stared at the list of evidence he’d slowly been compiling.
1. Peter clearly had feelings for Mary-Jane. They even showed signs of getting back together.
2. Mary-Jane was, despite her weak denials, Spider-Man’s girlfriend.
3. Peter had a weird habit of vanishing at random times and reappearing at equally mysterious moments
4. Spider-Man had seemed pretty cut up about May’s death
5. Spider-Man had also disappeared from FEAST just around the time Peter had returned to mourn his aunt
Miles glanced at item number seven on his list. He couldn’t be 100% sure about this one, but he’d spoken to Spider-Man multiple times and he could swear the hero’s voice sounded a heck of a lot like Peter’s. The mask did distort the sounds a bit, but Miles was certain he’d heard a distinct familiarity. He left a question mark next to “same voice” and looked down at the last item on his list.
Blushing a bit beneath the sheets, Miles flipped over to his photos and looked at the image that had trended #1 on Twitter for over four hours on the day it was posted. The shot was Spider-Man, swinging through the city, looking punch-drunk and wearing nothing but his underwear. Miles wasn’t ashamed to admit that he’d saved that image the moment he’d seen it and he’d spent a fair bit of time looking at it and the half-dozen others he’d found since.
Increasing the brightness on his screen, he zoomed in on the underwear that his hero had been wearing. They were a pair of tight, grey trunks with little Spider-Man masks dotted all over them. Miles had seen the design before, he’d almost bought a pair for himself a while back before chickening out. He already got a bit of flak from his parents for being a Spider-Man fanboy and if his mom saw Spider-Man underwear in the wash, he’d get completely razzed.
Still, Miles was familiar with the design and he’d seen a pair just like those earlier in the night, when he’d offered to wash Peter’s clothes for him. He hadn’t looked at Peter’s undies for more than the second or two it took to put them in the washer (he wasn’t a creep!). But Miles couldn’t help but notice that they were the exact same style. That brought the teenager to the last item on his list. Shaking his head, Miles blushed deeper and wanted to throw the device away and forget all about this.
You’re being a creep, Morales. What are the chances that Peter Parker is really Spider-Man?
But Miles had another reason, beyond normal hero worship, to try and find out Spider-Man’s real identity. It had been almost two weeks since that spider had bit him at FEAST, but in the days that had followed, Miles had come to the inescapable conclusion that he was developing superpowers.
He’d suddenly become incredibly strong. He was able to stick to walls. He was even able to jump ridiculously high distances.
Miles hadn’t tested his new abilities too much yet, but he was realizing that his powers were the same as Spider-Man’s. And that meant that Miles needed his help. He was still having trouble controlling his new abilities and he desperately wanted to talk about it with the one person who shared them.
Steeling himself, Miles went back to the photo. Pinching his fingers on the screen, he zoomed in on the streaking hero’s bare chest. Looking at the bulging pecs, washboard abs and veined biceps, Miles couldn’t help but feel a pang of envy. He worked out like a lot of the boys his age, but he’d never seen muscles like this on any of his classmates, not even the top athletes at school. Such a musculature was practically unheard of, outside of the models that decorated the underwear packs Miles’s mom bought for him.
But Miles had seen such abs just a few hours ago, on the young man whose snores were filling his bedroom. He looked in Peter’s direction and narrowed his eyes as he thought back to the sight of Peter, naked save for the guest towel wrapped loosely around his waist. Miles had a pretty good memory and he was able to recall the firm ridges of muscle that lined Peter’s stomach. There were six of them, the exact number that Spider-Man had been sporting in the photo. Peter’s pecs had looked firm and supple when Miles had gotten a glimpse of them, the nipples a light pink and pebbled from the cool air.
Sighing in consternation and just a bit of jealousy, Miles continued to stare at the photo, his tired eyes glazing over.
“Those are some nice abs,” he murmured absently, sliding his finger along the screen.
“Wish I had those.”
A loud snort snapped him out of his reverie and Miles nearly jumped off his bed. Sliding back out from under the covers, he peeked down at Peter, half-expecting the older boy to wake up and berate Miles for obsessing over his body and guessing his secret identity. But Peter just gave another snort and rolled over onto his side, the snoring returning to its normal decibel.
Miles stared down at his friend, watching the dim moonlight shining on Peter’s strong jawline, highlighting his faint stubble. There had to be a way to confirm Peter’s identity, Miles thought.
Come on, Morales, think.
Miles ducked back under the covers and looked at another of the photos carefully. He could see the lower half of Spider-Man’s nearly naked body clearly here. The pale skin continued from his navel down to his underwear, then reappeared along his muscular calves and stretched down long legs to taper off in lean ankles and feet. There wasn’t anything distinctive there that he could isolate though.
Going back to his science class lessons, Miles tried to approach the problem from another angle.
“I’ve got two variables,” he muttered to himself. He had the photo of a nearly-naked Spider-Man. He also had the man he suspected of being Spider-Man in his bedroom. All of a sudden it hit him. Scrolling through the photos, he began to examine each one for unique, distinctive features. It took five photos before Miles spotted something that fit the bill.
Just below his belly button, a prominent vein appeared on Spider-Man’s flat stomach. The bulging vessel trailed down the right side of the hero’s lower torso until it disappeared into the grey waistband of his briefs.
Miles shook his head at that last thought. He didn’t know for sure that Peter was Spider-Man.
Even though they both have the same underwear, same abs and same girlfriend…
Miles closed his phone down and lay back on his bed, thinking over everything he’d discovered. He was 90% sure of his hypothesis. All he had to do was confirm one last detail and that would remove the remaining 10% of doubt.
“Just gotta do an experiment,” the teenager muttered to himself as his eyes drifted shut.