The light from the data-streams was cold, sterile. It painted the walls of Miles's quarters in flickering blues and reds, a constant, silent scream of a multiverse in agony. Each report was a gravestone. Earth-807, consumed. Earth-928B, silenced. Earth-1104, gone. The Weaver's Child, a relentless cosmic plague, was winning.
The reports were a physical weight on the console before him, but the true burden settled in the hollow of his chest. It was a dense, cold thing, forged from a single decision. One name. Rorschach.
I let him in. I knew the risks... but I still let him in. The thought wasn't new. It was a well-worn track in his mind, a groove carved by sleepless nights. Maybe I believed he could save us. Now I wonder if he's the one who broke us.
He had seen the fractures in the man's soul and thought he could mend them, that the hope of the Spider-Army could be a balm for that much nihilism. He thought his compassion was a strength. Now, it felt like a fatal flaw. He had opened the door to a sickness, and it had spread through their ranks like a virus, leaving behind a fever of cold logic and fear. The team was spiraling, and he was at the center of the chaotic descent, a leader in name only.
The gentle whir of the door sliding open barely registered. Silk entered the room not with a sound, but with a change in the atmosphere. She moved with a liquid grace that belied the tension coiled in her shoulders, her eyes scanning him, the room, the glowing reports. It was the look of someone trying to gauge the stability of a bridge before crossing.
She came to a stop beside the console, her gaze falling on a particularly grim report. "Another one," she stated. It wasn't a question.
Miles could only nod, his throat tight.
"You're wearing it," she said, her voice quiet but sharp. "All of it. Like a shroud."
He finally looked at her, his expression a mask of exhaustion. "It's my responsibility, Cindy. I brought him here."
"His choices are his," she countered, her tone devoid of pity. "And their choices are theirs. You can't carry all their failures, Miles. You wanted to save them. But maybe not all responsibility looks like yours."
Miles felt a spark of defensive anger. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means you've been trying to be their shield," she said, stepping closer. The intensity in her eyes was unnerving. "You think responsibility is keeping everyone together, keeping them safe, patching them up. But you've been protecting them from the consequences of their own fear, their own doubt. You're smothering them with your guilt." Silk gestured vaguely towards the door, towards the rest of their fractured army. "You've coddled their weaknesses instead of trusting them to face the difficult truths. A leader can't fix everything. Sometimes, you have to let people break to become something stronger."
Her words stung, sharp and true. He had been trying to fix them, all of them. He'd seen them as broken pieces he had to hold together, and in doing so, he'd forgotten they ever knew how to stand on their own.
The briefing room was a tomb. The long table, once a symbol of unity, now felt like a battleground, with invisible lines drawn between its occupants. What was left of the Spider-Army was a collection of haunted eyes and tense shoulders.
Miles stood at the head, trying to project a confidence he hadn't felt in weeks. "The Weaver's Child is accelerating its consumption of the Web. We need a new strategy, we need to—"
"A new strategy?" The voice came from a junior Spider-Man from a defunct timeline, his suit a drab grey. "Rorschach's strategy was working. It was harsh, but it was effective. We were making surgical strikes, cutting off the infection."
"We were sacrificing worlds," Gwen Stacy shot back, her voice tight with suppressed anger. She wouldn't look at Miles, her glare fixed on the grey-suited Spider. "We were becoming the monster we're fighting."
"Better to be a monster that survives than a hero that's extinct!" he retorted. A murmur of agreement rippled through one side of the room.
Peter Porker, Spider-Ham, tried to break the tension. "Now, now, folks! Let's not get our hams in a twist. A little teamwork, a little witty banter, and we'll have this cosmic creep gift-wrapped in no time! That's all, folks!" His cartoonish bravado was thin, his usual jovial tone shaky and hollow. The joke landed with a thud in the suffocating silence. The fear was too thick for humor to penetrate.
Jessica Drew, ever the pragmatist, leaned forward, her arms crossed. "The issue isn't strategy, it's trust. We don't have reliable intel because we don't trust our sources. We don't trust each other. How can we move forward when we're all watching our backs?"
Miles looked from face to face. He saw it then, with horrifying clarity. Rorschach wasn't physically here, but his ghost sat at the table. His philosophy—that survival justifies any atrocity, that trust is a liability—had taken root. It was a shadow stretching over all of them, a sickness of the soul. His attempt to lead them forward was met with the very ideological poison he had allowed to enter.
The meeting dissolved without resolution, the team splintering back into their resentful cliques.
Later, Silk found him staring at the shimmering nexus of realities, a vast, chaotic tapestry of light and energy that was fraying at the edges. She stood beside him, her presence a quiet anchor in his swirling thoughts.
"That was a disaster," Miles said, his voice flat.
"It was inevitable," she replied. She wasn't angry anymore. Her tone was softer, tinged with a weary concern. "You keep thinking it's about saving them. It's not. You're just the one carrying the weight of the choices they all make." She turned to face him fully. "Rorschach's problem isn't his ruthlessness. It's that he doesn't care about how many people to sacrifice for the mission. You care about all of us. You want to protect everyone. But what if your responsibility is to give us the space to fail, to learn? To break without fear of losing our leader?"
Miles listened, the words sinking in. He had been so terrified of failing them, of seeing them fall, that he had held them in a death grip. He never gave them the chance to stand—or fall—on their own. He was so focused on being the perfect, compassionate leader that he'd suffocated the very people he was trying to protect.
The cracks didn't just show; they began to yawn into chasms. During a planning session for a reconnaissance mission, Gwen finally snapped. Her patience, worn thin by grief and disillusionment, broke completely.
"We can't trust this plan because we can't trust the person who made it!" she declared, her voice ringing through the command center. She was pointing at Miles. "You were too weak to make the hard choice about Rorschach, and now his poison is everywhere! You let this happen! You let him infiltrate us!"
Her accusation was a physical blow. Around them, others shifted uncomfortably, but no one rushed to his defense. Jessica Drew simply turned away, already running her own protocols on a separate terminal, a quiet declaration of her lost faith.
Then, a sudden alarm blared. A probe on the edge of the Web had gone dark, a potential incursion point for the Weaver's Child. Everyone looked to Miles. He froze, the weight of Gwen's words paralyzing him. In that moment of hesitation, Silk acted.
"Drew, run a diagnostic on the probe's last known transmission," she commanded, her voice cutting through the noise. "Porker, get two others and prep the Arachne's Kiss. We need eyes on that sector, now."
Her orders were clear, decisive. The team, desperate for direction, moved without question. Silk hadn't asked for permission. She had simply taken responsibility, filling the vacuum his leadership had become. And Miles realized, watching her, that his fear of failing was far more dangerous than any failure itself.
As the small team prepared to depart, Miles walked over to Silk. The chaos had subsided into a low hum of activity. He felt hollowed out, but strangely, lighter.
"You were right," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I've been trying to hold everything together so tightly, I… I think I'm the one who broke it." He looked at her, the admission costing him everything and, in the same breath, setting him free. "The mission is yours. Lead it."
Silk searched his eyes, seeing not defeat, but a flicker of something new. A painful, necessary understanding. She nodded once. "We'll find our own balance, Miles. We have to."
The chapter ended not with a victory, but with a quiet surrender. Miles and Silk stood together once more before the nexus, watching the Web of Life and Destiny flicker like a dying candle. The guilt was still there, a phantom limb, but his purpose was shifting. There was no easy way forward, only a path through the darkness.
As Silk turned to leave, she paused. "The responsibility is never just yours," she said, her voice soft but firm. "And it's not a thing you carry alone."
Miles watched her go, then turned his gaze back to the unraveling realities. He finally understood. True leadership wasn't about preventing the fall. It was about trusting that when you break, you can be rebuilt—stronger at the broken places. And that was a truth he couldn't teach. It was one they all had to learn for themselves.