He fails.
Miles’s plan was simple: lure the spider-people away from their base and double back, somehow, to use the Go Home Machine, but the plan was slapped together at best, and it backfired. Hard.
He thought for sure absorbing the electricity from Miguel’s suit would get the guy off of him, but his AI – Lyra, Miles is pretty sure Miguel called her Lyra – cut the power before Miles could short-circuit it. With one final roar, Miguel slammed Miles’s head into the train.
Everything was… cloudy… after that. Miles never truly lost consciousness, but his body won’t listen to him, hanging like a ragdoll in Miguel’s talons as he and all the other spider-people swing back to base.
Miles catches a blur of pink come up to Miguel as they swing back. He hears Mayday croon in concern and pat his face, prompting him to wince. “Hey, Miguel, maybe you can carry him a little more gently–?”
“Quiet.” Miguel growls, “I’ve had enough of your and Gwen’s ‘advice’. From now on, we’re handling this my way.”
‘His way’ turns out to be putting Miles with the rest of the anomalies, locked up in a forcefield and waiting. His head’s a bit clearer now, clear enough to hear the villains jeer at Miguel as the man drags Miles to his holding cell.
“You’re throwing spiders in here now, too?”
“Damn, kid gave you a run for your money, huh?”
He leaves Miles behind a wall of angry red with a warning: “Don’t bother trying to short-circuit this one, you’ll just hurt yourself.”
“Surprised you care,” Miles mumbles. The guy obviously had no issue chasing him all over the city or slamming him into the roof of a train.
Miguel scowls deeper, if that’s even possible. “I don’t expect you to understand, but this is for the best. You’ll be sent back … after everything happens.”
Miles should be angry; he should be banging his fists against the cell wall, trying to use his venom blast, anything. But he can’t, he’s just too tired, and definitely concussed.
Miguel stalks away without another word. Miles watches him leave, then thumps the back of his head against his brand new cell, wincing when it sends a bolt of pain through his body. With the adrenaline wearing off, he’s starting to feel the aches and pains of his escape attempt. The gashes on his chest hurt the most, with the rest of his body one big bruise.
“Shit, man, you’re really gonna leave him here with no medical attention?” A voice yells, Miles can’t tell who it is – only that they’re male, and angry. “You just fucked him up seven ways to sunday and you’re gonna leave him here?”
“Don’t bother, Sandman,” another villain says.
“Fuck you, man! They got a kid locked in here with us!”
“Not a kid,” Miles tries to say, but his ribs scream with pain when he tries to raise his voice. They probably won’t send someone in to treat him, not when he’s already proven he can escape.
The spider-people avoid his cell like it’s contagious. Only a handful even bother coming up to him, and even fewer say anything. What they do say always boils down to the same message – you don’t know what's good for you, this is for the best, blah, blah, blah. Miles gets good at tuning them out, choosing instead to focus on the steady throb of his injuries.
He’s been in the cell for maybe an hour before a familiar face comes into view. Gwen stands a foot away from the barrier, her arms crossed and her hood pulled up.
“Miles–” she starts, but Miles curls up and tucks his head into his elbows, even when it makes his chest twinge. “Miles, please, try to understand.”
“I don’t want to understand.”
“ Miles–”
He lifts his head to glare into her blue eyes. “What part of being spiderman means letting people die?” he demands. “Even if he wasn’t my dad, what part of you would just expect me to stand by when I know I could do something?”
“It’s for the stability of the multiverse.” Gwen says, but even Miles can see she doesn’t fully buy it. She’s scared. It shows in the way she crosses her arms, how she looks over her shoulder to make sure Miguel or Jess aren’t watching.
“You don’t believe that.”
“Yes, Miles, I do.”
And Miles needs a moment to look at her, really look at her. She looks the same on the outside, but something changed while they were apart, or maybe it was always there. “Then maybe you aren’t who I thought you were.”
Gwen takes a shaky breath, then turns away, her feet light on the cold tile floor.
Miles is alone again. Maybe he always was.
———
They end up sending in medical attention in the form of a robot. A little thing that has a bottle of water, a pack of bandages and some antiseptic, along with a bottle of what Miles assumes to be painkillers. The robots pretty cute, about the size of a dinner plate, with the typical red and blue color scheme most spider-people stick to. The hole that opens in the cell for it barely lasts a second, leaving no chance for him to lunge and maybe get himself out.
He takes the offered items and sees a note stashed under them all.
I’m sorry — Peni
It takes everything in him not to kick the stupid bot away from him. Sorry. They all say sorry, but none of them will help him , so how useful are their apologies, really? He uses the bandages and antiseptic but skips on the water and painkillers — for all he knows they slipped something in to make him more compliant. He needs his wits if he’s gonna think of a way out of here.
He’s finishing up the last of the bandages when someone approaches the cell. “Kid—” Peter B. starts, but Miles doesn’t let him finish.
“Don’t. Just. Don’t.” Miles’s plan might’ve worked if Peter B. hadn’t given up his location, and the knowledge hurts more than he thought it would. B. was supposed to be his mentor, the one guy besides his dad who Miles could always count on to be in his corner. Instead, he’s the one who helped get Miles caught.
Peter B. takes a deep breath and lets it go. “Yeah. That’s fair. But I just wanted to tell you: that thing with Jessica? I didn’t know she was tracking me. Please trust me on that.”
Miles rips off the end of the bandage, stubbornly refusing to make eye contact. The worst of his physical wounds have dulled, but the wounds in his heart? The inside of his chest feels like it’s breaking apart, falling to pieces and settling into his gut as anger. “I can’t trust any of you.”
——
Miles tries short-circuiting the cell walls once and only once. With a direct current of electricity, it never loses enough power, and when Miles inevitably reaches his limit it backfires on him, throwing him back to the other side of the cell. He rights himself with a groan and glares at the stupid cell wall. “Carajo!”
“Woah there, your mama teach you that kinda language?”
Miles looks to the source. It’s the Prowler — the one he was looking at before everything went wrong. “She did, actually.” Not on purpose though, Miles just happened to take his headphones off right as his mama burned herself in the kitchen. He may have a B in Spanish, but mama sure as hell expanded his vocabulary that day.
The Prowler laughs, and he barely had any resemblance to Miles’s uncle, but it’s the way his lips curl, the easygoing but tired tone that has Miles wiping his eyes. “Woah there,” uncle Aaron — but not his Uncle Aaron — says, “You good, kid?”
“Y-yeah. You just… remind me of someone.”
Not-Uncle Aaron goes quiet, taking in Miles with a strange look on his face. “Those other spiders called you Miles. Any chance your last name is Morales?”
Miles can’t say anything past the lump in his throat, so he nods. Not-Uncle Aaron chuckles, looking out at the rows and rows of other villains. “Just when I thought this multiverse stuff couldn’t get any weirder. So, if there’s a you, chances are there’s a me, right? What am I like? Haven’t seen any other Prowlers here.”
“He … he was Prowler, too.” Miles sees the realization cross his not-uncle’s face. “He died to save me from Kingpin,” Miles continues, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.”
He probably wouldn’t even be Spider-Man without uncle Aaron, he only got bit because he followed his uncle to that old subway station. Now look where it got him.
You’re the original anomaly.
You’re a mistake.
You’ll never belong anywhere.
Miles closes his eyes, doing his best to ignore the echoes of Miguel’s voice.
Not-Uncle Aaron blinks, taking in everything Miles said. “That’s… heavy.”
“You’re telling me,” Miles snorts.
“So what they got you locked up for? Didn’t wanna join the Girl Scout troop?”
“They want me to let my dad die.”
Not-Uncle Aaron swears, so do some of the other villains that were pretending they weren’t listening in. It’s crazy that the only normal reactions to that are coming from villains, but emboldens him enough to stand up and start pacing.
“Yeah. It’s gonna happen two days from now — and I— I can’t do anything cause I’m in this stupid cell!” He kicks out at the wall of his cell, swearing when the energy radiating off of it burns him.
“Hey, hey, hey. Miles, c’mon, you got a right to be angry, but you gotta put it into a better outlet.”
“Like what?” Miles demands.
Not-Uncle Aaron shares a quick glance with a few other villains before meeting Mike’s eyes again. “Like getting out.”
——
Maxwell Dillon, goes by the name Electro in most universes, with an ability a lot like Miles’s, only dialed to a hundred. The one close to his cell is made of pure electricity, held together by his suit and sheer willpower. Even through the cell walls, Miles feels like he’s standing near a power plant.
“I can sense the electrical grid,” this Electro tells Miles, the other villains keeping an eye out for any spiders. Luckily, they seem to be avoiding Miles’s holding cell like it bit them in the butt. “Every time one of us tries to break the walls of our cells, the system reroutes power to strengthen it.”
Which means if enough villains cause a ruckus, Miles might be able to venom shock his cell and short circuit the whole thing, but there’s a problem. If the system can reroute power from one cell to another that means the whole thing is an interconnected system. Miles would be taking down every cell in this place. “What about you guys? How can I trust you won’t hurt somebody?”
Sandman does an obvious once over of Miles. Miles doesn’t have one of him back home, but he was the one who had demanded Miles get medical care, so he doesn’t wanna paint the guy with one type of brush. “They had no problem hurting you.”
“Look,” not-Uncle Aaron interrupts, “this place is crawling with spiders. It won’t take them more than an hour to get all of us back into cells, but you, ” he points at Miles, “can use the chaos to find a way back home.” Some of the villains protest to the time estimate, making not-Uncle Aaron flick a not so nice gesture to them all.
Miles weighs his options. There’s at least two hundred spider-people in the facility, possibly more if Miguel called them in to catch Miles. Not-Uncle Aaron might’ve been generous with the one hour assessment, but he was right — Miles needs the distraction to both short circuit his cell and make it to the Go Home Machine. Villains as his allies and spider-people as the enemy, how did things get so twisted?
——
Word travels fast through the cells, the agreed signal being mealtime. It wasn’t a problem getting anyone to agree – the real problem was the wait.
Miles does his best to keep everything cool. The last thing they need is the spider-people getting a whiff of what they’ve got cooking, but it’s hard. The time passes, second by second, minute by minute, pulling his patience thin. But it passes, and soon the time comes.
“Careful,” a Green Goblin cackles somewhere out of sight, “feed him any more and he might start to weigh the same as a rhino, too.”
A deep voice growls back with a thick Russian accent. “What’d you just say, green man?”
“Goblin, dear, but it’s not your fault. There’s only so much brain in that thick head of yours.”
“You—!”
Alright, it’s go-time. Miles watches the cell wall flare an angry red before growing dimmer. Power was rerouted, just like Electro said it’d be. The fight gets out of hand, several other villains joining in, banging and throwing themselves against their cells, draining power from Miles’s own.
He places his palms flat on the cell wall and focuses.
“Come on, Miles.” Not-Uncle Aaron says, backing up a readying to punch his own cell. Miles begins the draining process, feeling electricity from the wall, into his fingers and down his arms. Miles releases all the electricity at the exact moment not-uncle Aaron lands his punch.
The world goes up in a shower of red sparks, everyone’s cell dropping at the exact same time. It’s chaos after that, the faster villains like Electro making a break for it while most of the Rhinos and Doc Ocs stay to brawl it out with the rapidly growing number of spider-people.
Miles falls to his knees, but a gauntlets hand is there to help him up. Not-uncle Aaron sizes him up with a proud look in his eye. “Not bad, kid.” He drags Miles forward, to the direction of the Go Home Machine. “Now go home.”
Miles hugs him before his brain can tell him it’s a bad idea. He’s bulkier than Miles’s Uncle Aaron, but the safety Miles feels when a large hand pays his back is the same. “Thank you.” There’s so much more he wants to say, to ask, but he can hear Miguel yelling orders over the coms and knows he doesn’t have enough time. All he can hope is not-uncle Aaron understands.
Not-Uncle Aaron gives him a gentle squeeze. “Your Aaron woulda been damn proud of you, Miles.”
“I know.” They separate as a big boom shakes the facility. Miles gives not-uncle Aaron one last look before pulling his invisibility on and making a break for the Go Home Machine.
Miguel can talk all that hot shit as much as he wants, if being Spider-Man means following the same story beats as everyone else, he’ll break away and do his own thing.
He’s Miles Morales, and he’s got a multiverse to save.