Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was a letter underneath the door of Peter’s apartment, which was weird, because he hadn’t received any mail in over a month. He checked his mailbox every day, more out of habit than anything, but ever since that day on Liberty Island, it had been empty. It wasn’t just his friends and classmates who had forgotten about him - it was the college recruiters, junk mailers, and guerrilla marketers. It was as if he had never existed. 

As he paced across his apartment, letter in hand, Peter looked toward his dresser. There was a minifigure of Emperor Palpatine, taken from the Lego Death Star he’d built with Ned. There was a dog-eared copy of a six-hundred page novel, and Peter was only now realizing that MJ would never ask for it back. There was a photo of May, a wide smile on her face as she handed out meals at the community center. Peter’s heart felt heavy, and a darkness clouded his mind as he remembered everyone he’d lost, all of those memories he’d never get back. 

Peter may have saved the world, stopped a multiversal crisis, but that didn’t make him feel any less alone.

The webslinger flopped down onto his bed and examined the letter - there was no return address, but it was addressed to “Peter Parker #1.” 

There were only two people who would even think of calling him that, and they were both in another universe. 

Peter tore open the letter, and his eyes went wide as soon as he started reading. 

Do you feel alone in the multiverse? Are you looking for friends who understand your hopes, fears, and struggles? 

Join the SPIDER-MAN SUPPORT GROUP!

December 28, 2024 - 1:00 PM - 31-42 Austin St., Queens, NY, 11375

Peter’s first thought was that this was all a cruel trick from someone who had discovered his secret identity. He worried that it had all been for nothing - that somehow, someone had unearthed that video of Mysterio, figured out that he was Spider-Man, and destroyed his life once again. 

His second thought was not so much a thought as a realization - a realization that yes, he did feel alone in the multiverse. There was no one he could talk to, no one who would understand the joy of watching the sunset from the top of the Empire State Building or the frustration of running out of web fluid in the middle of a fight. And after a month of being all alone, he desperately needed a friend who knew what it was like to be the one and only Spider-Man. 

His third thought was that if he went to this support group, maybe he would see Peter-Two and Peter-Three again. He’d never thought that he would get another chance to talk to his fellow webslingers, but whoever wrote this letter had mentioned the multiverse. Maybe the other Peters had gotten this letter too. Maybe one of them had written it. 

Peter took out his phone, and for the first time in a month, he added an event to his calendar. December 28th. One o’clock. Spider-Man Support Group. 

Of course, it wasn’t nearly that easy. 

The next Saturday, Peter swung into the convenience store on 71st Avenue, the back of his skull tingling like crazy. He’d been devoting more and more time to fighting crime lately, even if it wasn’t always for the right reasons. In a way, being Spider-Man was oddly therapeutic. Whenever he swung through the air, he could forget about all of the grief, all of the loneliness, all of the pain that hit him every time he stepped into his apartment, and whenever he webbed up a crook, he felt like he had a purpose, a goal, a reason to stay alive. 

As soon as Peter kicked down the door, his heart pounding, he found two robbers standing next to the slushie machine, with a scared clerk ducked behind the counter. Strangely enough, Peter recognized one of the thieves - he’d been involved with Vulture’s gang a few years earlier. Terrified, the spidery superhero’s heart started racing again, but he soon resorted to his usual coping mechanism: bad jokes. 

“Aaron!” Peter exclaimed as he clung to the ceiling. “I took your advice! You know, about getting better at interrogating people.” Aaron looked more confused than anything, but Peter nevertheless took a deep breath and affected an absurdly deep voice, something that, at least to him, sounded like a cross between Darth Vader and Saruman. “Aren’t you intimidated?” 

“Nope, you still sound like a chipmunk,” Aaron said. “And what’s up with the new costume? Why is it so bright?”

Peter was actually a bit offended. He thought of how he’d crafted the suit with nothing but a sewing machine and a few swathes of clearance-rack fabric, how he’d designed it all on his own, paying tribute to his counterparts and yet putting his own spin on that classic red and blue suit, creating something that was uniquely his. 

“I made this one myself, and I’m really proud of it, so…” All of a sudden, he aimed his web shooters toward Aaron’s associate and webbed his gun to the wall. “The bright blue is also a nice distraction if you’re…oh, I don’t know, trying to rob a convenience store.” 

That was when Aaron pointed his gun toward Peter. “I know you’re just a kid, so I don’t want to have to do this, but…” 

Suddenly, both of their phones started buzzing, and when Peter glanced toward his pocket, he saw a notification. December 28th. One o’clock. Spider-Man Support Group. 

“Hey Aaron, any chance we could do this later? I actually have plans right now, so it would be really nice if we could wrap this up.” 

“Weird, me too,” Aaron said before turning to his associate. “Come on. Let’s go.” 

Peter was shocked that had worked, but as soon as the robbers were gone, he launched himself out of the convenience store, latched onto the nearest skyscraper with his web, and swung through the city. Thankfully, Austin Street was only a few blocks away, and he quickly found the place he was looking for. It was a small, unremarkable building, sandwiched in between a nail salon and a pizzeria, and Peter couldn’t quite believe that, in the million times he’d swung through this neighborhood, he’d never once noticed this place. 

Peter opened the door, but when he poked his head into the building, it seemed empty, lifeless. The inside was just as nondescript as the outside - nothing but blank walls and open space. However, in the center of the room, there was a touch screen, and despite the voice in the back of his head telling him that it was probably a trap, Peter’s curiosity got the best of him, and he stepped closer. 

There was a message on the screen: Welcome! Please select your name. 

Below that, there was a list of names, and Peter scrolled through them all. Some of them he recognized: Betty Brant, Flash Thompson, MJ. Some of them he didn’t: Gwen Stacy, Harry Osborn, Eddie Brock. Finally, after a little too much searching, he found “Peter Parker,” and he clicked on it. 

Another message flashed on the screen. 

The Peter Parker Support Group is meeting in Room #1. 

Peter made his way down the hallway, a strange chill running down his spine, and sure enough, the first door on the right was labeled Room #1. He nervously opened the door and then peeked his head inside, not quite sure what to expect. 

There was a circle of chairs in the middle of the room, but all of them were empty - all but one. 

“Peter-One!” Peter-Three shouted, grinning and waving excitedly as Peter walked into the room. As the teenage hero took off his mask, he smiled slightly, glad to see his fellow Spider-Man once again. “What’s up, little man?”

“I’m seventeen,” Peter said, annoyed. 

“So too young to vote, drink, or rent a car. You’re just proving my point.” Peter glared at him, while Peter-Three laughed. “I’m just teasing you, Peter-One. You’re awesome. Anyways, what have you been up to?” 

“You know, just the usual Spider-Man stuff. Nothing too exciting,” Peter said as he sat down next to his alternate self. “How about you?” 

“I made some more web fluid this morning, and then I swung around for a while, and then I had to fight some Russian guy in a rhinoceros machine again…”

“Wait, but that sounds kind of cool.” 

“Believe me, it wasn’t.” Peter-Three sighed and then added, “And then I came here. I’ve been waiting here for a while, actually. I guess…I guess I wanted to see you guys again. I always wanted a brother, and now I have two. And you’re the coolest kid I know, and Peter-Two’s, like, my best friend…” 

“You only knew him for one day. I don’t think you can say he’s your best friend.” 

“You’re right. He’s my emotional support alternate self.” Peter, of course, immediately cracked up. “So what have you been up to? Have you been doing okay? You know, since you erased everyone’s memories or whatever…” 

“Uhh…yeah, I’ve been alright,” Peter said. “Made a new suit, stopped a robbery, helped my neighbor find her cat - oh, I crashed a kid’s birthday party! That was fun.”

“Lucky,” Peter-Three grumbled. “It’s just that…I know what it’s like to lose the people you love, and I don’t want you…I don’t want you to end up like me. But I’m glad you’re doing okay.” 

But the truth was that Peter wasn’t okay. He hadn’t been in a long time - not since the battle on Liberty Island, not since May died, not since Mysterio revealed his secret identity, not since he was turned to dust, not since he met Tony Stark. Maybe he hadn’t even been okay since the day he was bitten by a radioactive spider. 

Then again, if anyone understood what it was like to go through all of that, it was his alternate self. 

“It’s been really hard,” Peter admitted as Peter-Three nodded, happy to listen to whatever he had to say. “I’ve been trying to help people, trying to do the right thing, but it’s been pretty lonely. And then I got that letter…” All of a sudden, Peter realized something. “Wait a second. Did you send the invitation?” 

Peter-Three laughed and shook his head. “No, no, of course not…wait, you thought I sent the letter? I thought you sent it!” 

“Me?” Peter said, confused. 

“Yeah, it was addressed to ‘Peter Parker #3,’ so it had to be one of us, and I know for a fact it wasn’t me. I guess it must have been Peter-Two…” 

All of a sudden, the door swung open, and another Peter Parker walked into the room, carrying a gigantic stack of pizzas. “Hey guys. I hope eight extra large pizzas is enough…or maybe I should have brought nine?” 

“PETER-TWO!” both of the other Peters exclaimed. 

Peter-Two smiled and set the pizzas down in front of his fellow webslingers, and of course, Peter-Three immediately dug in. “Oh my God, this is delicious,” he said. “Where did you get it?” 

“Joe’s Pizza,” Peter-Two answered. “I saw one next to this building, so I thought I’d pick up a little something for you guys. I used to work there, actually, when I was Peter-One’s age.” 

“Whoa, that’s cool,” Peter-Three said as Peter-Two grabbed a slice of pizza. “I can’t believe it’s been a month since all of that multiverse stuff happened.” 

“Me neither,” Peter-Two said. “I told MJ about it as soon as I got home - she thought it was pretty insane.” 

“Because it was,” Peter-Three said. 

While his older counterparts chatted, Peter took a bite of his pizza, sinking back into his chair as he savored that crust, tomato sauce, and cheese. He still couldn’t quite believe that he was here with his alternate selves, that they remembered him, that they could enjoy pizza time together without the multiverse tearing itself apart. 

“I’ve fought a few more villains since the last time we saw each other, but really, I’ve been trying to spend more time on Peter Parker stuff,” Peter-Three said. “I’m no good at it though. After being Spider-Man for the last twelve years and losing Gwen…I just don’t know how to make friends.” 

“Yeah, I get that,” Peter-Two said. “I don’t have a lot of friends either.” 

“You have MJ,” Peter-Three pointed out. 

“Yeah, I do,” Peter-Two said, his blue eyes sparkling as he thought of her. “She was the one that talked me into coming here. She thinks I need friends that get what it’s like to be Spider-Man, and I…I’m starting to think that she’s right.” 

Peter-Three nodded, while Peter dreamed of his MJ, of the love he’d lost. “How did you and MJ meet anyways?” Peter-Three asked Peter-Two. “Because she sounds amazing.” 

“It’s a long story, but uhh…we went to high school together.” 

“Don’t get me started on high school. Worst time of my life.”

Peter-Two couldn’t help but agree, but he soon turned toward his teenaged counterpart and asked, “How’s school going for you, Peter-One?” 

“I dropped out.”

“Wait, what do you mean you dropped out?” Peter-Three said, shocked, while Peter-Two just gave him a worried look. 

“With May gone, I needed to pay the bills, and I couldn’t do that while I was still in school, so I…I had to drop out. I was five months away from graduating high school,” Peter said, trying to hold back his tears. “But I’ve been working full time at Burger Frog, and I’ve been studying for my GED, so I guess that’s good, right?”

Peter-Two looked heartbroken, and he quickly gave his younger self a hug. “I’m so sorry, Peter. I can’t imagine…” 

“No, you can’t,” Peter said bitterly as he pushed Peter-Two away. “You talk about how lonely you are, but you guys actually have friends and families and people who remember you. I don’t. May’s dead, and I talked to MJ, Ned, Happy, but…it’s like there’s some sort of block that’s keeping them from knowing who I am. I told MJ I’d explain everything, but she’s going to MIT! I can’t ruin that for her! I thought I was going to college with my friends, and now…” 

“You could still go to college,” Peter-Three said. 

“How?” Peter asked. “I don’t have money.” 

“Uhh…that’s a good question.” 

“Columbia has a pretty good financial aid program,” Peter-Two said. “I got a full-ride scholarship there.” 

“My high school teachers literally don’t know who I am,” Peter said. “How am I going to get recommendation letters?” 

“We’ll write them for you!” Peter-Three exclaimed. 

“You guys only knew me for one day.”

“I think we know you well enough,” Peter-Three said. “Right, Peter-Two?” 

“Yeah, of course,” Peter-Two said. “First off, you’re crazy smart. I mean - you cured all of those villains! That’s amazing!”

“They’re going to figure out that I’m Spider-Man if you say that,” Peter said, but both of his alternate selves ignored him. 

“And you’re curious, open-minded, resourceful, awesome at skateboarding…” Peter-Three said, already typing out a recommendation letter on his phone.

“I think that’s you, not me,” Peter said. 

“Not only that, but you’re empathetic, selfless, mature, and responsible,” Peter-Two said. “Any college would be insane to turn you down.” 

“Oh, and you’re great at teamwork!” Peter-Three said with a smile. “You know, because you were in that band. The Avengers.” 

“For the last time, the Avengers aren’t a band!” Peter exclaimed. “And if you mention them, they’ll definitely know I’m Spider-Man.” 

“I don’t get it,” Peter-Three said. “What does being in a band have to do with you being Spider-Man? Wait, is Spider-Man in a band? That’s literally the best thing I’ve ever heard.” 

“Listen, I know you guys are just trying to help, but can you please just stop?” 

“You don’t want us to help?” Peter-Two said glumly, while Peter-Three ignored them and kept on typing. 

“No, no, no, it’s just that…” Peter paused to think for a second. “I’m really glad you guys are here, I’m really glad you want to write me letters of recommendation, but I’m not a kid anymore. I can make my own decisions, and I…I think I need some time to think this whole college thing over.” 

Peter-Two nodded understandingly, while Peter-Three suddenly looked up from his phone, as if he’d just realized something. “Speaking of letters…Peter-Two? Did you send those invitations?” 

“No?” Peter-Two said, confused. “I thought one of you mailed them out.” 

“That’s so weird,” Peter-Three said. “My Aunt May got an invitation too - it was worded a little differently, but she doesn’t know who sent it either.” 

“My aunt’s also here,” Peter-Two said. “Same with MJ.” 

Peter, of course, couldn’t help but think of his Aunt May, how she’d always been there for him, how she’d taught him about great power and great responsibility, how she’d died right before his eyes. She would have loved to meet her counterparts, to trade stories with Peter-Two’s and Peter-Three’s aunts. 

Peter wished that she could be here now. 

All of a sudden, Peter-Three noticed his younger self, brooding in the corner, and he said, “Hey. I know it’s hard, but…it’s all going to be okay.” 

Peter-Two nodded. “We’ve all lost a lot of people, and all of that darkness…it doesn’t go away easily. My Uncle Ben died over twenty years ago, and I still think about him all the time. But Peter-Three’s right. You’re not alone.” 

Peter dried his tears, and that was when he realized that no matter what happened, no matter how much they teased each other, no matter how lonely he felt, he would always be there for his fellow webslingers, and they would always be there for him. 

Because that’s what brothers were for. 

Chapter Text

As Peter opened the door to Room #1, the ghost of May Parker floated past him, wishing that she could talk to her nephew one last time. She’d seen everything that had happened over the last month - how Peter had cured those villains, how he’d saved the universe, how he’d collapsed back into despair once it was all over. She wanted to make him smile again, just like she’d tried to do when Ben died, just like when they were both snapped out of existence, just like when the world found out that Peter was Spider-Man, but she didn’t know how. Death had taken away the one superpower May had: her ability to help people.

Worried and heartbroken, May opened the door to Room #2 - the May Parker support group - and when she looked inside, there were three other women, three other versions of herself. All of them were older, their hair having long since faded to gray, but they had her smile, her laugh, her insight and her kindness.

“Hey everyone,” May said as she floated in and took a seat. The other Mays seemed a bit confused at first, but they soon greeted her and introduced themselves.

One of them was by far the eldest - easily in her nineties - and as far as May could tell, she seemed like a sweet old lady, the sort who might give you a heartwarming speech or hit your enemies over the head with an umbrella. May decided to call her May-Two. May-Three was a kindhearted woman in her seventies, while May-Four was closest to May’s age, cool and compassionate, but with a profound sense of sadness in her voice.

All of them were alive.

“We were just talking about our jobs,” May-Three said to her younger self. “Funny how I’m the only one who went into nursing…”

“Yeah, sorry to break it to you, but I’m not a nurse either,” May said with a slight chuckle. “I’m the manager of the FEAST center…or I was. You know, before all of this happened.”

May-Three nodded understandingly. “That’s wonderful. I actually did something similar when I was younger. Anyways, I was telling the other Mays about how I almost had to take an extra shift at the emergency room this afternoon, but Peter…wait a second. Didn’t you all say that your nephews were named Peter too?”

All three of the other Mays nodded, and May-Three continued on. “Peter - my Peter - talked me into coming here. He’s a good kid - he’s got a brilliant mind and a big heart. His…his girlfriend died when he was in high school, and that’s been hard on him, I know, but he’s been doing better lately. He got some kind of science job - I can’t say I understand it, but…anyways, do you want to see a picture?”

“Oh yes,” May-Two said almost instantly, while both May and May-Four nodded vigorously.

May-Three pulled out her phone, and along with pictures of her friends, her homemade cooking, and a man who had to be her universe’s version of Ben, there were pictures of her Peter. Between the embarrassing baby pictures and the barrage of photos from his high school graduation, there were a few recent pictures - he was a tall, dark-haired man in his late twenties, a far cry from May’s teenage nephew.

May-Two smiled. “He reminds me of my Peter,” she said. She then pulled out her phone and showed the other Mays her lock screen - a photo of a blue-eyed man in his forties, a redheaded woman, and May-Two. “That’s from last Thanksgiving. Peter’s on the far left, and that’s his wife, Mary Jane. He’s been through a lot too, but he went to Columbia, married his high school sweetheart…I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

“Don’t get me started on my Peter,” May said as she showed the other Mays her favorite picture of her nephew, a photo she’d snapped before his sophomore year homecoming, with Peter all dressed up in a suit and tie. “He’s smart and selfless and kind…oh, and he was in the Avengers.”

“The Avengers,” May-Two said. “That’s wonderful. What is that?”

“It’s…uhh…a team of superheroes,” May explained. “They brought everyone back after the Blip…wait, did you guys not have the Blip either?”

May had been hoping to impress her alternate selves with the brave, benevolent boy she’d raised, but in the end, she didn’t know how to do this. Seventeen years ago, when Peter’s parents had left him with her and Ben, she’d thought that they would be babysitting for the weekend, not taking on a lifelong commitment. She never thought that she would become the closest thing Peter had to a mother.

But she’d done her best. She'd been there for him. She’d given him everything she could. She’d loved him with every fiber of her being. She’d tried to instill hope and joy and responsibility into her nephew, even if it didn’t always work, even if she was making it up as she went along, even if she couldn’t quite measure up to May-Two.

“Are you talking about those other Spider-People?” May-Four suddenly asked her. “With the other Peter and the girl with the robot and the pig?”

“Pig?” May said, confused. “I think there might have been a raccoon in the Avengers, but no, no pigs.”

May-Two and May-Three were completely baffled by this entire conversation. “I knew Peter was Spider-Man, I’ve known for a long time, but I always thought he wanted to keep it quiet,” May-Two softly said to May-Three.

“Me too,” May-Three said. “I just…I wish he wouldn’t hide from me. From us.”

“It’s been twenty years, and I still don’t know what to do about it,” May-Two admitted.

“I wish I could help, but I only found out because I walked in while he was wearing his Spider-Suit,” May said. “I knew something was up, but I didn’t think it was that. It…took some getting used to, but I’m glad he’s helping out around the neighborhood.”

“Is that how…?” May-Three asked, gesturing toward the silvery blue aura around May.

“I was stabbed by the Green Goblin,” May said. May-Two shuddered, and May wondered if she’d encountered Norman Osborn too - perhaps the very same one. “Peter and I were trying to cure Norman, and in the end, we did, but…he killed me.” May paused and then said, “It’s been hard. I miss Peter like crazy. I tried haunting him, but that just made him more depressed than he already was. I saw Ben again though. That…that was nice.”

“I miss Ben,” May-Three said with a mournful look on her face.

“Me too,” May-Two said. “We were together for almost fifty years.”

May-Four nodded. “Ben was everything to me. I’ve tried dating again - almost got remarried a few years ago - but…nothing’s the same without him.”

May nodded, thinking of that brief fling she’d had with Happy. He was certainly a nice guy, and she’d had some good times with him, but the truth was that she’d felt strange about dating anyone seriously after Ben died. She knew that Ben would have wanted her to move on, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t bring herself to fall in love again. She couldn’t bear to wake up next to anyone that wasn’t him.

“Those couple of years after Ben died were rough,” May-Three admitted. “I could hardly get myself out of bed most days, but money was tight - I ended up having to go back to school to get my nursing degree. Peter was seventeen, and…he took it really hard. I didn’t know what to do, and sometimes…sometimes I feel like I’ve failed him.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” May-Two said. “You’re amazing. All of you are. You’ve gone out there and changed the world, all while supporting a family. And between the four of us, I think we’ve raised some truly incredible young men.”

All of the other Mays smiled - it was exactly what they’d needed to hear.

May thought of a conversation she’d had with Happy once, about how both of them only seemed to take on the most thankless jobs, whether it was helping a neighbor in need or keeping Stark Industries’ security running or parenting a teenage boy. And May had never been the sort of person who needed a prize or a parade in her honor, but she was still glad to know that May-Two believed in her, that she recognized her quiet heroism.

May suddenly turned to May-Four. “You haven’t told us about your Peter,” she said. “What’s he like?”

“My Peter’s dead.”

The rest of the Mays were taken aback - because that was always the nightmare, wasn’t it? May had wanted nothing more than to keep Peter safe, to protect him from the horrors of the world while she still could. Watching him die would be unthinkable.

“I miss him so, so much,” May-Four said. “But I kept all of his things, made sure those web shooters still worked - I built them myself, you know.” All of the other Mays were impressed, but May-Four continued on. “And I ended up giving them to the new Spider-Man. Miles Morales.” There was a slight smile on May-Four’s face as she asked, “Do you want to see a picture?”

All of the other Mays nodded, and May-Four pulled out a phone and showed them two photos - one of a blond-haired twentysomething, and one of a dark-skinned fourteen-year-old. “He’s a sweet kid,” May-Four said, gesturing toward the photo of Miles. “Still visits me every week, even when he doesn’t need anything from the shed. He reminds me of Peter in some ways.”

“He looks so young,” May-Two said.

“He is, but he’s got a lot of potential,” May-Four said with a smile.

May thought back to her own youth, how she’d snuck out at night, skipped classes, partied like it was the end of the world. She thought of her twenties, how lost she’d been, searching for her place in the world, wondering how she could make a difference. She thought of the day she’d met Ben, how he’d offered her a cup of coffee on a cold day, how he’d taken the time to talk to her and learn her story, how she’d fallen for him in an instant. She thought of the life they’d planned out together - volunteering, making friends, traveling the world, maybe having kids someday, once they’d finished all of their adventures.

She still remembered the day Peter had come into her life. When his parents died, Peter was just a baby, only four months old. May would be the first to admit that she’d never had much of a maternal instinct, but when Ben got that fateful phone call, when he heard that his brother was dead, he’d asked May to hold the baby for a moment. As she cradled the child in her arms, still worried about her husband, Peter giggled and wrapped his tiny fingers around hers, and in an instant, May’s heart melted.

In that moment, her fate was sealed. In that moment, she knew that she would do anything for the tiny creature in her arms. In that moment, she knew that if it ever came down to it, she would lay down her life for Peter’s.

May had a hundred regrets, but mostly, she just wished that the years hadn’t slipped away from them so quickly. She wished that Peter hadn’t had to grow up so fast. She wished that he didn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders, that he hadn’t been saddled with power or responsibility, that he’d instead gotten another few years of blissful childhood innocence.

She looked toward the other Mays, and she knew that even if the details were different, they’d all been down the same path she had. They understood what it was like to have their lives turned upside down, what it was like to raise a child alone, what it was like to have loved and lost. They understood what it was like to be her, and that was something that she wouldn’t trade for the world.

Chapter Text

J. Jonah Jameson was here for one reason and one reason only: to find Spider-Man and expose him for the menace he was.

When he’d first gotten that support group invitation, he’d figured that it was for all of the people who’d suffered because of Spider-Man’s reckless vigilantism, but upon further investigation, he decided that this must have been set up by the webhead himself. He was teasing him, taunting him. Even after twenty-two years, Jonah had no idea who he was behind the mask, and now, Spider-Man had the nerve to mock him, to invite him to this support group, to tell him that he needed therapy. It was disgusting, really, that anyone still thought of that masked menace as a hero.

Jonah opened the door to Room #3, but Spider-Man wasn’t there. Instead, to his great surprise, there was a man who could have been Jonah’s identical twin. Everything was the same - his face, his mustache, his cigar. They could have been the exact same person, if it wasn’t for one important difference.

“Guess I can’t trust my barber after all,” Jonah said as he glanced toward his alternate self’s bald head.

“YOU!” the bald Jameson suddenly shouted. “You were the one who sent those invitations! You organized all of this! This whole support group is a trap! You must be in cahoots with that psycho Spider-Man!”

“What? No!” Jonah yelled. “Spider-Man’s a criminal! A public menace!”

“And so are you!”

“I don’t even know who you are.”

“John Jonah Jameson, Jr., host of thedailybugle.net, your #1 source for facts, not fiction,” the bald man said. “And if you think I don’t know about your little alliance with those masked vigilantes…”

Jonah’s eyes went wide. “I’m John Jonah Jameson, Jr., editor of the Daily Bugle, your #1 source for facts, not fiction,” he said. “And I am not friends with Spider-Man! I’ve been trying to throw him behind bars for years! Decades! Anyone in New York will tell you that he’s a menace to the city, and yet, he’s still out there!”

Even as he ranted and raved about his least favorite wall-crawling arachnid, even as his counterpart kept on yelling right back at him, J. Jonah Jameson couldn’t quite believe that they were the same person, that there was some other version of him out there, wielding the power of the pen, crusading against the dangerous vigilante known as Spider-Man.

Jonah imagined a headline: Daily Bugle Editor’s Evil Bald Doppelganger Accuses Him Of Working With The Webbed Menace.

Then again, stranger things had happened to him. There was the time the Green Goblin broke into his office. Or the time he bought Spider-Man’s suit from a garbage man. Or the one time Hoffman came up with a pretty good supervillain name.

Jonah didn’t trust his counterpart, not in the slightest, but he couldn’t help but respect him. The other Jonah had said that he ran thedailybugle.net, but in his universe, Robbie and Hoffman hadn’t even suggested making a website until a few years ago, long after their competitors had set up YouTube channels and TikTok accounts. Going digital had boosted their sales a bit, but Jonah felt like it was too little, too late for his struggling paper.

Sometimes, it felt like the world had left the Daily Bugle behind.

“Is the Bugle a newspaper?” the other Jonah said, a note of disdain in his voice. “Like the fake news media?”

“The Daily Bugle is not fake news!” Jonah shouted. “I resent that!”

“You’ve got to be careful. Fake news is everywhere these days,” the other Jonah said. “Just the other day, I saw a story about how Hydro-Man doesn’t exist, but my intern found proof that he does.”

Jonah honestly didn’t know what his alternate self was talking about, but nevertheless, he decided to probe further. “You have an intern?”

“All of my staff are unpaid interns.”

Jonah thought back to the day after that fight with Sandman and Venom, how he’d walked into the office only to find that Parker hadn’t gotten a single picture of the fight. He’d blown up at him. He’d ranted about how he’d had to pay some snot-nosed kid to get a half-decent shot. He’d threatened to replace Parker with that pint-sized shutterbug if he didn’t get some good pictures of Spider-Man next time. He hadn’t meant any of it. He’d only wanted to push the kid a little bit, to make sure that he was performing at his best, to make sure that the Daily Bugle wouldn’t go under just because the photographer wasn’t doing his job.

He supposed that was the difference between him and his alternate self. When the other Jonah said something like that, he meant it.

“The thing with Hydro-Man…it’s a huge story,” the other Jonah said. “And the government’s covering it up! It’s the conspiracy of the century, but you won’t hear that from the mainstream media, will you?! Just like you won’t hear about Spider-Man killing Mysterio!”

Jonah raised an eyebrow - he’d known that Spider-Man was a menace, that he’d destroyed property and endangered lives, that he could snap at any moment and no one would be able to stop him, but he’d never had direct evidence of his wrongdoings. “Spider-Man killed someone?” he said. “Do you have any proof? A picture? I need a picture!”

“I have a video.”

“Send it to me! Now! Or you’re fired!”

“It was on YouTube, but those Big Tech tyrants took it down!”

“Why? Was watching Spider-Man murder someone in cold blood too much for their fragile little minds to handle?”

“Content policy violations. They say I’m spreading misinformation! Well, I think they’re just scared of the truth! I think…”

Jonah swore he could feel his blood pressure rising. If there was one thing he stood for, it was journalistic integrity. He’d joined the Bugle because he believed in the freedom of the press, because he believed that honest, factual, independent journalism was the only way to speak truth to power. It was a dying art, he knew, but he would do anything he could to keep it alive.

“You’d better apologize to your viewers!” Jonah shouted. “Right this instant!”

“Why? I’m telling the truth!”

“You’re spreading bald-faced lies!”

“Who are you calling bald-faced?”

“Shut up. I won’t stand for this.”

“You won’t stand for the truth!” the other Jonah yelled. “They’ve brainwashed you! The government and the leftist media and the New World Order! They won’t tell you about how that wallcrawling menace didn’t do anything when those aliens invaded New York or how he hired Kubrick to help the moon landing or how he went to space with the Avengers to build a giant death laser!”

“That’s all crap.”

“It’s the truth, and you know it!”

“You’re fired.”

“You’re firing me from a support group?! You can’t do that!”

“I said, you’re fired!” Jonah yelled as he pulled open the door to Room #3 and gestured toward the exit.

“Will you at least buy one of my Daily Bugle supplements?” the other Jonah asked, holding up a small bottle of pills.

“GET OUT!!” Jonah roared, and his alternate self finally stepped out of the room.

As soon as the bald conspiracy theorist was gone, Jonah slammed the door shut and breathed a sigh of relief. He knew that he was a difficult person to get along with, that almost everyone he’d met thought he was nothing more than a penny-pinching, Spider-Man-hating jerk, but at least he was nothing at all like that weirdo.

“You don’t trust anybody,” Parker had said to him once. “That’s your problem.”

Parker wasn’t entirely wrong.

Jonah still remembered the day he’d walked into the Bugle as a starry-eyed young reporter, but the world had changed him, hardened him, turned him into the bitter old man he was. He’d seen what people could do to each other. He’d watched them slice their brothers and sisters into pieces. He’d watched them lie, steal, and cheat their way to the top. He’d watched them chop down rainforests and pump pollutants into the atmosphere. Over the years, he’d reported on hate crimes, school shootings, wars, and genocides. He’d run a hundred pictures of dead bodies and burning buildings. He’d watched the Twin Towers fall, just down the street from the Daily Bugle office. He’d watched his heroes die, one by one.

Of course he didn’t trust people. He’d never had a reason to.

Jonah took out his phone, realizing that he should probably let his wife know that he’d be home early, but he soon saw that he’d gotten a few texts during the meeting. There was one from Hoffman - he ignored it. There was one from his new secretary - he ignored that too. He’d liked Brant better, but she’d left the Bugle years ago. There was one from Robbie - he sent a quick reply back. Robbie had retired last year, but it was nearly impossible for two people to work together for over four decades without developing something akin to friendship. There was one from Joan. She’d sent a video of an interview that their son had done for NASA. Jonah clicked the link.

“What’s your greatest inspiration?” the interviewer had asked.

“Easy,” John said, a relaxed smile on his face. “My mom and dad. My mom is the nicest person in the world, she’d do anything for me, and my dad…well, we’re very different people, but he’s always supported me, no matter what.”

As he watched the video, Jonah couldn’t help but grin with pride. He thought of the drawings John had brought home as a child - of Mars and Saturn and the stars above. He thought of how John had struggled through English in high school, how Jonah had helped him with his homework so he could focus on his astronomy elective. He remembered his son’s first rocket launch, how he’d held onto Joan’s hand, trying not to shed tears of joy. Sharp-tongued and short-tempered, Jonah never thought he was cut out for fatherhood, but flying in space was John’s dream, and he would do anything to make it come true.

If there was one thing J. Jonah Jameson stood for, it was journalistic integrity. He believed in honesty, accuracy, fairness, and accountability. He believed in taking responsibility, keeping promises, and sticking up for the little guy. And the people he cared about saw that in him.

But he drove people away. When the world disappointed him, which it often did, his knee-jerk reaction was to yell at people for hours, to call them morons and menaces, to tell them that he’d cut their paycheck in half, to throw them out of the room once he was finally done chewing them out. Joan was trying to help him get better, to keep his anger reined in, but change didn’t come easily. When people tried to pull him closer, his first instinct was always to push them away.

Jonah cracked open the door, and sure enough, his bald-headed clone was outside, smoking a cigar in the hallway. The other Jonah represented everything he despised. He was a bastion of dishonesty: someone who would find any excuse to vilify his enemies, someone who would attack his target without mercy, someone who cared more about spreading his insane agenda than reporting the facts. Indeed, Jonah would have been perfectly happy if he never saw his conspiracy-peddling counterpart again. But kicking him out of the support group wouldn’t make anything better.

Suddenly, the other Jonah noticed his presence. “What do you want?” he snapped.

Jonah sighed and looked his alternate self in the eye. “You’re un-fired,” he said. “I need you. Come here.”

Chapter Text

Michelle Jones was pretty sure she was in the wrong support group.

When she opened the door to Room #4, she found three redheaded white women, two in their forties and one in her mid-twenties. They were all seated in a circle, and the youngest one was already in the midst of telling the others a story. “And then the waiter said that he could have done better if he had another chance to give me the bread I deserved, which is a really weird thing to say about bread…”

“I don’t know,” one of her counterparts said. “I think it’s sweet.”

“It kind of sounds like something my ex-husband would say,” the third one said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d tell you that was him.”

“You know, with all of the multiverse stuff that’s been going on lately, maybe it was your ex,” the second redhead said.

Michelle glanced back and forth between the three redheads, genuinely confused as to why she’d been invited to join this support group. As far as she could tell, the others all seemed nice enough, but they certainly weren’t her.

Honestly, MJ didn’t know why she’d come here in the first place. She had plenty of other things to do, plenty of reasons not to stay and watch the trio of redheads and their meaningless conversation. There were those work shifts she needed to reschedule, those books she needed to return to the library, that housing form she needed to fill out for MIT. But she’d always liked people-watching, and there was something about these three that intrigued her.

All of a sudden, the second redhead looked toward the doorway, and she noticed Michelle standing there. “Hi there,” she said with a smile.

“Um…hello?” Michelle replied, already backing away from the door.

“Why don’t you come join us?” the second redhead asked.

“Yeah, we don’t bite,” the first redhead added.

Michelle reluctantly walked into the room and sat down next to the red-haired trio. “I’m Mary Jane Parker,” the second redhead said. “But you can call me MJ.”

“Yeah, but that’s my name,” the first redhead said.

“I’m pretty sure we’re all MJ Parker,” the third redhead said. “Right?”

“Actually, my name is Michelle Jones,” Michelle said.

The Mary Janes all seemed mildly surprised, but they took it in stride. “You’re still an MJ,” MJ-Three insisted.

“Am I?” Michelle said.

“Of course,” MJ-One said.

“There’s a reason why they called it the MJ Support Group and not the Mary Jane Support Group,” MJ-Two said.

“Because otherwise it would sound like it’s a therapy group for stoners?” Michelle said before she could stop herself.

To her relief, all of the Mary Janes cracked up. “That’s a good one,” MJ-One said. “Nice T-shirt, by the way.”

Michelle looked down at her Joan of Arc T-shirt. “Thanks,” she said softly as she fiddled with her necklace, wondering who had invited her to the support group in the first place. She had some theories, of course. The Parkers must be involved somehow - aside from the Mary Janes, there were three other people with the last name of Parker listed on the touchscreen - but that didn’t explain how or why she’d ended up in a support group with this trio of cheerful, overly friendly redheads. Maybe there was something she’d overlooked, something that would help her solve the puzzle.

Then again, if there was a missing piece somewhere, it certainly wasn’t here.

“I…I should go,” Michelle said suddenly. “I have to fill out my housing form. You know, college stuff.”

For whatever reason, this seemed to pique everyone’s interest. “Where are you going to college?” MJ-Three asked.

“MIT,” Michelle said with a hopeful smile.

All her life, Michelle had been told that things would get better when she got to college, that she could leave all of those high school cliques behind and meet people who truly understood her. She wasn’t naive enough to believe that, but even so, she found herself hanging up posters and pennants, doodling in red, gray, and black, telling anyone who’d listen about the MIT Blackjack Team and the Time Travelers’ Convention. Maybe it was just the thought of a fresh start in a new city that brought a smile to her face. There was something almost romantic about leaving the past behind, going to a place where no one knew her name.

All of the Mary Janes looked at Michelle, genuinely impressed. “That’s where I went,” MJ-One said.

“Lucky,” MJ-Three said. “I applied and got rejected, so I ended up going to Empire State instead.”

“I never went to college,” MJ-Two said, a little sheepishly. “Ever since I was little, I always wanted to be an actress. So that’s what I did after high school. It took a while - I spent a long time waiting tables and singing at jazz clubs - but I eventually made it onto Broadway.”

“That’s amazing,” MJ-Three said.

“What play are you doing right now?” MJ-One asked.

“I’m in Les Mis at the Palace Theatre,” MJ-Two said. “It’s really nothing to get too excited over though. I’m just in the ensemble.”

“It’s still very cool,” MJ-One said.

“The Palace,” Michelle said, racking her brain. “Isn’t that where that acrobat fell to his death in the 30s?”

MJ-Two nodded. “Louis Bossalina. Supposedly, his ghost haunts the theater, swinging in the air before emitting a blood-curdling scream and falling to his death.”

“Whoa,” Michelle said. “That’s…that’s awesome.”

“Isn’t it?” MJ-Two said. “I always love learning about this kind of stuff.”

“There’s a lot of history in New York. You’d be amazed by how many mob bosses were murdered in Midtown alone.”

“Uhh…could we get back to the bread story?” MJ-Three interrupted. “I kind of wanted to know how that ended.”

“That’s the crazy part,” MJ-One said. “The waiter went on and on about how I deserved all the bread in the world, but he never actually gave me the bread.”

“Wait, really?” MJ-Two said.

“It was kind of disappointing, actually,” MJ-One said.

“Well, if you expect disappointment, then you can never really get disappointed,” MJ-Three said.

Michelle’s eyes went wide - because that was what she always said. How did MJ-Three, of all people, know that?

“That’s the phrase that got me through high school,” MJ-Two said.

“Really?” MJ-One said.

“Yeah,” MJ-Two said. “I was kind of a mess when I was younger. My father…well, there’s a reason why I don’t talk to my parents anymore. And I didn’t have a lot of real friends growing up.”

“Yeah, me neither,” MJ-Three said. “Flash and Harry don’t count.”

MJ-Two nodded. “I felt like people only liked me in high school because I put on this facade of being happy all the time, and it wasn’t until I met Peter that I found someone I could really be myself around. I love him to death, but we didn’t figure out how to make our relationship work and actually communicate until we were well into our twenties.” She shrugged and then said, “Expect disappointment, and you will never get disappointed.”

Michelle glanced toward MJ-Two, and strangely enough, she saw a piece of herself in the redheaded Broadway star. There were a million differences between them - Michelle had never been popular, and she’d never known anyone named Harry or Peter - but she knew what it was like to be alone and friendless. She knew what it was like to have trouble getting close to people. She knew what it was like to hide a part of yourself, whether it was behind a glowing smile or an avalanche of snark.

“It’s…it’s nice to have friends again,” MJ-Three said as she glanced toward the other MJs. “I haven’t had that in a long time.”

“Me neither,” MJ-Two said. “I guess there was Gwen Stacy, but that was years ago, and we had a bit of a falling-out after I decided to get back together with Peter.”

There was a heartbroken look on MJ-One’s face at the mention of MJ-Two’s husband, and Michelle wondered if something awful had happened to her universe’s Peter. Michelle wished she could help somehow, but she knew there was nothing she could do, so she twisted the chain of her necklace around her fingers, quietly listening to what the Mary Janes had to say. Of course, she couldn’t help but notice that there were a few things they were talking around - like how MJ-One’s husband had died in the first place - and as she tried to pull together all of the pieces of the puzzle, she played with the broken pendant on her necklace, her mind racing…

“Michelle,” MJ-One said suddenly.

“Yeah?” Michelle said, still fiddling with the necklace.

“Where’d you get that?” MJ-One asked.

“I was wearing it?” Michelle said, but she soon realized that wasn’t what MJ-One was asking. “I…uhh…I got this necklace as a gift. Someone bought it for me while I was in London on a school trip. It’s a black dahlia. You know, like…”

“The murder,” all of the MJs said at once.

That wasn’t the whole story, of course. The whole trip to Europe was a bit of a blur for her - she figured that it was a combination of jet lag and the lingering trauma of being snapped out of existence for five years that made her memories a little hazy. She still thought about the Blip sometimes - how she’d felt herself turning to dust, how her heart had filled with existential dread, how she’d thought of a line from a book she’d read once: “I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid.”

In that moment, Michelle Jones had been horribly afraid.

But no matter how hard she thought about it, she couldn’t recall who had bought the black dahlia necklace in Europe. It was like there was a wall, somewhere in her mind, keeping her from remembering.

MJ suddenly remembered something Ned had talked about a few days earlier, when she was at his house, helping him rebuild his Lego Death Star after his little brother had knocked it over. He’d said that he used to have a friend who would do stuff like this with him, that had been there for him ever since he was a little kid, that had helped him build that Death Star in the first place, but he couldn’t remember his name. He’d seemed panicked, as if not remembering his childhood friend was the end of the world.

MJ wondered if Ned was going through the same thing she was, and she made a mental note to text him once the meeting was over. Maybe there was something there, or maybe they were both going crazy. Maybe it was a shared psychosis, a folie à deux if you will.

Another memory surfaced, this one fuzzy and distorted, as if it was something she’d repressed, as if it had come from deep within her subconscious.

“I’ll come find you, okay?” someone had said.

“You better,” she’d replied, her vision clouded by tears. “If you don’t, I’m just gonna figure it out. I’ve done it before, I can do it again.”

But Michelle didn’t know what she was supposed to figure out. She’d always been observant, noticing things other people might not, but right now, she didn’t know if she could trust her own mind. She couldn’t find the answers when she barely knew the question.

That was when MJ-Two noticed the distraught expression on Michelle’s face. She gave Michelle a strange look, as if she somehow knew something she didn’t, and then said, “It’s going to be okay, Michelle. Whatever you’re going through, you’re not alone. We can help you, because whether you know it or not, you’re one of us.”

Michelle smiled slightly, because that was exactly what she’d needed to hear. She needed someone who would understand, someone who would listen to her, someone who would care about her college admissions and true crime stories, somewhere she belonged.

Maybe she wasn’t in the wrong support group after all.

“Actually, you can call me MJ,” she said to the rest of the group. “My…my friends call me MJ.”

Chapter Text

As the ghost of Norman Osborn floated down the hallway, there was a storm of emotions rushing through his mind: fear, shame, and most of all, regret. The last few months of his life had been a nightmare - blacking out for days at a time only to discover another building blown to pieces, another child in danger, another person killed by the Green Goblin. Norman could have stopped it, but he didn’t. He’d been too scared to act - or maybe a part of him had wanted them dead. In the end, he wasn’t sure which was worse.

The Goblin had been oddly quiet lately, but Norman was pretty sure he was still in there somewhere. When he’d been impaled by his own glider, the Green Goblin had died with him, and more often than not, the Goblin was the one in control. Whenever he took over, Norman was terrified - of who he was, of what he might do.

Norman didn’t know if therapy would help, if talking to his alternate selves would ease his guilt, if anything could ever undo all of the mistakes he’d made in that Oscorp lab twenty-two years ago. Even so, he desperately wanted to meet his alternate selves, to find out more about the multiverse.

After all, he was something of a scientist himself.

When Norman opened the door to Room #5, he found two other Normans, both of them with the same silvery blue aura around them. One of them looked ill - he had scaly patches on his skin, and his hands had deformed into claws. The other man was hardly a man at all - he was a gigantic, monstrous creature, complete with a pair of wings sprouting from his back. Honestly, Norman was a little disappointed - he’d been expecting a room full of brilliant researchers or cunning businessmen, but he supposed that this would have to do.

“We ended up going into cross-species genetics,” the human Norman said to his alternate self. “Eels, lizards, spiders - billions of years of evolution and we barely even tapped into all of that potential.”

“Fascinating,” the goblin Norman answered, his purple cap brushing up against the ceiling.

“If only there hadn’t been so many…accidents, I think we could have changed the world,” the human Norman said. “Is there an Oscorp in your universe?”

“We were bought out by Alchemax.”

Norman-Three sighed. “My company went under too,” he said. “Harry took over as CEO after I died, and he had no idea what to do.”

“Interesting - it was different in my universe,” Norman said as he sat down across from them. “Harry turned out to be quite the entrepreneur. Almost got us a Nobel Prize. Anyways, Norman…” Both of the other Normans turned to look at him, and Norman said, “We need numbers or something to keep all of this straight.”

“Norman-One,” the goblin Norman said, pointing to himself.

“No, I’m Norman-One,” the scaly-skinned Norman said.

“Oh, you can’t do this to me,” Norman said. “I’m Norman-One.”

“Nice try, Norman-Two,” the goblin Norman said, and with the way those yellow eyes were glaring at him, Norman didn’t want to argue with his demonic counterpart. “Norman-One,” the goblin repeated once again before gesturing toward the bronze-haired businessman and his diseased alternate self and dubbing them “Norman-Two” and “Norman-Three” respectively.

“You both said that you had a Harry,” Norman-One said, and the other two Normans nodded. “My son was everything to me,” Norman-One said as he sadly stared at the floor. “I loved him from the moment he was born, and now, he’s the person that I miss the most.” He paused and then asked, “Do you want to see a picture?”

“That’s okay, Norman-One,” Norman-Three said.

Norman instantly thought of his Harry, how he’d spent all of those evenings in the lab, how he hadn’t always been there for his son, how he hadn’t always been the father Harry deserved. “Things were…complicated between Harry and I,” he finally said, hoping that the other Normans wouldn’t inquire further.

“It was complicated for me too,” Norman-Three said. “My Harry and I weren’t exactly close. I spent all of my time finding a cure for the Osborn curse, and he spent all of his time at boarding school.”

Norman was appalled - even on the many occasions when Harry had failed to live up to his high expectations, the thought of sending him away had never even crossed his mind. He’d enrolled Harry in every private school in New York - all of which he’d managed to flunk out of - but Norman had decided that he’d rather send Harry to mingle with the commoners at Midtown High than live all alone in that penthouse. Even in their worst moments, Norman couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing Harry for years on end. He couldn’t imagine what could have possibly driven Norman-Three to push his son away like that.

“Boarding school,” Norman-One said. “I could never do that. It was hard enough when Harry thought I’d disappeared.” The other two Normans gave him a confused look, so Norman-One said, “Harry didn’t know that I’d turned into…this. Not until after I was dead.”

Norman thought of the secrets he’d kept from his son, how, in his dying moments, all he’d wanted was for Peter not to tell Harry. He’d hoped to protect the kid, but the Goblin, of course, had other plans. He’d appeared to Harry as a ghost. He’d haunted his son during his weakest moments. He’d convinced Harry to kill his best friend. He’d told him to make Spider-Man suffer. He’d wanted Harry to avenge him.

Maybe if it wasn’t for the Green Goblin, Harry would still be alive today.

Norman suddenly looked toward Norman-One’s monstrous form. “I have to ask,” Norman said. “How did you become…you know…”

“Long story,” Norman-One answered.

“We have time,” Norman-Three said as he leaned back into his chair.

Norman-One took a deep breath. “I used to be a man,” he said. “I had everything - a successful company, respect from the scientific community, a son who meant the world to me. And then the Kingpin took all of that away. He threatened to kill Harry if I didn’t do what he wanted, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t let Wilson Fisk lay a finger on my son. So I sold my company to Alchemax, worked with Olivia Octavius on an experimental performance enhancer…”

“Olivia Octavius,” Norman said. “Any relation to Otto?”

“Who’s Otto?”

“He was…an old friend of mine. We went to grad school together. I was studying nanotechnology, and he was studying nuclear physics.”

“I don’t know him.” Norman-One paused and then said, “I ended up testing the performance enhancer on myself, and I turned into this. A monster. Kingpin wanted me to do his bidding, and I…I did a lot of things that I regret. In the end, that’s how I died - fighting Spider-Man so Kingpin could open a portal to another dimension. Kingpin and Olivia didn’t care. Harry was the only person who even bothered to attend my funeral.”

“I’m sorry, Norman-One,” Norman said. “I know what it’s like to…”

Norman cut himself off - he didn’t know these other Normans, not really, and he certainly wasn’t ready to tell them about the Green Goblin. Maybe they were like those Oscorp board members, working behind his back, ignorant of his scientific achievements, ready to betray him at any moment.

Despite Norman’s suspicions, Norman-One nodded understandingly. “It’s all in the past now, but sometimes I wish we could have a second chance. It would be nice to go back and do it all over again.”

“Me too,” Norman said. “There’s a lot that I would have done differently.”

“I would have liked to find a cure for my disease…” Norman-Three sighed and lifted up his clawed hand. “Retroviral hypodysplasia. In the end, it took my life. I only hope it doesn’t do the same to Harry.”

Norman wasn’t sure what to do, what he could say that would possibly help, but he knew what it was like to transform into something you weren’t. He still remembered finding out that his assistant was dead, hearing about the mysterious killer at the festival, that time he’d looked into the mirror, only to find a twisted reflection of himself…

“Anyways, never test anything on yourself - that’s the moral of the story,” Norman-Three said. “Especially not after what happened to Curt Connors.”

“What happened to Dr. Connors?” Norman asked.

“He turned himself into a lizard.” Norman-Three paused and then said, “But at least we never became supervillains. Right Norman-Two?”

That was when Norman felt an evil rising up within him, and as his alter ego took over, his grip on reality began to slip away. He felt himself losing control over his own mind, he felt his face contorting into that sadistic grin…

“Not a supervillain, eh?” the Goblin said. “It seems like Norman was too weak to tell you the truth!”

“Leave me alone,” Norman muttered.

“Look at all of those other Normans,” the Goblin said. “They’re pathetic. They’re nothing like us.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to show them that you’re the superior villain. We have a gift, Norman. Prove that you’re the true Green Goblin!”

“No. I can’t.”

“Do it! DESTROY THEM!”

As the Goblin laughed maniacally, Norman-Three and Norman-One looked at each other in confusion. “What’s going on?” Norman-One asked.

“I think he’s hallucinating,” Norman-Three said.

“Norman-Two?” Norman-One said. “Are you okay?”

“Nyeheheheheheheheh!” the Goblin cackled.

Norman could feel his mind racing, trying to devise a way to destroy these two ghosts forever, but this time, he couldn’t just let it happen. He remembered what Norman-One had said about second chances, and Norman couldn’t help but think that this was his opportunity to make amends for everything he’d put Harry and Peter through. His alternate selves certainly weren’t perfect, but neither was he, and they certainly didn’t deserve whatever fate the Green Goblin had in mind for them.

“You can’t do this, Goblin,” Norman said.

“Why not?” the Goblin said. “You can have whatever you want, Norman. If you want these two gone, we can make it happen. We could blow up the whole building, the whole city! The world is ours!”

“I’ve had enough of this. You killed Dr. Stromm. You killed the board of directors.”

“It was all you, Norman. You wanted them dead, but you were too much of a coward to do it yourself. Just like you’re too weak to destroy the other two Normans!”

“You got us killed. You got Harry killed!”

“I gave you strength! I gave you power!”

“YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I SACRIFICED?!”

There was still that evil laugh ringing in his ears, but Norman felt the Goblin receding into the background, felt himself regaining control. As soon as the cackling faded away, Norman glanced toward his alternate selves, both of them looking rather confused, and he quietly said, “I’m sorry about that. I don’t…I don’t know what happened there.”

“It’s okay, Norman-Two,” Norman-Three said. “We’re all dealing with our own demons.”

Norman nodded, but he was nothing but a ghost now, a figment of who he’d once been. Nothing would ever truly change - no matter what, it would always be him and the Goblin, forever at war.

Maybe it didn’t have to be that way.

Once, Norman had drifted into another timeline, one where he was still alive, one where the Green Goblin was gone forever. The other Norman had refused to look up from his work, and he’d seemed tired, desolate, as if he had even more guilt on his conscience than Norman did. But he’d turned his life around. He’d founded a new company. He’d reconciled with Harry. He’d started volunteering at the community center. He’d made new friends. He’d fallen in love again. The other Norman had been given a second chance, and he’d done everything he could to atone for his failures.

Norman turned toward his alternate selves, and he saw that same guilt written across their faces. They’d all made mistakes. They’d all done things that they regretted. They’d all died because of their own failures.

Norman Osborn would never get a happy ending, not as long as the Green Goblin was still a part of him, but if he wanted to make up for everything he’d done, the least he could do was befriend Norman-One and Norman-Three.

After all, the three of them weren’t so different.

Chapter Text

Aaron Davis had already had a weird day. Between the goose incident, someone stealing his Muay Thai gear, and that failed convenience store heist, he was exhausted. The last thing he needed was some sort of multiversal therapy session, yet, here he was, in this strange little building in Queens, opening the door to Room #6 - the Aaron Davis Support Group.

When Aaron glanced inside, he found another version of himself, sitting all alone in the middle of the room. They weren’t exactly identical - the other Aaron was bald, and he had a neatly trimmed goatee rather than a five o’clock shadow - but he was humming that Wu-Tang Clan song Aaron had loved as a kid, and when Aaron walked into the room, his counterpart leaned back and gave him an easygoing smile. They might look different, but Aaron got the feeling that on a deeper level, they were one and the same.

“Uh, hey?” Aaron said nervously.

“Hey,” the other Aaron said. “What’s up?”

“Not much,” Aaron said as he sat down next to his alternate self. “Mostly just been looking for a present for my nephew. His birthday is coming up.”

“Miles?” Aaron nodded, and his alternate self smiled. “I have a nephew named Miles too. He’s a sweet kid, and he’s crazy smart. He started at Visions Academy last year, and he’s been doing really well.”

“My Miles is still working on applying there, but he’ll get in. He’s the coolest kid I know,” Aaron said. “He won this big award for his art last month - the whole family was at the ceremony.”

“No way!”

“Yeah, it was pretty great.”

“You know, I’ll blame Jefferson and Rio for everything else about that kid, but music, art…he got that from us.”

Aaron laughed. “Yeah, I was thinking of getting him a new pair of headphones, and I thought I had the money for it, but, uhh…”

Aaron paused for a few moments, trying to figure out how to tell his alternate self about the convenience store robbery, how he’d planned to split the money with Turk Barrett, how it had all gone wrong the second Spider-Man had shown up, but he couldn’t find the words. Thankfully, the other Aaron cut him off. “No worries, man,” he said. “I’m sure Miles will understand.”

“You think so?”

“If he’s anything like my nephew, yeah,” the other Aaron said. “You know, when Miles found out about my job…”

Aaron looked toward his alternate self one more time, he couldn’t help but notice that there was something off. There was that silvery blue glow surrounding him, that long, purple cape, those giant mechanical claws…

“Shit, were you in the Avengers or something?” Aaron suddenly asked.

“The Avengers?” the other Aaron said with a slight laugh. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know, the Avengers,” Aaron said. “Like those costumed dudes who fly around and fight androids or aliens or wizards or whatever.”

“Not exactly.” The other Aaron paused and then asked, “You sure you want to hear this story?” Aaron nodded, and his alternate self asked, “Do you know Wilson Fisk?”

“Fisk? Yeah, I met him once. When I was younger.”

Aaron thought back to his teenage years, all of that time he’d spent skipping school, making friends with petty thieves and drug dealers, starting fights with anyone he came across. He’d gotten into trouble more times than he could count, and by the time he was twenty, he’d already been arrested five times, for everything from aggravated assault to grand larceny. There was no hope for him after that. Sometimes, he thought about going straight, but with a criminal record a mile long, there was nothing out there for him, nothing but parole officers, dingy apartments, and a dead-end, minimum wage job.

He’d met Wilson Fisk once, when he was in his twenties, but he’d been careful to keep his distance. He’d heard enough about how the Kingpin treated his underlings, how he threatened their family, how he murdered them in cold blood when they didn’t do what he wanted.

In spite of everything he’d done, there were certain lines Aaron refused to cross.

“Fisk’s family died in a car crash a few years ago,” the other Aaron explained. “He wanted to bring them back, and I decided to help him. Because I knew that if anything ever happened to Miles, I would be doing the same thing.”

“Yeah, me too,” Aaron said. “I actually lost him once. During the Blip.” The other Aaron seemed confused, and Aaron figured that the Blip hadn’t happened in his universe, as strange as that was, so he said, “There was this alien who turned half of the people in the universe to dust. The Avengers brought everyone back, but for five years, we thought Miles and Rio were gone forever. Without my nephew, I…I didn’t know what to do. If I could have reached through the multiverse and brought him back, I would have done it.”

“I’m so sorry, man,” the other Aaron said. “But you had Jeff, right?”

“Jeff doesn’t care about me,” Aaron said. “He’s got a family, and he’s got that whole cop thing going, and…”

“You don’t understand,” the other Aaron said. “After I died, Jefferson was a wreck. He was the first person to find my body, and you should have seen the look on his face. He was crying - I don’t think I ever saw him cry while I was alive. We drifted apart over the years, but…he was always my brother. He and Miles even painted a tribute to me after I was gone.”

“Really?”

The other Aaron pulled out a photo of Jefferson and Miles standing in front of a colorful mural, spray cans in hand, and when Aaron looked closer, he saw his alternate self’s painted face, smiling back at him. There were five words written on the mural, and they told Aaron everything he needed to know.

Uncle Aaron. Rest in power.

Aaron thought back to his youth once again, how he and Jefferson had run around the city, tagging buildings, making art just like this. They’d been close once, but after Jeff started at the police academy, they’d started to drift apart. These days, they hardly spoke, only bothering to call when one of them needed to talk to Miles. Even during the Blip, they had stayed out of each other’s way, living their separate lives, visiting the memorial to the vanished all alone. Losing Miles and Rio should have brought the two brothers closer together, but instead, it had pushed them even further away from each other.

“Jeff never stopped caring about me,” the other Aaron said. “I just wish I’d known that while I was still alive.”

Aaron nodded. “It would be nice if we were close again, like when we were kids, but at this point, we’re just so different.”

“You don’t have to forgive him, but in the end, your family’s all you got,” the other Aaron said. “I think he knows that, and so do you.”

Aaron thought about that for a moment, and he made a mental note to call Jeff when he got home, to see if what his alternate self was true. However, when he looked toward the other Aaron, when he saw the blue glow surrounding him, he couldn’t help but wonder if the two of them were destined to walk down the same path, if they would suffer the same fate, if he’d die in the same way he had.

“If you don’t mind me asking…”

The other Aaron nodded, knowing exactly where he was going with that question. “There was this kid, this new Spider-Man, and he had a bypass key for the Super-Collider,” he said. “Kingpin wanted him dead, and I was going to do it, but then he took off his mask and…it was Miles. I couldn’t kill my own nephew, so Kingpin shot me in the back, and…”

“Hang on. You’re telling me that Miles is Spider-Man?”

“Yeah.”

“And Jefferson and Rio are cool with that?”

“I don’t think they know yet.”

Aaron had always had mixed feelings about all of those costumed vigilantes running around New York City. He liked Iron Man and Captain America as much as the next person - after all, they were the ones who had brought Rio and Miles back after the Snap - but he’d heard one too many stories about people getting beaten half to death by Daredevil or the Punisher to really trust all of those so-called superheroes. He’d always had a soft spot for Spider-Man though, as strange as that was. Maybe it was because he spent more time cracking jokes than throwing punches. Maybe it was because Aaron was pretty sure he was nothing more than a kid who was in over his head. Maybe it was because he’d saved Aaron’s life once, back when he’d gotten into trouble with those weapons dealers. But Aaron had never once thought that Spider-Man was his nephew…

“You think Miles is Spider-Man in my universe too?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t know,” the other Aaron answered. “That’s something you’re going to have to figure out yourself.”

At first, it seemed impossible, but now that Aaron thought about it, Miles had been acting strangely lately. He wasn’t visiting as often, and when he did come over, all he wanted to do was lie on the couch in Aaron’s apartment and stare at the ceiling. When Aaron tried to ask him about what was going on, he always dodged the question. Aaron had chalked it up to normal moody teenager behavior, but maybe it was something more than that. Maybe Miles really was New York’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Aaron was sure Spider-Man would be looking for him after what had happened at the convenience store, and he thought that this might be his chance to set the record straight. If Miles really was Spider-Man, he needed to know. He needed to talk to him, to listen to all of his stories, to become the uncle Miles needed. He and Spider-Man might be at odds sometimes, but his alternate self was right.

Aaron’s family was all he had.

He had to make sure that they wouldn’t drift away.

Chapter Text

“Okay, so here’s the plan,” Eddie said as he quickly walked down the hallway, making his way toward Room #7. “We’ll go to the support group, use our investigative reporting skills to figure out who sent that invitation, and then get the hell out of here, because this place is kind of creeping me out. And you’ll stay quiet, because we do not need to give the FBI another reason to show up at our house. Got it?”

“I’M HUNGRY,” Venom complained, and Eddie let out an exaggerated sigh.

“Come on, man. We just had lunch.”

“DID YOU BRING CHOCOLATE?”

“No…”

“YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BRING CHOCOLATE.”

“I left it at home, okay?”

All of a sudden, Eddie felt himself lurching in the other direction, stumbling toward the door. “What are you doing?” Eddie asked as he tried to regain control of his movements.

“WE’RE GOING HOME.”

“No!” Eddie said as he turned back the other way. “Listen, this is going to be really, really quick. We’ll find out who organized this little therapy group thing, and then we’ll go home. We can even watch another episode of Acorralada if you want. Just you, me, and Maximiliano.”

“YOU PROMISE?”

“Yeah. I promise.”

As Eddie approached Room #7, he was finally alone with his thoughts - a bizarre feeling for him, to be honest. There was something nice about that constant companionship, and when the symbiote was being quiet like this, he felt like there was something missing, like he was incomplete. Venom couldn’t survive without their symbiosis, and sometimes, Eddie wondered if that was true of him too, if he needed Venom as much as Venom needed him.

Even so, Eddie knew that he couldn’t have Venom bickering with him during the support group meeting. He didn’t want the other people in the support group to think he was totally out of his mind, and the absolute last thing he needed during an investigation was a repeat of the lobster tank incident.

Eddie opened the door, and when he looked inside, there was the ghost of a man in his early twenties, sitting in the middle of the room and giving him a self-satisfied smirk. As he discreetly pulled out his phone to snap a photo, Eddie said, “I don’t know who you are, but…”

“It’s Brock, sir,” the ghost said. “Edward Brock, Jr.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Eddie said. He wasn’t exactly sure what he’d been expecting - maybe something to do with his trip into that alternate universe with the purple alien who loved stones - but he certainly wasn’t expecting a ghost that shared his name. Despite the questions piling up in the back of his mind, Eddie decided to jump right to the point. “Did you send the invitation to the support group?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Listen, I don’t want to be here any more than you do. This is really a waste of my time, but…”

“Did you send it or not?” Eddie interrupted.

Eddie-Two rolled his eyes. “Why are you asking me all of these questions? I don’t have time for this.”

“I’m a reporter. It’s what I do.”

“And what’s wrong with your voice?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my voice!” Eddie said as he slumped back into his chair, exasperated.

“Either you’re from somewhere in Europe or you have a speech impediment, and I can’t figure out which one it is.”

“EDDIE!” Venom suddenly exclaimed. Eddie tried to shush the symbiote, hoping that the other Eddie wouldn’t notice what was going on, but Venom just kept talking. “CAN I EAT HIM?”

“No!” Eddie said.

“BUT HE’S SO ANNOYING…”

“But we only eat bad people, remember? This guy’s a douchebag, but he’s probably not a murderer or anything.”

“I’m a nice guy - I promise!” Eddie-Two whined. “And who are you even talking to?”

Eddie paused, trying to figure out how to explain Venom to his alternate self. “This is going to sound weird, but I’ve got, like, this parasite…”

“NOT A PARASITE!” Venom exclaimed.

“Oh yeah, I had one of those once,” Eddie-Two said.

“Really?” Eddie said.

“HE WAS VENOM TOO. IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE.”

“Whoa, I didn’t know there were other Venoms out there,” Eddie said. “That’s cool.”

“THERE ARE BILLIONS OF US ACROSS THE MULTIVERSE. WE SHARE A CONSCIOUSNESS, A POOL OF MEMORIES…DID YOU KNOW THAT IN HIS UNIVERSE, WE TEAMED UP WITH A GUY MADE OUT OF SAND? HE WAS CALLED SANDMAN. VERY UNCREATIVE NAME, IF YOU ASK ME. I ALSO BONDED TO SPIDER-MAN, MADE HIM DANCE LIKE AN IDIOT…”

Eddie ignored Venom and turned back to Eddie-Two, suddenly curious to learn more about his dead alternate self. “Wait a second,” the ghost said. “You said that you’re a reporter.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I have this TV show, and…”

“I used to be a photographer,” Eddie-Two interrupted. “I was really good at it too. You should have seen me back in the day. I had this job with the Daily Bugle, took all of these amazing pictures of Spider-Man…”

“Used to be a photographer?”

Eddie-Two looked distinctly uncomfortable for a moment, and Eddie knew that he was onto something. “I…uhh…I got fired,” Eddie-Two admitted.

“Why did you get fired?”

“The boss was a jerk.”

Eddie saw the look on his alternate self’s face, and he knew that it was something deeper than that. For a moment, he wondered if Eddie-Two had gone through what he had, if the Life Foundation existed in his universe, if he’d lost his job because he’d confronted Carlton Drake about his experiments. He remembered that time in his life, how much of a mess he’d been, how he’d felt aimless and lonely before he bonded with Venom.

Regardless, Eddie needed to know the truth. “You’re lying,” he said to his counterpart.

“I’m not lying!”

“Tell me the truth. Why did you get fired?”

“I edited some photos, okay?” Eddie-Two said. “I really needed that staff job, so I just touched up some old pictures of Spider-Man and turned them in. It really wasn’t that big of a deal, but Parker snitched on me, and I got fired.”

“You doctored your photos?” Eddie said, horrified. “You can’t do that! People deserve to know the truth.”

“WE SHOULD TEACH HIM A LESSON ABOUT ETHICAL JOURNALISM…LETHALLY.”

“How would we even do that?” Eddie asked. “He’s already dead.”

“I DON’T KNOW, BUT HIS HEAD LOOKS REALLY TASTY RIGHT NOW.”

“Venom, we only eat bad people.”

“AND HE’S NOT A BAD PERSON?”

“He doesn’t deserve to be eaten just because he edited some pictures.”

That managed to shut Venom up, so Eddie turned back to his alternate self, who was back to ranting about that Parker guy, whoever he was.

“God, I wish I’d killed Peter Parker while I had the chance,” Eddie-Two said. “I tried, but that goblin guy showed up, and then Peter killed the symbiote…I still should have done it. He deserved it after everything he did to me.”

Eddie felt his heart filling with rage, and all of a sudden, the symbiote’s tentacles burst out from inside of him, surrounding him, bonding with him, transforming him into an eight-foot-tall monster. Together, they were something greater than the sum of their parts. Together, they were Venom.

Eddie-Two looked up toward the creature and laughed. “What? You think you’re going to scare me with that thing? If my symbiote was here, we would totally kick your…aaaagghhh!”

That was when Venom chomped Eddie-Two’s head off.

“MMM. ECTOPLASM,” Venom said as he retreated back into Eddie’s body.

“You happy now?” Eddie said.

“THAT WAS AMAZING. I LOVE YOU.”

“Yeah, well, he had it coming,” Eddie said. “I just…I still feel kind of bad about eating my alternate self, even if he is a psychopath.”

“WE ALL HAVE TO EAT, EDDIE. YOU EAT YOUR HUMAN FOOD, AND I EAT BRAINS,” Venom said. “AND CHOCOLATE.”

“And ghosts now, apparently.”

“GHOSTS ACTUALLY AREN’T VERY GOOD FOR ME. THEY’RE ALL EMPTY CALORIES.”

“Then what was the point of all that?”

Eddie looked back toward where Eddie-Two had been sitting, but somehow, the ghost rematerialized right in front of him, head and all. “What the hell?!” Eddie-Two shouted. “You bit my head off!”

“You tried to kill some guy because he told your boss about your doctored photos?” Eddie said. “That’s not right.”

“He ruined my life.”

“No, he didn’t,” Eddie insisted, thinking of the ups and downs of his career, how many times he’d gotten in trouble for exposing people for their wrongdoings, how many complaints and lawsuits he’d gotten simply for speaking the truth. “It’s not ruining your life. It’s being honest. It’s doing the right thing.”

“What about you eating my brains?” Eddie-Two said. “Is that ‘doing the right thing?’”

“Venom was hungry.”

“AND THOSE BRAINS WERE REALLY GOOD.”

Eddie sighed. “Listen, Eddie-Two. I get it. We all make mistakes, but you can’t just kill people for no reason.”

“I like being bad. It makes me happy.”

Eddie groaned, impossibly frustrated with his counterpart. How was he supposed to figure out who was behind all of this when he was wasting time with his despicable alternate self? He got up and headed toward the door, but just as he was about to leave, Eddie-Two called out, “Where are you going?”

“You need to rethink your life,” Eddie said. “And I need a freaking drink.”

Eddie slammed the door behind him, and once they were far enough away from Room #7, Venom said, “SO WE’RE GETTING A DRINK? WHAT ABOUT THE CHOCOLATE?”

“Chocolate martini?” Eddie suggested.

“YEAH, THAT SOUNDS GOOD.”

As they walked down the hallway, Eddie said, “You know, I wanted to find out who wrote the invitation, but I just can’t stand that guy.”

“ME NEITHER, EDDIE,” Venom said. “BUT AT LEAST WE GOT TO SPEND SOME TIME TOGETHER. LIKE AN EDDIE AND VENOM SUPPORT GROUP.”

“Yeah, that was kind of nice,” Eddie admitted.

All of a sudden, Eddie saw something moving out of the corner of his eye, and he stopped in his tracks. “Hang on,” he said as he looked upward, toward the security camera hanging from the ceiling, swiveling around above him. “Why do I get the feeling we’re being watched?”

Chapter Text

When she opened the door to Room #8, Olivia Octavius wasn’t sure what she was most surprised by - the fact that her alternate self was a man, the fact that his tentacles were wrought from titanium and steel, or the fact that he was dead - but then again, Liv thought that maybe she shouldn’t be surprised at all. She’d been studying parallel universes for most of her life. Building a portal to another dimension had been her dream. She knew better than anyone that anything was possible when it came to the multiverse, but there was a difference between running experiments in the lab and seeing another Doc Ock in the flesh.

Really, this was the coolest thing that had happened to her all year.

She suddenly pulled out one of her newest inventions and pointed it in the other Doc Ock’s direction, curious to see what she’d find. “What are you doing?” he asked angrily as soon as he noticed the device.

“Just trying to figure out which universe you’re from,” Liv said as one of his metal arms shot toward her, trying to take the device away from her. “Huh. Earth-96283. That’s a new one. And neither of us are glitching, so this building must exist in multiple universes simultaneously…wait, what did you say your name was?”

“Otto Octavius.”

“I’m Olivia Octavius,” she said as she eagerly shook Otto’s hand. “But my friends call me Liv.”

Otto looked at his counterpart carefully, as if he was studying her, searching for some similarity between them. “So you’re a version of me from an alternate universe?” he said. “That’s incredible.”

“Oh yeah. This…this is amazing. I’ve always wanted to meet another version of me.” She watched Otto’s tentacles whirring and screeching and darting across the room, and she said, “I have to ask about the tentacles though. It looks like they’re just mechanical, but it’s almost like they have a mind of their own.”

“You’re right,” Otto said, a slight smile on his face. “The actuators are equipped with an advanced artificial intelligence, connected to my brain through a neural link, designed for the sole purpose of creating a successful nuclear fusion reaction.” Otto paused as he glanced toward his alternate self. “You know, you’ve got an impressive set of arms too.”

“Why thank you!” Liv said, swinging her tentacles around.

“Tell me, what are they made of?”

“Silicone, hydraulics, a few wired components,” Liv said. “They’re not sentient though. I totally could have done it, but I didn’t want to take the risk.” Otto nodded, as if he understood what she was saying all too well. “Nuclear fusion though. That’s amazing.”

“It was my dream to provide the city with infinite clean energy,” Otto said, a note of sadness in the scientist’s voice. “It almost worked, but…”

“You know, I wrote a paper on fusion when I was in college,” Liv interrupted. “I almost studied it in grad school too, but I ended up doing my dissertation on quantum mechanics and the many-worlds interpretation instead.”

Liv knew that it was probably better to let Otto keep talking, but a part of her needed to tell her alternate self about her work. She’d spent most of her life being the smartest person in the room, whether it was outpacing her classmates in math or unlocking the secrets of the multiverse. How long had it been since she’d actually gotten to discuss science with someone who was on her level, someone who thought in activation energies and p-values, someone who understood and cared about her life’s work? She had to take advantage of this little support group while she still could.

“So you’re studying the multiverse?” Otto said.

“More than that. I built an interdimensional portal once, and it worked. You should have seen it. It linked up to five different universes! Can you imagine what would have happened if my collider stayed open? It would have changed the world! The power of the multiverse in the palm of my hand…”

Otto nodded approvingly, but he quickly realized something. “Did…did you send the support group invitation by any chance?” he asked.

Liv laughed. “I wish!” she exclaimed. “This whole operation…it’s incredible. The building acts like it’s in some sort of multiversal limbo. I’d love to meet whoever organized this. You know, find out how they did it.”

“It must take a massive amount of energy to overcome the barriers between dimensions and create a space that exists in multiple universes,” Otto mused. “Whoever created this must have access to a fusion reactor, or something similar. Using nuclear fission, the portals would collapse within seconds.”

“You know your stuff,” Liv said, impressed.

“I wrote a paper on it in college.”

“My design used nuclear fusion, but it also wasn’t this stable,” Liv said. “Unless there’s magic involved…”

“What is this, a birthday party?” Otto snarked.

“Unless there’s magic involved, we’re dealing with a top-tier theoretical physicist, and believe me, there are only so many of those in the multiverse.” She looked toward Otto and smiled. “Present company included, obviously.”

“It can’t be that hard,” Otto said. “We are some of the brightest scientists of our respective universes. Between the two of us, we should be able to determine who invited us here.” One of his actuators pointed toward the device Liv had used to determine his home universe. “May I see that?”

Liv passed over the device, and Otto tinkered with it for a moment. “It’s picking up all kinds of frequencies,” he said. “There’s someone else from Earth-96283 in the next room - it won’t tell me who though…”

“Do you know anyone in your universe who could have done this?”

Otto paused to think for a moment. “Norman Osborn was a brilliant scientist, but he was more interested in those military contracts than the wonders of the multiverse,” he said. “Perhaps Peter put this together. I always thought that boy had a lot of potential.”

“Peter Parker?” Liv said dismissively, thinking of how he’d destroyed so many of her experiments, how he’d always been standing in the way of her latest breakthrough. There was no way he could have brought them here, right?

“He was a smart kid,” Otto said with a smile. “He was so curious about my research when he visited my lab, and I do think we could have been friends if we had more time together.”

“But he was such a nuisance,” Liv complained. “He blew up my lab, he destroyed my fusion reactor, he tried to stop my collider…” All of a sudden, Liv spotted something out of the corner of her eye. “Hang on. What’s up with that security camera?”

Otto looked upward, and all of a sudden, his top left tentacle shot toward the camera and latched onto it. “Fascinating,” he said as one actuator swiveled the security camera around. “It’s hooked up to some sort of network.”

That was when Otto pushed the red button on top of the camera, and suddenly, a screen appeared in front of the two tentacled scientists. Liv looked closer, amazed by the patchwork of footage on the display. There were fourteen different rooms, each of them with a different support group, plus a few videos from the hallway outside. Liv recognized a handful of people - she swore she’d seen the girl in the white Spider-Suit before - but most of the faces were completely unfamiliar, whole support groups filled with people she had never met in her life. It was like a microcosm of the multiverse, all laid out in front of her.

“This is like…weirdly organized,” Liv said when she finally looked up from the display. “I don’t know about you, but usually, all of my secret plans are buried under vacation ideas and sandwich recipes and cat pictures…”

Otto carefully examined the screen, and when one of his actuators gently tapped the display, it zoomed in on Room #5. She immediately recognized her universe’s Green Goblin - his transformation had been one of her lab’s great successes, a breakthrough beyond her wildest dreams. Even now, she couldn’t help but smile when she thought of the day in the lab, watching a man turn into a monster.

All of a sudden, one of Otto’s actuators flew across the screen. “What are you doing?” Liv asked.

“Trying to turn on the sound system,” Otto said. The actuator twisted a dial on the side of the screen, and suddenly, the conversation in Room #5 came blaring through the speakers.

“I just wish I could make up for everything I’ve done,” one of the alternate Normans said. “I murdered dozens of people as the Goblin…”

“Wait, but he’s not a goblin,” Liv said, confused.

“Norman’s from my universe,” Otto said. “I can’t say I know the whole story, but I know he was using Oscorp tech for his own purposes. The newspapers called him the Green Goblin.”

“Oh, I see,” Liv said as she scrolled past two newspaper editors yelling at each other, a pair of rich kids commiserating over their dead fathers, and some weirdo in the hallway talking to himself about chocolate martinis. Eventually, she found someone else she knew - two versions of the Prowler, one from her universe and one from another.

“I get that, man,” the alternate Aaron said. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve let Miles down too. He deserves a good role model, and I’m never going to be that for him.”

“At least you never tried to kill your own nephew,” her universe’s Aaron said sadly.

“It’s okay,” the alternate Aaron said. “Well, not okay, but…you know what I mean. You didn’t know it was him.”

“Huh,” Liv said. “I never knew he had a family.”

When she scrolled to the next screen, she saw three Spider-Men, but amazingly, Liv didn’t recognize any of them. These were three universes she’d never seen, three entirely new Peter Parkers.

Otto pointed toward the eldest of the trio with one of his mechanical arms. “That’s my Peter,” he said with a smile. “He’s all grown up now, but it seems like just yesterday that my wife and I had him over for dinner. How the time flies.”

“You’re married?”

“Rosie’s the light of my life,” Otto said with a smile. “We met in college - I was studying science, she was studying English literature - and…meeting her was like finding my other half. We were friends for a long time, but eventually, I decided I wanted to tell her how I felt, so I memorized The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock for her - all 131 lines of it! - even though I didn’t understand a word.” He chuckled and then said, “Thankfully, she interrupted me halfway through the first stanza and asked me if I wanted to go out for coffee with her.”

“She sounds like a lovely person.”

“She was,” Otto said. “Rosie and I were married for twenty five years, and we had our ups and downs, but in all that time, I don’t think there was ever a moment when I wasn’t in love with her.” Otto paused and then said, “I was the one that killed her. My fusion reaction was unstable, but I refused to shut it off, and Rosie died in the accident. When I met her again, after I drowned in the river, I thought she’d never forgive me. I could barely forgive myself.”

“God Otto, I’m so sorry,” Liv said as she tinkered with the display.

“Well, we’re together again now,” Otto said. “Curt Connors once said that Rosie and I were inseparable, and I suppose that’s true, even in death. I have to say, I was a little disappointed that she didn’t get an invitation. I think she would have liked this.” Otto paused and then asked, “Do you have someone?”

“Not anymore, no,” Liv said as she glanced back toward the screen, back toward the three Peter Parkers.

“Peter-Two, you’re a genius!” the youngest Peter exclaimed.

“I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” the one from Otto’s universe said as he took another slice of pizza. “All I did was complain about the door of my apartment sticking.”

“Yeah, but you got out of paying rent,” the middle Peter said. “Do you even know how annoying my landlord is?”

“Which one’s from your universe?” Otto suddenly asked as the three Peters kept on chattering in the background.

“My universe’s Peter is dead,” Liv said.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door to the Peter Parker Support Group. “What’s going on?” the middle Peter asked.

“I’ll go check,” the youngest Peter said as he walked toward the door. However, when he opened it, he found two people standing in the doorway: a brown-haired man in his late thirties and a kid in a black and red Spider-Suit.

“Oh, I know them,” Liv said. She gestured toward the older Spider-Man with one of her tentacles and said, “That’s Peter Parker - not my universe, but I have met him. He showed up in my lab one day, and then he and his little multiversal friends tried to stop my Super-Collider.” She then gestured toward the kid and said, “And that is the Spider-Man from my universe. Miles Morales. Just as much of a pain in the neck as his predecessor, if you ask me.”

“Whoa,” the youngest Peter said excitedly as he looked toward Miles and Peter. “Are you…are you guys Peter Parkers too?”

“I’m Peter B. Parker,” he said, already eyeing the box of pizza. “And my little buddy here is Miles Morales.”

“Hey,” Miles said.

“We ran into each other in the hallway,” Peter B. explained. “He doesn’t have a support group, so I thought I’d bring him here, if that’s okay with you.”

“I’m cool with it if you guys are,” the youngest Peter said.

“He could be, like, an honorary Peter Parker,” the oldest Peter suggested.

“All in favor of making Miles an honorary Peter Parker, raise your hands!” the middle Peter shouted, and with no hesitation whatsoever, all four Peters lifted their hands into the air.

“Uhh…thanks guys,” Miles said as he took a seat next to the youngest Peter.

Peter B. then turned to Miles and asked, “Wait, if you didn’t get an invitation, how did you even find this place?”

“So Doc Ock was trying to rob a bank…”

“I thought she was hit by a truck,” Peter B. said.

“I guess she survived,” Miles said. “I was trying to stop her, but then she ran in here for some reason. I still don’t know where she went.”

“You robbed a bank?” Otto said to Liv.

“The guy who was funding my research got arrested,” Liv said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, apply for a grant?”

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Think of all the people my research could benefit! It’s clearly better to get that funding sooner rather than later.” Liv then turned toward Otto and said, “Besides, don’t tell me that you’ve never robbed a bank.”

“The actuators were in control,” Otto said. “They were like voices in my head, telling me to rebuild my machine, no matter the cost. They turned me into a monster.”

“You’re not a monster,” Liv insisted as she tapped the display screen with one of her tentacles. “You were just trying to finish what you started.”

Otto gave her a wary look and then said, “You’re starting to sound like them.”

Liv was about to respond, but she saw the faces on the screen, all four May Parkers, and she stepped away from the display, her heart racing.

“Let me get this straight,” the youngest May said. “You almost married Doc Ock?”

“My word,” the oldest May said. “You know, in my universe, Doctor Octopus threw me off of a building once.”

“In my defense, she’s surprisingly charming when she’s not trying to kill my nephew,” May - her May - replied.

Otto gave Liv a confused look, but she was already lost in her own world. The memories all came rushing back to her - all of those candlelit dinners, those sunsets on the beach, those stolen kisses. She remembered the day she’d taken May on a tour of the lab, how she’d listened to her explain how those web shooters worked, how she’d been entranced by the mere sound of her voice, how she’d gazed into her eyes and wondered if this was what love felt like.

Sure, she had only started dating May because she wanted that atomic processing plant, but somewhere along their way, their relationship had turned into something special, something real. May was smart, courageous, compassionate, and endlessly devoted to that meddling nephew of hers, and of course, Liv couldn’t help but fall for her. When Liv proposed to May on a warm summer day, she’d truly, honestly wanted to spend the rest of her life with her. She saw a future together, her and May, and just like one of her multiversal experiments, she’d stop at nothing to make it happen.

The truth was that May saw something in Liv that no one else did. The rest of the world thought of her as a supervillain, but May saw her brilliant mind, her technical expertise, her ambition, her passion, and she believed in her. She thought that Liv could be a hero, if only she used her powers for good.

Liv had always countered that her research was for the greater good, but in retrospect, maybe May had a point. If she was good, she wouldn’t have even thought of using May for her own personal gain. If she was good, she wouldn’t have broken her fiancee’s heart.

Liv thought of the day she’d broken into May’s house with the rest of Fisk’s gang, how May had taken one look at her and said, “Oh great, it’s Liv.”

At that moment, Liv felt like her heart had stopped.

Even after all that time, even after everything they’d been through, she still called her Liv.

“May…she was…she was my Rosie,” Liv finally said to Otto. “I thought we could be together, but I ruined everything.”

“You could still make it work,” Otto said.

“I don’t think so,” Liv said. “She hates me - which I guess makes sense. She’s the sweetest woman alive, and I’m just an eight-limbed freak.”

Otto paused for a moment, and then said, “Let me give you some advice, one eight-limbed freak to another. It’s never too late to change. When I finished my reactor, when it was about to destroy the city, when I thought it couldn’t be stopped, I drowned it in the river. Olivia…”

“Call me Liv. We’re friends.”

“Liv, you are one of the most brilliant scientists I have ever had the honor of meeting. But intelligence is a gift, one that’s meant to benefit humanity. I lost sight of that once. I don’t want that to happen to you too.”

Liv let that sink in for a moment. The multiverse was everything to her. Meeting another Doc Ock, watching all of these support groups - that was her dream. But she’d already sacrificed so much. She’d worked with shady organizations. She’d been arrested more times than she could count. She’d lost the love of her life.

She looked back toward May one last time, and she made herself a promise. She was a scientist. She believed in knowledge, in discovery, in doing what no one had done before. But even if Olivia Octavius could never quite give up on her dreams, there was one thing she could do.

She could try to do better.

Chapter Text

“Yo, what’s up, Flash Mob?” Flash said, holding his phone in the air, trying to get the best possible angle. “It’s your boy, the Big F, and I’m here in Queens, but like, the lame part of Queens? This place is the worst. Anyways, remember that weird prank letter I got about the multiversal therapy group or whatever? Well, today, I’m going to find out who sent it.”

As he pushed open the door to Room #9, Flash glanced toward his phone again. There were a handful of likes, a few comments - nothing too impressive, but it still brought a smile to his face. It was a nice reminder that there were people out there who cared about him, even if they were only a couple of strangers on the Internet.

That was when Flash heard voices coming from inside Room #9, and when he looked up, he saw two athletic-looking white guys sitting across from each other. “So the Giants are doing pretty well this season,” the older of the two - a brown-haired man in his forties - said.

“Yeah, but the Jets still won,” the younger man - a blond guy in his late twenties - said.

“That’s because the ref made a bad call in the third quarter.”

Flash raised his phone again, trying to capture the two men in the video. “Okay, Flash Mob,” he said. “This isn’t what I expected, but…”

“Hey! You!” the brown-haired man said. “Are you filming us?”

“Just hang on one second guys,” Flash said into the camera before reluctantly turning off his phone.

“Don’t worry, I deal with kids like this all the time at my job,” the blond-haired man said before turning to Flash. “Hey…uhh…I’m Flash Thompson, by the way.”

“Wait, but my name is Flash Thompson,” Flash said as he sat down across from his counterparts.

“So’s mine,” the brown-haired man said.

“Okay, so I’m Flash-One.” Flash said before pointing to the brown-haired man and then the blond-haired man. “You’re Flash-Two, and you’re Flash-Three.”

“I’m good with that,” Flash-Three said.

“So we were talking about the big game yesterday,” Flash-Two said. “I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t think the Jets have any chance of making it to the playoffs this year, even if they did beat the Giants.”

“I didn’t watch the game,” Flash said. “I don’t really follow football.”

Both of the other Flashes looked at him like he was insane. “But it was the Jets versus the Giants!” Flash-Two exclaimed.

“What were you doing then?” Flash-Three asked.

“I studied for my math test, and then I took my father’s convertible out for a drive, and then I started filling out my housing form for MIT…”

“MIT?” Flash-Two said.

“Didn’t know you were such a nerd, Flash-One,” Flash-Three said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Flash said, but mostly, he was just surprised that he hadn’t even gotten a quick “congrats” from these guys. Half of Midtown High had applied to MIT, and he still remembered the day he got his acceptance letter. He’d shown up to school in a brand-new MIT sweatshirt, exchanged high-fives and congratulations with the other kids who had gotten in, bragged about his acceptance to anyone who’d listen, screamed Beastie Boys lyrics until he almost lost his voice. He still remembered the faces of the kids who hadn’t made it in - how it seemed like their whole worlds had come crashing down around them.

The two other Flashes were nothing like the kids at Midtown. In fact, it was like they were from a whole other universe.

“Did you know I published a book?” Flash said, hoping to impress his counterparts.

“Oh, that’s cool,” Flash-Three said. “What was it about?”

That was the weird part. Flash had written his memoir in a frenzy, but he couldn’t remember why. He’d come home from school every day, typed out all of those crazy stories, anything that popped into his head, anything to fill up those blank pages. He’d written it about a friend, a best friend…

And that was when it came to him.

“It was about my life as Spider-Man’s best friend.”

“You’re best friends with Spider-Man?” Flash-Three said. “That’s sick. I love that guy.”

“He’s so inspiring,” Flash said. “I even came up with his name. I went back and forth between Arachno-Kid and Spider-Man, but I thought Spider-Man sounded cooler.”

“Do you know who he is?” Flash-Three asked. “You know, behind the mask?”

Flash thought about it for a moment, and even though Spider-Man had saved him and his decathlon trophy in DC, even though Spider-Man followed him on Instagram, even though he’d written a whole book about their friendship, he couldn’t remember the webslinger’s real name. “He…uhh…he never told me,” Flash finally said.

“That’s weird,” Flash-Three said. “Especially if he was your best friend.”

“No, I get it,” Flash said. “The whole secret identity thing. He doesn’t want his friends and family to get hurt.”

“My buddy Jason thought Spider-Man went to our high school,” Flash-Two said. “There was this guy who punched me across the hallway during my senior year, and Jason was sure that dude was Spider-Man, but…I don’t know. He was just some weird scrawny geek who hated Jason and me, and there’s, like, a billion people in New York. There’s no way that guy was actually Spider-Man.”

“Actually, it’s ‘Jason and I,’ not ‘Jason and me,’” Flash corrected.

“You think you’re so smart, huh?” Flash-Two said.

“Well…uhh…”

“Are you making fun of the way I talk?”

“Just giving you some friendly corrections,” Flash said, perhaps against his better judgment. “But, hey, what do I know? I’m not the one who killed all of his brain cells playing football.”

There was this intense, infuriated look on Flash-Two’s face, and as he got out of his chair and walked toward Flash, he said, “You trying to start a fight, kid?”

“N-not really,” Flash said, nervously scooting away.

That was when Flash-Two lunged toward the teenager, grabbed onto him, and slammed him against a wall. “That’s good,” Flash-Two said. “Because I will break your teeth if you insult me again.”

“Break it up, you guys,” Flash-Three said. “This isn’t worth fighting over.”

“Yeah,” Flash said to his brown-haired counterpart. “What’s wrong with you, old man?”

That was the final straw. Flash-Two threw a punch in Flash’s direction, and his fist smashed right into the teenager’s face. “OW!” Flash screamed, clutching the left side of his face, terrified that Flash-Two had given him a black eye. “What the fuck?!”

Flash-Two was about to take another swing at him, but suddenly, Flash-Three stepped in and held his counterpart back. “Dude, chill out,” he said as he gripped onto Flash-Two’s arm, trying to wrestle him away from Flash. “You don’t need to beat up Flash-One just ‘cause he’s a prick.”

That was when Flash, still holding onto his eye, headed for the door. “Hey Flash-One!” Flash-Three shouted. “Come back!”

However, Flash didn’t respond. He was done with these weird alternate versions of himself, done with this so-called support group. At first, he’d thought that it would be funny to figure out what was up with that invitation, but the burning pain shooting through his eye was just too much. He slammed the door behind him, and as he stepped out into the hallway, Flash took out his phone again and brushed his bleached blond hair over his left eye, hoping to hide the bruises.

“Sorry about that,” Flash said as he turned the livestream back on. “So it turns out one of those guys is, like, a total psychopath. He gave me a black eye over nothing! Can you believe that?”

All of a sudden, Flash spotted someone else in the hallway. He looked to be about Flash-Two’s age, but he looked like an absolute mess, and he spoke with a strange, unidentifiable accent. “Just listen to me, okay?” he said. “I really, really don’t think breaking into other peoples’ support groups is going to help…no, you can’t bite their heads off! We talked about this!”

“Get a load of this guy,” Flash said as he turned his phone toward the mysterious man. “He’s, like, talking to himself. And what’s with that hoodie?”

That was when a blob of black goo with way too many teeth somehow popped out from the man’s chest, causing Flash to instinctively leap backward. “EDDIE,” the blob said. “I KNOW THAT GUY.”

“The blond kid with the phone? You know him?” Eddie said, confused. “You know what? I’m not even going to ask. You’ve probably bonded with every single person in the multiverse by now.”

“YEAH, BUT YOU’RE MY FAVORITE,” the blob said, leaning closer to Eddie.

Eddie ignored the blob and suddenly turned to look at Flash. “Hey!” he shouted. “Who the hell are you?”

“F-Flash Thompson,” Flash said as he lowered his phone, barely resisting the urge to run away again.

“I’m Eddie Brock, and this is Venom,” Eddie said, gesturing toward the blob.

“NO,” Venom said. “WE ARE VENOM.”

“Yeah, that…that’s probably more accurate,” Eddie admitted. “So what are you doing out here, Flash?”

“One of the guys in my support group punched me in the face,” Flash said.

“Yeah, the other guy in my support group was a jerk too,” Eddie said. “He didn’t punch me in the face though.”

“WE BIT HIS HEAD OFF.”

Flash was even more concerned now than he was before, which was saying something. “Are you…are you going to do that to me?!”

“PROBABLY.”

“No! We’re not going to bite his head off!”

“WHY NOT?”

“He’s just some high school kid,” Eddie said. “And besides, you already ate.”

“I’M STILL HUNGRY.”

“We can go home and eat as soon as we figure out what’s up with that security camera,” Eddie said as he glanced toward the ceiling.

Flash looked upward, and sure enough, there was a security camera mounted to the ceiling, swiveling back and forth. “That’s weird,” Flash said. “Whoever sent those invitations must be controlling it.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Eddie said as Venom suddenly reached upward and wrapped a tentacle around the security camera. “You see anything up there?” Eddie asked the symbiote.

“NOT YET,” Venom said as he yanked the security camera out of the ceiling, exposing a bundle of red and blue wires.

As Venom poked around in the ceiling, he tossed the security camera to the ground, and Flash took a look at it. “Huh,” he said as he inspected the device. “This is, like, really well made. Either these were here before, or whoever did this was an engineering major or something.”

“WAIT,” Venom said. “I THINK I SEE SOMETHING.”

“What is it?” Eddie asked, but all of a sudden, the door to Room #9 swung open, and Flash-Three poked his head out.

“Flash-One? Are you there?” Flash-Three asked, but moments later, he saw Eddie and Venom. “What the hell is that thing?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said as the symbiote retreated back into his body.

Flash-Three ignored them and turned toward his alternate self. “Hey kid, do you want to come back in?”

“Not really,” Flash said.

“I talked to Flash-Two. He’ll be nicer to you, I promise.”

Flash still wasn’t sure if this was a good idea, but nevertheless, he walked back into Room #9 and sat down next to Flash-Three. Flash-Two was on the other side of the room, sending angry glares in Flash’s direction, and Flash briefly reconsidered his decision. He looked toward the door, wondering if he should just leave now, before he got punched in the face again…

“Guys, no more fighting, okay?” Flash-Three said. “Please?”

“Yeah, okay,” Flash-Two said. He sighed, turned to Flash, and said, “Look, sometimes, I let my anger get the best of me, and I’ve been trying to work on it, but…I guess there’s no excuse for what I did there. I’m sorry.”

Flash nodded, and there was a long silence. “Hey Flash-One, maybe you should apologize too,” Flash-Three suggested.

“Why should I? He’s the one who gave me a black eye.”

“Because you were being mean to him too?” Flash-Three said. “Listen, I get it, kid. High school is rough. I…I know that from experience.” Flash-Three paused and then said, “My mom passed away when I was sixteen. She meant a lot to me, and I didn’t really have a support system or anything after she died, and…I guess I just took it all out on everyone else. I picked on the other kids just to make myself feel better, and I didn’t really turn things around until I went to college.”

“I’m sorry, Flash-Three,” Flash said. “I mean, my mother’s still alive, but…I think my parents kind of forget that I exist sometimes.”

That was an understatement, of course. When Flash was five years old, his mother’s butler had dropped him off for his first day of kindergarten, rather than his actual mother. When he was nine, he taught himself to ride the bike his father had bought for him, because no one else could be bothered. His parents had never once gone to his school plays or parent-teacher conferences or Academic Decathlon tournaments. Last summer, he’d spent the whole Europe trip trying to get in touch with his family, but they hadn’t bothered to respond. He’d almost died, and they didn’t even care.

All Flash had ever wanted was for someone to like him, or maybe just to pay him any sort of attention at all, just to notice that he was there.

Because most of the time, Flash Thompson felt like he was invisible.

“That sucks. I’m really sorry,” Flash-Three said.

“Don’t be,” Flash said. “I’ll be at MIT soon enough.”

Flash-Three nodded. “Things do get better in college, and then you have your whole life ahead of you. I teach gym and coach the basketball team at my old high school now, and…I feel like I’m really making a difference for those kids, you know? It all works out in the end.”

“Not always,” Flash-Two said. “I actually had a great time in high school, but…I think I peaked at age seventeen. I couldn’t get a football scholarship, so I enlisted in the Army, served in Iraq for a while. And then I came back, and it’s been hard, you know? I had trouble holding down a job, and then my girlfriend left me, and I’ve been in and out of anger management, but I’ve been trying to turn things around. At this point, I’m just hoping I don’t turn out like my old man.”

Flash nodded, and he still wasn’t entirely sure that he liked his alternate selves, but he at least understood where they were coming from. And he hated to admit it, but there was something special about meeting these two other versions of himself. For once, Flash didn’t have to be the smartest kid in school just to be seen. He didn’t have to come up with petty insults or make stupid videos just to be seen. For once, he could just be himself, and the other Flashes would notice that he was there.

Flash was about to say something to his alternate selves, but all of a sudden, the door swung open, and Flash saw Eddie standing in the doorway, a frantic look on his face.

“What's going on?” Flash-Two asked, but Eddie paid him no attention.

“Flash,” Eddie said. “I figured out where the security camera connects to.” There was a long pause, and then Eddie said, “Fine. Okay. Venom figured out where the security camera connects to. Are you happy now?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Flash said. “Who’s behind all of this?”

“Room #11,” Eddie said. “It all connects to Room #11.”

Chapter Text

This wasn’t Gwen’s first trip through the multiverse, but even she couldn’t help but admit that there was something strange about these support groups.

When she’d first gotten the invitation, she’d assumed that it was from Miles or Peter B. or even Spider-Ham, that this was some kind of reunion. When she’d swung into the building for her support group meeting, fresh out of a yet another fight with The Vulture, the touchscreen had told her that the Gwen Stacy Support Group was meeting in Room #10. And now, as she walked down the hallway, she thought of what it would be like to meet another version of her. A part of her was looking forward to seeing the Spider-Gang again, but on the other hand, she thought that it might be nice to meet another Gwen Stacy, another Spider-Woman.

Gwen wanted to get to know her alternate selves, but making friends had never been easy for her. Back in her home dimension, she’d been trying to rebuild some of the relationships she’d wrecked, but even that was tough. She’d started playing the drums again, started playing shows with the Mary Janes, but the band dynamic just wasn’t the same as it once was. MJ, Glory, and Betty were friendly enough, but these days, it was like Gwen was some kind of fourth wheel, awkwardly tacked onto a perfectly good trio. Two years ago, before the radioactive spider bite, those kids had been among her closest friends, but now, they were practically strangers.

Then again, maybe this was what she deserved after she’d pushed her friends away, cut off people she cared about most, refused to let herself get close to anyone new. She’d told herself that she didn’t need the distraction, that her responsibilities as Spider-Woman would always be more important than making small talk at band practice, but that wasn’t exactly true.

Maybe the problem was her.

Gwen pushed those thoughts out of her mind, and she pulled open the door to Room #10. She didn’t really know what to expect, but she knew that she was ready to meet someone who might understand what it was like to be her. She was ready to meet her alternate selves.

Inside Room #10, there were two other versions of her, two other Gwen Stacys. One of them - Gwen-Two - was in her forties, and the other - Gwen-Three - was only a few years older than her. The strangest part about Gwen-Three, however, was that she was a ghost, complete with a shimmering blue aura around her.

Gwen had certainly had a few close calls over the past few years. She’d almost been stabbed by the Green Goblin, strangled by Doc Ock, and shot by the Kingpin. However, she’d always made it out alive, whether it was through her smarts, her strength, or just pure, dumb luck. Gwen-Three hadn’t been quite so fortunate, and Gwen couldn’t help but wonder why.

“Let me get this straight,” Gwen-Two said to her counterpart. “There was a supervillain called Electro in your universe? Couldn’t he have come up with a better name than that?”

“Hey, you just said there was a guy with eight limbs called Doctor Octopus. I don’t think you get to judge,” Gwen-Three said. “But yeah, I helped come up with this whole plan to restart the power grid, and…”

“I think there’s someone in the doorway,” Gwen-Two suddenly said.

“Oh my God,” Gwen-Three said as she turned to look at Gwen. “You’re Spider-Woman.”

Gwen lowered her hood and removed her mask, revealing her face to the other two Gwens. “You’re not?” she said.

“No?” Gwen-Two said, confused.

“That sounds amazing though,” Gwen-Three said. “I wish I was Spider-Woman.”

Gwen could hardly believe it. She knew that she wasn’t the only Spider-Person out there, as crazy as that was, but she hadn’t even considered that there might be universes where she hadn’t become Spider-Woman. It made sense - this was the multiverse, after all - but being Spider-Woman was such a huge part of her life that she could hardly imagine who she would be if she hadn’t become a superhero.

“If you don’t mind, I have…a lot of questions,” Gwen-Three said.

“Sure, go ahead,” Gwen said.

“How did you get your powers?” Gwen-Three asked.

“I was bitten by a radioactive spider,” Gwen said.

Gwen-Three chuckled. “Okay, I probably could have figured out that much.”

“Wait, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Gwen-Two said. “You’d get radiation poisoning, not…”

All of a sudden, Gwen shot a web onto the ceiling, flipped around in the air, and then swung over to her seat, while the other two Gwens looked on in awe. “How did you do that?” Gwen-Two asked.

“A lot of practice,” Gwen said as she brushed a strand of blonde hair out of her face. “And also, like, five years of ballet lessons.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Gwen-Two said. “I did ballet for a few years when I was a kid, but I quit once they started doing all of that pointe stuff.”

“I probably would have stuck with it a bit longer, but, you know, it’s a lot of responsibility, being New York’s one and only Spider-Woman and all,” Gwen said.

Gwen-Three nodded and then said, “I could imagine. I bet you’ve fought a lot of cool supervillains though.”

“I guess,” Gwen said. “There was the Kingpin, the Prowler, Doc Ock, the Green Goblin, Koala Kommander…”

“Who’s Koala Kommander?” Gwen-Two asked, but Gwen-Three jumped in before Gwen could answer.

“We had some of those villains too,” Gwen-Three said. “In my universe.” She paused for a moment and then asked, “Was there a Lizard in your corner of the multiverse?”

“Y-yeah,” Gwen said. “There was, actually.”

Gwen-Three nodded. “It was really weird at first, because Dr. Connors was my boss,” she said. “I did some research in his lab for a couple of months, he wrote my college recommendation letter, and then he turned into a lizard. But I cooked up an antidote, and we were going to disperse it, and…Dr. Connors killed my dad. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to forgive him for that.”

“I lost my dad too,” Gwen-Two said. “It was liver cancer, not the Lizard, but it’s been two years, and I still miss him more than anything.”

“The years after Dad died were hard,” Gwen-Three said. “Sometimes, it felt like my whole family was falling apart.”

Gwen almost jumped in, but she kept her mouth shut, knowing that nothing she could say would help. After all, her dad was still alive and well. She may have had to web him out of harm’s way more times than she could count, but when she went home after the support group meeting, she knew that her dad would be there, cooking spaghetti and meatballs or watching the news on TV, waiting for her.

Gwen hated to admit it sometimes, but she was a police chief’s daughter, through and through. Her dad believed in the law, that the world would be a better place if only everyone followed every single rule and regulation to the letter, and even if she disagreed, even if she’d gotten an eyebrow piercing and joined a punk band behind his back, even if she was sure he would never approve of her life as a vigilante, Gwen knew that using her powers to fight crime might not have come so naturally to her if she hadn’t been raised by the captain of the NYPD.

She remembered watching Miles’ dad pull up in front of the school in the squad car, and she remembered thinking that she and Miles might have something in common beyond just a radioactive spider bite. A part of her wished that she’d been able to talk to him, before she’d said that her name was Gwanda, before he’d gotten his hand stuck in her hair, before she’d embarked on that whole adventure. There was a lot that she’d never gotten the chance to say.

“This is honestly insane,” Gwen-Three said suddenly. “I never thought I’d get to meet another…another me.”

“Me neither,” Gwen-Two said. “I’d love to get to know you guys a little bit more though.” She paused and then asked, “What do you two like to do when you’re not saving the city?”

“Honestly, school, homework, and driver’s ed take up a lot of my time,” Gwen said. “But I play in a band. The Mary Janes.”

Gwen and Mary Jane had started the band together during the summer between eighth and ninth grade. They’d dreamt of becoming heroes, of playing to stadiums of adoring fans, hanging on their every word. MJ had wanted to be front and center, a goddess of punk, while Gwen had seen one too many videos of Dave Grohl banging on the drums, and now, she wanted to be nothing less than a living legend, a master of her chosen instrument. It was the perfect teenage power fantasy, and even if her duties as Spider-Woman had gotten in the way of the band, she still spent plenty of days sitting on top of the Brooklyn Tower, listening to the Foo Fighters, dreaming of the day when they would finally make it big.

“Oh, I knew a girl named Mary Jane once,” Gwen-Two said. “She was a singer too, actually. She had an incredible voice - I hear she’s on Broadway now, but we haven’t really talked in a while.”

“Why not?” Gwen asked.

“I guess our lives just went in different directions,” Gwen-Two said. “It sure didn’t help that she got back together with that guy with the emo haircut though. God, he was a prick. We went to a jazz club once, and he literally started dancing on the tables.”

Both of the other Gwens burst out laughing. “Wait, seriously?” Gwen-Three said. “That actually happened?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Gwen-Two said. “I can’t imagine why anyone would ever take him back, but it’s MJ’s life, not mine. And honestly, I’m pretty happy with where my life’s at right now. It’s not where I thought I’d be when I was younger, but I’ve got a wonderful family, and my company just got funding to do some cool astrophysics research - we have a new telescope now! It’s very exciting.”

Gwen-Three sighed. “That’s so cool. I…I wish I’d gotten to do all of that,” she said. “I kind of had a rough time in high school - I didn’t have a ton of friends, plus there was that whole internship fiasco - but I got into Oxford senior year, and I really thought everything was going to work out. I was going to study molecular biology, I was going to meet all of these cool people in England, my boyfriend was going to come with me…and then I fell off a clock tower. Peter tried to save me, but there wasn’t anything he could have done.” Gwen-Three sighed and then said, “Maybe if I was Spider-Woman, I could have saved myself.”

“Don’t say you want to be Spider-Woman,” Gwen said. “The last person who did…”

She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. She saw him in her mind’s eye - his small frame, his tousled brown hair, his coke-bottle glasses. For as long as she could remember, they’d been like brother and sister, always there for each other, no matter what. She’d spent countless days with him, sitting on the carpet of Ben and May’s living room, playing games, watching TV, talking about science homework or punk rock or their summer plans or whatever else happened to be going through their heads that day. She’d helped him come up with his first D&D campaign. He’d been in the front row at the Mary Janes’ first concert.

They’d had a secret handshake, and even though they’d both decided that it was silly and childish, even though he’d been dead for the last two years, Gwen still remembered it perfectly.

“There was a Peter in my universe too,” Gwen finally said. “He was…he was my best friend.”

It all came spilling out - how Peter had wanted to be a superhero like Spider-Woman, how he’d snuck into the school chemistry lab and concocted that serum, how he’d transformed himself into a monster. She’d stopped him from tearing apart the city, but the serum had poisoned him. She still remembered it as if it were yesterday - cradling Peter as he drew in his last breath, thinking that she could have done more, thinking that she’d let her best friend die.

Gwen couldn’t save Peter Parker.

The least she could do now was try to save everyone else.

Gwen thought of the last time she’d traveled the multiverse, and her mind drifted to Peter B. In some respects, he couldn’t have been more different from her universe’s Peter. Peter B. wasn’t her Peter, not by a long shot, but he reminded her of what her Peter could have been, if only he had more time. If only he’d lived long enough to see his fifteenth birthday. If only she’d saved him.

“My Peter thought it was his fault too,” Gwen-Three said as soon as Gwen finished her story. “I don’t see it that way though. Life doesn’t last forever. It’s just that…I guess I thought mine was going to last longer than it did.”

Gwen was quiet for a moment, imagining what it must have been like for this other version of her, her life flashing before her eyes, suddenly realizing that this would be the end of everything. She saw herself as Gwen-Three, falling down that clock tower, time coming to a standstill, and she saw herself as that universe’s Peter, the one who’d been bitten by a radioactive spider - throwing down a web, casting out a lifeline, only to watch Gwen Stacy die.

In the end, it was part of the job. You couldn’t save everybody.

She only wished that her alternate self had gotten just a little bit more time.

“It sounds like you did a lot with what you had though,” Gwen-Two said to her alternate self. “You saved the city twice, after all.”

“I guess so,” Gwen-Three said.

Gwen was about to say something, about how Gwen-Three deserved better than what she got, about how she should have gotten the chance go to Oxford and pursue her dreams, about how all of the Gwens were heroes, even if no one else saw it, but before she could say anything to her newfound friends, her Spider-Sense suddenly started to tingle.

Something was happening in the next room, and it was up to Gwen to stop it.

Chapter Text

Curt didn’t know what to expect when he walked into Room #11. He was a skeptic by nature, and now, every neuron in his brain, every ounce of his scientific training was telling him that this couldn’t be real. The multiverse was a leap of faith, an untestable hypothesis, nothing more than conjecture so long as astronomers were unable to look beyond the cosmological horizon.

And yet, he had all the proof he needed. There was someone from another universe - a Curt Connors with blond hair and round glasses and an English accent - standing right in front of him.

“You’re here,” the other Curt said as he glanced toward his alternate self, unable to believe his eyes. “To be honest, I thought this was a joke. I didn’t think anyone would bother to show up.”

“Me neither,” Curt said. “When I first got that invitation, I thought it might be a prank from one of my students.”

“You’re a teacher?”

“College professor,” Curt corrected. “I teach physics at Columbia University.”

“I’m a biologist, not a physicist, but I don’t think I could ever handle classroom teaching,” the other Curt said. “I ran an internship program at Oscorp for a few years, and that was enough of a headache.”

“I had some friends in graduate school who felt that way about teaching, but I actually find it quite rewarding.”

Curt suddenly thought of all of his old friends, all of those people he used to know. Of course, most of grad school had been deadlines, papers, and stressing over his dissertation, but he’d met some of his closest companions there. He’d met Otto in his Electromagnetic Theory course, and they’d become fast friends, bonding over their shared interest in science, in unlocking the secrets of the universe. Otto had then introduced Curt to his lab partner Norman, another grad student in the physics department, and before they knew it, the three of them - the teacher’s pet, the armless wonder, and the wannabe tycoon - were studying together, going out for drinks after class, rambling to each other about their latest research projects, whether it was quantum mechanics or nanotechnology or nuclear fusion.

Slowly, more students started to join their study circle - classmates, mutual friends, anyone who could listen to Otto blathering on about the power of the sun for more than five seconds. In fact, it was one of those latecomers, Rosie, who’d come up with the idea to name their friend group, who’d half-jokingly started calling them the Sinister Six. The nickname had stuck, but the Sinister Six was far from sinister. Even if Curt sometimes felt like an outsider in his own circle, even if he could never quite keep up with all of the drama, college was one of the few times in his life that he’d felt like he’d had friends at all, and when he finally finished his doctorate, when it felt like everyone was going their separate ways, Curt wondered if he’d ever have people like them in his life again.

It hurt to think that all of them were gone now. Curt was the last one standing, the only one who would make it to their next class reunion, the final member of the Sinister Six.

Curt suddenly pushed all of those thoughts out of his mind and turned back to his counterpart. “You said you work at Oscorp,” he said. “What do you do there?”

“Oh, I don’t work there anymore,” the other Curt said. “But I used to do genetics research. We were trying to create a serum that would regenerate human tissue, and we almost succeeded.”

“Almost?”

“It’s a long story,” he said, but nevertheless, he told the tale. “We needed to perform human trials, and I refused to subject anyone else to such a dangerous procedure, so I injected myself with the serum. It seemed to work at first, but something went wrong. My new arm…it started changing, molting, growing scales and claws. I transformed into a creature - some said I was a dinosaur, but really, it was more like an anthropomorphic lizard. I threw a car off a bridge. I broke into a school. I…I killed a man. I wanted to change the world, to set the stage for the next step in human evolution, but all I got for my trouble was a long stay in a psychiatric hospital.”

Curt stared at his alternate self, dumbfounded. In this universe, he was nothing more than a perfectly average college professor, a background character in his own story, but in that other universe, he’d turned out like his friends, like Otto and Norman. He’d turned into a monster.

His mind drifted to the Sinister Six again, to what had become of them. Curt and Norman had lost touch long before he turned into the Green Goblin, but the last time Curt saw Otto and Rosie, they’d invited him and his family out for dinner. While they all sat at the restaurant, waiting for their food, Otto told Curt all about his demonstration, about how close he was to finally achieving a successful nuclear fusion reactor, while Curt told him about the kids in his mechanics course - the ones who were brilliant, the ones who were lazy, the ones who were somehow both at once. At the time, it had all seemed so ordinary. At the time, he’d been sure there would be a hundred other nights exactly like that one.

Four days later, Curt turned on the news, only to learn that Rosie was dead, killed by a shard of falling glass in the aftermath of her husband’s failed experiment, and Otto Octavius, Curt’s old college friend, was a criminal, a thief, a murderer, the supervillain known as Doctor Octopus.

Curt’s alternate self looked in his direction, a deep sadness etched onto his face. “I think I’ve said enough about the Lizard,” the other Curt said. “I’d love to hear more about you though. What classes are you teaching this semester?”

“Mechanics, General Relativity, and Quantum Field Theory,” Curt said. “I’ve taught all of those courses before, but it’s always fun to have a new group of students.”

The other Curt nodded and then asked, “Why did you decide to go into physics?”

“I took a few classes I enjoyed in undergrad, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself after I graduated, so I stayed on at Columbia as a grad student. And now I’m still teaching there, all these years later.”

The other Curt chuckled and said, “It’s like you never left.”

Curt’s alternate self was probably right about that, but Curt had grown to like his job, even if he was just an overgrown kid, unable to imagine a life beyond college. He’d tried to become the sort of professor he wished he’d had when he was younger: strict, yet supportive, demanding, yet caring, helpful and kind, yet always pushing students to work harder, to do better. He wanted to be the sort of professor that his students could go to with their problems. He wanted to be a guide, a mentor, a friend.

Curt was about to say something else, but all of a sudden, there was a loud crash outside. “What was that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the other Curt responded as the sound of loud footsteps came thundering in from the hallway.

There was a knock on the door, and Curt glanced toward his alternate self, unsure of what was going on. “Should I open it?” he asked.

“It can’t hurt,” the other Curt said. “Maybe you can ask those people outside to quiet down a little.”

Curt got up from his seat, and when he opened the door, he found a whole group of strange people standing in the doorway - a young boy with bleached blond hair playing on his phone, a white-suited superheroine hanging from the ceiling, and a creature made of black slime, looking like he might devour both of them at any moment.

“Honestly, I was expecting something better than this,” the blond-haired boy said, adjusting his phone to get just the right angle. “These guys are, like, kind of boring.”

“BE QUIET, FLASH,” the monster said before turning to the Curts. “DID YOU SEND THE INVITATIONS OR NOT?”

“What?” the other Curt said, confused. “No. I can assure you that neither of us had anything to do with that.”

“He’s lying, Flash Mob,” the teenager said into his phone camera, but after three decades of trying to get phone-addicted, barely-awake college students to pay attention to his quantum mechanics lessons, Curt knew exactly how to handle this.

“Put down the phone, Flash,” Curt said sternly, and Flash reluctantly did so. “Now, why do you think we organized these support groups?”

“Eddie and Venom found this security camera in the hallway, and it connects to Room #11, and we thought…”

Curt suddenly pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, the letter that had asked him if he felt alone in the multiverse, the letter that had told him to join the Curt Connors support group. “See this?” he said. “I got this in the mail last week.”

Flash looked at him, puzzled. “So if you didn’t organize this or anything, then why would that camera connect to Room #11?” he asked.

“It was probably a network of cameras, connecting to every room,” the other Curt suggested.

Curt sighed and turned to Flash and his friends. “I’m sorry, but I think you all have the wrong idea about all of this,” he said. “Now can you please quiet down?”

“We were having a nice conversation in here,” the other Curt added.

All of them were quiet for a moment, and then the monster turned to Flash and said, “SO IF HE DIDN’T INVITE US HERE, CAN I EAT HIM?”

“Venom, no!” Flash shouted, but the monster lunged toward Curt, the physics professor nervously backing away as Venom bared his nightmarish rows of sharply pointed teeth. Curt knew he couldn’t put up much of a fight against a supervillain, and he glanced toward his alternate self, wondering what he should do, how he could possibly take down a ravenous eight-foot-tall alien.

However, just as Venom was about to bite Curt’s head off, Spider-Woman bounced off the ceiling and shot a web toward the Venom. While the creature tried to tear through her webbing, Curt slammed the door shut, breathing heavily as he recollected his thoughts, as he tried to tune out the sounds of the fight going on outside.

“Are you alright?” the other Curt asked.

“I think so,” Curt said.

As the battle raged on, screams and shrieks coming from just outside their door, the other Curt glanced toward his counterpart’s empty sleeve. “Do you ever think about it?” he quietly asked. “Your arm?”

“Not really,” Curt said with a shrug. The other Curt seemed surprised, and Curt explained, “I was born without it. There were some kids who bullied me in grade school, and sometimes the students in my classes ask too many questions on the first day, but I don’t think my life would have gone any differently if I’d been born with two arms. I can’t exactly miss something that I never had in the first place.”

“It was different for me,” the other Curt said. “I was a surgeon at the British Army hospital in Northern Ireland for a few years after I finished medical school. There was a bombing in West Belfast while I was there...it was all over the news, but I don’t remember a second of it. I woke up in the hospital - scared, alone, feeling this missing weight on my shoulder and all of that phantom pain. It was as if I’d lost everything. And then, when I moved to New York and started working for Oscorp, I thought of lizards, casting off their appendages only to grow them once more, and I longed to do the same. I said that I was working for the benefit of all of humanity, and I was, but it came from a place of selfishness, a place of weakness. I wanted to regenerate my lost arm, and that want became something larger, something grander. I didn’t want anyone to suffer the way I had. I wanted to create a superior human being - faster, stronger, smarter. A world without weakness.”

Curt nodded along, trying to understand where his counterpart was coming from, but in truth, he’d never seen his missing arm as a weakness, as something that needed to be fixed. He’d never wanted to transcend his limits, to change into something new, to become something more than human.

In truth, he had always been a fairly unambitious person. While his friends wanted to build Fortune 500 companies or power the entire city with clean energy or write poetry that would touch the heart and the mind, Curt was perfectly content staying at his alma mater, occasionally publishing a paper or two, living a quiet, unassuming life in his home city. Curt’s colleagues at Columbia sometimes thought he could be doing more, that he could be a more productive researcher, but instead of revolutionizing quantum mechanics, he’d found meaning in falling into his wife’s arms after a long day, in playing board games with his son, in watching generations of students grow up, in hoping that he’d left the world just a little bit better than he found it. Curt had never once wanted fame or power or glory, and maybe, in the end, that was what saved him from his friends’ grisly fates.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door, and both Curts nervously glanced toward it. “Should we answer that?” the other Curt asked.

“After what happened earlier, I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” Curt said, but nevertheless, he got up and cracked open the door. When he looked through, he saw the girl in the white suit standing there, her hood draped over her face. Behind her, there was a man webbed to the wall, and strangely enough, he seemed to be having a conversation with that alien creature, the same one that had tried to attack Curt.

“We talked about this!” the man complained. “You can’t just go around eating people who don’t deserve it. Otherwise, we get the police or the FBI or weird kids who can shoot webs out of their wrists running after us.”

“BUT EDDIE…” the creature complained.

“Uhh…sorry about those guys,” Spider-Woman said to Curt, gesturing toward Eddie and Venom. “I don’t know why they wanted to kill you, but I think I have them taken care of.”

“Thanks,” Curt said, trying to figure out if he knew this mysterious girl. She wasn’t from his universe – Curt’s New York already had a spider-themed superhero running around – but there was something familiar about her.

“Anyways, Flash and Venom thought you guys organized all of these support groups…”

“We didn’t,” Curt said.

“I know that,” Spider-Woman said. “But if you didn’t do it…then who did?”

Curt didn’t have an answer, but the other Curt looked up at the security camera, endlessly swiveling back and forth, and he said, “I think I have an idea.”

Chapter Text

There was a ghost in Room #12 - a dark-haired man with a scarred face, perhaps a few years younger than Harry. While he stood in the doorway, the ghost simply waited there, staring out the window, and Harry did a double take, wondering if this was some sort of hallucination, if he was finally losing his mind.

Maybe all of those years he’d spent at Ravencroft were finally getting to him.

A few moments passed, and then, all of a sudden, the ghost turned to Harry. “You look terrible,” he said.

“Nice to meet you too,” Harry snarked as he adjusted his scarf, trying to cover up the patch of green, scaly skin on his neck. The cocktail of medications he was on controlled the worst of his symptoms, but he was well aware that the last few years – Ravencroft, the Green Goblin, his ever-progressing retroviral hypodysplasia – hadn’t done any favors for his looks. “So you’re…?”

“Harry Osborn,” the ghost said.

“You’re me?” Harry said skeptically as the ghost took out a bottle of wine – Cheval Blanc, his favorite – and poured a glass.

“From another universe, but yeah,” Harry-Two said. He then held out a glass of wine and asked, “You want some?”

“Sure, that’d be great,” Harry said before he took the glass from Harry-Two and sipped on his wine. He then looked at the other Harry, his alternate self, and said, “This can’t be real. Last week, I was in prison, and now I’m drinking with a ghost?”

It had been ten years since he’d experienced anything like this. He’d been locked in a cage for nearly a third of his life. He’d gone from living in a penthouse with a private elevator and a golf simulator to being just another inmate at Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane, and even though the money from his inheritance had made his newfound freedom a little bit easier, Harry was still trying to figure out how to exist in society again, how to reclaim his old life.

For him, a lot of things had been feeling pretty surreal lately.

“It’s called disassociation,” Harry-Two said. “Happened to me a few times after my dad died.”

“Your dad died too?” Harry said as he took a sip of his drink.

Harry-Two nodded. “He was killed when I was eighteen,” he said. “Things were always…complicated with my father. While I was alive, I spent so much time trying to make him proud. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.”

“I stopped trying years ago,” Harry said bitterly. “My father sent me off to boarding school when I was eleven. After that, I knew he didn’t want me around.”

“Yeah, I know what that’s like,” Harry-Two said. “I flunked out of private school three years in a row, and even then, my dad didn’t care. He always preferred my genius of a best friend over me anyways.”

“My dad sent me Scotch for my sixteenth birthday…”

“Wait, that actually sounds cool,” Harry-Two interrupted.

“It was meant for one of his colleagues at work,” Harry scoffed. “He cared about them more than he ever cared about me.”

“I guess we both had shitty childhoods.”

“Shitty adulthoods too,” Harry said. “At least in my case.”

“You said you were in some kind of prison, right?”

Harry nodded and then took another swig of his drink, trying to drown out the thoughts of needles, scalpels, scissors, saws. People in white lab coats. Vials of unknown chemicals. Being torn apart, piece by piece.

They’d experimented on people in Ravencroft. They’d wanted to know what they were made of, what made all those supervillains tick.

Harry Osborn was no exception.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” he said to Harry-Two.

All of a sudden, Harry noticed the security camera hanging from the ceiling, pointed right at them, and in an instant, he was back in his cell at Ravencroft. He remembered those cameras, always watching him, always waiting for him to show off his powers or team up with his cellmates or try to escape…

“You okay, Other Harry?” Harry-Two asked.

“I think so,” Harry said, but his eyes were still glued to that camera. What could it be for? Who could possibly be watching them?

“We can shut it off if you want,” Harry-Two offered.

“Yeah, that would be great,” Harry said, but just as Harry-Two reached toward the camera, the light on the camera suddenly blinked off.

“What just happened?” Harry-Two asked.

“I don’t know,” Harry said, but he heard something from the other room – two high-pitched, feminine voices, speaking indistinctly. “Who do you think that is?” he asked, still nervously glancing up at the camera, hoping that it wouldn’t turn on again.

“It’s probably whoever invited us here,” Harry-Two said. “I’d guess that they’re the ones operating the security system too.”

“And who would that be?”

Harry-Two thought about it for a few minutes and then said, “Well, it all links back to Peter Parker, right? I saw the list of people who came here. It’s Pete’s aunt, Pete’s boss, Pete’s girlfriend, Pete’s professor…they’re all people who know him.”

Harry thought of Peter Parker, the one from his universe. They’d been best friends once, a long, long time ago. They’d done everything together: playing video games at Peter’s house, copying off of each other’s homework, fending off bullies during recess, relentlessly snarking at each other all the while. He used to know Peter’s favorite food, his darkest secrets, just what to say to cheer him up. Peter had been there the day Harry’s father forgot about his birthday. Harry had been there the day Peter’s parents died.

Back then, he couldn’t have imagined a life without Peter in it.

And then his father sent him to boarding school when he was eleven, and in an instant, it was over. Harry and Peter had promised to keep in touch, but when school started again, Harry had tried to forget New York, tried to forget about the life he’d had back home, and soon, his former best friend was nothing more than a stranger, a ghost in his memories.

They’d met again as teenagers, and for just a fleeting moment, while they were skipping stones by the river, just the two of them, he’d felt a spark of something that he hadn’t felt since he left for boarding school all those years ago.

Sometimes, Harry wondered where that relationship might have gone if things hadn’t turned out the way they did. If Gwen hadn’t fallen from that clock tower. If Peter hadn’t been bitten by that radioactive spider. If Harry hadn’t inherited the Osborn curse.

“I used to know someone named Peter too,” Harry finally said.

“Used to?” Harry-Two said.

“I don’t think he wants to see me anymore.”

Harry-Two gave him a questioning look, and all at once, every memory from that fateful night came back to him. He remembered being injected with that spider venom, thinking that it would heal him. He remembered the transformation, bones shifting across his body, claws sprouting out of his fingers, all of that agonizing pain. He remembered that realization - that Peter and Spider-Man were one and the same, that his best friend had refused to help him when he needed it most.

He remembered the anger, the desperation, the hopelessness, the betrayal.

He remembered flying off with Gwen Stacy and throwing her down a clock tower.

Harry hadn’t meant for her to die, but whatever was in that spider venom had warped his mind as well as his body. All he could think of in that moment was Peter, Spider-Man, the man who he once thought was his friend. All he could think of was vengeance.

He’d woken up the next morning in Ravencroft, and when he remembered what had happened the night before, when he found out that Peter somehow hadn’t saved Gwen Stacy, he’d felt nothing but endless remorse, and he wondered how he could possibly face the world, knowing that if it wasn’t for him, Gwen would still be alive.

“I did…I did something I don’t think Peter’s ever going to forgive me for,” he finally said to Harry-Two.

“I did too,” Harry-Two said.

“What happened?”

“It’s complicated.”

Harry chuckled. “Everything’s complicated with Peter,” he said.

“Yeah, you’re right about that,” Harry-Two said. “It all started when my father died. I found Spider-Man standing over his body, and I thought that he was the one who killed my dad. So I wanted Spider-Man dead. I swore on my father’s grave that I’d make him pay.”

Harry nodded, thinking of what it had been like after his father died. Harry’s father had never been there for him. They’d barely even known each other, and his family’s butlers and assistants had done far more to raise him than his father ever had. His father’s death had made him the CEO of Oscorp, a responsibility he wasn’t quite ready for. But a part of him loved his father all the same, and when Norman Osborn finally succumbed to his disease, Harry lost the only family he had.

If Harry had been in his alternate self’s place, maybe he would have done the same. Maybe he would have wanted vengeance too.

“I didn’t know that my father was the Green Goblin or that my best friend was Spider-Man. And when I found out it was Pete…I couldn’t do it. But I took my father’s performance enhancers…”

“Hold on,” Harry said. “Your father was the Green Goblin?”

“Yours wasn’t?” Harry-Two said.

“No, it was…it was just me,” Harry said. “I was the one who turned into a monster.”

Harry-Two nodded understandingly. “I wanted to avenge my father so badly that I became one of the bad guys too. I tried to kill Peter. Twice,” he said. “I only found out later that Pete didn’t kill my dad, that he was impaled on his own glider.”

“Why didn’t Peter tell you that himself?” Harry asked.

“I don’t know. He was like that sometimes. I’d ask him where he went, and he’d just say that he was around. But Peter meant a lot to me. He was one of my only real friends, and after everything I put him through, I didn’t think we would ever be able to bury the hatchet,” Harry-Two said. “In the end, Pete forgave me. I helped him fight Sandman and Venom, and…that’s how I died. Saving his life.”

“My Peter wouldn’t…” Harry said, but Harry-Two cut him off.

“On my deathbed, he said that we were best friends,” Harry-Two said. “Trust me, if your Peter’s anything like mine, he’ll forgive you. It’s not too late.”

Harry wasn’t so sure, but he thought of the days he’d spent with Peter, before it all fell apart. He remembered riding the carousel, strolling by the river, telling Peter about his travels, about Brazil and Singapore and France. He remembered the crushing loneliness he’d felt at boarding school, while he was abroad, at Ravencroft, how it all seemed to disappear whenever Peter was around.

He’d seen Peter’s name on the touchscreen outside.

Maybe Harry-Two was right.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to make amends.

Chapter Text

The first thing Betty noticed about her alternate self was how young she was. The other Betty was a blonde-haired girl in a headband and a sweater vest, no older than eighteen, moving with a slight bounce in her step. She was just a kid, but already, she had a cool, confident demeanor, like she was used to having an audience.

Something about her reminded Betty of herself, or more accurately, the girl she used to be.

“Hey,” the other Betty said with a slight wave.

“Hi,” Betty responded. “Welcome to the Betty Brant Support Group.”

“Thanks, but I can’t really stay for long,” the other Betty said as she sat down next to her counterpart. “I have to go to work in, like, an hour.”

“Oh, where do you work?” Betty asked.

“It’s not really work, more like an internship,” the other Betty said. “But it’s at the Daily Bugle.”

Just from the way she said the paper’s name, Betty could tell that her alternate self wasn’t proud of where she worked, not like Betty had been when she started her first job. In her universe, the Bugle held a certain degree of prestige – there was hardly a person in New York who didn’t know its name. But Betty had been a secretary, not a reporter. Her job had been answering phone calls, filling out paperwork, reminding Jameson to take his blood pressure medication, always wishing that she could do something more.

“I worked for the Daily Bugle too, when I was a little older than you,” Betty told her alternate self.

“Really?” the other Betty said. “What do you do now?”

“I’m a political correspondent for the Daily Globe.”

The other Betty’s eyes instantly lit up. “That’s what I wish I was doing,” she said. “I want to be a real reporter, but my boss keeps telling me to make these annoying TikTok videos about his crazy conspiracy theories.”

“Well, everyone has to start somewhere, and the Daily Bugle’s not that bad,” Betty said. “There were some nice people there, the pay was enough to get me through journalism school, and Robbie helped me get a good job after I graduated.”

“I’m an unpaid intern,” the other Betty said.

Jameson may have been a cheapskate, but Betty never thought that he would the nerve to do that. While she was there, they’d all been underpaid, but they’d been paid, and if Betty asked, she was usually able to talk Jameson into giving her a raise. Her boss was a jerk, but he was never heartless.

“You could always quit if you don’t think you’re getting anything out of your internship,” Betty said.

“Yeah, but…”

“There are plenty of other companies out there,” Betty said. “I’d offer you an internship at the Globe, but you’d have to commute between universes.”

“It’s not that easy,” the other Betty said. “Especially after the Blip.”

“What’s the Blip?”

“Half of all life in the universe was dead for five years,” the other Betty explained. “And everything was a mess after that. People were displaced. There weren’t enough jobs. We had to start the whole school year over again!”

“Were you…”

“Dead?” the other Betty interrupted. “Yeah. I was.” She paused and then said, “It happened while I was in the school newsroom at Midtown. I started turning to dust, and then I just came back, like nothing had happened. It was weird, after the Blip. Most of my friends were already in college. My best friend Liz had already graduated – I guess she became an actress or something while I was gone. It was already hard, being an artsy kid at a science school, and then…it felt like all my friends had left me behind.”

When Betty saw the look on her alternate self’s face, distraught, she turned to her and said, “The Blip…it didn’t happen in my universe. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you, losing all of those friendships. But you’re Betty Brant. You’ve got this.”

“Thanks,” the other Betty said, a slight smile on her face.

Betty was about to say something else, but she spotted something out of the corner of her eye, and when she glanced upward, she noticed a security camera hanging from the ceiling, swiveling back and forth.

“What are you looking at?” the other Betty asked.

“The security camera,” Betty said. “There’s something strange about it.”

Betty stood on her tiptoes to get a better look, but much to her frustration, she wasn’t quite tall enough, so she moved her chair a little bit closer, and she climbed on top. From her new vantage point, she looked toward the camera again, and this time, she could see a bright red button on top of the security camera. Out of sheer curiosity, she gently tapped it, wondering what it would do.

Suddenly, a screen appeared in front of the other Betty, and the teenager looked closer, fascinated. Betty stepped off of the chair and walked over to her alternate self, and as she approached the screen, she saw fourteen rooms, fourteen different support groups, all laid out in front of her.

“Weird,” the other Betty said. “A lot of my classmates are here. There’s MJ, Flash…I wonder if Ned’s around here somewhere…”

“Ned Leeds?” Betty said

“Yeah,” the other Betty said, a bit awkwardly. “Is there a Ned in your universe too?”

There had been a Ned Leeds, once. She’d met him at one of the mayor’s press conferences, both of them fresh-faced young journalists, chasing a story. They worked for rival newspapers – she’d just started at the Globe, while he’d just started at the Bugle – and as they stood side by side, waiting for the mayor to answer their questions, they’d struck up a conversation. They had everything in common: the same taste in movies, the same way with words, the same hopes and dreams.

She remembered both the good and the bad: the coffee dates, the late nights, holding hands when their bosses weren’t looking, finding out the truth, watching him turn into a supervillain, seeing his corpse…

“He died a few years ago,” Betty finally said. “After he was brainwashed into becoming the Hobgoblin.”

There was a shocked expression on the other Betty’s face. “Okay,” she said. “Uh, maybe my universe’s Ned would be better off not knowing that.”

As the younger Betty took a moment to process everything, Betty looked toward the screen. Unlike her alternate self, Betty didn’t see any of her high school friends - or any of her current friends, for that matter – but there were a few people she recognized from her time at the Daily Bugle. Jameson was there, yelling at a bald version of himself. Peter was there, eating pizza with one of his alternate selves. That creep Eddie was there, but his counterpart seemed to have already left the room.

Beyond that, there were plenty of people that she’d never properly met. She recognized the Green Goblin from the front page of the Daily Bugle, and she remembered Doc Ock too – he and his alternate self seemed to have figured out the security system, just like the two Bettys had. The rest of them were unfamiliar: a group of older women, a pair of one-armed academics, a girl in a white suit, a man in a brown jacket…

“Who’s that?” the other Betty asked, pointing to one of the support groups on the screen.

Betty looked closer, and when she saw his face, scarred from his time as the Goblin, she said, “That’s Harry Osborn. He was the CEO of Oscorp for a while in the mid-2000s.”

The Harry from her universe hardly seemed to notice the security camera, but the other Harry kept glancing upward, visibly unnerved. After the third or fourth time he looked into the camera, terrified, Betty tapped a button on the side of the display, and the screen that showed the Harry Osborn Support Group went black.

“Wait, what if we need them?” the other Betty said. “What if they were the ones who organized this or something?”

“I don’t think they did,” Betty said. “You saw how scared that Harry was. It’s better to leave them be.”

Betty absentmindedly tapped on the screen, and all of a sudden, the display zoomed in on Room #1, the Peter Parker Support Group. As one of the Peters onscreen got up and peeked out the door, the other Betty stared at the display, fascinated. “They’re all Spider-Man,” she said.

“Looks like it,” Betty said, glancing back toward the screen. There were five Spider-Men now, but she immediately recognized the one from her universe. He’d aged a bit since the last time she saw him, but those blue eyes and that awkward smile hadn’t changed a bit from the day he first walked into Jameson’s office, looking for a job.

She’d known Peter’s secret. She’d known from the very first time she’d seen his photos, all of those gorgeous aerial shots that couldn’t have been taken by anyone other than Spider-Man himself. She remembered flipping through those pictures that Jameson had left on his desk, and she remembered her instincts as a reporter telling her to look further, to ask more questions, to investigate.

But back then, she’d been a secretary, not a reporter. Her job had been answering phone calls, filling out paperwork, reminding Jameson to take his blood pressure medication.

Her job had been helping people. And that’s what she did.

Robbie was the next person to discover Spider-Man’s secret identity, but by the end of the summer, most of the Daily Bugle had it figured out. Even Hoffman, after a series of increasingly obvious hints from the rest of the staff, had pieced together the truth. Jameson was the only one who didn’t know, and everyone else at the Bugle made sure to keep it that way. Peter and his problems were far, far above Betty’s pay grade, but she’d done what she could for him, whether that was guarding him from the worst of Jameson’s wrath or trying to cheer him up when she could tell that he was having a rough day. She could never quite be sure, but she had a feeling that Spider-Man wasn’t the menace Jameson imagined him to be.

“Do you know which one’s from your universe?” Betty asked her alternate self.

“No idea,” the other Betty said. “Maybe it’s the tall one?” She sighed and then added, “He seems like a good guy, the Spider-Man from my universe. He saved my life once. I just don’t get why Jameson hates him. I mean, there are, like, a million Avengers. Why pick on Spider-Man?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s just jealous,” Betty said. “You know, I saw Jameson dress up as Spider-Man once, after we bought the suit off of a garbage man.”

“Wait, really?”

“He pretended to shoot webs out of his wrists and everything,” Betty said. “It was probably one of the craziest things I ever saw at the Bugle.”

“Jameson’s insane,” the other Betty said. “And it’s not just Spider-Man. He thinks that the Blip was staged by the government and that the Avengers built a giant space laser and that Groot is actually a CIA operative running a Satanic cult…you know what? I’m probably just enabling him. Maybe I should quit that internship.”

The younger Betty sighed, turned toward the screen, and clicked away from the Peter Parker Support Group. A few of the support groups had taken a dark turn since they last saw them – Betty immediately spotted Spider-Woman and an alternate version of Venom fighting in the hallway – but for the most part, the rest of the groups were like her and the other Betty, more alike than different. They’d all found the multiversal family they never knew they had.

Suddenly, Betty looked toward the corner of the screen, and she saw a man in a brown jacket, walking into his support group. She was sure she’d seen him earlier, sure that she’d already watched him walk into that room. It was more than just a coincidence or déjà vu.

It might just be the key to unraveling this whole mystery.

“I think this one’s on a loop,” she said to her alternate self. The other Betty leaned in closer, and as both of the Bettys carefully watched the support group, the man in the brown jacket walked in, greeted another version of himself, sat down and talked to him for a while, and then, sure enough, the video started over, going right back to where it had begun.

“So he’s the one who set up all of this?” the other Betty said.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Betty said as she got up from her seat and opened the door. Her alternate self followed her as she walked out of the room and headed down the hallway, both of them ignoring the boy with the bleached hair, the girl in the Spider-Suit, the one-armed men, the other Eddie Brock. There was something in Betty’s heart, something between anticipation and anxiety, knowing that she and her younger self were mere moments away from discovering the truth behind the support groups.

At the very end of the hallway, the Betty Brants found Room #14.

And they pulled open the door.

Chapter Text

“How’s your nephew doing?” Ben asked.

“He seems…well, look at him!” Ben-Three answered as he gestured toward the display. Ben looked toward the corner of the screen, toward Peter’s support group, and he saw Peter-Three, eating pizza, dishing out advice, laughing at the others’ jokes, getting to know his alternate selves.

“I don’t know if your Peter or Ben-One’s Peter brainwashed him or something, but he’s happier than I’ve ever seen him, that’s for sure,” Ben-Three said.

Ben looked to Peter-Two, his Peter, beaming with pride as he told Peter B. and Miles about all of his adventures over the years. He then looked toward May, bonding with her alternate selves, and then to MJ, Harry, Flash, Norman, all the people they’d brought here.

Their plan was working.

For the first time in a long time, all of them had a reason to smile.

“My Peter’s doing better too,” Ben said. “I know he’s had it rough, but mostly, I’m just glad that I got to spend time with him and May while I still could.”

To tell the truth, Ben had done most of the things he wanted while he was still alive. He’d helped as many people as he could. He’d married the woman he loved. He’d raised a family, even if it was later in life than he’d expected, even if it was under the most tragic of circumstances.

His only regret was leaving May and Peter behind.

Ben knew what it was like to lose someone close to him, and it wasn’t something he would wish on anyone. Both of his parents had passed away within a few days of each other, and then, only two years later, he’d lost his younger brother in a plane crash. Ben had already been a teenager when Richard was born, more like an uncle than a brother, but as adults, they’d been the best of friends. He still remembered what it was like after Richard and his wife died, how he’d seen his brother’s face in his memories, how he’d missed his sparkling wit and his big heart, how he’d visited Richard’s and Mary’s graves with a bouquet of flowers in one arm and their infant son in the other.

But in the end, his family had gotten him through that dark period in his life. Just as he’d always done for her, May had been there for Ben, offering a shoulder to cry on or a beautiful melody on the piano whenever he needed a pick-me-up. And Peter, still only a toddler, had run out into the world with a sense of boundless enthusiasm, seeing the magic in the mundane as only a child could. He’d reminded Ben that there was still hope, that the world could be a beautiful place, if he wanted it to be.

Ben had tried to give something back to Peter. He’d tried to guide him through life, to instill in him the values he’d been taught as a boy. There weren’t enough good people in the world, people who took it upon themselves to make a difference, and Ben knew that it was his and May’s job to make sure that their nephew was raised right. He’d given him everything, all of his life lessons, all of the wisdom he’d acquired over his sixty-eight years. But mostly, he’d given Peter love, the sort of deep, unconditional love that any father would have for his son.

When Ben died, Peter was seventeen - no longer a boy, but not yet a man. He’d been acting strangely – hiding in his room for hours on end, getting into fights at school - and Ben didn’t know why until after he died. But in a way, Ben saw what it was all about. After all, he remembered what it was like being a teenager, trying to figure out who he was, growing up too fast, feeling like his whole life was changing before his eyes, thinking that no one would understand, least of all his parents.

On the day Ben died, Peter had told him to stop pretending to be his father. Ben was sure that he hadn’t meant it, but it stung nonetheless, and in his first few years as a ghost, he’d haunted Peter, wondering if he’d done enough, if his nephew had learned the meaning of responsibility, if he even saw Ben as a father figure at all. He’d had to learn when to step back, when to leave Peter be and hope that what he’d taught him about honesty, fairness, and justice had been enough.

A leap of faith, Peter B.’s Ben had called it.

“For a long time, I wondered if Peter really thought of May and I as family,” Ben-Three said. “He was always asking about what happened to Mary and Richard, and after I died, and after Gwen died, he used his powers for revenge. He thought it was what I would have wanted, but it wasn’t.”

“I thought about that a lot too, with my Peter,” Ben admitted. “But I’ve seen your nephew. He always does the right thing in the end. And he loves you and May more than anything.”

“Your Peter’s pretty amazing too,” Ben-Three said, and as soon as he heard that, Ben couldn’t help but smile.

For Ben’s Peter, the road to where he was now hadn’t been an easy one. He’d been tempted by vengeance. He’d struggled to balance his dual identities. He’d given up too easily. He’d made decisions that he would come to regret. He’d lost his mentors and his friends. Again and again, he’d had to sacrifice everything for his life as Spider-Man.

But every single day, Peter swung into New York City on his web, ready to save the city or help someone in need.

And every single day, he made his uncle proud.

“It’s been twelve years since I died,” Ben-Three said. “That’s crazy to think about. I haven’t gotten to talk to May or Peter in twelve years.”

“At least we have each other,” Ben said.

Ben thought back to the day he met his alternate self, his brother from another universe. Ben-Three had been shot trying to stop a robber, just three days before he met him. Just like his alternate self, he had a wife named May and a nephew named Peter. Just like his alternate self, he believed in looking out for others, in using his talents and skills to do what was right, in responsibility.

He’d befriended plenty of other Bens in the afterlife, other people who knew what it was like to live, to love, to pass on what they’d learned. There was a Ben whose Peter had figured things out, a Ben whose Peter had lost his way. There was a Ben who looked like he’d come from an old detective movie, a splash of color in a monochrome universe. There was Ben-One – he was still young when he died, barely in his fifties. Ben-One constantly worried that he hadn’t done enough for his nephew, that he'd left him with a responsibility he wasn’t ready for, and Ben hadn’t had the heart to tell him that every Ben he’d met had felt that way, at one point or another.

Ben wasn’t the type to pick favorites, especially not among his alternate selves, but he and Ben-Three had always been particularly close. Maybe it was simply because he was the first alternate Ben he’d met, but Ben thought it was because Ben-Three reminded him of Richard, his younger brother who had died far too soon.

The Bens had bonded over their shared sense of loss, their hopes and dreams, their brilliant wives, but most of all, they loved talking about their nephews. Ben had watched all of the Peters of the multiverse grow up and become heroes, not just his own. The Peters came in all shapes and sizes, but the important things – their courage, their idealism, their good nature - always stayed the same.

Ben and Ben-Three always thought that their nephews would get along if they ever got the chance to meet, but they never thought it would happen – until it did.

There were a lot of ghosts in the air the night the three Peters met. Peter-One’s May. Peter-Two’s Harry. Peter-Three’s Gwen. All of their Uncle Bens. The Peters had found each other in the most tragic of circumstances, and yet, despite their differences, they’d become friends. They’d traded stories. They’d cured all of those villains. They’d reminded each other that they were amazing. They’d saved the multiverse together.

And yet, it hadn’t lasted. After the other two Peters returned home, Peter-One was alone, friendless, barely holding himself together in a world where no one knew he existed. Peter-Three was still struggling to figure out how to be Peter Parker again. And Peter-Two, his Peter, would never admit it, but he needed his brothers just as much as they needed him.

It was Ben-One’s idea to bring the Peters of the multiverse together again, but Ben had been quick to point out that May needed a support system just as much as Peter did. Ben-Three had then said something about Gwen Stacy, and from there, a dozen names had flown about: MJ, Harry, Flash, Eddie, Doc Ock, J. Jonah Jameson. In the end, they’d decided to make support groups for all of them. A support group for all of the lives that had touched Peter’s, across the multiverse.

“I thought my Peter would have figured it out by now,” Ben-Three said as he watched the display. “He’s a smart kid. He just seems a little distracted.”

“He’s busy getting to know the other Peters,” Ben said. “That’s a good thing.”

Ben-Three was about to say something, but all of a sudden, the door swung open, and a brown-haired woman and a teenage girl in a sweater vest poked their heads into the room. “Do you know these guys?” the woman asked her younger counterpart.

“No, but they kind of remind me of Mr. Parker,” the teenager said. “He and his wife volunteered at my elementary school. Their kid was in my class…I don’t remember his name though. Something Parker, I guess.”

“You know Peter?” Ben said.

“Sort of,” the woman said, while the teenager looked toward Ben, confused. “We worked together at the Daily Bugle, a long time ago.”

“What did you say your name was?” Ben-Three asked.

“Betty Brant,” both of them said at once.

Betty Brant. He remembered now - Ben-One had talked about a girl at his Peter’s school, a girl who dreamed of becoming a journalist. She no longer remembered Peter-One, but she wouldn’t even be alive if it wasn’t for him. Ben-One had then found another Betty, one from Ben’s universe. Ben had never gotten the chance to meet her, but she and his Peter had been friends once, many years ago. They’d all agreed that the two Bettys deserved to meet, to learn from each other, to find the sister they never knew they had.

“I’m Ben Parker,” he said to the Bettys. “Peter’s uncle.”

“Peter-Two’s uncle,” Ben-Three corrected. “I’m Peter-Three’s uncle.”

“I have no idea what any of that means,” the younger Betty said.

“So…you did this for Peter?” the older Betty asked.

“We did this for all of you,” Ben said. “All of us Bens…we got to know each other, but only after we were already gone. We wanted you to meet your alternate selves while you were still around to appreciate it. And after our Peters met, we felt like we had to do it for everyone else too.”

“But how?” the younger Betty asked. “It’s not like you guys are superheroes or anything.”

“It’s complicated,” Ben said, but he tried his best to explain how they’d done it, how it had taken just about every Ben in the multiverse to create the support groups. The blond Peter’s Ben had borrowed some technology from Alchemax, but it was Ben-One who had called in a favor from someone in his universe – the one where superheroes were a dime a dozen – and made it work. Noir Ben and Peter B.’s Ben had finalized the details – the location, the date, the list of attendees. Ben had built the security system, his thirty-five years as an electrician finally coming in handy. And Ben-Three – his closest friend, his brother - had written the invitations.

The rest of the Ben Parker Support Group had asked the two of them to keep an eye on the security system, to ensure that everything was going according to plan. Now, it was all up to Ben and Ben-Three to make sure that their grand project turned out to be a success.

“That’s incredible,” the younger Betty said once he finished. “But, uh, I mostly just wanted to say thank you. It’s really cool – getting to meet another me.”

“I think so too,” the older Betty said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” both Bens said at once, and as the Bettys headed back to Room #13, Ben looked back at the screen. Most of the support groups were like the Peters and the Mays and the Bettys, a newfound family of alternate selves, but he saw one Flash Thompson punching another in the face, one Eddie Brock biting another’s head off, and somehow, the support groups that weren’t working mattered far more to him than all the ones that were.

“Did we do the right thing?” Ben asked.

It was a question Ben had asked his alternate self a million times over the last few years. It was something he’d thought about every time he met with the other Ben Parkers of the multiverse. And now, as he and Ben-Three watched the support groups on the screen in front of them, he couldn’t help but wonder if they were truly helping, if they were using their power responsibly, like they’d sworn to do.

“I think so,” Ben-Three said.

“Even with Eddie?”

“He and that alien goo thing got to bond. That has to count for something, right?” Ben-Three said. “We did everything we could, Ben-Two. We did our job. We were able to do good things for other people, and we fulfilled our moral obligation to do those things. Because that’s what’s at stake here. Not choice. Responsibility.”

Ben-Three was right, of course. They’d done something great for Peter and his friends, something they could be proud of. They’d used the power they had for good, but even so, Ben couldn’t help but chuckle.

“There must be a better way of putting that…”

Chapter Text

With great power comes great responsibility.

May had said that to Peter, the day she’d died, and ever since then, he’d tried his best to live by her words. It had been his responsibility to stop that multiversal crisis. It had been his responsibility to bring everyone home. It had been his responsibility to cure all of those supervillains, even the Green Goblin, the monster who’d murdered his aunt. It had been his responsibility to keep on being that friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, even when no one remembered him, not even the people he loved most.

And now, with a can of spray paint in hand, it was his responsibility to help Miles Morales finish his mural.

As the day went on, the Peter Parker Support Group seemed to get bigger and bigger. Peter-Two, Peter-Three, Peter B., and Miles were all still there, but now, there was a mysterious figure in the corner, dressed in a black trenchcoat, sipping on an egg cream as he attempted to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Next to him, there was a ghost version of Peter, a blond man in his twenties, and as Peter and Miles talked about their ideas for the mural, the blond Peter suddenly jumped up and started speaking.

“All of this pointing is getting old. We need some new nicknames,” the blond Peter said before gesturing toward Peter-Three. “What about…Skateboard Peter?” He then pointed to Peter-Two and Peter B., who were busy having a friendly argument over whether or not Joe’s really was the best pizzeria in New York. “And you guys will be Pizza Peter and Burrito Peter, and the Peter with the trenchcoat will be Noir Peter, and the high school kid’s Baby Peter, and Miles will be Miles, obviously. What do you guys think?”

“Uh, don’t you need a nickname too?” Miles said.

“What about Blond Peter?” Pizza Peter, better known as Peter-Two, suggested.

“I like Ghost Peter,” Peter-Three/Skateboard Peter said. “Can we call him Ghost Peter?”

“Or Dead Peter,” Spider-Man Noir said, not even bothering to look up from his Rubik’s Cube.

“Ooh, I’ve got a good one,” Peter said. “We could call him RIPeter!”

“That’s clever,” Peter-Three said. “I like it.”

“Me too,” Peter-Two said.

“Ugh, fine. I guess I’m RIPeter now,” the ghostly Peter said. “But what does that even stand for? Rest in Peter? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Don’t overthink it, RIPeter,” Noir said from the corner.

“Wait, I’m curious about something,” RIPeter said. “Have any of you ever recorded a Christmas album?”

“No?” Peter said, genuinely confused.

“MJ’s the singer, not me,” Peter-Two said.

“Did you make a Christmas album?” Peter B. said. “Because that’s crazy.”

“You invested in a Spider-Man-themed restaurant,” Miles reminded Peter B. “I don’t think you have the right to judge.”

“And it was one of the worst decisions I ever made,” Peter B. said.

“Hey, we’ve all got to make money somehow, right?” Peter-Three said. “I mean, web fluid isn’t free.”

“Unless you’re Peter-Two,” Peter said.

“Are you making fun of me again?” Peter-Two said.

As his alternate selves bantered, Peter looked back toward the blank wall. He didn’t have Miles’ artistic abilities: in fact, he could barely draw a simple shape without a slip of his finger turning it into a squiggly mess. Science had always been more his thing, but when he thought about it, art and science weren’t all that different. They were both about asking questions and thinking about the world in a new way, about creativity and intuition and invention.

So he stared straight at the spot he wanted to spray, and he pictured a perfect circle in his mind, and he aimed the nozzle of his can toward the wall…

And he covered the whole thing in bright red paint.

“Oh, I-I’m so sorry,” Peter said to Miles. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“No worries,” Miles said, already starting to paint over it. “We’ll use it as a background.”

The two of them kept on painting, and slowly but surely, it all began to come together. With Miles’ help, Peter’s clumsy splotches of paint turned into something beautiful, and when they were both done, when Peter stepped back to admire the painting, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

Miles had painted the two of them in their Spider-Suits, with their arms slung around each other and huge smiles on their faces. Their big brothers were standing right behind them, and Miles had painted them all – Peter B., Spider-Man Noir, RIPeter, Peter-Two, and Peter-Three – in bold, bright colors and with so much detail that it seemed like the portraits might come to life at any moment.

Across the top, he’d written, “The Peter Parker Support Group Was Here.”

“That’s really good,” Peter-Two said as he glanced toward the mural.

“Yeah, I think it’s awesome,” RIPeter said.

“Nice work, Miles,” Peter B. said.

“Baby Peter helped too, you know,” Miles said.

“Do you guys really have to call me that?” Peter complained, but no one answered him.

Peter looked toward the mural one more time, and his mind drifted toward the letter he’d received in the mail a few weeks earlier, toward the person who must have written it, toward the great mystery of the Peter Parker Support Group. “Uhh…do you guys think whoever invited us here is okay with this?” Peter said. “It’s not like we asked for permission or anything.”

“If they care enough to bring us all together…I don’t think they’ll be mad,” Peter-Two said. “I think they’ll be proud of you.”

“Who do you guys think organized this anyways?” RIPeter asked, but before Peter could say anything, he felt a tingling sensation at the back of his skull.

“Did you guys feel that?” Peter asked.

“Yeah, my Spider-Sense is tingling too,” RIPeter said.

Peter swung toward the door, pulled on his mask, and opened the door, and when he looked down the hallway, he saw a girl in a white Spider-suit fighting something that looked like an alien made of black slime with far too many teeth. “Hey!” he shouted to Spider-Woman. “Need any help?”

Just as the monster lunged toward her, baring his teeth, Spider-Woman leapt out of the way and webbed the creature to a wall. “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ve got it,” she said to Peter.

“Wait, Gwen?” Miles said as he ran over to the doorway.

“Oh hey, Miles,” Gwen said. “I didn’t know you were here too.”

“You know her?” Peter said.

“She showed up in my dimension once,” Miles explained. “You know, when I first became Spider-Man.”

Suddenly, Peter spotted a familiar face. “Whoa, hold on,” the boy with the MIT sweatshirt said, holding his phone in the air. “Two Spider-Men and a Spider-Woman? How many of them are there?”

“Is that Flash Thompson?” Peter said.

“Spider-Man knows my name!” Flash shouted. He immediately sprinted toward Room #1, but as he came closer, Spider-Man Noir webbed the door shut.

“What was that for?” Peter asked.

“Well, you probably don’t want that shabbaroon figuring out your secret identity, do you?” Noir said.

“No, not really,” Peter admitted.

Peter wanted to say something more, but suddenly, Peter-Three turned to Miles. “Did you say her name was Gwen?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Miles answered.

“G-Gwen Stacy?”

Miles nodded, and Peter-Three glanced toward the door. “She could have been Spider-Woman,” he said. “Gwen could have been Spider-Woman, and I took that away from her.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Peter-Two said. “You did everything you could, and…we all make mistakes. It’s kind of part of the job.”

“And you saved MJ when you were in my universe!” Peter said. “That was awesome!”

Suddenly, Miles looked toward the doorway again, and as Peter’s Spider-Sense buzzed again, he noticed a curly haired woman with four silicone tentacles strapped to her back, cackling maniacally as she ran down the hallway.

“SPIDER-MAN!” she shouted. “Did you really think these little support groups would stop me from finishing what we started?”

“Uh, I’ve actually got to go,” Miles said to the other Spider-Men as he leapt out of the room, narrowly avoiding one of Doc Ock’s tentacles. “I think Doc Ock’s going to try to rob that bank again.”

“Hey Miles, if you have any nanotechnology in your suit, you could probably pair it with her tentacles,” Peter suggested. “Then you can just use Bluetooth to keep them from attacking you!”

“Or you could talk to Olivia,” Peter-Two said. “You know, have a nice heart-to-heart, remind her of the ideals she’s forgotten.”

“Or maybe you could wait for her to get hit by a truck again?” Peter B. said.

“I don’t have time for any of that!” Miles said as he backflipped away from Doc Ock’s rampaging tentacles.

Peter looked toward his alternate selves, and he knew what he had to do. Along with the rest of the group, he launched himself out of the room and swung into battle, ready to help Miles defeat Olivia Octavius.

“Hey, could we maybe meet up again next week?” Peter-Two said to the others as he shot a web toward Doc Ock. “Same time?”

“Yeah, that…that’d be great!” Peter exclaimed. “There’s this really good shawarma place nearby - I’ll bring some next week.”

“Are you guys seriously scheduling a support group meeting in the middle of a fight?” Doc Ock said, annoyed, but the Spider-Men ignored her.

“Can Peni and Peter Porker come next time?” Miles said.

“Sure, why not?” Peter B. said.

“Wait a second,” Peter-Three said, dodging one of Doc Ock’s tentacles. “Are we a pig in another universe?”

“It’s not as weird as it sounds,” Miles insisted.

“It’s exactly as weird as it sounds,” Spider-Man Noir said.

All of a sudden, Doc Ock leapt out of the building, and Miles webbed his way after her. “See you guys next week!” he shouted as he swung out the door and back into his home universe.

“You know, last time I saw Miles, he was still figuring out how to control his powers,” Peter B. said as the Peters swung back into Room #1. “And now he’s taking on Doc Ock all by himself.”

“They grow up so fast,” Noir said.

Peter was about to join them in Room #1, but he suddenly noticed the man who’d tried to rob a convenience store earlier in the day standing in the middle of the hallway. “Aaron?” he said.

“Spider-Man,” Aaron said. “I didn’t know that you had a support group too.”

“Yeah, I do,” Peter said. “Because, you know, even your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man needs moral support sometimes.”

Aaron sighed. “Listen, I know I haven’t always been there for you, and I always haven’t done the best job of being your uncle, but…”

“Whoa, wait a second,” Peter said. “I’m not your nephew.”

“You’re not?” Aaron said. “But the other Aaron said…”

“I’m really sorry, but I’m not Miles,” Peter said. “But I met him today, and he’s awesome, so as his uncle, you must be doing something right.”

Aaron gave him a slight smile, paused for a moment, and then said, “You know, when I tried to rob that convenience store earlier, I just wanted some money to get a present for Miles.”

Peter looked back into Room #1 and he saw that Miles had left a pair of headphones on his chair. He then ran inside and placed those headphones in Aaron’s hands. “I think the other Miles would want you to have these,” he said.

“Thanks,” Aaron said.

“Yeah, no problem.” Peter paused and then said, “So…are we going to have to fight again after my support group meeting’s over?”

“No, I…I actually haven’t seen my brother in a while, so I think I’m going to go visit him,” Aaron said. “See you later, Spider-Man.”

“See you,” Peter said as he swung back into Room #1, only to find the other Peters in the middle of another conversation.

“Huh,” Peter-Two said to Peter-Three. “I didn’t know there was a Harry Osborn in your universe.”

“Did your universe’s Harry turn into a goblin too?” Peter B. asked.

“Yeah, he did,” Peter-Three said.

“Mine didn’t,” RIPeter said. “He was actually a really nice guy. I still feel bad about what happened to his dad though.”

“My universe’s Harry wasn’t a supervillain either, but he did steal the Declaration of Independence,” Spider-Man Noir said.

“Who’s Harry?” Peter asked.

“It’s a long story,” Peter-Three said, but all of a sudden, a man around Peter-Three’s age with an overpriced scarf and patches of green, scaly skin appeared in the doorway. “Wait,” Peter-Three muttered under his breath. “That’s him.”

“Hey, can we talk for a minute?” Harry said to Peter-Three.

“Yeah, sure,” Peter-Three said before turning to the rest of the support group. “I’ll see you guys next week, but…uhh…thank you. For everything.”

Peter waved goodbye to Peter-Three, and the support group continued on, but eventually, the other Peters had to leave as well. By the end of the day, there were only two of them left: Peter-One and Peter-Two.

“Don’t you have a city to save or something?” Peter asked his older brother.

Peter-Two glanced at his phone, smiling. “I’m waiting for MJ,” he explained. “Her support group is taking a while.” He paused for a moment and then said, “You know, with all of these support groups, meeting all these other versions of me…I’ve been thinking a lot about my Uncle Ben today. He would have liked to see all of us together.”

Peter nodded, thinking of his aunt and uncle, knowing that he wouldn’t be where he was without them, wishing they were here. “I think May would have liked all of this too,” he said. “Today was the first time I’ve felt like I had a family since…since I lost her.”

“Hey, you know I’ll be here if you need anything,” Peter-Two said. “And I’m sure anyone else in the Peter Parker Support Group would do the same.”

“Thanks,” Peter said.

“And let me know if you change your mind about the recommendation letters, okay? Because I think Peter-Three’s already written his.”

Just as Peter-Two’s phone buzzed again, there was a knock at the door, and when Peter opened it, he saw an elderly woman and a redhead in her forties. Peter was sure he didn’t know them, but there was something familiar about them nonetheless.

“Peter?” the older woman said.

“Yeah?” Peter said.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re Peter too.”

“No, I’m Peter-One,” Peter said, pointing toward his blue-eyed alternate self. “That’s Peter-Two.”

“It gets confusing,” Peter-Two said.

The woman looked toward Peter-Two, and that was when it all hit him. That was when Peter recognized the worried expression on the other May’s face, the kindness in her eyes, the way Peter-Two and the other MJ looked at each other, like they could take on the world together.

“Are you okay, Peter?” Peter-Two’s May asked, but all he could think of was his aunt, his selfless, supportive aunt, how the Goblin had stabbed her, how he’d watched the light leave her eyes, how he’d lost everything that night...

“Y-yeah,” Peter said, his voice shaking. “I’m okay.”

All of a sudden, the other May enveloped him in a hug. “I talked to your aunt,” she said. “She told me about everything that happened, and…you really do mean the world to her. She’s proud of you, Peter. I hope you know that.”

“And I talked to your universe’s MJ,” the other MJ chimed in. “She’s probably one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.”

“It may not feel like it right now, but there are people out there who care about you, Peter,” Peter-Two said.

Peter tried to hold it in, but the tears began to fall, and all of a sudden, Peter-Two and the other MJ came over and turned it into a group hug. “It’s going to be alright,” Peter-Two said. “We’re here for you.”

“Th-thanks,” Peter said, already feeling a little better.

“We should probably head home though,” Peter-Two said as they all let go of Peter. “But I’ll see you next week, okay?”

“See you next week,” Peter said, but as Peter-Two and his family walked out of the room, all Peter could feel was the aching in his heart, and all he could think of was everyone in his life that he’d lost – May, Ned, MJ…

“Didn’t expect to see you here.”

Peter turned around, and there she was, standing right in front of him. As she twisted the chain of her black dahlia necklace around her fingers, she looked in his direction, carefully studying him. “Uh, hey,” Peter said, nervously adjusting his mask. “I was actually just telling this to someone else, but sometimes, even your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man needs…”

“No, I get it,” MJ said. “Maybe this is going to sound a little mushy, but it’s nice to have someone who understands what you’re going through.”

“Yeah, definitely,” Peter said. “So…how did your support group go?”

“The other MJs were awesome,” MJ said. “But I didn’t think they were alternate versions of me at first. They were just so…different.”

“Well, apparently one of my alternate selves is a pig,” Peter said. “I don’t think it gets much more different than that.”

“Is this a literal or a metaphorical pig?”

“Literal…I think,” Peter said. “I’ll get to meet him next week.”

“My support group’s meeting again too,” MJ said. “We still have a lot to work through, and we haven’t figured out who sent the invitations yet. And I’m going to have to tell the Mary Janes that I’ve met the one and only Spider-Man.”

“Well, I’m not exactly the ‘one and only’ anymore.”

“Yeah, me neither,” MJ said. “You know, if you expect disappointment, you’ll never be disappointed, but…I’m kind of looking forward to next week.”

“Me too,” Peter said, but his Spider-Sense suddenly started tingling again. “Listen, I’ve got to go, but I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“See you around, Peter,” MJ said as he shot a web onto a nearby skyscraper and swung out of the building.

It took Peter a moment to process what he’d just heard.

MJ knows my name, he thought. She knows I’m Spider-Man.

But how?

Peter didn’t have an answer for that, but as he swung high above New York City, he felt a certain lightness in his chest, and for the first time in a long time, he felt like there was hope. He felt like he could find a way to go on, a way to be Peter Parker again. He could recreate the life he’d once had, or he could start everything over. He could befriend Ned again. He could rebuild his relationship with MJ.

And no matter what, his brothers would be with him every step of the way.

Peter wasn’t alone in the multiverse.

Not by a long shot.