Chapter 195: The Soft-Hearted Holland Peter
"By the way," Ethan said, turning to Harry and Tobey-Peter, "where'd the other one go?"
"He said he was going back to find his girlfriend Gwen," Peter said, a little wistfully. "Probably seeing the girl version of Spider-Man set something off."
He was, if he was honest with himself, jealous. Why didn't he have a girlfriend like that? Then his brain helpfully replayed the image of the other-universe Gwen from earlier, and his face went red on its own.
Ethan watched this happen and sighed. "Pete. You can't keep doing the shy thing forever. You've got to make a move sometime. Be bold about it."
Keep this up, Ethan thought, and that kid Miles is going to walk off with her instead.
There was something else nagging at him, too — a logistics question. Had he physically transported the entire villa across universes, or had this universe somehow connected directly to Earth-42? If it was the former, the Garfield-verse Spider-Man wouldn't necessarily have come along for the ride. If it was the latter — that meant the two universes were genuinely linked now, and that was a much bigger problem.
"Alright," he said, standing. "Both of you go find the rest of them. I've got an old friend to catch up with."
He left to go find Strange. Harry and Tobey-Peter headed out the other direction.
Meanwhile, the Holland-Peter — soaked through, breathing hard — dragged himself up onto a muddy riverbank and just sat there a minute, getting his breath back.
He looked down at his ruined suit and laughed, short and humorless.
Guess the talk with the school board is gonna have to wait until tomorrow.
Right now, the more urgent question was simpler: what is even happening. Why did he suddenly have an entire roster of enemies who all seemed to know exactly who he was?
Still soaked, still confused, he made his way back to the New York Sanctum.
Strange took one look at him and led him straight down to the holding cells.
Peter stopped short. The tentacle guy. Sandman. The lizard thing. All of them — caged, contained, right there in front of him.
Strange didn't waste time on pleasantries.
"I told you not to interrupt the casting," he snapped. "You wouldn't stop talking, and now the spell that was supposed to make the world forget Peter Parker is Spider-Man has instead pulled in every version of reality where people already know that fact!"
That was the actual mechanics of it, as it turned out. The botched memory spell had torn open the multiverse, and the backlash had specifically dragged in people from universes where Peter's secret identity wasn't a secret at all.
Otto and Strange filled him in on who everyone was.
Strange had managed to contain most of the incursion fast enough. A handful of slipperier intruders had cloaked their presence and slipped past him, but the ones in the cells were accounted for, and the priority now was sending them all back before this got any worse. These weren't even all of them — but the cells had limited capacity, and Strange wanted them moving while he still had the chance.
But the more Peter learned about what waited for these people back home — what their original timelines had in store for them — the harder it got to just nod along.
He stood there a long moment, something visibly working through him.
Then he straightened up.
"We can't just send them back," he said. Quiet. Firm.
"Why not?" Strange asked.
"Because some of them are going to die."
He said it low, the words coming out heavier than he meant them to.
He knew exactly who these people were. Knew what they'd done, knew the damage in their files. None of that erased what he'd just heard — that every single one of them had a story, that every life carried something irreducible, that he couldn't just hand-wave away what was waiting for them on the other side of that portal.
"Parker," Strange said, with the patience of a man repeating himself for the third time, "everyone dies eventually. We don't get to rewrite people's fates because we feel bad about them."
"Come on, Stephen. Don't be like that."
It wasn't that Peter didn't want to send them back. He just wanted — needed — to do something before whatever was coming for them actually arrived.
Strange's eyes went distant for a moment.
"In the grand calculus of the multiverse," he said slowly, "their deaths mean more than their lives would."
"I'm sorry, kid. Fate's already decided."
This was a man who'd once held the Time Stone and watched fourteen million futures, who'd traded his own death — over and over, an unfathomable number of times — just to get Dormammu to leave Earth alone. A man like that wasn't going to lose sleep over a handful of villains. Protecting the bigger picture was the job. It had always been the job, even now that the title technically belonged to Wong.
Strange reached for the small box on the table — the one holding the failed spell, the one switch away from undoing all of it and shipping every intruder straight back to where they came from.
Peter grabbed it first.
And ran.
Strange watched him go, deadpan. "This is why I don't have kids."
Then he lunged, caught Peter mid-escape just as he was about to web away, and hit him with a strike that knocked his soul clean out of his body.
Peter looked down at himself, floating loose and translucent, and had exactly one reaction: "Okay, that's actually so cool."
It also didn't work. His Spider-Sense apparently didn't care whether he was technically dead at the moment — it fired off just as fast either way, and his soul snapped right back into his body before Strange could get the box back.
Strange, out of patience, threw him bodily into the Mirror Dimension.
Home turf advantage. He pried the box back out of Peter's hands and opened a portal, ready to leave with it.
Peter wasn't done. "You know what's cooler than magic?"
A beat later, Strange was bound head to foot in webbing.
Peter hung upside down above him, grinning. "Math."
He'd used the time to map the entire geometry of the Mirror Dimension and laced it wall to wall with webbing while Strange was distracted gloating. He came away with both the Sling Ring and the box, and made Strange a promise on his way out: the second he found a way to cure these guys, he'd bring everything back.
"Damn it," Strange muttered.
No Sling Ring meant no way out of his own Mirror Dimension.
Then, to his genuine surprise, a portal opened anyway.
He assumed it was Wong.
It was not Wong. A black-haired man — clearly Asian — stepped through instead.
"Took a while to find you with Observation Haki," the man said, looking him over with open amusement. "Turns out you're tied up in the Mirror Dimension. Didn't know this universe's Strange was into that."
Strange's expression shifted into something knowing, almost pleased.
"Ethan," he said. "You finally made it."
"...You know who I am?"
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