Spittin'
There was a certain smell, to the wind above Brooklyn that was different depending on which side of the city you were on. Miles would sit for hours sketching the skyline and breathing the cool air, which tasted sweeter on his tongue the higher he positioned himself in the city. Even growing up, he had never been scared of heights. Maybe it had to do with how tiny he had been, and how tall his dad was. Miles always knew he would stand tall like his dad, and maybe that was why. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Miles had a deathwish, spider-monkey-ing up strange buildings while news drones circled him and people on the streets below chanted for him to drop. (It garnered the most views on twitter, anyways.) This smell wasn’t always the greatest, coated with gasoline and smoke and just, that city smell that was indescribable. It was alive, shifting with the currents and ever changing.
But above this version of Brooklyn, everything smells the same.
Miles can smell weed from down below, and sees the flames rise on the skyline as well as taste the smoke and smog on his lips. He wants to spit it out, but can’t really manage in the position he’s in. There are cars below, albeit, many less, but the smell of the gas is different. Maybe it’s diesel, he muses, since he isn’t really sure on the difference. Someone must be cooking nearby, because he can sense the burning tang of food and black rising out of the air from nothing. Up here, above this Brooklyn, nothing is sweet. Nothing is even bittersweet, in any capacity, shape or form. This is not Miles’ Brooklyn, and the longer he stands here the more apparent that becomes.
He gets a tug across his waist, and almost topples down the side of the building. His counterpart snorts, yanking him away from the edge. “Don’t get any bright ideas, baboso.” Miles really can’t get too many ideas right now anyways, after getting the shit knocked out of his bains on the floor of this Uncle Aaron’s apartment.
Around his hips sit some type of harness, and he can’t seem to remember exactly how it got there. It’s built out of something soft with padding, and looks like it’s made for rock climbing. The entire system is lightweight, and so tight around his hips it feels like it’s cutting him in half, wrinkling his spider-suit and pulling around his pelvic bones in a way that makes him want to scream. He keeps digging his fingers between the nylon and his hips, but it doesn’t relieve any of the pressure there. There’s a loop around each leg connecting the system, and is tightened much the same. He sort of wants to lie down on the roof top right there and give up, body sore and coveted with injuries that his spider-sense can’t heal fast enough. The harness is just another itch to add to the collective, but is a near breaking point.
Across from an AC unit his doppleganger types furiously on his phone, harness similar to Miles’ on his own person, a chord attaching the two together. Miles pulls at the chord and tries to rip it apart, but it is surprisingly strong.
“You’re not going to break that,” he tells Miles, not looking up from his typing. He frowns. “You’re not going to want to break it, in a minute.” Miles slups against the AC unit, energy doging from his bones. He mutters over his breath about his own situation, letting his eyes hang close for a minute. The late morning sun makes his head pound and heart race in anticipation to get back to his father. He has to get back- It’s the only choice he has.
A tug from around his hips pull him into a standing position, and he sways for just a moment. His duo eyes him from over the top of the phone screen questioningly. “It’s so tight, it feels like you’re trying to cut me in half,” he concedes after a moment. The prowler snorts, and glances back to his phone.
“You’re bigger than me. Get over it.”
The Prowler finishes his text and pockets the phone in a zip-up pouch, grabbing the cord to drag Miles along with him to the other side of the roof. Miles has never been scared of heights, but here his heart drops. He has a vague idea of what's about to happen, and he doesn’t like it one bit. Miles has nothing on him but the suit on his back, no mask, phone, shoes. Most importantly, he has no web shooters. He digs his toes into the concrete, trying to stand ground instead of letting his double pull him to the edge. In one large yank he once more, about goes tumbling down the side of the 30 story apartment building. It takes sticking with all his might to keep from sending off the edge.
From here he can see the destruction a little clearer. There’s a break in the safety fence capping the top of the building, which looks like it’s been ripped into by claws. There’s fire across the Broklyn bridge, and traffic stopped up from one end to the other. Construction crews and cranes are everywhere, in more multitude than the cars that liter the streets. In the daylight he can see the murk in the river, and the grime that covers every inch of the city. He wonders when it got this bad- he wonders how, and somehow, he knows the answer and won’t admit it. His head spins, and not just from the situation.
He turns his face to, well, his own face, honestly, and the other Miles gives a smirk before the Prowler takes over. A claw comes up to rest on the back of Miles’ neck, and a gentle pressure to push him off the side of the building.
“Ready to fly, pajarito?”
—-------------------------------------
Gwen Stacy manages to down half a cup of coffee and almost an entire breakfast danish before she promptly spits it all back up in this universe’s MJ’s kitchen sink. There’s no one in the kitchen at the time, thankfully, and she silently prays that no one hears her as she gags and coughs. She’s so antsy she can’t even bear to sit, pacing back and forth from room to room and looking for anything to distract herself with. In the end, there is nothing here for her. The others nap and watch Peni and keep track of Miguel, and she wears a hole in the floor. It gets so bad to a point that around noon, Peter kicks her out of the house because the baby can’t sleep due to all of her nervous energy.
She finally collapses on the front steps of the house, watching a squirrel run a tree down the Queen’s neighborhood. It’s too quiet here, she thinks, picking at the skin around her hands and scratching her arms viciously.
There must be something she can do, she yells at herself. Anything, besides sit here and wallow in self pity. It was her idea to arrange the group, it was her resolve to go after Miles and find him before anything bad could happen, it was her that went to Earth 1610 and-
And.
And.
She shoots up and dials a familiar number into her goober, portal forming and disappearing before anyone in the house can realize she’s gone.
—---
“Mi amor?” Rio rang as she shut the front door, toeing her shoes off and leaving them on the mat before locking the deadbolt back. She swept her greasy hair back across her shoulder behind her as she stepped in, gaze falling when she realized that Miles’ shoes were still missing. At the dinner table Jefferson still sat, hunched over paperwork and that little black book. Rio passed him with a kiss to the cheek, bending over and giving her husband a once over. “Baby?” She asked, eyebrows furrowed at the concentrated look on her lover’s face and the mess of papers scattered across the table. It didn’t take but a glance for her to get the gist of what he had been up all morning plotting.
Reports of all incidents and inclusions involving the new Spiderman, as well as an itemized list of every time Miles had snuck out of Visions. (That was known, anyways.) Photos from similar angles comparing the two entities, a piece of torn suit ziplocked as evidence that Jefferson had obtained sometime last week. He was in charge of the unlucky case of Spiderman 2.0, so it wasn’t unusual for the table to be littered with police reports and files of all known information about the boy. It wasn’t unusual for him to set his glasses carefully on the table and rub the crease between his eyes, complaining to Rio about how young the new Spider was and how much trouble he caused Jefferson.
And by trouble, she meant worry.
Without looking up to his wife Jefferson slanted the little black book open, flipping pages to one he had dogeared that morning himself. Rio gingerly took it from his hands and stood up to investigate the drawing. “I don’t understand,” she whispered, and Jefferson raised a hand to flip a taped-in grade report to reveal a sketch. It depicted the new spiderman, contorted in some uncomfortable parkour-esce stance without a mask on. It depicted Miles, the new spiderman, contoured in some uncomfortable parkour-esce stance without his mask on, hair wild around his face and smile uneven.
“Mio..” Rio trailed.
“How did we miss this?” Jefferson asked in a broken voice. He had never felt so lost before, then in that moment. “How do we find him? How do I find him?” Rio pulled his head to her chest, petting softly and holding the book to her heart.
“Don’t say things like that,” she hissed at him. “You’ll find him, we have to. I’ll- I’ll go through records of who's been in the hospital, maybe he’s come through and I didn’t catch it. That’s happened, before.” Exactly once before, when a good samaritan found Spiderman passed out on the roof of their building and drove him in themselves without revealing his identity. Spiderman was gone before he could be checked in, back then.
Her baby was gone before he could get checked in. She exhaled a shaky breath.
“Rio you don’t - you don’t understand.” Jefferson’s voice was muffled by his wife’s scrubs. “I’ve worked with spiderman, with Miles, for over a year now. He’s not so easy to track. “
“Don’t you dare tell me I do not understand!” She hissed, pulling his head from her chest, holding firm to his collarbones. Rio Morales would not be told what to do, or what she could or could not feel or comprehend. She refused to, that’s why she had married Jeff Davis. She felt warm suddenly, after working in a cold and sterile hospital all night. “Don’t you tell me-”
She was interrupted by a knock at the door, only it wasn’t the front door. They both jumped up and swiveled to Miles’ room as his door slid open, only to reveal the little blonde thing he was fancy on. They both shared cursed sentiments.
“I thought you were Miles,” they said at the same time, and the white girl frowned.
“Nope, just Gwen.” She popped her ‘p,’ bouncing on her heels awkwardly, hands tangled in the hem of Miles’ coat pockets. She hadn’t thought this through so well, had she? Jefferson Davis eyed her, and the way his face scrunched made her feel the smallest she had in years. Or, maybe just almost as small as when her own father pointed his glock at her. She frowned harder.
“Or should I say, Spiderwoman?”
Gwen had to close her eyes and look up to pray for strength. Why now? Out of all the times for this to happen, out of all the times for her best friend’s parents to realize her secret identity, why now? When tensions between everyone in her life had reached their peak. She thought she could come here, and maybe garner some reprieve with Miles’ parents. Maybe they would all agree that they felt helpless, and that would have passed the time long enough for Peni to finish her adjustments. Maybe someone, with some vague parental figure head vibe could tell her that things were not okay, but that they eventually would be. (No one ever understood-)
“Most people call me Spider-Ghost, or White Widow where I’m from.” Her joke sat ill in her own throat, just like the coffee and danish had. All three of them garnered a large breath, trying to calm themselves.
“And where do you come from?” Rio asked, only to be echoed by her husband.
“And where is ‘Spiderman?’” The women winced.
“I’m from Earth 65, and Miles is stuck on Earth 42.”
“The hell do you mean Earth 65 and 42?”
“There’s this whole like, multiverse thing going on. Each earth is it’s own universe, with it’s own people and dimensions and- So I guess it would be better to say I’m from a different dimension but-”
“You’re telling us, that our son, isn’t even on thisEarth?!”
“No, he is not here on Earth 1016.”
“Dios Mio-”
“So how the hell does that leave us, huh? If you're so high and mighty from a different dimension, which makes no fuc- no sense at all, and you just so happen to know where my son is, why haven’t you found him yet?”
“Jefferson calm down-”
“I can’t calm down, Rio? How am I supposed to be calm right now, I am the opposite of calm? How are you calm? This doesn’t- this doesn’t make sense, none of this. Why? Why is this happening to my baby? I just want my Miles back,” Jefferson cried, tension finally seeping from his shoulders and into the floor. “I just want my baby,” he repeated, over and over. Rio ran her soft hands over his front, urging him back down into the kitchen chair. Gwen wasn’t sure how to react.
Her and her dad had never been real good with the whole emotions thing. He was always so quiet and stoic, or angry. The other day when she met him for the first time after the gun incident was the first time he had shown any real emotion in months, maybe even years. Even after her mother died Gwen was not allowed to miss school. She wasn’t supposed to cry, or he would hold her down and tell her to stop it, to calm down and get over herself. She understood now that she was older that he was just uncomfortable with the emotions, but at the time it had felt like he was telling her she wasn’t allowed to be sad, or angry, or hurt or upset. A common phrase in their household had been ‘walk it off,’ even when her mom was around. Gwen Stacy was completely and utterly out of her element watching the Morales family break apart in each others’ arms.
Gwen was out of her element, period.
When it came to friends, or crushes, or their family or different universes and having to rely on other people to get things done and having to step back and wait. She was confused on what her purpose was in life, and just what exactly the consequences of her inactions were to Miles. He hated her now, she was sure of it, and here she was in his living room, taling with his parents who had discovered who they were. She hadn’t even tried to deny it, or give him the change to explain himself. She had only added fuel to the fire and admitted that yeah, she was Spiderwoman. From a different dimension.
She had admitted that Miles Morales was spiderman of the universe 1610, and she had done the one thing she had always told him never to do. She wanted to throw herself off a bridge so hard in that moment she gagged, rushing over to the kitchen sink to spit overtop the dirty dishes. Her eyes burned, but she wouldn’t let herself cry in front of his family. She refused. (She couldn’t believe she let it out in front of Peter, how dare her-)
“You,” Rio said to her, not so much gentle but not angry as Jefferson had been. Gwen wiped spittle from her mouth with the back of her hand, pulling the coat sleeve back over her fingers afterwards.
“Gwen. Gwen Stacy,” she admitted. That name rang a bell in Jefferson's head when he turned with open mouth to say something to her, but his wife cut him off.
“Gwen. Tell us what to do to get our baby back.” Rio had stood up, hair swooped over her shoulder and scrubs decorated with filth from her nine hour shift. She was all the vision of mother bear, with grizzle littered through her and shoulders squared away to do what she could. Gwen chewed her lip over what to say next.
“Peni, a spider from a different dimension, is working on altering a goober so we can travel to that universe without Miguel finding out.”
“Who’s Miguel?” Jefferson asked, eyebrows furrowed. Oh boy, what a loaded question that was.
“That’s a really loaded question.”
“According to you, we have time.” Rio prompted. So Gwen spilled the beans, about the collider and the multiverse. About how she met Miguel - leaving out the part about her own father - about what spider society was and the purpose it served for each and every single universe. Gwen talked for nearly two hours, spilling her guts out onto the Morales kitchen floor for her best friends parents to witness.
—--------------------------