To Maine!
The door continued to bang. “Peter, buddy, talk to me. If you’re in there having sex or something, I can leave, just lemme know- Wait actually , we should talk about the condom thing, I’ve got a bunch-”
Peter-Three flung open the door with a large, toothy smile. “Uhhhh… hi.”
A long, painfully awkward pause followed as the two men stared at each other.
Jason -a thin, dark-haired college student with glasses who looked better-dressed than any of Peters had been in college- hesitantly lowered his hand from where it had been pounding on the door. “Hi? You’re… not Peter.”
“Yup, I mean nope, absolutely not , that is a ridiculous accusation. My name’s Andrew, actually.” Peter-Three leaned against the doorframe with what he hoped was his most charming smile. He did his best to take up as much of the space in the doorway as possible so the RA wouldn’t just charge in and see that a lot of Peter-One’s ‘notes’ were covered in magical writings. “I’m Peter’s brother and he’s uh, definitely not having sex. At least, not while I’m here, ‘cause that’d be awkward and nobody wants that.”
Jason blinked, confused by this tall, unfamiliar man who could talk a mile a minute. “Riiiiight, but where’s Peter?” He strained his neck to look into the empty room behind ‘Andrew’, then looked back at the lanky man with suspicion. “This isn’t the regular visiting week for family members.”
“Don’t sweat it, we took him out for…” Peter-Three scratched the side of his neck. “A birthday. It’s my birthday, actually.” He didn’t think he could fake a bigger smile, but he still tried.
Jason raised an eyebrow. “At… 10 PM?”
“Yeah, of course, we’re taking him uh…” Peter-Three made a big gesture with his arm. “- suuuuper out , like out-of-town out. Like, to Maine , to see the lobsters and stuff. I’m turning the big three-o and decided to turn it into a family trip of my dreams.”
“To… Maine. To see lobsters.” Jason repeated, squinting at him.
“Yeah, man, what do you have against lobsters? They’re delicious.”
Jason crossed his arms. “Okay, so why are you in Peter’s dorm room if it’s your birthday?”
Peter-Three stuffed his hands in his hoodie’s pocket to prevent himself from fidgeting any more. “Well, Peter forgot to pack something so I came back to grab it. As you can see, he’s a total slob so it’s taking me a while to-” He stiffened when there was a weird sound behind him, something that sounded suspiciously like a baby beginning to cry and then the sound being muffled abruptly. Belatedly, Peter-Three realized the window was still open behind him.
Jason tried to peek over his shoulder again. “Is that a baby-? ”
“No! No, obviously not , it’s just my Spotify.”
Jason stared at him like he had grown a second head.
Peter-Three gave him a thin-lipped, forced smile. “What?”
“You listen to baby sounds on your Spotify?”
“Ugh, you kids. You have no appreciation for Aaliyah, you know that? Her ‘Are You That Somebody’ single was such a good song, I love the way her voice-”
Jason laughed and held up his hands. “Alright, cool, enjoy your old people music. Happy birthday to you, man.” He made a motion to step away but then stopped and turned back to Peter-Three as if he just remembered something. “It’s midterms week starting Monday, by the way. Don’t keep Peter out too late.”
Peter-Three nodded rapidly, a little too eager to get him to leave. “Of course, wouldn't think of it. Back by Monday, got it.”
Jason gave him one last suspicious look before turning away, waving over his shoulder. “Have fun in Maine, dude.”
“Yuuup, will do! Can’t wait to go… go crabbing and stuff!” Peter-Three called a-little-too-loudly after him, before quickly slamming the door shut and locking it.
Peter-Two’s head popped into view, upside-down, through the open window. He looked entirely unamused. “ That was your brilliant plan?”
“I didn’t expect the goddamn Spanish inquisition, okay?” Peter-Three hissed. “Where’s the kid?”
His elder slid back in through the open window with silent grace, although he moved with care not to jostle his precious cargo. He had apparently stuffed Peter-One -wrapped in the MIT hoodie for warmth- into his jacket to free his hands for crawling, so now he looked vaguely like a kangaroo. Peter-Three snorted at this, which made Peter-Two glare at him self-consciously. “Boston in the fall is way too cold for a baby,” he explained matter-of-factly, unzipping the jacket and pulling the baby back out.
“Awww, look at him, he’s all rosy-cheeked,” Peter-Three cooed, reaching over to take the bundled-up baby and cradle him against his own chest. Peter-One was still gnawing on his favorite sock -which was growing more and more damp by the second- but he made a happy coo and snuggled against his taller brother’s chest.
“Him being cute doesn’t fix the fact that he’s a baby ,” Peter-Two stressed, moving across the room as he tried to gather together all the notes that were thrown haphazardly everywhere. He skimmed each page quickly but none of it made any sense to him. “Help me look, there has to be a way to reverse the spell.”
Peter-Three carefully set the cooing baby on his back in the middle of the bed. “Stay, okay? Stay,” he told the child.
Dropping to his knees to help the other Spiderman, he began to stack the tomes into a neat heap. “What are we even looking for? We have no experience with this stuff. It took the kid months to even learn how to use the ring to make a portal-”
The two men froze and looked at each other from across the floor. “ The ring. ”
After a brief scramble, Peter-Two found it -flung by the blast- underneath Peter-One’s standard-issue clothing dresser. He used his webbing to fish it out and stood, blowing dust off of it before holding it cautiously in his palm. “Well. We have it. Now what?”
Peter-Three took the ring from him and studied it carefully, then looked at the baby on the bed, who continued to gnaw on his sock without a care in the world. “You… think he remembers… stuff? Like, magic, or whatever?”
Peter-Two followed his gaze toward the infant. His brow furrowed a little. “What if he’s stuck in there, mentally? Like he wants to talk to us but he can’t, because his body can’t talk yet?”
“Yeesh, talk about dark. You must be fun at parties,” Peter-Three grumbled, kneeling by the bed and holding the ring up to Peter-One. “Peter, look at me. Peeeeter, look -Okay, you’re doing it. Sort of. Can you do the portal thing?”
The child stared at the gold ring with fascination and reached out with grasping hands, clearly wanting it.
Peter-Three held it just out of his grasp. “ Ohhh, ahhh, yes, it’s very pretty. But can you do your magic with it?” He used the ring to draw a couple of loops in the air. “You know, portals? Circles? Loops? Anything?”
Peter-Ones response was to strain harder and reach out with both hands. He kicked his chubby legs victoriously when he reached the ring and promptly pulled it in his mouth, gnawing at it with enthusiasm.
Peter-Three’s face fell.
Thwp . Peter-Two used his webbing to pull the ring out of the baby’s mouth, wiping drool off of it before sticking it in his pocket for safe-keeping. He sighed. “There goes that idea.” He crossed his arms and looked down at Peter-Three with a stubborn set to his jaw. (Peter-Three knew that face; it was the same intense, no-nonsense face that Peter-Two had when he yelled at them to stop babbling and come up with a decent plan at the Statue of Liberty.) “There’s only one person who can fix this. We have to go to Dr. Strange.”
Peter-Three groaned and face-planted into the bed. “I was really hoping you wouldn’t say that.” Peter-One stirred next to him and started to make sad whimpers again, so the older Peter blindly fished around for the sock and stuffed it back in the baby's mouth. “Shhhhh, adults are talking.”
Peter-Two began to pace back and forth, familiar lines of worry creasing his eyes and forehead. “We have to. He can’t stay a baby forever. And without him back to normal, we can’t get home.” He sank his face into his hands. “I can’t put MJ through this again.”
“I’m on thin ice with Jameson already, I’m going to get fired if I don’t show up for work on Monday,” Peter-Three agreed unhappily. He pooled his head in his arms and studied their now-infant little brother. “You know,” he told the kid, conversationally, “You probably can’t even count to five right now, but if by some miracle, you have Dr. Strange on speed dial or something, let us know.”
Peter-Two perked up at that. He quickly searched around until he spotted Peter-One’s cell phone, which had slid under the chair during the blast. Picking it up, he handed it to Peter-Three. “Worth a shot, right? Maybe he’s got some of the -whatever they’re called- Avengers people on there.”
Peter-Three looked up at him with a frown but took the phone, poking at it until it came off screen-saver mode. “What would we even say? ‘Oh hi, we’re Spider-people from another universe, can you come and pick up YOUR Spiderman? He’s a baby right now and we don’t know how to fix it. Also, nice to meet you, I’m a big fan of how you saved the world from the purple alien with the nutsack chin.’”
The older man rolled his eyes at his sarcasm -he did that a lot, come to think of it- and sat behind Peter-One on the bed. He gently sat the baby up into a sitting position and turned the child to face Peter-Three. “Let’s see if we can even unlock his phone.”
“I don’t think this was in Samsung’s test cases,” Peter-Three grumbled, but held the phone’s screen up to the baby.
Predictably, it did nothing. Carefully, Peter-Two pulled the sock out of Peter-One’s mouth and Peter-Three waved the phone in the baby’s face again. Once again, the phone didn’t unlock. Peter-One unhelpfully cooed at it, his eyes following his own reflection in the glass screen.
Peter-Three took one of the baby’s hands, unfurled it -which took a surprising amount of coaxing because baby fists did NOT want to open- and pressed the other’s tiny thumb to the phone screen. The phone refused to unlock because the fingerprint was too small to register. He groaned as Peter-One began to bat at the screen with his full, open hand, because now the infant thought it was a game. “They made these things a little too baby-proof.”
Peter-Two leaned back against the wall in defeat and looked up at the ceiling as if he couldn’t believe this weird corner his life had turned. “This is bad,” he murmured, “Our phones and credit cards don’t work because of the multi-verse. We’re here in Boston and Dr. Strange is in New York. That’s what, five hours away? Six hours, maybe?”
“By car, yeah. By swinging…” Peter-Three shook his head. “I’ve never swung that far, not in one go.”
“Me either, my back hurts just thinking about it,” Peter-Two agreed with a cringe. “And the kid could die from exposure or something -Hey, no , you stop that.” He pulled the baby away from trying to grab the phone (presumably to put in his mouth, like he did with all things) and pulled him firmly in his lap, tucking the oversized hoodie around the naked child for warmth. His face softened as the baby instinctively curled his little hands around fistfuls of his jacket and looked up at him with those giant, brown eyes framed by long lashes. He could see flashes of the Peter-One he knew in those eyes -they were naive, kind and curious all at once, just like the teenager had been.
Hesitantly, the older man poked at one of Peter-One’s soft, squishy cheek with his finger. The baby grabbed it with surprising speed and tried to put the knuckle of the finger in his mouth. Peter-Two let him, looking torn between exasperation and fondness as the baby gummed at his skin. “Well… this is an improvement compared to eating your sock.”
Peter-Three’s dark eyes studied them both for a long, quiet second. You and MJ did want a child , he remembered, feeling a twinge of sadness as he watched them. You would have been a good dad.
He cleared his throat to break the moment and sat back on his heels on the floor. “So, we travel the old-fashioned way, I guess?”
“How though?” Peter-Two sighed, unable to tear his eyes away from the baby that was currently latched to his finger. “If my credit cards don’t work in this universe, all I’ve got are like forty bucks and that’s supposed to be for groceries when I get back.”
“I think I’ve got like fifteen, max.” Peter-Three eyed the heap of discarded clothing in the middle of the floor, then at the baby in Peter-One’s lap, then back to the clothes. He cringed. “Sorry about this, kid.”
He reached out and fished around the boy’s pants until he found the kid’s wallet. He dumped the contents of the wallet out on the bed for closer inspection. There were coupons for the Lego store (of course Peter-One had those), some super-long grocery receipts, Michelle-Jones’ phone number (that had almost faded off the paper it was written on, but it was adorable that he kept it), his school ID, a library card and a debit card.
“We’re broke but we’re not that broke!” Peter-Three fished out the debit card with flourish, looking proud.
Peter-Two’s gray eyes flickered toward the card and he managed to look simultaneously relieved and guilty.
Peter-Three deflated. “I know we’re stealing from a literal baby. Don’t go all Uncle Ben on me now.”