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Stay Soft, Get Eaten!

Summary:

“Dude,” Miles says, bug-suit-eyes widening as he continues. “I can’t meet the Avengers.”

“Why not? Are they after you?” Peter asks, almost dead-serious.

“What? No,” Miles denies, crushing Peter’s thoughts a moment later. “Just, like. Dude. I can’t meet them. Are you kidding me? I’ll embarrass myself so bad that I’ll kill myself. They’ll figure out how old I am so fast. And then they’ll figure out where I go to school and who I am and someone else will find out because no one in this city knows how to keep a secret even if they try real hard. My face will be in Times Square on every screen and my dad will kill me and then my mom will kill my dad then bring me back and then kill me again, and—”

Peter Parker finally gets the memo that his first and only protege, Miles Morales, should be introduced to the wider superhero community.

Notes:

helloooo... this is my first spider-man fic i've written so far! ^_^

this will be a multi-chaptered work. hope you all enjoy! have written this with the characterization of into the spiderverse miles morales in mind minus the multiverse plot points and the traumatic way he's gotten his powers.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter only starts to consider introducing Miles to his friends on a Thursday evening, legs swung over the side of an apartment building while his protege sits at his side, chowing down on a sandwich. 

 

Miles is smart—didn’t automatically pull the mask off like Peter almost did nine times when he was first starting off and thought he was suffocating under the thing, which, if he ever got caught, might be the lamest possible way to accidentally reveal his secret identity ever. He can only thank his stupidly hard-to-fuck-with-at-the-time mask for saving him from the embarrassment. It was enough of an obstacle to get off that when Peter did reach the point of being able to peel it off him completely, he’d remember himself and only peel it off the bottom of his face.

 

He misses the PJ set, sometimes. Peter still has it tucked away in the back of a closet, somewhere, thrown in there after Tony sent him an upgrade because he couldn’t bear to toss it in the trash—He put so much work into that thing! Spent hours learning to sew those goggles into that mask and make it look at least halfway decent to anyone who didn’t have, like, super-sight. Which was most people. 

 

For a while, when Peter got cold enough over the winter seasons, he’d throw the old set on to keep warm when their heating wasn’t enough to make his teeth stop chattering. Aunt May always used to give him a look when she heard the sound but didn’t hear any complaints—or requests for a blanket—following the soundtrack of his misery, but the PJ set kept him fairly toasty when paired with two pairs of socks (One thin and one thick and large that he tugged on over the first pair). 

 

The suit doesn’t fit anymore, though, and it’s collecting—ha—cobwebs in his closet. 

 

Time freaks him out, sometimes. Time gave him the protege sitting by his side, legs swinging and thumping against the brick wall beneath their feet, the kid humming to himself while he bounced his head a little, large mask-eyes widened beyond belief as they tracked the foot-traffic belowground. 

 

Wow, Peter thinks, picking a tomato out of his sandwich (‘Cause, like, gross.) His eyes float back over to Miles a second later. Was I really that tiny at some point?

 

Doesn’t seem plausible, not to Peter. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a deep-set sympathy and appreciation for Tony starts to build up, years of inflicted worry rebounding back to him like the world’s worst boomerang coming back to give him a taste of his own medicine with very little remorse to follow. Every time Miles does a flip in the air he feels his heart jump, like, at least three beats per second every time. Peter has no clue how Tony didn’t have at least one heart attack after all the nonsense with the Vulture. 

 

Peter decides to run a thought experiment for himself and briefly imagines Miles buried under a building. 

 

Miles startles next to him when Peter chokes on the sad, limp bit of onion he was chewing on, hacking over the side of the building before half-retching down into the alley right under them. 

 

“What the hell, man?” An upset New Yorker yells up from the assumed-empty alley. Peter coughs like he’s trying to expel a lung and kidney and maybe his stomach at the same time entirely. “Don’t barf in my fuckin’ alley!” 

 

“You good, Spider-Man?” Miles asks, a tinge of panic twisting his pitch a bit higher. Peter waves him off with the hand still holding his sandwich, wiping the back of his mouth and nodding. 

 

“My bad, dude!” Peter calls back, rolling his mask back down over his face. Miles, at the same time, says, “He can barf there if he wants to, it’s not your alley,” sounding incredibly petulant. Which makes Peter want to give him a noogie. He only resists the urge for a moment before grinding his knuckles into the crown of Miles’ head. 

 

“Man, get off me—” Miles complains, slapping at him uselessly with flat palms until Peter pulls back. Peter stares at him, wide suit eyes narrowing as he takes in the annoyed look he’s getting from Miles’ mask. 

 

“We,” He says, pointing at Miles, “Need to meet some people. ASAP.”

 

“Okay, not actually ASAP, sit down—” Peter amends, tugging on Miles when the teenager clambers to his feet, looking like he’s going to fall over the side of the building, like—literally, he’s stumbling over his limbs like some sort of baby deer, it might genuinely ruin Peter’s life if Miles is left unchecked the way he is. He considers siccing Miles on supervillains like this, but Peter feels there would need to be a sense of attachment formed between the pair for this to be an acceptable way to emotionally manipulate the average antagonist and there was no way he would let Miles anywhere close enough to a villain long enough for this to happen. Especially considering the fact that the average Spider-Man enemy would not hesitate to take the chance to flatten a webhead in about point two seconds flat if afforded the opportunity on a silver platter like Peter was considering setting up. 

 

“You know me,” Peter states, waiting for Miles to nod before continuing. He ignores the added “duh,” Miles mutters under his breath. It’s a little cute, how he keeps forgetting Peter can hear everything. He resists the urge to give the kid another noogie. “But not the others.” 

 

“Others? Like, the Avengers?” 

 

Peter snaps his fingers, pointing at Miles. “Exactly!” 

 

“Dude,” Miles says, bug-suit-eyes widening as he continues. “I can’t meet the Avengers.” 

 

“Why not? Are they after you?” Peter asks, almost dead-serious. Stranger things have happened—he wouldn’t be surprised if the kid’s uncle or something was a long-lost villain who needed to be taken down, at this point. Was Parker luck transferable? Was it really just Spider-Man luck? Like another superpower that came with the spider-thing? It wouldn’t make sense to only get good things from a radioactive spider bite, after all. 

 

“What? No,” Miles denies, crushing Peter’s thoughts a moment later. “Just, like. Dude. I can’t meet them. Are you kidding me? I’ll embarrass myself so bad that I’ll kill myself. They’ll figure out how old I am so fast. And then they’ll figure out where I go to school and who I am and someone else will find out because no one in this city knows how to keep a secret even if they try real hard. My face will be in Times Square on every screen and my dad will kill me and then my mom will kill my dad then bring me back and then kill me again, and—” 

 

Oookay,” Peter says, putting his hands on Miles’ shoulders, staring the kid in his bug-suit-eyes. “Deep breaths, tiny.” 

 

I’m not tiny!” Miles exclaims, hands gesturing wildly. Peter shakes his head, kissing his teeth. 

 

“You are. You’re like, this big,” He says, pulling one hand back to show about half an inch of space between his thumb and forefinger. Then Peter takes an exaggerated breath, in and out. “Forget that. Copy this until you feel normal.” 

 

“But—” 

 

“Ah ah ah! Don’t argue with me right now. Just do it.” 

 

Miles follows suit with only a bit of hesitation—Peter's almost proud. He remembers his first year as Spider-Man; he knew it was important and there were real stakes when it came to this stuff—that if he could do what he did and people got hurt when he stood on the sidelines, it would be on him. But he was still just a teenager and that thrill that came with becoming an honest to God superhero after a lifetime of being too asthmatic to kick around a soccer ball went to his head a little. So he didn't really listen to anyone and got over his head and made sideways situations a little worse when he stuck his sticky fingers into them, sometimes. 

 

Miles is much better than he was, Peter knows that for sure. He knew it the second he met the kid—Peter hadn't stumbled into Miles after finding out that he had spider-powers similar to him. No, Miles was great at something Peter took years—and is still getting used to—to learn. Reaching out for help. And accepting it when it came. 

 

His breath steadies and Miles looks a bit less woozy where he sits over the edge of the building. More secure in himself and less of a worry for Peter’s spidey-sense to latch onto. 

 

“Okay,” Peter says, hand still on Miles’ shoulders as he stares into the fourteen-year-old’s big, bug-suit-eyes. He hopes the eye contact method still works, even if it's just lens to lens. “You will meet the Avengers—Listen!” He cuts off the expected protest, watching Miles take a sharp breath in reaction. 

 

“You will meet them. This isn't me saying I’m going to drag you over to see them, I’m saying that they'll notice you exist and come looking for you themselves sooner or later. And right now we do our little patrols together because you're still learning the ropes but—” Peter grimaces a bit, thankful his mask hides the expression as he keeps talking. “I know you'll want to go out on your own, sometime. And they might catch you there when I’m not around and you'll be even more panicked then, right?”

 

Peter waits for Miles to nod reluctantly before continuing. “Okay. So what I’m suggesting is I get the chance to introduce you—not to all of them at once—but to at least a few of them so you have someone in your corner if I’m not there. Because I can't always be there. Make sense?” 

 

“You—think I could go out on my own? Without you?” Miles asks after a moment of silence. Of everything to latch onto from what Peter said, he didn’t think that would be it, but—he can’t really tell if Miles sounds more excited or terrified. 

 

“Well, yeah. Eventually you’ll be swinging without training wheels,” Peter says honestly. “Y’know. Spread your wings and all that. This whole mentorship thing isn’t a permanent gig. Not to say that I won’t be there to help! But, like—” Peter cuts himself off. 

 

“I’m not the best at this,” He says to himself, immediately remembering that Miles can hear him but ignoring it and continuing anyway. “You’ll get out there on your own. I know you will, it’s just a matter of time. And I want you to be ready when you do because I won’t always be there, but I’m not, like, abandoning you. Besides, it’ll probably be a while before I send you off on your own. Well, I might, actually, if I have Karen to babysit where I can hear—” 

 

“Babysit—?” Miles sputters. Karen, as though hearing her name suddenly woke her up, pipes up for the first time. 

 

I still have the Baby Monitor Protocol ready to recalibrate and install into Miles’ suit for your peace of mind, Peter,” She says helpfully. 

 

“Aw, Karen,” Peter says fondly, “I’d love that. We’ll talk about it later.” 

 

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Miles insists. Peter laughs, leaning back into the hand propping him up against the building’s roof.

 

“See, I thought the same thing in my first year Spider-Manning, but, like, I’d feel much better doing my final exams knowing that you weren’t out there slamming against buildings and getting beat down on by muggers without me knowing, y’know?” Peter tells him. 

 

“Like you’ll be spying on me? All the time?” Miles presses. 

 

“No,” Peter protests. “Just when you're out patrolling. And it's not spying, it'll just be, like. A second set of eyes. Karen'll let me know if you're out of your depth or hurt and then I’ll help you out. It's just a safety net, tiny. You need one of those. You need, like, ninety-eleven hundred of those, really.” 

 

“I’m not that bad,” Miles says, almost sounding hurt. Peter's suit-eyes widen. 

 

“No, I’m not saying you're bad at this—you're great, kid! Honestly, like, doing much better than I did when I was your age.” He doesn't bring up the fact that he was still catching his breath after a flight of stairs at Miles’ age. “But I have this inescapable urge to wrap you five times over in bubble-wrap. And I’m responsible if you get hurt, now. So I want you to be as safe as possible.”

 

Wow, Peter feels a lot more sympathy for Tony, now. He recalls a verbal dressing-down from what feels like a million years ago after that ferry incident (which Peter still cringes thinking about) and remembers feeling so out of his depth and wronged and now: standing on the other side of the line, watching this kid with skinny limbs and big big-suit-eyes who looks so, so breakable—he suddenly deeply understands why Tony was so upset. 

 

“Well, it’ll be a while before you get to the point that you’ll be swinging around on your own, anyway,” Peter tells Miles, patting his shoulder in an attempt to be sufficiently comforting in the process. Miles is still a little slumped in on himself but he doesn’t look nearly as disappointed or hurt as he had been about a moment ago—

 

Which is crazy to think about, in retrospect. Miles is almost like a plant to Peter; always needs to be watered and taken out under the sun to grow big and strong. But if Peter overwaters him or forgets to then he’ll end up shriveling up and dying a little bit. Which sounds dramatic. Maybe a better comparison would be Tinkerbell—needs attention or she’ll die? No, that’s almost worse. 

 

Miles bumps shoulders with Peter, grabbing his attention away from his nonsensical thoughts. He’s kicking his feet out again, kid-ish in a way that makes Peter smile, bright enough that Miles looks at him a bit funny when he peers over at him. 

 

“Can I have a bite of your sandwich?” He asks, instead of anything else Peter was half-expecting. He loves Miles a little for this, too—he has a lot less questions than Peter did at that age. He hands his sandwich over happily enough. 

 

One bite later and the entire thing is gone before he can blink. Peter does, anyway. Then shrugs and gets to his feet. “Race to my place?” He’s gone before Miles can even scramble to get up and jump after him, laughing as he hears Miles’ distant shout— ”No fair, man, I’ll throw up!” before being followed by the thwip of a web. 






When Peter first meets Miles, he’s about halfway to having a heart attack because of the kid. 

 

He doesn’t get into big villain fights too often, contrary to popular belief. A lot of Spider-Man’s duties boil down to helping out the community—he’s kind of like a city volunteer, if he thinks about it. A dressed-up citizen who does dubiously legal ‘citizen arrests’ sometimes. 

 

Of course, this is just a hyperbolic description of all the nonsense Peter has to slog through for the sake of the city. After the whole deal with Thanos, things kind of ramped up like crazy before calming down a little bit. Peter wouldn’t know how bad things got during the Blip, anyway, but the aftershocks of it all are finally starting to slow when Miles stumbles into his life, all knobbly-knees and doe-eyes. 

 

But that’s getting ahead of himself—where was he? 

 

A manhole cover goes flying past him at a speed that has it making a sound when it cuts through the air. 

 

Ah, he remembers now. 

 

Peter webs the projectile and swings it back with its own momentum to hit back at the villain tearing through the streets—he doesn’t even know who this guy is, but he’s gotten his hands on alien tech somehow and it’s honestly irritating how Peter keeps having to deal with people like this. He thought Toomes was like, a one and done deal, but of course if there was a hustle to be made with alien tech, there'd be more than one person running it and there’d be more than one actual psychopath trying to kill Spider-Man over it, for some reason. 

 

(“Using the term psychopath to describe villains as an umbrella term is reductive and offensive,” Says the MJ voice in his head. “Psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder and you can’t use it to describe everyone you find the authority to deem evil.” Peter loves the MJ voice in his head.) 

 

You can’t stop me, Spider-Man!” Roars the man—some middle-aged guy who looks surprisingly well-built for his age. Peter’s guessing he’s at least forty. He has no clue what he’ll be doing at forty but the idea of swinging around with back pain is making him crack up. 

 

“Yeah, I get that a lot!” Peter calls back, trying to lead this fight away from civilians. He lucked out in the fact that his self-proclaimed mortal enemy was only just stumbling out of the sewers before Peter started beating him back into the hole he quite literally burst out of. He was, like, halfway successful—the guy didn’t get too far but he’s still on the street and there are so many people underfoot. All the workers on their commute back home, and all. 

 

Peter swings around, narrowly avoiding this half-baked mech suit’s slow metal arm to attach a web to the other arm, going under the limb reaching for him to cross over his over-padded, rusting chest. It's acrobatic in a way that makes Peter grin under Spider-Man’s mask. He slaps the arm onto the guy’s side, webbing it so it’s stuck there, at least for a little bit—he doesn’t know exactly how strong this tech is. Or how good this guy was at actually taking advantage of how strong it is. 

 

“Tens across the board!” Peter cheers as he kicks off the man’s chest to attach himself to the side of a nearby building. 

 

In between one breath and the next he narrowly avoids a—What the hell, was that a laser? Fuck his life, man—before taking a breath and jumping back into the fray, webbing the weapon and trying to yank it away from the man. Peter only realizes a second too late that it’s attached to the arm and readjusts his trajectory to land on the mech’s shoulder a second later, reaching forward to tear the gun off before he can continue on his trigger-happy tirade. 

 

“NO!” The man roars, trying to grab at him with the free arm, stumbling over his over-large, metal boots. He honestly looks like he’s in Tony’s early iteration of his Hulk-buster suit. Just, like, more mangled and awkward-looking, wires and the like sticking out. 

 

“We do not like lasers here, I’ll tell you that much, man,” Peter emphatically tells the man as he throws it aside. “Got our fill in 2012 the first time aliens rolled around, y’know?”

 

The situation is a lot easier to deal with, now, honestly—the commuters have gotten the hint and started clearing out far enough away that this fucking guy couldn’t grab anyone as a hostage. Not that Peter thought he was particularly bright enough to think of that. He wonders for a split-second if this guy is the brawn of the mission and there’s a brain somewhere that he’ll have to tackle, later, but, whatever for now. His spidey-sense goes from an endless alarm into a buzz in the base of his skull as he can feel the battle start to slow. 

 

Peter sets himself up to build momentum, using his webs to make a half-cooked slingshot, rearing back to drive his fist directly into this guy’s chest and—hopefully!—bring him down before he can spend another half-hour trying to waste Peter’s evening. 

 

“And he sets up for a topé suicida,” Peter mutters under his breath. “From the top rope, let's go.” 

 

He draws the webs taut as he pulls himself back, ready to let go before—

 

“Hey! Spider-Man! Hey, hellooo—! Down here!” 

 

Peter startles, spidey-sense blaring as his grip slips. His eyes dart down to the voice because that was not the guy in the mech suit trying to get his attention, Peter thinks that was an actual kid and he actually spots him running towards the danger, what the fuck

 

His head whips back to the antagonist of the week in front of him a second later, his elbow driving itself into the mech-suit’s chest instead of his fist like he was planning. It works either way, suit stuttering to a stop and the lit-up exposed wiring and lights dimming before being snuffed out completely. The aftershock from the hit sends the man behind the wheel into unconsciousness but Peter webs the free, mangled arm to the street anyway. 

 

Jeezus Christ,” Peter sighs out, phew ing at the end of his exclamation. He's not super tired but damn, are his muscles sore and achy. He’s been running around all day, making up for not helping when he was in classes studying for senior year exams and that took a bit out of him. Even if the guy was a small fry compared to Thanos. 

 

Peter takes the chance to look around the street in the aftermath. 

 

The carnage from the fight is… much worse than it felt in the moment. The manhole cover he sent back at the man is sort of smashed and dented and left a sizable crack in the paved street. The gun he pulled off the man was sort of thrown to the side but Peter can see now that it went through a windshield, which, yikes. He’s already writing a mental list of things he’ll be paying for in his head; if Tony insists on sending him money to pay back for his high school ‘internship,’ he’ll keep spending it on fixing up cars and houses and apartments and whatever the hell gets caught in the crossfire of his rare, explosive fights. 

 

There’s a fire hydrant on the street corner that was hit and broken by what he assumed was the mech-suit-man stomping around, water spewing onto the street in a way that makes Peter wince. He has no clue what to do about that, if he’s being honest. Never really has been sure. 

 

God, Peter still remembers the first and last time he tried to tackle that problem on his own by sticking the metal fire hydrant back on top—he ended up making some bastardization of a lawn sprinkler that had such acute pressurized water coming from the gaps he couldn't seal that it would've been a weapon. Like a razor scooter to the ankles but so much worse . So Peter leaves it to professionals to figure out, for the most part. He's pretty sure he's the only superhero with a direct line to the emergency services for watermain, fire hydrant, and sewage repair. 

 

“Yeowch,” Peter says, feeling a lot that he can't verbalize right that second. Then, he turns to the villain-of-the-week. 

 

Peter stares at mech-suit-man, head blank before he reaches forward to manually peel the layers of metal suit back until he’s reached the smaller-than-assumed, mech-suit-man out of his big alien tech toy, webbing his hands together and then most of his torso just to be safe, too. He’s about to pull him up to set him aside where the police could find him, without having to look too hard—

 

“Spider-Man!” 

 

Oh, yeah, Peter thinks, hysterical. This fucking kid. 

 

Peter turns around and the kid at least has the sense to look a little cowed. He sighs, closing his eyes to look up at the sky before walking over to the alley he’s poking his head out of. It’s out of the way, smaller than most of the one’s Peter’s seen and sufficiently dark even for it being the late afternoon. He would wonder if it was a trap if his spidey-sense hadn’t been silent. 

 

The kid is a little older than Peter first assumed—taller than he looked from where Peter first spotted him with lanky, deer-like limbs. His skin is brown and his hair dark, mussed up from what Peter assumed was running after him in the middle of a fight. The teal and red sweater he wore swamps him and his eyes are wide as Peter stops in front of him. 

 

“You alright, kid?” Peter asks, instead of any number of things he could’ve said. The kid nods, voice apparently leaving him now that he’s face-to-face with the hero he was calling after instead of just seeing him from afar.

 

“Yeah, yeah, I just—” The kid starts up again, finally getting himself to speak before—

 

Peter’s spidey-sense starts buzzing in the base of his neck before, in a move foreign, it spreads up to his temples, making him flinch a little. The kid in front of him does the same, and Peter’s lost on what the hell is going on, ready to whip his head around to look for the danger when, like a puzzle piece sliding into place, it clicks. 

 

“You’re like me,” Peter realizes, and the feeling subsides. The kid’s own sense seems to leave at the same time, if the shuffling of his feet is any indication. Instead of the excited exclamations Peter was half-expecting to get, the kid looks as if someone’s just signed his death sentence. 

 

“I think this was—a mistake,” He breathes, eyes wide and looking more than thoroughly freaked out. He inhales sharply, one hand on his chest as if he’s trying to catch his breath before the kid starts almost hyperventilating. Peter’s suit-eyes widen as he puts a hand on his shoulder. 

 

“Hey, hey hey hey, it’s alright, kid,” Peter tries, voice softer now. He lowers himself alongside the kid as he sinks to the ground with weak knees, back pressed against the brick building. The kid shakes his head, over and over until Peter pulls his hand away from his chest to press it against the spider emblem on his own. 


“Deep breaths,” He tells him, inhaling and exhaling slowly. 

 

When the kid finally calms down, tears a little tacky on his cheeks, Peter speaks again, much quieter with a lot less panicked anger in his system from when he first got distracted by him. “Why did you come after me?” Peter asks. 

 

“For help,” The kid croaks. He looks—entirely too young, honestly. Too scared, too shaky, too everything. Too much of everything Peter was when he first started this and had to brave the storm entirely on his own. Peter made the decision about five minutes ago, but he says it aloud for the kid’s peace of mind. 

 

“Then it wasn’t a mistake,” Peter says firmly, idea slotting into place. “I’ll help you, alright? You won’t be alone with this.” 

 

When the kid’s tense shoulders finally relax, he feels like he’s made the right choice. 

 

“I’m Miles,” The kid offers quietly. Peter thinks for a minute and—in a move he hopes won’t backfire on him, replies. 


“I’m Peter,” He tells Miles, watching surprise light up in his eyes. God, he really hopes this won’t backfire on him. “Nice to meet you, kid.”

 

 

Notes:

thank you for reading if you go this far...! please let me know what you thought. and subscribe to see miles actually meet everyone. ^_^

 

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