shokuto - Tumblr blog

shokuto · 27 days ago

Text

Open Wounds, Open Hearts

Ultimate au (Sequel to The Way Things Are)

There was a time, long ago, where Miles knew nothing of Katie Bishop. Where she was a mute but pointed constant in his peripheral—a strange girl his age, garbed in black frills and fishnets, sporting a stark strand of pink in what was once slightly wavier hair. He remembers her startling easily, always shifting back to whatever should’ve been holding her attention with a jump when he finally glanced her way—things like, her work. Her lunch. At one point, a bright red ball that smacked her across the face during an ongoing game of dodgeball.

But then his mother passed, and she stopped looking away. She initially offered him a wide berth like his other classmates who happened to catch the news or hear it from someone else, but when his hollow gaze would land on her by chance, her sorrowful one would remain locked on his. Sometimes she’d attempt a smile that barely reached her eyes and looked more like a grimace. Usually she would just…look at him.

Long after they became an item, he’d come to understand that she was trying to communicate something she hadn’t yet built the courage to say—that she was there. That she’d seen him. That she knew he was in unspeakable pain and it didn’t frighten her the way it did everyone else. That no matter what, she would never look away.

That warmth, nestled beneath a single look, is what brought her from his periphery, to his space, and finally to his heart. He loved her so much, how free he was to be himself around her, be it in happiness or sorrow.

For a while it was mostly the latter. Miles isn’t ashamed to admit it was her amber eyes that kept his head above the depths of his despair. With his father an absolute wreck, a shell of himself he’d never seen, Katie was perhaps the only person he could count on to remind him it couldn’t be all bad. That he lived in a world he could be loved without preamble.

So when the time came, and the walls closed in, it was her he relied on. Her place he used to to sneak out into. But that was when he was Miles Morales again, and she wasn’t—wasn’t a farmhand in Minnesota.

He feels the nightmare dragging him back down—horrible visions of shadowy constructs of death holding him in place, and finally the metallic stench of blood mingling with jasmine perfume. He’d woken a fitful whimpering mess, and no matter how still he held his breath, could no longer hold his composure.

If he were of sound mind, he’d note that he hadn’t suffered a dream like that in a long time, and would wonder if perhaps talking to Katie again is bringing him back to when they’d first gotten together, and his grief was still fresh. The more he tries to think however, the more the line between memory and prophecy blurs, and his trembling hands are pulling up the newest contact on his phone before he can do anything about it.

Two rings. Then three. His breathing is only just beginning to even out when he finally hears a click, and then her groggy voice, the timbre of which making him look at the clock beside his bed. Three thirty-eight.

“Miles?”

“Hey,” he says breathlessly, one hand braced against the side of his head.

He doesn’t hear anything on the other line for a beat, and would imagine anyone else staring at the caller ID or the time in puzzlement if it weren’t her. If she didn’t know better.

“…Is everything okay?” She asks, so she doesn’t have to ask outright.

A nightmare?

It exits his lips like glass. Even now, he wishes he didn’t have to burden her, that he could be strong enough to endure on his own like he was supposed to.

“Yes,” he whispers, so softly he’s surprised she hears it.

“Do you wanna hear about my day?” she offers gently, in that soft tone of voice that sounds like home. He basks in it like a desert man thrust into a lake, and is overcome by a desperate urge to hold her face in his hands one more time, to feel her lips press against his weeping eyes and hear her whisper that everything would be okay.

“Please,” he begs.

“Well…” she takes a breath. “You know I’ve been getting up at like, five in the morning a lot?”

He hears her over the echoes of gunfire in his ears, and tries to take a calming breath so his voice doesn’t shake.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. The animals, they have a rhythm going. So when the sun comes up they wait around for breakfast.”

The thought of her, feeding pigs, goats and chickens in that despondent outfit he saw her in last momentarily dispels the horrors simmering behind his eyes.

“What’d you have? For…for breakfast.”

“Eggs and bacon. They put me with this old couple. Like, the Kents? They’re a little too old-school for toaster strudels.”

Miles tries to remember what he ate this morning himself. Or rather, the morning before this one, and fails. It was probably either dry toast or cereal.

The same thing he ate hours before he held her through her dying brea—

“I’d ask what you had for breakfast but…you probably didn’t have any,” Katie notes, daring a weak attempt at a tease that makes him feel even more fragile.

He plays along though, because she’s right. He hadn’t.

“I totally did,” he lies, voice hitched

“Sure.”

At that, the line falls into silence. The smothering kind, that reminds him of a ticking clock.

“It was a Saturday, so I had my work cut out for me.”

“What’d you do?” he chokes out.

“Well, I milked maybe seven goats. I have no idea who drinks goat milk but I someone has to love it, right? Took forty minutes altogether.”

“That sucks.”

“It’s not that bad, it like—you build up a rhythm and you don’t even notice.”

“Be nice if there was a TV, probably.”

“Yeah. I’d love if I got like, Family Guy over there.”

He imagines it. Katie, milking a goat over Brian Griffin delivering the words “Ass ahoy,” and allows himself the first chuckle of the night over the chaos he’s fighting to stay above.

“What else did you do?” he probes a little easier.

“I picked up some eggs from the chicken coops.”

“How’s Riley?” he asks, remembering Katie’s beef with the rooster that cawed at 3am instead of 5 sometimes.

“Still an idiot. I don’t know why the hens give him the time of day.”

It starts to come out like a bracelet strung by thread, the vulgarness of what he’s about to say tentatively stretching his lips into a smile. “Y’know what they say about huge co—“

“Yes, Miles, very funny.”

“I try.”

The silence between them stretches, and as Miles begins to finally collect his bearings, he feels the sudden urge to apologize, to maybe give a little context.

“I’m sorry it’s so late,” he opens.

“No, it’s okay.”

“I just…” His mouth opens, his lips move, but no words come out. None at all. He wants to explain, but also wants to leave it behind him, and is trapped in silence.

“I know,” Katie says anyway, because of course she does. And it’s those simple words that mend his silence. Katie was tactile when they were together. If she were here, her hand would find his, and she’d squeeze it once. It only makes the absence of such a gesture pierce him like a scepter.

“Okay.” Despite that, he’s able take a breath, and feel the tightness locking him in place loosen a bit, until it doesn’t feel like his world is collapsing.

“Y’know, since we’re talking…” Katie says, drawing him further from that dark place without him realizing.

“Hm?”

“I didn’t really get why you were Spider-Man for a while.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I thought that…well, I thought what you did, what everyone like you did, was just…reacting to things instead of preventing them. I didn’t feel like anyone took it seriously because of how catastrophic things always got when some guy in tights would get on the scene.

He stills at that, but recalls things like the Ultimatum wave, the Galactus incident, the time America was invaded, and, more recently, fallen to a second civil war that he himself served in. He wants to mention that the Ultimates, for all their flaws, actually did save the world more often than not, but restrains himself. That’s not the point.

“I’ve always wanted to save the world, but I’ve been working this farm and, I don’t know…”

“What?” he asks.

“I’ve never been responsible for so many things at once. The goats, the pigs, the chickens. It’s not a real give and take—they’ll starve if I don’t feed them, bleed if I don’t wrap them…and a lot of the time it’s like if I don’t, no one else will. Or they won’t do it right,” she grumbles.

“Does it get overwhelming?” He asks, as if he doesn’t know exactly what she means.

“No. Well, yes, but…I just deal with it.”

“Is what it is,” he supplies, well familiar with bearing up and doing what needs to be done, simply because.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is…”

She trails off again, and he imagines her pursing her lip, furrowing her brow, wracking her brain for the right words before the moment can pass. He’d wait an eternity for her to get it just right if he had to.

“Living here’s made me feel a closer to you,” she eventually confesses, breathless and a little shy.

He doesn’t know what to say to that. Or maybe he knows if he voiced what he’s feeling, he’d never stop. Either way, he’s fortunate enough that she takes it in stride and goes on for him.

“I look out for all these animals that can’t communicate what they need and they just, count on me to know. To take care of them. They’re so, so sweet, and even if they aren’t, they still…they’re so innocent. And they need me, y’know?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

“Is that why you do it?” Katie asks, bringing to mind something he hasn’t thought of in a while—A wide auditorium, housing the sorrows of a hundred children that hadn’t been chosen. A hundred futures stepped on by the call of a single number, as his mother and father embraced him in joy.

Not a soul had looked to him, but their gazes pierced him anyway. He remembers wishing fitfully that things could be different, and not knowing how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t—that he made it and they hadn’t. He wasn’t ignorant, he’d seen wisps of the news with his father at times and understood, in theory, the reality that some trees grew while others wilted away, and that some people ran marathons and others passed away as their mourners pled for justice. And yet, he’d never been so directly exposed to that until then. It was a while before he realized the word that eluded him was “unfair.”

Is that why he does it? To honor the ghosts of a better future? To act because people suffered?

“I think so.”

His answer seems to satisfy Katie, because it’s a beat before she fondly says, “You’re really something, Miles.” And he bites his tongue, keeping his quick, almost instinctual response at bay.

No, I’m not.

“Makes us two of a kind.” he says instead. “I’m glad you don’t have any bad guys to worry about, though.”

“Actually…”

“What?”

“I shot a coyote with an arrow.”

For once, he’s glad she isn’t here to see the way his eyes fly out of his head. He’d learned that she used to practice archery a long time ago, way before she and her family even moved to Brooklyn—the Hunger Games made a big impression on her��but could never predict she could strike anything short of a static target.

“No way,” he says.

“I did! Literally the other day—it snuck in and caught a lamb in its mouth, I had to put one in its eye.”

“Was it okay? The lamb, I mean.”

She’s quiet for a beat. Then, softly, “No.”

His heart hurts, remembering the sheep she’d introduced him to during his last visit. There were two lambs, and he hopes it wasn’t the one he’d gotten to hold.

If she were there with him, he’d offer a steady hand on her shoulder. He’d pull her close by her waist, and her hand would ghost the skin of his arm. But she’s out in the midwest, in a room he’s never seen, so he can only offer his condolences.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“Where did you even…” he starts, swiftly changing the subject. “I thought you stopped practicing archery when you were like, ten.”

“I did. But, I like having things to do when I’m not milking goats and feeding pigs, so…”

“Oh, true. Wait, you don’t…”

“I don’t what?”

She’s a city girl stuck in Minnesota, he reminds himself. Stuck learning to traverse new surroundings, new people. “You don’t hang out?”

“Not a lot. I’m pretty busy back here. But even if I wasn’t…”

“What?”

“These people are insane. It’s like—it’s like One Tree Hill or something. They’re out in the middle of nowhere so they’ll do pretty much anything to keep busy and have fun.”

He immediately pictures it—parties, drugs, pressure, every after-school special he’d ever seen—and feels his heart sink at the thought of her having to navigate that alone.

“Oh.”

“There’s one friend I stole a canoe with last week though.”

“Really?”

“She told me about this legend of a ghost haunting the river.”

His mouth drops open. “And you went?”

“Well, I knew there wasn’t gonna be a real ghost, so…”

He processes that, trying to understand how Katie, having witnessed two separate alien invasions and a man dipped in chrome with goat legs could possibly not believe in ghosts. “Katie, I literally walk on walls,” he says pointedly.

“So?“

“So…ghosts aren’t that crazy.”

“Miles, do you believe in ghosts?” she asks, amusement lacing her tone.

“Well, yeah, why not? I’m Spider-Man, I’ve seen some shit.”

He thinks she’s gonna contest that, but she’s quiet for a moment instead. Then, sincerely, “What’s the craziest though? The craziest shit you’ve ever seen?”

He a little off guard but endeared by her interest. Of course, his mind has to ruin it, jumping to the monster of his nightmares in response. He forces himself to take an even breath, gritting his teeth and thinking of literally anything else. He’s been Spider-Man for two and a half years now, there has to be something else.

In the slideshow of reality defying moments sprinkled throughout his career, Miles eventually lands on the understated profoundness of standing in a world that was like theirs, but not.

“Another world,” he answers.

“What do you mean another world? Like, another planet?”

“No, another universe. It was during the Galactus thing.”

“You were there?”

He decides not to take offense to her bewilderment. “Yeah? I don’t know if they ever told anyone but like, the purple guy? He was from another universe. One of us had to cross over to find out how to beat him.”

“And they picked you?“

Okay, this time he does take a little offense. “What’s that mean?”

“It’s just…that was last year. You weren’t even fifteen yet. Why couldn’t they have Thor or Iron Man do it?

A spectacled man with a leopard gaze and a cheshire grin comes to mind, as he remembers how it’d unsettled, no, provoked everyone present except for him.

“No one wanted to go with Reed Richards. I was the only one who didn’t hate his guts.”

She processes that for a beat. “What the fuck.”

“What?”

“Reed Richards…the international terrorist, the guy who wiped out most of Europe, the Sahara, nearly killed the Ultimates. You went to another universe with him?”

Well, when she puts it like that, he supposes it does warrant some further explanation.

“Yep.”

“And he didn’t try anything?”

Despite how likely it’d seem, and despite the countermeasure Iron Man had personally installed just in case, quite the opposite happened, actually. When the other Reed’s security protocols were about to waste him, it was their Reed that called them off. A demonstration of goodwill, he’d insisted.

“Nah, he’s chill.”

“Miles, Reed Richards is not chill.”

“He was with me.”

Miles was never in the same four meters with Reed for very long, and yet, against all odds, they did put together a decent rapport. He wonders if him not hating his guts like everyone else made it easier to be around. It wouldn’t feel right to describe he and Richards as friends, but the way he bore witness to the way stared longingly at that picture, it makes it feel wrong to say they were total strangers.

“Wow, and they thought I was a security risk.” Katie observes.

“What? It’s not like we hang out or something.”

“It’s just, it’s weird. It’s like Dennis Rodman being friends with Kim Jung Un.”

“But we’re not friends,” he insists.

“I bet you guys send each other Christmas cards. And that he comes over to borrow a cup of sugar. I bet he even texts you all the time asking why the Ultimates hate him so much.”

“I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

She scoffs. “I’m not afraid of your boyfriend.”

That sparks a peal of laughter. “You’re impossible.”

“Impossibly cute.”

“Two things can be true,” he says, laying back and wondering if he can just fall back asleep like this—enjoying her presence a hundred miles away.

“Y’know, I don’t like the Ultimates on principle—they almost willed World War III into existence—but you’re different. They’re government stooges in fancy outfits and that’s not who you are.”

He ignores the implications behind her disdain. Instead, he focuses on how she goes out of her way to separate him from everything she hates about the Ultimates. No, he doesn’t have a salary, doesn’t have a public identity and media people to speak to every so often, but Katie thinks he’s cool, and he feels warmth flush through him at that.

And yet…

“I don’t think about it as fondly as you do, sometimes. Being…y’know. Being Spider-Man.”

“Why?” she asks innocently.

“I make a lot of mistakes, and it’s hard to look past them,” he says candidly.

“Oh,” she says, because she can probably guess which one comes to mind.

“I think I just wish I could be better. I used to wish I could be more like Peter Parker, but, I met him, and he’s kind of a dick. So now I just wish I could be better.”

He thinks of everyone he’s ever let down, everyone who counted on someone to be there and rescue them, even if from themselves. Peter. Aaron.

Mom.

“They deserve better.”

“…That can’t be healthy,” Katie says carefully.

“I guess.”

“So…” she begins, now eager to shift the subject. “What was that all about? Meeting Peter Parker.”

“I don’t even know,” he answers honestly. “We thought he was dead, he wasn’t. Worse, he was getting ready to just bail on everyone who missed him, because he they were better off with him dead.”

There’s a lot he’s leaving out. Like, the faustian behemoth in green, lunging at him in the eye of an inferno that smothered heat through the fabric of his costume. The seething wound from the bullet that grazed his skin like depressions in the earth, and had him slipping off into Maria Hill’s car. He especially doesn’t divulge the nagging suspicion that the man who came to his rescue wasn’t actually the boy that died on May front lawn, but a duplicate who believed himself to be.

It’s something Miles ponders sometimes, even now, because it doesn’t escape him that Jessica hadn’t been present to challenge Peter’s case—the idea that he couldn’t be a duplicate because of the clarity in which he remembered his past. But, hey, as far as the Parkers know, they got their boy back, and Mary Jane got to ride off into the sunset with the love of her life. Who he was he to pry? He even earned his blessing that night.

“If he was hiding, how’d you meet him?” Katie probes.

“He tried to take back the, uh. Webshooters his aunt gave me. His dad made them or something before he died, so I he wanted a memento for the road. Something to keep him steady while he abandoned the people actually alive to mourn him. Asshole.” The last part he mutters.

“You don’t agree with him?”

“What?” Miles bristles. “No, of course not. Why would I?”

“Maybe everyone did move on.”

“No, he was wrong, they didn’t. His aunt, his girlfriend, his…I don’t know, step-sister? They watched the life leave his eyes on their front lawn. That’s not something a person can just, move on from. He had a responsibility to them and he bailed because he was afraid of…of a hard conversation. It’s embarrassing.”

She’s quiet for a bit after his surprisingly passionate tirade. It must be strange, hearing him disparage his predecessor like this. It’s just that…Miles knows May Parker, Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy. They’re good people, who, like him, have gone through so much in such a short amount of time. He can’t imagine why anyone would leave them to suffer alone for any reason, much less the person they love most. He’s about to explain this to her when she asks a question that knocks him off balance.

“Did you ever forgive your dad?”

Once again, he’s glad Katie isn’t here to see the way he all but jolts, sitting back up again. “What does that mean?”

“I’m just asking—“

“That has nothing to do with this. Me and him are—we’re fine, it’s over.”

“So you don’t think they’re a little similar?”

“No? My dad is not…” he trails off, meaning to finish that sentence with all the things his dad wasn’t that Peter Parker was—An abandoner. Afraid of his feelings. Afraid of the people that love him—because he kind of is all of those things, and Miles doesn’t feel confident pressing the issue any further.

“Katie…”

After a while, she gives. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pried.”

“It’s fine. I didn’t mean to snap. I just…”

“You haven’t actually talked with him about this at all,” She finishes, and he feels himself get riled up all over again because she just apologized for doing that.

“We did,” he insists.

“Miles…”

“We talked about it. He told me about his past, I told him it was fine.”

“But it’s not fine!” Katie snaps, before lowering her voice, maybe account of the time. “He…you needed him, and he left. He left, Miles. And it’s okay because he…talked about his past?”

He’s reminded again that Katie—sweet, adorable Katie, who hid her face in her hands when she got embarrassed and talked to the potted lilac in her room—bears a heart that doesn’t forgive easily. Not even for him.

He means for it to come out more firmly than it does, only sounding weary when he says, “Maybe I’d rather just forgive and forget.”

She doesn’t say anything in return, and he wonders if she’s fuming. At him, for him, he doesn’t know. All he knows is that she spends time collecting her thoughts, and when she speaks, he braces himself. Her voice is calm, focused. Icy.

“So, you forgot waiting for him to come home after class for hours? You forgot checking the internet for any word of him so often that you had to put together a google alert? You forgot sneaking off into my room in the middle of the night a wreck that time you thought you saw his car parked outside? Because I didn’t. I remember every letdown he put you through. He may not have to, you may not want to, but I do.”

He can’t pretend that her words don’t threaten the delicate balance he’s put together between he and his father. That each memory she unearths isn’t an open wound he decided doesn’t hurt that bad now that everything’s normal again. But she pushes, she pries, and it just doesn’t feel fair that he has to confront this now when he’d only called her so she could maybe talk him back to sleep.

“You wouldn’t even tell me why he left,” she says finally. “but I don’t even care. There is no reason for him to have done that to you, Miles.”

His head hangs, his breaths weary. She’s right, because of course she is, and yet he feels compelled to defend the relationship they have that will always exist on the other side of this rift—It was him that unmasked before his dad was ready—deeper than that though, Miles also wants to bring forward a consistency between Dad and Katie that’ll remind her he isn’t the only one who’s made mistakes.

“When I unmasked in front of him, he ran away from me, and that was the last I saw him for months. He ran off for the same reason you did.”

“And you hated me enough to dump me in front of your friends like trash, so I guess that makes my point, doesn’t it?”

His mouth flies open like a man who witnessed a murder—she didn’t even have to think about it.

A thousand responses brace themselves on his tongue, none of them feeling sufficient. “I didn’t hate you.” He did, at the time. “You’re only trying to frustrate me.” It’s working. “Why can’t you just let this go?” Because against all odds, she loves him enough to bear his grudges for him.

Before he can choose any of those, Katie speaks up again having take his gobsmacked silence for resentment.

“Look, my point was…you wanna act like what happened with your dad is all in the past, but it’s not. That’s not how it works. How are you supposed to forgive him if you won’t even admit he hurt you in the first place? Why does everything have to be your fault?”

Her words, however gentle, slice through him, grief he’d buried long ago unearthing like cicadas. It’s not fair, he thinks, for her to dig up his wounds like this, even if she may have a point.

But he grounds himself with the reminder that she hasn’t seen what he’s seen. His father was helpless, pleading forgiveness on that park bench like it was a confessional, and Miles would forgive anything if it meant he’d be able to pick himself up and be his dad again. She’d do the same if she’d had to help pick him up the way he had.

He was already in pieces by the loss of his brother, then his wife. Knowing his son was a part of the world that threatened pulling him under from the time he was a teen and his brother started calling himself the Prowler broke him even further.

Miles just wanted the nightmare to be over.

“If I don’t give him a break, no one else will,” he says.

“When are you gonna get a break?” she pleads.

Then, without thinking, just to be funny, “I don’t know. When I’m dead?”

He regrets it instantly. And yet, he laughs anyway, waiting for her to join in, awkwardly clearing his throat when that obviously doesn’t happen.

“I’m sorry, that was—“

“Is that what you think?” she cuts in quietly.

“No, that was—Katie, that was a joke.”

She huffs, both annoyed and unconvinced. “Okay.”

He isn’t sure what to say next, how he could play off the fatal legacy of Peter Parker without revealing the way lingers in his mind sometimes. Never overt, but never absent. Nothing comes up, so the silence stretches out, and he opts to reconcile something else instead.

“I never hated you.”

He imagines her gripping her bedsheet at that, tight enough for her knuckles to pale. Kinda like his are at the moment. He doesn’t know why he said that, just that he needed to. That they need to get that out of the way before they can move forward, as friends, or…or something more familiar.

“So why’d you wait to see me?” she counters sadly, forcing him to go back and remember the nights he spent realizing he’d made a mistake, yet still having to reconcile the weight of her transgressions and what they could’ve done to him because of her.

“I didn’t know what to say,” he says honestly. “I wasn’t ready to admit I’d made a mistake and I was afraid of what’d you say when I saw you again.”

“You didn’t have to be afraid.”

He really didn’t, did he? “I know that now.”

“And I really am sorry about…about everything.”

In a split-second, he remembers the horror of waking up in a basement, the fear that gripped his heart when he saw his most important people thrown into cells just like his. But unlike the other times he’s gone down this road, he’s able to recall Katie’s sorrowful face, and the terror that overcame her while he’d been prodded with at Dr. Doom’s behest.

“Yeah. Me too,” he finally says. “We don’t have to get into all that.”

“Okay,” she lets out a huff of mirthless chuckle. “Maybe it did get kinda dour.”

“Yeah.”

From there, the line goes quiet. And while he’d like for it to be comfortable, he feels every second that passes them by that he doesn’t say anything. It’s something that makes him reach out for something he hasn’t thought of in a while, finally laying back down.

“You remember when, um—when the seniors glued all the laptops shut?”

He hears her mutter, “Oh my God,” and an accomplished smile creeps up his lips—he used to bother her about this all the time.

“Thirty-two laptops, Katie. Glued shut. Ricky Sanchez broke one trying to get it open, it was incredible.”

“You talk about that like you saw them do it,” she says, though he hears the smile in her voice.

“I do not.” He does.

“It’s like Steven A. Smith talking about Lebron.”

Miles spends a beat trying to remember whether or not he actually hated Lebron like he’d heard. His thoughts inevitably trail back to sharing a barely restrained laugh with his classmates while their english teacher fumed over the computer cart. “It was funny!”

“Edgar playing that song on the intercom was way funnier.”

“That song” being Ain’t No Fun, otherwise known as the filthiest piece of music Miles has ever heard. Fatigued laughter bubbles past his lips as he remembers the insanity that followed Edgar’s very special announcement. “Okay, that was pretty funny too.”

“I didn’t even know they made songs that dirty,” Katie giggles herself.

He, Katie and Ganke had shared a class then. Miles was the only one holding in a laugh—Ganke hadn’t even tried and Katie was too shocked to react at first. He himself only broke when he finally glanced at the open door, before witnessing their vice principal racing down the hall like the London bridge had fallen.

“Why’d Edgar even do that?” he asks.

“I’m pretty sure he was getting expelled.”

“That’s a hell of a way to go out.”

She’s quiet for a beat. Then, “Better than computer glue.”

“Katie, I’m really beginning to suspect you don’t understand what happened there.”

She laughs, but doesn’t say anything else for a while. Miles feels himself sinking deeper into his bed.

Then Katie asks, “Do you feel better? Than…than before?” When you woke me up at three in the morning, fighting ghosts? He seizes up just a little, feeling the dream linger in his periphery, without actually grabbing him.

The sound of voice, even challenging him, exorcises his demons like a silver crucifix. It actually makes him a little nervous, knows he’ll have to hang up eventually and go without her all over again. Can he do that, he wonders. Can he turn over and shut his eyes without waking up trapped within white walls, kneeling in a pool of blood?

…Maybe. Half an hour ago he wouldn’t have entertained the idea, so he guesses he has to feel a little better.

“You’re not trying to get rid of me already, are you?” he asks instead of voicing that, knowing it isn’t true and that she’ll take the bait anyway. He feels his shoulders loosen a bit more when she replies “No??” just like he thought, and keeps going.

“Going Hollywood on me, I see how it is. Them coyotes, Kate. They changed you.”

“You’re being a dick.”

He kind of is, but he can hear the grin her voice and it makes pushing her buttons totally worth it. Then, she asks, “Are you ever gonna come over again?”

“Hasn’t been that long, has it?” he teases.

“It has.”

She says it so plainly that his smile drops.

“I’ll figure something out. Next week, probably.”

From there, she’s quiet long enough that a yawn slips out. He assumes maybe she’s preparing something she wants to say, but all that comes out is, “Okay.”

“You can show me that river ghost. And the woods,” he offers, to which she chuckles softly.

“And Riley? You don’t wanna see your best friend? Or will Reed get jealous?”

He can already tell this is gonna be a thing between them. It makes his heart float, knowing they’ve built up a new inside joke. “That’s funny, Kate.”

By now he’s pretty much laying down again, and even though the call of oblivion lingers behind his eyes, he doesn’t wanna hang up just yet. He knows he’ll be able to see her next week and it isn’t enough—he wants to reach through the phone and pull her out beside him. He wants to hold her close, to entwine their bare legs beneath the sheets like roots beneath an oak, and he wonders how long he can stand yearning for her like this still.

“You really did help me out,” he says, closing his eyes, and imagining her shyly avoiding his gaze at how open he’s being.

“It’s nothing,” she murmurs.

“Still. I guess I’ll see you la—“

“Wait!” she yelps suddenly. His eyes fly open.

“Yeah?”

“If you can’t come, can you…can you still call me? Not just when…”

“I am coming.”

“I know, but…”

He reads her telltale silence for what it is, and waits for her to finish stringing her words together.

They end up being pretty simple. Three little words that him square in the chest, like failure.

“I miss you.”

If he were sitting up, his head would be hang, pressed against the weight of what is and what could not be—the knowledge that if things were different, she’d be too busy nuzzling into his arms to think about missing him. He’d tell her about his dad, and how despite everything, he can still count on him to cover his mistakes when he cuts it too close as Spider-Man, that it wouldn’t be possible if they hadn’t gone through what they did. He’d tell her about the dumb criminals he puts away and the scary ones that keep him up at night. Maybe even how he wonders if Norman Osborn will someday come back from the dead to finish him off like he promised.

“You won’t for much longer,” he jokes instead, wondering how long she thought she’d go without hearing from him again and feeling his heart break all over again.

“Night, Miles.”

“Night.”

His finger hovers over the red button on the screen for a moment before he actually presses it—a childish urge to prolong the end a little more. But he does, and he’s once again washed in darkness.

This time, he’s okay.

#Would you believe I forgot to post this this morning #my writing #ultimate spiderman #miles morales #katie bishop

3 notes · View notes