under fire

Alright this was fine, Miles could do this. He could do this, he just had to get Peter out of the box.

Actually, no. Was the box important?

Change of plans, he just had to get the box off the wall.

Easier said than done. It was hard to get a grip on the side of the box because it was attached to a concrete slab and, even then, once he did, it didn’t want to come off. Matt helped by pulling hard on the other side.

“Imaginary friends now, please,” he gritted out, really putting his back into it. There was a loud bang from above and he ripped himself away from the box.

“I’ll distract them,” he said, “It’ll give you maybe five or ten more minutes. You have my number, call me when you and him get somewhere safe.”

Miles promised he would and Matt bolted out of the lab. Then Miles reached out to Gwen. She reached right back and yanked open a window already in her suit.

Thank god for Gwen.

She didn’t need to be told to help him move the box (thank god for Gwen, part two), but their combined strength sent a crack skittering through the top layer of glass. Miles swore. Gwen didn’t. She was in superhero mode. She pulled again, more gently, but the crack just widened. She blew out a breath of air, then looked back into Miles’s eyes.

He shrugged.

They shattered the glass.

Peter was heavy, and not heavy as in ‘heavy-heavy.’ Miles could lift more weight nowadays than he was comfortable with admitting to himself or anyone else. He was heavy, as in, limp and unmoving. Deadweight. And awkward as hell. Neither Gwen nor Miles was tall enough to accommodate all the guy’s legs, and like seriously? Was that much leg strictly necessary? Gwen took the guy’s knees while Miles took his shoulders so they could lift him out of his new nest of broken glass. Then they had to put him down to have enough hands to reach out for Peter B.

He didn’t respond.

Miles was going to have a heart attack.

He pushed harder, and harder.

“Come on, man,” Gwen creaked out through her set jaw. “We don’t got time for this.”

They both crashed forward and Peter B. stood there, in his socks, in his living room, with a lady hiding behind a pillow on the couch behind him.

Peter B. saw them, flicked his eyes to the body behind them, and launched into Spiderman mode. He was tall enough and gangly enough to handle all those legs without much trouble. He dropped Peter on his living room floor, then did something Miles suddenly realized was absolutely genius. He took a video of the lab. He got out his phone and went as calmly and slowly as he could around the box, around the lab station. There was a crash outside the lab which he carefully ignored. Miles couldn’t. He got back up from his knees next to Peter but found himself stuck. A hand in the back of his suit. He turned around halfway to yank away, but found himself looking right into the down-turned eyes of Peter B.’s wife. Her hand wasn’t just holding him fast, Miles saw, it was clenched into a fist.

“Peter,” she said.

“Working on it,” Peter B. mumbled.

A shout echoed somewhere outside the lab and Miles’s stomach dropped. That had sounded like a gunshot. What if Matt had gotten hurt?

“Let go, please,” He said, pulling at MJ’s hand. She didn’t even look at him. Another volley of gunshots rang out.

“Let go, please,” Miles tried, not wanting to wrench her hand off. This was Peter B.’s wife they were talking about.

“Peter,” she said in a louder voice.

“I’m almost done, babe, give me two seconds,” Peter grumbled, half-buried under the little desk in the lab.

Several shouts broke out in echoes followed by manic cackling. Peter B. jerked at that and ripped the computer tower in there out without preamble. Miles had never felt so relieved in his life. That wasn’t Doc Ock cackling.

“That’s my friend,” he told MJ’s grimacing face.

“Friend?” Gwen asked.

“Daredevil.”

Gwen stared at him.

“He sounds happy,” MJ said helpfully. A sound like several old metal trashcan lids being smashed together reverberated through the lab door’s entrance. Peter B. poked his head out for a second, hummed, and came back through to his living room.

“He’s good,” he said. “Making a castle out of riot shields.”

He set the computer tower on the floor by Peter’s limp head, called behind him “They’re in good hands, Double D,” and, at the responding little cheer, closed the window.

An hour or so in, and Miles and Gwen still didn’t really know what else they were supposed to be doing. They held the cups of tea Peter B.’s wife had forced into their hands in silence, perched on their gray blanket-draped couch while MJ hooked her chin over Peter B.’s shoulder and nitpicked at whatever he was doing on his laptop.

Peter B. had listened to Miles’s tragic tales of woe with his chin tucked into his hands and had decided that they needed to get a better idea of what exactly Doc Ock had been doing to Peter before they tried to wake him up. He’d set himself to breaking into her admin account on the computer to this end, but apparently, hacking was a slow-going process. Nothing like in the movies.

Granted, the movies didn’t spend a whole lot of time covering husband and wife hacking teams either, which was a shame.

Peter B. kept saying “honey, I love you,” to MJ without looking at her, which Miles and Gwen quickly learned was code for “MJ, you’re driving me crazy, I’m trying to work here.”

MJ was undaunted. She leaned over him and picked at keys until he eventually held his hands up in irritation.

“Mary Jane,” he said while she typed awkwardly over his shoulders. “Spiderman here.”

“Hmm? Oh hi, Spiderman,” she said amicably.

“I’m delegating tasks.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Your job is over there,” he indicated with his hands to Peter’s lifeless body. MJ had extended hospitality towards him by carefully tossing an orange and green afghan over him and stuffing a couch cushion under his neck.

MJ studied him for a moment and gave it a good, hard think.

“I like this better,” she said. She returned to the laptop. Peter B. took in and let out a calming breath.

“Babe, you can’t code.”

“You can’t either; besides, I’ve been watching tutorials on Youtube.”

“What? No, I can code. Who told you I can’t code?”

MJ stared at him with pity in her eyes.

“I can code,” Peter B. maintained, a little more defensively this time.

“Baby, you’re so pretty,” she said. She petted the side of his face affectionately.

“Did Flash tell you that shit? He’s full of shit. I can code. I’ve been coding for like, years.”

“So pretty. I mean, model-esque.”

Gwen choked on her tea. Miles hid his face behind his. They were a great couple. Miles was so happy that they were together again. Peter B.’s MJ was sardonic and sarcastic and seemed to have decided that she would dedicate her life to harassing and haranguing him in whatever way she could while he pretended to be grumpy about it.

It was cute.

The elephant in the room was that Peter B.’s MJ, for some unfathomable reason, did not like Peter. She announced that he was weird and ‘spry-looking’ and she refused to look at him for longer than was strictly necessary. She shielded her vision with pillows and hands and Peter B. when he proved convenient. She called him ‘the blonde one’ and would not deviate from this, even though the poor guy’s mask was still stretched securely over his face.

Gwen pointed out gently that he wasn’t trying to make her uncomfortable, but got only a blank, suspicious stare in return, before MJ decided to silence her and Miles for the time being with tea.

Hence, tea.

“Woah, did that work?” MJ suddenly asked. Miles and Gwen perked up and looked over to Peter B. The corner of his mouth twitched. He said nothing. MJ got a handful of his collar and gave him a shake. “Did it would? Did I hack it? Peter. Peter, am I a hacker?”

Peter B. said nothing,

“I’m a hacker. Oh my god. I’m putting it on my—”

The screen went blue. MJ gasped and then turned back to Peter B. in betrayal.

“It didn’t work,” she said, heartbroken.

“But you tried so hard,” he told her sympathetically.

“You knew it wouldn’t work, you asshole.”

“You were doing so well.”

“I’m divorcing you.”

“Mmm, alright. I’ll call Stillwell again.” MJ huffed and shoved off him to flop down on the couch between Miles and Gwen. Miles offered her his tea. She groaned and draped herself all over the cushions instead.

Peter B. went back to work.

It took another hour or so, during which time Miles and Gwen tried to work out a new plan of action. It was hard since they really didn’t know how to wake Peter up safely or really, what to do with him after that. Gwen thought that if he was an Avenger, then maybe they could hand him over to them for safe-keeping and rehab. Miles didn’t know if he was an official Avenger in his verse, though. He only knew that Peter seemed to have had an alliance with Daredevil.

Peter B. made a pleased sound which got all their attention.

“Are you in?” MJ asked, upside-down on the couch now. She had a lot of hair and Miles had tucked his feet under himself so as not to get involved with any of it.

Peter B. huffed in amusement.

“Yeah, I’m in,” he said.

Nothing made sense. It was all just numbers and equations and notes in half-Latin. Peter B. and MJ stared at the screen in silent disgust for a full three minutes before they passed the laptop over to Gwen and Miles for a go. MJ then helpfully held the screen over Peter’s slack face and asked him what the fuck this meant, sir.

“MJ, language,” Peter B. sighed with his face in his hands as his wife got over her fear of his double to commandeer one of his hands to stick to the laptop screen so as to gain an answer by osmosis or clairvoyance. It didn’t stick, but the power of MJ’s stare somehow kept it from sliding right off.

“Maybe Tats Spidey can read it?” Gwen offered.

Miles looked at Peter B. hopefully. MJ set the laptop back down.

“Is he a hacker?” she asked.

Peter B. sighed and got up to take the laptop back.

“Dude, what?” Tats Spidey asked, having joined them all in Peter B.’s living room with a bowl of cereal in one hand. He stuck the spoon in his mouth and tried to scroll through the notes, then swore around the spoon upon realizing that the scroll went the opposite way in this verse.

He didn’t even look at Peter, or MJ for that matter. It was freaking them all out. They tried to kind of gesture at Peter when they talked about him, but Tats Spidey stayed resolutely fixated on the screen.

“This is some crazy shit,” He diagnosed.

Which, like, they all knew that already.

“Can you decipher any of it?” Peter B. asked.

Tats Spidey set his bowl to the side. Miles wouldn’t have pegged him to be a granola kind of guy; honestly, he would have set him squarely between Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch, but Tats Spidey was just full of surprises.

“I don’t do biology,” Tats Spidey informed them around the spoon. He did stop scrolling and stare at the document for a long moment, though. Then he stood up.

They all watched him.

“That’s uh, my PC,” Peter B. called after him. He opened a window to his own verse and made a confirmation sound behind him. Someone cursed him in his own apartment and threatened him with mutilation if he was going out on patrol. He informed them that it was Sunday and Sunday was Spiderman’s day off. He returned with the laptop held aloft and his own laptop slipping out of his grip on it and three other textbooks in the opposite arm. He reclaimed his seat on the floor next to his window and went back to staring.

At least he’d stopped chewing on the spoon.

MJ asked Peter B. why he didn’t have any tattoos.

“What would I even get?” he asked her. She shrugged.

“Something cool?”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll just get ‘Juicy’ printed across my ass.”

Peter B.’s MJ had a bizarre sense of humor.

“Won’t fit,” Tats Spidey informed them without looking up and with far too much confidence. Gwen meandered over next to him and he asked her to look up certain words in the index of one of the books. Miles went over and got assigned to look up a word in another of them.

It was hard to tell if knowledge of these words made any difference to the thoughts rattling through Tats Spidey’s head, but he did seem to be reading through the notes faster now.

MJ watched, intrigued.

“You don’t do biology, but you seem to know a lot of it,” she observed, then Tats Spidey locked his attention on her for the first time. He stared at her like she’d just told him the password for NASA’s front door.

He threw everything around him down and leapt back into his verse and they heard him shrieking, “MJ, YOU’RE A BIOLOGIST.”

“Get fucked, Parker,” a voice informed him.

“You’re a biologist, how did I forget you’re a biologist?”

“Peter, you’re half a biologist, you fuckhead, you’ve got a double major.”

“Holy shit, I’m a biologist.”

What. Miles and Gwen exchanged concerned eyebrows and Peter B.’s MJ looked up at him in concern.

“We can’t all be home runs,” he told her. She looked at the lifeless Peter on her living room floor as though he was the greatest proof of this.

Tats Spidey’s MJ, whose name was not Mary Jane, but Michelle Jones, had to be physically carried through the window and she did not come willingly. She clung to Tats Spidey and refused to put her feet on the ground, hissing that she had not agreed to fuck up a parallel universe with him. He dropped her on her ass and she punched him hard enough in the shin that he made a noise somewhere between a yelp, a squawk, and a whimper.

“Why do you hate me?” he asked her pitifully. She sneered at him and snatched Peter B.’s computer out of his reach.

Gwen was delighted with Michelle. She thought that they had a lot in common.

Michelle was a lot closer to the kind of expertise they actually needed at the moment. She examined Peter, then the notes, then declared it all some ‘crazy bullshit,’ just like her buddy (friend? Boyfriend? It was hard to tell what she and Tats Spidey were, not to mention if they even liked each other to begin with.). Then she scrolled a little bit and started frowning deep. The frowning didn’t let up. She made Tats Spidey rattle off a few definitions of things that he seemed to have repressed somewhere in his memory and which even he was surprised, although pleased, to find still lurking around in his head.

“I need a sample and a microscope,” Michelle finally announced.

Tats Spidey stared at her for a long moment, slack-jawed, and then came back to life.

“I’ll do you one better,” he said.

“Peter, why.”

“See, Mr. Stark, I know what this looks like.”

“No, no, you shush. I’m talking now. Why does this shit always happen to you? And why, why, why are you so hellbent on dragging me into it?”

“I’m not. I’m just here asking either you or Miss Potts—”

“Stark—”

“Potts for a favor. A personal one. For personal reasons.”

“Name them.”

Tats Spidey produced his evidence in the form of introducing everyone in his new party. Tony Stark, with more gray in his hair than the one in Miles’s verse, stared at them all. Gwen glitched. It set all of them off to glitching and Stark’s eye twitched behind his glasses.

“Lord Jesus protect this boy and everyone around him from his dumb fucking luck, amen,” he said to the ceiling. Then sighed. “You can use Lab 51—51, Peter. You’re still banned from 50, don’t think I forgot.”

Tats Spidey beamed at him.

“You’re my favorite su—”

“Finish that sentence and I’ll fire you. Get. Go. Out of my sight.”

“But sir, I already am out of your sight.”

Silence.

Even if he was a little grayer, this Tony Stark was much more spry than the one in Miles’s verse. He almost caught Tats Spidey before he made it down the hall and everything.

Michelle needed to take a sample from Peter which meant that they had to remove his mask and for a second, Miles’s heart stopped in dread that Peter’s face might not be under it. He was struck with the thought that maybe Doc Ock had dressed some rando up as Peter and left him in the box as a decoy. That Peter was still out there, screaming into oblivion, but now somewhere where they couldn’t hear him.

Relief washed over him like briny ocean water when Gwen peeled back Peter’s mask to reveal his placid, pale face and blonde mop.

Tats Spidey recoiled.

“What the fuck is that?” he demanded.

“Wait ‘til you see his eyes,” Peter B. told him.

“What the fuck’s the matter with them?”

“Hey, moron, open your double’s face, I need a cheek swab,” Michelle interrupted. Tats Spidey did it without question.

Michelle was so great. Miles liked Michelle so much.

She took a swab of his cheek and rattled through a bunch of drawers until she found a dish to rub the swab all over. She did some other things to it and stuck it under a microscope and went still and silent for a long few moments.

“Peter,” she said at length, referring to her Tats Spidey.

“Yes, dear?” he answered.

“Is Dr. Banner still here?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Go get him.”

“Roger that.”

And Tats Spidey bounced away, leaving them all standing nervously in this pristine white room with Peter laying on a cot. His face looked much softer without the mask. Miles could see now that he had blonde eyelashes, too. MJ plastered herself against Peter B.’s back to avoid having to look at them. Gwen stepped closer to Michelle, who had started taking notes on a piece of paper she’d torn off a larger one peeking out of a drawer.

“Is it bad?” she asked.

“Not enough info to tell,” Michelle said, “But it sure as hell isn’t good.”

Right. Yes. That was probably the best they could expect.

Tats Spidey reappeared with Dr. Banner, who looked exactly the same as the one in Miles’s physics textbook. He was much more flustered than anticipated, however, and did three whole headcounts of all the Peters in the room. He grasped for Tats Spidey blindly, then, once he got him, put his hands on his shoulders and stared him dead in the eye.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said kindly.

Tats Spidey smiled nervously.

“Surprise?” he said.

“You little monster; when did this first start? You should have told me then, Peter. Why are you always doing this? This waiting ‘til the last possible second thing? Is this part of the anxiety?”

“Yes,” Tats Spidey said without blinking.

Dr. Banner stared back at him and then dropped his hands with a sigh.

“Fair enough, alright. Hi Michelle, how are you? What’s Mr. Young and Stupid 2.0 got going on with him today?”

“His cells are weird,” Michelle said without looking up. “They’re glitching, first off. But also they’re—I don’t know how to describe it. Wavering? Kind of glittering? See for yourself.”

She moved so Banner could look into the scope. He did so and then pulled back and blinked at Peter’s sleeping face on the cot.

“What on god’s green earth—hold on. Stay there, all of you.”

Banner fetched Thor. Thor who had like, crazy hair. It was short. Thor was not supposed to have short hair. Thor in no one else’s verse had short hair. He didn’t even bother with the microscope, either, he just wandered over and smelled Peter, all nice and creepy.

“This one is very ill,” he informed Dr. Banner with sorrow in his voice.

“Yeah, no shit. That’s not what I asked you,” Dr. Banner said irritably.

“He must be returned to equilibrium.”

“Thor, speak in a language that we can understand, please, I’m begging you. Just this once.”

Thor gave Peter a shoulder squeeze and Miles thought he saw the guy take in a slightly bigger breath in response.

“He is stuck in between two states of being,” Thor said, “I have seen this a few times. Fading in and out between planes. Space sickness, you might say. People who get it start to smell of ozone.”

“Does it hurt?” Miles asked him. Thor looked over at him and cocked his head. Then dropped his eyes.

“It can hurt very much, yes,” he said.

“How do you know where the cells want to be?” Banner asked.

Thor hummed.

“You don’t,” he said.

Unhelpful. Peter B. crossed his arms.

“We’re all out of place right now,” he said, “Will taking him back to his verse help stabilize his cells?”

Thor looked at him with interest and then looked down at the top of Tats Spidey’s head next to him. Tats Spidey looked up into his face and he jerked his gaze away just before they made eye contact.

“It might, but if he’s stuck in between planes, then he might like that space better.”

“So we need to get him into the space in between verses?” Gwen asked. “Wasn’t that where he was stuck before?”

Yeah. Surrounded by sparks and screaming. Miles’s fingers felt cold and his eyes felt tired. It was probably somewhere around six or seven in the morning back at home. He was exhausted. But it seemed like there was still so much to do. The back of his head buzzed with white noise.

“Why don’t we do this?” Banner thought out loud, “Let’s do a little bit of sensory deprivation and see how that fairs for him. Maybe he can go into that place on his own and all this moving and shaking is making it hard for him to do that. We’ll give him a day or so in the tank and see if his cells stabilize a bit. If they do, then we can probably wake him up and see where to go from there. If they don’t. Well. We can start thinking about arrangements for that, too.”

You didn’t have to be a genius to know what that meant.

Peter was dying all over again. All that work to get him away from Doc Ock and he was still slipping away. At least he wasn’t screaming in the in-between again. Although now, Miles kind of wished he still was. At least that way they knew he wasn’t dead.

There wasn’t anything else he, or anyone else in their group could do, so they had to leave Peter with Dr. Banner. He promised that he would take care of him and, before they all left, he told them all that it was a stupid thing that they were all trying to do, but a brave one.

“Takes a lot of heart for all of you guys to come together on this,” he said.

A lot of heart.

Yeah. Yeah, that was true. If nothing else, then Miles hoped Peter would wake up once last time so he could show him the news coverage of his funeral, so that he’d slip back under knowing that he’d really made an impact. He couldn’t think of anything more comforting than that.

Miles went home and it felt like a relief. It didn’t make his heart any less heavy, but there really was something about being back in his verse that made the tension in his spine settle a bit. Things felt less heavy and more solid. Ganke came in and asked him if he was okay.

He said he was.

Then he went to sleep.