Chapter Text
The second time Gwen Stacy got sucked with inconsiderate abruptness into the dimension containing Earth-1610, she didn’t slam face-first into the mocking smile of a Times Square billboard. Instead she fell with a spray of dippin’ dots lights and a muffled oomph! into Miles’ bunk, right on top of him.
Having a cute girl drop on him out of nowhere, literally into his bed, wasn’t as thrilling as Miles might have assumed in his guilty adolescent fantasies. He coughed the wind back into his lungs while Gwen tipped her way over the edge of the mattress and off the top bunk, landing en pointe with all the grace of a cat that had fatally injured its dignity. Ganke, two Monsters deep into a caffeine binge past midnight and distracted by death metal, didn’t even look up from his desk.
“Hey, Miles,” Gwen said, tipping her hood back. “Got a minute?”
---
Peter’s New York was just different enough to be weird, and just not different enough to feel different. It was the little things that stuck in your head, tiny nagging imperfections, differences that lodged in the mind and irritated like a splinter slid fully under the skin. Like one of those Spot the Differences puzzles in the back of an issue of Highlights for Children: find the staircase with one more step in it between these pictures, the corner store with two faded advertisements plastered across the front windows instead of three. Landmarks subtly shifted a few doors down from where they were ‘supposed’ to be, shuffled around at random; new marketing campaigns for sideways familiar soda brands, all of it still in the same living color.
Somewhere in this New York, it was strange to think, there was another Miles Morales. At seven-ish in the evening, Other Miles was probably sitting down to dinner with his family-- no, it was a weekday, more likely he’d be grabbing something cheap and lukewarm from the Visions caf and smuggling it back up to their room with Other Ganke. Unless, of course, without the catalyst of a certain spider’s bite, they’d never become friends-- unless Other Miles still went to Brooklyn Middle, Brooklyn High that fall. Other Miles had homework. Other Miles had a sketchbook filled with designs that might be different, spilled forth from a mind that might have developed from unforeseen circumstances in unaccountable ways. Perched on a stranger’s fire escape in an alley he was pretty sure no one would chance to peer down, Miles contemplated how weird it would be to run into yourself on the street, a voyeur peeping into your own life.
But back up a moment.
There was a strange buzzing all over the surface of his skin, a hypertension like all the atoms that fused him together were jangling anxious against each other, and had been ever since the rift had opened between third and fourth periods and vacuumed him up into somewhere else. Rift was what Gwen was calling it, and that felt right, felt apt; a temporary hole punctured through the skin of reality, and beyond it that great dark tumbling void he’d glimpsed in the abyssal depths of the collapsing Alchemax Collider, crosshatched with strands of some ephemeral thread that stitched all the planes of possibility threadbare together. Looking into it, he hadn’t been able to imagine what it would be like to fall through that spiraling space, pulled forth by whatever force called like to like matter, the spider singularity.
He knew now. It was beautiful and terrifying and stopped his heart in his chest, made him quiet and small, just for a second. Then the moment of hanging equilibrium had passed and he’d been spit out stumbling, on his feet thankfully, on the gravel and pigeon shit encrusted roof of a squat brownstone building in somewhere that approximated to Chinatown. The bracing gust of an early April breeze blasted him in the face and out of his brief shock, but even when he’d strolled down the side of the building and gotten his bearings on solid ground the whole thing had left him on edge. Spontaneous dimensional travel would do that to a person, probably. The sample size so far was small.
Miles had been Spider-Man for about four months. About three weeks had elapsed since Gwen had blinked into his world, into his room, and then on a whim evaporated again. The collider did something to the fabric of reality, she’d theorized at him, both of them perched on a broad steel strut propping up the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge, sipping coffee from fair trade eco-friendly cups in relative privacy as they listened to cars and trains rattle along above their heads. Or at least, our reality. Tangled us up together, maybe, unless someone found a way to make another one--
So Miles had kind of, in the back of his head, been expecting it. Or anticipating, like you might hold your breath about a looming pop quiz in a difficult subject with an uncertain date. It might not happen again, Gwen had said. Or it might happen tomorrow. In any case, when she’d disappeared without fanfare or apparent cause a few days later it had neatly solved the problem of how to send her back before all her cells decayed to ash. Whatever the half life of foreign particles in a new universe might have been, Miles never wanted to find out.
He wondered, vaguely, if Peter knew Other Miles, or if this was even a universe with a Peter Parker in it at all-- but he felt, and had learned to trust such inexplicable out of nowhere deep gut feelings, that it was. For all the ways the air here was alien to him, the feel of the early spring sun against his skin had a familiar quality to it that went down bone deep, a comforting known quantity. Maybe Peter had saved his copy from a mugger once, a routine heroic altercation so rote and regular that Peter would never have remembered his face. Caught a glimpse of him on the subway, in civilian mode, and had the same sort of disorienting moment that Miles had every time he saw Spider-Man memorial footage on some news or entertainment program back home, that flash of disbelief and unrecognition: that’s not Peter Parker. That’s a stranger wearing something almost like his face.
Miles tapped out a beat against the brickwork and hummed indistinctly while he googled Peter’s name on his phone, infinitely grateful that even though cell service sometimes dropped out on the ferry for no reason, it apparently worked between universes. The first page of results included a Linkedin profile that hadn’t been updated since 2014 and several articles from the Daily Bugle’s online site listing a Peter B. Parker as photographer or coauthor. One of them (“Masked Menace Gums Up Midtown Traffic in Sticky Scuffle”) had a slightly blurry picture of the man in question at the bottom, buried beneath links to more relevant stories and an ad for Burger King. Miles hissed his breath out between his teeth. There was the messy hair, the big crooked nose, the scruffy five o’clock shadow. A face he’d thought he’d looked into for the last time in the seconds before he’d dropped the man into the chaos and color of the collider.
It was, for real, that Peter. Miles felt his heart make a deep slow thud, becalmed.
From Uncle Aaron, he’d picked up more than his fair share of street smarts: where to go if you couldn’t go home, who and what and which places to avoid, how to get a good meal or live on a little. Miles didn’t really need to find Peter, he had options of chilling and exploring B-Side New York until this phase was over and he could return to regular life, but he wanted to, despite not knowing quite how he wanted to find him. The hope was for a nice solidly middle-class row house, soft sterile interior decorating with no two-days-discarded empty take out containers in sight, pretty wife back at his side with maybe the signs of a baby on the way, or at least the signs that they were trying. That’s what he’d pictured, whenever he’d let himself get curious about Peter’s self-controlled destiny. That’s what they’d both wanted for him.
But Miles, whose life was upended drastically and permanently in the span of about 48 hours last December, knew that all it took was a hot minute for everything to change. There was every possibility that the Peter B. Parker of this universe would now be as unrecognizable to him as the blond straight-nosed, straight-laced stranger who had died too young to teach him the trade; thinner and well-washed and clean shaven, and someone else’s problem. Then, too, there was every possibility that the inertia of old habits had caught him in the grips of his holding pattern, and four months would have changed nothing at all. Privately, in his own head, Miles wasn’t sure which option disquieted him more.
It was getting dark slowly, twilight spreading itself across the cloud-choked sky, and the breeze was stiffening again, and a cold oozing rain had begun to fall. Thick droplets splashed ponderously across the backlit image of Peter’s face and Miles pocketed the phone, the image burned into his memory. If he was here, and for now he was, he would make the most of it, even if the idea of seeing Peter again sort of made him feel, for some reason, like an old car on a chill day, ready to shake itself apart.
---
Gwen stayed with Miles for a few days, because she had to, and between a couple of team-up patrols and hiding her from the faculty administration they chilled. It was chill.
What Miles had expected was to want her, with that sweet burgeoning directionless want that had swollen incipient under his skin that first time, a full-body ache. Like the flu, it made him sweat, and that hadn’t been so long ago in the grand scheme of things. Maybe something about fighting together, though, taking her hand and promising it was as friends, ruined it-- he saw Gwen in his room that night, full up on the awe and precious surprise of seeing someone he’d thought he’d given up, half in shadow from his erstwhile roommate’s computer screen, and she was like the sunshine, warm and bright and whole. But he wasn’t like a sunflower for her anymore, didn’t open and wilt by her smile or the flip of her hair, didn’t track each of her motions across the room with such a yearning need.
Some strange alchemy formed the science of love. That spark caught tinder, burned itself out, and having eaten through its fuel could not be rekindled the same way, nothing to burn but ashes there. In different terms, the longform chemical reaction had been completed. What was left was a gratitude, a fondness that suffused him; a new thing, not an absence, a friendship without pressure. He relaxed, and she relaxed, and they talked and laughed and she traced the veins spidering blue beneath the thin pale skin of her wrist, searching for signs of interdimensional decomposition.
“Sorry,” Miles had said. “It sucks that you’re here like this. But I’m glad we got the chance to hang again.”
She’d smiled at him, tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. It wasn’t growing out again on the other side; she’d clearly buzzed it down again recently, downy peach fuzz against the side of her skull. “Me too,” she’d admitted, and added, “but next time you have got to come to my place,” before he could stick his foot in his mouth somehow and ruin it.
Instead, at the capricious mercy of the universe, Miles found himself scuttling up the rain-slick side of the modern style building that housed the print offices of the Bugle, peaking in windows to see if he could catch a glimpse of Peter. There were easier and less conspicuous ways of doing this, probably. As a child he’d had a police scanner in his room and spent long nights listening to the chatter, hoping to hear the soothing sentorian rumble of his father’s baritone voice roll across the coms; easy enough to listen in awhile, head for the first major disaster that came over the wire, and wait for Spider-Man Classic to show up. That method relied on hope and faith and an ability to predict Peter’s behavior that Miles didn’t yet possess, though, so up the skyscraper he went. At least this plan felt like direct action.
It wasn’t as though he were leaping in blindfolded, either. The closer he’d gotten to the building the more it had throbbed against his consciousness, a localized pressure that beckoned like a flare. Each floor up made the fine hairs down the backs of his arms raise, that sensation pushing at the web of instinct and perception that made up the spider sense with an insistence that let him know he was on the right track. The curious shiver of recognition unfurled down his spine again and again, opening into the pit of his belly when, twenty storeys up, hands sliding against the great slabs of glass paneling, he caught sight of what was unmistakably Peter through the wet-smeared window.
He was sitting at a desk cluttered with the paraphernalia of a hectic working life, papers and newspapers and chunky overfull manilla folders piled at angles across every inch of available space and also the top of a boxy decade out of date computer. Several glossy enhanced photos of Spider-Man were tacked up above the desk. The light inside the office was warm and low and showed off a slumped-over silhouette that was maybe a little slimmer, a jaw still fuzzed with the furze of stubble; a heavy olive green coat that was rapidly becoming unseasonable hung from the cheap back of a highly un-ergonomic plastic rolling chair.
The spider sense flared up one final time and then burned down, and Peter’s head snapped back around towards the window at the same instant that Miles chose to knock, knuckles clunking a dull reverberation into the glass. A moment of incomprehension spread across his face before his brown eyes went big and wide and his caterpillar brows furrowed. Miles just grinned through his mask, trying to play it cool and not wave at him too frantically, keeping his excitement at a simmer while Peter mimed his way through a series of increasingly frenetic hand gestures of his own, a game of Charades where the answer was probably “this window doesn’t open, holy shit how are you here, meet me on the roof in five minutes”.
The wind was worse on the roof, this high up, and the gentle spring rain had turned entirely unforgiving. At least he had the suit on to insulate him, though he rolled the mask up over his eyes when he heard the metal clang of a door slamming open on its hinges and Peter’s boots (two of a pair this time, no longer hobo fashion) splashing through growing puddles. His cheeks were flushed ruddy and his voice had taken on a sort of breathless quality, like he’d bolted a few flights of stairs too quickly. “Miles?” he called, not waiting for a response before striding over, long legs closing the distance with loping ease. “How-- are you okay, bud? Are you in trouble?”
“Naw, man,” Miles said, unable to keep his smile from widening. It wasn’t so long ago that Peter wouldn’t have cared-- but it had been long enough that he might have forgotten the way he felt for Miles, the fondness and the pride in him, and a final tension eased. “I’m good. Just taking a day trip, thought I’d drop in and see how you were doin’.”
Peter snickered, in that dry half-helpless way that meant he was cornered, and ran a trembling hand through his hair. “Guess we’ve got a lot to catch up on.” He rolled up a sleeve to check his watch, shrugged. “Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere. Want to blow this joint and get dinner?”
Miles’ stomach churned in response. He shrugged back. “I could eat.”
---
An hour and two train rides later (the weather having been firmly classified as too shitty to swing through, and thank god money was the same in this dimension, because Spider-Man didn’t hop turnstyles let alone Officer Davis’ son) Miles found himself in a cramped hallway you could have set a convincing horror movie in, dripping rainwater onto mysteriously stained grey-beige carpeting while a single naked light bulb flickered frantic morse code at them. Broad arms bulging around take-out bags loaded up with warm dim sum and noodles, Peter shuffled stuff from hand to hand and under the crook of a creaky elbow enough to get the key in the lock, and kicked the door open with a smack. “Welcome to Chez Peter,” he said, dropping the paper sacks onto the apartment’s lone table. “If I’d known you were coming, I woulda dusted off the good China.”
They could’ve eaten at the restaurant, a bustling steamy hole in the wall under a stretch of elevated train track where voices called out in snatches of at least three languages and paper lanterns bathed the low fake-lacquer tables in soft red light, but Miles had argued for privacy discussing hero stuff. It was a pretty obvious cover for just wanting to see Peter’s apartment, which it turned out there hadn’t been a real rush on. An inventory of Peter’s continuing living situation was this, itemized: obscenely bare mattress, flat on the floor. A window that looked out at a cracking brick wall. No couch, just an aging cathode ray television sitting on an old orange crate before the bed. A stack of carelessly piled cardboard boxes containing personal effects perhaps no longer relevant to the person he had become, and a cork board beside the window where thick threads of red yarn tied suspect to suspect by push pin, solidifying the invisible connections of crime and purpose and suspicion. A framed picture of a redheaded woman Miles assumed must have been his MJ, not much different from the widow he’d once seen on the steps of a church. And on one wall, something mundanely, shockingly familiar.
Miles sauntered over to it, transfixed, while Peter unrolled the folded over mouths of the bags and unpacked segregated boxes of rice, beef chow mein, general tso’s, a translucent rice paper packet full of lumpy cheese wontons, chattering away as he worked. The decoration on the wall was a sticker. One of his stickers: Hello, my name is MILES. He recognized it as one he’d kept loose in the pages of his sketchbook, presumed lost in a flurry of loose pages when he’d chucked it streetward out the window in a fit of despair. Fat curvaceous outlines, bright sunny yellow highlighter, a new style he’d been trying out for a tag. Hello, my name is MILES. It was there on Peter’s wall, somewhere his dad would never be able to find it.
Like it was special. Like it was something Peter wanted to see, and remind himself, and remember.
“MIles?” he heard Peter call again, as if from a long way off. He was holding a selection of utensils out to him, still wrapped in their flimsy paper and plastic wrap restaurant-grade casings. “Fork or chopsticks?”
Whatever weird personal moment he’d been having broken up by this ordinary sort of question, Miles blinked and brushed it off. “Chopsticks, for sure. Who do you think I am?”
Peter tossed him a packet of sticks from across the room, and there was still a small marvel, a glancing novelty, in being able to reach out and pluck them from the air without even thinking. Miles tapped the end of the packet against his thigh to rupture the paper with the pointy ends and peeled the wrapper the rest of the way off while Peter inelegantly portioned out the rice onto paper plates, the aroma of grease and MSG wafting through the air, filling the whole space with something other than the scent of dust and black mold behind the walls. “Alright, alright,” Peter said, put upon with half of a grin flickering across his face. “Just giving you options.”
Miles wondered if Other Miles would have gone for a fork, if that was the kind of decision that made a difference at all. “I’m good,” Miles assured him, snapping the sticks apart and using them to grab a golden fried glistening piece of chicken from the top of an overstuffed open box.
Peter watched him eat for a second, then turned away, inhaling three bites’ worth of fried rice at once. “That’s a good break,” he said, muffled, mouth full, and Miles glanced at the fat ends of his own chopsticks, smooth without splinter or off-kilter angle where they were snapped. Clean, crisp, centered. “I never have that kind of luck.”
“It’s not luck, man.” The chicken made his mouth fill up with water for another bite, and he went for a dumpling that time, smooth and savory. “One hundred percent skill.”
Peter cracked open two glass bottles of Coke for them, still frosty from the refrigerator, and Miles let it get warm in his hand as he explained what had happened with Gwen, what had happened with him. There was only one chair, and Peter leaned against the grimy kitchenette counter slurping noodles in unusual silence, taking it in. “Quantum entanglement,” he said after a while, spraying crunchy wonton crumbs down the front of his shirt, and Miles nodded.
“Yeah. Like that thing Kingpin did, with the collider-- it got us all mixed up with each other, one big multidimensional particulate system. Uncontrollable dimensional warping.”
“Great.” Peter snorted, phlegmy, and took another pull off his Coke, wiping the residue from his mouth on the back of one big hand. “Are you holding up alright? Have you started glitching out yet?”
“Not yet.” Miles shook his head, hesitated, pressed on through his doubt. “How you doin’, though?” He glanced from the bed, to the boxes, to the TV, back to Peter, who grunted from the back of his throat.
“Work in progress.”
“Yeah? How ‘in progress’ are we talking here?”
It occurred to Miles that he’d never really seen Peter in his natural habitat before, in clothes he’d chosen and a place that was his. He’d changed out the borrowed sweat pants for jeans, which he apparently wore to work, and a plain white (off-white, with age) t-shirt under a rumpled red button-down that he’d left unbuttoned. There was a pressed charcoal grey suit hanging above the apartment’s rickety radiator, and it seemed like he might have run a comb through his hair at some point in the last week. All of this was encouraging, at least he was trying, but the positive signs were tempered by his general air of scruffy disheveledness, and the punched-out bags under his eyes, and the exhausted slope of his back.
“We’re talking again,” he said.
“Hey, that’s a start.”
“I don’t think it’s--” Peter bit that thought off at the edge, swallowed it down with another swill of soda. “Whatever. We’ll see. This stuff takes time.”
Miles tried to reconstruct the awkwardness of that first conversation, the apologies and the promises to do better that may have fallen a bit flat; pictured Peter showing up at his ex-wife’s door with a fist full of fresh flowers wrapped in foil paper, in his suit and tie and matching shoes, hopeful and hangdog and wanting, and the implied rejection of their surroundings settled over them. He wished he could give Peter some better advice, but him and MJ were probably well past the swaggering Shoulder Touch stage of a comfortable relationship-- even if Peter could probably do the “Hey” way better than Miles could, maybe almost as good as Uncle Aaron.
They watched The Late Show on the edge of Peter’s sad bachelor bed, full of heavy food and still cracking through a pile of fortune cookies, snorting at the empty platitudes (“You learn from your mistakes… You will learn a lot today!” “The secret to staying healthy is to eat more Chinese food.”). “D’you care if I crash here?” Miles asked during a commercial for Planet Hollywood. His phone told him it was almost half past midnight.
Peter tossed his head towards the window, where it was still raining. “You think I’d let you go out in that? Get real.” So when they were out of cookies and television had started to cycle into late-night reruns, Peter wadded up some old shirts into the general shape of a pillow and struggled out of his overshirt, laying himself out on the floor with his jacket as cover.
“You don’t have to do that,” Miles said. “There’s room up here.” ‘Up here’ being relative; there was only about ten inches of difference.
“It’s fine,” Peter said, shifting around from back to side to other side, trying to arrange his crooked back and out of alignment shoulder blades in a way against the scuffed wood floor that wouldn’t leave every joint a screaming point of welded-stiff pain in the morning. “Next time I’ll invest in a pull out couch or something.”
Next time made Miles’ insides flutter with that same queasy anticipation.
When the lights were off, Miles lay out flat on the mattress and listened to the rain and Peter’s breathing as it slowed and carefully began the work of dissecting everything he felt, hot and cold and tender. He was annoyed with Peter for still being here, he realized, for having stalled out, for not having made up with MJ and closed off forever a possibility that Miles would have preferred to have an excuse not to examine. Between the broken springs and the lack of a box frame the bed was only nominally more comfortable than the floor, but the sheets and the pillows smelled like Peter, not in a gross stale way but something living, like being wrapped up in him.
He was annoyed at himself, too, for having missed Peter in the way that he had, like the body might miss a vestigial organ once removed; nothing vital, nothing he couldn’t go on without, but an empty abscess all the same. He didn’t feel nervous about being here, or getting home, even when the first of the fracturing seizures rolled him and woke him before dawn, all sharp and jagged crunching between muscle fibers and in his gut, this universe attracting and abhorring him all at once. Peter was-- a friend, and comfortable in of himself, and they looked out for each other. He didn’t need a father figure, or another uncle, or even an older brother, but their bond was something different from that. It was something elemental, written now into every spinning atom of who he was.
Whatever happened was going to happen, the spasms of the universe would not be directed or controlled. All Miles could do was roll with it, when it came.