Chapter Text
Peter
Alright, Karen, let’s do this one last time. My name is Peter Parker. I was bitten by a radioactive spider and since then I’ve been Spider-man. I’ve done a lot of things in my time as Spider-man, I’ve saved the city, I fell in love, and I helped to save the world. I got to work alongside the Avengers and steal Captain America’s shield! But I’ve lost a lot of things too. My Uncle Ben, my mentor Tony, my Aunt May, and even my entire universe in the end. But I learned a long time ago that no matter how hard you get hit you have to get back up. I’ve made mistakes in my time and this last mistake led me to the discovery that I wasn’t the only Spider-man. I met two other versions of myself from alternate universes and I learned that there was a lot more out there than I ever expected. I’m discovering that now. After my last mistake, after I tried too hard to fix things I had to choose between the end of my universe or leaving it all behind and being erased from the memories of everyone I’ve ever known.
I felt kind of lost for a long time but now I live in a city called Gotham and I’ve met people that feel like maybe they could be family. No, yeah, I think, I think that it’s okay for me to call them family. They’re all vigilantes like me and they started out young like I did.
There’s Jason Todd, Red Hood. He’s a little bit prickly and he insists that he’s a criminal, not a vigilante but he does a lot more work towards keeping Crime Alley and the less fortunate of Gotham safe than he does building his crime empire. He found me on my first night here in Gotham and I think he felt bad for me or something cause he kind of took me under his wing and he’s taught me how things work here. We live together in an abandoned Opera house that we’ve been working really hard on making an Opera home. It was just the two of us at first but Jason comes from a big family and one by one they all kind of showed up and brought me into their family.
Tim Drake was the second teenage vigilante I got to meet in this world. He’s known as Robin, or well he was Robin. That’s kind of up in the air right now. We got off to kind of a rough start, Me and Jason flew all the way to Jump City on the other side of the country to check in with Tim and see how he was doing but Jason has a habit of turning into a big green rage monster that would give the Hulk a run for his money and he attacked Tim instead. I solved it though! I kept them apart and then I took Jason down and got us out of there before any real trouble could happen. Tim isn’t one to let things go though. He tracked me down here in Gotham and we bonded over my Stark tech and science. Jason acted pissed about it but he never really complained too much once Tim started living at the Opera house with us.
The next person I met was Dick Grayson, he’s the first Robin and currently Nightwing. He’s the oldest of the siblings and also weirdly kind of my dad. Biologically at least. I met him for the first time as his hero identity. I snuck into Gotham’s neighboring city Bludhaven to make some more web fluid in a school there and on the way out I ran into him on the rooftops. He was chasing me back into Gotham when a bomb was dropped on Bludhaven that blew the entire city up. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. The amount of death and destruction all at once. So many innocent people. Sometimes, I still hear it in my sleep, the normal sounds of a city and people living their lives going silent all at once. I can’t imagine how hard it is for Dick, the protector of Bludhaven. We met a few more times after that before I got to know who he really was. I kind of freaked out a little bit at first but who wouldn’t after seeing their dead dad back alive and like ten years younger than he’d been when you were born? It was a little awkward at first but being able to spend this time with him and to get to know him as a person has been something I wouldn’t trade for the world. I think that I wouldn’t mind actually considering him a dad. But I’m not actually his kid so I don’t want to weird him out or anything.
The day I met Dick for the first time as himself was also the day I met Barbara Gordon, formerly Batgirl and now known as Oracle. During the day she works the circulation desk at the Gotham library but at night she works behind the scenes as the eyes and ears of the Bats and a hacker extraordinaire. She’s honestly an icon really. She doesn’t come around the Opera house much because we haven’t finished putting in the accessible features yet but I’ve spent a lot of my free time with her in the library and in her base of operations the Gotham Clocktower. She coordinates everything for the Bats and runs her own team the Birds of Prey at the same time. There’s a lot that I can learn from her and I hope that one day she’ll be willing to teach me.
Cassandra Cain chose us before we chose her. She’s been trained as an assassin since birth but she ran away from that life and brought herself to Gotham where she met Bruce and Barbara. She kept popping up while I was on my patrols and we’d share meals together. She’s not much of a talker but she doesn’t mind when I fill the silence and we’ve learned to speak in other ways, like sign language and Morse code. She’s got a really warm presence that reminds me a lot of Aunt May. Sometimes just having her at my side helps me feel more grounded. I think she might have some kind of magic calming powers though she insists she’s just normal whenever I bring it up.
Damian Al-Ghul Wayne was the sixth bat to show up in Gotham. He found me and Jason one night while we were on a stakeout. I guess that before Jason came back to Gotham he was living with an organization called the League of Assassins and one of his jobs while he was there was to care for Damian. Who is not only basically the Prince of this league but Bruce Wayne’s only biological kid that he hadn’t even known existed for eight years. I wasn’t too sure about Damian at first. He comes off as a snobby rich kid who’s never been told no and sure that is kind of true a lot of the time but he’s also just a kid who wasn’t allowed to have a childhood. I can see the good in him and since I have the less dangerous day patrols I’ve kind of taken him on as my protege, trying to teach him what I know about being a vigilante. He’s got a lot of training with fighting and stuff but he’s never been allowed to interact with common people so I want him to see that there’s good in everyone. One day, possibly soon, he’ll take on the mantle of Robin as the fifth holder of that name but until he earns his wings he’s going by Fledgling.
One of the most important people that I’ve met since coming to Gotham is Alfred Pennyworth. He’s the butler for the Wayne family in title but honestly, he’s more like a grandfather to all of the younger ones and a father to Bruce. He took one look at me the morning after I arrived in Gotham and immediately welcomed me into the family. He always seems to know what’s going to be needed even before anyone asks for it. Tim says he’s omnipotent and immortal and honestly I’m kind of inclined to agree with him.
Bruce Wayne is, well I’m not really sure how to describe Bruce Wayne. He is or was Batman, and that was a pretty cool thing to be. He didn’t have any powers but he fought alongside the big hitters in the Justice League like Superman and Wonder Woman. The villains in Gotham fear him and the people trust him. Trusted him. I’ve got to get better at that.
There was a big battle a few weeks ago. For nearly two months this bad guy named Darkseid took control of the entire world with this thing called the Anti-life equation. He used it to control everyone. I managed to escape it, I don’t know why it didn’t work on me. Maybe because I’m not originally from this universe? Maybe because of my Spider sense? I’m not sure and with just me and Damian left to protect Gotham, there wasn’t really time to look into it. We won in the end. Batman shot Darkseid with a specially made bullet. No one really knows for sure except for Superman but I think that for just a moment, after Darkseid died the whole universe might have ended. I don’t know what Mr Kent did to bring it back, no one has really been up for talking about it. Not since Bruce died. Not since Mr Kent carried him out of that battlefield and laid him down in front of his family.
We didn’t have a funeral. There was a small gathering, just the family and Bruce’s closest friends. But to the rest of the world, Batman is still alive. Bruce Wayne is still alive. I think it’s doing more harm than good honestly. The criminals of Gotham have noticed his absence and they’re getting bolder. It’s barely been a month since he died and everything has seriously gone to shit. Even with the whole family out patrolling as much as we can we’ve had to call in help from some allies in order to keep Gotham under control. But it’s hard to keep the city under control when the family can barely keep together.
Things have been… tense to say the least. I think everyone was expecting Dick to pick up the cowl and fill in as Batman but he hasn’t done that yet. He says that Gotham can survive without Batman. I thought he was right at first. I thought about my own universe, my New York. There’s not really one hero that holds up the entire city the way that Batman did. And sure Batman was never really alone except for the very beginning but that cape and cowl meant more to the city of Gotham than anything I’d seen in my own world. It’s like without Batman the whole city is caving in on itself and I’m not sure how long we can keep it from happening.
Jason and Tim really haven’t been handling things well. Bruce left behind these holographic messages for everyone and we all listened to them one by one. I don’t know what Jason’s said but he stormed out of the Batcave right after he listened to it and I’ve barely seen him since and when I do his eyes are always a shocking green. I’m worried that we might be losing him to the Lazarus pit again and I’m not sure how we can get him back. Not with Bruce gone. Not when Jason and him never had a chance to really talk through their issues.
Tim on the other hand, has been working himself to the bone. He doesn’t sleep and the only thing he consistently drinks are energy drinks and coffee. Even my old methods of forcing him don’t work anymore. He’d said, shortly after Bruce’s death that he thought Bruce might still be alive and I don’t think he’s going to be able to let go of that. I don’t know if it was just his mind telling him that, or if there was something in his message from Bruce that he thought was a clue. But Tim is the smartest of all of us. Maybe even a greater detective than Bruce was. I can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe he saw something out there. Something his eyes caught and hasn’t been able to make sense of yet. I haven’t been able to really talk with him much. I slept for three days after the battle was over and when I woke up I was back in the Opera house and everything had already gone to shit. Tim’s been working on his own or with one of the allies they brought in. Whenever he’s in the same room as Dick they start fighting.
I just want, I wish. I wish that for even just one day things could go back to normal. I miss the days when we could all get together and have fun. But I’m not sure that it’s going to happen. Steph is off on some mission with Barbara, and Kate is dealing with her grief by shutting everyone out. Damian has become violent. More violent than he was even when he first got here. I’ve tried to help him the best that I can but I don’t think he’s going to listen to anyone right now. No matter how hard Alfred and Dick try they can’t seem to keep him out of trouble.
I can’t help but feel like… like I failed again. I was the one who gave Batman the radion bullet. I was the one who had the time and the freedom to come up with the plan and I couldn’t do that. I passed off the responsibility again just like I did in Europe. I know that Dick is nothing like Beck. I know that he is actually someone I can trust and that he did the best he could with what he had but I was free. I could have gone alone. I had Jason’s guns and I had the radion bullet. It feels like the battle against Thanos all over again. I handed the gauntlet off to Captain Marvel and in the end, it was Tony who had to use the stones. Maybe I could have survived the stones. Maybe I could have survived the attack from Darkseid. It was a stupid decision for me to make. I need to be better. Spider-man needs to be better.