The heat was wrong for dreaming. Too specific, too old. Heat that the earth had been producing for longer than anyone had been around to measure it. Peter knew, in the way of dreams, that the ground beneath him had been this temperature since before the continent had a name. The stones held the day's warmth hours after dark, radiating it upward into air that smelled of dust and distance and nothing else.
He was not Peter here.
He was Harry, and Harry was tired in a way that went past muscle and into something structural. Seven years of school and war and growing up while people tried to kill you, then over a decade chasing things across continents that most people didn't believe existed, and all of it pressed against his joints and the backs of his eyes. The wand arm ached from the base of the shoulder, an old ache he'd stopped noticing except when everything went quiet enough for the small pains to announce themselves.
The left arm was gone. Had been since he was fourteen, lost in the duel that ended differently than anyone expected. The stump was wrapped in cloth that was itself wrapped in minor wards against sand and infection, and he'd stopped thinking about it as a loss years ago. It was just the shape he was.
The Outback stretched in every direction, flat and enormous under a sky that didn't look like any sky Peter had seen from Queens. The stars here were denser, closer, with nothing between them and the ground but clean air. No light pollution. The Milky Way cut the sky in half, visible as an actual structure, and Peter-as-Harry knew the names of several constellations that didn't exist in the Northern Hemisphere with the same unconscious certainty that he knew his own middle name.
The map to this place was in his head, had been since someone traced the route for him weeks ago, rough lines on the back of a receipt. The land here was sacred in a way that wasn't metaphorical. You could feel it under your feet, a low hum like standing too close to a transformer, if transformers had been running continuously for forty thousand years.
The runes were already drawn. He'd spent the last six hours on them, working with one hand and a length of silver-bright chalk that had arrived by owl weeks before the journey, as though someone had known he'd need it. Concentric circles, spreading outward from the center point where he knelt. Each circle inscribed with a different runic sequence, and Peter-as-Harry knew what each one did. The knowledge was there as fluency, present as capacity rather than data. The innermost circle was containment. The second was direction. The third was memory, not his memory, the other kind. The accumulated record of every time this working had been attempted across centuries and continents and traditions that had never spoken to each other.
The crystal sphere sat on its wooden tripod at the circle's center, just to his left. Glass-cool against his palm when he'd set it there, humming faintly with something that felt like compressed certainty, a decision already made, waiting to become observable. It was small enough to hold in one hand. Inside it, something moved that wasn't light and wasn't liquid.
A fire burned to his right, low and steady. Spinifex and mulga wood, burned down to a core of orange coals that threw just enough light to read the runes by. The smoke went straight up in the windless air.
He was going to die here. He knew that.
Harry had learned to be suspicious of prophecy, but there was the other kind of certainty, the practical kind, belonging to a man who had done the math. The ritual required more than he had. It required, specifically, everything. The sphere would take what remained of his magical core, compress it, bind it, and hold it in stable suspension until the trigger word released it. The process of giving everything meant that afterward there wouldn't be enough left to operate a body, and without magic holding together the parts of him that basilisk venom and phoenix blood had made structurally unstable decades ago, the body would simply stop.
He'd made peace with this. Mostly. In the way that a man who'd survived things that should have killed him at eleven, twelve, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen made peace with anything. Incompletely, with reservations, and with the persistent suspicion that peace was something other people achieved.
The wind picked up. Enough to make the coals shift and resettle. Harry reached for his wand. It had been repaired once, and the repair had left a faint ridge near the base that his thumb found automatically, the way a guitarist's fingers find the frets.
He began.
The incantation was long. Parts of it were in Latin, parts in something older that Harry's mouth could form but Peter's analytical brain couldn't quite categorize. It sounded like something that predated the tradition, something the tradition had inherited from an older working and preserved without fully understanding, like English preserving Latinate legal terms because the precision mattered and no translation was exact enough.
The runes on the ground began to glow. The outermost circle first, a faint silver luminescence, and then inward, circle by circle, each one brightening as the incantation reached the passage that addressed it. The light was steady, functional. The runes were doing what they'd been designed to do.
Peter-as-Harry felt the pull begin in his chest. Low at first, like the drag of a current before you realize how strong the river is. The crystal sphere's humming climbed a register, became something he could feel in his teeth.
The magic came out of him in a way that wasn't visible but was utterly physical. It felt like warmth leaving a room, the sensation of a house going cold when the furnace cuts off in January, except the house was him and the furnace was everything he'd ever been able to do. The defensive reflexes went first. Then the fine-motor control he'd spent years developing. Then the deeper stuff: the part that let him feel wards, read intentions, sense a room's architecture before entering it. Each loss carried its own specific weight, each one noticeable and particular, like individual fingers going numb in cold water.
The sphere grew warmer. The humming deepened.
His vision greyed at the edges, then sharpened, then greyed again. The fire's coals looked very far away and then very close and then they were just coals, orange and steady, and the wind carried the smallest possible quantity of smoke across his face.
Close to the end, he could feel how close, Harry spoke the last word.
Oshtur.
Peter heard it the way you hear a word in a language you didn't know you spoke. It arrived in his comprehension before it arrived in his recognition, understood before identified. The word was a name and a key and a release, and Harry spoke it with the kind of precision that suggested he'd been carrying it for a long time, waiting for exactly this use.
The sphere pulsed once. White-hot at the center, then cooling rapidly back to its faint internal glow. The runes went dark. The fire went dark, not out, but dark, as though the ambient light had changed frequencies and the visible spectrum had temporarily become irrelevant.
Harry exhaled.
The breath was long, and at the end of it, something in his chest simply wasn't there anymore. A space where a thing had been. He could feel its exact shape.
He sat for a while. The stars were still there. The ground was still warm. The coals glowed again, or maybe they'd never stopped and his vision had simply caught up. The crystal sphere sat on its tripod, holding everything Harry had ever been able to do, compressed into stable suspension inside a container the size of an orange.
His body felt lighter and emptier and he was very cold despite the warm air. The basilisk venom that had lived in his blood since he was twelve, permanently stabilized by the phoenix blood, began to destabilize. He could feel it, a wrongness in his circulatory system, a subtle burning that was going to become less subtle very soon.
He lay down on the warm ground. The rune-circles were still faintly visible as indentations in the earth. Above him, the Southern Cross hung where it had been when he'd started. He'd half expected the stars to have moved. They hadn't.
He thought about the people who'd died in the war, one in particular whose name had been in his throat for years, and the people who hadn't, who were probably asleep on the other side of the world with no idea what he was doing. He thought about a boy who was old enough now to be angry about this, who would probably find out, and who would probably be furious, and that was okay. Better furious than inheriting this collection of burdens. The whole point was to get the power out of his bloodline before the venom-corruption found a way to piggyback on magical inheritance.
The cold deepened. Inside cold, not outside. His fingers stopped responding first, then his feet. The burning in his blood was still there, but farther away, muffled by the growing numbness.
He looked at the sphere one more time. The compressed certainty inside it pulsed faintly, a slow rhythm like breathing. What was inside it would find its way somewhere. He'd built the ritual to ensure that. Not to a specific person, that wasn't possible, so: outward. Into the world. Into whatever vessel was structurally capable of holding it, wherever that vessel happened to be.
Someone, someday, in whatever universe or dimension or reality the magic found its way to, was going to wake up carrying everything Harry Potter had ever known how to do. He hoped they were the kind of person who'd have the sense to be scared of it first and curious about it second.
The cold reached his chest. His heartbeat was a suggestion rather than an event. The stars looked the same. The ground was warm.
He closed his eyes.
The dream completed itself. The sensation of the body on the ground, Harry's body, already beginning the process of not being alive, dissolved slowly, and what was underneath it, what had always been underneath it, was a fifteen-year-old kid lying in a narrow bed in a Queens apartment with his face pressed into a pillow that smelled like laundry detergent and the faintly metallic tang of city air coming through a window he'd left cracked.
Peter surfaced.
He was already saying the word when consciousness arrived.
"Oshtur..."
His mouth had been forming it in sleep, and the whole word came out on a breath that started below awareness and finished above it, the last syllable trailing off as his eyes opened. The sound hung in the bedroom air for a moment, two syllables, spoken into a room where the morning light came through the window in the flat grey of early New York. Overcast, diffuse.
Outside, a bus braked somewhere below the apartment. A pigeon argued with another pigeon on the fire escape. The radiator clicked its irregular rhythm, the one that sounded like someone tapping a wrench against a pipe, which was probably what it was, somewhere deeper in the building's plumbing.
Peter lay still. His heart was going hard, the kind of rapid thudding he associated with nightmares, but this hadn't been a nightmare. His body was cycling through alarm without a matching threat.
Something had shifted.
The room was the same: his desk with the textbooks stacked wrong, the cracked mug on the windowsill that he'd broken three days ago when his grip crunched the handle before he'd registered he was holding it, the laundry pile that was technically clean but had never made it from the chair to the dresser. The walls were the same pale yellow he and May had painted three years ago. The ceiling had the same water stain in the corner, shaped vaguely like Rhode Island.
But something had changed in him, or through him. He didn't have language for it. The closest he could get: a signal that had been searching for its receiver had found it. A circuit that had been open was now closed. Something potential had become kinetic.
His skin prickled. Not spider-sense. He was learning to distinguish between the physical hyperawareness that came from the bite and this other thing, this older, wider sensitivity that he'd been carrying since the coma without understanding what it was. The prickling was the second kind. It felt like standing in a field during an electrical storm, the air itself charged, except the field was his bedroom and the storm was inside his nervous system.
Somewhere, and Peter could not have said where, because the somewhere was not a place on any map, things noticed. That was the only way to think about it. The word had gone out, and something, some collection of somethings at a scale and distance he couldn't conceptualize, had registered it. He couldn't perceive this directly. He perceived the aftereffect, a vibration in his coffee cup from a truck passing a block away.
He sat up. Swung his legs off the bed and stood, the floor cold against his bare feet. He walked to the bathroom and picked his glasses up from the shelf above the toilet, the shelf that had been his since he and May had divided up the bathroom's limited real estate years ago, and put them on. The apartment sharpened from soft blur to hard edges. His hands were shaking, a fine tremor he noticed as he reached for the shelf. His body was reacting to something his mind hadn't finished processing. He was scared, tightness in his throat, coldness in his stomach, and at the same time his brain was already asking questions, running ahead of the fear, the way it always did.
What just happened. What did that word do. What is different now. Can I test it.
Is May home.
He checked. The apartment had the emptiness that meant Aunt May was at work. Night shift, wouldn't be back until after eight, probably closer to nine if the handoff ran long. The dishes from her pre-shift dinner were in the drying rack. One plate, one fork, one glass. Her work shoes were gone from the mat by the door.
He was alone. Whatever was happening, there was no one to see it or ask about it.
His stomach growled. Loudly, insistently. The enhanced metabolism turning his digestive system into something that demanded fuel constantly, aggressively, as though his body were running background calculations that burned calories he hadn't consented to spending. He needed to eat. He also needed to understand what had just come out of his mouth and what it had done to him and possibly to everything nearby.
He went to the kitchen and ate four pieces of toast with peanut butter, two bananas, a bowl of cereal, and the leftover rice and beans from two nights ago, standing at the counter in his boxers and a t-shirt, chewing mechanically. His hands were still shaking slightly when he started. By the third piece of toast they'd stopped.
He knew the word. Oshtur. It sat in his memory now, not the dream-memory, his actual memory, with the weight of something personally experienced. Harry had spoken it. Peter had been inside Harry when Harry spoke it. And when Peter's sleeping mouth had repeated it, something had completed. Activated. Come online.
The magic was different now. He could feel it. Before this morning, the inherited knowledge from Harry's life had been like a library he could access but hadn't organized, shelves of capability without an index system. Now it felt live. Like a program that had been saved but never executed, and someone had hit run.
He put the dishes in the sink. Went back to his room. The cracked mug on the windowsill caught his eye.
He picked it up. Held it. The crack ran diagonally from the rim to the base of the handle, a clean fracture line with a tiny chip missing near the top.
"Reparo," he said.
The mug reassembled itself. The crack closed, the ceramic flowing back together like water filling a channel, the chip materializing from wherever broken pieces go and slotting back into place with a faint click that was more tactile than audible. The mug was whole. The glaze was unbroken. The handle was solid when he tested it.
Peter set the mug down and looked at it for about ten seconds. Then he looked at his hand, which had done nothing unusual, no gesture, no glow. He'd just said the word with the correct intention, and the mug had obeyed.
"Okay," he said.
His sleeve had a coffee stain on the cuff from yesterday. He pointed at it. "Scourgify." The stain vanished, the fabric returning to its original grey as though the coffee had never been there.
He sat on the edge of his bed. His hands were pressed together between his knees, the gesture his body defaulted to at moments of overload, when a math problem cracked open into unexpected symmetry or when the scale of something outran his ability to think about it. He pressed his palms harder together and realized his jaw was clenched and he wasn't breathing. He breathed.
He needed space. He needed to not be in his apartment. He needed somewhere he could try things without breaking something irreplaceable or attracting attention from whoever was on the other side of the shared wall.
He got dressed fast. Jeans, hoodie, sneakers, glasses properly seated, and grabbed his keys.
The fire escape was outside his bedroom window. He'd been using it since he was twelve, initially just sitting out there watching planes. In the last week he'd used it to test the physical aspects of his spider-powers, always late at night. He climbed out the window and sat on the metal grating, his back against the brick, and held out his palm.
"Lumos."
Light bloomed in his hand. White-gold, steady, about the brightness of a strong flashlight. It didn't burn. It didn't feel like holding anything, no heat, no weight, no pressure. Just light, produced from a point roughly two inches above his palm, persistent and calm. He could feel the energy it required, a small steady draw from somewhere inside him that he couldn't locate, not his muscles, not his nervous system, something adjacent to both.
He turned his hand over. The light stayed, floating above his knuckles. He closed his fist. The light went out. He opened his hand. "Lumos." It came back. He pushed, brighter when he thought brighter, proportionally, as though his intention were a dimmer switch, and it moved from flashlight to floodlight, bright enough to make him squint, bright enough that it would be visible from the windows across the alley.
He killed it. Closed his fist, dropped the intention, and pressed himself back against the brick. A window across the way was open, curtains shifting. He sat very still for a count of thirty. Nobody leaned out. Nobody yelled. He climbed back inside.
Out the front door, down the stairs, down the block. The morning was grey and cool, October in Queens, the air smelling of exhaust and fallen leaves and the bakery on the corner that opened at five. He walked east, toward the stretch of disused lot between two buildings. Chain-link fence, weeds growing through broken concrete, the kind of urban dead space that existed because someone owned it and someone else owed taxes on it and the city hadn't gotten around to doing anything about the disagreement.
He slipped through a gap in the fence and stood in the lot with old bottles and candy wrappers at his feet.
He started small and worked outward. Reparo on a broken bottle, which reassembled with a soft clink and stood upright on the concrete, whole and clean. Scourgify on a stretch of grimy wall, and the grime dissolved into nothing, leaving bare brick. He levitated a piece of concrete rubble. Wingardium Leviosa, and the incantation arrived from Harry's memory with the automatic correctness of a native speaker's accent. The rubble rose smoothly, hung in the air at chest height, rotated when he rotated his wrist, moved left when he shifted his intention.
Each success built a dataset. The spells worked on first attempt, every time. This wasn't decoding grammar. He was speaking fluently.
He tried something bigger. A chunk of concrete the size of a microwave, half-buried in weeds. He pointed and spoke and it lifted, and as it lifted something happened that he didn't expect: the effort scaled differently than it should have. Moving the small piece had required a small draw on his energy. Moving the big piece required... roughly the same draw. As though the energy cost wasn't proportional to mass in the way that physics demanded. As though the system underneath the spell operated on different rules than the system the spell was describing.
He set the concrete down carefully and leaned against the wall. His heart was going fast again, but this time it wasn't only fear.
The spells worked. They connected to something real. But the thing they connected to was bigger than the spells themselves. The wizarding tradition, Harry's tradition, the framework Peter had inherited, it was like one set of labels stuck onto something that the labels didn't fully cover. Like, he groped for it, like one notation. One way of writing down a phenomenon that could be written in other ways too. The spells were the notation. But the territory underneath went further. He could feel it going further when he pushed.
He couldn't finish the thought. The shape of it was there, but the vocabulary wasn't, and trying to force it produced the intellectual equivalent of reaching for a word on the tip of his tongue. Something about how the tradition was a map, and the map was good, but the terrain extended past its edges. He filed the half-formed idea away and kept working.
His categorization instinct kicked in. What worked consistently: everything he tried. What produced unexpected scale: the levitation, where the energy-to-mass ratio was wrong. What felt like he was operating at the edge of something rather than inside it: the moments when a spell connected to that deeper substrate and the draw changed character, became wider, less defined.
He stood in the lot and ran through six more spells and kept notes in his head about what each one felt like at the boundary conditions. The math brain was sketching a map even though the territory wasn't clear yet.
His stomach was making itself known again with an urgency that went past hunger into something closer to demand. The spell-casting was drawing on something, and his metabolism was registering the expense. He went home, ate two more bowls of cereal and the last banana, and sat on the floor of his bedroom.
He sat with his back against the bed frame, cross-legged, in the mid-afternoon light. The carpet was thin and slightly scratchy through his jeans. The window was still cracked from the morning and he could hear a dog barking three floors down and the irregular clatter of someone dragging a recycling bin across concrete.
Occlumency.
He knew it from Harry's memories as a discipline, not meditation in any pop-culture sense, but a deliberate turning inward, an organized self-awareness. You didn't empty your mind, you structured it. Gave everything a place. Made the architecture legible to yourself so it would be opaque to anyone trying to read you from outside. In Harry's tradition it had been defensive, a way to keep out intrusion. Peter wanted something simpler: to get a survey of what he was carrying, how it was organized, where the boundaries were between his own mind and the inherited material.
A survey, not an expedition.
He followed the technique from memory. Sat still. Breathed. Let his attention move inward, past the surface noise, the repaired mug, the light in his palm, the floating concrete, and toward the deeper structures where Harry's lifetime of skill and memory lived, integrated into Peter's nervous system like a second operating system running on the same hardware.
The carpet was rough under his ankles. He could feel the bed frame against his spine, the slight unevenness where the wood had warped. His glasses pressed against the bridge of his nose. He focused past all of it, going deeper, sorting through layers.
He went further than he intended.
The threshold was like walking through a doorway he'd thought was a wall. One moment he was inside his own head, sorting through layers of memory and skill. The next moment there was a door. Ancient weathered wood. Intricate carvings that his attention snagged on, geometric patterns, interlocking circles, angular shapes that his mathematical brain immediately wanted to decompose into symmetry groups. Runes pulsed faintly along the frame, and Harry's knowledge supplied their function: passage, boundary, threshold between states.
He didn't choose to open it. His attention reached a certain depth, and the door responded. It swung inward, silently, and what was on the other side was not his bedroom and was not his mind and was not anywhere that operated under rules he understood.
The ground was a surface that his awareness treated as ground because standing required a concept of down, and this was the nearest approximation. Colors shifted at the edge of his vision, hues his visual cortex was improvising names for, nothing from the spectrum he knew. The sky, if it was sky, moved in directions that didn't correspond to wind. Parts of it folded over other parts. Distances were wrong; things that appeared close receded when he moved toward them, and things that appeared far away suddenly filled his field of perception without having traveled.
He tried to build a model and failed. Tried again from different axioms and failed differently. The failure was informative: this place operated under a physics with additional terms his equations didn't include. Higher-dimensional geometry projected onto a lower-dimensional perceptual surface. He could almost see it.
There were presences here.
The first one he became aware of was vast and interconnected. He couldn't look at it directly because it wasn't a thing, it was a structure. Intelligence expressed as architecture rather than thought. It branched and recurved and self-referenced across dimensions he couldn't count, something that had been growing for a very long time and was not finished and did not care that Peter was present. The name arrived without language: the Celestial Arbor.
He moved, not physically, he didn't have a body here, or the body he had was made of attention rather than flesh, and came into proximity with something else. A region where all states coexisted. Every possible version of every possible outcome, simultaneously, all real, all contradictory. His mind tried to resolve it into a single coherent perception and couldn't, and the failure produced a sensation like seasickness, a wrongness behind his eyes. The Discordant One.
He should have stopped. He should have turned back. Back on the bedroom floor his hands were clenched in his lap, he could still feel that, faintly, the rough carpet against his knuckles, the distant awareness of a body sitting in a room in Queens, but the connection was thinning. And there was more. His attention moved toward it because attention has weight and this place had gravity.
The next thing noticed him. It didn't move. It didn't do anything Peter could identify as action. But its awareness turned toward him the way a searchlight turns, and where its awareness fell, something in Peter began to leach away. Something less replaceable than energy. The Sorrow Wraith fed without moving, without choosing, through proximity, the way cold transfers through conduction.
Peter tried to pull back and found the pulling harder than it should have been. The thinning he'd felt, the fading connection to the carpet, the bed frame, his own hands, had progressed while he wasn't paying attention. He could still feel his body but the feeling was approximate, like remembering the layout of a room you hadn't been in for years.
And deeper still, past everything, there was something else. The Incomprehensible One. When Peter's attention brushed against it, the sensation was not pain. It was wrongness. A load-bearing wall suddenly absent. His sense of himself as a person, the location of his name, the address of his bedroom, May's face, went uncertain. Not gone. Uncertain. Which was worse, because gone was an event and uncertainty was a process.
He was too deep. He knew because of what had stopped being available. His own name took a moment to find. His age. The feeling of the carpet. The dog barking three floors down was gone entirely, replaced by something that wasn't silence but wasn't any sound human ears were built to process.
His mind was failing, quietly, the way a structure fails when too many supports are removed.
Something closed around what he was.
Not around his body, around his awareness, around the dissolving edges of Peter Parker that had been leaching into the deep astral. Something gripped him with the practiced certainty of a hand that had done this before and knew exactly where to hold.
The falling stopped.
She was there. Present in the astral plane as something composed, authoritative, and completely unimpressed by the scale of what surrounded them. A bald head. Robes that were orange and yellow even here, where color was unreliable. She moved with the quality of someone who had been still for a very long time and moved when it was necessary and not before. Her face was angular, high-cheekboned, and she looked at Peter, at whatever Peter was in this place, with an expression that was both penetrating and patient.
She did not deliver a speech. She pulled, and the deeper astral fell away, and the Incomprehensible One's proximity receded, and the Sorrow Wraith's leaching stopped, and the Discordant One became background noise rather than environment.
"You went too far," she said. Her voice was calm. The voice of someone whose time was worth something, which meant she didn't spend any of it on reassurance Peter could generate for himself.
Peter tried to speak and found he didn't have a mouth. Or he had one but it was back in Queens on a bedroom floor.
"You're on the astral plane. You accessed it through a mental discipline you inherited but do not understand." She let that sit for a moment. "You are not trained for this."
He could feel himself reconstituting. His name came back. His age. The sensation of carpet under his knuckles, distant but present. The faint sound of traffic filtering through a cracked window.
"Who..." The word formed in whatever passed for speech here.
"That can wait. What matters is that you do not do this again without guidance." She studied him. Something in her attention sharpened; she was evaluating something about him, something about how he'd gotten here, how far he'd gone, what he carried. "What you encountered is real, it is permanent, and proximity alone is enough to cause damage."
The silence between them had weight. She let it sit there, then spoke again.
"I can teach you. There are also things in your mind now, residue from what you just touched, that are dangerous while you sleep. I can lock those away so they cannot reach you in dreams or meditation until you have the discipline to approach them safely." She paused. "Come to me. 177A Bleecker Street, in Manhattan. Come soon. The residue does not wait for readiness."
The logic was simple enough that even Peter's half-assembled mind could follow it. He had walked into something that nearly unmade him. Someone was offering a way to make sure it didn't happen again.
"Yes," he managed. "Okay."
She let go, and Peter fell backward through the door, through the layers of his own mind, through the Occlumency structure he'd used to get here, and landed in his body on the bedroom floor with a jolt that knocked his glasses sideways on his face.
He was sweating. His t-shirt was soaked through. His muscles were shaking the way they shook after being held rigid past capacity, fine, uncontrollable tremors in his hands and thighs and jaw. His back hurt from where it had been pressed against the bed frame. The carpet had left red marks on his knuckles.
The bedroom was exactly as he'd left it. Afternoon light. The fixed mug on the windowsill. The sound of the bus route below. A siren somewhere east, getting farther away. A game show was playing through the shared wall, and he could hear the tinny rhythm of it, applause and a buzzer.
He pulled his glasses off, wiped the sweat from his face with the hem of his shirt, put them back on. His hands were still shaking. He pressed them flat against the carpet and waited for them to stop, which took longer than he wanted.
Something small and stiff was on the carpet next to his right knee that hadn't been there before. He picked it up. An embossed card, cream-colored, heavy stock. The kind of card that belonged to a different century. On it, in raised lettering:
177A Bleecker Street
Manhattan
He didn't know how it had gotten there. He put it on his desk and stared at it for a while.
He didn't know the woman's name. He didn't know how she'd found him. He didn't know what the astral plane actually was, beyond the name Harry's memories supplied. He didn't know if the things he'd seen there were still seeing him back.
He sat on his bedroom floor and waited for his body to stop registering alarm, and eventually it did, and he got up and ate the rest of the bread in the kitchen and drank two glasses of water and sat at the table with his forehead on his arms for a long time.
School the next day was a thing that happened around him while he was somewhere else entirely. He sat in Mrs. Ramirez's class while she talked about post-invasion literature, first-person accounts from the Chitauri attack, and he watched her write a prompt on the board in blue marker and he copied it into his notebook by reflex and then realized thirty seconds later that he'd written it in the runic alphabet Harry had used for personal notes. He stared at the page for a beat, then flipped to a fresh one and rewrote it in English, his handwriting worse than usual, tighter and less controlled.
At lunch, Ned was watching him. Ned's face was doing the thing it always did when he was worried, the crease between his eyebrows, the slight forward lean, the way his expression broadcast his internal state to anyone paying attention. Everything showed on Ned's face, always had. Right now his face was saying I have a theory about what's wrong with you and I'm deciding whether to bring it up.
Peter was pushing rice around his tray without eating it, which was wrong in two ways: he'd been eating like a furnace for the last week, and he didn't waste food.
"You okay?" Ned asked, around a mouthful of cafeteria pizza.
"Yeah. Didn't sleep great."
"You look like you didn't sleep at all."
"It was a bad night."
Ned watched him for another moment. His expression shifted, still worried, but resolving into a decision. "My nana's making sinigang tonight. You should come over. She's been asking about you."
The invitation was Ned's way of fixing problems he couldn't name. Peter recognized it. When something was off, Ned didn't interrogate, he redirected. Offered food, offered presence, offered the structural support of being in a room with someone who cared about you without requiring an explanation for why you needed it.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Yeah, that sounds good."
After school they walked to Ned's place, which was four blocks from Peter's in the other direction. The Leeds apartment was on the third floor of a building that was older and louder than Peter's, and the stairwell smelled like a combination of cooking oil and laundry soap and the faint sweet plastic smell of someone's space heater running too hot. Ned's apartment was full in a way that felt different from cluttered. It was the fullness of a home that had been actively lived in by multiple generations, where surfaces acquired objects through use rather than decoration. School photos on the wall going back years. A shelf of cookbooks with cracked spines. An afghan draped over the back of the couch that had clearly been made by hand.
Nana was in the kitchen. She was short and round-faced and moved around the stove with the confident economy of someone who had been cooking in this kitchen for decades and knew where everything was without looking. The sinigang was already going, and Peter could smell the tamarind and the pork and the sharp green of kangkong before they were through the door. A pot of rice sat on the counter. On the table, which was covered in a plastic tablecloth printed with flowers, serving dishes were being assembled: adobo, dark and glistening in its sauce, and a plate of lumpia, golden-brown and still crackling faintly from the oil.
"Peter!" Nana said, turning from the stove. Her face did something warm and specific when she saw him, genuine pleasure. "Sit, sit. You're too skinny."
"Hi, Nana."
"Ned, get him a plate. A big plate."
Peter sat. Ned got him a plate. Nana loaded it with rice and sinigang and adobo and lumpia and looked at the result critically and added more rice. Peter ate. He ate a lot. His metabolism was grateful and the food was very good and at Ned's house he was allowed to be hungry without explaining why. Nana didn't ask. She just watched his plate and refilled it when the food level dropped below some threshold she maintained internally.
"How's school?" Nana asked, settling into the chair at the head of the table with her own plate, smaller than Peter's by half.
"It's good. We're doing post-invasion literature in English, first-person accounts."
"Terrible thing," Nana said, shaking her head. "I was at the market when it started. Everybody running. I just went home and locked the door and prayed." She pointed at Peter's plate. "Eat more. There's plenty."
Peter ate more. Ned was telling Nana about a coding project he was working on, something involving sorting algorithms, and Nana was asking follow-up questions with the genuine curiosity of someone who found everything at least slightly interesting. Peter's attention drifted, he was thinking about the card on his desk, 177A Bleecker Street, and Ned caught it. A flicker of his eyes toward Peter, the worried crease returning for a moment, then smoothing out. He didn't say anything. He filed it.
Nana turned back to Peter. "You look tired, anak. You eating enough? Your tita May, she's working nights again?"
"Yeah, she picked up extra shifts. The hospital bills from when I was..." He stopped, recalibrated. "It's been tight."
Nana clicked her tongue, the sound that meant she had opinions about the state of things. "You need a job? My friend Mrs. Santos, her son delivers papers before school. He says it's good money for a boy your age."
"I've been thinking about that, actually," Peter said. "A delivery route. Before school, so it wouldn't interfere with anything."
"That's smart," Nana said. "You're a hard worker. Ned, you should also get a job."
"Nana, I have a job. I'm a student."
"That's not a job. That's an obligation."
Ned looked at Peter with the expression of someone who had lost this argument before and would lose it again. Peter almost smiled, which was the first time he'd come close to smiling since yesterday morning.
After dinner Peter helped clear the table while Ned loaded the dishwasher and Nana made coffee. The kitchen was warm and smelled like tamarind and garlic and the specific sweetness of rice that had been sitting in a pot for hours. Peter dried dishes and thought about the astral plane and the woman who had pulled him out of it and the feeling of his own name becoming uncertain, and none of those things belonged in this kitchen with these people, and the distance between those two realities was something he couldn't bridge and couldn't explain and didn't try.
"Thanks for dinner, Nana," he said when they were leaving.
"You come back anytime," she said, and pressed a container of leftover adobo into his hands. "For your tita May."
He walked home in the dark. The container was warm against his side. The streets were doing their evening thing: car headlights, the yellow squares of apartment windows, a man walking a small dog, the distant rattle of the elevated train.
May was getting ready for her night shift when he got in. She was in her scrubs, her hospital lanyard already around her neck, putting her phone and keys and a granola bar into her bag with the distracted efficiency of someone who'd done this sequence a thousand times. She looked tired. She always looked a little tired before a shift, but tonight the tiredness sat heavier, in the set of her mouth and the slight stiffness in how she moved.
"Hey," she said. "Nana's?"
"Yeah. She sent adobo." He put the container in the fridge.
"That woman is a saint." May zipped her bag and then paused, her hand on the counter, and looked at Peter with the expression she used when she was working up to something. "So I was looking at the bills this morning."
Peter leaned against the counter and waited.
"The electric went up again. And the insurance thing from the hospital stay, they're saying the copay is higher than what they originally quoted, which..." She stopped, rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. "It's fine. We'll figure it out. I'm picking up an extra shift on Saturday."
"I could do deliveries," Peter said. "Before school. Nana's friend mentioned a paper route..."
"Peter..."
"I'm serious. It wouldn't mess with school. Early morning, done before first period."
"We'll talk about it," May said, which was May's way of saying she didn't want to argue before a twelve-hour shift. She picked up her bag, kissed his forehead, and paused at the door. "There's leftover pasta in the fridge. Don't stay up too late."
"I won't."
"Peter."
"I won't."
She left. He listened to her footsteps on the stairs, then the building's front door opening and closing, then nothing. The apartment settled into the quiet that meant he was alone.
He sat on his bed. It was late, past ten. May was at work. The apartment was his.
The room was messier than usual. His backpack was on the floor with books spilling out of it. The desk had his textbooks and a scattering of pens and the embossed card sitting precisely where he'd left it, cream-colored and heavy and looking like it belonged to a completely different story than the one about a kid in Queens who couldn't pay his electric bill.
He had a composition notebook. Cheap, college-ruled, black and white marbled cover, from the bodega on the corner. He'd bought it for school but the semester was still young enough that his other notebooks hadn't filled up. He pulled it out of his backpack and opened it to the first page.
He'd always kept questions in his head. That had usually been enough, his memory was good, his ability to hold and rotate complex problems was better than good, and writing things down had always felt like admitting the problem was too big to carry. But the list forming in his mind right now was already too long and too tangled to hold all at once, and some of the items connected to other items in ways he couldn't map without seeing them laid out.
He clicked his pen.
At the top of the page he wrote, in handwriting that was slightly steadier than what he'd managed in class today:
Things I need to understand
He started writing. The first few items came out numbered, neat:
1. Spider-powers: strength, wall-crawling, reflexes, the sense. Limits? What scales?
2. The magic. Harry's magic. It works, WHY does it work? Connects to something bigger than the spells
Then the numbering got inconsistent. Item three was about Oshtur and what the word did, but halfway through writing it he realized it connected to item five, which was about the astral plane, so he drew an arrow between them and the arrow went through item four, which was about the things he'd seen in there, the Arbor, the Discordant One, the one that fed, the one that made his name go wrong, and he circled "made my name go wrong" three times because that was the part that still frightened him most.
He wrote the woman, bald, robes, who is she, how did she find me and then underneath it 177A Bleecker St and underlined it twice.
Lower on the page, crammed into the margin because he'd run out of line space: the dream, Harry's life, all of it, why me? why a kid in Queens? And next to it, smaller, like he was embarrassed to write it even in a notebook no one would see: am I dangerous?
He turned the page. The back of the first page was already full of margin notes and connecting arrows. On the fresh page he wrote about the energy scaling problem from the levitation experiments, the mass-to-draw ratio that didn't match Newtonian expectations, and then about May's bills, and the paper route, and the hospital copay, and whether the spider-metabolism was going to bankrupt them in grocery costs alone. He wrote do the powers and the magic interact? and then do the powers and the magic INTERFERE? and then crossed out the second one and wrote it again more carefully with a question mark that took up half the margin.
The handwriting got smaller as he went. The pen pressed harder. Some lines were crossed out and rewritten. He drew a rough diagram of what the astral plane had felt like geometrically, concentric regions of increasing danger, with stick-figure labels for the entities that were laughably inadequate for what they represented. He wrote WHY in capital letters next to the Incomprehensible One and left it at that.
He filled three pages front and back before the pen slowed. His hand was cramping. The cheap paper had taken the ink unevenly; some lines were darker where he'd pressed harder, some were faint where the pen had skipped.
He looked at what he'd written. A mess of questions and half-answers and connecting arrows and margin notes and one small diagram that looked like a target with monsters at the rings. His handwriting degraded steadily from top to bottom.
He glanced at the desk. The embossed card sat there, cream-colored and certain. 177A Bleecker Street.
He looked back at the notebook. Wrote, at the bottom of the third page, squeezed below a crossed-out line about spell energy costs: the list is going to get longer before it gets shorter.
He closed the notebook and put it on his nightstand, next to his glasses case and the alarm clock that was set for 6:12 like it always was. The radiator clicked. Through the cracked window he could hear the late-night bus and someone's music, tinny and far away.
He turned off the light and lay in the dark. His stomach growled faintly, it always growled now, and he thought about the leftover pasta in the fridge and decided it could wait until morning. The ceiling was invisible but he knew exactly where the Rhode Island water stain was.
All day, things had happened to him. The word had happened. The magic had happened. The astral plane had happened. The woman had happened. He'd been a passenger in his own transformation, carried along by events he hadn't chosen.
The notebook was different.
He fell asleep with his questions on the nightstand and the card on his desk and the city outside doing what it always did, and if he dreamed, he didn't remember it.