you fall off a horse, you get back on.

[yougetup]

Summer school pretty much sucks.

Okay, so it's cool that they're letting him do it so that he can catch up and start high school in the fall, but not having a summer vacation is pretty crappy, even if he doesn't know what he'd do with one this year anyway. Ganke's not around to hang out with-- Miles never thought he'd miss Legos so much-- and Darrow television is pretty horrible.

He can think of a thing or two that he would spend his time doing, but he hasn't been able to bring himself to put on the Superpower Guy costume again. Not after the first time. It'd been kind of a disaster, all around.

Why would anyone ever wear a cape anyway? How are you supposed to do anything? Maybe that's why none of the Ultimates wear one. Maybe it'd be cool for flying, though.

Man, why don't spiders fly? There's got to be a spider that can fly. I could have spider-flying powers.

So since then, Miles hasn't been up to as much as he'd like. but every once in a while, he hears about something on the news or has to stop himself from wall crawling to go chasing sirens in the distance, and hates that he doesn't feel like Spider-Man anymore.

He should be out helping people, not doing practice questions from his Pre-Calculus book.

Though, he's really rusty with his math, and he really needs to pass a test on Friday.

He's sitting on the floor of the living room, math book on the coffee table while he tries to make his way through chapter three, which is all polynomial functions, and he doesn't think they got that far back at Visions Academy. Or maybe they did, and he just doesn't remember it. That was a pretty rough year.

It's not until he gets to the fifth problem that he realizes he's left his graph paper in his backpack in his bedroom, and heads in there for it, wishing that he just had the money for a graphing calculator instead. Maybe he could even put Tetris on it.



It's on the table when he comes back.



Just like right before he ended up in Darrow, there's a silver case just sat there. This time, at least, he knows what's inside. He's not scared of what's inside. Miles knows now that he has to be Spider-Man, and it seems like somebody else does too.


"Jessica?" Miles calls, though he's pretty sure she didn't have anything to do with this. Not this time.

Comments

[herownway]

"We do not," Jessica confirmed, sitting down on the couch, since it seemed odd to just keep hovering where she was. "I couldn't- I figured if I wanted to be me and not him it'd be easier if I wasn't in the same place doing the same things. Plus, awkward."

To be fair, she thought maybe Peter found it more so than she did, and she'd taken great pleasure in making him uncomfortable in the past, but still, hanging out with him and his friends and being aware the whole time how they were his friends and not hers... it hadn't been appealing.

That had changed, obviously, with time, and she'd built independent connections. And then it had changd again here and she didn't know what it was. Maybe she should see how he was doing more often. He was kind of in a similar boat to her, here. Even if her connection to those old memories hadn't faded, there wasn't so much to remind her of that life.

[yougetup]

It made sense. Everything had to be mixed up enough, not knowing what memories were hers and which were Peter Parker's, and it seemed like that might just make things more confusing, hanging out with the guy all the time.

It kind of sucks, because some part of Miles had kind of hoped that maybe they could all be this team now, the three of them. He'd wondered whether or not he and Peter Parker might have worked together back home if he hadn't died, but now it seems almost selfish.

"Yeah, I get that," Miles says, and he nods, "Maybe it won't always be so weird, though. You know, after a couple of years."

[herownway]

"It actually-" she said, about to try and express how she'd felt after Peter had died, how somehow that had canceled out the weirdness, or at least some of it, leaving only tragedy in its wake, which wasn't really a good trade. But she couldn't find a way to explain it that didn't sound horrible.

"It, um. I do have a lot less trouble, I'm not as... connected to all those memories. So, yeah, maybe. Just now there's that other weirdness where he's, um. Not- you know."

[yougetup]

Miles never really knew Peter Parker. There was the older Peter Parker from another dimension, but he doesn't think that's the same. He lived a different life, so Miles is pretty sure he's not really the same person. Still, he gets where Jessica is coming from. It's weird.

"He at least knows that happened though, right?" Miles asks, and it never really occurred to him until now that maybe Peter Parker doesn't know he's supposed to be dead at all.

[herownway]

"He knows that happened," she confirmed, remembering that very odd first meeting, when she'd found herself in Darrow. She'd thought he was a clone. Sometimes she still wondered how she knew he wasn't, but that just led down an avenue towards wondering if they all were, and that way lay madness.

"He was there. And then he was, um, here."

[yougetup]

"Oh. Good," Miles says, then realizes how that sounds, "Not good, but you know, good that no one had to explain it or anything."

That would have sucked, to be dead and not know you were dead, or to show up in Darrow and think that he'd won that fight.

[herownway]

"He was the first person I saw when I got here," Jessica confessed, one side of her lip curling up, eyebrow raising to match it, as if calling back to the bewilderment she'd felt that night. "I thought I'd died, for a moment. I didn't know what I could have died of but I thought I'd died. 'Here's the ghost of your genetic original to welcome you to the afterlife,' y'know?"

[yougetup]

Miles isn't sure what he'd thought when he first turned up in Darrow, but being dead hadn't been anywhere near the top of the list. In a way, he's lucky that he'd met adult Peter Parker from another dimension; at least he knew that people ending up in other dimensions was a thing that actually happened. Even if he still thought it was pretty crazy.

"At least he's alive here," Miles replies, "This place is messed up, but at least there's that."

[herownway]

"Yeah," she said, because what else could you say? Being alive was indisputably better than being dead, surely, even trapped apart from his family and friends. And if there was a way back... well, she didn't know what happened then. Something. "It has a couple of advantages, despite the messed up-ness. Maybe because of, for a couple of them."

[yougetup]

"Otherwise, I probably never would have gotten this back," Miles says, of the suit. Eventually, he probably would have tried to make something of that he wasn't going around in that Superpower Guy costume, but having the suit back that he'd left behind is about as good as it gets.

Just as long as we're not wrong and the suit doesn't blow up after I put it on.

[herownway]

"That definitely is one of the advantages," she said, because however that had happened, whatever slight worries about its provenance, if it meant Miles could get back in the suit, properly back in the game as Spider-Man, she couldn't be down on that.

Plus if we had to come up with an alternative suit it probably wouldn't be as cool. Whoever designed that one was on point.

"Now, if it could see fit to provide a spare or two for both of us, that would also be a great peace-offering," she said, pitching her voice to the ceiling. That was mostly a joke, she didn't think anyone was actually listening, because she'd swept the apartment for bugs multiple times. But there was tabs-keeping, or some sort, so who knew. She just hoped it wasn't some kind of creepy remote viewing.

[yougetup]

Miles frowns for a second, and then looks up at the ceiling like there's going to be someone up there that Jessica was talking to. It's only after he's already done it that he realizes it was probably a stupid idea.

"That's a good point. We're going to have to figure out how to get replacements made pretty soon," he says, because it doesn't happen often, and he really hopes that nothing crazy dangerous ends up in Darrow, but he's banged up a suit or two so badly that he wasn't able to wear them again.