Chapter 208: Being Spider-Man Means Being Funny!
"Miles!"
"Hey, man!"
Miles crossed the room fast and pulled the stroller-dad Peter into a hug that communicated about three months of accumulated relief in one squeeze. He hadn't seen him since the collider incident. He'd genuinely assumed that was the last time — that crossing back to his own universe had closed the door permanently.
And yet here he was. In the Spider-Society headquarters, of all places.
"You don't have to be scared of my friend Miguel," Peter said, patting him on the back. "He looks scary. He doesn't bite."
A few seconds later they were both looking at photos on Peter's phone — his daughter, Mei, apparently reaching some kind of new developmental milestone that was either very exciting or very messy, Miles wasn't entirely sure. Either way, the immediate crisis had been temporarily deprioritized by the existence of a cute child.
Miguel watched this happen.
"I can't do this," he said to no one in particular. "We are discussing something serious."
Mei, perched on her father's arm, appeared to be trying to grab Miguel's face. Miguel, to his credit, maintained his expression of profound exhaustion with remarkable consistency.
"You know, you're literally the only Spider-Man without a sense of humor," Peter said conversationally, without looking up from the phone. "Being Spider-Man means being funny. That's part of the deal."
"The fate of parallel universes—"
"Every time you say 'the fate of parallel universes,' my brain just—" Peter made a vague shutting-down gesture with his free hand. "Just stops. I can't process it. Can't we just — isn't there someone who can handle this? I thought there was a guy. Ethan something? I thought Ethan was dealing with the parallel universe problems now. Why is it back to being Miles's problem?"
Miguel looked at him for a long moment in the manner of a man who loves his friends dearly and sometimes wishes he didn't.
He turned back to Miles.
"You disrupted a canonical event."
Miles frowned. "A canonical — I saved people. I saved someone. How is that the problem?"
"That's exactly the problem."
Miguel drew a slow breath and raised his voice slightly. "Lyla. Show him."
The room changed.
Not dramatically — no flashing lights, no machinery. Just the sense of the physical space falling away, replaced by something constructed, layered, vast. The walls became transparent and then irrelevant, and in their place was something Miles didn't have immediate language for: an enormous branching structure, luminous, organic, stretching outward in every direction simultaneously. Like a tree that had decided scale was a suggestion.
Then the threads appeared.
Orange. Hundreds of them, thousands, weaving through the space in patterns that were either random or complex enough to look it. They crossed, intersected, pulled apart, came together.
Miles stood in the middle of it and turned slowly, trying to take it all in.
"These," Miguel said, "are us. Every official Spider-Man, mapped."
He moved through the space, gesturing. "Our individual stories — all of them, running in parallel, crossing at points, forming a network. That network is what holds everything in balance."
"The Spider-Verse?" Miles said, the words coming out before he'd consciously formed the thought.
Miguel's eye twitched slightly. "The Spider-Verse. That name is idiotic. It should be called the Arachnoversal Entanglement Nexus. Though I'll admit that's not much better."
Miles didn't comment on the name.
"The threads form nodes," Miguel continued. "Those nodes are canonical events. Fixed points. They represent specific moments in every Spider-Man's story — things that had to happen to make us who we are." He paused. "Some beautiful. Some terrible."
He reached into the virtual architecture and did something that shifted the display.
The abstracted threads resolved into images.
Miles saw Spider-Men. Dozens of them. Kneeling. Holding something — someone — in their arms. Each one different, but the posture was the same in every case: the grief of someone who had just lost something they couldn't get back.
He saw himself. He saw his uncle Aaron in that tableau, and felt something cold move through him.
"Uncle Aaron," he said, barely above a whisper.
Miguel, moving through the display, didn't appear to notice. He'd stopped in front of one node in particular.
"This is the Superior Spider-Man, Event 90," he said. "A police captain closely connected to a Spider-Man was killed in action — caught in crossfire while protecting a civilian during a fight with a villain. He died holding the line."
Miles watched the image play out. The Spider-Man in it — not his, but somehow familiar in the way all of them were somehow familiar — cradling the officer, the grief audible even without sound.
He saw the nameplate on the uniform.
George Stacy.
He looked at Gwen.
Her eyes were wet. She was watching the display with her jaw set, the way you set your jaw when you've already accepted something and don't have the energy to cry again.
The display shifted. More nodes. More Spider-Men, more final moments, each one carrying the same weight.
And then, near the end, something different.
The image was Garfield-Peter's universe. Miles recognized the suit, the build, the way he moved. And the scene started the same way all the others had — the same posture, the same grief, another Captain Stacy—
And then a second Spider-Man appeared in the image and caught him.
Miles stared.
"Is that—" He pointed. "Is that a canonical event too? Because it looks like someone changed it. Someone saved him."
Miguel's expression did several things at once.
Internally, he already knew what he was looking at. That was Tobey-Peter. Which meant, by extension, that was Ethan's work — Ethan operating through his student, as he did, accomplishing things by proxy in a way that made the web's accounting very difficult.
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"He's an exception," Miguel said, which was technically the answer to Miles's question while being almost entirely unhelpful.
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