Grant was dead. Grant was dead and someone was screaming, and it took Jess blinking her eyes a few times, refocusing, for her to realise that it wasn’t her – it was her neighbours, the people who unwittingly chose to live in the same building as one of the worst excuses of a superhero ever to exist. After all, did you see Captain America causing a mass explosion in his apartment because his ex showed up on the doorstep? Hell, even Iron Man had his act together to a greater extent, and wasn’t that a sad state of affairs? Nat would’ve found another way, a better way, would’ve brought him in or put him down without the collateral damage … but Jess hadn’t been trying to kill him.
She hadn’t been trying to kill him, but she had. He was in her lap, and tears were sticking dry now on her cheeks, and he wasn’t breathing. Green electricity continued to flicker through the cracked floorboards around her, flashing up the walls, snapping when they reached the metal of the photo frames she had pinned up with Miles’ help.
She had a photo of Grant, in her bedside table. She hid it under her gun, saw it every time she went to get ready for a mission.
Jess didn’t expect anyone to show up. She didn’t even remember what she had been doing before Grant arrived – but when she heard the crunch, she immediately pulled Grant closer to her, almost protective of the man she had just murdered. (What was wrong with her?) She saw it was Miles, and she held out a hand. “No,” she said, voice thin and throat aching. “No, don’t- Don’t come any closer. I … I can’t stop it.”
People were running. It was the first thing Miles realized when he got within sight of Jess’s building, the most obvious piece of the puzzle. People were running, and Miles... Miles knew. Long before he saw the faint green glow, long before he felt the shift in the air, long before he broke into a run towards the building, he knew. He didn’t know all the details, hadn’t gotten any kind of psychic abilities with his particular brand of spider bite, but he didn’t need them to know that when things were this level of fucked, when people were running scared from the one place he’d felt safe in months, it was bound to go back to the apartment where his backpack was strewn in the floor in front of the couch, back to the living room where his socks were still in the floor because he was still a teenage boy and teenage boys weren’t known for their cleanliness.
Miles and Jess had been living the family life for months now, and it was never going to last. Peter --- the Peter he’d met first, the one who died because he wasn’t fast enough --- had thought he was the only spider-person out there, and he’d been off by a long shot. There were plenty of them, Miles knew. There were plenty of people with their own special brand of spider-inspired super powers, and they had more in common than sticky fingers and themed outfits. They all attracted the same kind of trouble.
Miles just figured this disaster would be one of his making.
He didn’t remember until he crossed the threshold that just because Jess was older and more experienced didn’t make here any less of a trouble magnet than he was. He didn’t remember until he saw her cradling a body in her arms that she was a spider-person, too, that she’d been a bomb herself since long before his fuse was set. His father said once, in a fit of anguish and frustration, that every goddamn spider person who’d ever set foot in New York was a tragedy waiting to happen. Miles wondered if he might have had a point.
“Hey,” he said quietly as she reacted to him, pulling the body closer to herself. It was only when he got closer that he recognized the man. The one who’d tried to force his way into the apartment when Miles told him to go away. The one he’d known he’d seen at Hydra, even when the man told him he was being paranoid. Part of him felt vindicated that he’d been right, because Jess wouldn’t have hurt him if he hadn’t been bad. Another part of him only ached for what she must be feeling now. “It’s okay, Jess. Look, I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt me.” He took another step closer, sneakers kicking through the waves of electricity glowing in the floorboards with no effect. Electricity hadn’t had a hold on him since his spider bite gave him lightning of his own, but part of Miles thought it went a little deeper than that, too. Part of him knew he was safe simply because he knew Jess would never, ever hurt him.
