Epic Crossover Event! WHO: Nightwing and Spider-Man WHAT: Parkour! WHERE: In the Multiverse apparently WHEN: Now abouts, no one’s sure about the calendar yet RATING: PG
Nightwing didn’t know exactly what was up or where he was. He’d swung from a roof in Gotham and ended up reflexively catching himself on the cupola of a building. He leaned, sticking to the shadows as he looked out at the deserted town square seeming area.
There was nothing from back home, not even static, and he switched his lenses to check for heat signatures instead. Nothing in any of the buildings he was looking at. He switched them back quickly enough.
This...this was not good. He stayed perfectly still while he worked on figuring out where to start.
---
The worst part of it all had been feeling it coming. It felt like all the bonds that made up his body were coming apart and he couldn’t understand what was happening until he watched the Guardians turn to dust. When he figured it out he began to panic and reach out for Mr Stark, pleading for help even as he saw the fear in his mentor’s eyes. That had been a surprise, almost enough of one to distract him from the way his body was crumbling into dust. He remembered whispering that he was sorry just before everything went black.
Then everything was white.
Maybe he was somewhere white, everybody said heaven was white, right? He had to be dead. Strange said Thanos was going to wipe out half the universe. Peter was just unlucky, he was sure to the surprise of no one. But he was thinking, could the dead think? He could feel what he figured was the ground beneath him. That meant he had a body still, were there bodies in heaven?
That was when his vision came back and he realized he was laying on the ground. He was laying on his back on the ground, looking up a bunch of buildings, one with a weird gargoyle that looked like it was watching him. Weird, but he’d been dust a minute ago, critiquing decoration could wait. He sat up and looked around, scanning the area for some sort of sign of someone nearby or some hint at where he was.
“Hello? Anybody here?”
---
Nightwing’s attention pivoted to movement. There hadn’t been a kid there before. There was now. Was this place collecting people? He narrowed his gaze, checking again quickly to make sure nothing was hunting the kid. He moved lightly, hopping across to a building closer to the kid on the ground and eventually making his way down there to offer a hand up. There was no way he was gonna leave anyone behind.
---
Not a weird gargoyle then. Cool. He didn’t seem hostile either. Even cooler.
“Uh, hi.” He said taking that hand. He’d never seen him before, he was mostly sure. He hadn’t been on the news either, or anywhere online. He was fairly sure he would have remembered somebody dressed like that. Still, even if he was being quiet he was another person and Peter was anxious enough about being alive again that he might just stick himself to this guy for as long as he could. “Nice, uh, outfit. Like all the, black and whatever. Pretty sweet.”
---
Nightwing did a quick diagnostic scan of the kid. Heart rate way up, but other than that, he was fine. “You’re okay,” he said, giving him a gentle, calm smile. “Promise, you’re fine.” He put a hand on the boy’s bicep. “Nice armor you’ve got there.”
---
The guy reminded him of Cap in a way. He half expected him to call him ‘son’ and give him life advice while puffing out his chest and putting on a dazzling smile. The smile was pretty dazzling in itself really and Peter caught himself staring at it for a moment or two. “Yeah. Oh, yeah, my armor.”
He looked down over himself, he was intact again and the lights in the suit were still on. Maybe he really was fine. What the hell had happened? Where was Mr Stark? Peter looked back up at the mysterious stranger and his smile, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m Spider-Man. Good to meet you. I was dead like a minute ago. I don’t know what’s going on.”
---
“Nightwing,” he said, perfectly content to let himself be this kid’s center for as long as he needed it. “I wasn’t dead a minute ago, but we’ll figure out what’s going on, okay?” He tried not to think too deeply that there was an emotionally wounded kid talking about how he was just dead.
---
“Do you have any idea where we are?” It didn’t look he had very many answers but Peter was prone to hope against all reason. “I was on an alien planet when I died, didn’t look like this though. This actually kinda looks like that really really old tv show, The Twilight Zone.”
---
“Let’s hope we’re not in a place like that,” Nightwing said. “I was in Jersey last on patrol.” And then he was here. He frowned just a little. “You good with verticality?” He wanted to get back to the roof to see what else there was to see.
---
“Oh I hope we’re not in Jersey.” Peter said, more to himself. It slipped out. The guy would probably understand, especially if he was from Jersey.
“Up there?” Peter pointed to the roof.
---
“We’re not in Jersey. The air smells completely different than Jersey does.” Nightwing looked up at the roof and nodded.
---
“Dude, my name is Spider-Man.” The mask re-formed over his face and his lifted his wrists, shooting out his webs to the top of the roof. All it took was a little bounce and pull, Peter flipped through the air and landed where he’d been aiming with this webs. Sure, he could have just jumped, it was within his range, but the webs were cooler.
He felt like he had less of a chance of embarrassing himself if he used his webs, and he did want to show off for the guy with the nice smile.
---
Nightwing laughed a little and got himself up the building just as gracefully as ever. He took up a position next to him, falling naturally into a more confident Batman stance out of recent habit and for the benefit of the kid next to him.
“It doesn’t look like there’s much life around.”
---
“And it’s really creepy too. Like seriously Twilight Zone. It almost kinda looks like a set. I don’t see any- Oh, wait!” Peter looked down at his chest. “Hey, droney? You still activated?”
The suit opened over his chest, allowing the drone to fly off his first Stark suit. It hovered in the air in front of his face for a bit.
“Good to see you too, pal. Can you go look for people that way?” Peter pointed in a direction away from himself and Nightwing. The drone abruptly darted off.
---
Shit he missed having something like that in the bat suit and being connected to O and everything else. He smiled a little at the chirpy drone. He nudged the boy playfully, hoping to get him to relax some before he leapt to the next roof nimbly.
---
“Hey,” Peter went flipping after him mostly because it felt good to be alive again. Something about coming apart at the most basic level and turning to dust had made him miss activity. “You said your name was Nightwing, right?” he asked as he landed. “Does that mean you can fly?”
---
“Only figuratively. Mostly it’s a lot of free falling and parkour and grappling hooks and the like, sometimes hang gliders.”
---
He wanted to make a flightless bird joke, he really did. He was smiling under the mask just thinking about it, but he held it back. It was a little too soon to possibly annoy Mr Gorgeous Smile. “Oh cool, so you’re like acrobatic and whatever.”
---
Nightwing tapped the side of his nose and winked as he pointed that finger at Peter to indicate he’d gotten it in one and then let himself fall backwards off the roof of the building, flipping and catching himself with a grappling hook to get to the top of the next building before he touched the ground, obviously someone who was very, very skilled at these things.
---
Peter watched him and once the guy landed, Peter simply jumped down, landing in a roll before hopping back up to his feet. “Do you have like super powers or whatever? It’s cool if you don’t. I know lots of cool people who don’t have them.”
---
“Nope, it’s just me,” he said.
---
“So your suit is like special or something, right? Helps you do all those cool flips?” He asked as he moved to the next building, crawling up the wall so he could take a glance through one of the windows.
“This place is so weird, there’s like nothing here.”
---
Nightwing laughed. “Nope. The only thing my suit does is protect me.” He stayed in a casual crouch as he watched the boy crawl up the wall. “You?”
---
“Yeah. I can like crawl up things and stuff. Jump really high. Sense danger. Hang upside down for a really long time without the blood rushing to my head. Spider stuff, I guess. The suit is special too, I guess. It’s got the drone thing, and like extra legs sometimes. Oh, and there’s Karen.”
-Yes, Peter, what can I do for you?-
“Oh my god, Karen. Sorry. I didn’t think-” Well, he didn’t think. He’d been distracted by coming back to life and then the handsome guy and just the whole creepy vibe to this place. “Any idea where we are?”
-I’m sorry, Peter. I can’t connect to the GPS or the internet. There’s nothing in my memory that can identify this place at the moment-
“Great. So we really are in the Twilight Zone.” He said, talking more to Karen, a voice that Nightwing wouldn’t be able to hear.
---
Nightwing could see him talking to what was either an AI in his suit or a connection to somewhere else. Given that nothing he could do was connecting to O or a Lantern Corps outpost or anything else he was betting it was an AI. He stood up out of his crouch and walked over to the edge of the roof, hopping down to one of the houses not far off the main square. Half to explore and half to let the boy have his privacy.
There was nothing alive in the house or at least nothing with any kind of warmth. He was half prepared to find skeletons when he opened the door. He knew all too well the smell of corpses. If something here was dead it was either very very fresh or very very old.
---
When he didn’t see Nightwing right away he got a little anxious, at least until Karen helpfully highlighted him and Peter was able to dive after him. Again he landed in a roll and was back up on his feet quick. “Karen doesn’t know where we are, it’s a little scary.” He told Nightwing. “She’s trying to find life signatures now but she hasn’t come up with anything yet.”
---
Nightwing nodded. “Yeah, I haven’t seen any thermal signatures beyond the two of us,” he said, walking into the home, getting one of his sticks out just in case.
There was no one. No signs of life. There were things around, sure, but they seemed to have been left in preparation for someone like a dorm room almost.
---
Peter followed behind cautiously. He didn’t sense any danger, he wasn’t sure if that was because there wasn’t any or he couldn’t sense danger anymore thanks to having died. Still, the place was just weird enough for him to be worried.
“So any theories about what is going on?” He asked, keeping his voice low.
---
“Best I can tell you’re not too far off with Twilight Zone stuff. I’ve got no connection to anywhere else right now. Possibly some kind of waiting room for something? I’d say for death, but I’m not…”
---
“Guy named Thanos just killed half the universe I think. Maybe you got unlucky too.” Peter frowned under his mask. “But there should be more people here then, a lot more people.”
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“I get the feeling I would’ve been involved in that fight if it were a thing,” Nightwing said, walking up the stairs to the loft bedroom to look around.
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“Wasn’t much of a fight I think.” Peter said quietly, watching Nightwing. “He just closed his fist or something like that and me and a bunch of people turned into dust and blew away.” It was a hard thing to think about, the simple scale of it all. They had been so close to stopping it too, that was the worst part, knowing that they had failed so badly.
---
“So your universe, not mine,” he said. Nightwing took a heavy breath.
---
“Right, okay. Multiverse maybe then.” Peter nodded to himself. “Anything up there?”
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“There’s some clothes and things. The bed’s made, but everything feels more like it’s waiting. Hotel California, y’know?”
He looked back down at Spider-Man. “Seems like we’ve been expected and someone checked us in.”
---
Peter puffed out his cheeks, something that probably couldn’t be seen under the mask. “So instead of possibly being dead and in some kind of afterlife, we’re stuck somewhere, possibly somewhere we can’t leave. Wasn’t there something about getting stabbed too? I’m not sure I want to find anybody else now.”
---
“There’s always a way out. We just have to figure it out or hope that the people we left behind are smart enough to figure it out.” He pulled a pair of jeans and a t-shirt out of the second dresser that looked about the kid’s size and tossed them to him.
---
He had died though. He was fairly certain no one was going to come looking for him, but maybe if he got lucky someone would come looking for Nightwing and get them both out. Maybe it wouldn’t be his universe but there had to be someone who knew how to travel between them.
Mr Stark probably could have done it.
He caught the clothes, “Yeah, this place isn’t getting any less weird.”
---
“Just in case someone else shows up it’s safer for you to forget that there’s any connection between me and Nightwing, okay?” he said as he took off his mask and started to get ready to change.
---
And the rest of his face was gorgeous too. Of course it was. He could feel himself blushing under his mask. It was hard enough apparently for Karen to ask if he was feeling well. “I’m fine.”
He was fairly sure his ears were bright red, they always went red. He was more thankful than he could say for the mask.
“I’ll go recall droney real quick.” He said, quick to turn and head back to the door.
---
Dick smiled a little as he got changed, looking around to find the best place to stash his suit. There was a loose ceiling panel (likely an access panel) in the closet and it worked well enough. He went to the bathroom to wash the spirit gum off his face only to just...not have any water come out of the tap. “Time for all those years in Bludhaven to be useful, I guess.” He rolled up his sleeves and checked under the sink to see if things were turned on before he went hunting for the main.
---
Peter was half jogging the next time he ran into Nightwing, “Droney picked something up. Life signs, I think. He couldn’t get too much closer but there might be people here.”
The mask peeled back. “I should probably put on the normal clothes though right? Uh, what should I call you?”
---
“Dick,” he said, pushing himself off the bathroom floor. “Dick Grayson. You?” He headed towards what looked like a basement door.
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“I’m Peter Parker.” He said, trying to hide his reaction to hearing the guy’s name. He thought he was being called a Dick at first, then again, his name was still Peter. “Uh, nice to meet you. I’m gonna get changed now.”
---
The basement definitely did not look like a place he wanted to go alone. Something about it just sent his stomach sinking as low as it could go. “Sounds good. We can check out what your little buddy found when you’re done.”