inaccessible realms

Things don’t go smoothly right away, but it’s so close. They mold around each other like a puzzle, filing their edges so that the pieces fit together.

He tells them that he’s renting an apartment, and naturally they all pile into M.J.’s beat up pickup truck to check it out. The M.J. of his world had a truck of the same model, but a different color. Huh.

Harry takes one look at the inside before telling him to grab his things. When Peter asks why, he rolls his eyes and shoves him towards the one cardboard box filled with his only possessions.

“You’re moving in with me,” he says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Peter looks back at the empty apartment. There’s nothing tying him to it. It’s lonely, dark, and forbidding. He turns back towards Harry.

“I clogged the kitchen sink with web fluid once. Still want me as a roommate?”

Harry smiles and nods. Gwen rolls her eyes in the background. “M.J.’s done worse,” she says. “And he still lets her come around.”

“I heard that!” M.J. yells from her truck, before honking. “Hurry up!”

So, Peter grins and piles everything into that one box, and they get back in M.J.’s pickup truck.

----

He saves Flash from a mugger. He sets him on the ground and gets ready to disappear. No webs, because that would be too obvious. It’s weird, fighting without them, but Natasha had taught him enough that it wasn’t an issue. She’d tazed him every time he used his webs when she was training him, claiming he was too reliant on them. He’s pretty sure it was just an excuse, because she was a sadist.

Flash gives him a strange look. God, he’s so young.

Flash narrows his eyes and looks him up and down. Just when Peter is thoroughly weirded out, Flash sighs.

“You move like him, you know. Got the same style.” Peter freezes. Flash doesn’t say who ‘him’ is, but Peter knows in his bones. Apparently, his friends were more observant than they let on. Or maybe this universe was different. (He gets the feeling its scenario #1.)

Flash opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, and then just stops. “Good luck,” he says instead.

Peter melts into the shadows like Black Widow had taught him, heart going a million miles per hour, jackhammering in his chest.

It turns out that the four of them suck at stealth (so Fury was right, maybe he needs to work on incognito) because Flash finds him anyway.

He knocks on the door one night, and MJ and Gwen freeze. Harry, oblivious, goes to open it. Apparently, he’s already forgotten he’s harboring a supposed-to-be-dead-vigilante-from-another-universe. Because he’s Harry.

Flash walks through the doorway, giving Harry a grin.

“It’s movie night,” Gwen whispers frantically. Movie night, Peter mouths back at her, eyebrows raised. She rolls her eyes at him (it’s practically her superpower at this point).  She shoves him under the kitchen counter, but he’s not expecting it (where are you now, spider sense?), and he ends up sprawled on the ground in plain sight.

Flash drops the six-pack of coke he’s holding, but Peter manages to catch it before it reaches the ground. He sets it on the kitchen counter and turns to face Flash, who looks shaken.

“Flash,” he blurts out, and then just stops. Everything around them stops too. Harry seems to realize what exactly his faulty memory has led to and presses his lips together.

Flash reaches out and puts a hand on his chest and jerks it back when he makes contact. “You’re real,” he mutters, sounding dazed, like he’s hit his head. He meets Peter’s eyes. “So, it was you, on the street.”

Peter nods shakily. Gwen squeezes his shoulder from behind him. “We would have told you, Flash,” she says, sounding subdued. “Didn’t know when the right time would be or if there was even a right time.”

Flash rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands, sagging.

Peter doesn’t know how to fix this. He’d never been particularly close to Flash. Sure, they’d become friends eventually. After both of them had been knocked down a few pegs and learned to see through each other. Flash had fanboyed over Spider-man for years too. He’d been pissed when he’d uncovered the truth, but he got over it, like Peter when he found out Flash was Venom. He has no idea what this universe’s Flash has in store for him.

He takes another good look. This Flash hasn’t met Venom yet, and he’s younger, like all the counterparts from this universe.

Flash stops rubbing his eyes and gestures broadly at Peter. “So. You’re Peter.” He squints. “But not quite Peter.”

“Alternate dimension,” M.J. supplies. “He came in through a portal.” Flash doesn’t seem to be surprised. Then again, he lives in New York, where every week there’s a new supervillain. Peter suspects that by the time every New Yorker reached the age of ten they were immune to feeling surprised at the amount of weird shit that went down there.

“So, our Peter is still dead.” Flash says it bluntly, like it’s an everyday fact and not a minefield, drawing Peter’s attention back to him.

Harry flinches at that, but nods. Outwardly, Flash gives nothing away, but Peter can see the grief in his eyes. For someone who had once been his bully and now was begrudgingly his friend, he seemed to care more than Peter had ever thought he would.

Flash looks Peter up and down. “Spider-man and you still can’t hide from a civilian, huh.” He chuckles, and most of the weariness evaporates from his expression. Most of it. Some remains, and Peter isn’t surprised.

Still, he smiles back at Flash, who gives a deep sigh and hugs him, to his surprise. He looks kind of embarrassed after wards, and just kind of. Pats him on the shoulder and nods, before taking a coke can out of the pack he’d brought and collapsing onto the couch.

They all settle down to watch the movie.

Later, he and Flash are the only ones in the kitchen (the rest had fallen asleep on the couch). They were cleaning up the mess (M.J., the worst cook he had ever seen, had tried making popcorn. How do you even mess up popcorn?) and idly chatting, letting the conversation flow like the water from the sink where he was doing the dishes.

He tells Flash about how Gwen and M.J. had their own apartments, but they always seemed to be over. Flash hesitates when he says so and mentions off-hand that it was about a year ago that it started happening.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots. He died a year ago in this world, Gwen had told him. She’d died years ago in his, he’d responded. They’d stood there for a moment, unsure of how to continue. She’d smiled at him eventually, although it didn’t meet her eyes. She’d pulled him close, pressing her face into his chest.

“Let’s both try to make it this time,” she’d said softly, and he’d nodded before placing his chin on the top of her head and continuing to hold her.

In his head he’d been saying goodbye to old Gwen, the one who laughed at his dumb jokes (this one does too), the one who’d helped Spider-man fight Electro, the one who’d fallen off a clock tower at midnight and died along with part of her heart.

Hello, he’d told the new Gwen, in his mind.

There’s a lull in the current conversation, and Flash releases a deep breath.

“Finding out you were Spider-man after you died was a kick to the gut,” Flash says, eyes on the floor. Peter stays silent in response, because what do you say to a thing like that? He’s made the same mistake in multiple universes, and he didn’t have the words then and he doesn’t have them now.

Flash doesn’t bring it up again, and they continue cleaning, although the conversation is replaced by a somewhat uneasy silence. They spread a blanket over their sleeping friends, and Flash shrugs on his coat and heads to the doorway.

“I’m sorry,” Peter manages, before Flash crosses the threshold. Flash sighs deeply. He gives a quick nod and steps out into the night.

Peter locks the door and sags against it, letting his forehead rest on the cool wood. He closes his eyes and counts to ten. Then he joins the pile of people on the couch and falls asleep.

He wakes up the next morning to M.J.’s feet in his face and Harry’s face on his chest, and it’s the most at home he’s felt in ages.