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The match had been Dick’s idea, because Dick thought sparring and socialising were the same thing.
“This is how it starts, you know,” Peter told him. “Six months from now, when we’re selling tickets to our underground junior league cage matches, I want you to remember I said that.”
He’d still agreed to it in the end, of course. Damian and Miles, Robin and Spider-Man II, capes and webs: two kids with skills and abilities outside anything most of their peers could dream of, carrying a proportionately-sized share in the weight of the multiverse on their skinny little shoulders. Why not introduce them to one of the few other people their own age who could relate?
Possibly Peter should have remembered how their plans tended to go.
They had gone like this, years ago: a hole punched between two different universes containing two different cities prone to very similar onsets of questionably themed crime. Not part of anyone’s plan, but as a couple of young adults with a shared passion for colourful bodysuits and jumping off skyscrapers, they’d made the best out of the situation they could.
There had been costumed lunatics kicked in the face by alternating shades of red and blue, shouting matches (multiple) on rooftops (many), 3am commiserations on Top Ten Wardrobe Malfunctions held in dingy diners, and, eventually, something that came a lot closer to friendship than Peter had ever expected to get once he'd started wearing a mask.
“Really not the plan,” Peter had said somewhat giddily, arm slung over blue-striped shoulders, the mask in tatters, shredded spandex hanging off his jaw in long strips. His secret identity in this company wasn’t faring much better, thanks to Eddie Brock’s vicious parting gift. One last go at ruining Spider-Man’s life. “I don’t - nobody knows, not my aunt, nobody. It’s dangerous, Big Bird, you know that, the more people who know the name Peter Parker-”
“I do know that,” Nightwing had said with the sort of gentle patience he usually reserved for frightened civilians; Peter would have pushed him away out of sheer contrary instinct, if only it hadn’t been likely to end in a faceplant in an alley full of wet newspapers and rat droppings. “Of course I know that. I’d be very personally offended by this whole conversation if you weren’t bleeding all over my shoes.” He affected a thoughtful look at his boots that almost covered the strained edge to his smile. “I was totally expecting something more spider-y and dramatic, though, SM. Ichor, ooze, something bright blue - you’re letting me down.”
“It’s radioactive,” Peter had admitted, and Nightwing had very generously not dropped him on the spot.
Of course, the name Peter Parker had stayed behind closed lips, and Dick Grayson had come out from under the domino, like he couldn’t bear to let the inequity between them stand. 3am waffles became an evening at a Blüdhaven apartment here, a visit to the Bugle there, another face at Peter's college graduation. A thin tether to sanity, after that terrible night on the bridge, hauling Peter slowly back to himself.
He’d tried to return the favour when life handed Dick a kid and a cowl and a personal dose of world-ending, complicated grief - “Can't say this wasn't somebody's plan, knowing Bruce,” Dick said, an awful, twisted smile on his face - and instead felt every second of his own helplessness to do anything about the situation that mattered.
He'd brooded between weak jokes and weaker reassurances; tried not to stare too hard at the kids in his classes, picture any of them squaring up against the Rhino, and ignoring the selfish little voice saying, Well, at least it happened to the right one of us, huh? Batman and Robin was a duet that would keep playing until the end of time, even if the harmony got a little rough in places. Spider-Man hadn't been anything taught. They'd all lucked out there.
Naturally, it was all of two months later that Miles Morales had come scrambling up the spout, wide-eyed and wielding webs.
Peter was still trying to find the monkey's paw responsible for that one.
Miles was slippy and fidgety the whole way home, sinking every one of Peter's conversation starters with monosyllabic responses. Luckily, the universes - any and all variations thereof - cut them enough of a break that they made it back to the Chelsea apartment without interruption. Peter cast a silent thanks skyward for the rare good fortune: fending off the latest putz with a new patent and a bad idea was not what anyone needed tonight.
He waved the teenager in through the window ahead of him and made sure to snap the blinds shut behind, blocking out the view of two Spider-Men standing in Peter Parker’s living room from any eagle-eyed New Yorkers. Good thing too - when he looked around again, Miles had the mask off, his hair a wild explosion freed from the pressing confines of the spandex, and was staring a guilty-eyed hole through the floor.
“I really, really didn’t mean to hit him like that,” Miles said for approximately the ninth time.
“I know, Miles,” Peter assured him. “Dick knows. I’m pretty sure everyone back at that cab rank now knows. Accidents happen, bud.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” Miles said, and continued to look like Jiminy Cricket had just caught him kicking a small dog into traffic.
Peter sighed and hooked a hand up behind his head, thumbing the fold where his mask met his neckline and watching Miles twist his own back and forth in his hands. The kid’s suit still leapt out at him with every glance, though at least three different people had kindly found the time to comment that it was much less gaudy than the original. Than him, Spider-Man numero uno, doing primary colours proud.
Of course, there was a lot to be said for being the vanilla version. Amidst the approximately three billion things Peter had to stress about as a newly fledged superhero juggling crazy spider powers, accidentally nerve-jamming someone with the touch of his fingers had not been on the list.
“He was just - he was up in my face!” Miles blurted out. “He was up in my face and it was freaking me out and-” He mashed red-fingered fists into his cheeks. The words came out squashed and muffled. “I can’t believe I freaked out. Can we go to the universe where I didn’t freak out?”
“Sure, but it’s probably also the universe where you’re a redhead,” Peter said. All it got him was a wheezy sound like a deflating beach ball, and that old familiar feeling of complicity, settling into place like it had never left.
Dick had just been so delighted by the idea of a protege playdate. That right there had doomed Peter - Dick didn’t do delighted a lot, these days. It had been the full routine, too: sparkling eyes, magazine cover grin, hands clapping down on his shoulders for a light shake in his fit of enthusiasm. A long line of warning signs saying be afraid, Peter Parker, be very afraid, because you couldn't say no if you wanted to.
And, well - he had kind of wanted to.
He’d met the newest (and truest, if the lofty declarations of the subject in question were to be believed) Robin a few times before tonight's fiasco. Once during a formal introduction of Nightwing’s allies; again at the funeral, the kid a stiff and dry-eyed statue in Dick’s slumped shadow.
And, of course, the ever-memorable close encounter Peter had gotten during his personal bed-and-breakfast tour of all known quarters of the multiverse after Fisk had tried to quantum detangle him, which had fairly literally laid the secret identity on the table. He’d been half-loopy by the time he’d shown up sprawled in the mansion’s second dining room, the constant jerking between dimensions hitting like the worst kind of jet lag. Peter was pretty sure he remembered complimenting the kid’s teeth. He definitely remembered the moment he’d been indignantly kicked in his own.
From what he’d seen, Damian Wayne had the agility, the eloquence, and the fancy cape of his predecessors. He was also a pug-nosed, pugnacious eleven year old with a supervillain’s sneer, and he’d gone for Miles like a shopaholic after a rival for a Black Friday blender. Peter couldn’t confidently say he wouldn’t have deliberately shocked the kid in Miles’ shoes.
Miles, on the other hand...
“I beat up on a little guy. I’m a bully," Miles moaned into his hands, fingers dragging down under his eyes for full bloodhound dramatics. “Dios mío…”
“Relax,” Peter said, finally peeling his mask back so Miles could receive the full effect of the look he was shooting him, and tossed it onto the back of a chair as he headed for the kitchen. “Seriously, you’re going to give me an ulcer. I’ll name it after you, just watch me.”
“What if I’d hurt him? Like really hurt him?”
“That’s why we do these gigs, Miles. It’s a learning experience. Limits. Control. All those good things.” Peter swung his fridge door open, and winced. The motley jumble of expired condiments inside was a damning condemnation of the bachelor lifestyle. “Besides, I’ve nearly finished setting up your bail fund, so give it a few more years and you can get arrested for assault as much as you want.”
Silence. Peter looked over into Miles’ stricken expression.
“Joking,” Peter said. “That was a joke.”
“So funny I forgot to laugh, man.” Miles dropped bonelessly onto the yellow couch, head hitting the backrest with a dull thump. Peter watched him tuck his feet up onto the cushions briefly before starting and sliding a guilty look his way, placing them back on the floor.
“Look.” Without intending it, Peter could hear the tone in his voice changing to the one from his other day job. Mr Parker, substitute teacher, whiteboard looming behind him. He leaned on the open fridge door. “You’re right. You have the ability to do a lot of damage, you should be careful with that. It’s good that you want to be careful, Miles.” He raised an eyebrow, kept it light. “But this was a sparring match. Supervised. Hitting the other player was kind of the point.”
Miles looked down at the mask spread in his lap, big white eyes staring up. “The other player seemed pretty mad about it.”
“Yeah, well.” Peter hesitated, then decided to shelve that tangle of rattlesnakes for another day. “Losing is one of those learning experiences too. Luckily for me, I had a entire zoo lining up to help out with that when I was your age. Do you want blue electrolytes or green?”
“Huh?” Miles said and then, seeing the two half-empty bottles of Gatorade being shaken at him, “Oh, um. Green?”
A Spider-Man who gravitated towards the colour green. Forget the stylish new suit and the grab-bag of extra powers, this was the biggest difference between them. He just hoped it wasn’t some Dalai Lama style test for future Goblin tendencies.
“Sugar-free,” Peter said when he passed the bottle down to Miles, who murmured thanks. “Your dentist can thank me later.”
Miles wrinkled his nose. “Sugar-free’s not really better.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Peter sighed, folding down into the space next to the teen, who shuffled a little further sideways like there somehow might not be enough room. “But I’m a sucker for a quarter-price sale and ignoring everything I read in Bugle editorials.”
“Tell that to the gummy bear guy,” Miles muttered, but shrugged and darted his eyes away from Peter’s querying look. “Super gross. You don’t want to know, seriously.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Peter said wryly, and clacked his plastic bottle against Miles’, finally drawing out a smile.
It was silent for a bit, if not quite comfortably, both of them sipping at the sugar-free goop which - Peter could admit - might not be giving him cavities but did leave a weird film in his mouth. Halfway through scraping his tongue over his teeth, he noticed Miles had stopped drinking and settled into staring down into his bottle, a frown plain on his face.
Peter had been told he was too easy to read for a man who ran around in a mask, but Miles was a movie with captions in three different languages. There wasn’t a lot of patience needed to wait him out.
“Dam- I mean, Robin.” Miles fiddled with the flip-top lid. “He was just mouthing off, right?”
“Firstly, full marks for discretion, but we can ease up a bit,” Peter said. “Just don’t say anything too loudly, Mrs Muggins has pretty sharp ears and a disturbing habit of pressing them against my door. Secondly - yeah, of course. You don’t think Dick actually lets him keep a collection of severed fingers, do you?”
“I mean, maybe,” he said, which Peter was going to text Dick about at the first possible opportunity and at least once a week thereafter, “but not that, the other… everything.”
“Might have to be a little more specific, bud,” Peter said, and Miles gave him an annoyed look like he was being deliberately obtuse.
“Before we started fighting, he was talking about his grandfather,” he said. “With the name, Ray- Raysh-”
“Ra’s al Ghul,” Peter finished. “Kind of a mouthful, right? Almost justified by the get-up, let me tell you-”
He didn’t get the chance. Miles butted in, quickly, like he didn’t want to lose his nerve. Like a guilty confession. “He said that's where he got his training, before Batman. Before he was doing any of the Robin stuff - it’s how he knows all those ninja moves already. He said it as, like - he was kind of bragging, I guess? But also like he was…" He picked at the label, brow furrowed. "I dunno. Warning me?”
A dusty bulb finally flickered on inside Peter’s head and, oh boy, it was lighting up those snakes at the back of the closet. He pulled in a breath, but not quick enough to stop Miles from trudging stubbornly into, “Because he said he was trained to kill people. To be an assassin. Like seriously, he said that, assassin. And that he’d like-” hands went up, fingers curling around the quote that was all too easy to match to Damian's clipped, high tones: “left more than one fool resigned from the roster.”
And there it was.
They’d given the kids a chance to talk before the match on purpose. The social part of the social sparring, a moment to interact on their own terms without nosy grown-ups hovering directly overhead, if still close enough to intervene in case blades were preemptively drawn.
Apparently more had gone on in that little chat than either he or Dick knew. Or had agreed on, for that matter. This discussion had always been coming, but they’d planned for it to arrive further down the track, when the kids were more than nervous, heavily armed strangers. Dick had particularly wanted to give Damian a chance at doing this as close to the normal way as they could.
(“He needs friends,” he’d said, looking dangerously misty-eyed about it, and Peter had said, “So we’re saving the Leagues and Lazarus Pits Jerry Springer special for the third date?” and Dick had confiscated his last wonton to let him know he wasn’t mad, just disappointed. It was about how most of their arguments were settled these days.)
Apparently Damian had had other ideas. Peter set the Gatorade down on the coffee table.
Miles was watching his face too closely to miss what crossed it, and his eyes widened, plastic crinkling as his bottle buckled under his fingers. “It’s true?”
“Okay,” Peter said, holding up a hand to forestall the freak-out. He remembered it too well: a dark room, Dick’s face closed and regretful, the burn of righteous anger. That’s your brother, isn't it? The guy out there right now, the guy KILLING people. “First rule of multiversing.”
Miles blinked, then rolled his eyes and obediently droned, “Clean underwear before going through the portal.”
“What? Oh. Right.” He really did need to write them down at some point. “Still a good first rule, keep that rule. Okay. Rule one-and-a-half, then.” He grasped the kid’s shoulder gently and leaned in to lock eyes. “Miles… Sometimes you have to be ready for things to be different in other worlds. For other people.”
“Um. Yeah.” The duh was heavily implied through the eyebrows. It had been nice when Miles was too awestruck to make duh eyebrows at him. “The evil clown was kind of a clue.”
“Right, right, but.” He cast his gaze briefly upwards, as if the good grace of the multiverse might have printed the right words there. All he got was the silhouette of a mummified moth inside his ceiling light. It was probably karma. “Damian had a very different upbringing to you and me. And Dick’s the best person around to help him out with that, but Dick hasn’t been in his life all that long. There are going to be things he’s done without properly understanding what it meant, and things he’s still unlearning-”
“No, I know, I get that,” Miles said, and promptly shook both Peter’s hand and his entire grasp of the situation off in a single restless shrug. “I get that, I just - that’s his grandfather. You know what Damian told me he got for his sixth birthday?”
“A camel?” Peter hazarded.
“A sword!” He pushed up off the couch, fast enough that he almost stumbled over his feet before swinging around, arms flung out. “For stabbing people! Pete, that - that’s like cult levels of messed up. That seriously happened to him?”
Peter had underestimated a lot of people in his life, usually in ways that saw him limping around his apartment for several days afterwards. Strangely enough, there was a bittersweet ache building in his chest now as well. Forget the green Gatorade - he was alright with any number of differences that saw this Spider-Man standing before him, burning with righteous anger for the sake of a kid who’d never had a choice about what path he’d been put on.
“One day you are going to make me the happiest guy in the Old Spiders Home,” he said solemnly.
“What?” Miles said, but his lips quirked for a moment, pleased and confused, before he flapped a hand. “No, shut up - I’m serious, man.”
“So am I.” Peter leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers linked. “And you’re right. You're completely right. It’s a tough situation - cult’s not a bad way of looking at it, actually.” With the added bonus of likely making Ra’s purse his wrinkly lips to hear the word applied to his precious League. “But he’s got a chance at a different life now, and Dick’s doing everything he can to make sure it’s a good one. We all are.”
Miles nodded, but there was still something rattled in his expression and he looked aside, rubbing at one arm.
“Still kind of a lot, huh,” Peter said, gentle.
Miles huffed agreement. “It’s just - it’s crazy. I don’t get how anybody could do that. I mean, they’re family, right? Family’s not supposed to do that to you, even if they’re...”
He cut off on a hard swallow and was definitely not meeting Peter’s eyes now, which was probably for the best because Peter could feel his jaw tighten.
He still wasn’t sure if Miles didn’t talk much about the uncle who had chosen the path of the wannabe-supervillain, or if he just didn’t talk about him with Peter - with Spider-Man. There must have been something more to the man to put that kind of grief into the boy’s eyes, but it was hard to find nice things to say about someone who'd tried to disembowel you on multiple occasions. The Prowler hadn’t exactly been A-list, for all his ambitions, but he’d been vicious in a way that wasn’t easy to forget. Or forgive.
“Nope,” was all he said lightly. “Not even then.”
Some undertone must have come through despite his efforts, though, because in the next moment Miles’ stance was firming and he looked up, defiant, daring Spider-Man to disagree. “Uncle Aaron would never have wanted that for me.”
Peter drew in a slow breath. Then he said, “Not really the impression I got either,” and Miles’ expression crumpled, turning surprised and painfully grateful. It only lasted a moment, because he was nearly fourteen and much too cool for that level of emotional disclosure, but it was there.
Maybe Peter couldn’t say that Aaron Davis was a good man, but he’d made the right decision when it was most important. That was just going to have to be good enough.
Miles shuffled back over to the couch and settled on it with none of the stiffness of before. The final mouthful of green Gatorade was considered and disregarded with a single scrunch of his nose, before he sagged back against the cushions with a sigh that said he was not fourteen yet, and it had been a long day.
“Gotta get you home, bud,” Peter said, fond.
“Yeah,” Miles said. He blinked at the ceiling. “Hey, Pete?”
“Mm?”
“Is that why we did the sparring? Because he has his grandfather, and I had - you know.”
“No,” Peter said firmly. “We did the sparring because when Jameson shorts me on a check again in, oh, two weeks probably, I plan to make rent money by putting you in an illegal boxing ring with a three hundred pound ex-biker named Skullcrusher.”
“Okay,” Miles said. “That’s good. Because I’m pretty sure he hates me now.”
Somewhere, Dick was crying. “He doesn’t hate you,” Peter said, and then, raising his voice over Miles’ scoff, “more than he hates most people as a default, plus a little extra because you did light up his nervous system like the fourth of July.” After a moment he leaned back against the cushions as well, joining in the reflective staring at the ceiling. “Look, I won’t lie to you - Damian could use people who won’t judge, and you could use someone to practice against who doesn’t have a rap sheet longer than Fifth Avenue. And also isn't me. Not that I've got anything against being your personal punching bag, but it’s hard to give pointers when I can’t move my arms. Or my legs. Or, you know, most of my face.”
He could see Miles smothering a smile out of the corner of his eye.
“This isn’t super-playgroup. It’s just…” He fumbled a little, ended up settling lamely on, “Not not super-playgroup.”
“So we’re going to do this again?”
Somewhere Dick was definitely crying and possibly also tearing at his clothes, but Peter’s responsibilities were here, in his world, in his living room. He turned his head to Miles, serious. “Not if you don’t want to.”
Spider-Man numero dos chewed his lip a moment, then shrugged, too casual. “I mean, I kind of need my fingers.” But before Peter could do more than draw a pre-emptively supportive breath, he added, “So as long as that part was definitely just weird trash talk.”
A grin Peter had absolutely no say in tugged one side of his mouth up in a lopsided slant, and he raised one hand. “‘No unsolicited amputations’ will be hung on a sign outside the clubhouse. Webhead’s honour.”
This time Miles’ eyebrows spelled out god you’re old and weird, and at some point Peter was going to have to seriously evaluate the rate at which respect was vanishing, but for now the warm bloom of affection seemed like a trade he was willing to make.
Maybe Damian did hate his super-playgroup buddy right now, but Peter was willing to lay money down on how long would last (three months and a near death experience), and there was no way he was bringing up Kid Pupa as a suggestion but he might just consider letting that monkey's paw get away with it, and maybe, just maybe, Dick still knew his way around a plan.