Chapter 82: Peter Wants to Get Stronger — and Sandman Signs On
The sand finished settling into the shape of a man.
William Baker looked at Peter with the kind of eyes that had seen too much and were trying, badly, to carry it quietly.
"Long time no see, Peter," Sandman said. His voice had the texture of gravel and something older beneath it. "I'm Flint Marko. Sandman."
Peter studied him, visibly recalibrating. Another person. Another set of powers. Another stranger looking at him like they shared history he couldn't access.
He turned to Ethan. "Okay, another one with superpowers who already knows me." A beat. "Why does he know me too?"
Ethan smiled. "Let him explain. He earned some credit on the Ben situation."
Peter's expression shifted at that — not fully understanding yet, but the mention of his uncle's name landed somewhere it mattered. He looked back at Sandman with something less guarded in it.
Sandman caught Ethan's glance and gave a small, almost sheepish nod. In truth, his contribution had been limited. But he appreciated the generosity of the framing.
He'd arrived in this universe with one goal: find himself.
The parallel-universe logic had clicked into place fast enough — he was a man made of sand, he understood being in pieces and coming back together. And once he'd identified the native William Baker, he'd done the only thing that made sense: found him before the escape, before the test site, before everything went wrong. Pressed a roll of cash into the man's hands. Told him to take his daughter to the specialist. Told him there was another way.
The other Baker had stared at him — at his own face, rearranged into something made of shifting grains — and hadn't asked a single question. Just taken the money and left.
Sandman had told himself that was enough. That he'd rewritten it.
Then he'd arrived at the scene anyway, and found Ben Parker bleeding on the pavement.
He'd stood there in the dark, not understanding how fate could be that stubborn, that indifferent to the work he'd done — and then Ethan Cross had materialized beside him with the Horse Talisman already in hand, and made him an offer.
Sandman looked at Peter steadily.
"In a sense," he said, "I'm the one who killed your Uncle Ben."
The air in the room changed.
Peter went very still. Something hot moved behind his eyes.
"But not on purpose." Sandman's voice didn't waver. "I'd already decided to walk away — your uncle had talked me down from the carjacking. And then the gun went off. Accidentally. And he went down."
A pause.
"I know I've already explained this once. And another version of you already forgave me for it." He exhaled slowly. "But I needed to say it again. To you."
Peter frowned. Another version of me. He turned the phrase over, looking for where it fit. He hadn't met this man before — he was certain of that. Sandman had a particular quality of presence that was hard to miss or misremember. And Uncle Ben wasn't dead. So what was—
Ethan stepped in.
"Peter." He waited until he had the kid's full attention. "Do you know what a parallel universe is?"
Peter blinked. Then, visibly, he thought about it — and the pieces connected faster than most people would have managed. His eyes went wide.
"Wait." He looked from Ethan to Sandman to Doc Ock, who had been watching quietly from across the room. "You're all — you're from parallel universes?"
"Yes," Ethan said. "Different ones. Not the same as each other, and not the same as this one." He let that settle for a second. "Think of it as — we're all travelers who ended up in your universe. Different departure points, same destination."
"And they know me because..." Peter worked through it. "Because in their universes, they... they encountered a version of me."
"A version that could fight back," Ethan confirmed. "They've all crossed paths with a Spider-Man. Just not you, specifically."
Peter sat with that for a moment. His expression did something complicated — the edges of the anxiety softening into something that might have been, underneath all the weight of the last twelve hours, a quiet kind of wonder.
Somewhere out there, another him had already done it. Had already become what he was trying to become.
He turned to Ethan.
"Are you—" He hesitated. "Are you one of his enemies too?"
Ethan let out a short laugh. "You're not ready to be my enemy yet, Peter. Honestly? Anyone from my crew could put you on the ground in thirty seconds. No offense."
"...None taken," Peter said, though he was clearly taking some.
He scratched the back of his head, eyes drifting somewhere past the room, past the building — somewhere in the direction of other universes, other versions of himself who had already earned the title he was still reaching for.
"Can I go there? To another parallel universe?"
Ethan's expression shifted. The easy warmth didn't disappear, but something more serious settled over it.
"Don't romanticize that," he said. "Sit down. There's something I need to tell you about why I'm actually here."
The next thirty minutes, Peter didn't say much.
He listened. Ethan laid it out in full — the rifts, the arriving villains, what the Ancient One had told him, what was at stake if the timeline fractured further. Doc Ock occasionally added a quiet word. Sandman sat with his hands loosely clasped, the sand around his edges barely moving.
By the end, Peter looked like a man who had signed up for a sprint and just been handed a marathon bib.
"So what do I do?" he asked. His voice was urgent, stripped of everything decorative. "What am I actually supposed to do?"
He was thinking about May. About Ben — alive upstairs because of a talisman and borrowed luck and people from other worlds who had shown up and decided his uncle's life was worth saving. About MJ, who had no idea any of this was happening. About the fact that his universe was apparently cracking at the seams and he was a high schooler who had been a spider-person for less than two weeks.
For all of them, he thought. I have to figure this out.
Ethan picked up his tea. Took a measured sip. When he looked at Peter again, there was something in his eyes that wasn't quite encouragement and wasn't quite certainty — it was something calmer than either, the particular steadiness of someone who had already decided to see a thing through.
"Do what you've always wanted to do, Peter."
Peter stared at him. "What?"
"The universe is in crisis. Your home is at stake. People you love are in danger." Ethan set the cup down. "So go be a hero."
"That's — I don't understand, we should be planning, we should be—"
"Punish evil. Protect people. Put on the mask." His voice was quiet and completely certain. "The rest of it, we'll carry together."
Peter opened his mouth. Closed it.
Be a hero, he thought. That's the whole plan.
Somehow, coming from Ethan, it didn't sound naive.
Because Ethan knew something Peter was only beginning to understand: the moment Spider-Man appeared in this universe — visibly, unmistakably, swinging between buildings and showing up where he was needed — the villains hiding in the cracks and shadows would stop waiting. They'd come out.
And when they did, they wouldn't be fighting a kid who'd been spider-bitten for two weeks.
They'd be walking into something else entirely.
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