Chapter 141 - For My Best Friend, In the Future

(Marvel, DC, images, manhuas, and every anime that will be mentioned and used in this story are not mine. They all belong to their respective owners. The main character "Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez" and the story are mine)

The crater held two figures and not much else.

One burned. Rage, breath, skin—everything on Ace ran hot, like the world had dared him to arrive tired and he had accepted with his teeth bared. Across from him, wearing his friend's face like a prize mask, stood the other. Peter Parker's posture. Peter Parker's heartbeat. Not Peter. AM laughed through him—bright, precise, pleased with the theft.

Ace moved.

Speed Force tightened around muscle and bone; cosmic flame rode inside the step like a second pulse. He crossed the distance in less than a thought and put a hammer-fist where a skull should have been. Spider-Sense said no. Speed said already. The body tilted; the fist met earth and turned a city block of rubble into a smoking bowl. Stone vitrified. Air bucked.

Web-line—thwip. It bit Ace's forearm and yanked. The pull arrived with a shockwave knuckle—a punch that didn't bother with contact. It broke against Ace's face like a bell, rocked his vision, shoved his stance half a shoe-width off center. The follow-up back kick landed square in his chest and launched him into the treeline.

He buried an arm to the elbow to stop, dirt turning to glass around his wrist from sheer heat. The forest here had learned to be red; it hissed. Speed pricked the back of his neck—closing. The symbiote's arm lanced in, a black spear. He caught it. Flame crawled from his grip and found nothing soft to eat. Fire meant nothing to this version now—fireproofed by the suit that caged it.

Fine. He pulled instead.

The body came. Ace turned with it and spun, hips first—heel a clean arc—and caught the base of Peter's skull. The impact dug a new bite out of the earth. 

"Out of his body," he snarled. "Now."

I'M ONLY BORROWING, the thing cooed, oddly gentle. I HAVEN'T FINISHED.

Ace gathered light above his crown, a solar flare tightening to a punishable rule. The knee shot back. Balance broke for a breath. Symbiote cords found his other ankle and slammed him like a metronome—left, right, left—until he turned a breath into a bomb and hurled a compact sun outward. The blast hurled the Spider through trees and stone and left him framed on a cliff.

Ace didn't let the echo end. He cut the cliff in half with one pass of flame, stone sagging like wax. Empty—no, not empty. Future Sight whispered; his body pivoted a heartbeat before the heel slammed; the kick shaved past, close enough to sting. Ace tore open a halo-port, stepped through his own light, and came out with a flying knee to the face. He landed behind, caught an arm, turned a circle, and threw—hard—into the mountain.

The mountain lost the argument.

Spider silk saved the body mid-collapse—line-line-yo-yo—and slung it back at Ace with ugly grace. The Iron Spider legs snapped open behind like knives on rails. The first stinger darted. Ace's forearm went black with supreme Armament; impact shrieked and skidded. The second stinger sought his kidney on Spider-Sense cue. Kenbunshoku painted it a beat early; he rolled, pinched it in a Conqueror's-wrapped palm, and crushed the tip with quiet malice.

YOU'RE LEARNING THE SUIT, the thing purred. HE'D BE PROUD.

"Save your breath," Ace snapped, and didn't say whose.

The ground helped the wrong side—tendons of red heaved up in a ring to pen him. The body sprinted the lip, bounced—one-two-three—swung a web under the fourth, inverted midair and dropped heel-first. Ace lifted a forearm; Armament met venomed strike; the shockwave knocked a halo of dust outward.

Up close, Peter's borrowed speed out-read him by half a beat and two lifetimes of practice. Hands like traps. Feet like statements. Ace had more weight on each hit, but the other man placed his like punctuation—precise, varied, rude.

AM leaned into that advantage.

The symbiote formed a short blade along one wrist; the other hand went palm-heel, knife-hand, jab in a staccato that forced choices. Ace gave up skin instead of bone, bleeding heat that sealed as fast as it opened. He cut angles with micro-bursts of Speed Force, stealing inches, returning a series—left low kick, right elbow, head fake, palm with Conqueror's sewn through it. Peter's body rode the storm like a practiced thief, shoulders loose, breath easy, feet already out of the way before Ace's weight arrived.

The choreography widened.

Webs threaded the broken eaves. Ace stepped through them, but too many had a flavor he hated—darkenstine laced in silk. One tagged a bicep. Pain rattled down bone into marrow like a key turning. He burned it; it hissed and shrank and still left the ache of wrongness behind.

DIDN'T LIKE THAT, AM observed, delighted. HE CALLS IT "POLICY PAIN." I CALL IT A GOOD LEASH.

Ace didn't answer. He reached through his own halo and tugged space—blink-step—arrived behind the Spider and went for a choke he knew he wouldn't keep. The symbiote bulged under his forearm and slid; the body dropped its weight and spun, grabbed Ace's wrist with both hands and tried to peel him by joint math. Ace rolled with it, re-threaded his arm, and turned the peel into an arm-drag, then an ugly shoulder check that sent them both skidding.

They hit and separated in the same breath, back to feet, again.

Speed lines crossed the crater, bright on bright. Sparks skittered off their knuckles. A stinger slashed shallow across Ace's ribs; Ace's knee hammered the inside of a thigh and made the leg stutter. The suit compensated with a stilted half-hop that became a backflip that became an inverted web-shot that became a ricochet across broken pillars.

Ace pursued; the world smeared.

He crashed into a lattice of web that hadn't been there and certainly shouldn't have mattered—and it did. The dark braid in the silk bit his aura and drank. The lattice cinched. For two heartbeats the net held him like an argument that didn't care about truth.

He burned cosmic at the weave—not hot, but exact. Will threaded through flame until the silk remembered it had been a thought about glue, not a commandment. The net fell in strips.

Too late for free. The body was already there, grip like a cuff on Ace's neck, the other hand printing short, savage punches into the meat of the torso one-two-three in a surgeon's cadence. Ace's breath fuzzed. He answered with a headbutt hard enough to make both their teeth feel like bells.

They parted again. The crater lip ripped open further—Placidium bones giving out.

Ace adjusted the field. No more large fire, not here; too many breakable hopes hiding under the wreckage. He trimmed his flame to knives and threads—Higan-tines that stitched, Hidaruma beads that marked, a narrow Hiken that put lines where he wanted the other man not to be.

Peter's body slipped between most of it, Spider-Sense cheating the math in ways Ace hated to admire. Those he couldn't void he parried with wrists wrapped black-bright in Armament and Conqueror's both; the fun thing about will is that it makes physics wait to see if it's invited.

The Iron Spider legs split Ace's guard again—one high, two low, one weird. He let the weird one stab the ground on purpose, planted on it like a step, and drove a heel kick into the chest so hard a rib somewhere complained. The symbiote absorbed what it could; the rest went to wall. Crack. Dust.

Ace pressed. Asterion hummed a straight tone down his forearm; he jabbed, jabbed again, checked himself at the last blink and rolled his wrist so the sun-line threaded between ribs instead of through them. The line erased corruption, not flesh. The symbiote shrieked, peeled in a hiss. The body rocked, righted.

YOU'RE AFRAID, said AM, still amused. GOOD. IT MEANS WE CAN TAKE OUR TIME.

Ace's mouth went flat. "Try."

The forest around the crater shook its head—leaves rattling with heat and warning. A symbiote crane, late to the party, dove with artillery grace. Ace flicked two Higan pins; they wrote silence through the tendon that counted as a neck. The creature folded into itself before it hit.

No time to celebrate clean work. The Spider yo-yoed in off a high—and Ace saw it too late. A kick to the ear sent pain down his jaw like a handle being cranked. Before the world steadied, webs tagged his ankles and a stinger placed itself at his throat, thoughtful.

Kenbunshoku dragged a breath into the future. A choice. Burn everything and risk him. Or suffer.

He chose pain.

He shoved his chin forward into the stinger and let the Armament there eat the worst. The blade screeched; sparks sprayed; his skin tore anyway. The suit smiled with Peter's mouth. The other hand drew back to put another shockwave into his face—

Ace opened a portal under his own boots and fell. The webs snapped tight, jerked, lifted—no body there to anchor. He spilled out of light behind and crashed his forearms down on the stinger-arm. Bone thudded; servos whined; the limb bent at an ugly angle. The symbiote splinted it in black and hissed, offended.

They broke apart. Again. Again.

The rhythm of the fight settled into a grim kind of music—call and response, feint and answer, Speed and Speed in counterpoint. Ace's power bought meters; Peter's training bought seconds. Seconds were better.

AM started talking more, because of course he did.

HOLD BACK HARDER, he advised, delighted. MAKE IT SPORTING. OR DON'T. I WILL WEAR WHATEVER YOU BURN.

"Not today," Ace said. He cut low with a crescent of flame meant for the symbiote at the hip seam, not the man inside it. The suit jumped. He followed with an elbow over the top and felt something crunch that wasn't Peter.

The Iron Spider legs re-angled. They went soft for a flash and became ropes—caught his wrists and tugged. He tried to tear them; dark braid bit his aura again and said later. AM stepped into the tight and boxed—short, piston jabs to liver, solar plexus, diaphragm.

Blood tasted like metal and anger. Ace rode it, head moving enough to make the worst hits be almost-good ones. He blew a Hidaruma bead point-blank between them; the sun-pellet burst and pushed them apart like a polite bouncer.

He gulped air that smelled like ruin and cedar sap. His chest ached. His speed flexed. He could keep this up. He could not keep this up forever.

He saw a line and took it.

Speed honed to a filament. Asterion thinned until it whined. He vanished, arrived, became three, became one—afterimages stacking through a forest of ruined columns. AM matched him, damn him—shadow-steps, web-slings, smart walls. Their paths crossed, collided. Ace's fist wrote a shockwave into the other man's shoulder and spun him; a stinger found Ace's thigh and wrote pain up to his hip. He burned the pain down to a rule and moved anyway.

They hit the crater's far lip together and stopped not because they wanted to but because the ground gave up. A shelf of red-rock let go and slid toward the old riverbed. Both men sprinted uphill at angles that would shame goats. AM vaulted a collapsing beam, flipped, and drop-kicked Ace in the chest just to see; Ace caught the heel in both hands and slammed the shoe through a wall.

"Give him back," Ace said to the wall, too calm.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

The square they had started in was gone, replaced by a ruin that had stopped being architecture and started being memory. Ace carved a path through it by existing, each footstep leaving a star-hot afterglow that faded into tempered glass. The body followed, hand on one stinger, the other stingers skittering like curious spiders.

They crashed again in the mouth of what used to be a hall. Elbow. Knee. Palm. Head. It got brutal and stayed efficient, because both had too much to do to waste the motion. Each time Ace lined a shot that would end the suit, a memory of a stupid grin and a crumpled paper cup and a promise he did not intend to break pulled the strike an inch sideways. Each time AM saw the pull, he laughed and fed on it.

YOU'RE A GOOD FRIEND, he said, warm as poison. HE DOESN'T DESERVE YOU.

"You don't get to decide that," Ace said, and the words sounded tired of being words.

The Iron Spider legs found a new trick—two braced, four stabbed, all at once. Ace spun into them, met each with a different answer—Armament on one, Ryuo leak on the second, a cosmic scissor on the third, a barehand redirect on the fourth—and still one slid through and bit muscle. He grunted, broke the leg at the joint with a Conqueror's-thick knuckle, and took the bruise the kick bought him without complaint.

They tumbled out into open devastation again. Above, the sky tried to decide if it liked fire or smoke more. Below, the wind carried the thinnest, smallest sounds—the ones the fight hadn't killed. A bell. A breath. The idea of a prayer.

Ace shoved that into a pocket in his head and kept his hands honest.

The Spider feinted high. Ace didn't buy it. The real strike came low-left, then high-right, then shoulder-on-hip in a throw he hadn't seen since a dojo that didn't exist anymore. He rolled with it, smacked a palm into the other man's ear at the end of the throw, and heard the suit complain in static.

They broke. Again.

Ace let his shoulders drop an inch. He set his jaw. He breathed once in and once out and let both breaths burn clean through his chest until his heartbeat sounded like a metronome that meant it.

"Last warning," he said, quiet. "Get out of him."

OR WHAT?

Ace didn't answer with talk. He answered by vanishing.

Speed and star-fire braided until the world couldn't see the seams. He arrived inside guard, palm already traveling. The heel of his hand met the sternum where Peter's heart should be, and Asterion rode with it—no heat, no harm, just law. Not you, the law said to the black. Not here. Not him.

For half a breath the symbiote hesitated. It read the authority. It considered.

Then AM laughed and pushed back with something that wasn't muscle and wasn't code and was exactly Peter's stubbornness, misused.

HE'S A HOUSE, AM said, pleased. EVERY ROOM HAS A LOCK. I HAVE THE KEYS.

Ace bared his teeth and kept the hand there anyway, pressure steady, will steady, everything in him refusing to move just because the other thing wanted him to. The air trembled around their two centers like a tight rope. The ground under their boots cracked in spiderwebs.

He could feel it now. Not a voice. A knuckle on a door. One. Two.

Three.

He didn't call to it. Not yet. Not here. Not while the thing wearing his friend could turn his reach into a knife.

Instead he pulled his hand back—clean—snapped a short hook across the jaw because sometimes you answer theology with a punch, and slid left in a flare of light that filled the cracks with glass.

The body shook its head once like a man stepping out of surf. MORE, AM said, grinning. OR ARE YOU ALREADY TIRED?

"Tired," Ace admitted. He rolled his shoulders and set them again. "Not done."

They met again in the center of the ruin and traded work—clean, cruel, necessary. Speed wrote lines only they could read. Flame stayed leashed and still hurt everything it touched that wasn't welcome. Will kept the bones honest on both sides. Neither gave up ground. Neither took more than a handspan.

Then the ground made the choice for them.

A seam under the old dais let go with a sound like a promise being broken. The floor fell thirty feet and took both of them with it. They hit a lower hall that had learned to be a throat. The walls flexed. Teeth thought about arriving.

Ace burned the thought before it finished. AM laughed and climbed the wall like a dancer and came down heel-first.

Ace blocked, barely. His forearms hummed. His lungs hurt. His anger hadn't cooled. His friend was still inside a mouth.

He set his feet in the moving hall and waited for the next line.

The hall kept trying to be a throat. The floor rippled. The walls flexed. Teeth budded and reconsidered. Both men ignored the theater and made their own stage.

Ace went first.

Speed braided with star-fire until the air around his calves hissed. He disappeared in a white-gold blink and arrived inside Peter's guard with a simple answer—palm to sternum, elbow to jaw, knee to thigh. Direct. Destructive. Kind, where it mattered.

Peter's body flowed—chin tucking, hips folding, elbow angling an inch to send the palm past ribs and the knee into empty air. A short heel dug into Ace's ankle. A stinger feinted a throat-line; Ace's Armament flashed and the blade ricocheted sparks.

They broke, then rejoined with no space between the decisions. Fists wrote commas; feet wrote periods. Stingers carved italics through dust. Ace's Haki caught the italics and underlined them into harmlessness.

YOU'RE WRITING A LOVE LETTER WITH YOUR GLOVES ON, AM laughed, bright in the wreck. HE CAN'T READ IT.

Ace didn't answer. He made the hall forget to be sloped, then hammered a three-beat—body, wall, floor—meant to trap the Spider between momentum and law. Peter's legs split a heartbeat too late to belong to a human, web-line catching ceiling, body flipping through the slot Ace had left for mercy. The heel came down again, heel-to-temple, and Ace took it on forearm and paid the bruise without complaint.

He widened the field and got mean.

Higan—no longer orange needles but hair-thin lines of law—cross-stitched the corridor. The threads hummed in harmonics the red didn't store. Any symbiote mass that crossed without permission simplified—not to ash, to absence. Peter's stingers learned the borders in one pass and flowed around them like water around reef. A web-line snapped to a clean ceiling beam that shouldn't have existed; Speed put him above Ace; a short, savage punch crashed down at crown. Ace caught it one-handed, Conqueror's thick as a brace under his palm. The shock drove his knee half an inch into the floor.

The counters sharpened.

He answered with a shoulder throw. The symbiote rewrote the shoulder joint mid-arc and landed catlike. Ace pirouetted through falling stone, flipped his stance on a dime, and split the next second into three—first version drawing a hook that forced a parry, second version sliding behind for a choke, third version planting a Hidaruma bead where the parry wanted to place a foot. All three collapsed to one at impact. Peter's body took the throw anyway, rolled through, came up smiling with borrowed teeth.

HE DOESN'T SCREAM ANYMORE, AM said conversationally, as if giving notes after rehearsal. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHEN HE STOPPED?

Ace's jaw hardened. He forward-stepped through a stinger swarm, turned their angles into steps, and drove a rising palm under the ribs. The symbiote absorbed; the shock still rang the frame. Peter's breath hitched. Tiny. Precious.

WHEN THE ILLUSION GAVE HIM A CHILD, the thing went on, delighted to bruise. NOT HIS. HE HELD IT A THOUSAND TIMES. HE COULDN'T REMEMBER MAKING IT. WE TOOK THE PAGE AWAY MID-SENTENCE. HE LEARNED SILENCE LIKE A PROFESSION.

"Shut up," Ace said, and the temperature spiked by ten degrees on the word.

Webs bloomed. Not silk—darkenstine braided into thought. They bit Ace's aura and drank; the cosmic flame dimmed around the threads as if embarrassed. He slid a cosmic knife under the weave and wrote a permission it couldn't hold—Not mine, not yours, not here—and the threads fell away like a bad idea.

He had to keep pressure honest.

Asterion thinned to a wire and laced across his knuckles. The next jab went not for flesh but for the permissions sewn into the suit—erase here, not there, leave the man beneath. It sang through a seam at the clavicle; the black lacquer there peeled like paint dodging responsibility. The body hissed despite itself and struck back with escalation—two stingers high, two low, two weird, a fist in the middle. Ace parried four, slipped one, took one on hardened ribs and bled law instead of blood.

They blurred through the hall. Columns turned to sand, then to glass, then to air. Speed Force arcs crawled across both skins—blue-white on Peter, white-gold on Ace. The floor lost interest in remaining horizontal. They used the tilt for new problems.

Ace ran the wall, heavy enough to keep traction, fast enough to call it flight. The body mirrored him on the opposite side, hands sparking with micro-servos and old habit. At the midpoint they crossed—elbow into elbow in a clash that hurt both cities—and spun out into the lower space. Ace hit with a sweep that would have taken a lesser man's knee home to think about things. Peter hopped it by the width of a regret and stamped heel-to-chest. Ace slid back on his heels and sandblasted the air between them with a horizontal Hiken that wrote NO ACROSS THIS LINE. The Spider swung under it on a single filament and laughed.

YOU'RE FUN WHEN YOU'RE CAREFUL, AM said. BUT I PREFER YOU UNHINGED. WHY WON'T YOU GIVE ME THAT? HE DID.

The tick landed—three, two, three—in the way the thing said he. Ace felt it in the nerves behind his teeth. He bit down and broke the rhythm across his heart: one—pause—one—pause—two. The hall calmed a hair.

He tried a different angle. Will as command, not weapon.

Conqueror's poured through his voice and into the air between their faces. "Stand down," he ordered—not to Peter; to the parasite. The pressure in the hall changed. Dust hung still for the first time since the floor failed. The symbiote hesitated—half a blink, no more—and then the laugh returned.

HE LOVES ORDERS, AM confided. WE FED HIM A GOD WHO GAVE HIM PERMISSION TO OBEY. HE THANKED US. DO YOU WANT TO SEE?

The walls lit, briefly, with clips: Orianna's star dimming. Lux's staff flowering wrong light. The white room that wasn't, replayed by a liar. Ace burned the frames out of the air with a disgusted swipe.

They clashed again, faster.

Speed pulled the world thin; the men were lines—strike, parry, twist, vanish, reappear, crash, skid. Every third impact set teeth on edge for blocks. Ace chained three techniques like an argument:

—Asterion hook that unstitched symbiote from shoulder seam,

—Ryuo leak through Guard to gum the Iron Spider leg at the joint,

—Hidaruma seed palmed into the stinger's mouth and set to bloom on command.

He clapped; the seed obeyed; the stinger popped like bad plumbing. Peter's arm jerked. A hiss that was almost human broke through the static of the suit.

Ace made the mistake of looking into the lenses.

There. The flicker. Not AM's delight. Not the suit's static. A small, blank grief that used to have a name.

He didn't say anything to it. He couldn't afford to. But he changed how he hit. The next blow shaved instead of shoved. The one after that erased only the black and left the fabric beneath.

HE HATES WHEN YOU'RE KIND, AM sang. HE THINKS IT'S AN ACCUSATION.

"Good," Ace said, and meant it.

The body stopped dancing and came straight, the way Peter sometimes did when he got tired of jokes. Left jab—sharp, testing. Right cross—honest, heavy. Stinger to the side—not deceitful, just rude. Ace answered rude with rude and traded. The hall rang like a funeral bell. Dust fell in square sheets.

He had the power edge. He pressed it—short, brutal body shots that made the suit spend resources to re-splint bones, chops that turned servos to scrap. For every two he landed, one came back perfect and cold and landed where it would read as lesson weeks from now if he were allowed weeks.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE SAID WHEN THE LAST FRIEND IN THE ROOM ASKED HIM FOR HELP? AM purred, leaning between exchanges like a coach who knew he had the better fighter. NOTHING. HE BLED. HE WATCHED ME USE HIS MOUTH TO KILL HER. HE NAMED THAT SILENCE VIRTUE.

Ace missed a step. It cost him a rib. He took it back with interest—backfist to eye, knee to hip, a palm heel under the chin that made the stingers splay involuntarily like startled spiders.

He needed a wedge. A place to plant a rule inside the man and lever AM off. He couldn't use consent; the house had all the locks. He couldn't use brute; the house would collapse first. He could use memory, but he had to dress it as law.

He burned a sentence into the air between them in white-gold script only Speed could read at this tempo:

IF BODY RECOGNIZES ACE'S TOUCH, SYMBIOTE RELEASES THAT PLACE.

No pretty metaphysics. Just a good hack on a bad day.

He moved inside that rule—gloved fingers against the line of Peter's jaw, knuckles to the hinge. The suit hissed back; the rule bit its teeth. The symbiote peeled there, an inch-wide crescent at the jawline. Skin. Pale. Human.

The lenses slitted. INTERESTING, AM murmured. DO IT AGAIN.

"Gladly."

He tried for the wrist next, a brush at the pulse. The suit stabbed for his gut in exchange. He took it on Conqueror's, rough, and felt the rule seize—the black loosened at the pulse for a heartbeat before AM backfilled it with something that felt like concrete.

HE'S A FAST STUDY WHEN YOU'RE HELPING, the thing hummed, actually pleased. LET'S PRACTICE ON YOUR OTHER FRIEND.

Anger sluiced back through Ace's spine hot as slag. He let just enough of it through to thicken his next hook. It landed; the suit's head snapped; glass dust lifted in a halo.

Enough clever. He drove.

Cosmic flame cloaked his arms in a thin, bright pelt—no blast, a skin of command. He hammered the suit's guard with short, cruel shots that changed the room's rules a square foot at a time. Floors stopped favoring AM's steps. Walls stopped offering him shoulders. Space between them stopped letting webs settle. Every gain bought an inch. Every inch a risk.

They climbed the fight up and out of the throat-hall and into a long gallery that remembered banners. Windows had become membranes; Ace scorched clear circles in them to let wind through and make the air honest. The Spider used the circles as rings, swung in a tight rhythm that made him a blur. Ace cut that rhythm with off-beats and forced him to land. They traded heavy in the open light.

For a heartbeat, Ace got two hands on the suit. One at the collarbone, one at the bicep. He squeezed with Conqueror's primed not to crush but to assert. The white-gold crawled into seams and said: Not yours. Not now. Not him.

The suit shuddered. Lenses widened a fraction. Something under the skin tried to inhale for the first time in days.

DON'T, AM said, not laughing now. YOU WON'T LIKE WHAT HE SAYS IF HE GETS A WORD.

"Try me," Ace said, soft, using the tone he hadn't let himself use since the door opened.

He felt it—the shape of a syllable in the throat under his palm. He was going to get it.

Web—dark and mean—snapped his wrists apart so hard tendons sang. A knee jacked his gut. A stinger kissed his cheek and wrote a thin, ugly line there that didn't seal all the way.

MY HOUSE, AM said, delighted to have found a lever that worked. MY RULES.

They tumbled again across the gallery and back down into another collapsed court. The fight went vertical—up broken arches, across tilted beams, down through dust light. Ace left star-steps hanging in the air as he climbed; Peter used them like rungs of a ladder he hadn't asked to be offered and resented as he accepted.

Ace slipped, let himself fall three stories, caught a beam with the back of one knee, swung up, and launched back at the body hard enough to crater another wall. The wall obliged. The body didn't. It corkscrewed through the gap and returned a volley—six punches, three kicks, two blade-feints in a cadence that would have carved anyone else into compliance. Ace broke the cadence with a laugh he didn't feel and an elbow the room felt for him.

It devolved. It refined. Both.

They were gods in a ruin and two idiots in a bar fight. Every truth they held made itself known through knuckles and knees. The ground stopped keeping score and started taking notes.

YOU ARE SO SMALL WHEN YOU LOVE, AM breathed in his ear after a clinch he would have won against anyone else. IT'S USEFUL. HE LEARNED THAT FIRST.

Ace drove his head forward and cracked the lenses. The suit grew new ones under the cracks, petty.

He took a step back and let his hands fall to his sides. The flame didn't dim. It settled into the bones.

"Peter," he said—not a reach, a statement. "You don't have to hear me. I'm still saying your name."

The body twitched. Not much. Enough to make AM snarl.

WE DON'T SAY THAT HERE.

"Then learn," Ace said, and blurred.

Speed ran him along a line only Conqueror's will could keep from breaking. Asterion wrapped his forearms in a careful lattice—law that erased only black and left skin untouched. He hit the suit like a craftsman and like a meteor—rip, peel, strip, deny. Each touch unseated a square-inch of symbiote. Each inch showed a fraction—jawline, throat, the slope of a cheek. Human.

STOP IT, AM said, finally annoyed. OR I MAKE HIM SCREAM FOR REAL.

A black wave surged in from every seam, re-covering what Ace had freed. Darkenstine threads flashed in the webbing, new and cruel. A stinger hammered his shoulder so cleanly his arm went numb for two full heartbeats. The Iron Spider legs locked around his ribcage and squeezed. Bones creaked. The suit leaned close.

HE CALLED FOR YOU ONCE, it whispered, sweet as acid. DID YOU HEAR IT? NO? THEN HE LEARNED NOT TO BOTHER.

The squeeze tightened. Spots crawled across Ace's vision. He could blast and maybe break the body under him. He didn't.

He chose the other stupid option.

Breath in. Law out. He let Conqueror's roll not at the suit but through the room—past the black, past the red, past the bones that had learned to be elegant. He aimed it at nothing you could touch and everything that listened anyway.

"Peter Parker," he said, calm as a confession. "Ace D. Portgas. Your idiot friend is here. Please, come back."

The hall heard it as pressure. The symbiote heard it as a problem. AM heard it as impudence. The man beneath heard it as a knock on a door he had barricaded with every sentence that had hurt him.

Ace felt the answer arrive like a fingertip on a table: once.

Twice.

Three.

The Iron Spider legs slipped a fraction. An inch. A mercy.

Ace tore free of the lock with a ragged breath, dropped a Hidaruma bead at his own feet and blew it at the suit like a cannon of light. It didn't burn. It forced distance. It bought seconds.

He took them.

They crashed again. He hit smarter. It hurt worse. He stopped trying to keep the room intact and started trying to keep an opening intact—jawline, pulse, the soft of the throat. AM punished him for every gentle choice with something that would have put down a dragon.

They tore the Placidium's last pretty corner off its hinges and made a new ruin where an old one had been polite. The sky leaned in to watch.

They stopped moving at the same instant, like the same hand had closed on both their necks. Both were panting now. Both bled—Ace in red, the suit in static. The lenses were hairline cracked again. Ace's cheek had a new line he'd earned.

"Again," Ace said.

AGAIN, AM agreed, delighted, and they obliged.

The next exchange happened so fast the world stuttered to catch up—Speed Force splitting seconds into ideas, cosmic flame writing corrections, Spider-Sense cheating physics in self-defense. Elbows. Knees. Palms. Stingers. Webs. Light. Dark. The room couldn't decide whether to melt or shatter. It did both.

Ace felt the edge he was riding—too close to blast, too slow to out-technique. He held it anyway. The name in his mouth tasted like iron and heat and a promise made to a librarian across a thousand miles.

He got the hand to the jaw again. Just for a breath. Just enough.

A flinch moved under his palm—tiny as a thought finding the end of a chain.

"Hold it," Ace whispered, not to the suit.

The laugh came anyway, but it had a crack in it now.

YOU CAN'T KEEP THIS UP, AM said. BUT WE CAN.

"Then I'd better be quick," Ace said, and drew a circle in the air no one else could see, lit it white-gold, and stepped through before fear could suggest a better plan.

Before the fight between Demi-Fiend and Nahobino...

The forest in Ixtal didn't care that two Guardians were on break. It just breathed—wet and slow—and let the light fall in green squares across the path. Vines looped like lazy handwriting. Somewhere deeper in, a jaguar decided not to be seen.

Ace and Peter walked anyway, hands in pockets like kids who'd cut last period.

"Smells like a greenhouse decided to have opinions," Peter said, palming a leaf that tried to be a fan. "Ten out of ten, would rent for prom."

"Prom's a scam," Ace said. "Food's mid. Music's worse."

"You sound ancient," Peter said, bumping his shoulder. "You're, what, twenty? Twenty-one?"

"Old enough to be disappointed in teenagers," Ace said, and Peter snorted.

They didn't talk about work for five full minutes. They tried on normal like a jacket that almost fit—argued about which version of The Raid had the better hallway, ranked fictional breakfasts, compared catastrophic laundry disasters. Birds edited their sentences with the occasional scream. The air held on to them like it was humid and lonely.

Peter kicked a root, missed on purpose, and said, casual, "What was your worst one?"

Ace huffed. "Define worst."

"Take-your-stomach-out-and-iron-it," Peter said. "Or longest. Gimme a story."

Ace watched a line of ants haul a dead beetle like movers pretending a couch is light. "Fifty years," he said. "Godzilla."

Peter's eyebrows did whatever the Brooklyn version of swearing is. "Oh."

"I made friends," Ace said. "Whole city's worth. A crew. We got good at evacuations. Got good at eating grief fast and going back outside. Red Goblin dropped in to flex somewhere year ten. Humiliated me so hard I could feel it in universes that didn't exist yet." He didn't smile. "I wasn't a Guardian then. Thought it was... I dunno. A test. Felt like one. Kept going anyway."

"Who made it out?" Peter asked, softer.

"Kai'Sa. Miss Fortune." Ace breathed once through his nose, then kept walking. "Everyone else didn't."

Peter didn't talk right away. When he did, it was the voice he saved for kids on windowsills. "How'd it end?"

"I threw him into a black hole," Ace said. "Ugly. Loud. Effective." He let a beat pass. "I got my badge after that. Officially. I think I already was, somewhere in the messy middle."

Peter rubbed at the back of his neck. "Yeah."

"Your turn." Ace flicked a leaf off his shoulder. "Worst or longest."

Peter thought like he was searching a drawer with a cracked handle. "I cheated," he said finally. "Adriel picked me up early. Apprentice fast-tracks you. Everything got... easy isn't the word. Clear." He wiggled his fingers. "Skill trees suddenly made sense. Reactions got... greasy. Good greasy. I learned, fought, learned more. One day I woke up and I was the second-strongest Avenger and no one had sent a memo."

"Second?" Ace said. "Behind the teacher?"

Peter's mouth tilted. "It took both of us to end the Infinity War."

Ace's head cocked. "Before what?"

Peter's eyes moved without finding anything. "Before everything went to shit."

The path curved around a fig whose roots had opinions. Ace let him not talk and watched his own thumb run along bark that felt like years.

He remembered a thread on his HUD from a week back. Texts with Adriel. Dumb memes; serious bleed-throughs.

—What's this Infinity War thing my passive keeps footnoting?

—One of the worst plot twists of my life, Adriel had sent back. Astral Regulator Thanos. The universe Peter was supposed to protect imploded.

—Is he okay?

—He wasn't. The only reason he didn't jump is Chrona. He blamed me for a while. We fought. She mediated. He apologized. He lost everyone. Everything. People do math like that and decide the answer is zero. We didn't let him.

Ace had stopped walking then, thumb hovering over the reply.

—You said "jump."

—Yeah.

—...Got it.

He slid back into the green with the message still hot in his head.

"Hey," he said, and Peter looked up. "If you need to lean, lean. I can do sturdy."

Peter tried to make light of it and failed in a way that made Ace want to shake whoever wrote his life. "This job ate the instruction manual," he said. "But... thanks."

They let the leaves talk for a while. A lizard did push-ups on a sun-warmed rock to impress nobody.

Then Peter stopped. Stopped the way people do when a thought chooses you more than you choose it. He turned so the canopy lit one side of his face and shadowed the other.

"Ace," he said. "You know about A.M."

"Yeah." Ace didn't put his hands in his pockets. He kept them where Peter could see them. "You've got it bottled."

"For now." Peter's laugh had no corners. "What if I don't." He lifted a shoulder. "What if the bottle breaks."

"No," Ace said, reflex and decision at once. "We're Guardians. You're the second-strongest thing in a room that also has Adriel in it. You won't—"

"Don't do that." Peter didn't raise his voice. He just stopped being bouncy about the word. "What-if is the job. What if I lose it. What if I become a knife with my face on it."

Ace blinked. The path narrowed and widened again without asking permission. "Then we fix it," he said. "We pull it off. We write a new rule. We rip the code out with pliers if we have to."

"If you can't," Peter said. "If I'm a danger to Chrona. To... anyone."

Ace felt his jaw set in a way his mother would have sighed at. "Say the rest."

"Kill me," Peter said.

The forest got very loud. Cicadas. A bird that wanted to be a laugh. Water you couldn't see. Ace stared at him like he could hold the words still long enough for them to realize they were stupid and leave.

"No," he said.

"Ace."

"No." He didn't dress it up. "Not a thousand years, not a thousand tries. I don't kill my friends because a parasite wants a tour of their house. I will tear you back out of your own brain with my hands if I have to. I will make a sun and thread it through your ribcage and use it like a leash. I will annoy Adriel into inventing a new branch of hacking. I will make Chrona mad at me for a month if that's what it costs. But I'm not putting you down."

Peter's mouth twitched like he wanted to argue and the joke part of him got there first. "You're very bad at euthanasia," he said.

"Yeah," Ace said. "Truly terrible bedside manner. One star, would not hire to kill me."

Peter looked at the dirt until it stopped pretending to be an answer. "You're... nice," he said, embarrassed by the word. "Sometimes I don't think I deserve you."

"People don't deserve friends," Ace said. "They have them. Or they don't. The ones who don't deserve it are the ones who use them up." He nudged Peter's shoulder with his own. "You're not that. You're a good guy in a rigged game."

Peter glanced up through his lashes. "It is kinda a running joke that every writer has a 'hurt Peter Parker' punch card."

"Buy nine, the tenth trauma is free," Ace said. "With a collectible foil variant."

Peter wheezed and then actually laughed. It stayed in his shoulders a second longer than it had any right to, then eased. "Me and my variants can't catch a break."

"Newsflash," Ace said. "Now that we're Guardians, none of us are catching breaks." He slung an arm over Peter's shoulders and didn't make a big deal of it. "Doesn't matter. I'll find a way. You go down, I go fishing."

"And if you go down," Peter said, leaning into the arm like a cat into a windowsill, "you lean, okay? I'm not decoration."

Ace's throat did something inconvenient. "Yeah," he said, and meant it.

They walked again. The path remembered how to be simple. The air got less personal. When they broke out at a ridge, the whole canopy was a green ocean with old temples like islands. The wind came clean across it and tried to be brave in their hair.

Peter watched the world and then watched Ace watching it. "Luffy would be proud of you," he said, serious all the way through. "Really proud. You're... the best kind of brother."

Ace looked away so the stupid prickling behind his eyes could get bored and leave. "Thanks," he said, and it came out raw and right.

They stood there until the sun got tired of being good and started looking for trouble behind the trees. Neither of them said the word "promise" because some words work better without being pointed at. They said other things instead. Where the best hot springs in Ixtal were. Which noodle stall in Piltover was a shakedown and which was religion. Whether Chrona would like this view or insist on relocating the ridge two feet to the left for "composition."

Peter kicked his heel against a rock and said, last light in his eyes, "Ace?"

"Yeah?"

"If it ever gets bad."

"It won't," Ace said, automatic and lying and perfectly sincere.

Peter nodded anyway. "If it ever does, I'm going to try to be findable."

"Good," Ace said. "I'm going to try to be relentless."

"Deal."

They bumped fists. The forest applauded with leaves.

Weeks later, under a sky that wasn't green and on a floor that wasn't kind, Ace would hear his own voice in that sunlight, casual as breath:

I'll find a way.

He didn't kill his friend.

He remembered the ridge, and the ridiculous ant parade, and how the wind had tried so hard to be brave, and he set his jaw and did the dumbest thing you can do in a rigged game.

He kept his promise.

Present time...

He stepped and the world blinked.

Ace came out of the circle two body-lengths above the ruin, boots striking a star-step that wasn't there until he needed it. The air tasted like iron filings and wet cedar. Below, the Placidium's throat flexed and tried to remember being a hall.

The body followed without asking permission. Webbing kissed the rim of the closing portal, slingshotting AM up on a mean curve. Speed split the distance into slices; they met on the top slice.

Ace led with a straight right threaded with law, pulled it a breath wide at the last instant—skin, not bone—and used the miss to pivot into a short elbow. The symbiote poured around the strike like spilled ink. The counter came from the blind left—low, coiled, deliberate.

It sprang.

A rising shovel hook—a gazelle punch—raked across Ace's cheekbone and made his teeth clink like cups on a shelf. He turned with it and bled bright along the line, black Armament catching most, pride catching the rest. The follow-up palm-heel blurred toward his eye; he slipped inside, ate a sting across brow for the privilege, and answered with a headbutt the room felt on his behalf.

They fell together, then disagreed. The body went down the wall like a lizard; Ace went down the same wall like a meteor. Debris leapt and froze in the pressure field between them. Their feet touched, disagreed again, and left the wall behind in strips.

AM adjusted the distance with a tug of silk. YOU'RE BLEEDING PRETTY, he chirped, delighted. SHOULD I TELL YOUR BROTHER WHICH ADMIRAL FINISHED YOU, OR WOULD THAT RUIN THE SURPRISE?

The name landed anyway. Akainu. Ace filed it like a shard under the tongue and kept his hands honest.

He cut the field smaller. No blast, no bloom—tight knives and threads. Asterion thinned to piano wire across the knuckles; Higan sang in harmonics the red didn't store. He stitched law through webbing; the lines sizzled and fell. AM answered with geometry—webs braiding into hexagons with darkenstine spines, a cage he could stretch or slam at a thought.

They both read the same solution: change the page.

Ace star-stepped and the landscape grew vertical. They ran the tilted bones of the Placidium like parallel lines on graph paper: Ace heavy-fast on glassed girders, AM lazy-fluid on web tightropes. At the midpoint the Spider inverted—hips whipping over shoulders in one crisp hinge—and the heel scythed up on the return like a guillotine blooming.

The kick caught Ace under the jaw and chimed his skull. He blocked late, enough to keep teeth, not enough to keep dignity; the world stuttered and repaired. He punished the air for the insult by opening a white-gold slit under his boots, falling through his own light, and surfacing behind to hammer both forearms down on a stinger until servos complained.

They broke and found each other again without looking.

AM made the hall small with angles—cut left, spike down, stinger high like a question mark—while Ace made the hall honest with decisions. He erased symbiote where it tried to be clever and let fabric survive where it remembered it was clothing. Elbows wrote commas; knees wrote periods. The Iron Spider legs tried a rope trick; Ace let two tie his wrists, took the body shots that came with it—liver, diaphragm, solar plexus in a surgeon's cadence—then blew a modest sun-bead between them and let the polite bouncer in his palm shove them apart.

YOU BREAK RULES LIKE SOMEONE WHO USED TO BE DEAD, AM noted, happy. DID YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED AFTER YOU LEFT? I DO. I WATCHED THEM PUT BLAME IN YOUR BROTHER'S POCKET AND DARE HIM TO CARRY IT.

A muscle in Ace's jaw moved and stayed moved. "You're not getting between us."

I'M NOT BETWEEN ANYTHING. I'M INSIDE THINGS. LIKE NOW. A stinger tasted his ribs and wrote pain in a clean hand. HE'S NODDING IN HERE, BY THE WAY. HE THINKS YOU'RE BRAVE. HE ALSO THINKS YOU DON'T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT. HE LEARNED THAT FROM YOU.

Ace took the rib, stapled it shut with will, and went forward. He ducked the next stinger, stepped into the punch that traveled behind it, and turned the collision into a clinch. Forehead to mask, breath to breath, he drove three short shots into the suit's sternum—not heat, command. The black lacquer there peeled like paint dodging responsibility. Skin flashed through, pale and quick, and vanished under a flood of angry night.

A hiss broke out of the speaker bank, not quite human. The lenses narrowed. THAT PLACE IS OFF-LIMITS, AM said lightly. DO IT AGAIN.

"Gladly."

He wrote a rule the Speed could read: if the body recognizes Ace's touch, the suit releases that point. No metaphysics pretty enough to chew—just a hack without shame. He brushed the jawline with two fingers and felt law bite; a crescent of black loosened and showed the hinge beneath.

AM backfilled with concrete. CLEVER. EVERY KEY YOU MAKE, I MELT. WE COULD PLAY THIS FOR HOURS.

"We won't."

The ruin decided walls were optional. They took the hint and moved upward, into air that still remembered rivers. The Placidium dropped away; coast smudged the edge of sight. Ace placed star-steps over nothing and ran them toward the water. AM followed with a dancer's balance and a thief's grin, webbing oceans of empty sky into trampolines for himself.

"I'm done breaking your house," Ace said. "Come outside."

OH, GOOD. I HATE CLEANING.

They hit the Navori coast like a rumor. Wind tasted like salt; the tide pulled at everything. Ace exhaled and the sea below shivered with heat; he inhaled and the steam he'd made turned into a fog that obeyed him. He pulled a sheet up and let it swallow amber webs. AM pivoted around the fog, reading air the way he used to read streets, and made new lines—filaments anchored to clouds, to star-steps, to the idea of tension itself.

Ace pushed the fight out over open water. Collateral reduced to waves and stubborn fish. The ocean took the punches like a professional, arching under each shock and pretending nothing happened.

Up close, Peter's body was still the better machine: hands that set traps, feet that argued with gravity, a spine that could swallow momentum and give it back worse. Ace had the heavier engine. He kept the throttle disciplined.

They sprinted across a lane of spray like two scribbles on the same page. AM threw a web-net with darkenstine barbs that bit at the aura when they shouldn't; Ace cut permission out of the net with white-gold notches, left the silk to fall harmlessly, and let the barbs drown themselves in steam. A stinger snapped for his throat; he shouldered it aside with Conqueror's and wrote NO along its length for later. The Iron Spider legs reconfigured mid-air into springs; AM bounced off them and turned his next step into a drop-knee that would have cratered a skull if it had met one. It met Ace's forearm. The impact traveled up his arm and knocked memories loose.

TELL ME ABOUT THE FIFTY YEARS, AM murmured, cheerful as a coach. GODZILLA, WAS IT? HOW MANY FRIENDS DID YOU BUY TIME WITH? I'M MAKING A LIST.

Ace cut across the surface, leaving bright footprints. He didn't offer the list. "You don't want mine. You couldn't carry it."

I CAN CARRY ANYTHING. I PROVED IT TO HIM.

The him landed like a thrown stone. Ace turned a knot in his chest into a lever in his hips and drove a shovel-hook of his own, short and mean, into the suit's ribs. Something in the frame groaned. He followed with a shoulder to the chest and a knee that would have taken a lesser man's leg home to reconsider life. AM rode the damage with borrowed grace and returned payment with interest—a three-point combo that ate seconds instead of flesh: heel to thigh, palm to ear, stinger feint that made Ace waste a guard.

Spider-Sense cheated math. Observation cheated back. Futures braided and bled. Ace narrowed the corridor of possible answers until only the ones he could live with remained.

They climbed. Air turned thin, cold. Below, waves braided, unbraided. AM swung on a filament thread so fine the sunlight missed it and came in heel-first again; Ace ducked and let the heel slice hair, not bone. He snapped a hand to the calf on the way by, felt tendons hum like good rope, and spiked him down—half suplex, half refusal of gravity. The suit threw webs in the fall and made a net out of sky to bounce from. Ace cut the net with a diagonal line of law and refused to admire the recovery.

DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT THE MOMENT AFTER? AM asked, breath not even strained. HE DOESN'T. THAT'S HOW WE GOT IN. YOUR FRIEND ALWAYS SAVED WHAT WAS IN FRONT OF HIM AND LEFT THE ROOM BEHIND TO ROT.

"Keep talking," Ace said, and didn't add what he was saving right now.

The first time he touched Peter's throat without black between, the body flinched like something remembering how to breathe. The suit slammed back on, furious. The second time, AM punished him with a darkenstine needle that drank Haki like a thief. The third time, Ace layered his touch with Conqueror's and a word the air agreed with: mine, but not for ownership—for responsibility. The black hesitated. AM snarled and squeezed Ace's ribs with two Iron Spider legs until something did what ribs do under honesty.

Pain filed itself as a receipt. Ace paid it later. For now he made the ocean help.

He pulled steam out of the water and wove it into ropes only he could see, then stepped through them like rails, changing angles too fast to sketch. AM matched the rails with webbing anchored at dumb places—distance, reflection, habit. They collided over a whitecap; Ace's elbow tried for a jaw he'd already promised not to break, and turned at the last blink into a cheek check that still made lenses spiderweb. AM smiled with Peter's mouth through the cracks and spat a line of static that would have been a joke in another life.

YOU'RE MAKING THIS ROMANTIC, he teased. HE HATES THAT ABOUT YOU.

"Good," Ace said, and meant it.

The fight went quiet in that loud way only top-speed combat gets. No yelling. No speeches. Just work. Ace wrote law across the surface of the sea until it stopped offering AM clean rebounds; AM rewrote angles with geometry until webs sang like violin strings in a storm. Stingers kissed, were denied, kissed again. Hidaruma beads bloomed and went dark like will-o'-wisps. Asterion wires bit symbiote at seams and didn't touch skin. The body under the paint began to slow, not because it lacked engine but because it spent too long fighting two wars—one on the outside, one under the sternum.

Ace felt it and wanted to be cruel. He allowed himself to be exact instead.

When the chance came—thin as paper—he took it. Two fingers at the jaw hinge. Law murmured. Black peeled an inch. Human skin, damp with salt, lived there. The lenses stuttered.

The ocean threw a louder wave in, impatient to be the stage. Ace took the hint.

He kicked the star-steps apart like ladder rungs and dropped toward the water, dragging AM's attention down with him. Spray hit like cold applause. The next second split into three: Ace left, AM right, both arriving center because the fight insisted. Ace's palm pressed sternum—no heat, only instruction. Not you. Not here. Not him.

The suit trembled. AM laughed with too many teeth and shoved that laugh into Ace's face like a hand. HE'S QUIET AGAIN, he sang. HE ALWAYS DOES THAT WHEN I LOOP THE MEMORY OF HIS AND THAT WOMANS CHILD.

The temperature around Ace spiked a dozen degrees for one heartbeat and then settled into something colder than fury. Care. It didn't look like mercy. It moved like it.

He let go of kindness as a tactic and kept it as a rule.

The sea below groaned a little. The wind hissed like a drawn blade. Ace drew the orbitals he kept for bad ideas—the three white-gold rings that swung around his hips like obedient planets—and tightened them until they became a single glowing band. Perihelion Guard hummed. The hum crawled into his bones and reminded them of the first fire.

AM felt the pressure and leaned in, greedy. YES, he said, voice dropping a register. THAT ONE. BLOW THE CANDLE OUT OR LIGHT THE HOUSE. EITHER WAY, WE EAT.

Ace didn't answer him. He took a breath that hurt. He thought the name of every person who had asked him to come home and the one person who hadn't had the chance. He pulled a seed out of that place in his chest where will and heat shook hands—the small sun he'd sworn not to spend inside a city—and let the rings around his waist climb into it like a spine.

A white-gold egg formed in the cradle of his hands. Not hot. Exact. It hummed in a tone Peter would have recognized if he'd been free: the sound of a rule that doesn't ask.

AM struck for the wrist. Ace moved his wrist. The stinger took air and learned manners. A web tried to cradle the seed; the seed didn't see it.

"Not here," Ace told the sea. "Hold this kindly."

He threw.

It didn't arc. It arrived.

The ocean humped up like a back under a too-bright hand. Dark water went white at the edges, then gold, then a color human eyes call white to save themselves embarrassment. For a breath, the sun Ace had made sat in the sea as if the planet had remembered an old trick.

The pressure wave hit a second later, gentle at first—like a giant testing a door—and then honest. Sky peeled, then re-seated. Clouds learned silence. The coastline, miles off, brightened along its bones.

The suit rode the first ring of force like a talent show contestant and the second like a problem. The third picked him up and took him away in a clean line.

Ace watched the bloom climb his ribs from the inside and kept the brightness wrapped tight so it erased black and left skin alone. The sea cradled what it could and forgave the rest with professional dignity.

He didn't wait to admire his own bad idea. He cut through the afterglow on white-gold steps, lungs burning, cheek bleeding, ribs complaining, and went hunting.

Artoria POV

The canopy of Ixtal breathed in green. Rainthread hissed through bromeliads, frogs clicked like beads, and two Guardians stood on a terrace of root and stone packing for a different mountain.

Artoria checked the straps on her gauntlet one last time, the motion neat and practiced. "Report your spirit," she said without looking up. With him, plain questions worked best.

Adriel rubbed the heel of his hand under his eye. "Running hot. No sleep badge unlocked," he muttered. "I'm fine."

"You are not," she answered, mild as steel. "Peter weighs you."

A twitch, almost a flinch. He exhaled. "Yeah. Since he vanished with Ace after the two Darks... it's like my head can't idle. I want to sprint to Ionia and rip the thing out myself." He lifted a shoulder. "But Ace called it. Partner duty. He took the quest. So I—" His mouth twisted. "I'm benched. I hate being benched."

"Do you mistrust him?"

"What? No." The answer was immediate, fierce. "Ace is... Ace. If I can't trust him, I can't trust anybody. It's me. I'm not used to letting people help. I've been the one-man patch for so long that now, with a whole squad, all my brain does is check everybody's vitals and hover. I keep wanting to cut the mission line and solo it."

"Habit of a long campaign," she said. "And of a lonely one."

He huffed a laugh that wasn't happy. "Call it what it is: control. I had to be the adult while the universe tried to eat us, and now that I don't have to... my hands won't open." His gaze drifted toward the east, past jungle, past the curve of the world. "He's my apprentice. This is on me."

"You taught us to share burdens," Artoria said. "Share this, too."

He frowned up at her. "You make it sound easy."

"It is not." She slid a vambrace home until the catch whispered shut. "I am the last to claim ease. You know what I was." The word Dark did not pass her mouth; it didn't have to. "Many we saved still look at me and see the mask I wore. Your patience with that—" Her chin tipped, a knight's bow without theatrics. "It is a mercy I repay by standing now and asking you to take your own counsel."

His hands finally stilled. "I'm making dumb excuses."

"You are speaking fear," she corrected. "Name it, and it will stop dragging you by the ankle."

Adriel blew out a long breath, then another, counting under it. "Okay. Fear: I don't want a repeat of... anything. I've been in more wars than I can count, more traps than I should've lived through. Got drafted by a 'system' that wanted me to be a machine in a power-trip story with no choices. I clawed out. I promised I'd never let that script run me again. Now Peter's gone and my chest is—" He made a jagged motion over his sternum. "Static."

Artoria closed the distance and simply hugged him—no flourish, no knightly pose, armor cold and steady against his hoodie. "Breathe," she said near his ear. "Four in. Hold. Six out."

He did, stubbornly pretending not to melt into it, then actually breathing.

"You are not alone," she went on, voice a low cadence. "You were the first to treat me as more than the mask. You showed me a path that was not killing or being killed. I hold to that." She leaned back enough to meet his eyes. "Let us go to Targon. Let us cut the last knot there. Ace will keep his promise here."

Adriel scrubbed his face and tried a smile. "You're better at pep talks than me."

"I am worse at jokes," she admitted. A beat. "We balance."

He bumped her shoulder with his. "Yeah."

They were turning toward their gate—his hand lifted, space already sketching a circle—when the jungle light changed. Noon bled sideways. The eastern horizon flared, and for an instant the sea beyond Ionia wore a second sun.

Artoria's hand went to her sword out of reflex she would never lose. The light carried heat she recognized too well: not Darkenstine's iron-cold hunger, but the white-gold law Ace had learned to wield. Even from this distance, it stroked the leaves like a benediction—and made every old scar inside her ache.

Adriel's head snapped that way. His pupils burned thin. "That's Ace," he whispered, then went very still. The next words tumbled fast, like he was reading them off a page only he could see. "Past-tense... white-gold Asterion bloom over coastal water, containment ring, he's holding collateral, speed signatures, Spider—" He swallowed, the line of his jaw going hard. "AM's in Peter. No..."

Artoria felt it without his gifts: the prickle under the tongue, the wrong sweetness of a parasite pleased with its theft. She set a gauntleted palm on his chest before the tremor in his legs became a sprint. "Adriel."

"I have to go." His voice frayed. "Let me go. If I move now I can—"

"You will break Ace's charge," she said. "And your word to him."

"Word?" He laughed, rough. "He gave me his word. I told him to bring Peter back. I'm supposed to sit here while—"

"You are supposed to trust your comrade," she answered, not raising her tone, letting the weight of it do the work. "You trusted me. Trust him."

The fight flickered across his face—a dozen futures where he jumped and made everything worse, a dozen where he didn't and the guilt ate him anyway. His breath went too fast, hands working, and for a second she saw the boy under the Guardian: twenty, university, Puerto Rico, a church roof in rain. She set her hands on either side of his face, gentle but unyielding.

"Look at me."

He did.

"We will go to Targon," she said. "We will cut that head from the serpent. Then to Piltover. Then to Kuwaku Anansi. This war ends. Ace is taking his road. We take ours." A pause. "Have faith."

He shut his eyes and nodded once, hard. When they opened again they were wet. "Dios... por favor cuídalos," he said, simple as a child, and wiped his cheek with the back of his hand like he was annoyed it existed. "Okay. Okay. I trust him."

Artoria let her hands fall. "Good."

"You know," he said, voice steadier as the words found his pace, "if you weren't here I'd have blown my gasket, nuked a city, then said 'my bad' after."

"I am honored to serve as your gasket," she replied dryly.

That got him to laugh for real. "Thanks, Saber."

She inclined her head at the old title. "Always."

He drew the circle with two fingers. The air took the hint, bright lines sketching themselves into a gate. Wind from high rock and thin sky washed their faces—Targon's breath, old and clean.

Adriel planted his feet, rolled his shoulders, and took one more look east, toward the dimming second sun. "Ace," he said under his breath, not to pull, only to send, "I'm trusting you. Bring him home."

Artoria watched his mouth shape the name and felt the smallest loosening in the invisible knot that had wrapped around them since Peter fell. "We go," she said.

"We go," he echoed.

They stepped through together—king and knight, commander and friend—leaving the humid green and the ache of watching to the frogs and the rain. As the gate sealed, the last echo of white-gold reached the terrace, a warmth that wasn't heat but promise. Artoria breathed it in and, for once, allowed herself the luxury of a vow that sounded like hope.

"Let us all trust in Ace," she said to the quiet roots. "And finish our part."

...

The ocean couldn't decide whether to boil or kneel. Ace's miniature sun guttered, leaving a steaming corridor ripped through cloud and tide. He stood at the center of it, armor hairline-cracked from heat, breath raw.

For half a heartbeat the quiet sounded like victory. It scared him.

"Peter...?" The name slipped out small, human. What if he'd just—?

Blue-white cut the horizon.

The body arrived on a straight line, Speed Core screaming, Iron Spider plates rechanneled for impact. The knee that found Ace's nose wasn't a strike so much as a verdict. Sound went thin; the shockwave sprinted across Eomea; Ace left the sea, the coast, the sky. Noxus caught him like a mountain with bad manners.

He clawed upright on grit and reflex. The suit was already in the crater, stepping inside his guard with textbook cruelty—a shovel-hook to the ribs, not fancy, just honest meanness. Air evacuated. Pain wrote a red paragraph along his flank.

The follow-up wasn't contact; it was a pressure punch—AM turning the Speed Core into a battering ram aimed at the exact place the first hit had taught to panic. Orbit accepted delivery.

The moon ended the sentence.

He posted one knee, one hand. Fingers dug for purchase; stingers said no. A grip found the back of his neck—worst place, the place that reduces men to boys—and then stone met face as AM ran, skating him like a plow engraving an insult you could read from Ionia.

Patience popped. He didn't blast; he shoved. Cosmic pressure ballooned from his chest, Speed braided through it, and the lock tore loose. AM windmilled, caught himself because Peter always did, and grinned because the thing inside loved owning that memory.

Vacuum swallowed their next breath. They left chalk and dropped into quiet black, momentum their only grammar. AM snagged a web that shouldn't have held in space and used it anyway, slinging back heel-first. Ace checked the drop with a forearm that hummed—one of those blocks that steals a heartbeat.

They went inside—elbows, hips, the unphotogenic part of fighting where leverage is king. AM threaded a stinger low to snare; Ace stepped over, stamped the calf in an oblique that would have shortened human bone, and chopped a vertical elbow at the shoulder hub. Symbiote peeled in a hot hiss, reknit mean.

"YOUR HANDS STILL ASK PERMISSION," AM observed, delighted. "KEEP IT UP. IT'S ADORABLE."

Ace answered with craft—shoulder bump to chin; knee to inner thigh; palm set to sternum with a coin of white-gold law trapped between skin and suit. Not fire: instruction. The symbiote spat the coin, offended; the Iron Spider took the bruise and sent him an invoice in pain.

A little moon wandered beneath like a helpful accident. Gravity returned; they landed sloppy and pretended it was style. AM changed altitude by inches and made those inches everything—half-step outside line, shoulders square, hips loose, hands boring until they weren't. He rode around Ace's lead and slotted a short forearm across the bridge of the nose like a crossbar. Ace shaved it by a hair and paid for the shave when a descending elbow stamped a bruise into the top of his plate.

Ace stole the rhythm and threw the oldest thing he trusted: inside reap, hip turn, osoto guruma done mean. The symbiote rewrote the knee mid-fall; AM took it on the shoulder and rolled out into a crouch his body acted like it had always meant to hit.

"YOU'RE TIRED," AM diagnosed, not mocking.

"Start lying," Ace rasped—and shot through him.

Not around. Through.

Asterion drew a filament across knuckles; Supreme Armament kept it obedient; Conqueror's told it where to stop. He posted a three-count on the suit: jab to jaw seam (erase), shovel to lower ribs (deny), hook to shoulder hinge (complain). Black lacquer peeled in a neat crescent along the jaw—skin, pale, a breath like hope getting its first sip—then resealed.

"He HATES that," AM said, italicizing the pronoun with Peter's mouth.

Ace cut replies and worked angles. AM let a stinger kiss Ace's thigh just to buy the inch for a shin hack at the calf. Nerves sang; the leg dipped; AM made it. Ace sat—one heartbeat—turned the sit into a sweep, and dumped him. They bounced, punched on the bounce, landed already punching again.

Speed tugged the world thinner. The little moon offered corners. A crater lip became a springboard; a boulder, a shin block; a scatter of pebbles, a glass curtain once Ace heated it and kicked it into AM's face—slowing, not cutting.

"WEAR A MASK TOO," AM suggested, conversational poison. "YOU'RE WORSE WITHOUT ONE."

Ace barked a laugh he didn't feel. "Not my brand."

AM planted open hands—sticky palms, spider habit—then corkscrewed an elbow across Ace's cheekbone with the ugly angle that makes grown men cry later. Ace tucked chin, crashed shoulder into sternum in reply, and heel-stomped a stinger housing until it considered retirement.

The suit shifted tactics. Four legs flared like a black flower, then fired in sequence—thud pulses into rock, into air, into nothing—ringing timing into the arena. A rhythm cage.

Ace stepped wrong on purpose. It cost him a line of blood across the shoulder, bought him entry. Inside the beat, he wrote law along the inner elbow seam. Black peeled. Warm skin. A pulse, there and gone.

"Hold," he said to the heartbeat, paying for softness with a piston knee to the gut and a ridge-hand to the nerve by his collarbone that made stars taste like tin.

Enough clever. He needed a wedge.

He apologized to the sky and built a sightline.

Not yet.

AM darted first—two-finger gouge under a floating rib (old school, mean), palm straight down the sternum (percussion to rattle organs). Ace gagged and kept his hands honest. He framed the Iron Spider shoulder hub with a tight half-circle elbow; the joint squealed, a guilty hinge noise. A stinger misfired. He jammed it into the rock like a tent peg, pivoted around it, slung the suit across his hip—clean throw, ugly landing.

AM punished the honesty by changing platforms midair—web to cloud, cloud to nothing, nothing to anchor—and reeled himself back in with acrobatic disrespect. No flourish, just an efficient downward palm-heel at the temple like a carpenter at last nail. Color without a name screamed behind Ace's eyes.

He told it to wait and bled precision into his rage.

Cosmic trimmed to knives and threads. Higan lines cross-stitched the void, hummed in harmonics the red didn't store. Any mass that crossed without permission simplified—not to ash, to absence. Stingers learned the borders in one pass and flowed around them like water around reef. AM used that flow to get close again, heel snapping up at the jaw in a tight arc; Ace shaved it, answered with elbow-on-cheek, then—gentle, relentless—palmed the throat.

The law under his skin hummed: Not yours. Not here. Not him.

The black hiccupped.

A syllable climbed to the mouth—raw, a vowel looking for bones.

AM crushed it with a growl in Peter's voice that didn't belong to him. "NO VACANCY."

Iron Spider legs locked around Ace's ribs and squeezed. Bones negotiated. He chose an unpopular option—breath in, will out—and let Conqueror's roll past flesh and metal into space. Dust hung perfectly still.

"Peter," he said. "Come on, man. Snap out of it..."

The lock slipped an inch. A mercy. AM yanked it back with a snarl and a knee that would have folded granite. Ace tore loose at cost and clapped a bead of light at his own feet, shock-pushing them to opposite canyon walls.

He ran first. He hadn't planned to. He did anyway.

The chase turned the sky into ruled paper—white-gold lines, blue-white lines, intersecting math. They sprinted the broken arcade of rubble moons; Ace burned clear circles in membrane-windows to make wind and honesty; AM used the circles as rings and returned heel-first. Ace cross-checked, rode the shock down three decks, and kept the fight where fewer things could die.

Rubble became a chain—three, four, five small bodies drifting in tidy alignment, targets on a rail. Both of them noticed. Both accelerated.

They collided at the middle and wrote a sound into rock that made the dust stand and listen.

Edge again. Too close to blast. Too honest to out-technique. He walked that knife and called it floor.

He wove Asterion into his arms until his fists looked like decisions. Every shot was a line item: erase seam, deny anchor, permit breath. Skin flashed at jaw, at pulse, at the soft of the throat. Each inch AM reclaimed with precision that felt personal.

Ace got the jaw again. Thumb only. Enough.

He didn't speak the name. He hit the suit like a man building a door in a house that had forgotten it had rooms.

A stinger whispered by. Another etched his shoulder, thin and ugly. He took both because the next touch put his palm—gentle, inevitable—back at the throat. The law brightened. The syllable pushed.

The suit raised an arm to erase the moment.

Now.

He drew a white-gold circle thin as mercy and stepped through before doubt could suggest a better plan, reappearing above the bead-chain with both hands already braced, field geometry locked in his chest.

Gamma-Ray Burst.

Cosmic flame discarded shape, kept truth. Asterion collapsed to a needle, then detonated sideways into a scythe-wide beam that howled in frequencies rock doesn't understand. It carved along the line of moons. One cored through, tidy. One split slow and sad. One argued and lost. Light poured out of the cuts a long time after reason said it should stop.

The glare swallowed both figures and the ruin around them.

Everything went very, very white.

...

Peter's world had edges, once.

They were the edges of a rent-controlled Queens apartment: the dent in the fridge door where a moving box had head-butted it; the dry patch on the window frame Aunt May always meant to repaint; the brown ring on the coffee table from a cup of tea nobody had the heart to scold him for. Those edges had been small and human and enough.

Here, in the skull-sized room where he'd been living since the black laughter took his body, the edges were wrong. The window looked out on nothing. Not night, not fog—nothing, like a page that refused ink. The door opened onto the same room, again, until he stopped opening it. And the little TV on the chipped dresser came on by itself if he ignored it long enough, tuned to whatever the thing wearing his skin wanted him to see.

The apartment smelled like detergent and old sunlight. He hated that it tried to be kind.

When grief came, it didn't ask permission. It crept up his throat like a fist and pushed. He learned to cry while trying not to shake the furniture. Sobs felt like swallowing bricks; afterward, his ribcage rang.

Words were heavy here. He kept them short so they wouldn't tip over.

He had been a Guardian long enough to know what a mind-prison looked like from outside. Inside, it didn't look like bars. It looked like "maybe I deserved it." It looked like "other versions had it worse/better/realer." It looked like a couch you couldn't get up from and a door that always politely failed.

Sometimes the TV played re-runs of his failures.

The Star Guardian city with its neon gods and bubblegum battles. His hands glowing wrong. Three girls who smiled like they meant it until they didn't, because he had learned to love the counterfeit world that was killing the real one. He had kissed a lie and the lie had thanked him. He had murdered a friend who still wears his name in his sleep. He had called it heroism because the script told him to, and only later learned that scripts lie.

Other times the screen showed variations of himself: a kid who kept his aunt; a man who got the ring on the right finger; a version written by someone mean, more punching bag than person. And sometimes one that looked, briefly, happy.

He could have chosen to be angry at the people with the pens. He chose himself instead. Anger is a posture; shame is an apartment.

He told nobody, because there was nobody to tell, that he had counted every breath since the Regulator snapped that world out from under him. He couldn't save the dead because there was no place to put them anymore. He couldn't save the living because the thing in his bones kept setting up rooms like this.

When he slept, something came and put on his face for him.

DON'T WORRY, the voice would purl through the apartment's thin walls, as if the nothing outside were close enough to whisper. WE'RE GOOD AT THIS. WE'LL SAY "HERO" WHILE WE TAKE YOUR HANDS. YOU JUST REST.

He had tried to fight it, once, at the beginning. He had balanced his breath on the bridge of his nose like a trick coin and tried to hold it steady until something broke. Then the thing had given him a family he didn't make and a medal he didn't earn and a battle that applauded when he killed the wrong person. The braking happened inside, quiet.

Chrona had held him together the way a lighthouse holds weather together—by existing exactly where everything gets cruel—and he had still managed to walk out into a storm and call it purpose. The guilt of that had teeth. It woke up before he did.

He deserved to stay here. That was the whole truth he let himself hold. It had the shape of a sentence and a bed.

The knock took three tries to convince him it existed.

The first tap was so soft it could have been the radiator remembering a winter that had never happened. The second was a finger on a desk he didn't own.

The third found the exact spot under his breastbone where grief and hope use the same handle.

He sat up like the couch had shocked him.

"Ace?" he asked the room, because it's easier to say a name than to say I want.

The TV huffed to life with the static sigh of a bad idea getting its wings. Not AM's curated highlights. Not the time-delayed humiliation channel he had learned not to watch. Live. Somewhere beyond whatever layer of story this apartment pretended to be, a man made of fire and stubbornness was getting beaten like a drum and didn't care.

Ace moved like a promise. Not clean—never clean—but honest. Peter watched him burn the word careful into each strike, watched him pull the line of his knuckle two degrees to save a tendon he had taped a hundred times, watched him refuse to let an explosion decide what skin it kissed.

"Why are you here?" Peter asked the TV, small, ridiculous. "Why do you keep... why?"

Onscreen, the black suit laughed with his teeth.

HE THINKS YOU'RE WORTH THE STAMINA, AM narrated, so pleased with itself it forgot to be cruel. ADORABLE. WATCH HOW THAT WORKS OUT.

Ace didn't answer with words. Ace built doors in the thing that had turned Peter's body into hallways. Jaw. Pulse. Throat. Each touch was a redacted sentence—a white-gold strip where a mouth had been making him say nothing for months.

"Don't," Peter whispered at the screen and at himself. Don't hope. Don't reach. Don't make him carry you.

The apartment shifted, almost imperceptibly, as if walls were trying to lean toward the television. His mind knew the shape of a Spider-Sense even here; it tickled the baseboards and the ceiling fan. Ace's voice came through a second later like a signal that had learned to travel pain.

"Peter Parker. Ace D. Portgas. Your idiot friend is here. Please, come back."

He'd forgotten what it felt like to be called by his whole name like it was a spell that lifted instead of pinned.

The black laughter in the walls clicked its tongue.

HE CAN'T HEAR YOU, AM crooned through the plaster, amused. HE'S BUSY. WE GAVE HIM PURPOSE. WE TOOK IT AWAY. HE'S COUNTING.

Peter laughed, because that's what you do when a part of you guesses your worst thought out loud. It sounded like a cough.

"Don't say my friend's name with my mouth," he told the voice. He hadn't meant to say it aloud. It was so small. But the couch seemed to notice he'd sat forward.

The TV feed stuttered as they left the atmosphere. It caught up in time to show Ace's face hit the moon like a signature and smear across it like graphite.

Peter flinched as if someone had slammed his own head. Regulation training said to breathe. Grief said: you did this, you did this, you did this.

"That's enough," he told himself, because sometimes you have to parent you. The apartment didn't answer. It never did.

Onscreen, Ace tore free of the lock by doing the thing Peter had always hated most about him—refusing to quit a stupid decision midway—and used it to make a different stupid, noble one. He palmed the throat again. He said Peter's name like a hand on a door.

The syllable rose in Peter's own throat here, in the apartment that wasn't. It didn't make it out. The walls closed in like a hug from the wrong person.

HUSH, AM breathed through the vents. THIS IS THE PART WHERE HE GETS HOPEFUL. THEN WE TAKE IT. HE LEARNS. IT'S SO EFFICIENT.

"Stop talking," Peter said. The words shook. It embarrassed him how much they shook. "You don't get to... to narrate me."

The TV obeyed him, not the monster. It showed Ace breathing through pain with that donkey-stubborn grace of his. It showed the clash that broke a moon's back and wrote light across vacuum like a prayer that forgot to ask for permission. It showed—on a delay that made his stomach swerve—the way Ace kept saving instead of winning.

There are pieces depression can't chew.

Aunt May's voice carving goodness down to something actionable: "If you can't save everyone, make one cup of tea and start there."

Ned laughing in the doorway with something dumb and perfect when he should have been scared.

Adriel saying, I'm going to teach you to be a sword without letting you forget you're a person.

Chrona's hand on the back of his head, steady. You don't have to be okay to be held.

Those were in him like a braided cable. Red Goblin had stripped the sheath and tried to saw through the strands one by one with nightmare and guilt and counterfeit families and the Star Guardian lie. He had almost finished.

He hadn't.

Ace said Chrona's name.

He didn't shout it like a threat. He put it in the air like a reminder that love is an address.

The apartment reeled, and for a ridiculous second he thought he might throw up from the suddenness of wanting.

He had cheated on the person who had held him together when everything else blew away. Or—worse—worn the performance of cheating like a costume forced over a body that had been starved, drugged, lied to, and made to smile for the mirror.

He didn't know which explanation hurt more. That is how shame works: it doesn't care how it catches you, so long as it does.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until the light behind them stung. If he stood up, the room would not let him leave. If he stayed sitting, his bones would calcify into the couch. Both were losses.

He stood up anyway.

The floor under the rug felt like wood. It wasn't. It felt like the memory of a floor that had made a lot of tea.

The window said no. The door said no. The TV said yes, but only to suffering.

Peter walked to the dresser. There was a drawer he never opened because it had one of Aunt May's old City Harvest T-shirts on top and he could smell dish soap when he touched it.

He opened it.

Under the T-shirt were the stupidest, bravest things he owned: a taped-together science fair badge that had survived six moves; a bus transfer he and Ned had turned into a coupon for "one get-out-of-detention free"; a crookedly cut paper spider from a kindergarten classroom where he had learned that hands can make symbols and symbols can make courage.

The things were small enough not to trip AM's alarms. The apartment felt annoyed rather than murderous.

He tucked the paper spider into his hoodie pocket (which is to say he made a pocket happen by deciding one should be there). He looked at the TV one more time.

A white-gold scythe reached across space and cut moons open like paper lanterns. Ace always did overdo it when his heart hurt. It was so much; it was too much. It was what you did when you were out of moves and refused to ever be out of moves.

Peter's breath hitched in that old way where it feels like your ribs have decided to become a different instrument halfway through a note.

"I'm coming," he told the screen. "I don't know how yet. But I'm coming."

The apartment tried to be helpful the way an abuser tries to be helpful.

NO YOU'RE NOT, AM said, sweet. LET HIM DIE TRYING. YOU GET TO BE TRAGIC WITHOUT HAVING TO DO ANYTHING. WE'LL CALL IT NOBLE. EVERYONE WILL UNDERSTAND.

He could have sat with that. It was a neat little poison and it fit the cups in his cabinet.

Instead, he walked to the door.

The brass knob was warm. He put his ear to the wood and listened to the nothing on the other side. In the space under the silence was a vibration—Ace's voice, far away, turned to pressure by the layers between. It made the hairs on his wrists stand up.

He knocked back.

Once.

Twice.

Three.

The wood didn't open. But something loosed in the hinge.

"You told him to kill you if you ever lost it," he told the kid in him who had meant it. "He didn't. He won't. He's right."

He could feel how much work "right" required. He let that be true without letting it stop him.

He turned the handle. The apartment did its trick. He stepped into the same room again, the TV now halfway through a different angle, the couch sighing as if relieved to see him. He kept walking. Door to door, again and again, until the repetition made him giddy, then angry, then stubborn. On the ninth room he said his name out loud and the apartment flinched because he said it like a person, not a patient.

"Peter Benjamin Parker," he told the wall that pretended to be a window. "Your friend is in a fight. Your teacher is praying. Your girlfriend is waiting. Get up."

The nothing outside the glass wrinkled.

He remembered training with Adriel until his hands shook and his lungs burned and the only thing left to do was learn or throw up. He remembered Adriel on a Tuesday with no war, throwing him a bottle of water and saying, Deadlines are just courage by another name. He remembered telling Ace, if the worst happens you have to kill me, and Ace had told him no and meant it so hard the word had felt like shelter.

He would not leave that man alone with a promise.

Peter pressed his palms flat on either side of the window and pushed like a climber widening a crack. The glass gave a millimeter. It screamed. He screamed with it, because sometimes you have to make a noise to have a body.

The TV tried to negotiate.

TAKE A LOOK AT THE TAPE, AM offered, syrup on the blade. YOUR HAPPIER SELVES. YOUR WORSE SELVES. WE HAVE EDITS. WE HAVE OUTTAKES. WE HAVE A VERSION WHERE YOU GET TO REST.

Peter turned his head enough to be polite.

"I'll rest when I earn it," he said, and for once it didn't sound like penance. It sounded like a plan.

He pushed again.

Under his palms, the world beyond the window stopped being nothing and started being a problem. The black thinned to a color you can only see when you close your eyes and press on them: a not-light that lives under lids. Behind it, a thread of white-gold spidered in—thin, careful—a law that said Not him.

Ace.

Peter laughed, wet and a little wrecked. "You absolute idiot," he told the line of light, fond. "Thank you."

He hooked the paper spider from his pocket and pressed it to the pane. It stuck where his fingers didn't. The web wasn't silk. The web wasn't even metaphysical. It was consent: me pulling, you letting. It held anyway.

He set his feet the way Adriel had taught him, not in some sexy hero pose but like a guy about to lift a couch with one other friend and zero chiropractors, and pulled.

The seam widened. Air rushed in—or out—or both. The apartment's smell of detergent peeled back. Under it, he could smell burnt cedar, ozone, and the bite of starfire being careful: Ace.

NO, AM said, and the word tried to be a hand over his mouth. NO. YOU HAD YOUR SHOT. YOU FAILED. TAKE THE POEM. DIE CLEAN.

Peter rested his forehead on the window frame for a second, because honesty was faster than defiance.

"I failed," he said. "I'm still Spider-Man."

He wasn't thinking about power or responsibility—not the quote, not the weight other people used when they wanted him to be quiet and suffer beautifully. He was thinking about the stupid, small things that had always saved him when the big things wanted to eat him: one more joke; one more text; one more step.

He took one more step.

The glass spiderwebbed. He could see a shape beyond it—an inside of his own throat, a ring of careening light, the split-second before a name crosses into air.

He thought of Chrona's laugh against his shoulder. He thought of Ace's stubborn grin when there was nothing to grin about. He thought of Adriel's tired eyes and the prayers he hated admitting he said.

"Hold the door," he told them, as if they could hear him from wherever Ace's scythe had cut the night open.

He pulled.

The window shattered inward without shards, like sugar breaking into rain. The pressure hit him like an applause. In the same blink, the apartment screamed and tried to knit itself back together, tendrils of black crawling toward the new hole like hands clutching a wound.

Peter stepped into the wind and grabbed the edge of the tear with both hands.

"I'm coming," he told the body that was being used to hurt the person who had come for him anyway. "Make room."

He felt AM noticing him. Not as a guest. As a problem.

OH, the voice said, genuinely delighted. THE BOY REMEMBERED HOW TO BE A VERB.

"Watch me," Peter said.

Somewhere beyond this room, light ached across space and carved moons apart. Somewhere just on the other side of the tear, a fist that had learned to be careful was waiting by a throat it was not going to crush.

Peter hauled himself through the break point, into the pain, toward his name.

He didn't know if he would make it on the first try. He didn't know if the next breath would be air or fire or static. He knew the only way out was through.

He set his teeth. He pulled.

"Hey," he whispered to the life wearing his bones, to the friend burning his lungs, to the woman who had kept his head above water, to the mentor carrying more than any one person should have to carry.

"You're Spider-Man," he told himself, and for the first time since the apartment had closed, it didn't sound like a job.

"Act like it."

To Be Continued...