Chapter Text
Chapter 51
Seven in the morning, and the sky over Queens was doing that thing where it couldn't decide if it wanted to be orange or grey, so it settled on both, which was the most indecisive a sky could be.
I was upside down on a lamppost.
The robber beneath me was wrapped from shoulders to ankles in organic web, wearing the expression of a man who had made several consecutive poor decisions and was only now arriving at the consequences of all of them simultaneously.
"Okay," I said, dropping from the lamppost and crouching in front of him. "Let me explain your situation. You tried to rob a bodega that I was getting coffee from. Which, personally, I take as a commentary on my morning."
"I didn't know you were—"
"The suit," I said. "The *suit* was right there. On my body. Which was right there. In the bodega."
He opened his mouth.
"I'm not actually upset," I said. "I want you to know that. I'm in a genuinely good mood. Aunt May is on a honeymoon right now." I crouched down a little more, and something in my chest did the warm thing it had been doing since the backyard, since the ring box, since Ben's shaking hands. "She went to the Maldives with a man who loves her and who came back from being dead because sometimes life does that. So I'm good. I'm really good. I'm just also going to leave you here for the cops."
"Who's Aunt May."
"None of your business."
I stood up.
His phone rang.
The ringtone was a very aggressive club song.
I looked at the phone.
The phone continued to ring.
He couldn't reach it because his arms were webbed to his sides.
*Spider-Man,* my brain said, *do not answer that man's phone. That is not your phone. You are a hero, not a receptionist.*
The phone kept ringing.
"Can you," he started.
"I'm not answering your phone," I said.
The phone rang.
I answered the phone.
"Hello?"
The silence on the other end lasted exactly one second.
Then a voice I recognized.
It had a theatrical quality to it, the way a bad magician has a theatrical quality, except this one had actual fishbowl technology, so I couldn't dismiss him entirely.
"Hello, Spider-Man," said Mysterio. "Long time no see."
Something cold moved through me that I refused to show.
*Mysterio,* I thought.
"Yeah," I said. "Since I defeated you last time."
"Mmm." The sound of him smiling. I'd never seen his actual face, only the fishbowl, but I could hear the smile and it made my jaw tighten. "Yes. That's actually precisely why I'm calling."
"Revenge," he said.
"Let's play a game, Spider-Man." His voice changed slightly, the way it does when an actor finally gets to deliver the line he's been rehearsing. "I've planted plastic bombs. In Houston, Texas."
The morning air felt different suddenly.
"There's a plane ticket," he continued, "in the back pocket of the gentleman you've currently giftwrapped for law enforcement. Better hurry. The flight leaves soon."
I stood very still.
Then I reached around the webbed robber, found the pocket, and pulled out a plane ticket. I looked at it. I looked at the phone.
*He planned this,* I thought. *He knew this specific guy was going to rob this specific bodega at this specific time. He's been watching. He's been—*
"Are you CRAZY?!" The words came out at a volume I hadn't planned. "Bombs, Mysterio. You said bombs. Don't involve other people in this. This is between us."
"Mmm," he said again, enjoying it.
"And why Houston especially? Why not—"
"There's no superhero stationed in Houston," Mysterio said simply. "I don't want anyone interrupting our time together. You understand."
*Of course,* I thought, already moving. *He picked a city where no one could come and save me from myself.*
I shot a web to the nearest building and launched upward, the ticket in my hand, the phone pressed to the side of my mask.
"As for not involving innocents," he continued, and there was something in his voice now that wasn't the theatrical villain performance, something a little more honest, a little more bitter, "that's funny, coming from you. I thought for a long time about why I lost to you. Do you want to know what I concluded?"
"Was it the fishbowl?" I said, cutting left between two buildings, gaining altitude. "I feel like it was the fishbowl. Limited field of vision. Depth perception issues. I'm not a doctor, but I have concerns."
"Are you done."
"I'm just saying it was probably the fishbowl."
"I was too small," he said. "In my thinking. I was using what I had for petty money. Petty theft. Petty everything." A pause. "I've spent my time since our last meeting reconsidering the *scope* of my ambitions."
Something in the way he said *scope* landed wrong in my chest.
"Also," I said, because I couldn't help it, "you basically just admitted the fishbowl affected your eyesight."
"I'll call you when you land." The warmth was gone from his voice. "And Spider-Man? Don't contact anyone. Don't call your friends, your colleagues, no other spiders, no nothing. I have sensors. If I detect anyone other than you near any of my locations, I detonate everything early. And the body count becomes considerably less game-like."
The call ended.
I landed on a rooftop and looked at the ticket.
Houston. 8:40 AM departure. Forty minutes from now.
I looked at the city around me, the grey-orange sky, the morning traffic beginning below, and I thought of Aunt May in the Maldives and Ben with his ring box and the whole warm machinery of last night, and I thought, *don't let any of that become the last normal thing.*
"Fine," I said, to no one.
I ran for the airport.
I got through security in a way that I am not going to describe in detail because I'm not sure it was entirely by the book, and I found my seat, and I sat down, and the passenger beside me, a middle-aged man with a crossword puzzle and a look of deep personal peace, turned his head.
He looked at me.
The suit. The mask. All of it.
He opened his mouth.
"What," I said.
He closed his mouth. Looked back at his crossword.
I looked at him.
"I can't fly," I told him, because it felt important to explain. "I mean, I can swing. Between buildings. But there have to be buildings. Above open water I just fall."
He looked at the crossword.
"So. Plane."
He wrote something down.
I put my head back against the headrest and tried to sleep because I feel like I'll need it, and the plane took off, and somewhere over Virginia I actually managed it, and the last thing I thought before I went under was: *why is my spider sense still doing that.*
The cave was a different kind of silence.
Not the good kind.
Harry Osborn had been standing just inside the entrance for forty minutes now, his bag on the floor, his arms loose at his sides, his face doing the thing where it didn't do anything at all, which was somehow more alarming than if it had been doing something.
He looked around. The equipment. The makeshift lab. The screens showing city feeds from six different angles.
*He's been here a while,* Harry thought. *He has a system. He's been watching everything and planning and he's completely serious about all of it, and I used to think the worst thing my father could be was indifferent.*
"Harry."
Norman Osborn stepped out of the shadow near the wall and opened his arms slightly, the gesture of a man welcoming someone home, as though the home were not a cave and the welcome were not from a man who destroyed everything he touched.
"Welcome," Norman said. "To my humble abode."
Harry said nothing.
Norman let his arms fall. He studied Harry the way he always studied things he owned, working top to bottom, looking for what had changed and what still belonged to him.
"You've gotten cold," Norman said. "Why so cold? Is it because of the goblin?" He moved toward the center of the cave, slow, easy, the way powerful people move when they don't expect resistance. "I did what I did for *you*, Harry. Everything. The company, the power, all of it."
"You did it for yourself," Harry said.
The words came out flat.
Norman paused.
Norman thought, looking at his son's face. *He's looked at everything I've built and decided I built it for myself.* Something in him wanted to argue, wanted to explain, wanted to make the case, and then he looked at Harry's eyes and realized the case had already been heard and decided and he hadn't been in the room for it.
"All right," Norman said. He moved toward one of the screens. "I invited you here to tell you something. Do you know what I noticed about Spider-Man after our fight on the bridge?"
Harry's hands, at his sides, didn't move.
"He hesitated," Norman said. "He saw my face, and he *hesitated*. He recognized me personally, Harry. Not from the news. Not from some propaganda. He knew my face the way someone knows a face they've seen in a normal life." He turned. "So I thought: who in the circles I know would hesitate when they learned the Green Goblin was Norman Osborn?"
He said it the way he always said conclusive things. The way he'd announced quarterly earnings. The way he'd told Harry he was pulling him from school.
"Not my friends," Norman continued, and something around his mouth shifted, a smile. "But I don't want to brag, Norman Osborn doesn't exactly have friends."
"That's not something to brag about," Harry said.
"Whatever." Norman waved a hand. "So I looked at *your* friends instead. And there are really only two who could be Spider-Man. Flash Thompson," he said, and his expression made his opinion of Flash Thompson very clear, "is too stupid. Which leaves—"
He stopped.
His face did something genuinely pleased with itself.
"Peter Parker," Norman said. "Peter Parker is Spider-Man."
Silence.
He waited for the reaction.
Harry gave him nothing.
Norman's eyes narrowed slowly, the way a man's eyes narrow when a calculation he trusted comes out wrong.
"You already knew," he said.
Harry said nothing.
"You *knew.*" The theatrical control cracked at the edges. "You knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man and you sided with him. Against me, your father. You helped expose me to the *world.*"
The rage came up fast. Norman turned to the nearest wall and hit it, hard, and rock crumbled, and he hit it again, and again, and the cave absorbed the sound indifferently, the way caves do, and Norman stood with his fist in the crater he'd made and breathed.
*My own son,* he thought. *My own son chose a Parker over me.*
The breathing slowed.
He turned around slowly.
"I forgive you," he said.
Harry looked at him.
"You're my son after all," Norman said, and he said it the way you say the thing that's supposed to end an argument. "That supersedes everything. So here's what I propose: you have Oscorp. I have the power. Together we—"
The screen on the far wall lit up.
Both of them stopped.
On the screen, a face appeared in a holographic broadcast. A man in a silver suit. A fishbowl helmet that caught the light in a way that was probably expensive.
"Hello, everyone," said the man on the screen. "All over the world."
Norman looked at the fishbowl.
*Who,* Norman thought.
"This is Mysterio. The greatest of all."
"Presenting to you," Mysterio continued, with the energy of someone who had been practicing this speech for a long time, "an exciting game between myself and Spider-Man."
Father and son stood in the cave and watched the screen.
Harry's hands were very still at his sides.
*Peter,* Harry thought. *Where are you right now. Where are you.*
The phone rang the second I stepped off the jet bridge.
I answered it.
"You finally arrived," Mysterio said. "Welcome to Houston."
"Thanks, it's lovely, I've been here thirty seconds."
"The rules of our game." His voice had the energy of a man who had been waiting for this specific conversation for a long time. On the phone screen, the video call activated, and I saw him, fishbowl and all, holding three playing cards like he was about to do a trick. "Three bombs. Three locations, spread across the city. I tell you each location one at a time. Stop a bomb, receive the next address. Clear?"
"You said this was a game," I said. "Who's the audience?"
"Everyone," he said. "Everyone in the world, except Houston. I didn't want to cause a panic in your immediate vicinity." A pause. "Consider it a courtesy."
*He's broadcasting this. Globally. The whole game.*
"Do try to maintain your image," he said pleasantly. "You're being watched."
"Aren't you just the most considerate terrorist," I said.
He looked at the first card.
"The first bomb," he said, "is planted inside a high school. It will detonate in fifteen minutes."
I was already moving.
Out through the exit doors, past confused travelers, and the moment I had a building to push off from I went up, I swung hard in the direction the phone's GPS was calculating.
"Fifteen minutes," Mysterio said from the phone, which I'd tucked against my mask somehow. "I do hope you're fast. I'd hate for you to lose on the very first one."
"You planted a bomb in a SCHOOL," I said, cutting between two buildings, reading the street grid below. "You psycho. You actually planted a bomb in a school full of KIDS."
"Ticking," he said.
I pushed harder. Longer swings. The organic web held exactly as long as I needed it to, each anchor pulling taut and then releasing, and I cut the distance down block by block, and the school appeared at the edge of my vision with five minutes left.
"Where in the school," I said.
"The cafeteria," he said. "It's lunch break. Most of the students should be concentrated there right now." A pause. "Won't it make a great fireworks show—"
"STOP TALKING," I said, and hit the roof at a dead run.
Students saw me.
A teacher dropped a binder.
I ignored all of it.
*Kitchen,* I thought. *He'd put it in the kitchen. Not out in the open where someone could stumble across it. In the kitchen where it could take the whole structure.*
I vaulted a lunch table.
"EVERYONE OUT!" I shouted, and the authority in my voice surprised even me. "MOVE, GO, USE THE DOORS BEHIND YOU, NOW!"
They moved. Three hundred kids, the human instinct to believe the person in the suit when the person in the suit says run.
I went through the kitchen doors.
The bomb was behind the third prep station, tucked against the wall behind a sheet pan rack, and I found it with two minutes left on the clock and I looked at it and I thought: *no time to move it. No time to throw it clear. We're doing this here.*
I sat down in front of it.
"Spider-Man showing us a bomb-deconstruction tutorial," Mysterio said from somewhere I'd set the phone to the livestream. "Very educational. Everyone learning? Good."
"Could you," I said, hands working at the casing, "please *not.*"
The casing came off.
Wiring. Standard arrangement. I followed the logic of it backward from the detonator, and the mess resolved itself into the classic final question, the one that only has two options and both of them are trying to kill you.
Blue wire. Red wire.
Twenty seconds.
*Classic,* I thought. *He really did the classic. Who does this in real life.*
I hovered my hand over the blue wire.
My spider sense hit me like a bell rung in a small room.
*That one,* it said. *That one goes off.*
I moved my hand to the red wire.
Silence. The specific absence of alarm that meant *this one. Yes. This.*
Ten seconds.
I cut the red wire.
The timer stopped at 0:08.
I sat in the empty kitchen with my hands on my knees and breathed.
*Eight seconds.*
From outside, the sound of students who had been evacuating and were now cautiously re-entering, and then something that started with one person and grew, the spreading realization of three hundred kids all arriving at the same thought at once: *that almost happened. That almost, actually happened.*
I stood up.
"The red wire," Mysterio said. He sounded genuinely mildly surprised, which I chose to enjoy. "You guessed right."
"Didn't guess," I said.
"No time to celebrate," he said, and flipped the second card. "The next bomb is on a train track. Inside a tunnel. You have ten minutes before the train reaches it and," he made an illustrative sound, "boom."
I was already running.
The tunnel was on the complete other side of the city from the school.
Of course it was.
I swung hard and didn't waste breath on Mysterio's commentary, and I arrived at the tunnel opening with one minute left and no time for anything gentle. I could see the bomb planted in the tunnel, and from the far end of the track I heard the unmistakable sound of a train that did not know it had a problem yet.
"Why now do trains have to be so scheduled."
*One minute,* I thought. *Bomb is inside the tunnel. Train is coming. Too far inside to throw it clear. Too late to deconstruct it. I need to stop the train before it gets in. And I need to seal the tunnel before the bomb goes off or the explosion takes the train anyway.*
Two problems. Sixty seconds.
*Webs first.*
I turned to the tunnel opening, the mouth where the train would enter, and I shot. Web after web, organic and thick, layering over the opening like I was sealing a jar, each new layer bonding to the last. I built it up and up, not just shooting but willing the web to spread, to cover, using the subtle control I'd copied to angle each strand into the gaps the last one left, and the net thickened, dense enough that I could feel it through the connection I had to it, dense enough that it wasn't a spider web anymore, it was a wall.
*Please hold,* I thought, and ran down the track toward the sound.
The train came around the curve and the headlight hit me and I braced and it hit me like a wall.
I got thrown back.
I hit the track and rolled and rolled.
I barely stopped myself.
I got up.
My arms screamed something unpleasant.
*Yeah,* I thought. *I know.*
I threw myself at the train again. This time I grabbed the front and I dug my feet into the track and pushed backward, and the train didn't stop but it slowed, a fraction, and I pushed harder, and the track tore a little under my feet, and it slowed a fraction more, and the web-sealed opening was visible now, forty feet away, twenty feet, and the train carried me backward and hit the webbed opening and the web caught it, *stretched*, the organic material redistributed the force across the whole surface like a net, and the train's momentum transferred into the web and the web held and held and—
The bomb reached zero.
The far end of the tunnel blew.
The sound was physical. The air pressure hit me like a shove, and the tunnel behind the web collapsed, and dust and small fragments blew through and I was still on the front of the train with my back in the webbing that had cushioned the whole thing.
The train stopped.
Everything was still.
I peeled myself off the front and dropped to the track.
Inside the train, very faintly, the sound of people asking each other if they were okay. The specific sound of people taking inventory after something they don't quite have words for yet.
*Everyone's okay, I hope.*
I breathed.
My arms and now chest still had opinions.
"Remarkable," Mysterio said from the phone, which had survived in a web pocket I'd made. "I'll give you that one. Genuinely impressive."
"Thanks," I said, and I was tired, and it came through. "I'll put it on my res...ume."
"Final stage," he said. "The mall. Thirty minutes."
I looked up at the collapsed tunnel entrance. The torn webs. Looked back at the phone.
*Thirty minutes,* I thought. *He gave me fifteen, then ten, and now thirty. Why the long period this time.*
Something moved in the back of my brain that I couldn't quite name yet. A shape without a name.
I swung toward the mall.
And the thing with no name stayed right where it was at the back of my brain, waiting for me to catch up to it.
The building was half-finished.
No glass in most of the windows. Scaffolding on three sides. A construction site that had been paused midway through becoming something, which felt like a metaphor I didn't have the energy to unpack right now.
No people.
No foot traffic nearby.
I landed at the main entrance and looked at the building, and my body hurt, and the exhaustion from the last two bombs was sitting in my muscles like wet sand, and I thought: *thirty minutes. He gave you thirty minutes for a building with no hostages. That's just screaming something is wrong.*
I knew what I knew.
But I was tired.
And the building was right there.
And there were no hostages.
*Don't,* said the thing with no name.
I walked in.
The lobby of the unfinished mall was concrete and rebar and the kind of echoing silence that empty buildings have when they're waiting to be filled. I looked around, started walking toward the center of the space where a bomb in a structural position would do the most damage. My hands were loose at my sides.
Then.
The world went white.
The explosion started at every wall simultaneously.
Not one bomb.
*Every wall.*
"HAHAHAHA!"
Mysterio's laugh in the broadcast reached every screen in the world.
"The previous two bombs," he said, still catching his breath, one hand against his fishbowl in a gesture that suggested he might have actually been tearing up a little from the joy of it, "were to build a *pattern*. One bomb per location. Stop it, feel good, feel capable, move to the next one." He raised a hand for calm, composing himself. "I gave him thirty minutes for the last location. I gave him a building with no hostages, nothing to protect, no one to worry about except the bomb. I let him get relaxed. I let his body unwind from the two before it. He let his guard down." He paused.
"So he walked in."
He looked at the camera.
"Your masked hero, lost the game. Game over." he said, spreading his hands over the image of the collapsed mall.
He stood with the showmanship of a man who'd been waiting his whole career for a finale.
"Look."
*Peter,* Harry thought, watching the screen in the cave.
Norman Osborn had gone quiet.
That was the alarming part. Harry had been waiting for something loud, something theatrical, the performance of contempt that Norman did reflexively when he watched weakness. He'd braced for that.
But Norman was quiet.
He was staring at the rubble on the screen with an expression Harry couldn't name. Something that looked, disturbingly, like a man doing honest introspection.
"Someone," Norman said, very low, "tell me what this is."
Harry waited.
"Spider-Man," Norman said. His voice had the quality of a man running a calculation that keeps arriving at an answer he didn't want. "Who fought me. Who matched me. Who pushed me until I had to run." He looked at the fishbowl on the screen. "Beaten by *that.* By a game. A parlor trick with a game show format. No powers. No armor. *A game.*"
He stopped.
Then he laughed.
Small, and genuinely lost.
"I used everything I had," Norman said. "I fought him and lost. And then I had to watch..." He stopped again. The laugh left him, and something replaced it that was less funny. "With a *petty game.* I must be dreaming. Or this is a nightmare. Because the alternative is that someone with no powers, wearing a *fishbowl,* accomplished what I couldn't." He shook his head slowly. "No. No, that's not right. That doesn't make sense."
He turned away from the screen.
*Because if it's true,* Norman thought, *then what does that say about me. What does that mean.*
He was still working it out.
And Harry opened his bag.
*Now,* Harry thought. *While he's having an existential crisis about where he stands in the villain rankings.*
He pulled out the equipment. The suit, piece by piece, parts sourced through Oscorp subsidiaries on authorization codes Norman hadn't thought to revoke, because Norman thought Harry was soft. Norman had always thought Harry was soft. It was the most consistent thing about him.
*I'm going to get there,* Harry thought, pulling the first piece on. *And Peter is going to be fine, because he is always fine, and I am going to be there when he is.*
Norman was still talking to the screen.
Harry stood up in the suit.
He hit Norman in the face.
He smashed into the wall.
Then slid down it.
He looked at the ceiling for a long moment.
Then he looked at Harry.
"I," Norman said slowly. He looked at the man wearing The Green Goblin mask. "Did I just... hit myself?"
"No," Harry said.
"Harry." Norman looked genuinely confused, which was the first genuine thing on his face in a while. "Did you get my—how did you—"
"You said I was soft," Harry said.
"Yes," Norman said, from the floor.
"So you didn't think I'd actually do it," Harry said.
"Yes," Norman said.
"That's the thing about deciding someone is soft," Harry said. "Eventually they stop trying to prove you wrong. They just start proving themselves right."
He looked at the screen.
At the rubble.
Somewhere under several tons of concrete and the ambitions of a mall that never got to open, a hand came out of the rubble.
Bloody. Scraped across the knuckles. Trembling from effort.
The rest of me followed.
I pulled myself out the way you pull yourself out of anything, one inch at a time, prioritizing breathing over dignity, and I reached the open air and stood up.
Standing up was an adventure.
My suit was torn across the left side, the right shoulder, and several places I couldn't see but absolutely could feel. Something warm was running down my temple, and I had the professional certainty that it was blood. My left knee was having opinions about the last ten minutes that were predominantly negative.
I saved myself thanks to the spider sense last minute warning.
I stood there.
Somewhere in the city, large screens on building faces were showing a news ticker. I could see two of them from where I was standing. *Breaking news. Mall down. Footage of collapse.*
And then I saw it.
A man on the screen. Standing in rubble. Bloodied. Torn suit. Face—
A face.
Bloodied face.
Exposed.
I couldn't recognize it.
No, I chose not to recognize it.
The man on the screen looked like he'd been through something significant. He had my jaw. My hair. My blood, specifically, running exactly the way my blood was currently running.
*That's me,* I thought.
*That's... me.*
I touched my face. My hand found skin, not fabric. Found the place where the mask had torn away somewhere in the explosion, and my face had been just, simply, *there,* visible, in a building being broadcast to the entire world.
*Oh,* I thought.
*That's funny.*
I laughed.
It started small and then it wasn't, because the alternative was something else entirely, and laughing was better, and I stood in the rubble with blood on my face and my suit in approximately four separate states of damage, and I thought, *is THIS what the spider sense was warning me about at the end of the wedding. Was it this. Was it trying to tell me this was coming and I just,* and the laugh kept building, and I leaned on a piece of broken concrete and let it go.
*Aunt May,* I thought. *You picked an excellent week to be in the Maldives.*
The police. They'd found the broadcast location.
They surrounded Mysterio.
*"Sir, put your hands where we can see them."*
*"But I was just streaming everything,"* said Mysterio's voice, smooth as ever. *"Officers, I was simply, this was all a bit, I had a camera set up—"*
*"Sir."*
*"You see, the whole game was—"*
*"Hands up, sir."*
A pause.
He turned toward wherever the broadcast camera was. Mysterio, surrounded by actual police with actual guns, turned to it one last time.
"What's with him. Is he a cockroach, He survived even this. But at least I still won."
"Your masked hero was in the end, just a KID."
"I want you to know," Mysterio said, and his voice shifted into something that recognized the room had changed, "that it was a wonderful game."
"All of you watching," he said, with the grace of someone who knows a curtain call when he sees one. "Thank you. Truly. It was a pleasure."
He bowed.
The bow of a stage magician who has stuck the landing.
And the figure in the fishbowl, the one the police were surrounding, turned into light.
Dissolved.
A hologram.
Nothing but light where a man had been.
And wherever Mysterio was, he was somewhere that wasn't here.
In the cave, Norman Osborn looked at Harry in his hand now.
"You're too soft, Harry." He said.
"You want to beat me with my own powers and suit. Don't make me laugh, Harry."
"After all, I had the powers longer than you."
But just then he got punched again.
He smashed into the wall again.
He slid it down again.
Harry looked at the newcomer.
It was Scarlet Spider.
"What are you doing here," he asked.
"Peter said you were acting suspiciously," Ben said. "So he asked me to keep an eye on you."
Norman finally realized a certain truth.
"I got hit twice," he said.
"Yes," Harry said.
"Into the wall."
"Also yes."
"Just after," Norman continued, staring upward, "what I believe was a genuine crisis about my place in the world."
"That part I watched," Ben said.
Norman looked at the two.
Then, helplessly, he started laughing again. The same small, genuinely lost laugh.
Norman looked at his son in the suit he'd built without telling anyone. The suit built from parts sourced quietly, kept hidden right under his nose.
*That's mine in him,* Norman thought. *That's where he got that.*
Harry looked at the screen.
At the news ticker.
At Peter's face.
"He's okay," Ben said.
Harry didn't move for a second.
Then he breathed out.
*You thought of me,* Harry thought, still looking at the screen. *You always think of me. Even when you're the one buried under a building. You absolute idiot.*
On every screen in the world, Peter Parker's face was playing on a loop. Unmasked. Blood-covered.
And in the rubble of an unfinished mall in Houston, Texas, I sat on a piece of concrete and thought about Aunt May and Ben in the Maldives, and my spider sense was finally, for the first time in two days, quiet.
Which probably meant something.
I just didn't know what yet.
*End of Volume 1, "Wishes"*