Chapter Text
Nightwing jabs forward, striking open air with his fist as Peter ducks, and then sweeps his leg out immediately, without missing a beat.
There's a moment where Peter's brain is pushing out multiple conflicting signals: duck, jump, go left, dart right. What he ends up doing is all of them, in quick succession. He drops his head downwards, launches into the air as Dick kicks out, and then, as he lands back on the ground, throws a web at one of Tim's abandoned coffee mugs, yanks hard, and lets it break against the back of Dick’s skull, stepping in the opposite direction.
A sharp whistle blows from the corner. Peter winces.
“Well, I think that’s quite enough for now,” Alfred says primly, once the noise has faded.
“Sorry,” Peter says immediately. He raises his hands into the air. “I, uh, have this thing that kindof takes my brain over when I fight sometimes—”
“Nah, it’s fine. That’s what helmets are for.”
Peter grimaces.
While he’s wearing joggers and a t-shirt, Dick is equipped in a set of full body armor, including a motorcycle helmet. When he takes the helmet off, his hair is damp with sweat underneath. “No harm done, see?”
Peter glances towards the shattered coffee mug on the ground.
“Well, almost none.”
“So it’s an instinct thing, then?” Dick asks an hour later, once they’ve cleaned up and gone upstairs for snacks.
Snacking, in the manor, tends to mean eating whatever food Alfred has left in the fridge for them to scavenge. Today it’s a platter of sliced meat and cheese, with a large bowl of crackers that were in the pantry and a fancy little knife for spreading sauces. Peter doesn’t actually know what most of the things on the plate are called, but they taste good, and he’s hungry.
(So far, he hasn’t seen a single bag of chips. It’s starting to feel like a conspiracy. They’ve got to be hidden somewhere. Somebody has to have a stash. Peter just needs to find it.)
“Hmph?” he asks, chewing a large bite.
Dick smiles. There’s something in there that makes Peter think of Ben, of May. “Your fighting style. It’s instinct?”
Peter swallows, pushing those thoughts right back down. “Oh. I guess? Sortof. There’s this, like, voice? Feeling, maybe? In the back of my head that warns me when something bad is coming, or when I’m in danger. If I listen to it, usually I can avoid getting hit.”
“Did you ever get any formal training?” Dick’s face looks like he’s fighting hard to keep some kind of expression from leaking through–a frown, maybe.
“I, um. Not really, I guess. I used to watch fighting videos on Youtube and try to imitate the moves I saw.”
Dick slowly grabs another cracker, a slice of cheese, and a piece of what Peter thinks might be rich people's salami, stacks them together, and stares at the pile in his hand contemplatively.
“We’ll work on that,” he says.
Robin gets cleared for patrol and, subsequently, Nightwing returns to Bludhaven. Mostly.
“I'm going to do my best to split time evenly,” Dick tells Peter over a game of Chutes and Ladders he insisted on playing at 2am.
“Okay.” Peter leans over, picks up the dice, shakes them in his fist a couple of times, and then spills them out onto the table. The whole time, he feels that he’s being watched, and he does not look up.
Snake eyes. Peter picks his little green guy off the board, moves him forward two places, and then follows a slide downwards. Shucks.
“I'm going to come down to Gotham and stay at the manor on the weekends. And I'll always have my phone on me, so you can call if you need anything.”
Peter nods. Dick wins the game, and they both go to bed.
Peter checks Ned’s twitter about once a week, just to make sure everything is going well. So far, it is. Without Peter in his life, Ned appears perfectly happy and safe.
He thinks, selfishly, about sending him a message of some kind, but what would he even say? Hey, in an alternate universe where your family moved to the US, I was your best friend. Do you maybe want to be my friend here too? I know you’re, like, an actual adult and I’m a teenage vigilante halfway across the world, but I think we have a lot in common.
Or, alternatively, Does your mom still make lumpia on the weekends sometimes? Did you break your arm riding a bike in the sixth grade? Who was around to call your dad? Were you alone? Were you lonely?
It's a strange thing, to both hope something isn't true and, in the same breath, want it to be real.
Mr. Harrington’s last known address is in a somewhat dilapidated apartment building in Burnside. There’s a passcode on the front door barring entry, but Spider-man doesn’t need to enter through the front. At night, on a day he isn’t meant to be patrolling, Peter climbs the side of the building and picks the lock on the roof access.
When he finds the apartment, he knocks on the door, and the force of his hand allows it to swing freely open. Somebody else has already forced their way in.
Inside, the apartment has been pretty thoroughly destroyed. The glass surface of the coffee table is in shatters covering the floor. The cushions of the couch have been removed, thrown across the floor, and slashed open, with some stuffing scattered around them. From where he stands in the doorway, Peter can see that all of the kitchen cabinets are hanging wide open, their contents exposed and ransacked.
Peter had known, objectively, that the likelihood of finding Mr. Harrington in this apartment was slim to none, but, before he had actually seen it, he’d hoped to be able to find something useful. He hadn’t been sure what something useful could even be, but he’d figured he would know it when he saw it. Maybe. Hopefully.
Looking at the ruined living room in front of him, Peter can only think, “I wonder if they knew it when they saw it.”
He hopes not.
Peter works through the apartment diligently. He combs through the spilled trash can in the bathroom, sweeps up the glass and uses an abandoned fountain pen to poke through it all once he has it gathered, opens every container of food that’s been left behind in case it’s a hiding spot, and flips from cover to cover of every single book on the bedroom floor. He briefly considers leaving, buying a drain snake, and returning to check and make sure nothing is hidden in the bathtub. He takes the cover off of every light fixture that remains unbroken, which is only three of them. He reads through four ungraded homework assignments before deciding that, if there is a clue hidden in one of them, he might genuinely be better off never discovering it.
By the time he finds something, it’s nearing so late at night that some might start calling it early instead. It’s an accident, really. Peter’s on his stomach, scanning underneath the bed for the third time in the last hour, when he sees a small bit of shiny metal poking out from underneath a bookshelf across the room.
He moves so fast that he bangs his head on the wooden slats under the bed, curses, and rolls onto his back for a few minutes to suffer before dragging himself up. There’s something symbolic in that, Peter thinks, but he’s making the executive choice to pretend it never happened at all instead of examining any deeper.
It’s a lanyard, with an ID tag clipped onto the end of it reading Roger Harrington. The picture shows a version of Mr. Harrington that fits much closer with what Peter remembers him to be. Smaller writing underneath the picture identifies him as a Project Consultant.
On the back, in bold print, it says LexCorp Incorporated.
Once he’s safely back in his room at the manor, Peter opens up the franken-laptop and starts googling.
There are things about travelling to a parallel dimension that you never think about until you’ve done it; the prize among them is not knowing the easy things, the things that everybody knows without even needing to talk about them. The first of these that Peter encountered in Gotham was Batman. Within a few hours of arriving, he’d stumbled into a bodega, hoping to buy some food and a dry t-shirt, and as he’d been ringing up, he had seen a sign behind the register proudly proclaiming, ‘Batman loves our sandwiches!’
When he’d asked what it meant, the cashier had laughed and said, “Yeah, I don’t know how, like, true it is, but Mr. Rivera swears the Batman came in and got five bacon egg and cheeses during the night shift a couple years ago. It seems like every little corner shop in Gotham says that, though, and none of them have any proof, so, like, take that as you will.”
He’d spent the next three days convinced that Batman was an urban legend. His universe had Mothman, and this one had Batman. It had taken seeing him with his own eyes, sitting on a rooftop and peering over the edge as a massive man wearing a full costume beat the shit out of some thugs, to realize how deeply wrong that assumption was. Peter started spending much more time in the library.
When he types LexCorp into the search bar, it becomes immediately clear that this is one of those situations.
‘Originally founded as an aerospace engineering firm,’ his screen reads, ‘LexCorp has become one of the world's largest, most diversified multinational corporations.’
LexCorp has its fingers in everything, Peter soon realizes. They have manufacturing plants, they own apartment buildings, they have dozens of research centers focused on different subjects, they own airports, they run a few casinos. They have several buildings just in Gotham, though they appear to be centered in Metropolis.
After staring at the Wikipedia article for ten minutes, he walks across the room, grabs the phone off of his bedside table where it’s charging, and texts Tim.
Peter: hey so would you say that LexCorp is shady at all
Peter: just wondering
The message is immediately marked as read. Tim types, stops, types again, stops, and types again intermittently for several minutes, and then the phone starts buzzing as a call comes through.