Chapter Text
Parker and Pete walked through the dark and retraced their steps. They had talked it over and came to the conclusion that they had woken up in similar areas, which made them hope they’d come across Peter as well, since odds were that he did too. They didn’t have anything on them other than the clothes they had when they got transported into Peter’s universe before everything went down, so it was going to be an awkward few days before they could get extras, or things like sleeping bags or anything.
As they walked, both men kept minutely jumping a little every now and then at distant gunshots or other sudden, but distant, bangs. While New York was not a quiet city by any means, this was much more active than even that. Shaking his shoulders to try and relax a bit, Pete chuckled.
“This place is insane, huh?”
“Definitely. This place gives me the creeps, it feels like the city is diseased in some way, alive and sentient, or both. It’s freaking my spider-sense out.”
Pete gave him a side-eyed glance.
“More than just the gunshots?”
“Yeah, I can almost feel like energy running through the ground or something. I’m not sure, it could be like a metro or something, I could kind of sense that one back home when it was busy, but this one feels almost…damp? I don’t know how to explain it.”
“…Huh.” Pete said, his brain still running around in circles trying to process that.
“What, you can’t sense it?”
“Nope.”
“Huh…” Parker echoed, looking thoughtful, then stopped walking abruptly. Pete quickly stopped too, narrowly avoiding tripping over the older man.
“What?” Pete asked, looking around but not noticing anything unusual. (Other than their current predicament, of course.)
“Up there,” Parker pointed, and Pete looked up and saw a familiar white substance on the wall of the building above them. It was barely there; he probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all if Parker hadn’t pointed it out.
“He must be nearby,” Parker says, “but which way did he go?”
Pete looked up and down the street and saw webs going in both directions, one way down an alley, and the other crossing the road and down another side street out of view.
“We could split up and meet up here in either an hour or whenever we come to the end of the trail.” Pete offers, “Do you think we should go in suits or nah?”
“Suits would probably be better, plus we’ll have better speed then.”
Both men go down the alley and quickly shed their coats, shirts, and pants, showing their costumes underneath. Realizing he doesn’t have a backpack, Pete quickly zips his coat up and stuffs all his clothes into it and rolls them all into a ball and webs it onto the wall. He looked over and saw Parker do a similar thing, though he made a face and sighed.
“My webbing is such a pain to get out of this jacket but oh well. Sacrifices must be made.”
“Your webbing doesn’t dissolve?”
“Oh, it does, it just leaves a residue. Speaking of, we better hurry since we don’t know how old those webs are.”
“Right, right. I’ll go North, meet back here whenever we get to the end of the trail.”
“Sounds good, see ya.” Both leapt up onto the opposite walls of the alley and went their separate ways.
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Peter sat on the edge of a roof, and he sat admiring the view of the distant water and the lighthouse. Who knew such a shitty city would still have a nice view somewhere. As he sat, he swung his legs and took a bite out of a sub someone had given him after he stopped a robbery. It was from the owner of the food place that he had saved, and the owner said he could come back whenever he wanted for free food as thanks. Even before suddenly becoming homeless, he would have taken the man up on his offer, and Peter was even more thankful now.
As he ate, Peter’s sense went off (staring-strange-hostile?) and he quickly looked around. He couldn’t see anyone on street level, so he turned to look behind him and froze. Some guy was trying to blend into the shadows on the other side of the roof, and if Peter wasn’t, y’know, spider-man, the guy would probably have been successful. Peter didn’t really feel like confronting the guy, so he popped the last bite of the sandwich into his mouth, pulled his mask the rest of the way down over his mouth, rolled up the wrapper, pushed it in his pocket, (he may be legally a criminal, but he wasn’t a villain. Don’t litter, kids) and casually slid off the ledge of the roof. All while maintaining eye (or at least where the guy’s eye lights were) contact and flipping him the bird. Hopefully that would creep the guy out and teach him not to just randomly stalk people.
Not bothering to let the weirdo see which way he went, he quickly sped down the street and turned down an alley and turned again to keep going in the same direction. He wanted to go back to the abandoned building he’d been camping in, he was finally starting to get a little tired again and he wanted to sleep some. Peter was about to shoot a web out, when he heard a ‘pssst!’ above him. He snapped his head toward the sound, and he saw familiar white eyes on a red mask.
He was frozen for a second in disbelief, then sputtered.
“Oh my god, P- I mean, uh, um, you ! Oh my god-“
Peter leaped up the side of the building, not bothering with the nearby fire escape. He scrambled over the edge of the roof and shot to his feet, legs shaking from shock. Hesitantly, Peter grasped the other man’s forearms, as if to make sure he was real, genuinely there in the flesh and not just a hallucination.
“Oh my god.” Peter said again, unable to say anything else at the moment. He looked over the other Spider-man, recognizing that it was Peter Two. Not that it would really make a difference on which Peter they were, he was just so glad he wasn’t alone anymore.
The other Peter pulled him into a hug, and they just stood there for a moment. The other man was just barely tall enough to rest his chin on top of Peter’s head. Peter hugged him back, and their hug was tight enough to crush a regular person’s ribs but felt nice to them.
(safe-safe-safe Staring-near-hostile? )
Peter pulls back from the hug, his feeling of safety disappearing when the same feeling of being watched returned. He could feel Peter two prickle a bit next to him, the feeling hitting him too. It seemed to be slower than Peter’s own sense, but he wasn’t super concerned with that right now. Both Spider-Men looked around, but this time Peter couldn’t see anything. Peter two hopped to the opposite edge of the building and turned to look back at Peter and motioned back towards his building.
“Let’s go, Parker’s waiting for us.”
Peter trotted over to join him, and they both swung off, not quite retracing their steps so they could lose their tail if he managed to keep up but still heading the same general direction. As they swung, Peter realized something.
“How’d you know where I’ve been camping?” He said towards the other Peter, not needing to shout since he knew the other man would hear him.
“Oh, we didn’t, we just found your web trail and split up to follow it because we couldn’t tell what direction you went. We were going to meet up in the alley where we stored our clothes.”
“Did you guys get bags too?” Peter asked, casually doing a flip as he switched webs.
“Bags? No, we just had the stuff we entered your universe with. Pretty much just the clothes on our backs.”
“Oh.” Peter thought for a second. “We can split the stuff that was in my bag, there’s enough for all three of us, I think.”
“Sounds like a plan. Oh, we’re here.” The other Peter landed gracefully, and pulled his webbed up stuff off of the wall it was attached to. “Oh, perfect timing, it’s dissolving.”
As he put on his clothes, he glanced at the moon and said, “Parker should be here soon.”
“Parker?” Peter echoed, a question in his voice.
“Oh, yeah, we figured out a name thing, so we don’t have to call each other Peter Two Or Peter Three or anything, it was getting kind of confusing. I’m gonna go with Pete and he’s going with Parker.”
“Ohh, that makes sense.” Peter settled on the ground. Time to wait for Parker to return.
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Parker shot out another web towards the top of the line of buildings as he swung along the trail left by the younger man. He hoped the kid (because that’s what Peter was; a kid) was all right, especially in a city like this. If he wasn’t Spider-Man too, Parker would be concerned he wasn’t even alive anymore from the things he had heard going on in the city. He was so relieved when he had seen the webs, he hoped that Pete had found him already.
As Parker followed the trail, he watched it stop at an abandoned building. It was just like all the other buildings around it, but Parker had a feeling that this was the building Peter had been hunkering down in. Honestly, he’d choose the same one. Not a ton of holes in the roof, not a ton of broken windows and all the windows that were broken were in the same area, and it had roof access as well. All you could possibly need in an abandoned building.
As Parker perched like a gargoyle on the building next door, he saw a man run across the same building he’d just been studying’s roof before leaping onto the same one Parker himself was on. He was mildly surprised his sense didn’t alert him, seeing as he was in possible danger, but the sense still could be finicky even after his years with it. It was most likely because the sense didn’t consider the man a threat.
Parker squinted to take a closer look, he was surprised by the face he saw. It was too familiar, even with the domino mask that was supposed to hide his identity. (Though it didn’t really do that good a job in Parker’s opinion.) It took Parker a second to put two and two together, but…it looked exactly like his old pictures of his dad as a kid. He couldn’t be sure the guy had his dad’s eyes too because of the mask, but even without the eyes he still looked almost identical like Richard. Parker wished he could remember him better.
By the time he came to that conclusion, the masked man was already halfway out of sight, and Parker remembered he had somewhere to be. PleasepleasePLEASE let Pete have found the kid, Parker prayed to no one in particular.
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Parker landed back in the alley and felt a wave of relief wash over him when he saw the two people waiting for him.
“Oh, thank god, he found you.”
“Yep, there was some weird guy that followed us a bit, but we lost him.” Pete answered, Peter probably would have replied if he wasn’t half asleep leaning against Pete while standing up. Hearing the voices, though, caused him to look up, and quickly shake himself out of his slumber as Parker put on his civilian clothes.
“I c’n show ya where I’ve been hangin’ out, we can all sleep there,” Peter said, rubbing stuff out of his eyes.
“Sounds good, lead the way.” Parker said, wiping his coat with his hand and a grimace, web residue still sticking to it.
The trio headed out of the alley way, and back to their temporary home.
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Batman lowered his binoculars as he watched the identical pair hug each other. He followed them to the alley and watched as the younger of the two dozed off. He also watched the third join them, and he watched the trio head off. He didn’t bother following them further, because Nightwing had already found their base and that’s the direction they were heading. He reached up to his earpiece and unmuted.
“Trio is heading to their base, Oracle. That’s all for tonight, I‘m heading back to the cave.”
“Sounds good, Batman. You’re the only one still out, so once you come in I’m logging off for the night too.”
“All right. See you tomorrow.”
Batman muted once more and headed to the Batmobile. It was farther away than he liked it to be but since he knew at least one of them had super senses of some sort he didn’t want to risk the meta hearing him. Originally, this had been a ‘see if the meta is trying to commit any crimes’ task before it had turned into ‘why is there a kid all alone’ to a three possible metas in Gotham situation. The youngest seemed to at least be trying to do good and fight crime, but the older two were still totally unknown. They were probably related in some way, because they all looked fairly similar to each other. They honestly were reminding him of someone else too, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on it yet.
As he unlocked the Batmobile and sat down, his phone in his dashboard began to ring. The caller ID said Dick, and he hit the answer button. He didn’t bother saying hello and got straight to business.
“Don’t worry about doing reports tonight, Nightwing, we can do them tomorrow.”
Dick laughed. “You read my mind, B. You coming in for the night?”
“Yes, they’re going to their base so there’s not much left for me tonight.”
“Sounds good. G’night, B!” Dick said, and hung up before Bruce could reply.
“ Hn .”
Just then, it hit him why the three strangers were vaguely familiar.
They looked like Dick.