Chapter 189: Ethan Cross — Friend of Spider-Men?
Earth-Garfield
Garfield-Peter was still sulking over getting turned down for an apprenticeship. Meanwhile, Gwen had slipped quietly out of the villa and was already on the line with Spider-Man 2099.
"I didn't change anything," she said, pacing. "I just took out the anomaly and was getting ready to leave this universe."
She'd known this call was coming. Uncle Ben's death, George Stacy's death — both canonical events, the kind the Society treated as load-bearing. But none of that was on her. She hadn't touched a thing.
Miguel's voice and feed crackled through the watch. "Then explain to me why Captain Stacy is alive."
Gwen took a breath. Do I tell him about Ethan or not.
Miguel read her hesitation immediately. "Talk. Or I'll come there myself."
She gave up the fight. "Fine. There's someone. A man named Ethan. I don't know who he is — I just know he's the one who saved Uncle Ben and George Stacy. I was on my way back to base when he intercepted me."
It was the truth, more or less. She'd only just met Ethan herself. And there wasn't much point hiding it — Miguel would've found out eventually anyway.
What she hadn't expected was for the call to just... end. The second she said the name, the line went dead.
"Good," she muttered, glancing around. "Hope nobody heard that."
She had no idea that Harry and Tobey-Peter were standing not far off, both frowning.
"Ethan! It's him again!"
Miguel's voice tore through the Society headquarters loud enough that half the room flinched.
His jaw was tight, his expression somewhere between fury and genuine bewilderment. "He saved Uncle Ben last time. Now it's Captain Stacy. What is he trying to do? Is he trying to bring down the entire multiverse of Spider-Men?"
Nobody answered right away.
"This isn't even his universe to mess with," Miguel went on, voice dripping with disgust. "Is he some kind of bleeding heart? Doesn't sound like it, from what I've heard — ruthless, decisive. So why is he the one rewriting Peter Parker's life?"
"Except he saved Uncle Ben and that universe didn't collapse," said the middle-aged Spider-Man with the stroller — the one everyone called Pavitr behind Miguel's back, though that wasn't quite right either. His tone was calm, deliberately even. "Maybe he's found a way to do this that we haven't."
He wasn't wrong to be cautious in his defense — Ethan's name had already made its way through the Society's grapevine, and the reaction to it was, on balance, awe. He'd saved a Spider-Man's uncle. No universal collapse. No incursion. Nothing.
Privately, the stroller Spider-Man thought about his own life and wondered, just for a second, what might have been different if someone like Ethan had shown up for him.
"It's not going to be lucky every single time," Miguel snapped. "What happens the day it isn't? What happens when our universe is the one that goes? Damn Miles — this is all because of him. His existence was a mistake to begin with."
The frustration in his voice was real, and so was the helplessness underneath it. None of this — Ethan, the open channels, any of it — would have been possible if Miles hadn't first caused the original disturbance that let outsiders start crossing into Spider-Verse business in the first place.
But it had already happened. There was no undoing it now.
For all his anger, Miguel also wanted answers. Who is this person. He decided he'd go find Ethan himself, eventually, and get to the bottom of it.
What Miguel hadn't noticed: Margo had already put Ethan's name out to every Spider-Man in the network. Every operative on active duty, every Spider-Man currently off-shift and relaxing at headquarters — all of them now knew. They knew the name Ethan Cross, and they knew he'd done it again: broken a canonical death, saved a piece of someone's family, and walked away clean.
Word had already gotten around once before — that someone had saved a Peter Parker's Uncle Ben — but nobody had had a name to put to it. Now they did.
And something shifted, quietly, across the network.
They all knew the rule. Losing the people you loved was canon. Fighting that canon meant risking your entire universe. So most of them had learned, the hard way or secondhand, to let it go. To accept the loss and never gamble their world to undo it.
But here was a man who'd done exactly that — twice — and nothing had broken.
Spider-Men are still people. They still feel things.
And what they felt, watching Ethan's name spread through the network, was something they hadn't let themselves feel in a long time: hope. Maybe there was a way to save the people you loved without losing everything else. Maybe this man named Ethan had found it.
Some of them were more skeptical — figured Ethan probably had no idea what he was risking, that he was playing with forces he didn't understand. But skeptical or not, gratitude won out. He'd shown them a possibility. A door they hadn't known was there.
And there were others — Spider-Men who had never wanted the mask in the first place, who just wanted to live an ordinary life and had long since grown tired of Miguel's doctrine of fixed fate. A few had tried to fight it before. Every one of those attempts had ended in collapse, and the survivors had learned to stop gambling with their own worlds.
But they hadn't stopped hoping. They'd just been waiting for someone to come along who could actually break the pattern.
Now they had a name.
Could it be you? thought Hobie Brown, a Spider-Man with a punk aesthetic and a chip on his shoulder about authority in general, looking up at the sky. Could you be the one, Ethan?
Hobie had never been interested in falling in line. He wanted out from under the weight of fate, plain and simple. And now, without ever having met the man, he'd quietly pinned some of that want on Ethan.
Ethan, for his part, had no idea any of this was happening. He'd saved Tobey-Peter's Uncle Ben and Garfield-Peter's George Stacy purely because of something unfinished from his old life — a small private regret he was trying to settle. He hadn't been trying to start anything.
He had no idea he'd accidentally become a folk hero to an entire multiverse of Spider-Men.
His name was spreading through worlds he'd never visited. People were talking about him he'd never meet.
Back in Earth-42, Ethan hadn't noticed anything wrong with the universe itself — but the system panel kept lighting up, and he found the whole thing increasingly funny.
「DING!」
「Congratulations, Host! Pavitr Prabhakar has been added as a friend!」
「Congratulations, Host! Peni Parker has been added as a friend!」
「Congratulations, Host! Middle-Aged Stroller-Dad Peter Parker has been added as a friend!」
「Congratulations, Host! Spider-Rex has been added as a friend!」
「Congratulations, Host! Punk Spider-Man Hobie Brown has been added as a friend!」
「...」
Ethan stared at the notifications scrolling past.
His first thought: Did I just kick a hornet's nest? Spider hornet's nest?
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