Chapter Text
Miles Morales had always been a morning person… not by choice, but by necessity. When you're the one-and-only Spider-Man in your universe, the city doesn't pause its criminal activity just because you have a pre-calc test at 8 AM. So at 6:15 on a Tuesday morning, while most of Brooklyn was still hitting snooze buttons and cursing the existence of sunrise, Miles was swinging between buildings in pursuit of someone who had clearly never heard of the concept of "reasonable crime hours."
"Seriously, dude?" Miles called out, launching himself off a fire escape and sailing through the crisp morning air. "It's not even fully light out! Don't you people have some kind of union that prevents this kind of early morning villainy?"
The figure ahead of him—dressed in what appeared to be a modified hazmat suit with way too many glowing components—didn't respond. They just kept running across rooftops with the kind of desperate energy that usually meant they'd stolen something important. Miles had been tracking them for the better part of twenty minutes, ever since his spider-sense had woken him from a dream about finally passing chemistry without having to rely on his enhanced reflexes to catch falling beakers.
The thief leaped across an alley with practiced ease, landing hard on the opposite roof. Miles followed, his web-shooters firing with satisfying thwips as he propelled himself through the air. He was getting better at this; the whole swinging thing no longer felt like controlled falling, and he'd managed to go almost three weeks without accidentally sticking to his own web lines.
"Look, I get it," Miles continued, keeping up his usual banter as he closed the distance. "Early morning heists, fewer witnesses, cops are still drinking their coffee. It's a solid plan, I'll give you that. But some of us have school, and I really can't afford another tardy slip, so could we maybe wrap this up?"
The thief stumbled slightly, glancing back at Miles with visible panic before pushing forward. In their arms, they clutched what looked like a briefcase crossed with a laptop crossed with something that probably shouldn't exist outside of a science fiction movie. Whatever it was, it was glowing with an unsettling blue-white light that made Miles' spider-sense tingle unpleasantly.
Miles fired a web line and swung low, using his momentum to arc up and over the thief's head. He landed in front of them, straightening up with what he hoped was his most heroic pose. "Okay, that was pretty cool, right? I've been practicing that move. Now, how about you put down whatever that thing is before someone gets hurt?"
The thief skidded to a halt, breathing heavily behind their mask. Up close, Miles could see that the hazmat suit was definitely homemade, covered in amateur welding marks and what appeared to be duct tape. The glowing device in their arms was humming with energy that made Miles' teeth ache.
"You don't understand," the thief gasped, their voice muffled by the suit's built-in respirator. "This technology... it can't fall into the wrong hands. I'm trying to prevent a catastrophe."
Miles raised an eyebrow, though the gesture was lost behind his mask. "Right, because stealing potentially dangerous technology and running around Brooklyn with it is definitely the responsible thing to do. What did you take, and where did you take it from?"
Even as he asked, Miles was pretty sure he already knew the answer. The design of the device, the way it seemed to bend light around itself, the particular shade of blue energy crackling along its surface—it all had a familiar, nauseating quality that made his stomach clench with recognition.
"Alchemax," the thief admitted, confirming Miles' worst fears. "They were going to weaponize it. Turn it into some kind of... dimensional destabilizer. I couldn't let that happen."
Miles felt his mouth go dry. The same company that had built the Super-Collider. The same company whose CEO had nearly destroyed the multiverse just to bring back his dead family. The name alone was enough to trigger a cascade of memories Miles would rather keep buried—the portal tearing reality apart, the other Spider-People from different dimensions, the crushing weight of responsibility as he fought to send them home before they all died from cellular degeneration.
"So you stole it," Miles said, trying to keep his voice steady. "And now you're what, planning to destroy it? Find a better hiding place? Turn it over to the cops who definitely don't have the resources to handle interdimensional technology?"
"I'm going to shut it down," the thief insisted, fumbling with something on the device's surface. "Permanently. This technology is too dangerous to exist."
"Okay, I can respect that," Miles said, taking a cautious step forward. "But maybe we should talk about this somewhere that isn't a rooftop where one wrong move sends us both plummeting to our deaths? Plus, I'm pretty sure I hear sirens, which means the cops are getting closer, and explaining dimensional technology to the NYPD is really not how I want to spend my morning."
The thief's hands were shaking now, their fingers dancing across what appeared to be a series of switches and dials. "No, you don't understand. If Alchemax gets this back, they'll just build another one. And another one. They'll keep experimenting until they tear a hole in reality itself."
Miles' spider-sense suddenly erupted into full alarm mode, a screaming awareness of danger that made his vision blur at the edges. Whatever the thief was doing to the device, it was very, very bad.
"Hey, whoa, stop!" Miles lunged forward, his enhanced speed carrying him across the rooftop in a fraction of a second. "Don't touch that!"
But he was too late. The thief's finger found what looked like a dead man's switch, and they pressed it with the desperate finality of someone who believed they were saving the world.
The device erupted.
Not in fire or explosion, but in something worse—a tearing, screaming rent in the fabric of space itself. The air around the device began to twist and fold, reality bending like heated plastic. The familiar blue-white energy of the Super-Collider began to pour out of the tear, and Miles felt his heart stop as he recognized the exact same dimensional instability that had nearly killed him and his friends just months ago.
"No, no, no!" Miles reached for the thief, trying to pull them away from the growing portal, but they were already being drawn in by the inexorable pull of the dimensional rift. The device tumbled from their hands, clattering across the rooftop as the portal began to expand, hungry for matter to feed its growth.
Miles fired a web line at the nearest building, planning to anchor himself and maybe grab the thief before they were sucked into whatever dimensional nightmare lay beyond the portal. But the pull was too strong, the rift too large. His web line snapped taut, then began to stretch as the portal's gravitational field overwhelmed even his enhanced strength.
"This is exactly why I hate Tuesdays," Miles muttered through gritted teeth, straining against the pull.
The thief was already gone, disappeared into the swirling chaos of the portal with a scream that was cut off abruptly as they passed through the dimensional barrier. The device they'd stolen was next, tumbling end over end as it was drawn into the rift, its blue glow disappearing into the brilliant white light beyond.
Miles' web line snapped.
For a moment that felt like eternity, he hung suspended in the air, his enhanced reflexes cataloging every detail of his impending doom. The portal loomed in front of him, a wound in reality that sparked with energies he didn't understand. Behind him, the morning sun was painting Brooklyn in shades of gold and amber, the city stretching out in all its chaotic, beautiful glory. His city. His responsibility.
His home.
Then the portal's pull took hold of him completely, and Miles Morales fell screaming into the space between worlds.
The last thing he saw was his wallet, torn from his pocket by the dimensional winds, tumbling away into the Brooklyn morning like a piece of his life being left behind. The last thing he heard was his own voice, raw with terror and disbelief, echoing through the collapsing portal as reality folded around him.
The last thing he thought, as consciousness fled and dimensional energy tore at the edges of his existence, was that he was supposed to have a chemistry test today, and Mrs. Rodriguez was going to be so pissed when he didn't show up.
Then everything went white, and Miles Morales ceased to exist in the universe where he belonged.
Somewhere in the space between dimensions, where the laws of physics went to die and causality was more of a suggestion than a rule, the stolen Alchemax device continued to pulse with malevolent energy. It had served its purpose—opening a rift between worlds, allowing passage from one reality to another. But like all of Alchemax's technology, it was designed to be more than just functional.
It was designed to be profitable.
As the portal began to collapse, sealing itself with the violent finality of dimensional barriers reasserting themselves, the device activated its secondary protocol. A tracking beacon, built into its core programming, began transmitting across the quantum foam that separated universes. The signal was simple, elegant, and completely untraceable by any technology that didn't already exist in a state of dimensional flux.
Package delivered. Tracking active. Awaiting retrieval.
In a laboratory hidden beneath the streets of New York, in a universe where Miles Morales had never existed, an Alchemax scientist looked up from his monitoring station and smiled.
"Phase one complete," he said into his communications device. "The Spider-Man has been displaced. Beginning phase two."
The voice that answered him was cold, clinical, and utterly without mercy.
"Excellent. Proceed with the extraction. And Doctor? Make sure our friends in this dimension understand that their new guest is to be kept... intact. We have such interesting plans for him."
The transmission ended, leaving only the soft hum of dimensional monitoring equipment and the quiet satisfaction of a plan falling perfectly into place.
After all, some experiments required test subjects who didn't know they were being tested.
And Miles Morales, lost between worlds and unconscious from dimensional trauma, was about to become the most important test subject Alchemax had ever acquired.
He just didn't know it yet.