The World, reversed

Peter Parker had read interviews with people who were unknowns and then got pulled into the acting business alongside huge names, had read the way they described the jarring intersections between normalcy and celebrity. Like, you walk out of your trailer having just called your mom and there's Cate Blanchett eating pizza, and she waves to you, and you're like oh my god, what?? And that never really goes away.

He'd always thought it was kind of bullshit. Like, sure, the first few months hanging out with the Avengers had been weird, but now he was pretty used to it. They were all just people, at the end of the day, even if some of them were robots, or blue and furry, or actual gods.

Except that Johnny Storm—who he'd spent more time with than any of the Avengers—was leaning on the wall outside his apartment, sunglasses pushed up into his windswept hair, and there was still, just for a moment, a feeling in his stomach like when he hit the nadir of a swing and started being pulled upward again. "Oh my god," he said. "What."

Johnny checked the hall around him, as if Peter's neighbors wouldn't all be glued to their peepholes trying to determine why he was here. Which Peter would also like to know, actually.

"Mind if I come in?" Johnny asked, pushing past him before Peter could answer, and Peter barely remembered to let him, putting up a split second's instinctive resistance before letting himself be knocked aside. He closed the door.

"What are you doing here?" He asked, as Johnny looked around, taking in the honestly pretty disastrous state of Peter's kitchen. His suit was in a pile of laundry in his bedroom—he'd been too beat last night to try and eat anything, thank god, or he may well have left his mask absently somewhere and then where would he be?—so unless things got really weird he was safe on that front. Just the humiliation, then, of having super-famous, super-beautiful, super-rich Johnny judge his tower of Chinese takeout cartons.

"Trust me," said Johnny, "I'd prefer not to be." He sighed. "I got this with my mail yesterday."

He canted a hip against the edge of Peter's kitchen table and fished something out of—somewhere. His ridiculously expensive white-and-gold leather jacket didn't appear to have any pockets, and his jeans were painted on. Unstable molecules must be nice as hell, Peter thought, not for the first time. No need to stash backpacks all around the city with hoodies and clean socks.

He wanted to make the observation aloud, but resisted. Peter Parker didn't know shit about unstable molecules, or for that matter about Spider-Man’s socks.

Johnny held the thing out to Peter, who took it.

It was an oversized card, longer than a standard playing card, and painted beautifully. "It's a skull," he said, then frowned, looking up at Johnny. "A death threat?"

Johnny rolled his eyes. "It's a tarot card," he explained. "God, do you hang out with anyone who isn't straight?"

Peter raised his eyebrows at him, and then kind of regretted it. Johnny’s, uh, affairs with men were barely rumors compared to his big splashy breakups with women, and probably he would think Peter was the kind to fall for tabloid bullshit when actually he was just remembering that time Johnny rambled to him for two hours on a rooftop about how he’d missed his chance to make out with Matt Bomer at a party.

Johnny stared back, then fidgeted, coughed into his fist. "Doesn’t count," he muttered, "I mean, like, witchy astrology gays. Also, I'm not sure I'd say we hang out." His nose wrinkled like he found the concept distasteful.

They did—not just in the way Johnny didn't know about, sitting side by side in the afterglow of daring heroics with muscles singing and weary, staring at the city skyline that they'd both claimed as theirs and razzing each other about the disgusting things they put on their hotdogs—but also as civilians, as Peter Parker and Johnny Storm. Not often, sure, but he could remember at least a half-dozen stupid rich-person cocktail gatherings where Peter Parker, celebrity photographer, had found himself and then, subsequently, found Johnny, and at least three where they'd ended up drinking together as things wound down, or at least Johnny would drink and Peter would pretend while keeping an eye on whatever else he was there to keep an eye on.

But it was very possible Johnny interpreted that as weird hovering or networking or something other than Peter just liking his company much more than anyone else who attended that kind of shindig.

“Which brings me back to my first question,” he said. “Why are you here? Why bring this to me?”

Johnny crossed his arms. “Flip it over.”

Peter did, and stared. On the other side of the card, where the bicycle pattern or whatever would be on a playing card, was a large, stylized spider, in muted blue and red ink.

For a moment he felt like he'd been dipped in the Hudson in midwinter, and then Johnny said, “Don't worry, I don't think he's involved in—whatever this is. I just want to talk.”

Peter looked up at him. He looked tired, the spark a little faded from his blue eyes. Spider-Man could have asked him if he were okay, and why this was bothering him so much, pressed him for details, get to work immediately to see who the hell was using his imagery to freak out one of his best friends. Spider-Man probably could have given him a hug.

Peter said: “He's not exactly at my beck and call.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Johnny muttered, glancing away as if there was suddenly something fascinating about Peter’s kitchen wall, and Peter had no time to do anything but blink about the thread of bitterness in his voice before he continued, straightening, “I tried to contact him my way but didn't have any luck, and I think—” he bit his lip. “I think it might be kind of urgent.”

Peter imagined that, imagined Johnny blazing a message across the sky and then lingering alone and answerless because Peter was sleeping off a few measly blows to the head. “I'll do what I can,” he promised, holding out the card, and then took it back. “Actually do you mind if I keep this?”

Johnny blinked at him. “Why?”

“I’d like to do some tests,” he said, “science nerd, remember, had that short-lived internship with your brother-in-law? Anyway I figure I might save Spidey some time.” He ran a hand through his hair, watching Johnny hesitate. It was surprisingly hard, seeing him slow to trust. “I’ll give it back to him when I see him, he can return it to you when you meet up.”

Johnny’s eyebrows crinkled, just a little, like he was trying to figure Peter out. Shit. Had ‘Spidey’ been too familiar? Did he call himself ‘Spidey?’ It’d been too long since he’d had to do this stupid identity thing with someone who knew him this well.

“Thank you,” Johnny said at last. “You don’t have to do this. I appreciate it.”

Peter raised a shoulder in a shrug. “Any friend of Spider-Man’s is a friend of mine.”

Johnny stared at him for a moment longer, and then sort of shook himself. “Right,” he said, “Anyway. I should go.”

“Yeah,” said Peter. “Okay.”

Johnny started to let himself out, and belatedly Peter blurted, “where should I tell him to meet you?”

Johnny waved a hand. “The usual place. He’ll know what that means. I’m just gonna—go there now, I guess, but obviously I get if it’ll take some time for you to—whatever, he can find me. He usually knows how to find me.”

It was unlike him to be so unsure, to not finish his sentences. Peter sucked at the inside of his cheek. “Right,” he said, “yeah.”

Johnny stopped in his doorway. “By the way, Parker?”

Peter—primed for his sigh of relief—straightened back up as he turned. “Uh, yeah?”

Johnny flashed him a wicked, over-the-shoulder grin. “Nice legs.”

The door clicked as Peter stared down at himself, at his grubby, faded t-shirt and bare feet and distinct lack of pants. His boxers were black, thank god, since it had been about a hundred years since he’d done any laundry, but, fuck, no wonder Johnny had been so insistent they didn’t hang out, he’d descended into Peter’s wretched hive and probably regretted every single moment they’d ever spoken to each other.

He ran a hand over his face. “How am I ever supposed to show my face in front of him again?” he asked no one, dramatically. “Oh, right, I don't usually have to.”

Really, he told himself, it was Johnny’s own fault for waking a man up at the indecent hour of 7pm.

He did do some tests, mostly making sure there weren’t any slow-acting poisons or hidden tracking devices sewn into the paper, but didn’t spend more than a few hours on it. Johnny was right. This warning, if that's even what it was, wasn’t from his scientific (straight, his brain filled in in Johnny’s mocking tone) world, and he'd have to consult with someone outside of it if he wanted to show up to meet him with any new information.

He met Julia Carpenter at a 24-hour diner on 58th and 9th. She was sitting in the back, a half-empty milkshake at her elbow, and she didn’t react when Spider-Man quietly folded himself into the booth across from her.

“Madam Web,” he greeted her, though he was sure she already knew he was there. They’d never really spent much time together, and it was still weird to try and map that name onto her face in a diner rather than onto the cryptic old woman on a spider-web throne he was used to.

“Spider-Man,” she said, inclining her head. She’d changed her hair since last he saw her, or maybe he was just used to the black and white mask and not the dark glasses.

He watched a waiter grab a menu for him, actually look at who he was, roll his eyes, and put it back. He caught his eye and waved him over. “Can I get a burger and fries, please? Medium rare, no onion.”

The waiter nodded and wandered away. Peter sat back. “Not that I mind the swing through Times Square,” he said, “but I thought you were more of a lower Manhattan girl.”

Julia propped her head on her hand. “I am,” she said. “But you’re not my first appointment tonight, and since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d kill two red birds with one stone.”

Peter raised his eyebrows at her, not that she could see it. “That explains the milkshake, and how blase everyone is being about me being here.” He cocked his head, curious. “What’d Hell’s Kitchen’s personal savior want from you?”

Julia twirled the straw in her milkshake. “We meet up periodically to bond over being the bad literary trope of going blind and getting supernatural powers in exchange.”

Peter blinked at her. “You—you're joking? That’s a joke.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s a joke.”

They sat in silence for a minute, and then Peter reached over to unzip his backpack. “Uh. So the reason that I wanted to talk to you—”

“You got a card,” Julia said, cutting him off.

Peter stopped. “No,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “I didn’t, technically. It wasn’t delivered to me.” He pulled it out slowly, watching her. “You haven’t capital-S Seen this, or you would know that. So how did you know about it at all?”

Julia leaned down and pulled something out of her purse. “It was a guess,” she said, “since earlier today I got this.”

She slid it across the table to Peter. It was a second card, this one depicting an androgynous figure dressed in harlequin-style motley, their dancing steps taking them right up to the sheer edge of a cliff.

“Huh,” Peter said. “I didn't know you still did stuff like guess.”

“All the time,” Julia muttered.

Peter flipped the card over. The back was the same as the other, a stylized, red-and-blue spider as if stolen right off his chest. “Huh,” he said again.  He ran a hand over his head. “You know, if you got one—” his burger arrived, and he paused, raising a hand in thanks to the waiter, and then resumed, voice lower, “if you have one, maybe this is a bigger thing than I thought.” He peeled off his gloves and lifted his mask enough to eat. “Did Daredevil get one? Is that why he was here?”

Julia shook her head. “Unrelated. And it’s not a bigger thing. I got one because I’m supposed to give it to you.”

Peter—shoving half his burger in his mouth in one go—made an inquiring noise.

“No, that’s not a guess.” She took a sip of her milkshake. “Trust me, you want to take it.”

Peter chewed, swallowed, sighed. “I guess you can’t tell me why.”

“I could,” said Julia. She tucked her hair behind her ear. “I always could. But it changes things.”

“For the worse, I’m guessing,” Peter said, watching her face.

“Depends. Worse for who? You? That’s,” she hesitated, “complicated to answer.”

Peter rolled his eyes, finishing his burger in smaller but very quick bites. God, when was the last time he’d eaten anything? He should start journaling, or something, just to have a record of his meals.

“For the Human Torch,” Julia said, and Peter’s attention snapped back to her, “definitely.”

Peter grabbed a napkin. “Right,” he said, cleaning the grease from his fingers and gathering up the two cards. “I guess I’ll be taking these, then.”

Julia folded her hands in front of her. “Don’t you want to know what it means?”

Peter paused.

Julia leaned forward and plucked the card she’d given him from his hand like she was cheating at Go Fish, holding it up so he could see the figure. “The Fool,” she said. “They’re like—the protagonist of the Tarot, or, conversely, maybe its subject. All the other cards—the minor and major arcana—are ways they feel about things, or things that happen to them, or people who they meets along the way who change them.” Her finger tapped the card, indicating the figure’s raised, bell-adorned foot, and the cliff beyond. “The Fool is the beginning of the personal journey. See? One more step takes them over the edge.”

“Huh,” said Peter. “Good thing Johnny can fly.”

Julia said nothing, just watching him.

He took the card back from her, popped a couple more fries in his mouth, and retrieved his wallet from his backpack—his patrol wallet, no ID, just whatever cash he’d managed to scrounge from his couch cushions. “Thank you,” he said, “for meeting me, and for the advice, and. You know.” He thumbed through his bills, counting, and winced apologetically. “I was gonna offer to get your milkshake in appreciation, but I’m a little short.”

She waved a hand in dismissal. “I’ll take the rest of your fries and call it even.”

“Thanks,” Peter said again, left his money tucked under the corner of his plate, and turned to go.

“Spider-Man,” Julia said, and he stopped, looking back at her while he pulled his gloves back on. She ran a hand up the cane propped against the table. “You’re gonna think it’s clones again,” she said. “It’s not clones.”

Peter had no idea what the hell that could mean. “Small blessings, I guess,” he said, and swung away.

+

“I’ve only ever had a tarot reading once,” said Johnny, leaning back on his elbows, the wind shifting through his hair.

Peter crouched next to him, looking at him sideways, waiting. Johnny had his legs dangling off the edge of Lady Liberty’s crown. He was still wearing his white leather jacket, but it was over his Fantastic Four uniform, and it made him look pale and washed out in the floodlights. The river hissed to itself far below them.

“Ben took me,” Johnny continued eventually, his voice shifting for a moment into a passable impression of Ben’s distinctive rumble “fer a laff. We went to this little place on the lower east side, above a basement Ethiopian restaurant. One of those places with the ‘PSYCHIC’ signs in the window. Palm readings. Whatever.” He jerked his chin at the card, lying on the rooftop between them. “Death,” he said, “was the last card she pulled, in the spot that talks about your future.”

“Geez,” Peter muttered. “Morbid. I thought these places were always supposed to give you good news so you give them more money.”

Johnny smiled, just a little, and took a breath. “The next day,” he said, “we left on the first test flight of Reed’s new experimental shuttle.”

Peter frowned. “What new—oh.” Suddenly a lot of things made sense. No wonder Johnny hadn’t been sleeping. “Oh.”

Johnny leaned over and picked up the card, then lay down on his back, holding it up against the sky. “It doesn’t mean death,” he said, “it means change. The kind of change that’s only happened to me and mine once in my whole life, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way.”

Peter shifted position, letting his legs dangle next to Johnny’s, thinking. “Maybe it’s not as big a deal this time,” he suggested. “Maybe you’re just going to lose your powers again for a bit. Or swap them around, like happened with you and Sue that one time.” He knocked a knuckle lightly on Johnny’s knee. “More invisible pranks, hey?”

Johnny shook his head. “It’s not about Sue this time, or the others.” He turned the card over and over in his hands. “I’m not convinced it’s even about me.”

“What do you mean?” Peter turned himself around, swinging his legs up and over Johnny so he could fold them under himself again, facing him.

Johnny held up the card, its stylized back to Peter. “You didn’t notice?”

“Sure,” said Peter, “but I thought—I figured whoever was sending those was using my symbols to, like, freak you out, I didn’t think it meant the card itself was about me.” He frowned. “If it’s about me, why send it to you?”

Johnny was silent for a minute, and then he said, “you said you had another piece of the puzzle.”

“Oh, right.” Peter rummaged in his backpack. “After Pete called me, I met up with my—” he hesitated. “Friend seems a little strong. But she’s the person I know who knows most about, like, future stuff. Fortune-telling. She gave me this.” He handed Johnny the card. “She said this one’s, like, the first one? The protagonist. I thought, until you explained, that we had the beginning and the end. But if Death’s not Death…”

Johnny had sat up and was frowning at the card. “She, what, just had this?”

Peter nodded. “She said she got it yesterday, and she was supposed to give it to me.”

“Who is she?” Johnny asked, still frowning. “Why did she have it? You said she’s not your friend, but are you. Like.”

It took Peter a second to figure out what he was asking. “What? No, like I said, I barely know her.”

“You don’t really have to, generally,” Johnny muttered, but he was frowning slightly less.

“Why would that matter, anyway?” Peter asked, puzzled.

Johnny waved a hand. “I’m just—trying to get all the info. If I’m right, and this is about you, we should know who around you is being drawn into it—”

“It’s not about me,” Peter insisted. “She told me so, she said solving this wouldn’t necessarily change anything for me but it would be better for you.” It wasn’t exactly what Julia said, but he figured she’d forgive him for simplifying.

Johnny blinked. “You talked to her about me?” he asked, and then, “hang on, she knows what’s going to happen and she didn’t tell you?”

Peter shrugged. “You know how it is. Future magic shit.”

Johnny sighed. “I hate magic,” he said grumpily. “Send me on a jaunt to space any time, it's just as weird but at least there are hot aliens and interesting new worlds and usually, like, dancing. It's fun. ”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology,” Peter quoted, and Johnny smacked him in the arm.

“Shut up,” he said, lips curling, “you sound like Reed.”

“I'll take that as a compliment.”

Johnny rolled his eyes, but he looked. Better. Less stressed. Less scared, which was a look rare enough on his face that it had taken Peter a while to even identify it, and he really preferred to never see it again. He leaned over to tousle his hair, to fully shift his expression into normal, flustered, annoyed-with-his-shit Johnny, and left his fingers curled at the nape of his neck, tucked between the collar of his jacket and his skin. It wasn’t the hug he’d wanted to give him earlier but it was still—something.

“So,” he said.

Johnny raised an eyebrow at him, not pushing him off or shifting away. His hair was mussed from Peter’s hand, a wild, golden tangle over one eye. “So?”

“We have two weird tarot cards with my spider on the back,” Peter recapped slowly, “one representing the beginning of something and the other representing—the middle, I guess, or the turn in some way, and no real idea where to go from here. So now...we wait?”

“Wait for what?” Johnny asked, his gaze shifting off Peter’s face.

Peter stared out across the the water at the bright lights of downtown Brooklyn. “The end, I guess.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

Peter could hear the grimace in Johnny’s voice, and he ran his thumb up and over the base of his skull. “No,” he said, “neither do I.”

+

The third card arrived the next day.

Whoever was sending them didn’t bother with the mail, or however Julia’s had arrived. The thing just popped into existence above his cereal bowl, and it was only his quick reflexes that kept it from being immediately drenched in milk.

This card depicted the same figure as the Fool, but they’d lost their motley, dressed now in a tattered cloth that was barely more than a veil. Their hands were raised, as if they were caught mid-fight, or maybe mid-dance— there’s usually dancing— and they were surrounded by a long, serpentine figure eating its own tail. There were four symbols in the four corners of the card, but he couldn’t really figure out what they were meant to represent.

It also—and he knew, vaguely, that this was important for how Tarot was read—appeared upside-down.

“It means it should be read as the opposite of what it would be normally read as,” Johnny said, “I think.”

They were in his room at the Baxter Building, about an hour after the card had appeared—just enough time for Peter to finish his cereal, shower off the last five day’s worth of sweat, and swing across town.

“Which would be helpful,” Johnny continued, “if we knew which card it is.” He was sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor, his hands loose on his knees, the card on the carpet in front of him. He looked like he’d maybe actually slept last night, comfortable in a t-shirt and jeans. There was something that itched about that, something odd—not unfamiliar, because it happened not infrequently, but perpetually odd—about being in Johnny’s bedroom in full Spider-Man gear when Johnny was so dressed down.

“It’s the World, I’m pretty sure,” said Peter, tugging his mind back to the matter at hand. “The ouroboros, the thing around the edge, it symbolizes constant regeneration, right, death and rebirth, the end and the renewal of the cycle.” At Johnny’s look, he shrugged. “I did some googling.”

“So it is the end,” Johnny said. “You have the other two?”

Peter nodded, pulling them out of his backpack, and handed them to Johnny. “It’s a pretty hopeful end,” he said, “especially compared to the symbolism of the middle. I was expecting, I don’t know, lightning strikes or something, not rebirth.”

“Maybe we’re looking at this wrong, maybe it’s not actually malicious, but someone trying to contact us about something.” Johnny lay the cards out in a triangle in front of him. “Then again, it was reversed, right? So what’s the opposite of rebirth?”

Peter frowned. “Good question. Stagnancy, maybe? Like, if the ouroboros is perpetual motion, maybe the opposite would just be not ever moving—”

It happened very, very fast. He wasn’t even watching as Johnny laid down the final card—why would he be?—but he looked over when they started glowing, and then the carpet between them flashed a strange, milky white, and then Johnny was gone.

“—forward,” Peter finished, and then his mouth caught up with his eyes. Johnny was gone. Johnny was gone, and the portal, small to begin with, was rapidly closing.

He spat a curse and threw himself bodily through it after him.

Peter woke up to darkness, shooting pain in one temple, and the unmistakable feeling of someone tying him to a chair.

“Hey,” he said, his voice catching in his throat, and tried again. “Hey! Could you maybe not?”

The rope-tension around his upper arms eased, as if the person exerting it was surprised, and he took advantage of the moment to grip the arm of the chair under his hand and wrench it upward. The wood splintered as it came free and Peter twisted, fast, swinging it in a broad arc at the place he guessed the rope-holder would have to be.

The blow stopped short. Whoever it was must have moved fast enough to catch it, because they tried to pull the makeshift weapon out of his grip. Peter resisted for a moment and then let go as abruptly as possible, dropping backward and sweeping one leg forward to trip up his opponent. He grinned in satisfaction as his shin connected with someone else’s, and then that someone said in a weirdly familiar voice, “Hey, stop, I just want to talk!”

He’d already thrown an arm out to catch whoever it was, his fingers closing around fabric, but rather than snapping his other fist forward into his assailant’s face he pushed the blindfold off, blinking at the sudden light and peeringly frowningly at—himself.

His brain was already halfway through his mental checklist of distinguishing characteristics for Ben or Kaine before he pulled it up short. It’s not clones, Julia said in his head, and he started over, cataloguing the face in front of him as new. It was, unmistakably, his face, though a version of his face spared at least a few of the multiple times he’d broken his nose. He made up for it with the scar splitting his right eyebrow, though, which combined with the speed likely meant he wasn’t just Peter Parker but also Spider-Man.

Peter relaxed, but not enough to let go. “You’re me,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” other-him said, and his gaze flickered over Peter’s shoulder and then back to his face. “Can you let go of me now?”

Peter looked around. They were in a small, nondescript, vaguely military room, a small table and the now half-destroyed chair in its center, and they weren’t alone. On the opposite side of the room, in front of the door, stood two men in military jumpsuits, hands on their guns, flanking a third figure.

Peter blinked at them, his hand loosening on other-him’s shirt. For a split second he thought it was Johnny—they had the same high cheekbones, strong jaw, blue eyes—but another blink and he realized it was Sue, her blonde hair cut short against her head, her hands shoved into a cropped black military jacket.

“Sue?” he asked, releasing other him entirely. In the corner of his eye he saw himself make a face and smooth down his t-shirt.

Sue raised an eyebrow at him. “Parker, I’m assuming.”

On her lapel, and that of the soldiers, he recognized a familiar logo. He rolled his head on his shoulders, still wary, his eyes on the men and their guns. “You’re with S.H.I.E.L.D?”

“You expected something else?” Sue asked. “And most people call me Ace.”

“You’re, uh, not much of a military woman, where I’m from,” said Peter, “though I’ve seen you corrall the kids and march them like a regiment—oh, god, I sound like I’m, like, telling you to get back in the kitchen, that is not what I’m trying to say. You’re also an extremely accomplished superheroine and you’ve saved my life probably a dozen times, it’s just that you also, you know, have a family, it’s a good family, really, uh, wonderful.” His alternate self looked dubiously sideways at him. “Shut up,” he muttered at him, and then continued, to Sue—Ace, “your family is actually why I’m here.”

She’d started relaxing a little while he talked, amusement growing in her eyes, but that made her tense immediately again. “What do you mean?”

Peter held up his hands. “Nothing bad,” he reassured her. “Not for your version of them, anyway, and if I figure this out, not to mine, either.” He bit his lip. “I’m looking for Johnny. My Johnny.”

There was probably another way he could have said that, but it was too late for it now, and for some reason it made Ace soften. She gave a tiny nod to the soldiers flanking her. “You can go,” she said, “I’ll be fine.”

They left, and Peter took the opportunity to turn on his alternate self. “What was your plan, exactly?” he needled, to get back at him for the side-eye. “Tie me to a wooden chair with ropes, when you know what—”

He stopped. Other him was staring at him, eyes hard. “What did you do?” he demanded.

Peter blinked, taken aback. “What did I do? With Johnny? Something took him—it’s not my fault—” he stopped, remembering the pattern on the back of the cards. “Or. Maybe it is. I don’t know.” He sagged, leaning back against the back of the broken chair. “I don’t know.”

Ace crossed to him, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. “Take it from the top?

“It’s not very far up, there’s not much to tell,” complained Peter, and gave them the rundown—the cards, what Julia had said (without the clone warning—he figured that had served its purpose, and if this him hadn’t had to deal with that particular debacle it was better not to confuse things), the milky white portal. “So. Then I woke up here. With a splitting headache, I might add.”

Other him had the grace to look guilty. “I maybe tried to knock you out,” he said, “but to be fair you were starting to come around before I had you tied up, and we didn’t know if you were evil or whatever.”

“Whatever,” Peter said, “decidedly whatever.” He sighed, looking at Ace. “No one saw anyone else pop in portal-style?”

She shook her head. “No reports of dimensional disturbances except the one you came through, and that closed as soon as you came out of it.”

“Damn.” He ran a hand over his face. “Well. There has to be a reason it sent me here, besides admiring your sweet haircut.” He flashed a smile he didn’t really feel at Ace, who gave him a sort of indulgent blink in return. “Let me out of here, and maybe I’ll find whatever that reason is.”

Ace hesitated, glancing at the other him, who also hesitated. “What are you going to do when you find Red—Johnny?”

“Red,” Peter repeated, then looked at Ace. “Ace. Do we all get cool new nicknames? What’s Reed, ‘Doc’?”

Ace’s mouth tightened in an extremely Sue-hiding-a-smile way. It eased something curled and fistlike in Peter’s heart. “Prof,” she said, and gave up on hiding the smile when he laughed.

Other him wasn’t laughing. He kicked Peter lightly in the shin. “Answer the question.”

Peter took a breath, meeting his own worried eyes. He had more practice at it than most, but it was still a strange feeling, looking at yourself and knowing it was both you and not you, a discrete version of yourself not under your control. Like practicing lies or hard truths in the mirror and having your reflection privately form its own opinions. “I’m going to bring him home,” he said simply, “and I’m going to beat the shit out of whoever took him away.”

Peter Parker held his gaze and smiled.

Ace raised her wrist and started hitting buttons on a futuristic-looking watch. “I can get you supplies, if you need them.” She paused, and then suggested, “a gun, if you like.”

Jesus, thought Peter, Sue Storm wants to give me a gun. He wondered if it being Johnny in danger changed that, or if there was something about this Sue, this world, that pushed that offer to the front of her mind.

He glanced at his other self, who was just watching him. “I don’t know how you do things, but I don’t kill people,” he said shortly. And if I did, I wouldn’t need a gun to do so. “Just give me back my mask and I’ll be good.”

+

Whatever alternate version of S.H.I.E.L.D this was had its headquarters in what looked, if he had to make a mostly uneducated guess, like Chicago, if Chicago sat perpetually in the eye of some kind of unmoving storm. The wind whipped around him as he swung between buildings. High above, lightning crackled. He kept one eye on it, staying lower than he usually preferred. The likelihood of him being struck, as a non-metal moving target surrounded by buildings equipped with lightning rods, was zero to none—or would have been zero to none if he hadn’t known for a fact that magic was involved. As it was, he figured it was probably hovering somewhere around 75%.

Speaking of magic. He landed on the low roof of a city hospital, because there was something flat and un-bending tucked into his costume, along one of his thighs, that he had no memory of putting here. He crouched, fishing it out, and stared at the Fool card, illuminated by the storm-light sky.

“Okay,” he said, though he wasn’t sure to what. “Okay.”

Something scratched and twitched at the edge of his awareness, in the strange extra-sensory place usually reserved for his spider-sense. It wasn’t the urgent instinct-trigger it was when someone had him in their sniper-sight, or even the creeping, buzzing dread of something being wrong. It almost felt. Nice. A gentle tugging.

He followed it, cautiously, leaping between rooftops, poised for it to shift into screaming danger-sense when whatever trap he was following it into was sprung.

Instead, he reached the edge of the world.

It wasn’t the edge of the city—the city clearly continued, he could see the beginnings of buildings and half of a tree on the street below. But the ends of them, the other half, just. Faded. Like he'd been swinging through an impossibly realistic pencil drawing and beyond here it had been erased, nothing but the same shifting whiteness that he’d glimpsed through the portal before Johnny disappeared.

And, winding away from him into the distance, a white, featureless road.

“What the hell,” he breathed.

His alternate self landed lightly, near-silently next to him, and Peter glanced at him. “You see that?”

Other Peter stared out at the nothingness, brows curled in confusion. “See what? The storm?”

Peter shook his head. “Nevermind,” he said. “I think I figured out where I'm supposed to go.” He turned to look at himself. “Here to pass on something your S.H.I.E.L.D boss forgot?”

Other him rolled his eyes. “I don’t work with S.H.I.E.L.D,” he said. “They just called me in to consult, since someone showed up with my face.”

“So I guess they know your face,” Peter observed.

His other self frowned at him slightly. “Yours don’t? Ace—your Sue, she doesn’t?”

Peter shook his head. “I play it pretty close to the chest.”

Other him shook his head. “Your Johnny must be way better at keeping secrets than my Red.”

“He doesn’t know, either,” said Peter, and pulled his mask on. He turned to look at his double, wondering if they should hug, or shake hands, or something, or if that would be weird.

Other him was staring at him, face disbelieving. “You’re dating and he doesn’t know who you are? What kind of messed up arrangement is that? He likes our face so much! How do you kiss? Doesn’t that seem unfair? Why don’t—”

“Woah, woah!” Peter said, holding up his hands. “We’re not dating!” He took a second to process. “You’re—you and your Johnny, Red, whatever, you guys are—?”

“Yeah,” other him said, as if it should have been obvious. He shook his head. “Sorry, I guess? I just—you threw yourself through a mysterious portal after him, you were so serious about finding him, and.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine being around any version of Red and not wanting to be with him.”

“I like girls,” said Peter, in the least defensive tone you could say something like that in.

His double gave him a weird look. “Okay,” he said, like he didn’t see the relevance. “Same?”

“I was engaged to Mary Jane until about eight months ago,” said Peter weakly, and then, “hang on, why am I justifying this to you? I’ve got shit to do.”

“Right,” said his double. He sounded, of all things, amused, but when Peter held out a hand he sobered, taking it and shaking it firmly. “You’ll find him,” he said, holding Peter’s eyes, “and you’ll make whoever did this pay.” He smiled, very slightly, with no warmth at all. “I know, because that’s what I’d do.”

Peter nodded at him, that certainty that was both his and not his settling onto him like a cloak, heavy and protective, and leapt down onto the strange white road.

+

The cute nicknames dimension, as Peter started referring to it (because it was less weird than “the one where Johnny and I are dating”), turned out to be the first in a long line of worlds, or—pieces of worlds, each of them containing different versions of him and people he knew, presumably, though he tried to mostly ignore them. He knew if some alternate version of him showed up and started messing with his friends he’d be pissed. Better to just sort through the world, see if he found any trace of his version of Johnny, and continue on.

The worlds lay along the road, self-enclosed and shining, like drops of dew along—well, a spiderweb. The moment Peter had settled into a feeling of city his feet took him to its edge, its streets and colors streaking and fading into nothingness around him, leaving only the road. It was almost always a city, usually some vaguely, unsettlingly familiar one, though he spent one disorienting afternoon in the suburbs, semi-hysterically peering in through random windows. He was rewarded by a brief flash of blond through a window, an impression of muscled bodies in motion—yoga?—before he was pulled away.

“Either yoga or sex,” he said, alone again on the road, and then felt very weird about having those words just—hang in the silence. There was nothing for anything to bounce off of here, no motion of air or or even of sound. It was the like the heaviest of summer nights, when darkness descended like a velvet cloak, combined with the white, untouchable quiet of the morning after snow, but with none of the temperature or smells or life of either. For someone for whom the city was like a secondary circulatory system, this level of stillness was the most unnerving thing in the world.

Outside of the world. Before The World?

He ended up talking to himself a lot, even more than he did when working his way through foiling a bank robbery or psyching himself up for a confrontation, the words providing a rhythm for his feet to follow as he endlessly walked. He talked to himself—recapping his experiences in cities, wondering about who he would meet, asking himself any of the millions of questions this whole thing raised for him without receiving anything in reply. But he also talked to other people. To May, at first, which felt fitting; his feet hurt and he was lost and he needed that touchstone of home, the first person home had ever been. He started out asking her about her life, affecting a carefree normalcy that felt further behind him at every step, but it shifted quickly into explaining—this, however he could. The words never quite seemed accurate to what he was actually doing or feeling, but the attempt to make them fit helped.

May had always been a good listener, but he felt the absence of her dry wit and wisdom in return like a stitch in his side—possibly it was a stitch in his side, emotional pain and physical symptom were a hair’s breadth apart at the best of times, and this was hardly that—and he bid her farewell at the edge of a world where Flash was a famous concert pianist. He felt somehow that she would have liked that.

He turned briefly, guiltily, to the second person who lived in his heart as home, and, just as guiltily and even more predictably, launched immediately into the darkest aspects of what he was feeling. Explaining that the space between worlds felt dead, that he felt dead while in it. That he could only properly breathe within a bubble of world. That he needed it, needed the feeling of something solid under his feet, needed the yelling mass of people and the shriek of trains and the buzz of voices around him to even feel real.

And that this wasn’t the first time he’d felt this way. That this white endless void was maybe always there, in the back of his mind, ready to swallow him if he didn’t move, if he didn’t fight, if he didn’t hurt and be hurt. Stagnancy, he’d said to Johnny, and he shivered to himself. Things grew in stagnant water. Small, insidious, poisonous things, diseases and parasites, things that worked through you, remade you from the inside out.

She knew, was the thing. She’d always known him, had always known him, been able to see him better than anyone else. Telling her felt like he was wasting her time and his own, so he pressed a kiss to imaginary Mary Jane’s cheek and let her go.

After that his cast of listeners rotated quickly. He told stupid jokes to Harry, proposed half-formed metaphysical theories to Reed, pitched joking articles to Jonah. But the longer he went on the more he felt like it was a tightrope, not a road, that he walked; no room for a wrong foot-fall, less for companions on either side. And the more he was certain that, lost in the mist below, something waited.

+

The one where Johnny was the sun was the worst.

Before he got to the one where Johnny was the sun he would have said one of the ones where Johnny was dead was the worst, would have said it was absolutely worst to have blundered into the parlor of the Invisible Lady and accidentally asked about her murdered brother, or the one where he'd tracked a skeletal, paper-skin-clinging-to-robotic-frame Reed down into an absolute underground metropolis of a lab and accidentally demanded to see his dead husband, but.

But the one where Johnny was the sun was the worst because it was the one where he could see him, but not save him.

He thought about it three, four, five worlds on. Johnny's slender form nothing more than an impossible silhouette inside an impossible brightness. A children's connect-the-dots constellation of swimming afterimages whenever Peter closed his eyes.

“What do you think it means,” Gwen asked, “that he’s the one you came after?”

Peter stared at her. She wasn’t the first Gwen he’d found, but she was the first he’d managed to make himself speak to, the first who’d known him. She lived in a city of light—New York, she’d said when he’d asked her the name of it, of course, and the only thing he could think to say in response was mine’s got more rats—and seemed made of light herself, somehow, in a way as far from Johnny-as-sun as it could get. Her light was silken, moony, but with something spark-shock-bright to it, too. Like a crescent-shaped sign outside a St Mark’s bar, cool white neon running just under the glass of her hair and skin.

In his less cogent moments, when the reality he'd left behind felt as porous as the one he was surrounded by, he thought that this is what his Gwen would have looked like, too, if he’d let her.

“What do you mean?” he asked. They were in her library, sitting by the window; Peter had spent the night here, quite literally, curled up on the too-short window seat with one arm hanging off. He’d had to massage all the blood back into it this morning. He didn’t mind, though. It was better than sleeping on the side of the semi-real road he’d been following, on something his eyes told him was ground but his mind was certain could just kind of decide not to be at any moment.

Gwen pulled her hair over her shoulder, looking out across the spires of her home. “You told me your version of me was gone,” she said. “Your version of MJ, too, right?”

Peter nodded. “In different—different, uh, kinds of gone.” If death and Los Angeles were actually different, he wanted to say. His Gwen would have laughed. This Gwen—he didn't know. He didn't like not knowing.

“And now Johnny,” said Gwen. “But you came after him.

“I” said Peter, shifting, “first of all.” He stopped. You're dead. She was dead and it was his fault and neither of those knives in his chest moved anymore, no longer shoved themselves deeper in, his flesh calcified around them, but neither could they be removed. “I couldn't. For you.”

Gwen cocked her head at him. “Death is just another room,” she said.

Peter squinted at her. “Are you quoting someone, or is this you a poet?”

“It’s William Blake,” said Gwen, unimpressed. “It also happens to be literal fact. Dr. Richards took a ship there last week. Much easier to get there than it was for you to get here, probably.”

“You know Reed?” Peter asked. “Do you—this Johnny, is he—?”

Gwen smiled at him, odd, sideways. “He’s fine,” she said. “I don’t know him, exactly, but we could track him down if you want.”

Peter swallowed, thinking about that. He did want. He wanted to hug Johnny, even some alternate Johnny, talk with him, reassure him. But there was no mechanism by which that reassurance would go where it needed to, and he was worried that he’d made finding Johnny too much his lodestone, that at this point if he found any version of him at all whatever preternatural strength was letting him keep going, keep putting one foot in front of the other, might leave him. He might just decide this was good enough, that maybe staying here wouldn’t be so bad. He could just ignore the road, ignore the knowledge that for him, the world ended a few blocks away, if Johnny was here. If Johnny was here and Gwen was alive.

“No,” he said eventually. “No, that's okay.”

“You're avoiding the question,” Gwen pointed out. “I'm not trying to guilt you. If you're anything like my version of you I'm sure you do that great on your own. I'm just presenting evidence, and trying to get you to form a hypothesis.”

Peter sighed and made himself actually think about the question. There was a marked difference, he wanted to argue, between someone dying and someone leaving and someone being taken. When someone died you got revenge. When someone left you let them go. When someone was taken, you—well, you leapt after them. But Gwen was right. Death, while certainly more permanent and impermeable than Los Angeles, was by no means always final, and as for MJ he couldn’t exactly use expensive plane tickets as an excuse when he knew several people with personal jets and several more with personal teleporters.

It's not like he hadn’t thought about it. Hell, for about two months it had been all he thought about. But it had felt. Desperate, possessive, insecure, vulnerable, all of the above. And anyway Mary Jane had made a choice, and what kind of asshole would he be if he tried to take that away from her?

Johnny wasn’t here by choice. Johnny was here—there, wherever, because someone had targeted him, and he'd come to Peter for help.

“Because he needs me,” he said finally. “He's the one who needs me.”

Gwen just watched him, her cat’s eyes thoughtful, for a long time.

He found Norman Osborne pinning a battered and thin but unmistakable Harry to the wall of a collapsed building by his throat, and the sketched-in white of the new world vanished into red.

His web hit Norman’s face, only partially covering his mouth and nose—a shame—and he wrenched on it hard, making Norman’s head snap unnaturally sideways and pulling him bodily off Harry, who dropped into the rubble with a kind of ragged “ wh,” that Peter felt in his throat and his knees and the pit of his stomach. He released his web line, leaping onto the remains of a roof beam, away from Harry, diverting the Goblin’s attention. “Get the hell away from him.”

Norman clawed ineffectually at the web covering half his face. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, glaring at Peter with his visible eye, yellowed, malevolent. “Some new upstart hero has a problem with the way I treat my son? ” He gave up, letting the shreds of web hang off him like lichen off the twisted green crags of his face. “Harry, tell your would-be rescuer that we’re fine here and we don’t appreciate his interference. Tell him what we do to people who interfere.”

In his peripheral vision Peter could see Harry push himself up out of the rubble, one of his hands clutching his side. “He's going to kill you,” he said quietly, dully.

Peter’s jaw was clenched so tight it ached. “No, he's not, Harry,” he said firmly. “He can't. He’s not strong enough.” He finally looked at Harry, forcing himself to meet his eyes, to take in the bruising around his throat. “He’s not strong enough for a lot of things.”

Norman laughed, piercing and familiar, but Peter realized through his anger that it almost glanced off him, his brain refusing to let it bounce around his skull. Norman lobbed a pumpkin grenade at him but he dodged easily, leading him in a merry chase, making Norman follow him through the wreckage of the building, always away from Harry. The glider was slower than he remembered, Norman’s movement less agile, less cunning. It wasn’t the back and forth, the trading of blows, wasn’t the deadly match of wits as much as bodies he was used to. He didn’t have to strategize, he could just move, and Norman had no way to anticipate him.

The blood in his veins fizzed. This Goblin didn’t know him, didn't know what his strength could do, hadn't planned for him, couldn’t get into his head. This Goblin couldn’t fucking touch him.

He used the green smoke of another miss as a cover to swing both of his feet directly into Osborne’s chest. He slammed him into the ground, hearing with satisfaction the cracking gasp of breath leaving him, and kneeled immediately on the joints of his shoulders, not letting him wriggle free before driving his fist into his face, once, twice, again, again.

Harry’s eyes, so huge above his sunken cheeks. Living, breathing, luminescent Gwen in his recent memory so easily over-written by the older, silent Gwen he’d truly known.

A hand wrapped around his wrist. “Hey, now,” someone said behind him, “I think that's enough, don't you?”

Peter pulled away, spinning, all his rage shifting heart-stoppingly into disbelief. “Johnny? ”

The man standing in front of him was undoubtedly Johnny Storm, younger than his, and dressed in a blue-and-white classic Fantastic Four suit. Peter kind of missed it, he thought with the part of his brain not completely overwhelmed. It really brought out his eyes.

His eyes—blue and beautiful and blank, with no hint of recognition in them whatsoever. “Sorry, have we met, or does my reputation just precede me?”

Peter managed to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “I—” he said, and then, “You're—this is going to sound weird, but can I give you a hug?”

Not-his-Johnny blinked at him. “Uh, sure.”

Peter pulled him in, trying not to be too weird about it, trying not to think about the shape of him in his arms or breathe him in too obviously. It made it easier that Johnny stayed stiff and careful and wrong, and Peter didn’t prolong it, just giving him a hard, meaningful squeeze and letting him go.

It helped, some, even as it made everything worse. “Thank you,” he said, “you have no idea how much I thought I needed that.”

He looked around. The Green Goblin’s face was a mass of blood and purpling bruises. There was no sign of Harry, but behind Johnny he could see Reed and Ben lifting rubble, and Sue protecting a group of kids as she ushered them underneath a section of precarious wall. Something in Peter ached at the sight, for himself and for Johnny, his-Johnny, wherever he was. How much he must miss them. How much his-Johnny’s family must miss him.

“I should be thanking you,” this Johnny said, pulling Peter’s gaze back to his face, to the rueful curl of his mouth. God, Peter missed him. “The Goblin’s been a thorn in our side for years, and you took him down in about five minutes.” His gaze swept Peter’s body, his lashes lifting slow in a way that Peter recognized with a start was distinctly appreciative. “Who are you, masked man?”

Peter shook his head, his face hot beneath his mask. “Let's not confuse things further. Just call me a concerned citizen, trying to make my neighborhood a little safer.” He cracked his neck and muttered, “Every version of my neighborhood.”

Johnny narrowed his eyes. “You know, your voice sounds familiar.”

“Does it?” Peter asked. “Wow, something in the water in this version of things must make you guys way more perceptive.” He hesitated. “You know a guy named Peter Parker? Probably a photographer or a journalist or something? Or a scientist I guess, maybe an engineer—”

“Parker?” Johnny asked, blinking, “you mean the news anchor? Yeah, pretty sure like everyone knows him.”

“Oh,” said Peter, surprised, though that explained the voice familiarity. If Johnny was younger he was also probably younger. Good on this him, moving up in the world. “Sweet. You should, uh, go say hi. Buy him a hotdog sometime. I've a hunch that the two of you would get along.”

Johnny frowned at him. “What—”

“Anyway, gotta go,” Peter said hurriedly, “things to do, people to save.” He let himself stare, just for a last long moment, at Johnny’s face, memorizing it so he could keep it with him. The arch of his brow, the curve of his full lips. “It was really, really nice to see you.”

“Okay,” said this Johnny, baffled.

Peter started to motion towards swinging away, and then stopped. “Oh, and check up on the kid, would you?”

“Kid?” asked Johnny, his expression an almost-familiar one, almost the face he made when he was equal parts amused and bemused at Peter’s rapid code- and topic-switching. Almost.

“The Goblin was choking a kid,” said Peter, aware he was probably fucking with timelines or destinies or whatever and not really able to make himself care. “His son. Harry. Make sure he’s okay? I mean, he’s not, but.”

Johnny’s eyes were wide. “He was choking his own son?”

“Not everyone’s as lucky in their family as you,” Peter said quietly, stopping himself from moving toward him again. That gravity he’d been afraid of, the one he’d avoided by not meeting the Johnny of Gwen’s world—it was real, pulling him in, making him drift closer, speak softer. Despite the weird discomfort of their hug, despite his youth, despite—everything, there was something about being around Johnny, any Johnny, that made the white stagnant nothingness waiting for him a few blocks away feel like a swiftly fading dream.

Johnny was looking at him again.

He shook himself. “I was leaving,” he said quickly. “I—bye.”

“Bye,” said Johnny behind him, and Peter could feel his eyes on him as he swung away.

He set back out on the road feeling more urgent but also better; he suspected it was the fight. The gift of being able to lay into someone who deserved it, given to him by this weird endless string of worlds as a kind of stress relief. He wondered (aloud, to an imagined Reed) if that was a mechanism of whatever weird magical web he was caught in, if somehow these worlds were formed in response to his subconscious needs.

That theory lasted right up until it dropped him in the middle of a warehouse while Dr. Doom was blowing it up.

It was his shortest stint in a world by far. One moment he was alighting on the roof of a building, about to look around and get his bearings; the next it was collapsing beneath him with a great groaning that could only come,Peter knew from long experience, from several tons of concrete and load-bearing steel giving up on holding their own weight. He flung out a hand, webbing snapping into the side of a neighboring building, and had exactly enough time to catch sight of familiar armored shoulders under a familiar cloak—a figure, watching him—before a wave of roaring, blistering pressure and flame flung him free of his web line and of the world both.

+

Mary Jane picked him up in a red convertible mustang. She found him collapsed on the side of the road, his suit in tatters, struggling to even roll over enough to cough up the ash in his mouth. The rest of the world formed around her as she bent to help him, a skyline sketching itself into being from beyond her shoulders like spreading wings. “Jesus, Tiger,” she said. “What happened to you?”

Suffering serious injuries approximately once a month since you were fifteen made you pretty good at self-diagnosis, and Peter was pretty sure one of his ribs had at least fractured when he hit the not-quite-ground. He fisted one hand against whatever was supporting him, tried to stand up, failed, and listed over again, hovering right at the dark grey edge of consciousness.

“Fractured a rib, probably,” he said, in lieu of trying to move again. “Explosion. Doom.”

It took him until he was propped painfully across the back seat of her car to wonder which, if any, of those words meant anything to her. This her.

She'd called him Tiger. “You know me,” he managed, through a sandpaper throat.

“Yeah,” said MJ. “Sort of. Not this you.” She glanced at him in the rearview and for the first time he saw her rather than just being aware of her, knowing her by her presence, comfortable immediately in its rightness. Her hair was cut short, a pixie cut, and she had sunglasses perched on top of her head. There was a line between her eyebrows as she glanced at him again. She looked - older than he thought of her being. Or maybe just more tired.

She was wearing a striped tank top, her long arms tanned in the faintly-buzzing summer world now fully formed around them, and she was perfect. “You’re perfect,” he said, and then said, “I may have a concussion.”

She laughed. “Way to backhand that compliment.”

“No,” he said, “I meant it.” He stared upward at a sky blue, so blue, blue as Gwen’s eyes. Or Johnny’s. “I just maybe wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”

“Good,” MJ, leaning one of her perfect arms on the back of the passenger seat. “I’d hate to think my husband would fall into another world and start telling other versions of me I’m perfect.” She paused. “Or maybe I wouldn’t? Maybe it’s nice to think all versions of you think that of all versions of me.”

It was nice, Peter thought, but didn’t say so. Husband. He waited for the word to hit, for the blow to land, but it never did, really, just settled like a gentle but heavy weight on the center of his chest. “I’d ask my version of you, but we’re not exactly. Talking much, right now.”

MJ switched lanes to swerve around an SUV that—Peter now noticed—appeared to be hovering. “Oh?” she asked, voice carefully light. “Why not?”

Peter sighed, running a hand over his face. “You know, Gwen asked me the same thing.”

MJ’s knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “Gwen,” she echoed, “you—you have a Gwen, where you're from?”

Peter tried to laugh, for some reason, but thankfully his mouth knew what a hideous, inappropriate thing that would be and turned it into a kind of choking sigh. “No,” he said, “not anymore.”

The tension in her hands eased, but only the way soldiers did, waiting and expectant rather than relaxed. “Me, neither,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and she said, “so am I,” but his was apology and hers was sympathy and that, too, was so familiar it made his eyes prickle hot.

She took him to her apartment—their apartment, they were married , though it was empty when they got there. The city--her city--swarmed with hovering vehicles, and Peter even saw a teen girl hover-skating casually sideways along a wall, her steps unerring even as she argued with someone on some kind of headset. MJ’s mustang settled gently to the street, and she helped him up a single painful step into a narrow, sort-of-elevator that shifted sideways and upward and forward through various walls until it spat them out into a set of rooms only half-unpacked. Or maybe recently being re-packed, but he didn’t like that option as much.

“I assumed you wouldn’t want to go to a hospital,” said MJ, leaving him propped awkwardly against the edge of the bed. The grey had receded from his vision. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. Or maybe something about changing worlds had helped. He filed both options away as stuff to talk to himself about once he was alone again, and then immediately hated that that was an impulse he even had.

MJ went to the closet and pulled out a long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans that definitely belonged to other-him, laying them out on the bed for him, and then rummaged around in a box for a minute, coming out with something that looked like a roll of medical tape, except there were small metal circles woven into it.

“You seem very...prepared,” Peter said tactfully, thinking Jesus, how often do you have to patch me up?

“You always have this stuff around,” she said, “but also, yes, I was expecting you.”

Peter accepted the water she gave him gratefully. “How?”

MJ unwound a generous piece of tape, snapping it off with her teeth. “My you,” she said, and pushed his shoulder gently back so she had access to his side. He helped, gingerly, not exactly stripping so much as just allowing the ragged remains of his costume fall away from his body. MJ smoothed the tape over his ribs with medical precision. “He said he was warned by—” her lips quirked, “—’acquaintance, not a friend, the person who knows most about fortune-telling and future stuff’.”

Peter shook his head, carefully not watching the graceful, gentle motion of her hands over his skin. “If she keeps doing me these solids, she’s well on her way to friend status. Tell your husband to buy her a milkshake, there’s a diner she likes on 58th and 9th.”

“She didn’t give him specifics, though,” said MJ. “Can I ask what you’re trying to do, or would that information break reality or something?”

There was warmth spreading out from the tape where she crossed it over his ribs, and in its wake blessed numbing relief. Peter raised a hand, running it through his hair. “I’m looking for Johnny Storm. My Johnny,” he clarified, and realized he’d been calling him that in his head so often it didn’t really sound weird anymore.

MJ’s hands stopped, and she looked up at him. “Oh, Peter,” she said, her voice so full of sympathy it made his heart hurt for himself, even though he didn't know why. She’d always had that quality—a kind of outwardness of emotion, an aggressive empathy, where he felt what she felt for him before he understood what he was feeling in the first place.

He swallowed his mouthful of water. “What,” he managed.

“I know how much you loved him,” said MJ softly.

“Loved,” echoed Peter. He did, of course he loved Johnny, everyone loved Johnny, but there was such a depth of sorrow in her voice.

She winced. “Love, sorry,” she corrected herself, laying in a final strip of tape, like it was the past tense he'd been asking about, “sorry, we've just had this conversation—me and my you, and. I'm just glad that you have a chance to get him back.” She went to replace the tape in the box where she’d gotten it.

Peter carefully pulled on the jeans she’d laid out for him, saying nothing, feeling—odd. Displaced. Which made sense, he literally was in a place not his own, but it was worse than usual, worse than the days—weeks?—he’d been forging through these worlds. Maybe it was being here in a space so close to what he could have had, so that this felt less like a sideways momentum and more a forward, but a forward he had no right to. A forward he’d fucked up.

Maybe. We’ve had this conversation. Me and my you. Maybe it was something else entirely.

Mary Jane looked at him sideways. “What’s up?”

Peter shook his head, pulling the t-shirt over his head. “Nothing,” he said, and then, because that never worked, “you ever feel like every you but you has something figured out?”

MJ raised an eyebrow. “I’m not often in the position to compare notes with myself.”

“Sounds nice,” Peter sighed. “Oh, to be you.”

Mary Jane crossed to him, smoothing the shirt across his shoulders. “You know if you were me you’d still have to be married to you.”

Peter wrinkled his nose, his hands settling automatically at her waist. “Yeah, I couldn’t stand that much of myself.”

Mary Jane smirked at him. “There are few who can.”

“Only the very strongest,” he said, meaning it, and leaned in to kiss her.

They both realized what he was doing at approximately the same time, and both abruptly turned aside. MJ’s soft cheek brushed his nose, and he took his hands off her waist and then had no idea what to do with them, leaving them flexing, uncomfortable, hanging in mid air. Mary Jane patted his shoulders but didn’t quite move away, like she was taking a moment to breathe.

“Sorry,” he muttered, half into her hair. “Sorry, I wasn’t even thinking—”

“I know,” she said, and finally stepped out from between his hands. “It’s—you’re very like him. It wasn’t just you.”

He watched her move across her space, away from him. Stretching away from him, unspooling.

He licked his lips. “Your Johnny,” he said. “He’s dead?”

MJ didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to—it was written in the line of her stiff spine.

“It’s okay,” he said softly, though it wasn’t. Not for her. Not for her him, who had to live in this world he was just passing through, had to live with that loss every day. Had to deal with the reality he refused to even consider possible. Had to face the reality of—of failure, the same failure he could feel looming, hovering around him. A reality where he gave up . He pulled himself back from the treacherous edge of that thought and up into horrible, ill-advised humor: “He’s dead a lot. Unusually so, statistically speaking. A lot of the time it seems like it was pretty heroic, the self-sacrificing bas—”

“If I drove back the way we came,” MJ interrupted, as if she hadn’t been listening at all, “back along the road I found you on. Could I find her? Gwen?”

Peter opened his mouth to say no, and stopped. He didn’t actually know that was true. He didn’t actually know how this whole thing worked, and he especially didn’t know how it worked for someone who wasn’t him. “Maybe,” he said instead. If anyone could defy the rules of this place, it was her. “I don’t know.”

He picked up what remained of his tights, and found something tucked in his waistband. It was the Fool card: singed, battered, but whole. Acting on sudden impulse, he held it out to her. “Hey. Here.”

She frowned at it, reached out a hand to brush a finger along its edge. “What is it?”

“It’s a tarot card,” Peter said, “it’s—it’s been kind of a guide, for me to find him. Maybe it would do the same thing for you.”

She raised her eyes to him. “You’re sure? What if you still need it?”

“I don’t,” Peter said, thought he wasn’t sure how he knew. “I’m getting close.” He smiled at her, a strange grief coiling up into his throat. “Consider it—something of an apology.”

The little line was still between her brows. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” she said. “Not to me.”

Peter raised an eyebrow at her. “Haven’t I?” he asked, gesturing around at the dark apartment, her stuff, at ‘his’ stuff, at how much of the latter was the stuff still in boxes. “Where am I, then?”

She raised an eyebrow back, mirroring him. “Where are you ever?” she murmured, but she took the card. 

He pulled her into hug her, and she returned it. "Good luck," he said, fierce, against her temple.

He strapped his web-shooters to the insides of his wrists and left the rest of his costume behind. He hadn’t been lying. He could feel it, now that he could think through the pain, now that he could see anything but Mary Jane. That same warm itch at the edge of his extra-sense, tugging at him like the wind through a subway tunnel, just in the wake of a train. The road that remained was a short one.

By the time he reached the edge of the world, Death had manifested quietly, tucked into the back pocket of his borrowed jeans.

As soon as he stepped into the next world he knew he was in the right place.

There was a feeling, like the pressure-pop of your ears when you pass through the subway tunnel under the river, and the tugging itch at his spider-sense abruptly vanished as soon as the world finished coalescing. But mostly he knew because of the huge, towering structure in front of him, hung all over with fluttering, blue and red pennants, their pattern the exact same spider as the back of the card in his pocket, as the shredded costume he'd left behind.

“Alright,” he murmured to no one, “let’s do this.”

The structure facing him looked like a combination between medieval fortress and a high-tech lab. The whole thing was built of a strange, dark-grey material, maybe stone, maybe metal, maybe something in between.  There were small inverted-dome security cameras over the wrought-iron gates, and his spider-sense—back to being its usual non-magic self, now that he’d reached the end of this journey—told him he was just barely outside of their range of vision, and it was closing in on him rapidly. He took a running leap off the small hill he was on, landing against the smooth side of the fortress wall, and scrambled up and over it.

He spent the next while crawling carefully around the fortress complex while the sky lightened from steel grey to bone-white above him. It was morning, somehow, again; day and night had become so genuinely relative that Peter thought maybe it had been weeks since he’d leapt through the portal in the Baxter building and maybe it had only been hours and maybe neither of those terms even meant anything anywhere but there, to anyone but him and the ones left behind.

Maybe Johnny would know. He could ask when he found him.

The complex was laid out strangely, like it had once been several unrelated buildings but someone with a vaguely medieval aesthetic had built it out and put the high wall around the whole thing. There were more security cameras here and there, and Peter alternated between trying to steer clear of their arcs of vision and webbing them up. He crossed over the main, rectangular building of the complex multiple times, doubling back on himself so no one would be able to track him based on trajectory, and then landed lightly outside a nondescript-looking door, broke the lock, and stepped inside.

For a moment he stood in darkness, and then two full rows of humanoid robots buzzed to pale blue, crackling life on either side of him.

“Oh,” he said. “Shit.”

Trust him to choose a door at random and it leading to the fucking garrison. He backflipped onto the wall above the door, then flipped further so he was sticking to the ceiling, grabbing the first two ‘bots heads and slamming them into each other as hard as he could. The metal crunched satisfyingly, and Peter crawled rapidly along the ceiling to the other end of the lines before any of the others could get a bead on him with their undoubtedly powerful energy or electric whips or guns or—whatever.

His brain gathered details about them as he dropped down by the far door. They were vaguely reminiscent of Doombots in design, if the design of Doombots weren’t largely concerned with looking, well, like Doom, and were more concerned with looking creepy as hell. Their joints were thin, which was useful—he tore an arm off one and jabbed it through the skull of the next one down the row—and their limbs almost skeletal, their heads too big for their necks and their eyes—shining the aforementioned pale blue—too huge for their humanoid faces, huge and luminous like the eyes of undersea fish.

“Someone took all that Death imagery a little too far,” he said, picking one up bodily over his head. “It doesn’t even mean death, guys! What, your architect doesn’t have any witchy gay friends?”

He threw the robot as hard as he could into the milling crowd, crushing several and knocking more down, broke the lock on the door behind him, spun through it, and webbed it shut. Then, taking a breath, he continued down the hall.

He took the same tactic inside as he had out, avoiding and blacking out cameras as he turned corners and scurried through rooms, except this time he was conscious of leaving himself an exit. He’d promised his other self revenge, and he did intend to get it, but now that he was here his focus had narrowed to Johnny—finding him, making sure he was safe, making sure he was—

No. He was alive. There was no other option.

The corridor he was in emptied out into a large lab. There was a central pillar with a computer console in its base, and the walls were blank in a way that implied to Peter’s mind they were actually screens. There were several workbenches with robot-parts scattered across them, giving the whole place a simultaneously macabre and impossibly sterile feeling.

And above him, curled waiting in the corner, hanging, arms splayed, was Otto Octavius.

Or. Almost Otto Octavius. The figure swaying between the arms was thin, and the metal mask over his face, like his robot guards, was more reminiscent of Doom than anything Otto had ever crafted, but the arms themselves were unmistakable, and Peter would recognize the scrape of their clawed hands grasping for purchase on metal anywhere. There were six, though. Six arms and that mocking symbol blazoned across his chest, beneath what was presumably a kind of superfluous lab coat. What the hell was this?

“I've been expecting you,” Not-Otto said, his voice crackling through the Doom-mask in a way that made it impossible to recognize.

“Really?” shot back Peter, keeping him in his peripheral vision but scanning the room for any sign of Johnny. Expecting him, in his experience, usually meant setting him up to die, and while he wasn’t going to rule out confronting this asshole, he certainly wasn’t going to do it where he had all of the advantage and most of it was unknown. “I hadn’t guessed by the show you’re putting on.”

There was an unnaturally dark corner of the room, past Not-Otto’s shoulder. It was the darkness of depth, as if the corner extended further back than it should. Peter glanced at Not-Otto again, then at the double doors below him, which doubtless would open soon and release more of those knock-off Doombots. “You should probably get on with the part where you reveal who you are and what your master plan is,” he said, trying to shift subtly to a point where he had a clear swing-arc to the dark corner. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“I don’t think so,” said Not-Otto. “I have no reason to reveal anything to you. I do have a word of advice, however, before you die, that may shed some light on why you’re here.”

Peter rolled his fist on his wrist, stepping to his left a pace, another half-pace. There. That should be the right angle. “Oh yeah?” he called. “What’s that?”

He leapt on the final word, shooting a webline at the ceiling, between two of Not-Otto’s arms, then another, and another, swinging and zig-zagging through space past him. Not-Otto lashed out at him, but Peter kicked the claw out of the way and landed just below the dark space. He’d been right—there was an opening in the corner of the ceiling, just barely big enough for him to slip through.

He wriggled into it immediately, expecting Not-Otto to tear into his own ceiling to drag him out again, but there was no scrape of metal behind him, no shriek of rage. Just that unreadable voice, cool and unbothered, echoing after him. Continuing the conversation.

“It's not enough to be needed, Peter Parker. You also have to need.”

He frowned, scraping himself along in the too-small vent, but had no time to puzzle out what the hell that was supposed to mean because the vent dropped him right into another room full of robots. He took a blow to the shoulder before tying most of them into knots. They really weren’t much individually, but there were so god damn many of them, and they were fast.

He worked his way deeper into the building, and finally broke into another, much smaller lab, this one a square room with a bank of computers against one wall. Where the other lab had felt like a theatre set for a confrontation, the workshop of an extremely dramatic and excessive man, this one was an actual workspace. It smelled stale, like someone had been eating in here at some point relatively recently, and there were pictures on the small desk in the corner. It felt almost familiar.

He had no time for examining the personal effects in the room, though, because all of his attention was taken up by the huge, grey-white cocoon suspended in the corner of the room.

He could hear the skittering footsteps of more robots from the hall behind him.

Working quickly, he tore the cocoon down from the ceiling and laid it carefully on the floor, his hands suddenly shaking uncontrollably.

“I don't even want to know where this stuff comes from,” he muttered, past his panic, pulling the strands apart to reveal the form inside. His heart was pounding, his brain cycling through a million reasons Johnny had to be alive, from that’s how spiders keep their prey to this guy wouldn’t have gone through this trouble to steal him just to kill him once he had him, and then the strands of web gave away to blond, and he was lifting Johnny out of the cocoon and into his arms.

He was breathing, slow and shallow, and Peter shook him, heart in his mouth. “Johnny,” he said, and it came out thick, strangled. “Johnny. Hey.”

Johnny stirred, muzzily, artificially-induced sleep still clinging to him. He blinked up at Peter, blue eyes clearing, dazed confusion giving way, slowly, to recognition—Peter could have cried with relief—and then to sharper, different confusion. His lips parted. “Peter Parker?”

Peter stared at him, his own realization hitting him like a hammer. Johnny didn’t know. Johnny—this Johnny, his Johnny—didn’t know.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to tell him, all of his reasons for not telling vanishing like smoke in a breeze. He wanted, he knew suddenly, his gaze catching on the flicker of Johnny’s tongue across his lips as he pulled himself together, to kiss him. To feel that he was alive, to feel his breath against his mouth and taste how goddamn warm and real he was.

It wasn’t—a revelation, exactly, because it wasn’t exactly new. It was like something deep that had just now surfaced, hanging iridescent for a moment as an idea before it popped into sudden, visceral longing. He cleared his throat, filing that away to examine. Later. Maybe. “Really no time to explain, flamebrain,” he said, and picked up one of Johnny’s arms, using it as a guide as he slung him over his shoulders.

“Jesus,” said Johnny, startled, “strong,” and Peter did laugh, and then he started running.

It took until he’d started working his way up a wall with one palm and his toes, leaving two of the robotic guards buzzing angrily on the floor behind them, but he actually felt the moment Johnny figured it out. His whole body tensed, muscle suddenly apparent against both Peter’s shoulder and the steadying palm he had braced against the small of Johnny’s back, and then he started squirming.

Peter hadn’t really been aware that one could squirm angrily, but this definitely qualified. Johnny still seemed pretty out of it, but Peter thought maybe he felt at least one half-hearted fist-blow against his spine. He tightened his grip. “I know we have a lot to talk about,” he said, trying to sound serious but still feeling stupidly light, “but I will drop you if you don’t quit it.”

Johnny curled himself around—impressively, Peter had to admit, and found it was both easy and surprisingly nice to remember what his abs looked like—so he could grab Peter’s other shoulder and snap in his ear, “When you reach the next horizontal surface I'm going to kill you.”

Peter grinned. “Seems to disincentivize me finding one, huh?” he replied, and Johnny let out a surprised yelp against his ear as he threw himself backward into open air.

He swung them swiftly along the long, high-ceilinged corridors, his mind half on the warm weight over his shoulders, half keeping track of the path of the security cameras he’d blocked on his way here. He did eventually find a place to set Johnny down—a narrow ledge above a hallway swarming with robots—and Johnny immediately scrambled away from him, steadying himself against the wall, and glared. “What the hell,” he demanded. “What—you’re—what is going on? ”

Peter opened his mouth, then closed it again, unable to think of how to put any of it in a way that made sense. “I,” he said, and then, “I don’t—do we really have to do this now?” He gestured at the robots, who thankfully didn’t seem to be able to fly or anything, but were threatening to reach them just by sheer volume and clambering up each others’ bodies in a wave, World War Z-style. “Can you at least melt some of these guys down into sludge before you do the same to me?”

Johnny didn’t stop glaring at him, but he snapped, “Fine,” and curled his fists the way he did sometimes before he flamed on.

Nothing happened.

Peter raised his eyebrows at him. “Shit, that’s not good.”

Johnny raised his hands, opening and closing his fists. “What’s—what’s wrong with me?” His glare had shifted into a kind of panicked shock. “Where are we? What is this?”

Peter sighed and leaned down to grab the robot that was trying to clamber onto their ledge by the face and throw it hard into the opposite wall. “Long version will have to wait,” he said apologetically. “Short version: I’m Spider-Man, someone kidnapped you into an alternate universe, I followed you, and apparently they did something to you to take your powers away.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “And now we have to figure out how to get the hell out of here.”

Johnny took a breath like he was centering himself. “You’re Spider-Man,” he stated, like he was telling Peter.

“Yeah,” said Peter apologetically. He twitched back his sleeves to show his web-shooters. “See?”

Johnny crossed his arms, his gaze flickering from Peter’s wrists to his face to his wrists again. “ You’re Spider-Man. Peter Parker is Spider-Man.”

“You need proof?” Peter asked, maybe a little teasing. “I mean, other than the fact that I have his stuff, and all his powers.”

Johnny stared at him for another long minute, during which Peter threw another robot into the wall. “I really don’t mean to interrupt your processing time,” he said, “but I really think it’s the getting out of here part of this that needs our attention right now.”

Johnny shook himself. “I. Right. Okay. Sure. Fine.” He glanced around, taking in their surroundings for maybe for the first time. “Can’t you just take us out the way you came in?”

“Nope,” said Peter, “there are way too many robots the way I came in.” He looked around, too. The ledge they were on led to a corner, where it met a kind of catwalk or causeway that ran out across a warehouse floor filled with inactive industrial machines. At the end of the causeway was a thick steel door with no discernible handle or lock.

“Hey,” said Johnny, and Peter turned, weirdly gratified to see he’d come closer so he could point upward. “Look.”

Above them, barely visible through a complex pattern of pipes, was a set of switches. They both walked over to stand on the causeway beneath it, staring upward.

“How the fuck are we supposed to reach that?” Johnny complained. “That’s ridiculously impractical. Also, god, I can’t believe you were right about my fucking powers going away.”

“Did I say that?” Peter asked, surprised.

Johnny gave him a weird look. “Yeah, like, yesterday? You were like ‘maybe it isn’t so bad this time, maybe you’ll just lose your powers for a bit’, or whatever.”

“Oh,” said Peter and then burst out laughing. When he subsided, Johnny was staring at him again, like maybe he thought he did need more proof, or maybe he’d decided Peter Parker and Spider-Man were both crazy. “Sorry,” Peter said, wiping his eyes, “it’s just. It is fucking wild that that was yesterday for you.”

Johnny’s brows wrinkled. “Was it not yesterday for you? Is this a time thing also—”

“I don’t know,” Peter said, because he didn’t. God, how long had it been since he'd laughed like that? “I missed you."

“I,” Johnny said, and then stopped. He looked taken aback, like it had been the last thing he expected to hear.

Peter rushed ahead, not letting either of them linger. There’d—there’d be time for that shit. He’d make time. “Anyway,” he said loudly, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about your powers, I got this.”

He squinted at the switches, plotting his course through the tangle, and then leapt upward, clinging to a pipe, sliding sideways between two more, hanging for a minute upside down to figure out his next move. His borrowed shirt had come untucked, falling down around his face, and he just shook it off, letting it drop to the causeway next to Johnny before pulling himself up to sit on the pipe below the switches. He examined them for a minute, shrugged, and then flipped them each in turn.

The first one made some kind of horrible grinding sound, the second made something hiss, and the third—blessedly—opened the door. Peter flipped the others off again, then swung himself down through the pipes.

Once he was on the causeway he turned to see Johnny staring at him, expression still a little dazed. He frowned. “Hey, you good?”

Johnny blinked himself out of it. “I, yeah, I'm fine. Watching you do that out of costume is. Disorienting.”

Peter reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “Sorry, pal. This isn’t exactly my ideal way to work either.”

Johnny huffed a laugh, soft and a little dark but real, and Peter grinned at him. “Let's go.”

He started down the causeway, but Johnny lingered. “Uh,” he said, “your shirt?”

Peter waved a dismissive hand. “Something tells me that's not the last time I'll have to do some stupid acrobatics,” he said.  “Besides, it’s not my shirt.”

Johnny caught up with him, looking at him sideways. “Whose shirt is it?”

“Mary Jane’s,” said Peter. “Though. Actually. Probably it’s from a different me? So technically that guy’s, or if you want to deal with transitive properties of alternate selves, it’s back around to being mine again.” He squinted. “Have I mentioned this is an alternate universe thing? I’ve been through like. Twenty.” Twenty-two, he thought, trying to remember his brief research, what felt like years ago but apparently maybe had been yesterday. Twenty-two cards in a tarot deck. Right?

“Twenty,” echoed Johnny, staring at him. “You fought through twenty universes to reach me?”

Peter shrugged. “Only a few of them I had to actually fight through,” he said. “Mostly I just passed through looking for you. Only stayed a couple of hours in most of them.” Or a couple of seconds, in the case of the Doomsplosion world.

Johnny seemed to think about that for a while, walking silently next to him, and finally he asked, “How was it? Seeing her?”

Peter stretched, his shoulders popping. “Weird,” he said, “because. Because it was her, but it wasn’t the her that I hurt, if that makes sense, and I wasn’t the Peter who hurt her.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “Though I think her version of me still—I don’t know.” He smiled sideways at Johnny. “He must not have fucked up too bad, since she married him.”

“Jesus,” muttered Johnny, not smiling back, “I’m sorry.”

Peter raised an eyebrow at him. “I was about to say it was nice.”

Johnny looked incredulous. “You think it’s nice to see a version of yourself married to your ex-fiancee?” He shook his head. “I—I’m trying to imagine a worse world to pop into than one where I get to have everything I want, but it’s not actually me, and I can’t stay.”

“I don’t know,” said Peter, “I think I prefer a world where I’m still trying to get what I want.” He knocked a shoulder into Johnny’s, not liking the way his face had darkened. “You know me, I’m not great with contentment.”

“Do I?” asked Johnny, voice unreadable, and he sped up, leading Peter—presumably at random—down the long stairs at the end of the causeway and out a door into a courtyard of steel and stone.

It was empty, The sun was high, now, but still cool and somewhat distant. It glanced off a round pool at the courtyard’s center, making it shine brilliant and silver. Peter webbed the door shut behind them and looked around. “I think we’re okay for now,” he said. “Why don’t you try and get some of that cocoon crap off you? I have a theory that it’s what’s dampening your powers.”

“Of course you’ve got a theory,” Johnny muttered. “You’ve been here all of six minutes, and you’ve already got a theory.” But he crossed to the pool anyway, and Peter slowly wandered after him, doing a last check of the perimeter.

“Actually I’ve been here for about an hour,” Peter said, “probably, time is fake. Smashed up some robots and ran into your captor before I found you.”

That made Johnny turn. “My captor? Who is it?”

"You didn't meet him?" Peter asked, surprised.

Johnny shook his head. "I don't remember anything since the Baxter Building."

“I’m not sure who he is.” Peter sat down on the flagstones. “He looked like a kind of cross between Doc Ock and Doom, but more spidery.” He wrinkled his nose. “And he talked like my therapist."

Johnny narrowed his eyes. “You’ve never had a therapist.”

Peter snorted. “Guilty as charged. See? Told you you know me.”

Johnny ran his hands up his own neck, maybe trying to work out some knots from his long sleep. Or short sleep. Whatever. Sleep. “You take him out?”

Peter shook his head. “My priority is getting you out of here.” He pulled his knees up to his chest. “Though now that I think about it I actually have no idea how to get home, so maybe we do go back there and kick the shit out of him once you’ve got your mojo back.”

“You don’t know how to get us back? ” Johnny demanded. “What exactly was your plan? Pop on through twenty-odd worlds, find me, and wait for another portal to just show up?”

“Hey,” said Peter mildly, “I had about five seconds to think when you vanished, it seemed like a better idea than just letting the portal close behind you.”

Johnny ran his hands over his face, muttering something presumably insulting, and Peter rolled his eyes, settling his elbows on his knees. The stone was cold and hard under him and there was wind rustling through what sounded like trees outside the fortress walls. As surreal as this place was, it also felt— more real, somehow, than anywhere he’d been in ages. He wasn’t waiting for it to fade. He wasn’t storing things away to talk to himself about on the road. He didn’t have to go back on the road, couldn’t even feel that pressing, waiting whiteness. Everything he could feel, he would feel until he chose not to. None of it would be ripped away slowly and numbingly, like the worst band-aid removal ever.

He realized with a start he was hungry. When was the last time he’d been hungry? He’d had water at MJ’s. Had he eaten anything? Had he eaten anything since the diner with Julia, all the way back home?

Johnny stripped off his shirt and waded into the pool, bending down to cup water in his hands and pour it over his head. The pale sunlight caught in drops of water as they traced down the muscles of his back, and Peter felt that same swooping nervousness in the pit of his stomach, the feeling he'd attributed—nonsensically, he now realized—to some lingering awe over Johnny’s fame. “Oh,” he said. “That explains a lot.”

Johnny looked at him over his shoulder, his lashes dark with water. “What’s up?”

Peter shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, “I'm just an idiot.”

Johnny turned back to the pool to wash his arms and chest. “No argument from me.”

Peter propped his head on his knee to watch him. Now that he was aware of what was up with this feeling, it was kind of nice to indulge it, especially here where feelings were real. He felt, somewhere in the back of his mind, like he should be pissed off. Like his other self and Mary Jane had been right. Like he’d had to be led here by the hand. But at least if he had to admit any two people were right about him, himself and the woman he once thought he was going to marry were the top of the list.

He wondered when he’d stopped thinking of her as the woman he was going to marry. Wondered if maybe it had been in the back of her car, staring up at a sky as blue as Johnny’s eyes.

“Spidey—Peter,” said Johnny, and grimaced, “sorry, it’s just—it’s fucking weird, reconciling two people I know into—the same fucking person, into. You.”

Peter arched a brow at him. “You want me to wear a paper bag on my head or something til you get used to it?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Johnny shot back. “Maybe I need Peter Parker to leave for a bit so I can talk to my best friend.”

Peter had thought about this scenario a lot, what would happen if Johnny found out. Much as he tried to be careful, he’d known it was possible, even likely, that it would happen sometime. All in all, this was going better than it could have—Johnny was still speaking to him, for one thing, though he wondered if he would be if they weren’t trapped on some kind of weird alien plane without Johnny’s powers—but it still ached, the idea that if he could, Johnny would cut part of him off, go back to not knowing.

He wrapped an arm around his knees, pulling them closer. “Hate to break it to you, Firefly,” he said, a little bitterly, “but Peter Parker is your best friend. All the shit you don't like about him is shit you don't like about Spider-Man, too.” He shrugged, his movement a little stilted. “I’m just better at hiding those bits when I, you know. Have a mask.”

Something must have shown in his face or his voice because Johnny deflated immediately, crossing to him, crouching so they were on the same level. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I didn’t. I'm sorry.”

Peter shrugged again. He didn’t like the way Johnny was looking at him, didn’t like this whole off-kilter space. He’d spent so goddamn long looking for him, missing him, and now here he was and he was resisting snapping into place next to Peter where he belonged, and he didn’t exactly blame him but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

He raised a hand to Johnny’s face, sealing it over his eyes, and said in his best cheerful Spidey voice, “here, maybe this will help.”

Johnny tried to shift backward, startled, but Peter stilled him with his other hand on his shoulder. “I did mean it,” he said, taking a breath and dropping the false cheer. “I get that it’s weird. I get that everything is pretty fucking weird, right now. Whatever you need to help with the cognitive dissonance, it’s cool.” He smiled, though Johnny couldn’t see it. “Call me whatever you want.”

For a second he thought Johnny might fight him off, but after a second he relaxed. “Christ,” he muttered. “I—fine.” He shifted, but not uncomfortably, just settling so he was sitting rather than crouching. “Weirdly, it does kind of help.”

Peter could feel the sweep his eyelashes against his palm. The tip of his thumb was hovering above Johnny’s cheek, where he knew there would be a dimple if he smiled. Mouth dry, he prompted, “You were saying something.”

Johnny licked his lips. Peter bit his. It hadn’t occurred to him how much putting a hand over Johnny’s eyes would frame his stupid, beautiful, newly distracting mouth.

“I was gonna ask why you didn’t tell me,” Johnny said, and Peter stared out across the pool so he could actually concentrate on what he was saying. “Why, you know, it took one of the weirdest experiences of my life and you being forced into it for me to know who you are.”

Peter sighed, trying to pull in all the scattered justifications behind a lie that now seemed impossible to justify. “At first—like, really first, years ago first, it was because I didn’t know if I could trust you. After I figured out I could, it. I thought—Peter Parker doesn’t exactly live glamorously. “ Johnny started to say something, but Peter tightened the fingers on his shoulder, and he shut up. “Once I realized you probably wouldn’t care about that, I just. I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want it to change things. With us.”

Johnny’s mouth curled sideways in a sort of disbelieving smirk, his dimple appearing right beneath Peter’s thumb like he knew it would. Briefly, guilty, he let the pad of his finger brush over it, quick enough to be an accident.

“You thought it would change things?” Johnny asked, sounding incredulous.

Peter frowned. “Yeah, and it has,” he pointed out. “Clearly connecting up my ugly mug to your pal Spidey has left you with some mixed feelings—”

That made Johnny twist away from him. He grabbed Peter’s wrist, tugging his hand away from his face, and Peter let him so he could glare. “Peter. You cannot possibly think you’re unattractive. You were engaged to a supermodel— ”

“The ability to attract beautiful women is the most enduring mystery of my adult life,” acknowledged Peter. “It’s the only silver lining to the Parker luck, maybe.”

Johnny rolled his eyes. “Bad news, there is no silver lining. You’re gorgeous, and pretending otherwise is an insult to me and basically everyone else you know.” He was still holding Peter’s wrist absently, fingers loose. “The things I don’t like about Peter Parker—”

“Me,” Peter interjected, though about three quarters of his brain was caught up in Johnny ‘hottest superhero alive, in more ways than one’ Storm calling him gorgeous.

Johnny ignored him. “The things I don’t like about Peter Parker have nothing to do with his face. They’re—you know what, you were right, they’re the same things I didn’t like about Spider-Man—”

“Also me,” said Peter helpfully.

“Shut up,” Johnny snapped, suddenly realizing he was still holding Peter’s wrist and kind of throwing it back at him. “I’m trying to make a point!”

Peter shut up, holding up his hands in surrender.

“The stuff I didn’t like about you when we first met—the first time, as Spider-Man, it's. The same stuff I didn’t like when I met you again, as Peter Parker. Which. That seems really obvious when I say it out loud but it also means, like, it doesn’t matter?”

Peter squinted at him. “I’m not following.”

Johnny sighed, standing up, and began to pace back and forth in front of the pool. “When we first met, I thought you were arrogant, and reckless, and flippant, and always shoving your nose into things where it didn’t belong.”

“I knew I made a bad first impression,” said Peter, watching him pace, “but ouch.”

“Let me finish,” said Johnny. “I—you know, then I got to know you, and I realized the arrogance was mostly earned confidence, the recklessness—well, still recklessness, but the brave kind, and usually pretty strategic, and the nosiness was you actually caring about people, trying to figure out how to help them. Like, all people, individually. It’s kind of weird.”

Peter leaned back on his hands, touched. “Oh,” he said. “And the flippancy?”

Johnny shot him a grin. “That stayed annoying, you’re flip as hell.”

Peter inclined his head, conceding the point.

“So then I meet Peter Parker, and he’s got all the same damn flaws, and I probably should have figured it out but I didn’t. Only with him, like, I didn’t have the chance to find out what’s behind the annoying shit, you know? We didn't spend enough time together. So it stays annoying. Except now I do know what's behind it.” He stopped pacing, turning to face Peter. “Because it’s you.”

Peter ran a hand through his hair, looking up at him, at the surprisingly earnest blue of his eyes.

“I'm saying,” said Johnny, holding his gaze, “that you don't have to worry, because the reasons I disliked Peter Parker are actually the reasons I—” his gaze flickered, so quick Peter thought he might have imagined it, “—really like you. Not flaws but just. The surface-level bits of your virtues, misunderstood, and I, I understand now.”

He offered Peter his hand, and Peter let him haul him up and into a hug. “Thank you,” he muttered against Peter’s ear. “For saving me. You. Both of you. You.”

Peter clung to him, hard, burying his face against Johnny’s bare shoulder. It was so different than his stilted hug with the other Johnny, standing over other-Norman’s unconscious body. He felt almost physically rooted to the earth by his relief, by this moment to breathe, to understand Johnny as his and alive and knowing and not leaving, understand him against his palms and his chest and his forehead. Johnny's skin was so warm, and getting warmer the longer he held on.

“God,” Peter said, finally releasing him, “you're hot.”

Johnny quirked a brow at him. “Look, I know I showed my hand a minute ago but don't feel obligated to return the favor—”

“I'm not,” said Peter, “that's not—I mean yes, obviously, but I meant the other kind.” He didn’t know if he was blushing or just hyper-aware of where his face had been pressed to Johnny’s heating skin. Both were pretty embarrassing. “Uh. See what happens when you try to flame on?”

Johnny took a breath, closing his eyes, and Peter stepped back, expecting the bright, roaring burst he was used to. Instead, Johnny turned pale gold, the color emanating from the center of his chest outward slowly, like a winter sunrise. Flame—flickering, transparent, candle-flame rather than forest fire—licked along the muscles of his outstretched arms, the line of his jaw. Like his skin, it was mostly golden, but here and there it shaded blue or orange or just the barest hint of red.

Slowly, Johnny opened his eyes, and Peter swallowed hard at the expression in them. People used ‘smoldering’ enough that it had become a kind of joke, a Blue Steel-esque way to describe masculine desire, but he had the wild thought that if there were an ur-expression that had given rise to the modern use, it was this: there was a banked fire behind Johnny’s eyes, a roaring power struggling and failing to be free, a white-hot need to consume kept caged and sluggish.

“Oh,” said Peter. “Fuck.”

Johnny’s gaze met his just for a second, hungry in a way that made Peter’s brain blank out for a second, and then he sagged, his eyelids fluttering and the flame along his skin flickering and fading. He passed a hand across his face. “Sorry,” he muttered, as if he’d done anything but look at Peter like he wanted to eat him alive. As if he’d somehow failed. “I can feel it coming back, but it’s slow, this stuff dampening it, it’s.” His hands flexed. “It sucks.”

It was so—simple, prosaic, from someone who had looked like that, that Peter barked a startled laugh, then immediately felt bad about it. “Hey,” he said, when Johnny gave him a miserable look. “Sorry, hey. Those flames still burn hot, right?”

Johnny blinked at him. “Yes?”

Peter nodded. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go beat up the guy who brought us here until he tells us how to get home.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, “okay,” and smiled at him, slow, and Peter felt his spine straighten, his shoulders square, as if in response.

The other side of the courtyard wasn’t as featureless as it had first appeared. What had looked like a blank expanse of stone wall had a long, almost invisible seam running down the center of it. Peter pressed his fingertips into the stone on either side and hauled, and after a moment of straining the seam split, the two halves of the wall grinding outward, swinging open toward them into the courtyard.

Beyond the hidden door was a dark, still space; no automatic, motion-detecting lighting, no waiting robotic bodies swarming to life. Just gently-shifting dust-motes through pale sunlight and stale, musty air. Shelves lined three of the walls, to their left was a long work bench with tools strewn haphazard and sloppy across it, and in the center of the room was a blockish shape covered in canvas.

“A car?” Johnny asked, quizzical, from over Peter’s shoulder.

Peter glanced at the shadowed back corners of the room again, but there was no buzzing danger sense in his head. He crossed to the shape and pulled off the tarp. And stopped, blinking.

It was, in fact, a car, sort of—something like but not quite a Jeep. It had no roof or doors to speak of, just a windshield and support bar between the front and back seats, and it was painted with blue and red web-patterns.

“ Your car,” said Johnny, even more confused. “The—our car, the car we built. For that thing with Corona Motors—didn’t it end up in the Hudson—”

“Not this version of it,” said Peter, and turned on his heel, stalking past Johnny back across the courtyard and wrenching open the door he’d previously webbed shut.

“Hey,” said Johnny, “Pete—what’re you—”

A whole pile of robots fell out of the newly-opened doorway, as if they’d been pressing forward in a wave, and Peter slammed a fist down through—he couldn’t tell, but at least three of them, because he got weird glowy robot guts up to his elbows. He shook them off, felt an extra-sensory twitch, and threw himself sideways, heat crackling in the air against his ear. For a moment he thought Johnny’d gotten his powers back, but when he glanced at him he was still in normal-form, though his hands were wreathed in pale flame and he was quite handily using it to heat the chest of one of the robots and stretch it glowingly, painfully out of shape, like it was made of taffy, or whatever Reed technically was.

He look another look around and saw a different version of robot, this one shorter, squatter, its head dominated by a single pale blue eye, which was now glowing brighter and brighter, and fixed—he followed its gaze —on Johnny.

“Right,” he said, and flung himself forward, grabbing Johnny bodily around the waist and swinging him up onto his shoulder again. This time he saw the shot as it barely missed them, a hissing beam of pale blue light that left a smoking hole in the courtyard floor.

“Thanks for riding with Parker Airlines,” he said, kind of to Johnny’s ass, abandoning the door as a lost cause and swinging them up onto the roof again. It would take a minute for the laser-bot to crawl its way outside and re-position, and at that point he could drop down and find another door. “We hope you enjoy your flight.”

“Could use more warning,” Johnny grumbled, sounding a little breathless. “I almost set you on fire, I thought one of the ‘bots was tackling me.”

Peter put him down. “Next time I’ll let you get shot with lasers so that our takeoff will be less bumpy,” he said, but it came out mild. His brain was still back in that dusty secret garage, puzzling over that car that clearly hadn’t been touched in years. So much of this place was so staged. The huge, clean lab, the endless robots that, lasers notwithstanding, weren’t so much a threat as an aesthetic. So much of this place was a performance, for them, for him , but that?

He stared out across the roofs, frowning.

“Um,” said Johnny.

Peter blinked, and realized he’d set him down the way he did with people he was used to carrying while swinging, mostly MJ, or Felicia, or people he’d just saved from danger: protective, close, his hands curled loose around Johnny’s hips. Johnny was looking at him sort of sideways, and he hadn’t moved away.

“Oh, sorry,” said Peter, and then took a step back, but filed that away somewhere in his brain, a secondary puzzle piece to fit with others after the more pressing ‘how do we not die twenty-two dimensions away from home’ picture had been completed. Johnny hadn’t moved away.

Johnny took a little breath and ran a hand through his hair, and Peter filed that away, too; was it nervousness? Why? “Where are we going?” Johnny asked. “What’s with the car, what did you figure out?”

Peter shook his head, moving to the edge of the roof and trying to overlay his understanding of the inside of the building onto what he could see of the outside, what he’d determined in his surveillance earlier. “Nothing, yet,” he said, “but I have a hunch. I want to go back to that lab where he kept you. It was—personal, there were pictures. This guy—he knows me.” Unlike other-Norman. “I don’t like him having that advantage.”

Johnny nodded. “If—if that car exists here, where’s here’s you? Does that mean this guy knows a version of you, a, a version of me?” He stopped. “I mean, like, I guess that’s an obvious question, why would he kidnap me if he didn’t know me, but also why would he kidnap me me if he had a me here to kidnap? Seems a little convoluted, right?”

Peter licked his lips. “Maybe he doesn’t have a you anymore,” he said, and dropped down onto a lower roof.

It took a little trial and error—opening a door, punching a robot, peering down a hall, muttering, webbing it shut again—but they eventually managed to locate the small lab with the remains of the cocoon in the corner.

He peered at the photographs tacked up onto the pinboard on one wall. Some of them were damaged, smudged and bubbled like they’d been saved from a fire, but the figures in them were still recognizable: Ben, clearly the Thing in this universe, too; Sue, her hair short but not military-short like it was in the world where she went by Ace, just a softer sort of pixie cut, and a scruffy, longer-haired Reed, grey at his temples and his arms stretched out long as he handed something to—Doom. Doom, just as Peter knew him, working alongside Reed and Sue in a lab—he squinted at the smoke-streaked background—that looked a whole lot like this one.

He had a moment of satisfaction that he’d correctly identified the provenance of the robots before turning his eyes to the next photograph in the row and coming, as was becoming annoyingly regular, face to face with himself.

He looked older than Peter himself was, more lines around his eyes. He was wearing a lab coat, no costume, no facial scars, and he was smiling, not a staged photo smile but mid-laugh, at something or someone just out of frame. It was a sideways, private sort of smile, one that Peter knew more from feeling it on his face than seeing it in action.

“You know this is never going to work.”

The voice was Johnny’s, but it was tinny, recorded, and Johnny himself stepped back from where he’d been examining the bank of computers along the other wall of the room with a surprised, “whoa.”

Peter came over to join him, staring at the screens as they flickered to life (possibly in response to Johnny’s touch? He filed that away under ‘open questions’). He saw the clean, high-ceilinged lab he’d seen not-Otto in earlier, without the deconstructed robot garnish. Instead, there was a machine at its center, something that looked kind of like a 3D printer combined with one of Reed’s short-range teleporters, except there were glowing blue sigils set—not exactly into, they didn’t appear to be etched or otherwise affecting the surface of the metal at all—but sort of against its surface. Doom—stripped down and unassuming in a way Peter’d never seen him, still masked and armored but with a lab coat rather than his voluminous cloak, and maybe different armor, too, something sleeker, that moved easier?—was drawing the last of the sigils at the base of the machine with a glowing fingertip.

“I don’t see why not,” came Reed’s baritone from behind wherever the camera was resting, and he walked into frame, also in a lab coat. “Shall I quote Arthur C. Clarke again? Or would that make you throw something at me and maybe damage the thing before we even begin, making your naysaying into self-fulfilling prophecy?”

Johnny, next to Peter, snorted. “Told you you sounded like him,” he muttered.

On the screen, another Johnny also snorted, following Reed out from behind the camera. He, like the Peter in the picture, seemed older; Peter wasn’t sure he would be able to pinpoint   how he knew—he could only see Johnny’s back and the back of his head—but it was there: something about the way he was moving, maybe, a confidence, a steadier energy.

“I prefer to think of magic and science as related but separate fields of study,” said Doom, straightening up, the light fading from his fingertips. “Though I understand why you must cling to the belief that mastering science will eventually give you access to a power you cannot otherwise seem to grasp.”

It was an insult that the Dr. Doom Peter was familiar with would absolutely have delivered, but the tone could not have been more different; here it was teasing, almost—no, openly affectionate, and the Johnny in the footage laughed. “Shots fired,” he said, amused, and then, “speaking of which, are we firing this baby up so you can prove me wrong, or…?”

Reed waved a hand. “Yes, yes.”

Johnny turned to the camera. “You’re recording, right Pete?”

“Yeah, I got Victor’s good burn and everything,” said Peter’s own voice. “Sue, you ready?”

Just for a moment there was a weird, soap-bubble distortion around the machine before the footage seemed to reassert itself; Peter guessed that Sue had placed an invisible force-field bubble around it as an added precaution. “All set,” said Sue, from somewhere—either she was off-camera or invisible herself, who could say—and then Doom did something complicated in the air with his hands, and the machine whirred, then blazed, to life.

The screen whited out. When it faded back in, everyone was gathered close—Peter and Sue and Ben included, as if drawn in by whatever this thing had printed, or teleported in, or whatever it actually did. Floating in midair in the central column of the machine, was a slightly-too-long, flat, rectangular object.

“The cards,” said Peter, frowning. “We—they made the cards?”

Apparently doing so was a success, because Johnny whooped and slung an arm around Ben, who tousled his hair. Reed caught Sue’s hand and brought to to his lips, then reached out his other to Doom.

Peter glanced at his Johnny. He was staring at his family on the screen, the white-blue light flickering against his face. He swallowed. “How long did you say it had been for you?”

“I'm not sure,” Peter admitted. “My internal clock got kind of messed up dropping into an afternoon here and a morning there.” He reached out to touch Johnny’s shoulder, trying to convey wordless reassurance. “Could’ve just been a couple days.”

“Maybe,” said Johnny. “Or maybe time works differently in here and we'll have been gone for years.” He was frowning. “I didn’t even leave them a note.”

Peter almost laughed at him. “You know that's usually the kidnapper’s job, right, not usually the victim’s responsibility—”

Johnny’s frown sharpened. “Peter.”

“And anyway, this is magic stuff. It's got rules. We do this right, complete whatever we're supposed to complete, and we'll be returned as if we never even—”

“Peter!”

Peter blinked. “What?”

Johnny pointed at the screen.

The video footage had skipped. Reed and Sue and Doom and Johnny and Ben were all gone, and the viewpoint different. Rather than a camera set up to record an experiment, this looked like security footage from the cameras Peter had been making a mental map of as he moved through the complex. The camera was set high above the desk they were standing at now. The other him, lab coat discarded and feet propped up next to his keyboard, was drinking something out of a styrofoam cup, an empty packet of chips next to his elbow.

A blur of motion. Something small, moving past the camera. It vanished, and then reappeared, skittering down the wall above the desk. The light in the video was dim, so color was hard to assess, but the camera focused, sharpened on the moving object, and Peter recognized it—a small ball on many long, spindly legs, just barely recognizably a burnished gold. An Octobot. A very specific Octobot.

The bot dropped, silent, and landed right down the back of other-him’s shirt. Peter suppressed a sudden and visceral urge to shout a warning.

He closed his eyes, just for a second, just long enough to breathe in, and then out, and then opened them again, pausing the video footage with an instinctive touch to the touchpad.

“He took your body,” said Johnny, stunned. “Like our version did—”

“No.” Peter shook his head. He tapped a few keys on the keyboard, pulling up a closer image of his frozen face. “It's different. I think—I think I'm still in there.”

Johnny blinked at him. “You what?”

“I thought there was something weird going on, like two people were running this scheme, not quite in tandem. I thought it was maybe Otto and Doom, but—” he searched the face frozen on the screen. “I’ve changed my mind.”

He let the video play again, then set it to double speed, taking in the images as they flashed across the screen. It was disjointed, footage spliced together over days, maybe weeks. Otto-him working on something, his posture hunched, defensive, angry, none of the open, playful familial scenes they’d been watching before the—well, for lack of a better word, possession. Sue and Reed and Doom and even Ben orbited around him, their own postures confused, then growingly suspicious, hostile. And Johnny—Johnny appeared most, leaning hips-canted against his desk, laughing, reaching out to him, and when it was just them, the others off somewhere else, Otto-Peter’s demeanor changed, relaxed, some of the previous joy returning.

“Yeah,” said Peter quietly. “I’m still in there.”

Johnny looked at him sideways. “How can you tell?”

Peter raised his eyebrows at him. “You can’t?” he asked, and then moved on before Johnny could try to figure out what that meant too hard. “I think he’s—the me that’s in there, I think he brought me here.”

“What do you mean?” Johnny asked.

Peter didn’t answer, still watching the security footage. The joy didn’t last, and neither did this world’s Johnny’s openness and laughter. Flashes of shouting, fights. Slowly everyone but Otto-Peter disappeared from the screen, and Peter was about to turn it off when Johnny reappeared, carrying a cardboard box, which he unceremoniously dropped on the floor and then just as unceremoniously set on fire with an angry wave of his hand. It took Otto-Peter a second to realize what was happening, and then he shouted something, and a familiar, many-segmented arm shot out from whatever he’d been working on in the corner of the room, grabbing the box and semi-effectively tamping out the flames.

Peter glanced at the photos on the wall, singed and damaged as they were. “Right,” he said. “Okay.”

Johnny sighed, crossing his arms. “You gonna parlor-scene me any time soon, Agatha Christie?”

Peter rolled his eyes at him. “You were right.”

“Oh,” said Johnny, taken aback. “That’s nice to hear. About what?”

“About it being unnecessarily complicated,” said Peter. “And about how he could just kidnap a you from here.”

“But you said he didn’t have one,” said Johnny.

“It was speculation,” Peter said. I’m too used to you being dead, Peter didn’t say. “I think he had to take a you who had, well. A me attached.”

Johnny just stared at him blankly and waited.

Peter licked his lips, piecing it together. “I don’t think he’s fully in charge. Otto, that is, Ock. I think I’m still in there somewhere, and maybe he knows and maybe he doesn’t but I’m influencing the stuff he does. Otto decides to kidnap you, but rather than go for the you he knows—the you who is already pissed at him, and surrounded by your whole family who is pissed at him, including apparently Doom—”

“Yeah, that was,” said Johnny, and then stopped, and Peter almost wanted to derail the whole thing and press because that was what, but if he stopped now he’d never be able to get back on track.

He redirected himself with an effort. “So he goes for a different you. One who doesn’t know what to expect. And I bet he thinks he came up with this plan all by his lonesome, and I bet he thinks the cards are just technology with some style attached—but me, the me inside his head, that me knows they’re not, that me knows they’ve got all that—destiny magic or whatever as well as the dimension-travel stuff, right?”

Johnny’s eyes were narrowed. “Right,” he said, cautious.

“So,” said Peter, excited as the shape of it came together. “So, Otto sends out the cards, thinking they’re just a cool new interdimensional kidnapping tool, but actually they end up where I—this me—chose them to, where I—me me—could use them to follow you and get you back. He’s being sabotaged from inside his own head.”

“Okay,” said Johnny slowly. “Okay. But why did Otto need to kidnap me in the first place?”

It's not enough to be needed, Peter Parker. You also have to need.

Peter licked his lips, his eyes finding his own picture again, sketching in the unseen recipient of his smile. Maybe Otto didn’t.

“I think you might be a bargaining chip,” he said slowly. “Those robots out there—they're Doom’s tech, but I think Otto’s been replicating them, making an arsenal. He's using the tech left behind when everyone left to build an army. I think—” he took a breath. “Other me convinced Otto he would shut up and let him stage whatever coup he's planning. In exchange for you.”

“As a trick?” Johnny asked. “To get another version of him here, one who would save me and in the process find out about what happened to him?”

Maybe, Peter thought. Maybe not. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s the theory.”

Johnny sighed, running his hands over his face. “This is making my head hurt,” he said. “I liked the plan better when it just involved beating someone up.”

“Oh, that’s still basically the plan,” said Peter. “I did kind of promise myself I’d beat the shit out of whoever took you, I don’t see why the fact that’s it’s kind of me changes that.” He crossed to the door and pulled it open.

Johnny raised his eyebrows. “When you say promised yourself, do you mean promised yourself, or like….promised yourself?”

“Both,” said Peter, and held out a hand. “You coming?”

+

He lead Johnny quietly to the door he’d first used to enter the central lab, avoiding as many cameras as possible on the way, then opened it and yelled, “Hey, ugly!”

Not-Otto—not-Otto-not-Peter-but-somewhere-between-or-maybe-really both, to really be accurate, but that was just unwieldy—was coiled in the corner of the room, his body completely obscured beneath the mass of his coiled arms like an octopus tucked into an undersea crevice, or a spider in some hidden-away hole, waiting. He uncoiled, his sharp-clawed arms finding purchase in dents and cracks they’d already put in the walls, pulling his almost inert body after them. Slowly the body raised its head. “Spider-Man,” he acknowledged. “I see you found your prize. No matter. Neither of you will leave here alive.”

“You were talking to me earlier about need,” said Peter, stepping sideways into the room. “You could see me, maybe, on my way here. You heard me talking to Gwen.”

“Yes,” said Not-Otto. His voice cracked through the mask but now that Peter was armed with his knowledge it was recognizably his own. “We—I could see you.” His voice grew amused. “I especially liked watching Victor nearly kill you.”

Next to Peter, Johnny stiffened.

Peter flapped a hand. “He got lucky, bad timing. Besides, I’m not talking to you, Otto.”

There was a short, surprised pause, and then a snapped, “Of course you are, who else would you be talking to?”

Peter didn’t answer, his back to the wall, shifting along and up it on his fingertips and the balls of his feet, slow, like he was just being wary. “I wonder if you knew you were going to be able to see me. There’s a lot I wonder. How much you know about the whole process.”

Not-Otto was shifting to watch him as he moved, his head cocked. Peter wondered if he would recognize the expression on his face, if he’d been able to see it, or if the expressions were all Otto.

He continued talking, continued climbing. “Whether you knew I would give the card to Mary Jane, whether that was a part of it. Whether you ever had a Mary Jane, or whether your sights have always been set elsewhere.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Johnny sliding slowly sideways, farther away from him.

“I think you misunderstood something, though. About need. About being needed. You talk like it’s an ego boost thing, feeling needed. A passive state. But it’s not.”

Johnny was nearly all the way to the far pillar by now, and Not-Otto was still fixated on Peter, swaying, swaying between his ever-moving legs.

“Isn’t the monologue usually thing my job?” asked Not-Otto, his cadence shifted, just slightly—quicker, more clipped, like he had to push past something to get the words out.

Peter grinned. “There you are.”

“Talk faster,” Not-Otto gritted out. “Make your point, at least, before he kills you.”

Peter stopped moving, lifting his gaze and doing his best to hold his own eyes through the slits in the Doom-like mask. “The thing about being needed is you have to follow through,” he said. “Be ready, be there, be good when you need to be good and strong when you need to be strong, and you know what happens when you don’t?”

He thought about the flickering, sped up footage of the swiftly-emptying lab, the shouted arguments. The half-packed boxes of his things, in that alternate apartment he shared with Mary Jane. The half-packed boxes of her things, eight months earlier, in a much more familiar room, the echoes of their own arguments still bouncing off the walls. “When you let down the people who need you enough times,” he said, still holding his own eyes, “they stop needing you. They give up. They leave.”

Not-Otto have a wordless shout of anger, stabbing forward at Peter with two of his arms. Peter dodged, flipping out into space and landing against the central pillar, upside down. “I don’t get the point of bringing us here,” Peter called, lying. “Why put yourself through having him leave you twice? ”

“Shut up!” Not-Otto snapped. The tentacled arms swung again, cracking stone, and Peter dodged. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do—”

“Clearly,” Peter muttered, dropping lower on the pillar.

“—but no one is leaving.” The arms swung, and Peter started to dodge, expecting another blow, but instead all eight arms thudded into the pillar around him and Not-Otto landed in front of him, human feet against the pillar, standing parallel to the floor, the eerie metal Doom-mask looking up at him. “Not anymore.”

“What’s with the mask, anyway?” Peter asked. “The Ock I know isn’t much for aesthetics, and pretty sure my face isn’t as fucked up as Doom’s.” He aimed a feint at Not-Otto’s side, which Not-Otto twisted to avoid, and then slammed the heel of his other hand into his jaw. “Yet.”

Not-Otto’s head snapped to one side at the force of the blow, but he just shook himself, and Peter shook out his hand.

“Ow,” he said. “Shit. Was kind of hoping you weren’t Spidey here.”  

Not-Otto advanced upward at him, walking on all ten of his legs, and Peter stepped back.

“Though I guess it makes sense you would be, what with keeping Johnny in the big cocoon and all—”

Not-Otto snapped out an arm, fast, and Peter started to dodge but—spider-sense on perpetual buzz what with sharp arms on every side—got hit in the back with one of the tentacle-arms, knocking him forward and letting Not-Otto get a hand around his throat. Peter moved to knock it away but Not-Otto didn’t stay still—instead he threw him upward, and Peter tried to redirect, fling out a wrist to control his free-fall, but it was the opposite of fighting Norman. Not-Otto didn’t just know him, he was him. A sharp claw caught his wrist, and then four metal arms were wrapping around him like snakes, cool and rapidly constricting.

“I should thank you,” Not-Otto said, swaying closer. Peter felt his ribs creak. “You provide such a good illustration for what I’m going to do with the mind of yours that lives beside mine.”

Peter tried to take a breath to respond— if you could do that you would have already —but he couldn’t quite get the air necessary and ended up coughing, instead, the edges of his vision greying out. Was his Ock this strong? Was it being in his body, somehow, that allowed it, or his brain in there, feeding Ock the specifications he would need..to...shit, it was getting hard to focus.

He looked at Johnny, grounded and semi-powerless, his back to the smaller door set into the lab’s walls, where Peter knew rows upon rows of modified Doom-made robots waited.

Not-Otto followed his gaze, and laughed. “Even if you did escape me,” he said, “I knew you were coming, and I prepared. My army knows your face, they would hunt you down no matter where you went.”

Peter let his eyelids flutter shut. “You know,” he managed, “I was really hoping you’d say that.”

With a huge, painful effort he twisted one of his arms free, snapping it forward and tearing the mask from Not-Otto’s face. Out of the corner of his eyes he watched Johnny shove his hands against the door, watched it vanish into sludge and steam. He slapped the Doom-mask over his own face just as the first of the robots emerged, squat, its eye just beginning to glow.

“What—” said Not-Otto, and then a beam of blistering blue cut clean through the tentacles holding Peter and he dropped, taking a great gasping breath of air and just managing to snap out a web-line before he hit the ground. He swung by to grab Johnny out of the way as more ‘bots swarmed into the room, converging on Not-Otto, who was clinging with two of his remaining tentacles to the central pillar, using the two others to swat and crush the ‘bots as they advanced.

“Stop,” he shouted. “Stupid, mindless—this isn’t—”

Peter set Johnny down at the base of the pillar. For a second Johnny just stared at him, one of his hands raised like he wanted to touch his face, but he didn’t. Maybe he thought better of it; maybe it was the mask in the way.

“You, uh, you okay?” he asked, lowering his hand.

“Yeah,” said Peter, wishing he hadn’t.

He glanced around, doing some quick calculations of angles before he set his webs, and caught sight of Not-Otto. In a moment of unnatural stillness, robot-parts falling around him, his gaze was fixed on them—on Peter, and on Johnny, looking at Peter, and the expression on his face was not Otto at all.

Peter swallowed hard, nodding to him, and thought, maybe—it was so slight he could have made it up—he received a nod in return.

A laser shot past Not-Otto’s face and it twisted in unfamiliar rage, breaking their staring contest, and Peter made himself look back at Johnny. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

Johnny nodded, too, quick and abrupt, and turned to the console at the base of the pillar, setting his bright-burning hands against it.

Peter swung upward as the console behind him began to melt, flashing and burning as the silicon and copper within met heat meant for titanium, and stuck himself into the same corner Otto had been curled into when they’d first arrived, both web-lines stretched tight and wrapped in his fists. “Hey!” He shouted. “Octavius!”

Not-Otto tore the robot that had nearly hit him in half and turned to face him.

Peter licked his lips. “Fuck you,” he said, and launched himself forward.

Otto’s arms snapped forward to meet him, but Peter wasn’t aiming for him and slipped between them easily, both feet slamming instead into the pillar above his head. Cracked and fractured from the earlier blows and now unmoored from its base, it shuddered, swayed, and then dropped, and Otto fell with it. So did a decent chunk of ceiling.

Johnny had already cleared out of the way, pressing himself against the wall, but the pillar crushed a good number of the robots, and rubble from the ceiling half-buried Not-Otto as he struggled to push himself to his feet. Peter landed between him and Johnny. “Time to go.”

“‘Fuck you?’” Johnny quoted, his eyes laughing.

Peter shrugged at him. “They can’t all be winners.”

“You’ll,” said Not-Otto, his breath coming in gasps, “never—”

“Oh my god,” said Peter, rolling his eyes. “Give it up. Hope you enjoyed your time in my body, because it’s not gonna be yours much longer.” He grimaced. “God, that sounds wrong.”

“It really does,” Johnny agreed.

One of Ock’s tentacles swung at Peter’s head, but Johnny reached out and grabbed it, his fingers flexing, and within seconds it hissed into hot ooze.

Peter crouched by Not-Otto’s head. “Look,” he said quietly. “I hate to do this, but clearly Ock’s not going to cooperate, and I need you to sit tight til your family arrives. So.” He gripped his hair in one hand, drew back his other arm, and punched himself in the face, almost as hard as he could.

After a few seconds of stillness, Peter checked to make sure he was still breathing; satisfied that he was, he straightened up, raising his eyebrows at Johnny, who was staring at his hands. “Getting pretty good at that.”

Johnny nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s interesting, having so much fine control. I miss flying, though.”

“Then let’s go see if you can do that again yet,” said Peter, and started to pick his way across the rubble, and then stopped. “Oh, right.”

He turned back and looked down at himself, lying crumpled in a pile of twisted and melted arms, and pulled the Death card from his pocket. Leaning down, he placed it against his chest, tucked under a motionless hand, and left the mask by his side.

They wound their weary way through the halls to the courtyard again, and Johnny took a minute to splash more of the water on his face and take a few steadying breaths before he flamed on.

It worked—a true, gold-red-brilliant Johnny Storm blaze, and he laughed triumphantly and immediately launched himself upward, rising against the pale, distant sunset and carving a joyful, practiced 4 through the sky.

“You want to stick around?” Peter asked when he dropped back to the ground. “See everyone?”

Johnny thought about that, his expression lost in flame but his head cocked. “No,” he said finally. “No, I just want to go home to my version, you know?”

Peter nodded. “Well,” he said. “Before when I gave away the card, it didn’t take long at all for the next one to appear. So if I'm right about how this works, we shouldn’t have long to wait.” He grinned. “You wanna go for a ride?”

Johnny stared at him. “Seriously?”

“Why not?” Peter raised an eyebrow. “It’s my car, after all.”

Johnny narrowed his eyes. “Sure,” he said, “but I'm driving.” Peter started to protest, but Johnny levelled a look at him. “I’m not gonna let you put another of these things in the Hudson.”

“I don’t think we’re even in New York,” Peter grumbled, but he followed Johnny to the car anyway. “For all we know this could be Latveria.”

“Something tells me you’d find a way,” Johnny replied, and Peter vaulted into the passenger seat, laughing.

They drove in silence for a while. This world was no bigger than any of the others, whiting out out into nothingness a few miles from the walls of the complex, but there was no sign of the white road Peter had spent so long walking. Just a real road, black asphalt, crumbling in places, newly-painted in others, running parallel to the edge of everything.

Johnny had been giving the nothingness to their left nervous looks at first, as if he suspected it might expand and swallow them up, but after a while he seemed to relax. Peter was just glad he could see it at all.

“I hope now you’ve got your mojo back you don’t forget how to do your whole melty-hands thing,” Peter said. “It was cool. Though I noticed you avoiding actually punching Otto with it.”

“Yeah,” said Johnny, and said nothing else.

“How come?” Peter needled, trying to get through the silence Johnny had constructed between them. “Cold feet?”

Johnny kept driving.

Peter poked him in the arm. “Get it?” he asked. “Hot hands, cold feet—”

Johnny swatted him away. “It was your face,” he said quietly. “And you said you were still in there, I.” He shook his head. “Sue me if I was hesitant to fuck up your face a few hours after I learned what it actually means.”

Peter relented. “I'm not sure I could bring myself to mess up your pretty face either.”

Johnny stared at him, opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it again, looking back at the road.

“What?” Peter asked

Johnny licked his lips. “Nothing,” he said. “It's just—that's like the third time in as many hours you've called me attractive.”

Shit. “You can't possibly think you're unattractive,” Peter said, parroting his own words back at him, thankful for the ammunition. “You’ve been on Time 100 Hottest People list like five times.”

“Yeah, falling in rank every time,” Johnny huffed. “And that's not the point, there’s a difference between me being attractive, like, generally, and you thinking I'm hot.”

Peter looked at him sideways. “Is there also a difference between me being generally gorgeous and you thinking I'm gorgeous?”

Johnny groaned, letting his head fall forward onto the steering wheel. “Why are you like this. ”

“Radioactive blood, head trauma, and a childhood in Queens,” said Peter. Johnny was blushing—he could see it in mostly his ears—and he wanted to reach out and touch them, not to do anything, just fond and wondering.

Johnny took a breath, sitting up, eyes on the road. “It was rhetorical,” he said. “Anyway, forget I said anything, let's just get the hell out of here so I can go back to a world where I only have to see you once every three weeks when the city's in danger or when you're bringing beautiful women to charity events or both.”

“It’s usually both,” Peter acknowledged distractedly. He fit the blush in Johnny’s ears together with his raised hand in the fight, wanting to touch but not, with him not moving away on the rooftop, with his casual you're gorgeous by the pool. He took a breath. “Pull over.”

Johnny glanced at him, surprised. “Why?”

“Just do it, flamebrain.”

Johnny did, coming to a stop in a gravel pull-off along the side of the road. “What's up?” he asked. “What—”

Peter leaned across the center console of the stupid, hideous car they'd built together and kissed him.

Johnny’s mouth was soft with surprise, and then he was tilting his head and kissing back, and Peter’s heart was hammering in his chest because god, this had been a good idea—

Johnny hauled back and punched him in the mouth.

It didn't exactly hurt— Peter could take a punch from people who habitually punched people through buildings—but the shock of it sent him reeling back against the sort-of door at his back. By the time he recovered Johnny was out of the car, several paces away, his fists curled at his sides.

Peter scrambled out of the car after him. “Johnny,” he said, baffled,  “what's—”

“Who,” said Johnny tightly, his eyes narrowed to furious blue flame, “the fuck are you.”

Peter stared at him. “I'm—I'm me, we went over this by the pool—”

“No,” said Johnny, “no, you've gotta be from here or, or a Skrull, or this is more magic bullshit yanking some fantasy version of you out of my head.”

Peter licked his lips, hurt. “Why is it so unthinkable that I'm the real me?”

“Because I've been in love with you for years,” Johnny snapped, “and this doesn’t happen. You dropping everything to, to fight through alternate universes to save me and suddenly be flirting with me and meaning it, kissing me like—fuck, that's not how this goes, that's not how we work, you and me, that's not who we are —”

“Change,” said Peter.

Johnny stopped, his mouth still mid-shout. He looked stupid and beautiful and Peter wanted to kiss him again but he'd probably just get another bruise for his trouble.

“That's what you said the card represented, right? Not death but change?” He stepped forward, and Johnny didn’t move back, watching him suspiciously. “Maybe you're right,” Peter continued. “Maybe that's not who we were. But maybe that's who I want us to be.”

He raised a hand to touch Johnny’s jaw. He was warm, warm the way only Johnny ever was, and Peter had a passing fantasy of that beautiful pale flame sliding down his wrist and along his arm, like his skin against Johnny’s skin was the completion of an electrical circuit. “I wanted to kiss you,” he said, and Johnny took a breath through his nose, nostrils flaring. “I dropped everything, I fought through alternate universes, I flirted with you and meant it, and I kissed you. Because I wanted to. And more than that, I.” He swallowed. “I need you, Johnny.”

Johnny’s eyes slid shut, his throat bobbing as he swallowed, and Peter let his hand drift down to it so he could feel it against his palm.

“You don't,” Johnny said. “You’re you.”

“I do,” Peter insisted. “You saved my life.”

Johnny scoffed, his eyes flickering open but not settling on Peter’s face. “From something you wouldn't even have been in danger from if not for me.”

Peter shook his head. “Actually from something you wouldn’t have been in danger from if not for me, if you think about it,” he said reasonably, “since it was, you know, me.”

Johnny laughed and scowled at the same time, his face twisting with it, and Peter wondered if he was capable of making a face he didn't want to kiss. “Anyway,” he said, “that's not what I'm talking about, though that too.”

“It’s not?”

Peter shook his head, dropping his hand from Johnny’s throat and wandering over to lean against the hood of the car. It took a minute—longer than he liked—to figure out how to line up the words. Where to start. “I almost killed Norman Osborne a few days ago.”

Johnny blinked at the subject change, but didn’t say anything, just waiting for him to continue.

“It would have been easy. I don’t think I was Spider-Man in his world, so he didn’t know me, he hadn’t spent any time understanding who I was, learning to hurt me or defend against me. And afterward, when I was back on the road between worlds, alone, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” He stared at the ground, at the unremarkable verge of roadside ahead of them. “Not the violence of it, though that was part of it. But what really wormed its way into my head was like—the potential. The consequence, the lack of consequence.”

He took a breath. “I thought: what if I can use this? If these worlds are real, distinct places that exist, if the things I do matter here, if the effect I have here lasts— and I have no reason to think it doesn’t, the things alternate dimensional people do to our world usually do—then he’d just be. Gone.” Peter licked his lips. “No more Goblin in that world. No more corrupting, abusive, shit-heel of a father for Harry, no more deaths at his hands, just everyone wakes up one day and that element of evil is—” He spread his hands. “Poof.”

He could hear Johnny shifting his weight, but didn’t look up.

“And then I thought. If I could do that to that Osborne, why not others? Other Osbornes, other killers? Wouldn’t that be worth whatever the hell it did to me? Ridding countless universes of murderers, never letting the guilt touch the me or the you or the anyone else of other worlds. No one would ever even know. I would just stop in, just for a few hours, and when I left the world it would just. Be better.”

For a long moment Johnny was silent, and then: “That’s—god. That's the most heroic justification for becoming a serial killer I've ever heard.” His voice was only half joking.

Peter let out a noise he’d really intended to be a laugh when he started it. “Yeah,” he said harshly, blinking rapidly at nothing. “Yeah.”

Johnny coughed. “So, uh. Why didn’t you do it?”

Peter scuffed a foot against the gravel underneath the car, the grind of it somehow centering. “People talk about not being able to look at themselves in the mirror after they do something terrible, but I've done that, and the problem with me is he's me. The bastard is just as good at justifying my shit as I am. Looking at myself doesn't scare me. I might not like it, but I don’t like a lot about me, and I live with that, so.” He raised his eyes, finally looking at Johnny. “What scares me is looking at you.”

Johnny was staring at him, the only bright, full-color thing in a pencil-sketch world. He was so beautiful it made Peter’s ribs ache.

He unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth and made himself continue, made himself explain. “And—and you're what stopped me. The you in that Norman’s world, you stopped me and you looked at me like—” He stopped, shaking his head. “I left, and I thought about it, and I justified and justified, but then. But then I thought about how you would have looked at me if you’d arrived just a few minutes later. The person you would have seen.”

Johnny stepped closer to him, his hands tucked into his jeans, but at an angle like he didn’t want them to be, like they were there rather than somewhere else because he was actively choosing it despite himself.

Peter was weirdly grateful for that. There was a nervousness under his skin, an energy he wasn’t used to, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to express what he needed to express if he were touched, like touching would release it and leave him blank. “I—if you hadn’t—” He swallowed hard. “That’s what I meant. You saved my life because when you look at me I remember what my life is, or what it, like, can be. You remind me what I can be. Not in some—big, world-saving potential way just like.” He waved a hand, frustrated. “I don’t know, normal, but normal-better. Normal-happy.”

“Peter,” Johnny said softly.

“I’m not sure that the me from here was lying to Otto,” Peter admitted. “Being trapped like that inside your own head with Otto Octavius of all people—I’m not sure that he wouldn’t just have traded the safety of this world for you, for the comfort and companionship and control you could have given him. Until he saw you look at him. Until he saw you look at me.”

Johnny stepped up into his space and Peter tried to smile at him, tried to figure out what his face was doing at all. “You remind me who I am when I like myself the most, because—because you look at me and believe that's what I am all the time. And if you do, maybe I can—”

Johnny leaned in slow, telegraphing it, like he thought Peter might pull away; brushed his parted lips against Peter’s mouth while he was still talking.

“—too,” Peter said against him, mostly left-over momentum, and then they were kissing again, slow, and Johnny’s hands were in his hair, and his hands were on Johnny’s hips. Now that he wasn’t being punched Peter actually had time to enjoy himself and god, he liked kissing pretty much everyone he'd ever kissed but he immediately loved kissing Johnny Storm. His mouth was wide and soft and he was so intent about it, focused, like now he had access to Peter’s mouth he was going to do this right .

Peter gladly opened his mouth to him and Johnny made a small, desperate noise, and then it wasn’t slow anymore but slick and hungry and Peter gripped his hips and picked him up and spun them so he could press Johnny back against the hood of the car. Johnny moaned into his mouth, his legs immediately wrapping around Peter’s waist, and Peter broke off with a gasp, running his hands up Johnny’s sides and arms and shoulders to bury his fingers in his hair, tug his head back to expose the long line of his throat.

“God,” Johnny kept saying, as Peter mouthed up under his jaw. “God, god, god.” He wanted to make some crack—you can call me Peter— but there was something delicate, here, something Johnny was working through, hell, something he was working through, and anyway saying anything at all would involve taking his mouth off Johnny’s skin. He sucked on it, hard, instead, and Johnny’s hands scrabbled at his shoulders, blunt nails catching on his skin.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathed, and Peter flickered his tongue over the place he'd marked and pulled back, pleased with himself.

“You like that?” he asked, half dirty-talk and half genuine question. Johnny was sort of a public figure, after all, maybe he wouldn’t want to invite speculation--

“You have no idea how much,” Johnny said fervently, and then his darkened eyes focused on Peter’s face, and he blinked. “You—genuinely don't, do you?”

“Don’t what?” Peter asked, puzzled.

“Don't know,” said Johnny, pushing himself up on his elbows. “How much I want this. How much—fuck.” He shook his head, disbelieving. “Whenever I thought about this happening, whenever I let myself, it was always you, like, realizing, you catching me staring, telling me how obvious I'd been, doing me a favor, a, a one-time—but it's not. You're not.”

Peter frowned at him. “Did you not listen to a word I just said—”

“That’s feelings, ” Johnny objected. “That’s emotional need, not want, not—” he gestured between them. “This. It’s different. Or. I thought—”

“You thought you’d kiss me all chaste and sweet and then we’d be on our way?” Peter asked, arching his eyebrows.

Johnny went red. “I wasn’t thinking about much of anything,” he admitted.

Peter reached out to touch his cheek, knowing the feeling. “It’s not different, for me,” he said. “And I’m definitely not doing you a favor. I kissed you first, remember? And you punched me for it, and now you’re surprised that I don’t know how much you wanted to be kissed—”

“I also told you I was in love with you,” Johnny pointed out, all in a rush, “so forgive me if I thought I was pretty clear—”

A spark of remaining nervousness shot up Peter’s spine like a firework. “I thought,” he swallowed, “I don’t know, you were exaggerating, or like—simplifying, to make a point.”

Johnny stared at him. “You thought I told you I was in love with you to make a point. ”

Peter winced. “I, well, no, you—you thought I was sucking hickeys into your throat as a favor— ”

“People fuck people as favors, Peter!” Johnny snapped. “That’s a thing! ‘Sexual favor’ is like, a phrase people actually use!”

“Is it?” Peter asked, dubious. “I feel like no one has actually ever said—”

“Oh my god,” said Johnny, dropping his legs from Peter’s waist and starting to sit up, giving Peter’s shoulder a cursory push to get him out of the way. “Whatever. You’re—”

Peter caught his hands, pulling them effortlessly up above his head and pinning them to the hood of the car. Johnny let out a small oh but didn’t fight it, his eyes suddenly wide, and Peter leaned down over him. “I want this,” he breathed against his ear, voice low. “Let me convince you?”

He heard Johnny swallow. “Y-yeah,” he said, weakly, “okay.”

Peter kissed him hard, sank his teeth into Johnny’s lower lip, and Johnny groaned, his hips twisting. Peter transferred both his wrists to one hand, running the other down his arm and side, shifting his palm over his ribs to feel him breathing, curling it finally over his hip and holding him still. He licked into Johnny’s mouth, his thumb playing over the line of Johnny’s hipbone, and Johnny was twitching, twitching and tugging his wrists, deliciously ineffectual, and Peter tugged his hips down so they were flush with his, both of them gasping at the contact and at—

“Did something just manifest in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Johnny joked, breathless, his voice shifted into a throaty register Peter had never heard on him, and Peter bit none-too-gently at his throat before pulling back, grinning wide at Johnny’s sharp inhale. He fumbled for the card in his pocket, not taking his eyes off Johnny. He didn't sit up, staying where Peter left him, his shirt rucked up over his muscled stomach, his wrists crossed above his head. Watching him, blue eyes filled with the hunger Peter had seen by the pool, that banked fire, that need.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

Johnny smiled at him, slow, and then Peter managed to actually get the card out of his uncomfortably tight jeans. He glanced down at it, then turned it to Johnny. “The World,” he said. “Right-side-up this time.” He bit his lip, shifting his eyes over Johnny again. “I hate, like, really, really hate cutting this short,” he said, “but I don’t know how long we have, and this might be our only chance to get home.”

Johnny let out a breath, his eyelashes fluttering, and nodded. He relaxed, sitting up, and Peter interrupted him with his mouth, kissing him open-mouthed and filthy, sucking at his tongue.

Johnny swayed in the wake of it, his palms on Peter’s throat. “God,” he said again. “It’s not fucking fair.”

“What’s not?” Peter asked.

Johnny ran a hand through his hair in a vain effort to fix it. “That you’re so good at that,” he said, “and that we wasted so much time not doing it.”

Peter grinned at him and caught his hand. “We got all the time in the world,” he said, and held up the card. “Get it?”

Johnny rolled his eyes, but threaded their fingers together, and Peter held the card out flat in front of them, right at the edge of the world, like he was pasting a poster to a wall. He could feel something beyond it—some sort of pressure, there and not there, like the side of the white, winding road, like guilt and worry and hope. He let go, and for a moment the card hung, suspended, glowing. Johnny’s thumb shifted over his wrist, Peter squeezed his hand, and then everything went black.

+

Peter woke up and opened his eyes, slowly, groggily, to be confronted with the confused, rocky, scowling face of Ben Grimm.

“Ben,” he said, then glanced around. They were on the roof of the Baxter building—Johnny was lying next to him, still passed out; Sue was leaning down to check on him, and past Ben he saw Reed, watching them curiously. He was carrying some kind of high-tech scanner. Beyond them, he saw the New York skyline—no futuristic lights, no endless storm, no fading into nothingness, just a slate-grey sky and greyer buildings.

“Home,” he said. “Home, I’m actually here!” Even the air smelled right. Bad, yeah, but the right kind of bad.

“Peter,” said Reed, approaching him. “What happened? Are you alright?” He was frowning slightly. “Is Johnny?”

“And why,” said Ben, holding out a big rocky hand, “did ya have these?”

In his palm lay Peter’s web-spinners.

“Oh,” said Peter. “Well. Um.” He rubbed his forehead, coming up with and abandoning four or five lies in as many seconds. He was so tired. Fuck it. “In order, I guess? A whole lot happened, I’m okay, Johnny’s okay, and uh, I’m Spider-Man.”

“You came through some kind of magical dimensional portal,” said Reed, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. Probably he’d stopped listening after ‘Johnny’s okay’. “It set off my sensors, nothing my systems could identify but there’s something about it that seemed almost famil—”

“Reed,” said Sue. She came over to stare down at Peter. “Can you repeat that, please?”

Peter pushed himself wearily to his feet. “I’m Spider-Man,” he said. “Just saved Johnny from, uh, kind of myself, it's complicated, and Reed, the reason it’s maybe familiar is because it’s your tech mixed with Doom’s mumbo-jumbo.”

Ben was frowning at him. “Now, hang on,” he said, “how do we know—”

“He’s telling the truth,” said Johnny. He sat up, wincing, and Reed—four feet away—gave him a hand up. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys. How long was I gone?”

Reed and Sue exchanged looks. “You weren’t,” Sue said. “We saw you this morning at breakfast.”

“Oh,” said Johnny, wandering over to stand by Peter. “Uh. Cool.” He scratched the back of his head and muttered, "kinda anti-climactic."

Peter raised his eyebrows at him. “Hate to say I told you so—”

Johnny narrowed his eyes at him. “No, you don’t.”

Peter grinned. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

“My tech and Doom’s magic?” Reed asked, slow. “Now why would we create—”

Peter sighed and checked his pockets. “I knew you’d be curious,” he said, pulling out a flash drive, “so I brought you something. There’s at least a couple hours of surveillance footage from an alternate universe on here. I’m not really sure how much, I fast-forwarded through the back half.” He handed it to Reed. “And now while I’m sure you all have questions I would really like to go, like, sit down and stop moving. Preferably for about three straight days.”

+

They ended up on opposite sides of the couch in the Baxter building, Johnny in pajamas, Peter in a t-shirt and jeans he’d stowed in an alley a block away about two months ago, just in case. The just in case he’d had in mind was, like, quick transformation back into Peter after team-ups, but it occurred to him he should replace it when he had the chance in case of. Other reasons he might need spare clothes.

Sue and Ben had been mollified with promises that Johnny would tell them all about it later, and Peter’s separate promise that he’d buy them drinks (somehow) and justify his years of lying to them. Reed, for his part, had vanished along with Peter’s flashdrive almost immediately.

Peter wondered what questions it would answer for him, and what questions it would raise.

“I thought you were in love with yourself,” Johnny said.

Peter blinked. “I'm sorry,” he said, “say again?”

“I thought you were in love with yourself,” Johnny repeated, his cheeks faintly, grumpily pink. “Like—Peter Parker and Spider-Man.”

Peter thought about that. “I guess that kind of makes sense,” he said, “Parker was always taking all of those pictures, after all, seems like an obsession to me—”

Johnny shook his head. “Other way around.”

“You thought Spider-Man was in love with Peter? ” Peter asked, startled. “Why? I never even mentioned myself that way around unless I really couldn’t help it, I thought I’d done a good job with that.”

“You did,” Johnny admitted. “But you were always there if he needed you, and those pictures? Dude. I, uh, paid attention to those, and I know you—Spidey-you, I mean. They were clearly staged, and usually staged really flatteringly. I thought you were, you know. Showing off.”

“Showing off,” repeated Peter slowly. “For myself. ”

“Besides,” said Johnny, ignoring him, “I knew—well.” He looked sideways at Peter. “I thought I knew that Peter Parker was the straightest man alive. Spidey, I was maybe.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “Holding out some hope.”

“I am pretty straight,” Peter admitted. “Clearly not the straightest man alive, but this is the first time I've like, acted on anything.”

“Oh,” said Johnny,  “so I'm your exception?”

Peter nodded, and caught the wariness in Johnny’s eyes. “Stop looking for reasons this isn't real,” he chided. “Exception, not experiment.”

“Still,” Johnny muttered. “Not awesome, and maybe—I don’t know, maybe you got mixed your relief response with your, your attraction response, or maybe you went crazy between all those universes or something.”

“Okay,” said Peter. “Okay, you know what, fine, let’s actually go with experiment.” He scratched the back of his head. “To determine the results of an experiment, you run it multiple times, see if it replicates, right?”

“Why are you asking me? You’re the scientist.” Johnny narrowed his eyes. “Short-lived internship with my brother in law, remember?”

“Shut up, dumbass, it was rhetorical. Anyway—”

“Do you insult everyone you’re courting?” Johnny interrupted, crossing his arms.

Peter grinned at him. “Yeah,” he said, “but usually by accident. Anyway, listen up, I’m trying to tell you why you should believe I actually love you.”

Johnny froze, mouth partially open as he prepared to retort, and then he said, very quietly, “oh.”

Peter’s face was suddenly very hot. “Uh,” he said, “anyway, replication, right, is taking the same materials and putting them through the same processes but under different conditions, so you can determine whether or not it was contextual factors or the actual materials and processes that produced the results. Yeah?”

Johnny was still kind of staring at him, his hands messing with the hem of his shirt. Peter could see a mouth-shaped bruise just starting to form under his jaw. “Yeah,” he said, “sure.”

Peter cleared his throat. “In the universes I came across where I found out the relationship between you and me, the you and me of that world, I mean, it was romantic.”

Johnny blinked rapidly at him. “Wait, what?”

“Specifically,” said Peter, “the first world I ended up in we were dating. You went by Red for some reason and Sue was called Ace and maybe both of you worked for S.H.I.E.L.D, but we were dating.” He remembered his own weirdly earnest eyes, and smiled slightly. “That me told me he couldn’t even imagine a world where we weren’t. ”

“Oh,” said Johnny again.

“Technically the next one was Norman world and we weren’t dating yet but I did maybe tell that you to ask that me out,” said Peter thoughtfully, “and I hope he gets up his courage to do so, because something tells me I’d be into it.” He nudged Johnny with his toe. “You know what tells me?”

Johnny’s eyes were suspiciously bright, but his eyebrows were still quirked dubiously. “Science?” he asked.

“Science,” Peter confirmed, and his heart lifted and swooped at the way Johnny’s lips curled. “Anyway then there was the one where I met Mary Jane—”

“Hang on,” Johnny protested, “you told me you were married to her in that one.”

“I was,” said Peter, “am, I guess, if that’s how time works. Probably. Maybe, unless she’s left me for Gwen.” He grimaced. “She almost definitely left me for Gwen.”

“Hey,” said Johnny, snapping his fingers, “we’re supposed to be talking about me, here, not your exes.”

“Right, sorry,” said Peter, and reached out to take his hand. Johnny let him, surprised, and Peter turned it over in his, tracing the lines on his palm. “MJ said she was glad I—this me, me me, got a chance to bring you back.” He ran his thumb up over Johnny’s wrist, the tendons there, the veins. “Because they’d talked about what you meant to me, her and her me. About how much I loved you, before you,” his voice caught in his throat, and he had to fight past an unexpected panic-bubble, days, maybe weeks delayed, the alternate reality, all of those alternate realities where Johnny was dead suddenly overwhelming. Who was he to talk about replication and the convincing power of repetition when there were so damn many places where he'd lost this before he’d ever gotten it—

Johnny tugged his hand away from Peter’s and Peter looked up at him, surprised, just in time for Johnny to wrap his palm around the back of his head and pull him in to kiss him, hard. It made Peter’s heart go liquid in his chest, the panic dissolving into boneless relief, and he made an embarrassing little noise into Johnny’s mouth. Johnny shifted closer, his thumbs on Peter’s cheeks, solid and warm and alive.

“So,” said Peter breathlessly, tilting their foreheads together. “Same materials, same processes, different contexts—”

“I get it, nerd,” said Johnny, and kissed him again.

After a minute Peter pulled back, adopting a thoughtful face. “Of course, there was also that one universe where you were still dead, but you’d been married to Reed.”

Johnny pulled a face. “What? Gross.”

Peter raised his eyebrows. “Is it?”

“He's my brother-in-law,” Johnny said, but Peter waved a hand, cutting him off the scandalized rant before it could begin.

“Sure,” he said, “but objectively, if he’d never met Sue and he were into dudes, c’mon, he's got a certain something.”

“Oh my god, just because you want to kiss me all of a sudden doesn’t mean you're allowed to have opinions on the attractiveness of men, especially my family.”

“You're avoiding the question, Hot Stuff,” Peter pointed out, skimming his hands up under Johnny’s shirt again, and Johnny squirmed, his cheeks reddening. Peter tweaked his nipple and raised his eyebrows.

Johnny blew out a breath. “Under extreme duress I will admit that occasionally Sue and I have had distressingly similar taste in men.”

Peter laughed, and Johnny reached out a hand, tracing his smile with his fingers, his eyes warm. Peter kissed his fingers, one after the other, then narrowed his eyes. “So you think me and the Invisible Woman—”

Johnny shoved at his face, but Peter resisted, grabbing his wrist and wrestling with him until Johnny was tucked comfortably against his side, under his arm.

“I hate you,” Johnny grumbled against his chest.

“I know,” Peter said, and pressed a kiss into his hair.