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It all happened so fast.
Miles can still feel the imprint of gravel on the side of his face. He tries to rub the feeling out of it, but all it does is smear tacky blood down his forehead. It’s gross, hot, and scratchy. It’s not his.
The bruise around his neck burns. His skin buzzes with faint leftover electric charge. Speaking hurts, so much, and yet his little lungs don’t stop gasping, a pleading mantra of words hitching around panicked breaths.
“I-I didn’t mean to. I...It was an accident, I didn’t...didn’t mean to...”
No one answers.
His hands press hard over his eyes. Stars spin under his eyelids. It hides the sight before him. He can’t keep staring at it for longer, or the nausea is going to overtake him. He doesn’t want to vomit while his throat is still throbbing painfully from the Green Goblin’s chokehold. Something tells him to suck in his breath and let it out slowly, like a whistle. It helps, at least for the first minute.
The nausea quickly dissipates as his shaky fingers flinch to movement. They clench around his multiverse watch and start hitting through contacts. He has to call someone. He needs to do it now, before it gets too late past fixing. How am I supposed to fix this? Who is he supposed to tell?
Miles has good friends. People who have seen him at his worst. They're the kind of friends he can call and trust.
And yet he keeps picturing Gwen, or Peter, or even Hobie looking at what he’s done with horror. Not Hobie. Hobie wouldn’t judge him. He’d say something funny probably, about the Goblin’s fried barbecue iguana look—
The panic in Miles’ chest rises.
His fingers have to redial a couple of times as they fumble to press a built-in code.
It starts to rain as he waits. Feels fitting. The night sky blackens even more, to a nightmarish gnarl of storm clouds. Then, a punch of yellow-orange a few feet away from the body blinds him. He doesn't bother shielding his eyes. He knows who's walking out.
Miles stutters to explain, “I didn’t know who to call...”
Miguel's tall shadow is on him in an instant and—
Fear instinct kicks over reason and Miles curls away, arms over his face, protecting his bruised neck. His heart jumpstarts to a rabbit-kick pace, but the hand settling over his masked head is light and calm.
“Miles, what happened? Let me look at you.”
His mask slips from his face at the quiet command. Raindrops cool his skin and wash away the blood scratches and the dirt. It's pouring now, and his whole body is shaking, even though his fingers and his chest still burn from the venom charge, even though his throat is on fire—
“Miles, mírame, look at me. Breathe.”
There's a whiny sound grating in Miles' ear, but when he shakes his head, it doesn't weaken. He hears Miguel say his name two more times, and Miles chokes on inhaled spit—realizes that keening noise is coming from him, out of his own suffocating throat in a wheeze, as the surface luminance from Miguel's suit wavers in his vision, from the hot tears mixing with the rain.
“—I killed him, I-I killed—”
“Look at me.”
Miles hiccups into a fist. The pad of one careful neon-red thumb rubs a tear off one of his eyes. He looks at Miguel, unmasked, hair drenched and slicked back hurriedly.
“You didn’t kill him,” Miguel says. A complaint bubbles to Miles' lips, but Miguel beats him to it with a firmer, louder tone, as if to drown out the screaming whitenoise in Miles' head. “You protected yourself. See—” Miguel starts, and then turns very quickly on a heel to twist the Goblin corpse's neck with a ferocious show of strength. “I made sure he was dead. Okay? Can you get up?”
Miles nods harshly, stunned by the altering of his—no other word for it—crime scene. He clings like a boy to Miguel’s arm. He stops crying. Everything feels, far away, all of a sudden. Like he’s sunk into someone else’s nightmare. This isn’t happening to him. The Goblin didn’t almost kill him. He didn’t fry anyone, thinking he was about to die. It’s not his fault. There's nothing Spider-Man can afford to panic over.
The next time Miles comes to, there’s a soft blanket being tossed over his shoulders.
He flinches, at first. The weight of it is unexpected, and the room of his surroundings isn’t familiar at all. The low light buzzing from the ceiling draws his attention, and the wall of glass that looks over a dark cityscape. He’s sitting on a couch, high above the ground, no dead Goblin in sight.
He almost wonders if it all really had been a bad dream, when Miguel kneels in front of him.
“Here,” he tells him, offering a glass of water.
Miles takes it automatically. He goes through the motion of drinking it, mind blissfully empty. At least, for a while. His throat feels better now. Healing factor must have kicked in. Something about it erasing the pain, the reality of everything that just happened, makes his stomach want to crawl out of his mouth.
As Miguel gets up, his hand moves to reach up to Miles’ shoulder. It stops itself halfway. Miles doesn’t flinch, not yet. His senses don't alert him to danger.
Miguel still puts his hand away.
“How are you feeling now, kid?”
“Not a kid,” comes out of his lips on reflex.
“Of course not,” Miguel answers, but it’s not mean or, dismissive. His eyes are carrying too much weight for it to be anything but honest. Maybe it’s the circumstances of the night’s meeting.
“I'm...better.”
“Good.” He continues after a once-over on Miles' fading injuries, “Do you think you can sit tight for a minute alone?”
“Why?”
“Just a minute or two, Lyla’s programmed into the security access, if you need anything.”
The thought of being left alone terrifies him. It must show on his face, because Miguel rounds back to him, this time patting his shoulder with light, soothing pressure.
“It’ll just be a minute.” A pause drags on, way too long for it to be intentional. It explains the tentativeness of Miguel's next, “Want me to get you anything? A…smoothie or, something?”
In his smallest voice, Miles asks, “Can you get me a Baja Blast Frozen? It, uh, it’ll probably take you longer than a minute though—”
“Where do I buy it?”
“Taco Bell, I guess.”
“Can you wait here while I’m out to get one?”
Miles nods, too tired to add more.
He watches Miguel open a new portal, filling the room in a bright yellow-orange light, before it winks out and leaves him alone in a dark, spacious room. It’s nighttime in Nueva York, too. Funny how time coincides across multiverses. Back in Brooklyn, he’d be on his way to bed at this hour, hoping to catch some Z’s and energize for the weekend.
Instead, he’s a murderer hopping universes.
More than a minute’s time passes. After five, Miles brings his legs up and squeezes closer to the cushions of the couch. The seconds stretch out forever, a dozen after which Lyla pops up and startles him up to the ceiling.
“Sorry there!” she calls, floating in a glitchy array up to him. Miles has curled himself into a ball, using the blanket as a shield.
But it’s just Lyla. It’s just Lyla, who is an extension of Miguel, under Miles' mental filing cabinet of relevant-multiversal-Spider-Man-stuff-to-remember.
She apologetically says, “Just letting you know that Miguel is going to take a little longer than accounted for. Maybe half an hour, at most. You wanna watch a movie?”
“Uh, sure.” Slowly, he unsticks from the ceiling back to the living room floor, eyes tracking Lyla’s flickering locations around the far side of the room. Something hums to life there, he feels it in the electronic field running through the flat, and a great transparent TV screen projects out of the wall. “Woah. Okay, I didn’t think Miguel owned something as mundane as a television.”
“What you feeling?”
He’s not really feeling much in the mood for anything, so he lets Lyla pick for him. The sounds of an old-timey animated comedy fill the silence. It’s a good one, but the jokes fall flat to his ears. At some point, he refocuses on the screen and the piano that lands on the cartoon guy, and Miles pictures a real piano, with a real person crushed under it, not the laugh track and the wacky animation effects. The broken bones, blood oozing from bent ribs—
Miles covers himself completely in the blanket. He’s about to ask Lyla to please turn it off, please take the moving pictures in his head out and erase them from his memory, when a portal flips every ungrounded object in the room up in the air. In steps Miguel.
“I brought the—oh.”
His shaky arms are hugging tight around Miguel's middle before he convinces himself out of it.
“You said a minute.”
The hurt in his voice dies out, as a cool plastic cup hovers on his shoulder. He immediately snatches the Baja Blast and cradles it close, as if someone else were about to steal it from him.
Standing close to Miguel, taking a sip from his frozen drink, that’s when he notices the strange, shiny quality to Miguel's suit.
“Were you in the rain?”
“Yeah.” Miguel sits him back on the couch, signaling for him to wait while he changes into something more civilian. In the passing minute, Miles uses his head. Water stains, the smell of dirt, and ozone. He doesn’t like what he deduces.
“You went back to my dimension,” Miles accuses.
“Yeah,” Miguel repeats. There’s no pity, just fact when he says, “I cleaned up.”
Cleaned up. Like it was spilled milk. It knots in Miles’ chest, guilt and shame crawling up his neck and face and eyes, until they start to water again. Cleaned up his mess.
“Hey, hey, no.” Miguel comes up to him and sits on a free spot. The couch dips. He’s close enough to reach out to Miles, but he doesn’t. Miles is glad for that—he isn’t sure if he wants him to, if it would release the panic and fear and frustration buried in Miles’ chest. “Miles, I wanted to, okay? You know how I work, chronic micromanager,” he tries to lighten.
It sort of works. Miles does snort against his will, because despite the new HQ executive work distribution among Spider-leaders, Miguel still overrides orders on preference and inserts himself into missions out of spite to some decisions. Google micromanager and a picture of Miguel O'Hara ought to show up.
“Miles, why don’t you finish your Freeze? I scoured three different Taco Bells for it.”
That’s the best idea Miles has heard all night. He takes to the task like a soldier, persevering through a brain freeze. It tastes like Sunday night before midterm week, on the nights when he crams for a test with Ganke. Much like then, he’s witness to a lot of movement around himself: the TV holoscreen being turned off, a screen shade covering the windows, the couch bottom being extended from under his calves into a sleeper sofa.
“I don’t imagine you’re too excited about going home just yet,” Miguel says after reorganizing everything in the living room to be out of the way and more welcoming.
“No. Well. Can I...stay the night, maybe?”
Miles cringes at how childish it sounds. His fists tighten on the blanket. Makes himself sound like a baby afraid of the dark, when he’s the toughest person in the room, a threat, a danger to everyone around him—
Miguel’s voice cuts through the growing fog.
“You can have the couch. If that’s what you prefer.”
“The couch is okay.”
“Alright,” Miguel says, and then shuffles around the room some more.
“What are you...?”
A bed comforter sails through half the room to land square on Miles’ head. It smothers him with its weight. Crawling out free from under it, he’s blinded next by a hoodie landing squarely on him.
When he takes it in his hands to inspect it, Miguel says, “I don’t know if you’d like to change, but you’ll have the option. It’s...probably not going to fit you well.”
“Thanks,” Miles croaks out. He holds the hoodie over his head and puts it on, over his suit, hiding the growing shame of carrying Spider-Man’s symbol, after what he’s done. It’s like a balm over a gaping wound. His palms still tingle, the ghost of Goblin's scale-skin texture impressed on them.
“Um, Miguel? What’s going to happen now?”
Miguel pauses where he’d been ready to cross to a different room of his futuristic flat. He crosses his arms and leans into the wall there. “Nothing. We keep going.”
Just keep going, springs crueler from Miles’ thoughts, twisting in the memory of his Uncle. There’s no manual for being Spider-Man, but considering the creation of the Society, there should be, for people like Miles to not screw things up so badly. How does he keep going? Is there a powerpoint presentation Lyla will email him? Is that too hysterical a request?
Miles hesitates to follow that up.
“I...but I messed up.”
His feet jump when Miguel is there, again, kneeling in front of him over the extended half of the couch.
“How did you mess up? I don’t see how you could have, in your circumstance.”
“But I did, I, I didn’t control the power behind my venom blast, it-it just, rushed out.” Venom-sparking fingers dig hard on his thigh. He can’t stop the words from flooding out. “I knew the Green Goblin was dangerous! He—I thought he died in the blast that got my Spider-Man killed, but, turns out he’s not out of the fight and comes back from the sewers and I have to stop him before he does some real damage on the city, and—I’m doing my best to web him up, but he’s too big and he takes every punch like a slap from a baby and—”
“Miles, slow down—”
“—and he’s scary strong. Was scary strong,” Miles corrects. His hands stroke tenderly on the giant bruises still decorating his neck.
Miguel notices the gesture. The troubled downturn of his brow instantly becomes furious.
It makes Miles want to disappear, so he does. Into thin air. He’s betrayed by the comforter and the blanket still in his possession, outlining his curled up frame.
“Miles,” Miguel starts, his stare managing to land close to Miles’ own frantic one. “You don’t have to uncloak, just listen. Your Green Goblin almost killed you. You reacted. That doesn’t mean you messed up.”
Logically, the justification is there, unwrapped and presented for Miles to accept. He almost killed me. I reacted.
“But, I killed him.”
Miguel’s hardened anger melts off. He takes on a gentler tone. “Is it the killing part that bothers you most? What about what some of your friends have done, like Hobie? You know he kills his archvillains. But that doesn’t bother you. You’ve never made an issue out of that, like other Spider-people.”
“That’s different. He does his thing his way, and, and he is a good guy. I...I didn’t mean to...I didn’t want to kill him...”
His chest hurts thinking about it, because it’s true, Hobie is one of his best friends, and he has killed, more than most Spiders. Miles has never felt the need to forgive him for something that isn’t his business to judge. But, they are not the same. Some Spiders struggle to keep their powers in check. It’s never occurred to Miles that he might need to, that’s how well it’s been for him so far.
So far, until today.
“It was an accident, Miles. Accidents happen.”
Miles can’t accept that. Accidents can get his friends, his family killed. Accidents are uncontrollable. They sneak up on you when you least expect it. And how is Miles supposed to work with that fear, that constant vigilance?
“I had an accident once,” Miguel says, and it pulls Miles out of his spiraling panic, runs his thoughts to a halt.
“You?”
“Yeah. I did. You know, you’re about to die one moment, too many things overwhelming your new super senses, and in the next, you’re trying to catch a guy from falling out of a skyscraper. Only, I didn’t realize I had these yet,” and he raises his hands to show the palms and the click of talons extending. They retract smoothly after. “It might have been kinder to let him drop on his own.”
“Oh.”
“I haven’t had an accident like that happen to me since. That doesn’t make it easy. You just, have to focus on what matters, Miles. You didn’t mean to kill him. You would have died if your bioelectricity didn’t surge more powerfully in your defense. You’re hurt, but you’re not dead. That's a positive outcome.”
“You’re not very practiced at this cheering-up thing, are you?” Miles jokes, after Miguel inhales like he's got a longer speech prepared. The guilt sitting like a rock in his chest starts to shrink. It's not as heavy anymore when he says, “Thanks for letting me stay. I hope I'm, um, not intruding on your night plans.”
“No te preocupes de eso. Stay however long you need to.”
Again, Miguel gets up, his hand just a hair away from landing on Miles' shoulder before dropping. He leaves for his room with a quiet, “Buenas noches,” and the lights fully turn off.
It's quiet. The only sound felt in the room is the rustle of the sheets as Miles tries to lie down in a cozier position. The comforter is big, soft, warm, decorated in little sparse black dots. It screams of Ikea minimalism. Miles closes his eyes.
The dark has spots in it.
The spots have faces in them.
And the faces are staring at him.
He opens his eyes again, to the oppressive dark.
“Miguel?” Miles tiptoes over to the bedroom door he saw before lights-off, and waits at the knob. It takes some bravery to lift his hand to knock. Or terror, as the shadows in the corner dance just out of his periphery.
The door clicks open without a touch.
He pushes it in slightly and asks, “Can I...come in?”
“¿Qué pasó?”
He hates that Miguel actually sounds drowsy.
“Nada, nothing.”
Disturbing his sleep is not what Miles wants to do. But, before he can run back to his night fears, the darkened shape of Miguel sits up and tells him, “Ven acá.”
He pads to the more open space on Miguel’s bed, takes the waving expression for welcome, and makes himself into the smallest human ball at the edge of the bed. Soon enough, there’s a thin bedsheet and a heavy arm setting around him. A broad hand that reminds Miles of his dad's famous headrubs smoothing over his topside arm. He holds back from sniffing too loudly as he wiggles back onto a hug inside Miguel's gentle arm enclosure.
Miles feels like a bird in a homemade wooden house. He's not sure how he got there, who he has to thank for the home, but it's such a relief to be nestled in its warmth and its safety.
“It’s going to be okay, mijo,” Miguel tells him in a low, but assured, murmur.
Miles closes his eyes, sleep clouding over him, unimpeded, this time. In the morning, he'll figure this out. Even if the Goblin defied death, could portal through time and space, and get to Miles, Miles falls asleep. The dark behind his eyes gives up drawing gory pictures.
Nothing will get past Miguel.