From the Top

The kid led them past a park Peter dimly recognized in his funk. In this universe, however, the swings still had both hinges attached and the graffiti on the benches was less spectacularly creative. Night had fallen and snow drifted to the ground with a hush that dampened the ever-present noises of traffic congestion. He trudged through mounds of dirtying snow with little thought to where he was going. Who cared where he went now?

Spider-Man stopped at a bench at the edge of the park. “Wait here,” he said, “I stowed some emergency clothes in an alley nearby. I’ll be right back.”

Not caring that it was an obvious excuse for the kid to relay the night’s events to Stark out of earshot, Peter accepted the opportunity to sit down and parked himself on the bench. “Take your time,” he said. “Give a thorough report.”

Expression unreadable behind the mask, Spider-Man jogged off down a side street. Peter had once hidden his own stashes of clothing around New York’s rooftops and alleys. Sometimes he forgot about them until coming across the piles months or years later. MJ used to tease him for his lack of fashion sense; all his decent clothes had been selected by her expert eye and sat safely in the closet at home. What he squirreled away on rooftops were usually sweatshirts and jeans with holes in the knees.

One time he’d had to recover a set of clothing only to remember he’d hidden them during a brief stage of fascination with football that had seen him emerge from the alley wearing a Brett Favre Green Bay jersey well after he'd gone over to the Vikings, earning snickers from passerby.

Numbly, he wondered what MJ was doing now. Time passed relatively between dimensions. Even though he could be said to have come from the future of his own timeline, he’d been gone from his universe exactly as long as he’d lingered in Miles’s, and now here. Did anyone miss him? Did she know he was gone? If he had gotten back and picked up his phone to see no missed messages, would he have been disappointed or relieved? The answer to that might have changed over the last few days.

Well, it didn’t matter now. The collider lay in pieces and the only person who could have rebuilt it lay in pieces too. He was no worse off now than he’d been before.

Unbidden, the memory of a conversation floated to the surface of his thoughts…

Noir had been the only one to ask, perhaps because next to Peter B. he was the most experienced and came from a dimension where Nazis still lurked in the shadows and spies on both sides chose cyanide pills over capture.

“What will you do?” he’d asked in a quiet moment, after Peter had made the call for all of them. For some reason they accepted him as the de facto leader of the little group. “Will you wait?”

Peter had hesitated before responding, but Noir’s sympathy was refreshingly countered by practicality of the nature only a Great Depression and world war could produce. “Depends,” he said as matter-of-factly as possible, “but probably not. Don’t tell the others.”

Noir nodded. He’d experienced the glitching himself, after all, and knew what kind of end that would be. No self-respecting crimefighter wanted their obituary to include the word “disintegrated.” In Peter’s place Noir would have done the same.

Not far away, the others were making their fond farewells to Aunt May, whose smile stood stalwart against unshed tears. She did not know he intended to stay behind or he had no doubt she would have marched to the particle accelerator herself with rocket launcher in hand. It did not matter that he wasn’t her Peter. Not her child.

The notion of taking his own life was anathema to Peter and would have made old Rabbi Abraham weep to hear, but worse still was the thought of curling up in a corner like an old dog, waiting to die as his atoms stretched past their breaking point. He’d been in the business long enough to get over his own nobility.

He’d make it fast, and as painless as possible.
.
.

But that had been before he’d given up giving up.

After a minute the kid trotted back barefaced across the street, skidding on patches of forming ice and tucking away his mask and, surreptitiously, his phone. “This thing always gives me hood-head. My hair just kind of flattens out,” he complained as the mask went into his backpack.

He was trying to make Peter feel better, which was appreciated and didn’t work in the least.

“Listen, ah,” the teenager tried again, standing awkwardly before him, “I’m really sorry about the collider.”

“Wasn’t your fault,” mumbled Peter in an unwitting echo of the kid’s disappointment back at the Expo, when he’d thought for a moment he was looking at Ben Parker. “Sorry about back there. Things got…I wasn’t expecting that.”

Death wasn’t a new concept to any Parker in any universe but it was one they actively sought to prevent. Octavius might have been a batshit-crazy mad scientist whose work barreled over human lives in her pursuit of scientific frontiers, but given the chance, he would have saved her. For all the good it ever did him.

“I know. You just wanted it to stop. It happened so fast. Did…that happen in the last universe?”

“Not exactly. Though it wasn’t any prettier.” Same end, different means.

“Maybe—maybe there’s another way to get you home,” the kid continued encouragingly, “something else we can try…”

Tony Stark was smart, but not smart enough to do in a few days what had taken Ock over a decade. Peter stood up tiredly and brushed flakes of snow off his trousers.

They set off walking again. “Where are we going?” asked Peter.

“Home, for now,” said the kid. “Ned—my friend—was gonna grab a pizza. You met him at the convention. My Aunt May’s out visiting her cousin.”

Pizza sounded like just the thing. It usually did. Peter noted the kid didn’t try to lead him to any of the subway entrances. Probably he figured the older man would prefer the walk, cold as it was. He was right.

Privately Peter was glad May was not at home; he could only take so much heartache. At this point it would be better to disengage. He’d already seen Ned, so that particular blow he’d had time to absorb.

A pack of teenagers loped nearby, laughing and sharing chips out of a bag. Otherwise the street was lightly populated. Peter knew he should be the first to acknowledge the elephant in the room but he felt very tired and not at all eager to launch into an explanation of the past days’ events.

Spasms briefly splintered his torso and he put a hand to his ribs.

“We’re going to meet Mr. Stark in the morning,” the kid said firmly, catching sight of it. “I mean, crazy tech stuff like this is kind of his specialty. Maybe he knows how to get you home. Plus…there are other people who could help.”

“Avengers, I assume?” Converses were no shoes for the snow. Peter felt the canvas starting to soak through. With his luck he’d end up with a cold.

The kid smiled. “Yeah. And some of them know a thing or two about quantum theory.”

Four or five or fifty things would be better. “OK.” He didn’t really feel like adding Avengers to his headache, but could he really turn down even the smallest chance they could help? Every once in a while they pulled a rabbit out of a hat without killing the rabbit.

They’d jaywalked several more blocks with typical New Yorker abandon before the kid asked, “What’s your name?” In the words he heard many more questions.

Peter glanced sideways, wondering if he should go for the sucker punch.

The teenager shook his head. White flecks of snow fell gently down to stick to his hair. “OK, spit it out. What aren’t you telling me? Come on…you’re like me, I can feel it, and…” he looked at Peter, “you—you look so much like Uncle Ben…”

In his face dwindled a grieving boy’s last hope: that in some dimension, the man who’d raised him still lived, that the spider had found its way to a man so stalwart, so good, that it seemed only natural he should become a hero…

Peter said to him gently, “I’m not Ben Parker. Or your dad. But,” he sighed, “I guess…we do take after them.”

He saw the kid mouth "We…"  and was almost fascinated by how the color drained from his face. The boy stopped dead on the sidewalk and Peter paused after a few feet, watching him. Falling snow partly obscured his face and deadened the world around them.

From somewhere close by came the metallic screech of a shopkeeper pulling down the grate of his bodega for the evening. It was startlingly loud in the muffled street. The shopkeeper trudged around the corner, going home, a his back a smudge of navy jacket against the late evening.

Peter stood with hands in his pockets, waiting. The kid’s eyes were wide as saucers.

“No,” said the kid. “No way. You’re…me?”

“I’m older, so you are me. I,” declared Peter, gesturing to himself, “have dibs.”

For some reason the teenager’s shock lightened Peter’s mood and he couldn’t stifle a grin. Maybe the elephant in the room was a bit of a party animal.

The kid found his voice. “Prove it.”

Peter made a face. “Seriously? C’mon.”

“Do it. You can’t just like, show up like John Connor or something and tell me you’re me!” The poor kid sounded slightly hysterical.

“No, what I said was that you’re me, and it was Kyle Connor who traveled in time. Or he did it first anyway, I haven’t seen the last few.” Peter flapped a hand between them. “Lemme make this clear, I’m not future you. I’m future me. From my dimension. Welcome to the club.”

“You have an ID?” demanded the other Peter.

“What?” Peter rolled his eyes. “No. I was kidnapped from my apartment, kid, I don’t have my wallet.” He grimaced at the teenager’s mingled defiance and wonder. “Fine. Did you have a battery-operated talking Elmo when you were a kid?”

This was evidently not the proof the teenager had in mind. “Um, yeah? Me and half the kids in New York.”

“And did Aunt May tell you it broke one day?”

The kid frowned. “Uh, yeah, she said it wore out or something…”

“Well, I hate to ruin Santa Claus for you, but that Elmo didn’t break. It just ran out of batteries. You played it all the friggin’ time and it drove her crazy so she told you Elmo went back to Sesame Street.”

Maybe this was a revelation too far, because the kid stood gobsmacked. “Holy shit.” He brought his hands to his head. “Holy shit!”

Man, this one’s a pottymouth, thought Peter.

“You really are me! Aunt May is so busted!”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t hear it from me.”

“This is so wild!” the kid drew forward, now looking the older Peter up and down and circling around him in the snow. “You’re taller than I thought I’d be. Do you have a tattoo? I thought about getting a tattoo someday. How old are you? When did we start getting gray hair? Ned is not going to believe this.”

Peter raised his eyebrows. “Uh, were you planning on telling him?”

.
.

“OK, let’s take it from the top. I was the one and only Spider-Man for twenty years, until one day, I’m minding my own business, eating a slice from Sunnyside Pizza and I’m friggin’ hijacked through a cosmic portal and shot into another universe with like five other Spider-Things because Ock’s crazy ass is consistent across dimensions. So she’s built this collider, right, to bring back Kingpin’s family from another dimension ‘cause he’s in denial except the accelerator is even jankier in that universe so she’s gonna end up opening a black hole that will swallow New York like a sardine so we go to shut the collider down, typical Spider-Man stuff, you know how it goes, and we get the dimensional rift open and I’m sailing home when your Octavius triggers her collider at the same time and snatches me outta mid-flight and I land on my butt in Woodside. Then I do a little detective work and see Ock needs the megaconductor to operate her collider on the sly, so I go to nab it and who shows up? Kingpin’s little cronies! But they’re stealing it FOR Ock because they’re all in league because of course they’re all in league, they’re so unimaginative. You don’t know this yet, but at one point you start a Bad Guy Bingo sheet because you see every trope like fifty times over and no matter how often you rearrange the sheet you get Bingo literally every time. Anyway, I get nabbed but they bust me outta jail before I can bust me outta jail and that’s where you came in.”

He drew breath and turned back to his audience. Ned dropped his pizza slice.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

Wide-eyed, the younger Peter Parker repeated: “‘Spider-Things?’”

Peter waved his own slice in the air as he stood before the two seated teenagers like a pontificating Roman senator. “Well, in every dimension there’s a spider, and in every dimension that spider wants a snack, I guess.” He sat down in a chair and pretended not to hear it squeak beneath his weight. “It just hasn’t been us every time.” Once it’d been pork.

At his request Ned had picked up a classic margherita pizza which contained no pepperoni. Apart from keeping kosher, even the sight of pork product nauseated Peter now that a pig had numbered among his comrades-in-arms.

“Kingping—”

“Kingpin.”

“Right…what did he want the collider for again?”

Peter hesitated. “His wife and kid died.”

The younger Spider-Man chewed on this, then wiped the grease off on a napkin. They were sitting in the kid’s living room with the news turned on low volume. So far, neither of the poker-faced anchors had mentioned an incident at Stark Industries. “But…if he’d gotten them from another universe, they wouldn’t really have been his family.”

Would the kid have felt the same if the Peter who’d tumbled into this world had, in fact, turned out to be his uncle Ben Parker from a dimension in which the carjacker chose another target? It was one thing to theorize, another to have the flesh-and-blood replacement of a lost loved one standing before you. Peter chose not to address this.

“He’s selfish,” he said instead, “and that means he’ll blame everyone but himself—including you. Be careful.”

Not once could the Kingpin bring himself to face the reality that it had been his greed and villainy which had put his wife’s key into the ignition, every time. His grief had frozen somewhere in a hellish limbo between denial and bargaining. Grief, however, was not an apology. It was not redemption.

Peter was sad for the wife and son. There seemed no universe in which they’d been saved; their fates were as sealed as Ben Parker’s.

He looked at his alternate self and was surprised to see his feelings reflected on the boy’s face. “I don’t know Kingpin, but I know what kind of man he is,” the kid murmured. Beside him, Ned was uncharacteristically quiet. “He’s the kind who convinces himself he does everything for his family, when he really just…did you ever know Adrian Toomes?”

“Yeah,” said Peter heavily.

His explanation had conveniently glossed over what had become of the Peter Parker in Miles's universe, though he expected that he'd ask at some point. Peter didn't know whether this Spider-Man was experienced enough yet to crowd that kind of thing out of his headspace. He didn't want to psych the kid out.

Ned finished his slice and cleared his throat. “So, Peter—”

“What?” they said together, then looked at each other.

“This is going to get confusing really fast,” said Ned.

“Okay, okay.” The older Peter held up his hands. “I get to be Peter. You’re Parker,” he told his teenaged self.

Parker protested. “How come you get the first name?”

“‘Cause I’m Patient Zero!” Peter jabbed a thumb into his own chest. “As far as I know.” Which, come to think of it, was perhaps not something to boast about. Ned snickered.

“Okay, Peter,” he said with a sly look at Parker, who rolled his eyes, “is this guy like your nemesis or something? Or was it that Octavius person?”

“What? No. I don’t have a nemesis. I have enemies. ‘Nemesis’ is just an enemy who got promoted. Never give ‘em the satisfaction.”

Both teenagers nodded sagely at this advice. In their faces was reflected some of the veneration he’d seen from Miles, which he didn’t know how to feel about.

Some time later Ned had drifted off into a doze, head tipped back on the couch and snoring softly. School was still on winter break and wouldn’t resume for another week so, with Aunt May’s permission, Ned was staying over till May returned from her visit.

Peter felt alternately exhausted and strangely wired. His spider-sense had not ceased its humming since he'd crash-landed in Woodside. Boxes of pizza were piled on the coffee table, behind which the television droned gently. Parker removed the boxes to the recycling and returned from the kitchen with Peter’s favorite Coke.

“This must be pretty weird, like going back in a time machine,” Parker commented as he cracked open his own can. “I mean, even though you’re from a whole other dimension.”

“A little.”

“In a way, though, seems like pretty typical Avengers stuff. We’re like magnets for crap like this.”

Peter yawned. “That’s right, you’re an Avenger.”

“What—aren’t you?” said the kid blankly.

“Naw,” said Peter dryly. “Cramps my style.” For a moment he knew he must have worn his feelings plain on his face, because Parker paused as he reached for a last slice.

“Where are they in your universe?” he said curiously.

Peter barked a laugh. Between them, Ned stirred and mumbled something in his sleep about fifth period. “There’s about a thousand answers to that," said Peter. "There are still some Avengers, yeah. I’m not a member of the club.”

“Why?”

A familiar note in the kid’s question made Peter feel nostalgic, a little sad and indescribably tired. “I guess there was a moment when I wanted to be. Mostly because I was broke and figured they made a better paycheck.”

He paused and saw the kid listening intently.

Ordinarily he wouldn’t have answered this. He’d gotten the question countless times from fans and foes and heroes alike, and there was never a response he could give that was streamlined enough to offer in a soundbite.

“Oh, I don’t know. When I asked, they said no, and when they asked, I said no. It just never worked out.” He laughed without humor. “Actually, we clashed at times. Philosophical differences.”

One of those differences had been his secret identity, which had always served as a wedge between himself and those who wore their heroism openly. Peter had never bared his face to the Avengers, and they’d resented it. In fact he’d been in more than one skirmish with an Avenger over the years, usually the result of misunderstanding and lousy circumstance.

Then there had been the Accords.

Parker looked a little crestfallen. Peter remembered the way he’d felt about the other heroes he’d periodically shared peacekeeping duties with in New York City. They were moments of frustration, amusement and occasional admiration, like a romance that could have been and never was.

Not to mention he’d simply never been good at fitting in. Judging by his limited observation of the universe he’d landed in, this Parker fared little better when it came to clique-y popularity. It would be unfair to stomp all over the common ground he’d managed to stake out with the Avengers, who appeared to exist in a timeline where they’d repaired much more neatly.

“Besides,” he went on gently, “I always balked at dropping Queens to go play Space Invaders.”

“Yeah,” said Parker, relaxing with a small smile. He picked up the remote and began flipping channels. “I still patrol and stuff.”

Peter smiled. “Good.”

Parker looked up. “Do you?”

“Sure. Gotta punch in the hours.” Patrol around the city made up the majority of his work, now. The rest of the universe was so whackadoodle it sometimes didn’t seem to matter whether or not he handled every catastrophe himself, or some other plucky individuals got together and made a hash of it. He didn’t tell Parker that.

“Mr. Stark will be able to help you,” Parker said confidently.

Peter’s instinct was to say no.

“Does he know who you are?” he asked instead.

Parker hesitated. “He does, yeah.”

“Anyone else?”

“Um, Doctor Strange. No, he’s alright!” Parker added hastily as Peter groaned aloud. “He won’t say. He’s not exactly an Avenger anyway, he kind of does his own thing.”

“It’s a big universe, bud, but a small world when it comes to superheroes,” sighed Peter. “Do you even have a secret identity anymore?”

“Yes,” said Parker defiantly. “None of the other Avengers know.”

Peter scratched behind his ear. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it, kid—that’s going to be a problem one day.”

Parker looked down at his hands, resting on his lap. “What about you?”

Peter didn’t want to answer that, even to his younger self. Maybe especially not to his younger self. It was like one of those time-capsule things in reverse. How did you explain to a younger, more hopeful you how your marriage, your life fell apart? It was impossible to maintain secrecy without alienating the people you cared about. In this universe that seemed to include the Avengers, and it was almost painful to know what Parker was going to experience.

Or maybe not. There were parallels and there were divergences. Who was he to say this would stay a parallel?

Anyway, he didn’t have much of a choice.

“Okay, we’ll go meet Mr. Stark,” he said with severe misgivings. “Can I nap on your couch?”