sparks
Ganke had written out and pinned to his bulletin board a list of names which he was now busy reading through so that Miles would understand the full extent of how he felt about him coming in unannounced through the window again.
Ganke was a good guy, a calm guy, the kind of guy you wanted on your team if for no other reason than because his chill in the face of what most people would call insanity was vaguely threatening. He’d stared at Miles straight in the face after they’d finally had a frank conversation about the whole, ‘why do you sneak out at night, every night, like a loser?’ thing and had given him a good squint, up and down.
Miles realized later that in that moment, he’d been weighed, measured, and found severely wanting.
Ganke was not a big fan, nor a huge fan of Spiderman. No, see, that didn’t even begin to cover how Ganke felt about Spiderman. He had every single one of the guy’s comics. He had Spidey t-shirts, jackets, backpacks, keychains, a phone background—he even had Spidey slippers which Miles was gratified to learn were essentially blue, furry monstrosities with eight dragging little legs bursting out from either side of them. Apparently, they were supposed to be 3D versions of the emblem on the back of the original Spidey suit.
Given that this was not a battle he had any chance of winning, Miles decided that he’d keep his thoughts on just how accurate all them little feet were to himself. He ruminated on them, though, while Ganke rattled off some of the new invectives he’d added to the list in Miles’s absence.
They were so blue. Like, blue raspberry sherbet blue. Jolly Ranchers blue.
“Dude, are you even listening?” Ganke demanded.
“Huh?” Miles said reflexively.
Ganke groaned and grumbled and waved a grumpy hand back at Miles over his shoulder to dismiss him from further conversation. It was almost a relief. Except.
“Hey man, guess which dumpster I fell in this time,” he goaded.
Ganke whipped around in his computer chair and produced two pens from his desk to make the sign of the cross at him.
“Touch nothing, demon,” he threatened.
Miles hummed long and thoughtfully.
“I dunno,” he drawled, “I’m feeling a little sad, man.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“A lady called me a menace today, right to my face. Could really use a hug.”
“You are a menace. That is exactly what you are.”
Miles made puppy eyes and pouted big and sad, slowly edging a hand towards the can on Ganke’s desk. Ganke hissed at him. He made a noise of disgust when Miles’s fingers made contact with the can.
“There are easier ways to get a coke, Miles Morales,” he snapped. That was as good as permission. Miles swiped the can and beamed at him. He took a sip, it was flat, but so, so much sweeter with Ganke’s annoyance.
He emerged from his shower and received clearance to re-enter his and Ganke’s dorm room. He flopped down on his bed, at which point Ganke leaned back in his chair with one headphone on and said,
“Oh, by the way, you got like six messages while you were in the shower.”
Six?
“Yeah, dunno if that’s good or bad.”
He checked. The phone had way more than that. He unlocked the screen.
No messages.
“It’s Gwen,” he said.
“Sending six messages?” Ganke clarified. He had accepted Gwen’s existence the same way he’d accepted Miles’s night job, at first with skepticism, then with a shrug. “She okay?”
Miles never knew, he couldn’t ever open Gwen’s messages. They could only send them to each other. Ten messages was a lot, though, she must have really been trying to get his attention.
“Maybe someone’s dying,” Ganke hypothesized.
Someone’s always dying.
It was nearly three, though; Gwen’s patrol typically ended around then, she’d be going home to sleep soon. Miles would call her after a few hours to reboot.
Someone was screaming. Far away. So far, it sounded like an echo.
Miles thought he knew that voice from somewhere.
Where had he heard it?
Maybe on tv?
He opened his eyes.
It was black all around him, and blinking didn’t make any difference to that. The usual pulsing charging lights around his dorm were absent, and belatedly, he realized he was standing. He flexed his hands. They didn’t feel warm or cold, just empty. Or not. Was it empty? That felt kind familiar too, somehow.
The screaming seemed like it was getting a little louder, like the buzz at the back of his brain. Miles’s feet started moving towards it. One in front of the other. He didn’t feel like he was walking, more like he was just moving his legs. There was nothing hard beneath them; just a shattering of color.
Color?
It was there, then gone; bursting out each time he set his foot down, like ripples almost, fading away into the blackness almost as quickly as it had arrived.
Wait. He knew this place. Didn’t he know this place? How did he know this place?
The screaming stopped. He stopped, too.
He searched the blackness around him. The colors no longer arced out from his feet.
His hand brushed something and he jerked his head over to see a few fading sparks of gold and teal and florescent pink. They faded off into blackness, nothingness in the space between his fingertips.
He realized muzzily that he couldn’t hear his own breathing, even though he could feel his chest expanding in his shoulders.
Expand. Contract.
Expand. Contract.
Exp—
“HELP.”
He woke up gasping with the cry ringing in his ears. His heart throbbing in his neck.
Familiar--it was familiar. He knew that voice. He knew that voice, where did he know that voice from?
He threw off his covers and scrambled off the bunk. Ganke had left. Made his bed and gone. It was the weekend, so he’d probably gone home. All his pens were stuffed in the Spidey mug he had on his desk.
“HELP.”
Miles blacked out for a millisecond and blinked back to himself on the floor. He’d dropped off the bed’s ladder.
“HELP, PLEASE.”
The shouts sounded like they were right in his ear. Right next to him. But there was no one else in the room. He staggered up and threw his head out the door to look down the hall.
It was empty.
He jerked back into the room and threw himself half out the window.
There was no one, just a handful of people lazily strolling down in the street below.
“HELP.”
He nearly slipped and cracked his chin against the sill.
“Where are you?” he asked, scrambling up to his feet and trying to find the body of the voice with his face. He turned in circles in the small space between the two desks and the bunkbed in the room. No one was there. It was just him and his socks spinning on carpet. He stopped and listened again. Listened hard.
“HELP.”
He leapt a foot in the air and then threw his hands out in front of him; maybe this person—whoever they were--were in camouflage-mode like him. He couldn’t feel anyone, though, he couldn’t feel anything but air. There was a rushing in his ears now, like static. Like glitching. It got louder and louder with each spin he made.
“HELP, HELP, PLEASE, STOP.”
Right in his ears, he swore to god. Right there. Right next to him. But there was nothing, no one.
“WHERE ARE YOU?” he shouted back, desperate; his tone had started to match the other’s. His voice wavered.
And yet there was nothing and no one around him. Just his own stuttered breathing.
Nothing.
Then, an echo. His own words coming back to him from somewhere he couldn’t pinpoint, no matter how hard he looked around the room. Wait, those weren’t his words. No, they were, but that voice wasn’t his. It was—
It was Gwen’s.
“Where are you?” she called, soft and hoarse as though far off in the distance. “Where are you? I want to help you. Where are you?”
Gwen could hear it too then. She could hear the screaming, too. They were—
“Who are you?” another soft voice called in response to Gwen’s shouting. She didn’t seem to hear it, she kept crying out the same question over and over.
“Who are you?” the voice repeated, “Where are you?”
That was Peter--Peter B. Miles hadn’t heard from him in nearly a month; Gwen said he was having some personal life drama which he’d sworn her to secrecy over. He sounded upset. He sounded rushed, like he was running.
“NO.”
The word came like a punch to the head. Miles recoiled at the sudden volume and bumped his back into the bunk bed’s ladder.
“STOP--MAKE IT STOP.”
Putting his hands over his ears didn’t block out even a little of the sound.
In fact, as soon as he did so, a whole chorus of new voices erupted from all around him to join Gwen’s and Peter’s and the person who was screaming’s.
He knew all of them. Peni. Ham. Noir.
He’d never been able to hear all the Spidermen this way before. He could talk to them sometimes, yes, but not in his head, never in his head. It didn’t even feel like any kind of psychic connection, either, it just sounded like people shouting into a dark, winter street in the middle of the night. Where no one was hearing anyone else, nor expecting any answer. But it was light outside. And the contrast between that and the desperation crowding Miles’s ears and head wasn’t just jarring.
It was suffocating.
Even more voices started to join in with the others, voices he’d never heard before. People he didn’t recognize—they had to be other Spidermen. Spideys who hadn’t stepped through their verses before, suddenly reaching out now.
Miles heard his own voice call out. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t him, he hadn’t even opened his mouth. It had to be another Miles somewhere, a hero like everyone else, screaming into the emptiness.
“Where are you?” called that other Miles. “I can help you! Tell me where you are!”
I can help you.
“HELP. PLEASE, help.”
Fuck. He slapped his arms over his head.
His heart wouldn’t start pounding, he couldn’t breathe. His fingers had gone cold with panic, and his legs had gone jittery, shaky—like he needed to move. He needed to do something. He needed to help, someone, something, now.
But then, just like that, it was gone.
Everything was gone.
He lifted his arms and all he could see were dust motes hovering in the air in the light from the window. A few cars drove down the street outside. A group of people outside were laughing. Someone playing music.
The pulsing in his neck remained, stubbornly throbbing away, undaunted. Miles could feel it more than anything else in his body. His chest heaved as he stared out the window.
Uh-uh. Fuck this. He needed to call someone.
He reached out to Gwen with shaky hands the way they had learned to and she reached back immediately. They both tore the space between their universes away so they could see each other and just as they did, another hand, painted red and webbed black, joined theirs.
Peter B. threw away the space like a curtain. Miles and Gwen couldn’t even say anything to each other because he looked like he was on the verge of panic. He tore off his mask, and while he always white, but he was never this pale.
“Did you guys hear that?” he asked.
Gwen made a horrible sound and covered her mouth, and Miles realized that she looked like she’d been crying.
“He sounds like my Peter,” she choked out, her face creased and only crumpling more with unshed tears.
The air in Miles’s lungs froze.
Oh, god, no. Don’t be Gwen’s Peter.
Peter B. looked at Miles with wide eyes, then forced himself to take a few deep breaths to get keep himself together. Miles felt like his throat was closing.
“What do we do?” he asked, “We have to help him.”
Gwen choked on a sob. Peter rubbed at his face with more pressure than necessary. It was nighttime in his verse, his suit was lit from behind by streetlights.
“We’ve gotta find him,” he said, dropping his hand, “We’ll find him.”
“How?” Gwen managed to creak out through her distress. “How? My Peter—he’s dead. I—It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“That’s not true,” Peter B. countered immediately.
“You don’t know that,” Gwen said miserably. Miles reached out to touch her arm, but she jerked back to wipe away tears.
“Gwen, he might not be your Peter,” Peter explained gently, “But he’s definitely one of us. A Spiderman. We need to talk to him.”
“He keeps fading in and out,” Miles said. “And how do we talk to him if we don’t even know where he is? What if—What if—” God, he couldn’t make himself say it. Just the thought made his entire throat ache.
“What if he’s dying?” he finally choked. “What if he’s dying in his verse, and that’s the end of Spiderman for him. Are we allowed—should we interfere?”
Peter went still in shock at the idea. Gwen’s face crumpled again and she gasped into her hand.
“No,” Peter suddenly snapped. His eyebrows dropped low. “No, it doesn’t matter. We’re Spiderman, and Spiderman saves people. Including himself. If this guy’s dying or has to die, then fuck it, whatever. I don’t care. No one said he’s gotta do it alone.”
Miles swallowed again and forced himself to take a deep breath in through his nose. He heard Gwen do the same and when he opened his eyes, saw her letting her shoulders drop like his.
“Okay, you’re right,” Miles said. He set his own eyebrows. “So, how do we do it?”
“I have no idea,” Peter B. admitted, deflating a little. “Any thoughts?”
The other two wilted as well. Miles pressed his hands against his forehead.
Think.
Think, Morales, come on. Think.
Someone’s dying, one of yours.
“HELP.”
They all jumped.
“Fuck,” Peter B. swore. “I can’t with this—BUDDY,” he shouted into the empty alley behind him, “WE’RE GONNA HELP YOU, JUST HANG IN THERE, ALRIGHT?” He turned back to the other two, and Gwen slapped a closed fist onto her palm.
“We need a game plan,” she said, still a little teary, but mostly recovered, “Let’s scaffold this. What do we need to know to find him?”
“Where he is, like physically,” Peter B. offered.
“Which verse he’s in,” Miles added.
“Okay,” Gwen said, “So we need to locate him first. Then we need to find out what’s happening to him. Then we can go from there. Maybe, if he’s in danger, we can take him through to one of our verses for safe keeping, so he can heal for a bit.”
Miles agreed with that and looked up to see Peter nodding, too.
“So our priority right now is finding him,” Gwen reiterated. “But how can we find him? He sounds like he’s right next to me, like, right here.”
“Me, too,” Miles said.
Peter sighed. He pinched the bring of his nose with his thumb and a knuckle and dipped his head low to think.
“We need someone who knows how parallel universes work,” he said after a moment, “At least, someone who understands this shit better than us. Like, we don’t know if where I’m standing is the same through all the verses, and I can’t think of any way to verify that without like, opening a window into every verse individually, which is impossible. Not to mention that it seems like we’re running on a close time-table here.”
“So like, a scientist?” Gwen asked.
“Yeah. Preferably, an un-mad one. Anyone know any? I can try to get ahold of Stark or Banner or someone on the Avengers, but they’re gonna think I’m fucking nuts.”
The thing was, Miles thought a little hysterically, was that they already probably thought that Peter was nuts since he was a giant red and blue spider who routinely threw himself off the Empire State.
Gwen snapped up to attention.
“We don’t need one of those guys,” she said, “We’ve already got a scientist.”
“We do?” Miles asked at the same time Peter did.
“Peter,” she said.
“Woah, what? No. I’m not—I’m a photographer,” Peter clarified, “A tinker-er at best, I only know as much chemistry and physics as it takes to make my tech not break mid-air.”
“Not you,” Gwen snipped. “The other Peter.”
“My Peter?” Miles asked.
“No,” Gwen said, ever more exasperated, “No, the other one. We met him. The one with the tattoos.”
A pause.
No, actually that was a great idea.
“You don’t know if he’s a scientist,” Peter B. pointed out hesitantly. “I mean—”
“He said he works as a team lead. He said his staff are intelligent—”
“That doesn’t make someone a scientist, Gwen. He could be a fucking accountant for all we know.”
“No, he works for Stark Industries, I saw the insignia on his coat.”
“Lots of people work for SI, that’s kind of how corporations work.”
“Wait,” Miles said.
The other two stopped and looked back at him.
“I’ve got his card,” he realized. “Hold on, just a second.” He swung around and started digging through everything on his desk.
Where was it? Where was it?
He hadn’t thrown it out, for sure. He remembered saving it from the trash once when Ganke was on one of his cleaning binges. He took the elevated desk attachment off his desk proper and set it down to sort through the piles of papers, assignments, mail, and what-have-you that he’d stacked in the corner by the pens.
“Miles,” Gwen said with concern.
“No, I’ve got it,” he maintained. He dumped out one of the pen cups and then hissed in triumph.
Lo and behold, there it was.
He swiped it out of the pen carnage and returned to his window reading aloud:
“Peter B. Parker, Research and Development Lead Coordinator, Stark Industries L35-L40. He’s got an email and a phone number—research and development, that’s science right?”
Peter B. mulled this over.
“Well, probably, but we don’t know if this guy knows anything about physics or parallel—”
“If he doesn’t, he’s surrounded by people who do and he can ask them without drawing attention to himself,” Gwen interrupted. “How do we get him?”
Well, they’d talked to this Peter two times before, but that was only two times.
“Did you teach him how to open a window?” Miles asked.
They had not.
Damn.
“Maybe he’ll get the hang of it,” Gwen said, “He’s opened one before. Let’s just try?”
It was a weird thing to do, reaching out to other Spideys. It was probably a physicist’s worst nightmare, actually, given that you had to reach out into the space between verses and all concepts of normal and good and rational went right out the window, so to speak. Obviously, since none of them were physicists and therefore had little regard for the proper order of things, it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t warm or cold or anything, it just felt like a lurch. Like you were stuck in the swing of a rollercoaster. Anything that went into that space glitched all over. Again, it wasn’t painful, you just had to get used to it, and you also had to have a very clear idea of who it was that you were reaching out to in order to make contact. Miles could reach out to any of the Spideys he’d already met before, provided he remembered what they looked like. The trickier part was that they had to reach back to open the window.
If the other Peter didn’t reach back, then they were screwed, and Miles didn’t know if the guy knew to be tuned into the signs that someone from another verse was trying to get his attention.
Regardless, they had to try, and try they did.
The other Peter was easy to bring back to the front of his mind because the guy had had sleeves of tattoos on his forearms. He had geometric work, a plane of neatly aligned and overlaid circles from wrist to elbow on one arm with a burst of daffodils overtop that. Miles remembered because, well, he was an artist, he had an eye for these kinds of things, but also because that Peter had also opted not to get the flowers inked in color. This, Miles thought was a bit strange, given that the whole point of daffodils was their color. He couldn’t remember what was on the guy’s other arm as clearly since he’d been mesmerized by the circle design (which, he saw now, was probably the point), but that didn’t matter, he had the first sleeve, that was a good start.
He thought he remembered that Peter looking a bit younger than Peter B., maybe around the same age as the Peter in his own verse before he’d died. He had a squarer jaw and a more heart-shaped face and—
“Did he have blue or brown eyes?” he asked Gwen.
“Brown,” Peter B. sniffed. Well, okay, Miles wasn’t going to ask how he knew so confidently.
He took the brown and tried hard to put everything together. Brown eyes, sweetheart face, daffodil tats.
Brown eyes. Sweetheart face. Daffodil tats.
He felt the space give a little under his hands and he pushed them through the air until they sunk into the space in between.
He held them still and steady, trying to keep the picture in his head.
He waited.
And waited.
Nothing.
No one reached back.
“Fuck,” Peter B. swore after both he and Gwen had given it a shot, too. “Alright, no. It’s fine, I’ll just go ask Banner and tell him I’m thinking about grad school again and he’ll do the thing where he mashes my face and—”
“Wait no,” Gwen yelped, startling them both. “Messages, we can send him messages, he’s got an email! Miles and I send messages all the time.”
Peter paused to direct a skeptical eyebrow at each of them individually.
“Messages,” he repeated. “Like, texts?”
“Yeah, we can send them,” Miles explained, getting excited with Gwen, “I can’t open them, I don’t know about Gwen. But I can’t open them. I just know when I get them to reach out to her.”
Gwen bobbed her head along with his words, eagerly staring up at Peter’s frown.
He seemed to process this information for a second, then threw up his hands.
“Why the hell not?” he said, “Why don’t we do this, we’ll send him some emails—here, lemme take a picture of that card—and I’ll talk to folks ‘round here anyways, on the off chance that he doesn’t answer.”
“How many?” Miles asked, and at the others’ twin blank looks, clarified, “How many emails should we send, like? If his verse is like mine, he can’t open them, so how many do we send so that he knows it’s us?”
Gwen and Peter thought about it.
“666?” Gwen offered. Peter scoffed at her.
“616?” she amended.
“Gwen, no. Ain’t no one got time to send that many emails,” he groaned.
“How about a hundred?” Miles offered. “Or 99. We each send 33, and that’s a super intentional number to get. You can’t ignore 99 emails.”
“Unless he gets 200 emails on the regular for his job, but sure, whatever, we need to get moving. Now. We don’t know how long our pal’s got left,” Peter said.
He was right.
CC: ____
Subject: Please contact
Hi Mr. Parker,
This is Miles. You helped me find a lawyer to get my dad out of jail a while back. I don’t know if you can hear him like we can, but there’s one of us, another Spiderman, who’s in trouble. He needs our help. We need your help to help him. Please contact us the way we talked before.
Get in touch with us soon as possible, please, please, please. We think he might be dying.
Thank you,
Miles