Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The city that loved to pretend it could swallow anything kept doing what cities do, kept doing what New York does: it went on. In Queens, the subway rumbled like a steady spine; laundry hung from metal arms and snapped in the warm August air; a kid kicked a soda can down the block and laughed in a way that had nothing to do with loss or history. The sun came down and made baked-brick stoops look like oven shelves. The ice cream truck turned its tinny song into a dare and then moved on. No one in Queens would have raised an eyebrow at the way the evening softened into night. No one in Queens, except for a boy who had become used to being small in a big life. 

Peter Parker moved like two people stitched together: the one who could still move a city with a flicker of muscle and the one who had been taught to make do with less than a whole heart, less than a dollar or smile. He walked through his old neighborhood with careful furtiveness of someone who remembers door codes and the smell of Mrs. Delgado’s lemon soap but is no longer listed in the ledger of who belongs. His hoodie hung on him the way a tired flag droops on a pole—more fabric than body, the sleeves long enough to pretend there’s camouflage in his hands. He was nineteen and looked like the boy who once broke physics for fun, except his jaw was sharper under his faint stubble, his collarbones had come to be more pronounced, and every shirt—not that he had many, maybe three—sat a little looser. The violence of hunger sat under his ribs like a thin, faithful dog.  

There were details he catalogued without thinking; the laundromat’s fluorescent bulbs buzzing at the same pitch, a stoop where three teenagers were arguing about a movie that had nothing to do with him, a deli whose owner still scolded customers for stealing extra napkins. The city was the same, which was the cruelest part. You could walk the same blocks and find the same pigeons, the same pieces of newsflashed light on late-night buses, and still feel that the ledger had been altered—someone had rubbed his name out with a slow, patient hand. He had been erased of facts: Social Security numbers, ID photos in some online registry, people in the subway he used to ride with on a schedule used to tip their hats at him when he smiled—none of them knew him now. They knew Spider-Man, but not the man under the mask. The city did not feel different to strangers. It felt different to him. 

He’d grown used to making small economies. One dollar could buy a single disposable warmth in a bakery front window: a cupcake with frosting too white and too confident for what it held. He paid with quarters and kept the receipt folded inside a wallet that had stopped caring about being full. He hadn’t been full, or warm, or happy in a long time. When the clerk said “Happy birthday, kid,” the tone was automatic and bright and sorrowfully ignorant of the particular death that a date could carry, and Peter let it land there and fold itself into his ribs. 

He climbed, because climbing was what he did between choices. He climbed the back stairs to a roof that had given him a friendly scar once when he’d slipped and learned a lesson about grip. From there the skyline was a cheat of geometry: Manhattan windows forming a familiar constellation, the Empire State like an old sentinel pinpricked with lights. He liked to come up here sometimes and pretend the city would notice him if he made enough noise. Tonight he sat with the backside of the view, perched on a concrete lip that had once been warm with a summer that smelled like different things; hot pretzel carts, oil from a hundred different engines, the tang of the Hudson. He pulled his mask on not as ritual but as armor. No one would question Spider-Man here. He pulled enough of the mask to cover half of his face, pushed down enough that his hair could escape, his cheekbones exposed to the air like small offerings. He couldn’t take his mask off all the way—it felt presumptuous to show a face people had been forced to forget, a face he barely even recognized.

So, he sat there, the thin fabric a deliberate partial reveal: a boy whose mouth was visible for laughing or a calloused joke, but whose eyes could still be given over to the city without demanding recognition. He turned the cupcake between his fingers, watching frosting soft as clouds and crumbs that wanted to fall like tiny regrets. He ate in small, nervous increments. Sugar could be, and was dangerous. Half the ritual of birthdays had been such things—silly cups of cheer, a chorus that was usually expected and always not absent—but rituals worked even when they were small. A candle lit in a bathroom could be sufficient. He closed his eyes often and used their darkness to summon others. 

“Happy birthday, Peter,” he said aloud, and the voice that answered in his head was two voices braided into one—the soothing, sharp cadence of Aunt May and a laughter that used to belong to people who remembered the shape of his elbow when he fell. He pretended May was there, smoothing out his hoodie like she would have smoothed the paper of a birthday card. He pretended Ned stood behind him and could smell sugar and faintly disapproved of his reckless caloric choices. He pretended MJ would roll her eyes and say—No, he couldn’t. Not her. Pretend was a muscle he had to exercise, it kept the marrow from freezing, it was why he said his name out loud sometimes, just to remember it, just to hear it from someone’s lips and caress his identity. 

He wrapped his fingers around the only thing that made him ache and not just hollow: the ring he wore on a thin, thrifted chain around his neck. He had stolen it. He was honest about that in the only place that still held truth—his own chest. He could still feel the dent the ring had left against his skin, the slight ridge from sleeping with it pressed under thin cotton. He had taken it from May’s hand the night she had gone, just before he had run and the fire started, fingers too clumsy with grief and need. It was culpability made of gold. It was comfort made of copper. The ring weighed more than its metal; it weighed like a decision, like grief and pain and loss and the fading flickers of love. 

The night grew fat and humid and the air carried the late-summer smell of hot tar and exhaust. He finished the cupcake because sometimes completion was an act of faith, however small. The final swipe of frosting left his mouth tasting of sugar and salt and the faint hum of too-bright lights. He licked his fingers and the action was absurdly mundane. He had been oddly religious about small things lately: checking his empty web-shooters like saying some form of grace, tying a shoe like whispering apology, tracing skin where scars would have lingered with a faint disgust of a child on the steps of an altar. He looked out across the skyline at the bright stab of the Empire State and felt the city like an organism he had not been allowed to join recently. 

“If New York doesn’t want me anymore,” he said into the dusk, the words not quite a prayer and not entirely a joke, “I wish to be someplace that does.” 

The words were small, they fit in his mouth like something that could vanish. He had silently begun to wonder about his place many months ago, had seemingly decided that he had nothing left to live for here except Spider-Man, and so he kept the mask on enough to become the mask, and not a boy, which he forgot he was. He did not expect anything to listen, wishes were childish and he had been trained by loss to keep his expectations minimal. He tucked the ring beneath his suit with fingers that trembled the kind of subtle way shock trembles—fault lines on a quiet map. He did not see the moment at which the air changed, not at first, because it came in soft hues: the city’s hum was muffled as if someone had pressed a hand over the skyline’s mouth; the little insects that had been singing at the edge of heat fell silent. Shadows lengthened as though the light had been resized, the streetlamps in the distance dimmed and then flared like breath. 

The rooftop felt slightly too warm under his thighs. The ring, wherever it lay against his skin, became hot in a way that was not temperature but intention. He felt like a needle turned into a compass. There was a taste of metal on his tongue that had nothing to do with the frosting and everything to do with some other current in the world. The city went on with ignorance and applause, and the place where his wish had landed began to hum. 

Peter thought then about all the rules he had learned from heroes and sorcerers and old men who said things that sounded like warnings; words spoken into the night sometimes move the night. He thought about Strange’s fingers weaving spells that looked like paper cutouts of golden light but whose effects weighed more than metal sheets. He thought about the way magic liked to answer with a small, precise cruelty—a kind of curiosity that didn’t ask for permission. He thought about the stupid science joke someone had once made about superpositions, and how sometimes you put out a question and the universe decided to try on an answer. 

He rose, moving without thinking. Suspension and rhythm were muscle memory, many problems in life could be escaped by getting up and going higher. He found the edge of the roof with the practiced ease of somebody who had slept on more hard surfaces than they would like to admit and strapped his sneaker onto the lip and leaned back for the web. He thumbed, as he had a thousand times, and the familiar snap of the webbing sounded small in the hush that had fallen. He wasn’t planning on using his web-shooters, shouldn’t have, but it was all he could offer himself for his birthday, a single, stranded moment of normalcy. The world held its breath as his weight shifted. He launched with a practiced arch, the sound of a thousand little thread-screeches and the sweet, stupid joy of being airborne that had comforted him for years. 

And then the city tugged. 

It began at the nape of his neck like a soft hand that insisted on being noticed. It was warm and it carried a smell of cold books and a bonfire and someone’s cologne left near a candle. It was gold at the edges, like a coin warmed in the sun. Beneath the gold was black that sucked in the light, a little absence that looked like a moth’s wing. Green braided through it, alive and urgent, like folklore and iron wire and a memory trying to climb back into being. The sensation was not violence and not kindness; it was apparatus—something ancient and patient, reaching for the part of him that answered to ritual. 

He tried to fling a web to a ledge mid-swing. The finger that had launched a thousand lifelines stuttered as if the muscles had been briefly replaced with someone else’s memory. The world lengthened. He heard himself curse, the sound ripped from his throat thin and strange. He felt—not with his mind so much as with every cell—the thread of something wrapping around him and folding him like a map, and with one long, disorientating pull he was unmoored. 

Airhouse, gravity, sound—they shifted names. New York gave itself to him and then, all at once, slid from his bones. There was a pair of hands that were not hands and a tide of colour and sound—gold like the coin-edge of heat that warmed but would not burn, green like moss and the underbellies of books, black like gutters in which promises drowned—and the city that had been the only place he knew receded. His stomach tried to remap the sky. His ears filled with the whisper of wings, not the kind that belonged to pigeons but the kind that belonged to architectural things. He tasted smoke and water and something chemical under the diesel.

He hit a roof that smelled of old tar and iron and wet stone. He coughed like a man who had surprised his lungs; the air in his throat tasted metallic and sour. For a beat he thought he had been broken into a hundred little impossible pieces and then put together by someone with a different plan. He rolled onto the gritty surface and pushed himself up on palms that felt oddly longer, a touch more quick to respond. His bones hummed like tightened strings, he could feel his muscle tense in immense control. 

The city there was not New York. It was built on a colour palette that preferred shadow to neon. Gargoyles crouched on ledges with the casual indifference of tax collectors. The skyline suggested itself in jagged teeth and towers that looked like hands folded over a secret. There were more than the usual number of alleys with attitude. Somewhere beneath the sound of late-night traffic a siren wailed and then was swallowed by the echo-choke of narrow, dangerous streets. The air was a brew; wet tar, old things burning, hard diesel, the iron scent of a river that had teeth. In the distance, where a skyline should have been recognizable, a bat-shaped silhouette cut the horizon in a way that made his chest tighten like a hand. 

He reached up, touching the fabric beneath his ribs where his suit layered under a thin crewneck that had been a deliberate compromise. The webbing lay where he had left it, familiar as guilt. When he rushed his fingers to his neck, the ring was still there and so hot it had left a print on his skin. For an instant he considered that he had hallucinated everything, he considered that he had fainted and dreamed—it wouldn’t have been the first time. Doors closed in his memory like the lids of books and for a moment the continuity of his life felt porous. 

He was taller, or at least his limbs felt like they were reaching for the world a degree farther than before. His hair had curled more than he remembered, a particular stubbornness at his temples that made him look both older and less tidy. The spider-sense throbbed, flared, not merely as a warning but as a bright animal presence that had graduated into something sharper—less a flinch than a claim. His wrists itched and when he spared them a glance, curiosity turned into dread and then into ash. He thumbed the subtle, raised skin that looked more like a cluster of pores that flexed when he curled his fingers, a faint shimmer of wetness glistening around them. The realization hit him only when a single translucent thread slid free, sticky and warm against his skin, and he nearly gagged. He could feel the chill of metal over a rooftop three alleys down in a way he hadn’t felt since he’d learned to listen to the city—his city. This city tasted wrong in his mouth, and his head was a little dizzy as if the air had been a beverage too strong for his stomach. 

Somewhere, two hundred miles and one universe away, the Sanctum Sanctorum was not supposed to be interrupted at its quiet. Tonight the Sanctum had been quieter than usual—strange, given its name—with Stephen Strange mid-practice in a room that smelled of incense and wax and books. He was deep enough in meditation that the outside world existed at the clearest and dullest of edges, a film over music. The ancient curtains at the window moved with no wind; a faint halo of orange light shimmered across the ceiling where candles hummed. 

The relics and artifacts on the shelf shifted minutely, as if to breathe. 

Something broke that film. It was a ripple, at first minute—the kind of microscopic nitrogen-run in glass that tells a craftsman something is wrong. Strange felt it as an inkling at the base of his skull, that precise, professional sort of apprehension he had cultivated after years of learning to listen. There are flutters only certain people are taught to notice; the world speaks in these flutters and the Sanctum’s bones remembered them. He opened one eye like a man assessing whether a joke had been told well enough. 

The sensation multiplied into an awareness. Threads of magic that had been quiet and obedient reared like startled animals. Strange’s lips moved in a silent counting, as much to calm his own body as to call down anchors. He did not say his name out loud; he did not need to. The Sanctum announced itself differently when reality hiccupped. The shelves hummed, the jar of brine over there trembled. The light over the central table flared and then softened. Strange opened his other eye and the room focused as when a camera finds its subject. 

“Something’s wrong,” he told the ceiling, and the ceiling—patched with the residue of other worlds—was inclined to agree. The door opened hard enough to rattle the frame. Wong came down the steps fast, his expression sharp, though he had left his tea on the landing. “You felt it,” he said. It wasn’t a question, just a statement, one that sucked the air out of the room.

Strange rose, the Cloak stirring as if it too had tasted the shift. “Not just a fluctuation. This wasn’t sorcery—it was older. Something ritualistic.” His fingers twitched, restless. “Something primal enough to drag a tether across realities.” 

Wong stopped halfway into the room, caution and exhaustion dancing in his eyes. “Who?”

And Stephen knew. He didn’t need to ask the Sanctum, didn’t need to trace the ripple to its source. His chest had already tightened with recognition, something ugly and sharp tearing at his skin. Because no matter how carefully he had constructed the forgetting, no matter how precisely he had peeled back memory and left it in tatters across the world—he had cheated. He had remembered. Every day, every hour, every breath.

Peter Parker. 

The boy who had walked away from him for good at dawn in December, face hollow with loss, a thank you on his lips and nothing in his hands. Stephen’s greatest failure. Strange swallowed hard, his jaw clenching. “The old magic answered him.” And it was horrible and his fault and he was so sorry. He should have checked sooner, should have made sure there were no traces. 

Wong blinked, stepping forward. “What are you talking about?” 

“Birthday magic.” Strange spat it like a curse. “It’s…ancient. Thought it was a joke but then I studied it. It’s closer to covenant than spellcraft. Words offered in innocence, bound by time. He made a wish, Wong.” His voice shook. “A stupid, small wish, and the world bent to hear it.” 

The air shifted again. The Sanctum’s shelves groaned, dust cascading from a higher window. Strange staggered as a vision struck; a boy on a rooftop, a small cupcake in his hands, a flame snuffed out by breath. The whisper carried by night air like confession, the wish to be someplace that wants him. And then—threads of gold, threads of green, threads of old, old black that tasted of grave dirt. Magic tearing a seam open, dragging him through, unforgiving and final. 

Strange’s knees went weak. He pressed a hand to the table, the wood groaning under the weight of his grip. “Gods. He didn’t know what he was saying.” There was something like panic crawling through his veins, something akin to grief and worry and plain hatred. He couldn’t breathe, could barely make out the gentle brush of fabric against his arm. 

“Stephen.” Wong’s tone was warning, but it was soft underneath, almost pitiful. 

“I left him with nothing,” Strange said, the words spilling too fast now, unpracticed and cracked and honest. “I remembered him anyway—I remembered everything—and still I let him go. He asked me to fix it, and I—” His voice broke and for a moment, he was an older version of himself, broken and hurt and fragile, on the cusp of never being whole again. “I fixed it by breaking him.”

Wong crossed the floor, steadier than the shelves, steadier than Strange’s breath. He put a hand on Stephen’s shoulder, solid and grounding. “If the ritual carried him, then it carried him where he is needed. Even you can’t unmake a birthday wish. Not even I can. You know that.” 

Strange’s laugh came sharp and bitter. “Needed? Wong, he’s nineteen. He should have been allowed a life. A family. Friends who remember his name.” He dragged both hands across his face, shoulders shaking. “Not another exile. Not another war he doesn’t deserve.” 

Wong didn’t flinch, just stood still. His voice came quiet, carrying the weight of years. “Then perhaps this is not a war. Perhaps it is a home, waiting for him.. Not the one he thought. Nor the one he lost. But the one he can build.” 

The Sanctum thrummed again, settling. Strange bowed his head, unable to look at Wong, unable to look at anything. He had thought about Peter every day but he was a coward. He wasn’t strong like Steve, nor was he as courageous as Tony. He was a coward, simple and true. His hands clenched white-knuckled on the wood. He had thought himself resigned to sacrifice. He had told himself he could bear it. That it was mercy. But the image of a boy rocking on a rooftop, alone in a city that did not know him yet, that he did not know either, would not leave him. 

It clawed into his skin, unforgiving. An old, heavy gaze burned through him and he inhaled sharply. Brown eyes, tired, resigned, so brave, peered at him through his mind and Stephan couldn’t breathe. Tony was looking at him, he was staring at him. The weight of a look so heavy that the rest of the world folded just to carry it. Tony would be so disappointed in him, in his cowardice. In the simple truth that was—he had died for the world, for Peter, and Peter was no longer here. 

And miles and miles away, in the choking dark of Gotham, Peter Parker curled forward on cracked tar, arms locked around his knees, May’s ring curing a circle into his chest. His mask hung loose, his breath rattled, his head bent low. He was rocking with a rhythm of grief, trying to breathe enough rotten air to smother his insides. “Not again,” he whispered, voice hoarse with unshed tears. “Not magic. Please. Not again.” He hated magic, he really did. It was horrid, a means to a never-ending end. He never wanted to see it again, never wanted to feel it on his skin but it was stitched into his bones now, weaving through his hatred with the determination of weeds. 

The city—cold, dark, unforgiving—groaned beneath him, uncaring. The world had shifted, and Peter had been pulled across its seam—head in his hands, hating the very thing that had stolen him away, hating a certain sorcerer and everything he didn’t do for him. 

Chapter Text

The first thing Peter noticed was the heat. It clung to him like a second skin.

Not the sticky August warmth he’d grown up with in Queens—the kind that sat heavy in the brickwork and made the pavement shimmer—but something thicker, harder. It pressed against him like a hand clamped over his mouth. The air was humid but sour, clinging with a chemical tang that coated his throat and stung his sinuses. New York summer smelled of roasting pretzels, cat exhaust, the salt sting of the rivers. 

Gotham smelled of copper and oil and blood and rot. Asphalt sweated beneath his shoes. Windows wept condensation down brick. And everywhere Peter looked, the city seemed to lean inward, watching him, ready to fold him into its ribs and never let him out. 

He knew New York, had lived through every version of it; the loud, the bustling, the late-night laughter spilling from bodegas and stoops, the summer hydrants blasting water into the streets. This was not New York. Gotham’s voice was different, lower, rougher. Like the bass note that hummed in your chest after a subway roared past, but it didn’t fade—it lingered. A growl underneath everything. 

Peter’s stomach twisted as he walked, though hunger had more to do with it than nerves. He had ten crumpled dollars in his pocket, May’s ring burning against his skin, his phone, dead and useless, and nothing else. No web fluid, no bag. Just the clothes on his back and a suit folded tight under his hoodie, hidden against his body like a second heart. He was hot, burning up. He kept hearing May’s voice—you figure things out, Peter, you always do—but even that was starting to fray at the edges. Figuring things out meant having somewhere to start. Gotham gave him nothing, not even its name. 

Streetlights flickered. A neon sign across the block buzzed like a swarm of wasps. Somewhere deeper in the city, prettier, a siren wailed, stretched thin until it broke off. People moved quickly here, heads down and voices low. New Yorkers would look you in the eye, mutter hey as they brushed past, maybe curse at you if you blocked their way. The people here? They didn’t look at all. They seemed hollowed, hard-shelled, like they’d already learned not to invite trouble by meeting its gaze. Still, Peter could feel a never-ending sharp gaze on him. 

Every step made him more aware of how alien he was here. Taller now, leaner, all spider angles; his limbs didn’t fit the way they once had. His pants fit a bit better, so did the hoodie. His senses prickled against Gotham’s air, every car backfire rattling like a gunshot in his skull, every smell sour and acrid, the stink of hot trash and oil sinking into him. His nerves didn’t know how to sort it. The city was wrong. Too loud, too sharp, too much. It was like walking through a mouth full of broken teeth. He could feel the pressure of a headache building behind his eyes and for a moment, panic settled deep within his gums. He paused on the street and took a deep breath, trying to remember Matt’s instructions—Breathe, Peter, that’s it. Listen to your own heartbeat. The air was dirty, too pungent, and Peter felt himself coughing, agony lacing his throat. The thought of Matt made something in his heart ache. He squeezed his eyes shut and shoved all the thoughts of Matt and Wade and New York to the back of his mind. Not now. 

He needed bearings. Needed something solid. And like he had when he and May once spent nights on benches with nowhere else to go, he thought of a library. Libraries were constants. Quiet, neutral, a place to breathe. A place with computers and information. His skin itched and he curled his fingers into a fist. 

He found one by accident, tucked between two apartment blocks, its stone steps cracked with weeds pushing through. The sign was old, letters fading, but the doors were propped open. Cool air licked out, smelling faintly of dust and paper. His chest loosened and something akin to relief washed over his face. 

Inside, it was dimmer than he expected. Shadows pooled in corners, the fluorescents overhead buzzing faintly. It wasn’t bustling—not like Queens libraries where kids shouted in the aisles—but there were people. A woman at the front desk, red hair catching in the low light, sat in a wheelchair. She looked up when he entered. Her eyes were sharp, but her voice when she spoke was even, if a little soft.

“Evening,” she said. Not suspicious. Not warm, either. “How can I help you?”

Peter hesitated, the instinct to apologize catching in his throat. Instead, he cleared his throat. “I, uh, was wondering if I could use your computers?” His voice sounded strange to him, something old and familiar but new and rough. He swallowed and brushed his curls out of his eyes. He was sweating, and he didn’t miss the calculating look passing through the woman’s eyes as she assessed him.

She nodded and the edges of her lips quirked upwards. A polite smile, something she’d give to a child who asked for picture books. “Computers are in the back. Do you have a library card?”

Peter shook his head, feeling strange in his body. Everything felt wrong and this wasn’t New York and he just wanted to go home. “I don’t.” 

She studied him for half a beat longer before she gestured toward the rows of screens humming faintly at the end of the hall. “Go ahead. You don’t need one for computers.” No questions, no prying. He looked like a college student, should have been bound by the library. It was the smallest kindness he’d been shown since he got here, and it almost undid him. 

Peter pursed his lips and nodded his head, feeling strangely emotional. “Thanks.” She simply stared at him for a moment before she went back to typing on her laptop and Peter knew dismissal intimately. 

He moved towards the back of the library with a speed he didn’t recognise. He chose the very last screen and sat down, sighing in momentary relief. The keyboard clacked under his fingers, familiar muscle memory anchoring him. He typed names—MJ, Ned, May—Nothing. He tried Stark. Avengers. Every result a void. He tried Strange, desperate, his chest squeezing with something that felt like betrayal and hope knotted together. Still nothing. 

The silence of the search engine felt cruel. Like a door shut in his face. 

He tried Peter Parker, finally, because he had to check. When nothing came up, something broken and angry and final settled in his chest. He didn’t exist here, either. He wondered if that was a blessing instead of a curse. He wasn’t sure he wanted to exist in a place that didn’t have his family, that didn’t have the Avengers. 

Inhaling, he clicked on the news tab. He still didn’t know where he was. Columns and columns of news flooded his screen and his eyes hungrily drank it all in. Words bled across the screen: Gotham, crime capital, vigilantes, Batman, Arkham, bad, bad, bad. His throat dried as he scrolled. Mentions of the Justice League caught his eye and he clicked on everything he could. Heroes, but none he knew. Strong, powerful, out of this world. Entire names and histories that meant nothing to him. Whole universes that weren’t his.

The cursor blinked, patient, waiting for him to type again. His hands shook. Different world, he thought, different everything. The weight of it pressed him down into the chair until he thought he might disappear into the plastic. He clenched his fists and May’s ring but into his skin. He could feel the panic coating his tongue like a blanket, the way it crawled up his throat and settled between his teeth. He was in a different world, universes away from his own. This was different than before, different from the other Spider-Mans and their villains. Peter couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Everything was so loud around him, pounding against his skull and bones. He was alone. So completely, irrevocably alone. This wasn’t like Queens, where he still had the other vigilantes and faces that were familiar to him. No—this was worse, this was Peter’s worst nightmare, alone in a world that he didn’t know. His hands trembled and the ground beneath him swayed and he leaned forward, ready to heave, when a gentle, but strong hand touched his shoulder. 

“Hey,” the red-haired woman from before said, interrupting Peter’s descent into madness. Peter flinched and met her gaze head on. She blinked at him, surprise masked instantly by faint concern. Barbara knew that green, that faint, sliver of green that bled out of Peter’s eyes instantly as his eyes returned to that soft brown. She rolled backwards, trying to give him space. She held out a water bottle, hoping he’d take it. “Sorry to interrupt,” she apologized, softly, “but you looked a little sick. You okay? Do I need to call someone?” 

Peter stared at her, lips dry and parted. The panic was still there, still pressing into his muscles like it couldn’t help it, but the fog in his mind slowly cleared. Hunger gnawed at him harder now. His ribs ached with it, but he couldn’t spend any money, not yet. His head throbbed, skin buzzed with the wrongness of the city. His eyes flickered down to the water bottle being offered to him and with hands he wasn’t sure were his own, he grabbed it, slow and sluggish. He mumbled a quiet thank you and untwisted the cap, closing his eyes as the water cooled his skin and placated the tension in his heart. 

He crushed the empty bottle in his hands and licked his lips, briefly aware of the curious look Barbara was throwing him. She was patient and Peter hated it. He didn’t know what to say, how honest he could be. Instead, he tried for a smile and it seemed to work as the tension around her eyes smoothed out and she offered a small smile in return. 

“All good?” 

Peter nodded and threaded his fingers together so they’d stop shaking. “Yeah. Thank you. How much for the water?” He tried not to think about how little he had, how he practically had nothing. 

Barbara simply shook her head and wheeled back a little more. “No charge. Just don’t kneel over.” Her words were even, like before, but something like amused concern clouded them. This kid wasn’t from here, that much was obvious. It always was. She stuck her hand out. “I’m Barbara.” 

Peter stared at the outstretched hand and bile crashed inside his ribs. He could count on one hand how many people had extended their hand to him since the spell. He lifted his hand and watched curiously as Barbara clasped it and shook it once. “Peter.” His name sounded foreign to his ears and he tried to pretend it didn’t.

“Well, Peter,” Barbara said, and Peter tried not to whimper at the sound of his name on another’s tongue, “let me know if you need anything, alright? I’m the only one here.” 

Peter nodded and his mouth felt dry. He wasn’t used to this much conversation outside of the mask and his hands were still shaking. “Yeah, alright.” He watched as Barbara moved away and when she was back behind her desk, did Peter turn around and face his doom. The search bar sat there, empty, waiting. Flexing his fingers, Peter typed Justice League and drank in all the information he could. There must be someone—some wizard or sorcerer—that could help him get home. Names and faces and powers jumped all over the screen but nothing stood out. Then, in a moment of weakness, he typed Tony Stark and clicked enter before he could regret it. 

When the screen remained blank, Peter almost screamed. This universe didn’t have Tony, it didn’t have any of his friends or any of the Avengers. He needed them, he’d never stopped needing them, how was he supposed to survive here? In the most crime-ridden city in the world, with nothing but a few dollars and a suit that meant nothing. He could feel the panic bubble in his throat. 

Finally, just to stop seeing the name that haunted him every night, Peter typed in Batman and clicked enter. The page flooded with black and yellow and red. His eyes darted all over the screen, information settling into his brain and disguising itself as food. Words like vigilante and metahumans and Nightwing and Robin tore through his skull until he was sure he knew enough to get by. 

He sat there, reading and reading and pretending like he wasn’t avoiding the night and the evening breeze and the hunger until the lights flickered and Barbara was by his side again, eyes tenser than they had been. Peter noticed, noticed how she moved quicker and smoother than one might have thought. He could notice things like this now, with little care. Something in the back of his mind reminded him of how arachnid he felt, how different and alien. He swallowed the lump in his throat and thanked Barbara for letting him use the computer. She smiled at him and said his name and he felt richer than he had in a while. 

When the library closed, he lingered outside, the heat still clinging even as night settled. Gotham didn’t cool, except when it did. It grew darker, streetlamps cast small, trembling pools of light that looked too fragile to hold back the dark. 

He walked without knowing where, and the street names began to fade. Buildings sagged, windows were boarded. The air thickened with rot and something metallic underneath. He didn’t know the name of the place, not then, but later he’d learn it was Crime Alley. 

It felt like stepping into the lungs of the city, and those lungs were full of smoke. 

A smear of blood darkened the sidewalk by the gutter. He froze. Voices carried from a nearby corner—sharp, guttural, the sound of fists on flesh. Someone whimpered. The spider-sense inside him, because that’s what it was now, sparked bright, a hot wire, fight or flight. His body wanted to leap, to intervene, but his web-shooters were empty and he didn’t trust his new mutations. He had no safety net. He wasn’t ready.

So, like a coward, he turned and walked away fast. The shame burned hotter than the hunger, but he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t stupid. This wasn’t Queens. He didn’t know who these people were, what lines you crossed by even looking too long. His hands shook as he shoved them into his pockets, shoulders hunched. His heart wouldn’t slow down. 

By the time he stumbled back toward the library, the city had swallowed every other option. He found a side window cracked open and climbed through, moving with the silent grace he hated himself for, spider-slick in the shadows. 

The library smelled stronger at night: old dust, glue, faint mildew. He drifted through the aisles like a ghost, trailing his fingers along spines. History books caught his eye. He opened one, scanning dates and names, mapping differences. Here, wars had gone differently. Leaders were unfamiliar. Some things mirrored, but bent. It was like looking into a funhouse reflection of the life he’d known.

Eventually, he found a beanbag shoved into a corner, its fabric worn and grimy. It wasn’t clean, but it was soft enough. He sank into it, body folding as though all the fight had drained from him. 

May’s ring glinted faintly as he turned it over between his fingers. The weight of it anchored him, but also cut deep. His thumb rubbed circles against the cool metal. He tried not to think about how alone he was. He pulled out his small, cheap phone. He had to sell his Stark-phone a few months ago, but he had this one. It was enough, with how little he used it. He traced the cracked edges softly. He had a few photos in here, the ones he managed to copy before his resolve broke. It was all he had of them—of his home, of the ones he loved. And he couldn’t look at them, because despite how cheap, and broken this phone was, the technology in his world was different from this one. He’d have to find a charger, or make one, but he couldn’t find the strength to face the memories in the phone. So he slipped it back into his pocket. 

A prickling sensation crawled under his skin. He glanced at his wrist where, if he pressed just right, the spinnerets flexed. A thin strand slipped out, shining faintly in the dim light. It disgusted him—too raw, too alien, too familiar. He swallowed hard, trying to ignore it, trying to remember the comfort of web cartridges and mechanics instead of biology. He tried not to think about Peter 2 or Peter 3.

His senses kept twitching, catching the hum of the building, the tiny scuttles of insects, the far-off thrum of Gotham’s streets. He pulled his knees to his chest, burying his face there, trying to shut it all out. It felt so foreign, so familiar, the loneliness and panic he felt when he was first bitten, the strength it took to learn. He thought of Matt and how he’d been patient as he taught Peter how to hone his skills, how to listen and think. He thought of Wade, and how he knew how it felt when the noise got too loud. He thought of his only friends who didn’t know he was gone, friends he considered family but didn’t know him, not well, at least. Friends that wouldn’t look for him, wouldn’t wonder. He felt his heart squeeze in his chest before it splintered. 

Sleep came in fits, heavy and jagged. When he closed his eyes, he could almost see MJ’s smile, Ned’s laugh, May’s hand steady on his arm. But when he opened them, there was only Gotham.

And Gotham didn’t care. 

He rocked slightly, head pressed to his knees, May’s ring biting his skin as if to remind him of who he was, or what he’d lost. The ache hollowed him out, sharp and unrelenting. It tore and tore at him until his soft snores carried through the shelves. 

Chapter Text

The bathroom stall door stuck half a beat before it finally gave, a small, stubborn hinge protest that felt appropriate to the moment. Peter should have known that small things would fight him even in a minor mercy. He had learned to expect resistance after the world had been rewritten; that lesson reached even into the quiet places that felt like refuge. 

The public lavatory in the library was fluorescent bright and merciless, a square of light that measured him down to bone. He locked the door with a soft click and leaned his forehead against the cool metal for half a breath, letting himself be a person allowed to seek something as small as a sink. The mirror above the basin had a smear of something long dried at one corner; the fixture hummed. It was anonymous, efficient—exactly the sort of place where you could not be required to tell a story. 

He turned the tap and held his face under the stream until the water ran tepid and then shockingly cold, a bruise of sensation that helped steady the vertigo. The grime of two cities clung to him in layers—dust from a rooftop, the sticky heat of the night, the taste of a cupcake that had never felt like enough. He scrubbed at his jaw, at the hollow under his eyes. He washed at his hair until his curls stuck up and then smoothed them down, teaching himself to look like a person who could be trusted with small tasks. He was glad it was warm out, that the blazing sun would dry his hair fast enough to avoid a cold. He couldn’t afford it right now.

When he finally looked up, he stared too long. The face in the mirror was his, and not: the familiar freckle under his cheekbone, the slope of a nose that still caught sun the way it had always done, the stubborn mouth that May had teased for being gentler than it had reason to be. But his cheekbones had hollowness now, a map of thinness that astonished him. He saw the way the shadows under his eyes were deeper than they ought to be on anyone nineteen years old. He saw the line where tension had become habit and habit had become bone. 

There was something… off about his face. About everything. Besides the thinness and the hollowness, there were traces of muscles and lines he didn’t recognize. Everything felt a bit stretched, his torso and his fingers and he felt more filled out but still so faint, skin stretched across bone in a way that was inhumane. 

And then there were his eyes. 

They were brown in the way they had always been—warm, easy, the kind of brown that had been called "just right” in old yearbook captions and smiley late-night photographs. But when a thought unwound at the edges of his patience—some small jag of panic or anger—the light in his irises shifted. Green appeared there: not a bright, foreign flash but a pit-green that lived at the margin of brown like moss at the edge of stone. It frightened him in a manner that felt ridiculous to be frightened by one’s own reflection. 

He studied the flicker until his teeth itched and he tried not to pay attention to the ache in his gums, the way his teeth felt a tad bit sharper. The green was not constant, it flared when he held his breath too long, when his pulse hit the wrong tempo, when he saw a memory that pinched like a net. He had seen a similar effect once in a lab tube under fluorescent light—a chemical indicator changing as if in a reaction. The thought made him feel half-scientist and entirely exposed.

He looked at this person in the mirror—both the boy from Queens and the thing the city had made cleaner and sharper—and the reflection looked back as if recognizing an intruder. Peter pressed his thumb to the ring under his sweater until the metal was warm. He tried to catalog the differences without letting the small panics become proclamations. He was more spidery than he had ever been: fingers long and quick, joints that seemed to remember edges he hadn’t in months, a quiet animal patience that listened to brick and wind. It was not all strength. Some of it was discomfort—bones stretched and nerves tuned to frequencies that made the world too loud and made his gums itch and spinnerets ache. 

He blinked and rinsed his face one more time, the water stinging the corners of his eyes. Then, because he could, he combed his fingers through his hair and straightened his sweater, fingers brushing his suit once for comfort. It felt like armor, even if the fabric was ordinary and damp. 

Outside, the library doors were still chained; the morning had not given the city permission to be busy. Peter slid through the cracked window and crawled down the brick, sliding between the narrow columns of the entrance like a ghost. The city looked almost kind before the sun decided to really wake. The street smelled different in the clean light, the air was still thick—sour wet from the night’s hold—but it smelled less like rot and more like steam rising off hardened tar, like the city was trying to scrub itself awake. The sky was a thin sheet of white-blue, as if the city had finally been given a soft-focus lens. Gotham at dawn was fragile in a way that made him ache: pretty from certain angles, cruel in others. 

Peter moved through it with slow, careful feet, because motion made thinking less like an accusation. The hunger inside him dug into his bones and he blinked the sleepiness out of his eyes. He’d slept a little—the beanbag had swallowed him, given him the kind of shallow pull of sleep you get when your bones are more exhausted than your mind—but sleep had been a collage of faces and a constant, painful itch at his temples. May’s voice had been a thread through the dreams; MJ’s laugh jagged like a scratch in a record; Ned’s answering grin a small, disappearing star. The spell had rewritten his life sat like a sore tooth in his chest. 

Now, in the early chill, the ache felt absolute because everything looked possible and he had no stake in that possibility. He wandered, marginal as a ghost and no less human than yesterday. The city felt enormous and intimate at once—ever heat-vent hissed like a microphone pointed at him, every building’s shadow a spectator.

He drifted toward the place where the world had become most honest with him the night before. 

Crime Alley wore morning differently, holding a strangely domestic quality. In the low light, the gutter stains looked less like bruises and more like history. The walls, spray-painted and pitted, took on peculiar colors when the sun bothered to find them—peace in a sliver of dawn a thin green where mildew clung. A stray cat darted between the bins and sniffed at something copper-smelling by the curb; the small domestic moment made his chest catch in a way that had nothing to do with hunger. Peter watched it go and felt something small and human—relief—pass through him like sunlight. 

He climbed back up to the roof—the same one, the same squat brick and tar, the same broken drainpipe that had first felt like a staircase when the world folded him into itself—and sat with his knees pulled up, the city unfurling in front of him like a map he’d misplaced the legend to. 

He could see rooftops in tight rows, laundry hung across lines like pale flags, a church steeple caught in the fractured light. From up there everything was a little less monstrous, the gargoyles turned to anonymous ornamentation. Pigeons were industrious in this hour; they stalked the sky with the righteousness of scavengers who knew how to live on crumbs. From this height, Gotham’s teeth gathered into something more foolish. 

Memory bunched under his ribs like coil. He could taste the last words he said to Tony in the grime and destruction; he could hear MJ’s laugh curled into a voicemail he had no way to replay; he felt the ghost of Ned’s stupid, loyal grin like a phantom limb. He could recall May’s hands—small, calloused in the way that tenderness has—smoothing his hair with the same motion that had once smoothed their ragged days into tolerable ones. Grief was a kind of arithmetic. He counted the people he had lost or been forced to let go of like stones in a pocket that always meant to be light. The spell had been a blunt surgeon’s hand; it had cut something out of him and wrapped the wound with clean cloth. But it could not mend the absence. 

There, on the roof, Peter let himself sink, thinking about choices he could not call back. He had nothing else to do, except that he had so much to do. Instead, he let his thoughts get louder and louder and hoped, mildly, that something would take him—out, away. 

Strange had tried to balance universes. That was the rational frame; the interior truth and felt like an accusation. Peter’s mind turned bitter fast and maybe unfairly. Strange had not come to him then. Strange had left him with an ache and a question: which was worse, forgetting or remembering alone? The memory of Strange’s face when he had argued—tired, unsurprised—tangled with the image of the Sanctum’s incense and its quiet sanctum of decisions. He wanted an apology that was not a lecture, something like a hand offered without measurements.

Peter wanted to go home. He hated this, hated everything so much. He had just made broken peace with everything, with his anger and resentment and loneliness and now he was here, alone and angry and he didn’t have his small comforts, didn’t have the familiar scents or noises or even the few familiar faces he had chosen to befriend. He’d kill for Matt’s wisdom, his solid, and unmoving presence, or even Wade’s humour, his ability to figure things out, even if it meant losing a limb. He closed his eyes and thought of Jessica’s dry humour, of the safety that Luke brought with his thick skin, and Danny’s soft smiles and calming presence. In Queens, he didn’t have much, didn’t have anything, but he had them, and he had the ghosts that followed him. It was enough, it could have been enough. It would have been, if he had let time wither him down. 

But here—here he was alone. Completely. There was a strange comfort in it, in knowing that there was no one to appease, no one to protect, no one to listen for, but it was dangerous, because Peter wasn’t safe, not on this roof and not in his own mind. 

The haze thickened until it muffled the world, and he thought, unbidden, of asking for the impossible. To have his old days back; the mechanics of his Iron-Spider suit—older jokes—pizza on the couch with people who would call him into the light. He let the thought become a kind of prayer, and it tasted like salt. 

He watched the city wake. Delivery trucks began their measured roar. A bus scraped past, dragging an overheard hum of commuters tightening their scarves even though the August sun promised heat. Voices floated up—one man arguing about rent, a woman scolding a child. The ordinary sound justified itself like a litany: normality insisting on being true even when the center of your orbit had been peeled away. It was cruel, and beautiful.

The sound of a fight split the quiet with a particular, precise violence. It was close, metal ringing, feet slamming. Peter’s body answered before his brain could rationalize, it was a habit before a decision: the path of least resistance for someone whose body was trained to turn toward trouble. He stepped from roof to water-tank to fire escape, fingers finding fingerholds in brick the way breath found a throat. The motion was both memory and instinct; he remembered the mathematics of swinging, the small arithmetic of momentum and release and it was easy to adapt without his webs, to move like DareDevil and not like Peter. Rooftops blurred under his soles.

He moved along gutters and across sloped tiles like a shadow born to the surfaces. He kept low, the city’s pulse under him louder with every progression. The sound of the fight grew sharper, more specific—an impact, the grunt of body, a metallic clink. He scaled silently, the spider-sense a whisper now pushing him on. He had no intention of being the show; he wanted to learn. The rooftop alleys shuttled him forward in a choreography of fingers and soles until he could see the source: a daytime hero in a suit the color of sunlight and caution taking down a cluster of men quick with knives. The man moved with the clean, rehearsed brutality of someone who had chosen to be efficient rather than theatrical. Signal, Peter thought, because the colours read like a broadcast and he had done his research, however minimal. 

Signal’s blows were precise, not brutal. He immobilized, he incapacitated, he moved bodies with technique—locks, holds, the kind of trained pressure that left opponents disoriented but not annihilated. He palmed a wrist, twisted, and the man went down with a stifled curse. It was elegant and terrifying. Peter’s whole body hummed, taking in each detail; the angle of the elbow, the push of hips, the way Signal used the ground to fold a man’s force back into himself. 

He inched forward to get a better view. Roof after roof, the city swallowed him in a slow willful progression. He didn’t know he’d threaded the distance into a new country of the skyline until he reached a terrace of townhouses where the brick was cleaner and the gutters less choked. The air tasted less of rot and more of people who could afford to keep the drains clear. He perched on a high point, watching Signal finish, chest heaving, the day hero flatten his coat over someone who was bleeding and speak over the throng with a voice used to commanding dignity. 

Peter wanted to help, he always wanted to help. The impulse was old and safe in him—an honest instinct that had guided too many nights to its limit and sometimes beyond. But hunger and the literal absence of tools made the ache of wanting sting. He had no webbing, no cartridges. He had only the raw, biological tethers that made him twitch under his skin, wrong and uncomfortable. Even if he leapt, it would be only him, a single boy against a city he did not understand. His admiration felt like a small, guilty thing. He wanted to be nearer, to taste the competence, to learn the angles of a man who could be daylight’s answer to a city of shadows. Peter was lost in motion, and lost is a kind of currency. 

From his new vantage, he could see the way the rowhouse terraces opened onto a quieter, tree-lined stretch. Someone had hung lace curtains and a balcony overflowing with geraniums caught the morning like a thrift of domestic insistence. The sight made something in him miss a life that had been trivial and perfect. 

Peter stayed a long time, watching the way Signal tucked a wounded torso into a cab’s back seat, the hero’s face, the lower half, set with an impossible kindness. The idea of a day-walking defender who could be a light in this dark city like a lighthouse struck something fierce and tender in him. It felt, absurdly, like a taste of home. The feeling crashed into him with all its weights; nostalgia, envy, a fury at how thin his own thread had been left. 

Thoughts sharpened into a thin, dangerous place. He thought of Tony, of how he’d joked about building better tech out of duct tape and stubbornness. He thought of Strange, as he often did, and the sanctum of glass and old books and the guilty soft way Strange’s hands must have moved when he promised he’d fix something for the greater good. He didn’t think of the wish he made, that stupid, petulant wish about being somewhere that wanted him, because he didn’t know, didn’t know that magic had answered him. Nothing else ever had. He wasn’t someone that was listened to. 

He let the questions, the pleas and the anger, circle him until the sound of a tearing wind shattered the calculus. It came from close—space folded like paper, a sensation of the air itself becoming an instrument. For a moment, the world narrowed to the sound and the stark white line of something opening. Peter’s spider-sense spiked into a scream so sharp he tasted bile. It was an opening that did not belong to roofs and brick—gold and green, a current of red like blood in silk. He fell backward before his body comprehended the physicality of the rip because magic had taught him its old trick: the world is soft where ritual tugs. The tile met his palms in an ugly, unprogrammed resistance. Fear fired first—he had been taken before, and the memory was a bruise in his marrow. Magic terrified him. He tasted metal, the same coppery shiver that had been his first terrible wake. 

The shimmering resolved into person: Wong, impossible to be simple. He had the measured weight of someone who knew the price of broken edges. He was slightly paler than Peter remembered, a thread of gray at his temples. His robe hung with the performance of simple authority. He stood there as if the rooftop were a stage and he had wandered into it on purpose. 

“Peter.” The name vibrated in Peter like a struck string. Wong’s voice had a softness that made Peter feel ridiculous for expecting only harshness. It was recognition, the best kind—unembellished and immediately meaningful. Peter felt himself bend toward the sound like a limb inclining to sunlight. 

Peter’s knees hit the title. Something inside him cracked open. He had been waiting like a boy on the wrong porch for a friend who would never knew to come back. But Wong’s presence—semi-solid, impossibly near—cut through months and months of absence with the ease of a key.

He was close to tears in a way that surprised him; the heat in his throat felt like something both shameful and necessary. He laughed once—a ragged, incredulous sound—eyes greener than they ever should have been. He wanted to throw himself at the man’s ankles and plead; instead he simply opened his mouth, and a string of sound came out. 

“Wong—” It was less a question and more an unstitched prayer. “What—how—why are you here?” Peter’s voice broke on the last question, a long, ragged thread of panic and relief mixed. He could go home. Wong was here to take him home. 

“What happened? Where’s Strange? Why—” 

Wong’s expression was craved out of patience and sorrow. “You made a wish,” he said simply. “Birthday magic. There was residue—old ritual tucked into the threads of the spell that image-bearing hands sometimes leave. It answered.” 

His tone held a professional weariness that meant long hours and long decisions. “Ritualic remnants follow the shape of the one who speaks. They are… precise in their cruelty.” 

Peter’s throat closed and he wanted to slam a fist where the words lived. Everything that had been vibrating in his limbs rearranged itself into a single fault line. “Why—” He tried to shape the question into something non-hysterical, something that would not make him look weak in front of a man who had the patience of mountains. “What do you—a wish? What wish? Why me? Why couldn’t—why didn’t Strange come?”

Wong’s face softened and then tightened with a kind of sorrow that looked borrowed. “Dr. Strange made the choices he believed necessary. He believed forgetting you—publicly—would be less costly. He carried that burden. He had his own way of processing what he does.” He said it hemmed in, with a careful distance. “We can debate ethics later. Right now—” He paused, and the pause had the gravity of someone who had spent years answering for decisions other people made. “Right now you are here, and you are not where you do not belong. The ritual will not be reversible. It answers to memory and hunger and want.” 

Peter’s reaction to that, to Wong’s words—immediate, incandescent—was not just the heat of a wronged child. It was deeper than anger; it was the hurt of a boy handed a promise and given scraps instead. Peter had imagined this, in some collapsing fantasy of retribution and mercy—Strange with his eyes made of light, the man who had remapped reality personally apologizing in the language of triangles and mirrors. Instead—Wong, smaller in some ways, steadier in others. That absence—the lack of Strange—felt like betrayal magnified. Peter’s voice became a raw animal. “Where is he? This is his fault—”

Wong’s hand lifted, not to silence him but to protect him from the cascade of questions and anger he might not be able to bear. “He is not able to face this yet.” There was a human exhaustion in the way he said it; pity, but not the condescending kind. “He is working. He is doing what he can. I will not lie or make his conscience lighter—he has been a man of great shame and hope. I believe he thought it best to manage this away from you, bluntly, because he could not bear to see the consequence of his action when he had convinced himself it was mercy.” 

Peter’s hands were fists on his knees. For a delicious, dizzying second he wanted to hurl the ring that burned warm against his skin into the wind and watch it vanish into gutters and then pretend none of this was his. “So he chose for me,” Peter whispered. Anger matched with grief is an ambient fire that makes words too hot to handle. Everything inside him burned loud and red, but there was a green tint around his eyes, something maddening trying to crawl out of his skin. 

“He chose to—and then, what? He stayed in his sanctum like a—like a king and left me on the street?” Peter gripped at his hair, feeling a bit manic. “I was alone. He left me alone and he remembered me? This whole time? And now—now I’m here, because he—” He choked, tears and bile and hatred burning through him. 

Wong’s face did not shift into defence. Instead, he sighed softly and when he met Peter’s brown-green eyes, something tense smoothed out. “I cannot pretend to know his reasons. He is a man trained by the universe to make large decisions; sometimes that training closes him off from smaller mercies.” The language was indirect because direct statements would have been crueler. 

Wong blinked slowly and reached into the pack at his side—or the wind had conjured it, or Strange had prearranged it, or perhaps the city had simply decided someone would be practical—and produced a backpack. It was not the kind Peter would have chosen, it was utilitarian, scarred at the seams with a travel-stained look. He set it down with careful hands. 

“This is from Strange,” Wong said quietly. “He insisted I bring what he could spare where you are. There are clothes, some money, and a handful of things he thought you might miss. He cannot come. He asked that I be the one.” Wong’s eyes were steady on Peter, fierce in a way that suggested he wanted to say another thing and could not. “I can visit two more times, Peter. Use them wisely.” 

Peter stared at the pack like it might explode into a thousand excuses. He peeled at the zipper with fingers that trembled. Inside were shirts folded with mechanical kindness, clean socks, his old, tattered notebook and a new one too, and a few photographs wrapped in plastic that made his stomach tilt—Tony’s face, mid-smirk, caught in a moment that felt extraordinarily private, May and Happy laughing in the F.E.A.S.T. kitchen, Ned and MJ standing in front of M.I.T. grinning, a blurry, out of focus selfie Wade had taken on their weekly patrols with Peter in the middle and Matt frowning beside him—and Peter’s chest gave a hollow, disbelieving sound. 

He laughed then, a short sound pressed into the air like a damp match. There was suddenly so much to be grateful for and so much to hate in gratitude at once. He wanted to hug Wong and punch something until it cracked and made him bleed. It made him feel small and feral in the most unforgiving way. 

“I can visit two more times,” Wong repeated, something like insistence in his voice. “There are rules and constraints. Ritualic magic answers to threads—once pulled they knot, and it takes something to loosen them. I can come to you when you think—concentrate on the Sanctum, on the way the magic was, and I will find you. But—” He paused, and in that binding pause, Peter felt the shift against his skin, the way Wong nearly came undone. “I cannot undo the ritual, Peter. I cannot offer you everything you have lost.” 

Peter’s lips parted in something akin to agony. “Two times—two—but you just said Strange was trying—” Wong simply shook his head. “What am I supposed to do?” Peter asked, and Wong was reminded of a small child. “Live? Build a life here? You people—” The words died before he could let them become accusations. Despite everything, he was still May’s nephew. “I want to go home.” 

Wong’s expression was utterly patient. “Home is not solely a place, Peter.” His voice was gentle and certain. “Home is people who remember you and who you remember. In some instances—you can carry your home by remembering it with care. In others—you can find new people who will hold you. You can keep your memories of New York, and you can build new anchors here. That does not mean you choose to forget. It means you will not let the absence hollow you.”

It was a sentence people said in warm-voice self-help channels and in small kitchens over cups that were too hot—an aphorism. But Wong said it as if he had folded it out of truth like metal into a shape. Peter could not swallow it whole. It felt like both a comfort and a command. All he wanted was to be back in his shitty apartment and listen for familiar heartbeats and pretend like he was warm. 

“And the wish?” Peter asked, because he had to know whether his careless, tired wish had been a crime or a confession. He felt shame at the memory of blowing out a candle and letting a thought loose without thinking the consequences through. He should have known he hadn’t been allowed the small luxuries of someone happy, he should have known he didn’t deserve to wish for anything, not after everything. 

“It answered the hunger in your sentence,” Wong explained, gently. “Ritual will not give back what was lost. It re-allocates. You wished to be someplace that wanted you. And this place,” he spread his arms, “wants you.” He spoke the word as lightly as possible, and yet the roomless rooftop seemed suddenly smaller. 

“I didn’t mean for—” He stopped. Part of him didn’t want to admit that the wish had sat like an ache he’d given words to; part of him knew the line between intent and desperation is often narrow and slippery. “I didn’t mean to leave New York,” he finished instead, voice raw. 

Wong’s eyes softened into something that could have been kinder. “That does not mean it was not time for you to leave New York, Peter. New York will always be yours. But that does not mean that this city cannot be yours, too. Build something, Peter. Live. You deserve it.” 

Peter felt like he had been handed both a map and a pair of scissors, and the logic of Wong’s words was the exact wrong comfort. He tipped forward as if to touch him, to anchor the possibility of this conversation in skin and pulse—some affirmation that Strange had not left him to imagine consolation. His fingers passed through fabric as if the world was a myth and his hands were gullible.

Wong’s face had the gentleness of a person who was not often kind. “I cannot be touched," he said softly. “Not this way, not with this magic. I can be present in other ways.” 

Then, with an economy of motion that felt like final instruction, he placed his hand over Peter’s clenched fists. The contact was solid for a beat—warm, tactile, an old man’s hand with a smudge of ink—and then it faded like a shadow pulled back from sun. 

He was gone like breath. 

For a long stretch of seconds, Peter sat frozen. His eyes stung. The rooftop was suddenly very far away, the wind suddenly too loud. He reached for something to steady himself and found the black backpack at his feet. He slung it over his shoulder because motion was a salve, and because Wong had told him to live and, absurdly, a pack from Strange felt like both a promise and cold justification. He breathed in, tasting the metallic edge of the city, trying to blink away the green. Everything was so green, so loud and antagonistic as the tears leaked through his eyes. 

Peter did not notice Selina at first. As heightened as all his senses suddenly were, with the chaos in his mind and the rage in his heart, the subtle tingle in the back of his neck, the goosebumps and whispers of danger danger danger were quieter than they should have been. Maybe it wasn’t danger at all, maybe it was look look look. She had been watching from the adjacent cornice, half-lifted, all cat and observation, the way she tended to be when the city offered a scene that included other people’s wounds. She wore a leather jacket that had learned to be chic in exactly the wrong alleys. When she saw him flinch and then put his pack on, she announced herself with a soft, sardonic note overtly casual enough to make him startle. 

“Well, you certainly don’t look like a local,” she said, swallowing the mild discomfort she always felt in the presence of magic. 

Peter startled so badly he nearly fell backward. He shoved the backpack higher on his shoulders, scrubbed his fingers over his face and turned, hood falling back completely, eyes raw.

Selina watched him for a long beat, an expert taking inventory. Hood, trembling hands, backpack, a ring clutched in one palm, the kind of bare knuckled helpless that looked like hunger. There was something…lost about him. Something sad, like he was pulled from everything he ever knew. Her features relaxed into a softness that suggested she had a fondness for things that could be coddled back into shape. 

“You alright, kid?” She asked, but her voice didn’t carry the inflection of kindness as much as a careful curiosity. She had seen strays with worse scars and more feral desperation. Something in his posture made her tense in a way she’d not expected: a boy who had seen stars fall and kept counting them anyway had a sort of dangerous innocence. It made her feel strange. Made something flutter in her heart and she hadn’t been prepared for it. 

If he was stunned and wet behind the ears, she was the exact opposite—slick with experience, shaded by the night, eyelashes that tilted like razors. She smelled of citrus and the faint chemical perfume of things that are sold late at night. She had the look of someone who did not do sentiment—only choices and consequences. 

She…she looked a little like—May. Peter stepped back, and when Selina’s eyebrows furrowed at him, he almost burst into tears. 

It wasn’t a stark resemblance, it wasn’t really a resemblance at all, but there was something about her that reminded Peter of May; the smile lines she tried to conceal with makeup or the softness in her eyes that leaked out like water, despite everything. He couldn’t breathe, because May—someone who reminded him of May—was standing in front of him and it was too much, it was all too much and he couldn’t breathe, why wasn’t he breathing? Everything was green, it was green and brown and red and Peter was falling. 

He was falling and falling and falling—

“Kid,” Selina ran faster than she ever had before, catching him just before his head hit the brick and she pulled him into her arms. Peter’s eyes rolled to the back of his head but not before she caught a glimpse at a familiar green. She sucked in a sharp breath and her hold on him softened unconsciously.

“Hey, kid,” Selina tapped his cheek before her fingers slid to his neck, checking for a pulse. “Fuck,” she sighed in relief as Peter’s pulse beated strongly beneath his sweat-slick skin. She pursed her lips when the beat grew into something irregular, something too fast and static and she quickly lost count. Meta, she thought, and it did little to ease her discomfort. She sat on the back of her heels as this kid—Peter—laid in her arms and Selina pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth in thought. 

She could call Bruce but something cold and sharp and unwise twisted through her at the thought and she swallowed the lump in her throat. She hadn’t heard the whole conversation Peter had with that magical figure, but she heard enough to deduce that this kid wasn’t dangerous. If she brought Bruce into the conversation, he would want answers and demands and he’d be soft in his own way but a glance at Peter’s pale, frail figure in her arms put her off. She could call Dick, or even Jason, but something soft, almost buttery whispered in her ear, told her she had to do this alone. 

So, against all her instincts and better judgement and the fury she knew she’d be faced with by the Bats later, she gathered Peter in her arms more securely, slid half of his body weight over her shoulder and frowned when she stood up easily. He was light, too light. The lightness that came from grief and hunger and lonely nights. She slung the backpack over her other shoulder and slowly made her way down the fire escape. She had some practice hauling men across roofs so it wasn’t too difficult, especially with the lack of plated armour and weapons. Thankfully, she lived only two floors down. 

She kicked her window open and ducked in, hand on Peter’s head so he wouldn’t hit the ledge while she struggled not to throw him onto the carpet. A beat of sweat trickled down her forehead and she huffed as she gently—as gently as she could—settled Peter onto the couch. She tossed the backpack beside the grey couch, wincing briefly just in case there was something fragile in there. She sighed and tilted her head back, a multitude of thoughts running through her head but the only ones she paid attention to were is he okay? And is this kid magical? The idea of bringing a magic-ridden kid into her home made her mildly uncomfortable but then she glanced down and something tight in her chest loosened and she crouched, eyeing the weariness and taut skin of the child laying before her.

His hair was a dark brown, unruly mess and his skin was pale, leaning towards illness. Even through the layers, she could tell that Peter knew hunger intimately, like it was just another layer he wore despite his best efforts to shed it. Selina pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and brushed some of the hair that had fallen over his shut eyes. Something protective and maternal and raw was beating through her and she couldn’t figure out why. She had never seen this kid before and she had just been at the Batcave a few days ago. No one had mentioned any new metas or magic. How did this kid fly under Bruce’s radar? With the wild, majestic display of golds and reds she had stumbled upon earlier, it was clear that the kid or that wizard weren’t doing much to hide the fact that they were using magic. 

Briefly, Selina wondered if she should reach out to Constatine and the sudden flare of annoyance beneath her skin was enough of an answer. Constantine would only be contacted if there was no other choice. He was too irritating and snarky to be dealt with on pure whim. 

Selina looked down when a small, gentle thing brushed against her leg and she smiled as a few of her feline friends stalked towards her and Peter. She watched curiously as Cheerio, her shyest orange tabby curled against Peter. Huh, interesting. The small brush of fur against Peter’s cheek was soft and it had him curling into the warmth. At the movement, Selina stepped back. She knew she had a thing for strays but taking a teenager with magic who had been in a state of panic before passing out into her home with her cats and absolutely no back up was a bit too far, even for her. Still, she didn’t feel any fear. There was something achingly familiar about this kid and while it did put her on edge, it also made her want to wrap him in a blanket and pretend like everything was okay. 

Selina glanced at Peter once more before she fished her phone out of her pocket and pressed the number at the bottom of her favourites. The familiar music of BatBurger rang softly before it cut and a familiar voice hummed in greeting. Selina paused before the weight of the kid’s thin, bony wrist came to mind and she listed an order big enough to feed at least four of the Bat kids. The man on the other side didn’t repeat the order, just told her he’d be there in ten minutes. Selina thanked him and pocketed her phone, hoping she wasn’t making a big mistake.

Ice, the kind that blistered and tore you apart, slewed through his body, May’s face turned towards him as she bled out. He reached towards her but he wasn’t quick enough, he never was. Her body is turning to dust, he’s losing her, and there’s something glowing, magic—and Peter lunged forward. 

The scream ripped itself from his throat as he bolted awake. Peter couldn’t stop screaming and panic drives any logic or calmness from his body. Selina suddenly rushed through a door and grabbed hold of him before he fell off the couch.

Peter resists, half asleep with the image of May dead under him and blood drenching his hands. But May is right there, right in front of him, holding him and far away and dead and alive and Peter can’t breathe. He can still smell the sweat and blood. 

“Kid, kid, Peter, it’s okay. You’re safe.” Peter shook his head and cried, sobbing and shaking as Selina held him firm. It’s unfamiliar and familiar all at once and Peter doesn’t realize he’s gripped her arm until she yips in pain and he lets go, scrambling away from the warmth. He tries to talk but every sound from his mouth is incoherent. His forceful screams have tapered off into harsh cries and shrieks. Peter can’t get a solid breath in past his tears. 

“Kid, I need you to calm down.” Selina tries but Peter is too far gone. His heart can’t stop beating too fast and his lungs try to compensate for the pace but there’s cotton and ice in his lungs. He sees Selina’s hands flutter once before they grab his shoulders, firm and solid. 

“Breathe,” she says, once, twice, before Peter slowly starts to mimic her exaggerated movements. Slowly, his erratic breathing thins off into something manageable and he heaves in as much air as he can into his lungs. 

“Who—” Peter swallowed the lump of roughness in his throat. “Who—are you?” His eyes are brown and gold with swirls of green in them and he’s sweating and shivering but Selina had a bruise on her wrist so she knows he’s strong, even battered and broken like this. He could probably kill her and it’s a sobering thought but the tears are leaking out his eyes and all signs of danger and self-preservation are pushed to the side. 

“I’m Selina. You’re in my apartment.” She kept her hold on him firm and grounding. “I’m sorry for touching you but I didn’t want you to get hurt or accidentally blow up the place.” Peter blinked and the green bleeds deeper into his eyes and Selina feels that familiar inkling of fear cling to her spine. She knew that green. It was the same green as Jason’s eyes in the beginning and Selina wondered briefly if she should have called Bruce. She couldn’t deal with pit-madness on her own. But this didn’t feel like pit-madness, it felt like more, more authentic and real and fragile. 

Peter blinked a few times and inhaled deeply, held it, then exhaled. Selina watched as he counted his fingers and came into his own body. She wasn’t even sure if he knew he was doing it, but the green melted out of his irises and was replaced by brown. Once she was sure that Peter wasn’t going to jump off the couch, she let him go and moved back, still on her knees. Close enough to catch him and far enough to let him fall. 

“You—” and Peter’s voice was so hoarse and dry, “You were on the roof, right? Where—” 

Was it real? Or a nightmare? Had he really seen and talked to Wong? Was he truly trapped here forever with no way home? His eyes fell to the black packbag next to the leg of the sofa and his heart rate picked up. It was real. Bile turned in the pit of his stomach and he blinked back tears. 

Selina nodded slowly, as if she was talking to a child. And wasn’t that what Peter was? A child? A sad, lonely, fucking orphan child who had been ripped away from his home and thrown into purgatory. “I was. Only for a bit.” She paused and uncertainty flashed through her eyes before she drew her shoulders back. Peter closed his eyes and tried to breathe, to clear his mind. He had passed out and a stranger had taken him home. He reached out to the spider-sense in the back of his mind and listened. It was quiet, humming, a little frantic and twisted but there was no danger present. The woman in front of him, the one who had caught him before he fell, who had laid him out on her couch and pulled him out of a panic attack, wasn’t a danger. 

Could anyone who reminded him of May truly be dangerous? The answer was no. It always would be. Peter tried not to bite off his tongue. 

Peter licked his lips and rubbed the panic out of his eyes. “I’m Peter,” he said quietly, though Selina already knew his name. He felt like he had to introduce himself, had to do something normal and human so he could stop feeling disgusting, like a monster. Alien, his mind whispered.

Selina smiled and it was so reminiscent of his aunt that Peter dropped his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “For…catching me. And not killing me.” It was morbid but it was the truth. From the darkness that passed across Selina’s face, Peter knew she could relate. But then she laughed, and it was soft, like a cat’s purr that might have been amusement. 

“You’re welcome, Peter.” Her smile was crooked and a bit tense. “You look like you’ve been run through a woodchipper.” Her smile only tightened when Peter said, “I feel like it, too.” She swallowed and glanced at the kitchen table, where she had left all the food. She tilted her head and slowly stood, as if trying not to startle him by any sudden movements. “Let’s sit and eat. I’m sure there are a few things we could talk about.” Her tone made it clear she wasn’t doing this because of charity. She did this because she cared, because she liked to know where strays ended up and this one ended up right in her arms. 

Slowly, Peter pushed himself up and mumbled a series of soft apologies as the cats that surrounded him all hissed in annoyance. It was cute, and Selina quickly turned her head and pointed to the door she had originally come out of. “If you want to wash up a bit, go ahead.” She paused and turned back to Peter. “If you choose to run, that’s okay too. But all this food would go to waste.” It was a bit of a low blow, to use Peter’s apparent hunger and lack of food as an incentive to stay, but Peter was tired and angry and so hungry, so he nodded in thanks. He wasn’t above a free meal, or multiple. His pride was a tattered thing and survival meant the death of ego. 

Peter stumbled into the bathroom and for the second time that day, he found himself under fluorescent bright lights and an unwelcome reflection. This time, he just stared at himself, head-on. His eyes traced over his features, the hollowness of his cheeks and the tightness around his jaw. His hair was still a mess and his lips were chapped. It was almost like looking at a self-portrait of himself if he had to draw from memory and it had been a bad day. He thinks of Wade and how bad his days got. He thinks of how much he misses him, and Matt, how he’s with this stranger and he rather be anywhere else, rather be with them, safe and warm and home.

Peter blinked away the tears that gathered in his waterline and twisted the tap. He doesn’t check the temperature of the water before he cups enough to splash his face with. The effect is instant, as the tightness in his shoulders melts and the water washes away the stress and grime of earlier. He holds his face under the tap and and runs wet fingers through his hair. He gurgled some water before leaning against the basin. 

Wong’s words flash through his mind and his grip on the white sink tightened until he heard the creak in the stone. Quickly letting go, Peter stumbled back. He had to watch himself, had to control his strength. Just because he felt like he was moments away from death didn’t mean he could suddenly lose control. He made brief eye contact with himself in the mirror before he unlocked the door and slowly made his way towards the kitchen, to the soft rustling of movement and the delicious smell of batter and oil. 

The kitchen, like the rest of the apartment, was soft and clean and made up of mainly earthly tones. It was different, given that Peter remembered the feeling of leather and latex just before he fell unconscious. It smelled of coffee and stale grease, a kind of comforting banality that Peter’s thoughts clung to like a flotation device. He pulled out the chair across Selina and sat down, stringing his fingers together. 

Her lips twitched into something that couldn’t be called a smile but was just as soft as she pushed a plate of plain, stale crackers towards him. Peter’s eyebrows furrowed before he masked his emotions. He wasn’t entitled to more, didn’t deserve more. He ignored the burgers and fires and different drinks to the right of him and smiled at the crackers, like a sinner awaiting salvation. 

Selina watched him before she sighed, amused if a little sullen. “I don’t know the last time you ate, but after prolonged hunger, jumping straight into grease and fried foods isn’t ideal. So,” she nudged the plate of crackers closer to Peter, “eat a few of these. Get your stomach settled, then you can have as much BatBurger as you want.” 

Peter nodded in understanding and picked up a cracker. She was right, of course, and Peter wanted to pretend that his body’s healing factor would protect him from being sick but he knew it wouldn’t. Not when he wasn’t eating enough or sleeping enough to keep it at its best functionality. “Thank you,” he says, because he needs to. Because he never said it to Wade or Matt or Danny and now he wished he had. It didn’t matter if they knew, he should have said it. And now he’ll never get a chance to. He’ll never be able to thank them for everything, for protecting him and teaching him and always having crackers on them. He’ll never get to thank them for being the reason he got out of bed.

He nibbled on the stale salt before he shoved a few into his mouth to keep his mind occupied. Selina pushed a tall glass of water towards him and he nodded his thanks and tipped it back. Once Peter had eaten a handful of crackers and told Selina he was okay, she placed a burger, fries, and a bottle of apple juice in front of him. He only blinked once before the urges of a hungry, street dog took over and he was biting and eating and swallowing. The food warmed him in ways that went beyond the stomach. 

Selina watched him while he ate, not exactly intrusive. She was a sentry with soft eyes. He ate mechanically, if a little feral, each bite a small prayer. For the first time since the Sanctum had quieted him into erasure, a human hand reached him in a way that didn’t require papers or permission. He felt almost absurdly grateful. He kept thinking—brief, frantic—that if he could just let this be the seam he used to stitch himself to the city, he might survive it. But the thought passed, the wax paper crushed in his hand, and another form of redemption was pushed out of his way. 

Selina sat across from him, elbows on the table, fingers steepled, like a woman preparing to interview a specimen. She picked at her fries carefully before she glanced up at him, trying to read him. Except, and she’d never admit this outloud, but she found that she couldn’t. She was so good at it, so good at understanding a man’s motivation, his desires and his flaws. But with Peter, there was only grief. It wrapped around him, as if he was caught in a spider’s web, just waiting to be eaten by something vicious. Her lips twisted into a frown before she pushed another burger towards him. 

“You’re from out of town.” It wasn’t a question, just a simple statement, an observation that was biting. 

Peter swallowed and met Selina’s eyes, surprised at the lack of suspiciousness. She seemed curious, if a little concerned. Timidly, Peter nodded. “Yes.” It came out flat and obvious. 

“Where’s the accent from?” It was a kinder way to ask where Peter was from, because he didn’t belong here. It was obvious. He had observed Gothamites and they were cruel, cold, more reclusive than New Yorkers could ever dream to be. 

“Queens.” He recognized the defeat in his voice and cringed, dropped a fry. 

Selina’s eyebrows arched a fraction. Her eyes glanced over his again, taking stock. She slowed her chewing, trying to think of the words. “Look, kid, you’re not in the best city to be lost and hungry.” There was no scolding, just practicality. Just the truth. “Gotham is dangerous.” Her tone grew softer, not soft as in sentiment, soft as in assessment. “Do you have anyone?” The question has no mirth. 

Peter shook his head. It felt like both a relief and a rupture. Because the truth was binary and stupid and absolute, and saying it made the idea of him feel like a small lie whispered into a too-large world. He didn’t have anyone here, and he didn’t have anyone back in Queens either. Except, that wasn’t the truth. Peter could admit that, now that he’d been ripped away from all he did have, he could admit that although he had forgotten what May’s hug felt like, and how MJ smelled and the musky scent of Tony, he had learned how Wade liked his coffee and how peculiar Luke was about his pizza. He did have people there, people who cared and maybe they didn’t love him, but that was for the best. Anyone who loved Peter just ended up suffering, anyways. 

Selina’s face was unreadable for a beat. Everything about the boy sitting in front of her was strange, sad, grief-ridden, and she felt a wave of distress rush through her. It was well-founded, of course, but it didn’t help that she had only felt like this around young girls, when she fought tooth and nail to protect them from the horrors of life, from men. She pursed her lips for a moment and decided fuck it. 

“How long have you been here, Peter?” 

Peter blinked once, twice, before he slowly set down the handful of fries he had planned to stuff into his mouth. He could eat for hours, he thinks, distantly. “Two days.” He glanced out the window before he nodded, a bit more sure. “Yeah. This is my second day.” 

Selina nods slowly, understanding clicking into her mind. She smelled like vanilla, but something sour too. Peter’s eyes raked over her tight shoulders and her straightened back and decided he hated the smell of tension. It was weird, he had never been able to smell someone’s emotions before. Selina smiled at him softly and pinched the skin of her palm. No wonder Bruce hadn’t said anything. She pushed a vanilla milkshake towards him and ignored his wide eyes. 

“And…how long have you…been able to do magic?”

A fry lodged itself in Peter’s throat and he coughed in pain, surprised. He slapped his chest and cleared his throat once before he gaped at Selina with an incredulous look. He looked younger, naive in a way he shouldn’t. He reminded Selina of someone but she just couldn’t figure out who. 

Peter licked his lips and mulled over his words, wondering how much he could tell her. She was a stranger, a kind, knowing stranger who saved him from a cracked skull and death by starvation. He wanted to tell her about Wong, about the gold and green and red that had torn open in the air, about the way the world had cracked and then tried to glue itself back together without his consent. He wanted to scream about Strange, about loss and grief and how stupid wishes should never be uttered outloud. Instead, he smiled something fake and raw and decided that he couldn’t keep it all to himself. She had offered him a lifeline, the least he could do was tell her why he needed it.

“I can’t do magic,” Peter responded, quietly. Like a quiet admission wouldn’t like more. He played with the gold chain around his neck, wrapped it around his finger before he thumbed the ring. “That wasn’t me.”

Selina blinked, and nodded once. “Okay.” She poked the inside of her cheek with her tongue. Peter’s body language, while exhausted and tight, sat before her, completely honest. “So no magic, then.” 

A small, brief smile traced itself on Peter’s lips and Selina finds that she quite likes the smile on the boy. “No magic.” 

She glanced at her wrist, the small, subtle bruise that had already formed, and met those brown eyes. “But you are meta, though? Right?” 

She sees the way Peter swallows and wounds himself tightly, like he can fold it all in. She doesn’t expect his next words. 

“Batman has a no metas rule, right? I read about it briefly.” 

Selina resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Bruce could be so dramatic sometimes. Then, she frowned. Peter didn’t seem afraid but he did seem almost guilty. Like he understood how important rules and territory were and the last thing he wanted was to infringe on them. She wondered, briefly, about how many children might be secretly meta, a danger to themselves, hidden in the shadows of Gotham, simply because Batman does not want them there.

“That has more to do with the Justice League and other heroes. Less to do with teenagers who may need help.” At Peter’s unchanged, suspicious look, she smiled. “The other heroes, they mean well but they don’t understand Gotham. Batman is protective, you could say.” 

Slowly, Peter nodded and the tension in his shoulders melted away. “I understand.” And Selina would never know how much Peter truly did get it. After the spell, after Strange, Peter became almost obsessed with Queens. It was all he had, and he made it very clear to the other vigilantes that they would have to answer to him if they crossed any lines. And Peter wasn’t pulling his punches anymore. 

“So,” Selina said, a little bashful. “Are you meta?” 

Peter didn’t hesitate when he nodded. There was no point in hiding it, not when she had seen the magic and Wong and it felt good, admitting it to someone and not having to worry that their life was immediately going to end. “Not since birth, though.” Selina raised an eyebrow and tilted her head, curious. “I was fourteen when I was…when it happened.” 

“That’s young.” She tried to hide the frown behind her hand but Peter caught it anyway. 

He shrugged. “Yeah. But I managed.” 

“How old are you, Peter?”

He smiled a bit as he picked up a fry and plopped it into his mouth. “Nineteen.” 

“So, the magic then? If it wasn’t you.” 

At that, Peter’s heart fell to the pit of his stomach and he frowned. He wasn’t ready to talk about it, not yet, not when Wong’s words sliced through him consistently. He felt the green bleed into his vision a bit and when the scent around Selina grew panicked and wary, he decided that he had enough. Slowly, Peter pushed back the chair and stood, movements slow, although his blood prickled at his veins. 

“Thank you for everything, Selina, truly, but I have to go.” He moved quickly, went straight to the couch and picked up his backpack, slung it over his shoulder. He made a beeline for the window and froze when a solid, feminine hand landed on his shoulder, grip firm but not crowding. 

“Peter,” Selina said, a bit frantic. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about the magic.” Her words were soft and something warm curled inside him. He let her turn him so they were facing each other and he noticed their height difference for the first time. He wasn’t going to stay, not with her, a stranger, although kind, because he didn’t want to hurt her, didn’t want his rotten luck to crawl into this apartment and tear another apart. 

“You can stay. Okay? You can stay or I can call someone and you can stay with them. You shouldn’t be alone on the streets of Gotham, kid. You won’t survive.” Selina’s heart was breaking and she wasn’t sure why. She passed by homeless kids all the time. Passed by children who had seen too much of the world too young. But something was different about Peter and maybe it was the hollowness of his cheeks or the softness of his brown eyes that were still tinged with green but he reminded Selina so much of Maggie that—oh. Peter reminded Selina of her sister, and it almost knocked her off her feet.

Peter’s soft, pink, chapped lips lifted into a smile so soft and painful that Selina almost pulled him into a crushing hug. It was so bizarre, happening so fast, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t do anything for the other homeless kids, for any meta-child that was hiding from Batman, but she could do something for Peter and that felt like enough. 

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Peter. Okay? Just don’t go yet.” 

It sounded real, it sounded way too real and Peter was panicking. He could feel it, the way it always started in his eyes, wrapped around his vision until it spread to his chest. He was still reeling from earlier; seeing Signal and missing the taste of Spider-Man on his taste, the gold and red that wrapped around the air before Wong was in front of him, his words, those horrid, comforting, solid words that tore Peter apart and put him back together. And now, he was here, in some random apartment with some random woman who looked like May and was begging him to stay because she…what? She cared? Peter could have scoffed. Caring about Peter never came without consequence. He needed to leave, needed to be alone. He had rested, and had been fed. 

He would be fine, he’d survive. It’s all he knew how to do. 

“Please, Selina,” Peter said, soft and breathy. “I have to. Please. Thank you. But I can’t do this. I can’t be here right now.” When she didn’t move, or loosen her grip on him, he furrowed his eyebrows and hoped he looked as sorry and thankful as he felt. “I don’t want to hurt you. And you don’t know me. You already did more than you needed to.” 

At that, Selina let him go, stumbling back. His words sounded so quiet in her ears, reminiscent of Maggie, once upon a time. Peter took that opportunity and slid the window open, glancing down once at the kitten that had brushed past him. He looked up and smiled at Selina, bright and real and thankful and so full of grief she knew it would haunt her. 

“Thank you, Selina. For everything. I’ll see you around.”

Selina could only watch as he gracefully stepped through the window, like it was second nature. She stepped forward and felt like something was tugging at her, like a mistake was being made and she didn’t know who was making it. 

“Peter!” She sighed when he looked at her, patient, if a little weary. “Just… don’t be a stranger. If you need anything, come to me. I can help you.” She thought of Maggie, of what she had always wanted to tell her sister, and the words came tumbling out. “I can keep you safe. No questions asked.” 

Peter stood on the ledge of her fire escape and stared at Selina, almost reverent. The way a soldier stares at the altar, hoping to atone for his sins and beg for a sign to live on. His eyes glistened like honey and shook like grass and Selina wondered if it was magic, after all. 

Peter smiled at her and then he jumped and something between a scream and a sigh escaped her as she threw herself to the window. She stuck her head out and was only mildly disappointed when there was no trace of the teenager. She should have known but it didn’t make it any easier. 

Peter readjusted the backpack and his feet took him back to the place that had held the sharpest of his questions when he had first arrived. The same alley, ridden with crime and blood and the fear of kids who had long accepted that the monsters weren’t under their beds, but everywhere. He paced the ledges, swallowed words he never wanted to say aloud and muttered fragments to the wind until dusk turned thin and cold and unbearable. He blinked away the tears that seemed to find a permanent home at the surface and bit the inside of his cheek every time the urge to turn and go back to Selina became too strong. 

He was too close to the edge when his foot caught on some slippery stone and he felt his weight shift. Naturally, on instinct, his arm shot out and he felt the faintiest twinge of ruptured skin thin out before a web, strong and slimy, connected with cement and steadied him. 

Breathing out, Peter stared at the flexed spinneret in his arm and plucked at the thin strand, wincing when it tugged on some phantom muscle Peter wasn’t sure he had. He swallowed the bile and pressed his thumb into the muscle just above the raised skin and watched with muted fascination as the fibres around the spinneret loosened and the web fell from his skin.

He shouldered off the pack and set it beside him as he sat on the ledge. After a moment, he turned and grabbed the thin, silky strand that he had produced. He coiled it around his finger and decided that tomorrow, he’d look more into it. He could do that. Research. Something mundane. 

For now, he swung his legs and blinked until the light cleared out from his vision. His jaw hurt and his gums twinged and he reeled it in, thought about everything unsaid and everything he did say, just long enough for the poison to recede back into his gums and the fangs to disappear. 

He had slept most of the day away on Selina’s couch but a sudden wave of drowsiness hit him and he slid backwards, until he was tucked against the inner side of the ledge, hidden by view. He pulled the backpack to his chest and stared at his wrists and decided it would have to be enough. 

Either his spider-sense would warn him of danger, or he’d finally get his long-time wish, the one he had never uttered out loud and maybe he should have, maybe if he had wished for everything to end, Peter wouldn’t be here right now.

He closed his eyes and pretended like he wasn’t a child afraid of the dark.