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Jess is the one who asks. She pulls up outside of where Hobie’s staying, looks over her glasses and asks, “You really wanna live in a place like this, kid?”
Hobie tilts his head at her from where he’s duct taping his boot back together, the sole having fallen out the last time he got crashed into a building by one of Osborn’s goons. He’s currently squatting in an apartment block scheduled for demolition in a month. There’s a woman with two kids in the apartment Hobie used to live in on the second floor, but it’s the only one with a functional plumbing system so he happily gave it up, and he’ll make sure she gets another place in a month when the contractors show up.
“You one of the construction guys here to bring the place down?” he asks her, biting off his tape and flattening the edges over the leather.
“No?”
“Then I don’t see why it’s your fuckin’ business where I live, mate.”
Jess - he doesn’t know her name is Jess, yet, but whatever - looks at him like she’s seeing something. She’s not pregnant at this point, beyond a baby bump, but Hobie’s mum taught him to identify mothers on sight just in case he gets lost somewhere and needs to find someone trustworthy. Jess has a mother’s look about her.
“I’m not bringin’ the building down,” she tells him. Her accent’s American - what he hears on TV from the black women in sitcoms, who are all stereotypes. “But I could offer you a better place.”
At first, Hobie says no. Jess doesn’t tell him much, but she tells him enough to trigger that little sense in the back of his radioactive bug brain that says get the hell away from this place and all it stands for.
It goes off pretty often.
Spider Society, she calls it.
“I don’t do societies,” he tells her. He buries his hand in his pocket so she doesn’t notice him slipping his webshooter over his wrist.
Community, she talks about. People like you.
“You’re not like me,” he tells her. He grabs his guitar and checks that his amps have power.
“Right,” she says. “Someone like you wouldn’t be in a society.”
Hobie grins at her in a way he knows will tick her nerves. Leans against an amp and crosses his arms.
Shirty, he calls her, ‘cuz she’s got anger in her eyes and the line of her mouth and he doesn’t think she quite knows what it means.
Kid, she calls him, ‘cuz she thinks it’s true.
No, he says, and she starts to leave, and he realises--
“You can go to any universe you want?”
(There’s a warehouse some ways across town, a decommissioned Oscorp one that has a big metal door to stop folks from getting in.)
(Not much of a problem for someone with superstrength.)
Jess looks over her shoulder. “I would have thought that was implied.”
Hobie looks over her, at the rip in reality lighting her face gold. “Just with that li’l bobbin, yeah?”
(Strewn across the tables in that warehouse are schematics, borderline philosophical equations, written in a jagged hand and a dozen different inks.)
(Tech parts, amps, the idea of sonic destabilisation that can go through more than just this world.)
Jess gives him a bit of a smile. She knows she’s gotten him. “You wanna see?”
A watch. His chance of freedom, of getting the hell out of his reality and finding other ways to help his people, and it’s all hidden in a little watch. Hobie can wear it around his wrist, over his webshooter, can hide it under his jackets. It’s so small.
“This is Miguel O’Hara,” the avatar girl tells him - Marge? - and she’s got that underlying anger in her voice that Hobie recognises very, very well.
He raises an eyebrow as O’Hara’s platform lowers down and down. He’s got an intimidating figure, the kind that Kingpin has, if to a lesser degree. He stands dramatically, the spider on his back closer to a skull.
Hobie doesn’t like him.
“I’m surprised you got him here,” is the first thing Hobie hears Miguel O’Hara say.
“Just got to give the kid the right motivation,” Jess - he knows her name is Jess, now - tells Miguel with a dangerous kind of smirk.
O’Hara built the watch. O’Hara knows how to build it again.
“Right, well, this has been nice, but I’ve gotta go see a man about a dog, so.” Hobie gestures over his shoulder.
O’Hara pauses for a moment, figuring out what Hobie’s saying, before he says, “So soon?”
Hobie’s starting to think O’Hara doesn’t like him either.
Pavitr Prabhakar sees Hobie and immediately tries to fight him. That makes him alright in Hobie’s book, especially because Hobie totally wins. He then declares that Hobie is going to be his best asshole friend, and Hobie laughs and punches him in the shoulder and doesn’t disagree. Pav’s nice and smart and sticks to his own most of the time. He gets along with Hobie well, even if he’s a bit naive and doesn’t put his whole ass into anything that deserves it.
“I’m makin’ my own watch,” Hobie tells Pav when they’re both lying on Hobie’s bed staring at the collapsing roof of the building Hobie’s squatting in. “The others don’t know.”
Pav touches his bare toes to the skin of Hobie’s thigh. They’re cold. There are glow in the dark stars on the roof, and they make Pav’s hair shine green-gold.
“Good,” Pav tells the glow in the dark stars. His eyes shine in the dim light. “I am going to help you.”
Jess grabs him by the arm as he’s exploring HQ. He slaps her hand away.
“Whatever you’re doing, kid, stop,” she whispers low enough that no one other than him will hear her.
“I do whatever the hell I want, shirty,” he tells her. “You gonna try and stop me?”
Jess’ eye twitches behind her glasses. “You keep going on like that and you’re going to do something you’re going to regret.”
“I don’t believe in regret,” Hobie snarks.
“I think it’s interesting,” Pav tells him one day, when they’re both bent over diagrams in Pav’s high school lab, Pav’s watch in pieces on one of the tables, “that Miguel isn’t letting anyone go to sixteen-ten.”
“Wha’chu on about?” Hobie looks up from his soldering iron.
Pav doesn’t meet his eyes, poking at the glitching oyster Hobie’s brought him. “About a year ago, an interdimensional rift was formed, which caused all the small fractures that are sending random things through. It originated in sixteen-ten.”
“And sixteen-ten’s Spider-Man i’n’t here?”
“And sixteen-ten’s Spider-Man is explicitly not to be contacted,” Pav adds.
“Huh,” Hobie hums.
“The glitching doesn’t target the nervous system.”
O’Hara looks up. “What?”
“The glitching. When you go to a different dimension. Dun’t have anything to do with the nervous system.” Hobie tosses him a USB drive. O’Hara plugs it in and raises his eyebrows at Hobie’s calculations and observations scrolling down his holographic screen.
“Huh,” O’Hara mutters.
“You could make the watches slimmer with that, yeah? Redirect energy to make the battery life last longer.” Hobie runs his hand through his wicks.
O’Hara gives him a cautious look. “What do you want, Brown?”
Brown. God, Hobie hates being called that.
“Spider-Man sixteen-ten. Why aren’t we ‘llowed to talk to him?” Hobie spins his guitar in his hand and leans on a chair.
O’Hara stares at him for a moment before pinching his nose. “Yeah, right, you’re new.”
Hobie spins around in his chair again, just to watch O’Hara’s eye twitch.
“Spider-Man sixteen-ten was bitten by a spider brought in from another universe. He’s an anomaly. Shouldn’t exist. Causes anomalies wherever he goes. The easiest way to contain him is to keep him in his own universe.”
Anomaly. Shouldn’t exist.
Contain.
He catches Margo’s eye on the way out. She flickers but doesn’t lose his gaze.
He tilts his head.
“His name’s Miles Morales,” Margo says, ostensibly doing work on her computer. “He’s fourteen.”
Hobie helps the mum and her kids move. He’s got some cash to spare now that he’s eating on other people’s dimes, enough to give the mum some time to take care of her kids.
“You’ve been vanishing,” the mum notes, putting seatbelts on her kids as Hobie puts boxes of her belongings in the back of the taxi. “Getting a lonely look in your eyes and then disappearing off the face of the Earth. I’ve looked.”
Hobie sighs. “Yeah. Guess I have.”
“This is the last I’m gonna see of you, innit?”
Hobie gives her a grin. “Guess it is. Don’t need me bringin’ trouble to your door.”
The mum looks at him. Really looks at him with hazel green eyes. “You’re facin’ something bigger than you, aren’t ya?”
“Everythin’ I face is bigger than me, mate. I’m wee tiny.”
It’s a joke, almost.
“Ask wha’chu wanna ask,” she tells him.
He closes the boot of the taxi. Leans against it.
“It’s wrong, innit? Containin’ someone, even if you got a reason for it. People deserve to be free.”
“That’s not what you wanna ask.”
He looks at her. At her hazel green eyes. “I’ve found folks that can get me outta here. They’re not shit people, but they’re doin’ shit things. I don’t know how to bring 'em to the ground.”
The mum looks out over the ruins that pass as a town. Hobie’s seen worlds other than this, seen places where something that looks like a metropolis to him is the worst of the worst.
“Shit people doing shit things need to be killed,” she says. “But good people doing shit things… They just need to have some sense beaten into them.”
“I don’t think I’m the one to do that. They don’t know me.”
She looks through the window at her sleeping sons. “Then you’re not the one to do that. Teach the one who is.”
“He’s fourteen,” Hobie tells the skyline.
“We were all fourteen once.” She looks at the stars. “But that’s all the more reason he shouldn’t be trapped.”
Hobie looks at the ground, at his duct taped boots. “Here, twenty quid. For the road.”
“I can’t take this.”
“I won’t need it.”
She taps his chest, the holes in his fishnet shirt. “You’re a pretty shit capitalist.”
“That’s ‘cuz I’m an anarchist.”
She smiles.
He never sees her again.
He doesn’t tell Pav. Doesn’t know how he can tell Pav.
Pav notices, because despite how empty headed he seems he’s damn observant when it comes to people and he’s also kind of the only friend Hobie has. But he notices how focussed Hobie is on building the watch, how little he’s sleeping, how his hands start shaking when he thinks too hard about it.
Pav drags him into bed - he’s got a semi-decent apartment nowadays, credit to Jess - and lies on top of him until he stops trying to get up.
“You can’t fight a war on all fronts at once,” Pav tells him, face buried in his collarbone. “Small battles, one at a time, that’s how you win a war.”
“Right,” Hobie says. This apartment doesn’t have glow in the dark stars, but there’s a hole in the wall that the sun sets behind, staining the room gold. “Small battles.” He runs his fingers through Pav’s hair, absentmindedly braiding tiny plaits in it.
“Gwen,” Jess says. “Hobie. Hobie, this is the new kid, Gwen.”
“Hi,” Gwen says, pulling a strand of hair behind her ear. “Uh, I kinda left everything I own at home. Jess said you could help me out, maybe?”
Hobie raises an eyebrow at Jess. Jess raises an eyebrow right back.
“Ugh. Right good, then. Come in, I’ll grab you some clothes.” He leaves the door open and rummages through the boxes of clothes he’s left around for when someone inevitably tries to kick him out again, half an ear on Gwen and Jess’ conversation in his doorway.
“Uh, thanks, Jess,” Gwen whispers.
“I’ll leave you to it. Call if you need anything,” Jess answers, and Hobie’s room is stained gold as a portal appears.
Hobie grabs a pair of boots that he grew out of, a knitted cardie that some Spider-Man fan left out for him, a band tee, sports bra and period underwear, and a pair of jeans that are more holes than denim.
“Here,” he tells her, holding out the pile.
She stares at the pile, then slowly up at him, then down at the clothes again. “Um,” she starts. “I don’t need a… bra. I don’t-- um.”
Hobie nods and tucks the bra in his pocket. “They’re bloody uncomfortable anyway. I don’t got any boxers, but I think those’ll work well enough.”
She stares at him. She’s much more obviously out of place in his apartment than Jess and Pav, with watercolour staining her skin and hair, her eyes. “You don’t-- Oh!”
He smirks at her, grabs her around the shoulders and guides her to the laundry so she can change in peace. “Tell me if you need any oestrogen, my dealer does a two-for-one sale.”
“I’ll stick to a pharmacy,” she says with a little laugh, those watercolour eyes staring up at him like she’s never met someone like her before. Maybe she hasn’t.
Hobie wears his fishnet crop top and a shrug the next morning, so his top surgery scars are in clear view, and dances around his kitchen as he cooks some eggs. I was a Teenage Anarchist, he’s playing, because he’s nothing if not a stereotype.
He flips the fried eggs onto his plastic plates, pausing to do some absolutely epic air guitar with his spatula.
His door crashes open.
“Hobie!” Pav yells, “I’ve figured out how to build the--”
Hobie slams his hand over Pav’s mouth with a worried glance at Gwen’s room, and Pav gives an offended grunt before he flips Hobie over his head, but Hobie manages to grab his legs on the way down and then they’re both on the floor, wrestling.
“You fuckin’ numpty,” Hobie tells Pav, and Pav kicks him in the stomach for it, but Hobie’s got a hold of his wrists and not having far to kick means it doesn’t really do anything. “Watch your damn Queen o’ the South!”
“I have no idea what you’re saying,” Pav says cheerfully, and Hobie manages to throw his leg out and throw his weight over until he’s got Pav pinned beneath him.
“Um.”
Hobie and Pav both glance up (or down, in Pav’s case). Gwen’s standing in the doorway in Hobie’s lended clothes minus the boots, eyes wide and face flushed with watercolour blush.
“Hobie, you didn’t tell me you had a girl over,” Pav gleefully says, wriggling. Hobie doesn’t let up on his pin.
“Right, yeah, Pav, this is Gwen, Gwendy, this is the biggest cunt in the land,” Hobie introduces.
“Hi!” Pav calls, waving his fingers.
“Um,” Gwen says again, blush only getting worse.
Hobie realises that he’s straddling Pav with his wrists pinned over his head and both of them panting and grins, pushing Pav’s head into the carpet as he gets up. “Hope you aren’t allergic to eggs, Gwendy.”
“No, uh, no, I’m not.” She clears her throat and sits on one of Hobie’s chairs when he hands her her plate.
“This ain’t nothing,” Hobie tells Pav.
“She’s wearing your clothes,” Pav responds with a demon’s grin.
“She di’n’t have nothin’ else, you nonce,” Hobie tells him, swiping his plate out of Pav’s reach as the asshole steals one of his eggs.
“Didn’t she?” Pav asks, wiggling his eyebrows.
Hobie pushes him as he goes to sit down.
Gwen talks about Miles. Asks them if he’s part of Spider Society yet.
Hobie meets Pav’s eyes. “Haven’t met a Miles. Where’s he from?”
“I figured it out,” Pav whispers in the laundry with the machines on so Gwen can’t hear them. “But my reality doesn’t have what we need, and I don’t think yours does either.”
Hobie taps out a rhythm on the machine he’s leaning on. “So we need to steal it.”
“I don’t go to HQ often enough for them not to be suspicious.”
“Right.” Hobie runs his hand through his wicks. “Right.”
“You’ve got this, bro.”
Hobie chuckles and punches Pav’s shoulder. “‘Course I do. Who d’you think you’re talkin’ to, mate?”
“You play?” Hobie asks Gwen. She’s more often in his reality than not nowadays, and she’s alright. She’s a nice kid, with a backbone and snark and enough opinions to make her interesting to talk to. There are Gwens in other universes in the same way there aren’t Hobies - she’s a secondary love interest who trips and dies before the finish line. She’s to them what her Peter was to her.
She looks away from his guitar. Tucks her hair behind her ear again. “Uh, no. I play drums.”
“Aces.” He swings his guitar over his shoulder and pulls his webshooter over his wrist. “I’m headin’ to practise now. Wanna come?”
Hobie gets a call from a social worker. He gets one every half a year or so since he emancipated, because he’s an ‘at risk’ teen and that means he needs supervision.
“How are you doing?” his social worker asks.
“I’m pretty good,” Hobie tells him. “Got a new apartment. Made a couple of friends.”
“That is good. What are your friends’ names?”
Hobie rolls his eyes. “I’m not lying, chief. Pav ‘n’ Gwen.”
Gwen gives him a look but doesn’t comment until after the phone call’s ended.
“You don’t have parents?” she asks, something painful in her voice.
“Most of us don’t, Gwendy,” he half-answers.
She traces watercolour scars across her fingers. “Oh.”
He builds the watch in the warehouse on the other side of town, and realises that he hasn’t been making it for him.
“Police!” Gwen’s dad yells, and Hobie glances up from where he’s bent over Gwen’s drum set.
Stacy’s a big white man, watercolour like his daughter. He’s got a badge at his hip and a gun in his hand, and Hobie squashes the immediate urge to punch him square in the nose.
Instead, he draws himself to standing, stretches out his arms over his head. “Your daughter talk to you recently?”
Stacy wavers. “What the hell do you know about Gwen?”
Hobie tilts his head. “I know you scared the pittance out of her and she went runnin’ off into the multiverse because she thought you were going to arrest her,” he says. “Which, for the record, is the shittiest fucking thing to do to your daughter.”
Stacy pauses for one moment, two, before he lowers his gun and pushes his hair out of his face with his palm.
“Is she safe?” he asks, and he almost sounds like he’s going to cry.
“She’s alright, man. She’s strong.” Hobie puts his hands in his pockets. “I want you to give her something, when everything goes sideways.”
Stacy blinks. “What do you mean?”
“Shit’s ‘bout to go down,” Hobie explains. “In a big way. ‘nd ‘cause she’s a good kid, she’s gonna get punted for it. Give her this, when she comes back here.”
He holds out his box.
“You’re a piece of work,” Stacy tells him after an hour or so.
“Most pigs say that,” Hobie shoots back.
Stacy folds like wet paper. “Keep her safe.”
“I thought that was your job,” Hobie snaps. But then, “‘course. Not ‘cause you told me to, though.”
He meets Miles. The kid’s good. The kid’s different: he’s got venom in his fingers and a kind of solidity most of them don’t have.
Hobie tries to help. The venom’s not all that different to what Hobie does with his guitar - electric destabilisation rather than sonic, but same difference. Hobie tells him to flatten his hands.
The kid gives him an anxious smile and calls him cool. Hobie smirks back and confirms it.
Hobie steals what he needs. Some things he doesn’t need. Tells Miles to think for himself. Tries, tries, tries to warn him before the worst comes.
“Your universe is a wreck,” Pav tells him once, after he follows Hobie to a riot and realises that Hobie’s not fighting the rioters. “We could help. A couple of us come in here, help reinstitute--”
“They don’t want to fix universes,” Hobie replies. They’re sitting on top of the building, sharing a pizza between them. “They just want to control everythin’. They don’t care about me, ‘bout you, they care about the 'canon'.”
Pav’s mask is lifted over his nose so he can eat his pizza, and that’s how Hobie knows his mouth purses in frustration. “That is not the way things should be,” he says. “We need to change it.”
“Small battles,” Hobie replies.
The worst comes.
Everyone yells, screaming at Miguel and at each other, but Hobie knows how to take advantage of chaos, and Miles’ eyes are screaming for help from inside his cage (containment).
Hobie gestures.
Miles flattens his hands.