"Hey, Miles..."

"..."

"Miiiiillllles."

Even with his face planted flat against his bed, Miles can still hear the moan of complaint leave his mouth as he unfolds the pillow wrapped around his head. His face feels gross - greasy and sticky around the eyes - his throat is dry, and yup, he thinks, shuffling his legs beneath the blankets, he's still wearing the pants of his spider-suit. He shoots a glare over his shoulder and finds his roommate sitting on the edge of his bed, fully dressed, and blinking at him as if this morning of suffering is normal.

He's also got Miles' laptop on his knee.

"What's the password for your laptop?" Ganke asks, unmoving with his fingers frozen over the keyboard. "I need to check my email."

Miles squints, trying to understand the question as his brain lags. He then closes them entirely to shield his eyes from the sun that is piercing through the windows of their room.

He's barely been awake for a minute and already he has a splitting headache.

"Ganke…" he groans, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes and rolling his head back over to face the wall. "Can't you just... use your own laptop?"

"Uh yeah, no I can't." Miles hears the flat tone in his friend's voice and feels irritation prick the back of his neck. "Which is why I need your password- I wasn't gonna wake you up but I tried like fifty different things and none of them worked also it's like one, dude." Miles feels the dip in the bed where Ganke is sitting shift closer to him before an elbow nudges his back. "I figured you'd wanna get up anyway."

Miles clenches his eyes closed. His knees, still constricted in the spandex of his suit, curl upwards against his torso while he pulls the corner of his blanket over his head, and groans because he really, really doesn't wanna get up. There's an ache that's flooding his body that's from more than the horrible sleep he got last night and has been getting in the last month. Except yesterday - or this morning? - was the worst night he's had in probably ever . He remembers dragging his limbs up the wall of the dorms with the vague notion that it was almost three in the morning, then falling through his window and wiggling his way out of the mask and shirt of his costume all the while thinking for the first time in the two months that'd he taken up Spider-manning as an extracurricular that sometimes it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Sometimes, it straight up sucked.

Lying in bed now, he feels a throb in his back and stomach where he'd been kicked and then punched and then punched again, all before being thrown through a window and landing on the concrete of the apartment he'd pretty much broken into.

Not that he regrets it.

He absolutely does not, will never regret halting his web slinging the moment he heard a high pitched cry pierce his ears from the 5th floor of the apartment building he always passes by when he goes between school and home, whether on foot or via web shooters but somehow he never heard anything before last night? The fact that he never noticed anything in all this time and all the things he could've done differently is still flip flopping around in his brain like a choking fish that got dropped on the dry ground.

Either way the end result was him crashing through the window to find a lady with curly black hair, green hospital scrubs, and a swollen black and blue face that made Miles tremble in his suit and tighten his fist as he peered up to the monstrous figure of a man who had an enraged look in his eyes that said he was going to kill Miles before throwing another punch at the face of this sobbing woman that looked too much like Mom.

And maybe all of that, on top of the lack of sleep, made Miles a little sloppier with his web shooters than usual. And maybe that's why he took a few solid hits before being thrown back through the same window where he'd come in.

He's impressed that he was even able to drag himself into bed before he finally passed out.

Sitting up now, listening as Ganke keys in the password Miles reluctantly just gave him, he finds the world spinning more than it usually does when he's suffered a few hits in the mask. Over his two months of being Spider-man he's been, kicked, hit with a crowbar, decked in the face at least ten times and each time, by the next morning, after a good night's sleep, his bruises would fade and the pain would dull.

Except , Miles thinks, reviewing the last month in his head as he slowly places each of his costumed feet onto the floor, When was the last time I actually had a 'good night's sleep?'

"Man, dude," Miles looks to his side to see Ganke giving him a sheepish smile, "I mean no offense but you look terrible." Ganke nods to Miles' legs, covered in black spandex, and adds, "Is sleeping in that thing comfortable cause I'd think-"

"It's not," Miles cuts in, planting both hands to his knees before trying to standing. He means to bend down to sort though the clothes littering the floor to find a shirt and maybe some pants, because yes, he actually does feel terrible with only the bottom half of his costume on, but instead of a shirt he finds himself tipping over too far and dropping to his knees.

"Whoa! Miles! You alright?" A hand settles, firm on his shoulder and it isn't until the world stops spinning that Miles realizes that it had started spinning, or that Ganke is the only thing keeping him from hitting the floor. There's a small intake of breath from Ganke while Miles presses his knuckles to his throbbing temple hoping the world will give him a second to get himself together.

Miles feels a hand ghost across the skin over his spine before it pulls away.

"Dude- that," Ganke begins, and then pauses, waiting until Miles looks up to meet his eyes. "Your back. It looks like someone ran you over... Holy crap was that what happened last night? Did someone run you over?!"

Miles shakes his head which is still pounding miserably. Like his back and stomach which are still throbbing as if he was tossed around three minutes ago and not nine hours ago, but even more concerning is the dryness in his throat that has seemed to stick. Not vanishing like it usually does once he clears his throat after climbing out of bed in the morning. Also the aching over his body that's getting worse every time he shivers is still there. That seems bad too.

"I think I'm sick," He says, as much to himself as to Ganke, who helps him sit back on the bed, where he barely misses crushing the screen of his laptop. "Can Spider-man get sick?" He wonders, looking up to Ganke, whose face melts away from concern and is that awe? - to something more bemused as he slides the laptop out of Miles' way.

Ganke gives him a shrug. "I don't know, man, you're the one with the Spider-people connections," then reaches down to grab a black T-shirt which he tosses to Miles. "I mean- you survived whatever monster pummeled you into the ground last night, and... I am now noticing he got you pretty good in the front too."

Miles watches as Ganke's eyes widen, their focus on the bruising pattern along his stomach which travels up to spot his upper chest. They probably match the bruises he has on his back too, considering they came from the same fist, and the fact that they make his muscles throb in the exact same, painful way.

There's a bit of embarrassment tickling him at being inspected and he tries to rush when pulling on the T-shirt in his hands. This turns out to be a mistake as it makes him bend and stretch in all the wrong ways for his bruises. He can't help the hiss that slips through his teeth.

"Jeez," Ganke breathes, sitting back in the desk chair across the room, "Who was this guy?"

Miles smooths his shirt down the front and finds his fingers worrying the bottom seam as he feels the weight of last night drop against his shoulders again like it did as he stood next to the lady, whose face was caked in blood and tears, and whose name he never did find out, while they waited at the curb for the police to come after Miles decided it was better to stay with her than chase after the guy who'd run for the hills once Miles had delivered one good punch.

He'd stood next to her, spoken to her softly - in a voice he'd once heard his mother use with younger kids, when he helped organize files at Brooklyn General over summer break. He stayed by her side, pretending that his entire body wasn't swollen from the beating he'd just had, and waited up until the moment his stomach had dropped and his eyes had gotten a little wet behind the mask when a police car drove up and out stepped his dad. He'd taken off not a second sooner - because he wasn't sure he could say two words to " Officer Davis" without bursting into tears along with the lady who was helped into the car by his dad - zipping away, to scour the streets for the guy who had run away the moment he realized his actions would finally have consequences. But somehow he couldn't realize what a disgusting piece of shit he was, every time he decided to whale on his girl.

"An asshole," is what Miles settles on, spitting the word out as he slips on the pair of loose sweat pants and socks that Ganke gives him when he rolls across the room in his chair to grab Miles' laptop from the bed and place it back onto the desk.

"Well, yeah, I could've guessed that," Ganke answers, a nervous laugh at the end. "But was this guy- you know, one of the 'OG' Spider-man's big costumed bad guys, like- you know, the Rhino or something?"

Miles presses his knuckles to his right eye hoping to alleviate the pressure behind it. "No," he says. "He was just some guy." Miles stands, careful to hang onto the frame of the bed as he does, and makes his way to the chair next to Ganke, who holds a hand out with caution until Miles safely sits down.

"Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't see anything about you last night on twitter. But man," Ganke sighs, turning in the chair to face Miles' laptop where its placed before Ganke's laptop and two other monitors which are filled with dialog boxes that seem to be loading something. Ganke glances to Miles before he begins to type. "I mean, usually, you don't have that big a problem with normal guys on the street- well, except for that carjacker last month but-"

"But that was different," Miles finishes, watching as Ganke pulls up a browser tab and logs into his email. His mind wanders back to a month before and the hockey mask wearing car thief with his choice weapon of a crowbar who'd decided to teach Miles a lesson in pain after Spider-man had made his life of criminal activity difficult.

After that final encounter - which had luckily left Miles with only a dislocated shoulder and left "crowbar guy" in police custody - swinging home had been difficult. Miles rubs his right shoulder at the memory.

The phantom pains are quickly forgotten when the dryness of his throat becomes an unpleasant tickle and he shoves his face into his elbow to cough it away.

Miles coughs for longer than he expects to and he finds himself out of breath, with an even worse feeling in his throat when he's done. He also finds Ganke looking at him with the same crooked brow line he usually has when he's dissecting a sample for a new music track.

"You know…" He starts, with a tone that sounds like he's testing the waters. "Maybe you had such a rough time with that guy last night because you were already getting sick?" Ganke leans back in his chair and gestures to all of Miles. "Hence you nearly hacking up a lung just now."

There's a slight whistle coming from Miles' throat as he breathes, his stomach and back are spasming painfully after his coughing fit, and he has to wipe the back of his hand along his hairline. There's sweat collecting there when he's barely moved in the last few minutes.

"Uh, yeah, maybe," he answers, halfheartedly, most of his attention devoted to keeping Ganke's face from blurring into the bright colors of the computer monitors as his eyes refuse to focus. This few seconds of struggle gives Miles time to reinterpret Ganke's idea, and he tries to separate how much like shit he's feeling in the present, to remember if the heaviness of his limbs, the ache filling his bones, and the wet wheezing of his voice had already existed the night before.

Which, for some reason, is much harder than it should be, what with his brain stuck in his head where his headache is raging.

He can slightly recall, even before his pummeling, that he'd felt the weight of exhaustion as he'd swung through Brooklyn, watching the streets for anything out of place. At the time, he'd dismissed it as another result of his bad sleeping schedule over the last few weeks.

He'd also blamed lack of sleep on his spider-sense not buzzing fast enough to warn him before a foot and fist were sending him careening through that window.

Something tells him - possibly the way Ganke's arms are crossed and a voice in his muffled brain that sounds like his mother asking him how he's feeling before ignoring his answer and sending him back to bed - that yeah, maybe it wasn't just sleep; maybe Spider-man can catch a cold.

Too bad there's not a Spider-person here I can ask , he mulls, thinking of a group of different faces and masks, and feeling a twinge of loneliness. Inter-dimensional communication was limited, and while he'd gotten to talk to Gwen three times - yes he counted, who wouldn't - since the collider was destroyed, it was only by means of a bubbly portal neither of them were brave enough to step through, the lasted at most forty minutes, and seemed to be a rarity on her side since only she could contact him and neither of them had heard from any of the others. Miles just hoped they were all doing alright.

Specifically Peter. He couldn't help but worry about that guy.

Ganke swivels in his desk chair and breaks Miles from his thoughts when he thrusts a cell phone into Miles' focus.

"Here's your phone back, I charged it for you," He adds once its in Miles' hand, to which Miles can only respond with, "Wait what? I thought you just needed my laptop?"

"Yeah, I needed your laptop when your phone was dead and I couldn't use it. I figured your passwords were the same so I could just login but… well, you know."

"Yeah, I know, considering you woke me up about it."

Ganke chuckles a bit at that, and Miles joins in too, until he breaks into a small interrupting cough. He settles back into his chair and taps into his phone, finding a bunch of notifications that he easily swipes away. It's mostly about homework that he'll look at tomorrow, since he'd like to enjoy his weekend, or what's left of it, after sleeping most of it away. Which Miles finds a little ironic after he actually tried to practice some time management this time.

He'd specifically told his parents that he wanted to stay at the dorms this weekend instead of coming home on Friday, so he could catch up on school stuff. Which was true. He just failed to mention that it also included Spider-stuff.

Patrolling, homework, and sleep was a lot harder to balance when he had his parents to worry about when sneaking back into his bedroom and falling asleep in his superhero getup.

Hence, one of the perks of staying at school for the weekend and letting Ganke in on his secret.

While Miles' thumb does its mindless task of swiping away on his screen he leans an elbow on the desk which brings him next to his laptop where his friend is typing away. He catches a few words and finds his interest piqued.

"What are you doing anyway?" Miles questions, looking over the monitors again. The two extra monitors that stand mounted above the desk still have the same loading bars filling the screen, but Ganke's laptop has an obvious box of coding filling it that makes Miles curious and slightly answers his question as to why Ganke needed his laptop in the first place. "Is this for school?"

"Hmm?" Ganke hums, looking up from Miles' laptop, and his face brightens when he catches onto what Miles said. "Oh! This? No, this isn't for school, it's uh, actually kinda for you." Miles perks up. "I mean, it's really for your spidersona, but you get me. It's still a work in progress and I was waiting until I got the kinks outta the programming before I showed you."

"Wait," Miles interrupts, clearing his throat before he continues. "You made something for me. For when I'm Spider-man?" He can't help the weird way his voice breaks, and it's totally because of puberty and not the warm feeling bubbling in his chest.

"Yeah, exactly! I was actually looking over some of that tech you brought back from the 'Spider-cave.'"

Miles giggles, a bit hysterically, and wobbles when he stops leaning on the desk to look closer at Ganke's work. "It's not a Spider-cave. It's a shed ." He notices his mask laid out besides the laptop and some of the gadgets May Parker had allowed him to take the last time he'd seen her.

She'd offered him access to the entire shed, but he'd politely refused. He wanted to figure out his style of Spider-manning on his own.

Also the Spider-car was a little much.

Though, in the end, Miles had relented to the overwhelming power that was Aunt May and had taken some of the pieces that the Peter Parker of his universe had never gotten the chance to finish.

"It's a Spider-cave, dude. Just go with it," Ganke mocks. "Anyway, I was looking at this thing," Ganke points at a square looking chip," I think it was meant to be a kind of transmitter the original Spider-man was gonna use and after messing around with it, I kinda had an idea of how to create an improved version that we could program into your mask. Which is… exactly what I'm doing? Sorry I messed around with this stuff without asking you first."

It's probably two in the afternoon, on a Saturday that Miles has all but slept away after getting his ass kicked, first by the biggest A-hole of the week, and now by whatever illness is evading his immune system, but somehow it feels like the best day ever.

Ganke rattles on as Miles rolls his chair behind him to his other side to inspect his mask which is now implanted with two incredibly small microchips. One where his mouth would be and the other by the ear.

"I figured we could implement a simple communicator in your suit first since- uh well - I don't have to explain why you'd rather be hands free while crime fighting. But after that we could implement an interface - which I'm already working on right now - so you could check messages or crime radar, and access the internet without pulling out your phone. If you want you could try the mask on, see how it works. It's easily removable if you don't like it. So don't freak or anything."

Miles' throat stings as he swallows before turning to his friend, his mask in his hands. "Ganke this… this is awesome. I- why'd you do all this- cause like, thank you, but-"

"I'm Spider-man's best friend." Ganke smiles and Miles feels his throat close up. He remembers wandering this new school months ago, feeling like he didn't belong and didn't deserve what a random chance had gotten him. Now Ganke gives him shoulder a punch and Miles can barely remember a time where things weren't like this . "I gotta pull my own weight, as the loveable sidekick. Now gimme your phone and put on the mask and try it out! Just uh... try not to get phlegm on the chip."

Miles and Ganke share a laugh while Miles turns the mask from inside out to slip over his head, though he pauses when just his hair is covered.

"Wait... why'd you need my laptop for all this? Is the program for the communicator on my stuff too?"

"Oh, no. I just forgot my Netflix password. I needed to check my email to reset it."

Miles squints behind his mask as it slips on. "Righhhhhht… and you just had to wake me up for that one."

Through the lenses of his mask Miles watches as Ganke shrugs and clicks Miles' phone into a wire the leads back to Ganke's laptop. "You can be mad at me later, first, let's test this baby out."

Also immediately after Ganke says that a robotic Siri like voice resounds from within the mask.

"You have one new voice message from-"

Miles nearly sends himself into a coughing fit, when he exclaims over the voice, "It works! I hear it!" He tenderly places a hand over his stomach that aches with his sudden movement. Though he doesn't let it deter his excitement.

"Of course it works!" Ganke replies, watching his monitors as he does. "This is the easy stuff, now tell it to play the voicemail to test the microphone."

"Got it. Uh… Spider-siri, play that voice mess-"

He doesn't have a chance to finish as Spider-siri interrupts him.

"Incoming call from Mom."

"Oh no."

"Huh…?"

There's a clink that barely resounds over the mindless babble of the TV as MJ's fork slips from her fingers, nicks the side of her dinner bowl, and hits her carpet with a plop of spaghetti and sauce.

"Oh-!" She rips the blanket off her legs and scrambles to put her feet on the floor to reach the coffee table to place her bowl. With her hands free, and now sitting on the edge of the couch, she properly eyes the mess besides her toes. "Come on..." She complains, face scrunching as she inspects the red splotch of tomato chunks bleeding into her vanilla colored carpet. Though a wrinkled forehead is about all she gives it, her attention drifting upwards to the wall behind her television.

MJ inspects the unmoving, totally normal, dried paint that covers the wall of her living room. Her eyes start at the ceiling then move down until she hits the edge of her TV screen where the local news is running an exaggerated story on some new online app obsession.

She lets her eyes dart away from the screen to the left to check the window that leads out to her fire escape but finds nothing unusual. Only the glow of the city radiating from the dark of the night. She turns back to the wall.

She gives it such a critical eye that her head must be slowing tipping to the side. She quickly shoots up a hand to readjust her towel and stop it from flopping sideways off her head.

Now, if MJ were any other reasonable woman, she'd probably shrug her shoulders, tighten the belt around her bathrobe and chalk it up to the steam from her shower getting to her head, before going to the kitchen to grab some paper towels to wipe up the stain at her feet.

Instead, MJ shoots up from the couch and begins to inch towards the kitchen with her eyes never leaving the center of her living room and her hand feeling around blindly for her cell phone charging on the island counter, because the thing is she is absolutely a reasonable person.

But the definition of reasonable and logical changes when you're Spider-man's ex-wife.

So despite the unmoving, totally normal, dried paint on her wall, MJ reaches around her counter to grab her phone and lets her eyes fall to the screen after it unlocks so she can type in the number she had told herself not to dial until things felt more settled. Settled beyond a bouquet of flowers and only a week of coffee and conversation.

MJ's thumb hovers over the call icon while her focus lingers on the contact name on her screen.

Pete .

She glances up to the wall. The completely normal, grey tinted, unmoving, wall.

There's not a single hint of any bubbling, blistering, ultraviolet colors or swirling shapes which had puckered right above her TV before she had blinked and her fork had tumbled from her hand.

"Maybe this multiverse stuff is really getting to my head," she mumbles, leaning back against her counter and pulling the towel from her head. The damp ends of her hair drop around the collar of her robe as she heaves a sigh, feeling like she could really use a glass, or maybe an entire bottle of wine.

But her bare feet remain stuck in place on her kitchen tile, making no move for the cabinet where she keeps her drinks, still only moving her eyes to peer up and watch the wall from across the room.

"I'll call you- or you call me- or we can call each other- or texting, texting is good too-"

"I'll call you, Peter."

"Really? I mean... okay, cool. Great. Yep. Sounds like a plan. You'll call me."

She stays put, thumb hanging loosely over her phone screen, mulling over her ex-husband's voice - which is a term that had first empowered her heart-break when their split up was fresh, but then it had festered and sat in her chest up like something she could never fully move past until he'd shown up at her door, flowers in hand, and an endless, nearly unbelievable story to tell after months of silence - their last conversation bounces around in her head. His tone jumping around like a nervous teenager, explaining multi-universes and spider-people and all the mistakes he wished he never made, which was a long and tiresome list but it had still made her cry by the very end.

Maybe she's tired, or maybe she needs glasses, or made a full glass of wine, and maybe her wall really is totally normal. Devoid of any superhero happenings and she's just looking for an excuse to finally call .

MJ presses her lips together for a second, lets her thumb tap her phone to keep the screen from dimming, and decides that whether it was a late night hallucination induced from stress or an actual space-time portal glitching into existence for a fraction of a second, in the end, she rather have Peter at her side.

That's really all she'd rather have.

And that's why she's already hitting the call button, when it happens again.

She hits the speaker button purely by mistake, her phone slipping from her grip and spinning from her palm to the floor. The dial tone stutters at her feet, its sound splitting into several tones and resounding as if from several different phones at different corners of the room. MJ finds herself entranced and yet almost desperate to cover her ears. It's like she has two phones in her hand and she's called one using the other, and now she's stuck listening to the endless echo that each emit, all the while watching as the wall of her living room begins to spin.

Just above her TV, the grey paint that was still nearly a second ago is twirling with bubbling black circles that look less like spots and more like endless holes to some other side. MJ latches a hand along her kitchen counter and crouches down to clasp her phone, still ringing with its infinite dial tone. She remembers how Peter described the portal, how it had sucked him up like a vacuum and sent him careening into the other side. Another world.

There doesn't seem to be any force pulling her away, but MJ doesn't take a chance. She dives around the counter to brace herself against the other side. With her phone in hand and a kitchen island wall between her and the space-portal she clutches her phone and watches.

"Come on, Peter." She mutters, tightening her grip around her phone. "Now would be a really good time to pick up."

The hole - holes? There seems to be at least seven black blobs circling the first larger one - vibrates and almost seems to splinter. Shards of color, shapes, and symbols burst like rays light from the thing, and then it twitches, jutting to the side, closer to her window and farther from her TV, where the local news had been showing a morphed picture of multiple different channels.

Over the alien noises whirling like an electrical wind from the moving portal, the mashup of twenty different news reports playing on her TV, and the gasp that bubbles from her own throat as the space-time spinning mess stretches over her entire front window, MJ can barely hear the voice that shouts from her phone.

"MJ?" The voice - Peter's voice, she recognizes, despite how it stutters from the disturbance across the room- asks and MJ feels her entire body loosen with relief. "Are you there?"

"Peter! Oh thank god," She starts, bringing the phone to her chin. "Something's-!"

Her jaw feels like it drops to the edge of her robe, draped around her knees.

Almost like a bubble, the intergalactic, glitching computer virus black hole thing that had just been invading her living room and been turning her window into a Picasso painting, is suddenly gone.

As if it hit the end of a sharp stick and popped.

Mary Jane straightens up from where'd she'd been hunkered between her cabinets. Her limbs feel like the limp noodles that are probably getting soggy on her carpet floor.

"What the-" She tries, spinning around to look at every corner of her room, but Peter cuts her off.

As does the metallic crash that blares from outside her window after MJ is absolutely sure she catches something solid fall in the corner of her eye.

MJ jumps and Peter keeps talking, "-I'm not that far from your apartment! I can be there in fiv- four! I'll be there in four minutes! Just- Whatever's going on just wait for me to get there! Okay? MJ? MJ?!"

"Peter, I'm here, I'm alright," she reassures him, hearing the desperation as well as the slight muffle to his voice that lets her know he's already in the mask.

"Then- what's going? What was all that noise in... the background?" He asks, huffing, and in the background of his call she can hear the signature noise of his webs shooting out in record time. "It sounded like- like it was bad. Are you sure you're alright?"

MJ, with her bathrobe loosely tied around her waist, her wet bangs tickling her face, and her bare feet against the cold tile of her floor, she begins to inch a little closer to the window across the room. "I promise I'm alright," She says and hears him sigh. Unfortunately, she's going to probably make his heart rate jump again. "But, Peter, just now- and please try not to freak out." She attempts to stand on her toes and peer over the windowsill to see anything but the shadows of the late night outside. "You know that space- that portal thing you told me about? The thing that brought you to the other world?"

"Of course I-" He begins, and she give him a moment since it sounds like he's putting it together. "Wait, why- why are you asking…?"

"Because I think it just opened up on my living room wall," she answers, slinking closer to her window, though with enough caution for another possible space portal that she keeps a safe distance. "And I think... something may have just fallen out of it?" She ends, voice teetering on unsure and possibly frayed nerves. "How far away are you?"

"Less than two minutes away." His voice sounds tense, she notes, like he's straining himself to move faster than he should. "MJ, wherever the portal opened do not go near it. Wait somewhere safe until I get there, grab your taser just in case and-"

"Don't worry, I'm being careful." And she is. "I'm just trying to see…" She tries leaning as she moves to peek out the window."... what fell outside."

"Bad. Bad idea. Probably the worst and most bad idea that you- Can you-" He grunts and it gives her enough time to steer clear of the window and anywhere near the TV as she walks across the room to her new destination, which is the second window of her living room. If she sticks her head outside, it should give her a clear view of the fire escape outside the window where she's sure something crash landed from the inter-dimensional space hole. MJ moves with a careful pace as Peter complains, "Can we put a pause on this solo investigation until I get there? Please? Before I- I go into cardiac arrest?"

MJ steps to the window pane. Looking out the window she can clearly see the street below, outlined by the yellow glow of the street lights.

"I'll put a pause if things seem out of hand. For now, I'm checking the fire escape to know what we may be getting ourselves into." She focuses her hearing beyond Peter's protests for any indication of what could have crash landed outside, then slides the window open. The knot of her bathrobe digs into her hip as she bends her upper body over the windowsill to crane her neck outside. She only has half her head out, with her wet hair twirling in the city wind when a small shuddering noise catches her attention.

"Mmsss… Parr...k?"

MJ's head swivels to her right.

Her eyes blow open wide and she breathes out all the air in her lungs.

There, sprawled over her fire escape, and slightly propped up against the stone wall of her building beneath her window, is very clearly the basic outline of a costume she knows all too well.

"P-Peter?" MJ chokes out, not sure if she's referring to her's or affirming if this stranger in a slightly familiar mask is actually not a stranger, but rather, in line with Peter's story, another version of the man she knows.

She takes in the red and black mix of the costume, and jolts when she notices the definite figure of what can only be a child underneath the costume as the mask turns, or rather rolls to face her with wide and white colored eyes. She can just barely tell in the light glowing from her apartment that his frame is trembling and she shoots a hand up to cover her mouth when she notices the sickening way his left arm is bent.

A Spider-man is at her window.

Another Spider-man.

MJ drops her phone.

A/N: I've finally overcome my fears and I'm writing spider-man fics. Buckle up people. If you'd like to talk all things spider-man and other fun stuff you can find me on tumblr: createandconstruct.

And let me know what you think of this first chapter :)

(This was posted awhile ago on Ao3. I'm just finally getting around to posting here.)