Miles remembers nothing about the rest of the night except for how his eyes fill without permission and how he walks out.
There’s a brief “What the fuck, Hobie?” and an answering “He's not yours, Gwendy. You don’t get a monopoly on him finding out.”
He’s overwhelmed and lost, ignoring how his phone vibrates. His mouth hurts where Hobie’s touched him, his teeth working at the skin as if they can tear it off and rebuild the past few hours. Every part of him is aching and the world is moving on without him, his brain left melted on the floor in the gummy, pink silhouette of a flower.
Maybe he should call his mom and tell her that she was right. Maybe he should call his dad and explain that he really was okay and that his mom wasn’t covering for him. Neither one of those feels right when he thinks of them.
He’s slammed out of his thoughts when he almost wanders straight into traffic, a bystander’s hand looping itself around a strand of pearls and yanking him back so hard that the jewels are burned into the skin of his throat.
“Thank you,” he tells them and the person nods, their face blurred.
He thinks again of calling his parents and again, he chooses not to. The person he truly wants to call is laid to rest with his face smeared artfully against a city wall.
He knows nothing catastrophic has fully happened and yet there’s a chasm in his stomach, and his cheeks feel torn apart. Because before it was like this: he could bow out, watch them be happy, and learn to be satisfied eventually. But now it was this: tugging apart the crack in his chest and seeing if his heart had enough love for both of them.
He could not have enough love for both of them. His eyes blur once more and Miles looks up and tries to breathe.
And then the city falls out from beneath his feet.
✵
This villain is different.
Something about her is more devastating; seeing that she’s hurting is so much clearer. Her face is severely beautiful, so much so that Miles wonders if it hurts her when she looks in the mirror. If the glass cracks.
She’s eerie and child-like, her face scaled with ice-blue eyes that settle above her bones like fossils of a lunar apocalypse. There’s a slow horror as Miles realizes that half her body is rotting. Her body is large, giant, and towering over the screaming citizens of London.
She’s an Anomaly, a girl on fire.
Maybe she’s wandering to find her final grave, but there’s something else behind the way she looks down at the humans screaming beneath her. Her face twists with grief and then rage, a foot coming up to slam into a building and cave it in.
Miles snaps into action and swipes a woman and her screaming child from the shower of glass coming down upon them. Shards get stuck in his shoulder blades and he realizes his face is uncovered, the mother’s hand curling over that of her child’s as they both touch him in awe and gratitude.
Something is terribly wrong and as he tries to figure it out, he uses a car to direct the flying debris of another tower. Finally, when he sees Gwen and Hobie spinning through the sky with their webs interlinking with one another’s, he understands.
The world is silent.
Every death, every fall is unheard. Life ends to the right of him, unnoticed. The girl miles above them is crying, her rotted skin falling to the streets below and landing in heavy craters and he can’t hear any of it. Her tears seem so small on her face in comparison to the rest of her and maybe that’s why he swings closer and closer.
This is death, he knows it, but he gets so close that he can see the pink hint of her heart covered in a sludge of oxidized blood. She looks at him and stretches out a hand to cup his body in, her fingers completely bone and pressing down on his stomach till he’s thrown almost all of his love up.
“You’re a fool and I’m going to kill you,” she says, her eyes honest. “But you’re so sad. I’ve been like this before. I’m sorry you’re sad.”
“Did you make it?” Miles asks her hand somewhat grounding around his throat.
“You never really get what you want,” is the answer and she cups the back of his head gently and brings him close.
“Where are you going?” he asks, his voice low and sweet.
“I’m trying to go home but—” she breaks off and begins to cry again.
Miles rubs a brown hand up the rotting skin of her hand, his limbs so comically miniature in the palm of her hand. She’s crying because she won’t make it, because she’ll die here in a city unknown with no name and the smear of villainy across her face.
And Miles is kind to a fault, so sentimental that his teeth are shaking and his lungs are crawling out of his mouth. And maybe it’s because he feels like he has no control over the GwenHobie situation that he reaches out to this girl and asks her what her name is.
“Hanna,” she says and he repeats and she smiles.
“You say it like how my mother says it. Like the ‘h’ is stuck in her throat and leaning too long on the end.”
“Mmm,” Miles lets his head loll to the side before looking back at her. “I love my mamá too. She makes me feel like I’m a good person. But sometimes I think I’m not because if it was the world or her, and if there was no way to save both I’d—I’d save her.”
Silence.
“It’s harder with my dad.”
Hanna hums and it makes him vibrate. She brings him close to her mouth and even though she’s rotting, her breath smells of cloying hibiscus and her chest makes a sound like a hummingbird as she breathes. From the outside, it looks as though she means to eat him.
Gwen is screaming somewhere in the background and for once in his life Hobie sounds something less than brave.
“Are you going to kill me still?”
Hanna places him in the middle of her tongue.
“Yes,” she says around him and he slips slowly, tumbling like Alice in a rabbit hole of tissue and bone.
Miles thinks of his mamá, the Virgen María statue she has that’s always on his nightstand with her tears and her child of God. How after a while he intertwined the two and prayed to Rio, hands clasped around his back as he curled into a ball beneath his sheets and pleaded for his heart to let up on the pressure.
He hopes she keeps it in his room after this, that after a while she goes in and lays where he did to help with her grief.
He thinks of how all he’s learned tonight is that love is pain and he thinks of that when the Anomaly is ripped open around the diamond of his spine, his head tucked into his stomach so that he sees nothing as he dies, digested inside of a girl with grief so large that it became hunger.
Instead of her body, his grave is now the air.
He tumbles through falling debris, his back crashing through a window separated from the body a building. There’s a crescendo of noise as sound filters back in and he hugs himself through the swell. He’s moving so quickly he thinks he might die again and this time he begins to cry, tugging a hand free to claw through the collar of his suit and hold the gold-plated pendant that holds his mother’s name.
“Miles!”
The scream is so sharp and visceral that he turns midair to look, accidentally breaking his fall on what feels like floating concrete. The city must be beginning to collapse and he looks to the side to see the familiar bodies of Jess and Miguel directing the cleaning crew towards the black hole.
Another scream of his name calls him back to the direction he was looking previously and there he finds Gwen, her eyes wide with fear and love. She has never looked more beautiful, her cheeks full and flushed red with blood and her eyes slightly puffy from tears. Her hair floats around her as if she’s divine, and her hands are outstretched toward him as if she can catch him if she tries hard enough.
She’s trying to shoot strings of webbing to catch him but they keep falling short and she lets out a cry full of raw rage and frustration.
“Miles. Miles! Hold on for me, just hold on.”
She’s begging him and he loves her so much in this moment that his face feels like it will break apart. All the desire he thought had bled out of him comes rushing back in, full force. His mouth feels swollen as if he’s been stung. She’s so beautiful. She’s so fucking beautiful.
“Mi alma,” he says and her face starts to shatter in devastation.
“Don’t you dare,” she says, quiet but with enough force that it travels to him.
He smiles and then he’s slamming through level after level of a skyscraper, stars exploding behind his eyes. He finally stops moving and he registers the pipe through his stomach, the blood staining his hands.
Someone’s hovering over him, a gravelly voice trying to catch him before he goes. He’s so tired.
“Mamá?”
No answer.
He blacks out.
✵
“Slow, papito. Slow,” is what he wakes to.
His stomach is on fire, the agony a flashing purple and red lattice of light as he struggles to open his eyes. Miles can smell his mother’s perfume, his father’s concern. He’s bare except for some boxers and an oversized Ralph Lauren button-down that pools around him like water.
There’s a rush of movement in his chest and then he’s throwing up, bile piling over his teeth and catching on his mamá’s hands. She says nothing, kissing his forehead and soothing him as he empties himself into a ceramic bin.
“‘M so sorry,” he moans and someone else comes to sit beside him, the bed dipping.
They stroke his curls and massage his temple, his headache temporarily soothed. Miles kisses the skin of their wrist in gratitude before falling back on his pillows again.
“Spiderman, papito? What were you thinking?”
“‘M so sorry,” he says again, voice thick with tears.
“You came to me in pieces. I only ever want you whole,” she whispers, lips against his cheek. “Mi niño, tratando de salvar el mundo. Let God do that.”
Her fingers stroke his necklace, her name on his chest in gold. Her breath hitches and she smoothes his eyebrows before standing.
“Stay with him for me. I’m going to get him some broth.”
The person next to him nods and Rio disappears, the door shutting softly.
Miles turns, eyesight bleary as he gazes at his other visitor.
Gwen stares back at him, hair long enough to braid into a messy fishtail. The shaved side of her head looks freshly done and he wonders how long he’s been out. She smiles, her face puffy from the lack of sleep. A bowl of ice water is in front of her and he knows she’s been using it to keep the swelling down.
His throat works but he struggles to speak. She doesn’t push him.
Miles pulls himself up with a huff of pain and her hands settle on his spine, thumbing at his back dimples as she steadies him. Love for her once again courses through him. She is the reason the world retains beauty. Snow has fallen because of the weight of its love for her. There was nothing before her.
His eyes settle on the windows across from his bed and on the sill sits Hobie, his face so open it's like a message from above. His eyes are a billboard screaming ‘love me’ with the last of its strength and something warm swells in Miles’ stomach, opening his lungs a little more.
He raises his arms to beckon him over but he can’t make it very far. Hobie understands, still. He climbs like a child into the space of Miles’ open side, face pressing briefly into his neck before pulling back. His skin is left wet and soaking and he touches the moist landscape of Hobie’s cheek where tears fall minutely, as if he cannot cry without permission.
“I’m sorry,” Hobie says, quiet and Miles thinks that apologies are all that have been said since he’s woken up. “Shouldn’t have dumped that all on you. Should’ve eased you in and I didn’t and fuck—”
“You’re not the reason there’s a hole in my stomach,” Miles says, his Bambi eyes dark with intent. “I am.”
Gwen shifts beside him and he leans against her, a hand intertwined with Hobie’s.
“I’m scared. Really scared,” he pushes out. “I love her, and I know that I can love you. That I will love you. But I am so scared that I won’t have enough to make you stay.”
Hobie watches him intensely, and passionately, and Miles once again feels overwhelmed. He studies the boy in front of him and makes the observation that his face is bare, piercings gleaming and eyes free of smoky makeup. His lips are uncovered from the blanket of lipstick, his top lip darker than the bottom.
Here his hair is a halo, the sun streaking through the wicks. Brown cries out through the black and Miles catalogues that too. Hobie’s tongue rolls in his mouth and his hands work nervously over something silver. Upon closer look, Miles realizes it's a pillbox. Inside are perfect circles of blue.
Anxiety medication. Miles has the same stashed in the back of his bathroom drawer, prescribed and untaken. His parents say nothing but sometimes his mom smashes the correct dosage and sprinkles it in the tall glass of coconut water she feeds him.
“I’ll take whatever you give me. That’s the thing about being mad about someone,” Hobie tells him. “You take what you can get.”
Gwen hums and strokes Miles’ throat, her head resting on top of his.
“It’s you, Miles. You’re the star,” she says, her voice hoarse from disuse.
“I hate the camera,” he says tiredly.
Hobie laughs just a little, and all three of them feel their bodies relaxing. Gwen ghosts a kiss over the corner of his mouth and Hobie kisses his temple where blood is still stained. When he pulls away his lips are red like they’ve been kissing and Miles can’t help the way his hands trail his jaw, pressing sharply against the bone and tugging him closer.
Hobie falls into him, his weight pushing the other deeply into Gwen’s soft stomach. She drapes over them like fabric, laughing with shoulders that shake around Miles like trees. Hobie puts pressure on the lines of her shoulder blades, the bones fluttering like birds underneath his warm hands.
Love is pain, but love can be healing too, Miles thinks.
His eyes close as he’s encased in the forest of their limbs, body softening as sleep comes in waves. Gwen kisses his bent neck. Hobie mouths at his dirty knees.
“Wish I could hold you like this always,” Gwen whispers, the words heavy like a secret.
“I don’t know how you didn’t know,” Hobie adds, “that you were in the center. You were always the center.”
Miles shudders with something like sadness, lashes wet against his cheek, and his mind hazy with pain.
“I’m lonely. Since Uncle Aaron, I’ve been lonely.”
There’s a noise like a weeping dog and Gwen’s shoulders are shaking again. Hobie rubs at his waist, rough enough to keep him awake but not enough to hurt him. He turns to alleviate the aching in his side and his mouth catches on someone else's and he sucks on someone’s tongue and someone is sucking at the skin of his shoulder and neck till it's swollen with hidden blood and tender with affection.
He wants it like this always.
Rio comes in again, a green porcelain bowl with birds on the edges filled to the brim with a steaming liquid. Her face is tired and Miles knows she’s heard him speak of his uncle, which they never speak of. His father is at the side of the door, his body leaning toward his son like he wants to break free of something.
Miles looks at Jeff and then away again, his chest too full to breathe.
Gwen pulls him back toward her, his back against her arms and Hobie moves to the side so that Rio can settle at his feet with her legs crossed underneath her.
She looks young with her hair like this, braided up and pinned with a claw clip. The warm sepia of her skin seems to shed light on his thighs, her fingers are dark against the bronze of the spoon that she drowns in soup.
His mamá feeds him, and nourishes him till his face flushes with the warmth. Her arms shake with exhaustion but she refuses help, her resemblance to her son so strong that both Gwen and Hobie feel half in love with her too. Strands of hair fall loose against her neck, long curls dipping into the soft curve of her chest.
Miles can’t eat anymore without his throat hurting so he takes the bowl in his own hands, feeds her until he feels like she seems less tired.
“How long have I been out?”
Hobie sighs and stretches out his legs, hips jutting out of his linen pants like shadowed jewels.
“About two weeks, but you’re on bed rest for longer. The whole event had everyone fuck—” a look from Rio. “—messed up. Peter and Jess were knackered from cleaning up and Miguel…”
“Miguel?” Miles prods.
“The anomaly—”
“Hanna,” Miles corrects her.
“Hanna,” Gwen repeats softly. “Hanna looked a lot like his daughter.”
“And we killed her,” Hobie says hollowly. “So, he kind of. You know.”
Rio strokes a piece of hair out of Gwen’s face and tucks it into her braid. She sets the bowl aside, settling Miles back into bed. Rising, she squeezes Hobie’s hand.
“You had to. It was her or my son.”
“What about the city?” Miles asks, voice cracking slightly.
“The city’s been okay. We’ve been saving it,” Hobie answers with a cheeky smile. “We work our shifts and all, come home to you.”
Come home to you.
And Miles. Miles with his large brown eyes and his open mouth. Miles with his sweetness, with his blindness when it comes to love. Miles like a deer in the rising night, alone in the road.
The words transform him. We come home to you. They settle in his stomach like fire, smoke steaming the inside of his body till his blood is water and his marrow flavors the bone.
He cups their hands, pulls till Hobie and Gwen are resting inside the curve of his arms beside him. Rio turns out the light, leaving the window open so that the city that is never sleeping can lull the three to a quiet place where there is no savior and only a home.
Miles like a lamb, Miles like a wolf.
Hobie and Gwen look at him, faces smeared with adoration. He feels speared on their fingers. They touch his body, they won’t leave him alone.
When he looks back, there’s a hunger.