NOVEL WEB Chapter 4: Chapter 4: Echoes of Who I Was
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Gotham mornings didn't bring light.
They brought dimness with better visibility.
The sun barely pierced the thick clouds above Park Row, turning everything a sickly yellow-grey. Peter Parker sat on a bench outside a shuttered bodega, hood pulled low over his face, nursing a burnt cup of coffee that tasted more like regret than caffeine. The buzz of city life started around him honking taxis, barking dogs, the occasional shriek of distant violence.
He didn't flinch at any of it. He just listened.
Because this this mundane tension was manageable. The cosmic weight of the multiverse had been muted. His spider-sense, once scrambled like an AM radio through a thunderstorm, now pulsed with a steady beat, humming only when it needed to. Gotham was still alien, but the noise had quieted.
And yet, the ghosts had found a way to speak.
They came at night.
Not in dreams Peter didn't sleep deeply enough for that but in flashes. Smells. Sounds. A word here. A gesture there.
It started with a laugh.
A very specific laugh warm, snorting, and just a bit too loud.
Peter had been halfway up a power conduit on a rooftop in Burnside, adjusting a camera he'd jury-rigged from WayneTech scraps. Then he heard it. Behind him. Familiar.
Harry.
He whipped around, heart seizing but the roof was empty.
He stood there, breathing hard, lips slightly parted.
Nothing.
Then came the smell of Aunt May's kitchen.
Cinnamon rolls, hot and buttery, with that citrus glaze she always used when she was worried about him. Peter smelled it near a sewer grate in Gotham's industrial ward.
He nearly threw up.
Because he could see her hands wrinkled, delicate, flour-dusted. Hear her humming Nat King Cole. Feel her arms around him after Ben's funeral.
But she wasn't here. Couldn't be. Would never be again.
The memories weren't real.
Or they were but from another Peter.
One night, in the empty shell of a condemned tenement near Tricorner Yards, Peter knelt on cracked tile, breathing fast.
He'd woken with tears in his eyes and blood on his palms, convinced he'd just pulled Gwen from a collapsing bridge. Except her face didn't match. Blonde, yes. But the name in his dream had been Stacy Lorraine, not Gwen Stacy.
He didn't know her.
And yet his heart felt like it had been torn out of his chest.
Every flashback layered over another fragmented across time, identity, and dimensional bleed. Some from his own past. Some… weren't. There were versions of him who had married MJ. Some who'd killed Norman. Some who had no web at all.
And he had no idea which ones belonged to him.
It was unraveling him quietly. Gotham didn't notice because Gotham didn't care. But he did. And that's why, for the first time in years, Peter Parker tried to do something radical.
He tried to disappear.
His new name was Marcus Coles.
He forged the ID with help from Oracle, who Batman had introduced through an encrypted call line. She hadn't said much only that she'd been briefed, and that if he brought any multiversal collapse to her doorstep, she'd personally fry his brain.
Peter liked her immediately.
Marcus Coles lived in the Narrows, in a windowless room above an illegal print shop. He paid rent with salvage fixing busted radios, reconfiguring vending machines to actually take Gotham's inconsistent currency.
He kept his head down. Bought groceries in cash. Patched his own suit when he could. Patrolled less. Watched more.
And for a while, it worked.
The ghosts faded. Not gone, but blurred.
He even started sketching again on napkins, on walls, on the backs of broken signs. Spider-shapes. Cityscapes. A woman's eyes he couldn't quite place.
And one face he never stopped drawing.
His own.
But older. Sadder. In a world where he hadn't survived.
Until the train incident.
He hadn't planned to intervene. He wasn't even wearing his suit. Just hoodie, jeans, cap low, blending in.
The train jerked to a halt between two stations, halfway beneath the East River. The lights died. Screams rippled through the car.
Peter's spider-sense went off like a gunshot.
The doors burst open.
Two men in rebreather masks stormed in, shouting commands. One had a sonic blade. The other carried a gas dispersal canister marked with a symbol Peter recognized from his earlier ambush: the stylized "R" with three slashes.
He froze.
Another message.
They were hunting him.
The gas hissed.
People screamed.
And just like that, Marcus Coles died.
Peter Parker stood up, grabbed the nearest pipe from the car wall, and went to work.
He moved like a blur, even without the suit. Ducked a swing, disarmed one man, shoved the canister out the open doors. The second attacker jabbed with the blade, slashing Peter across the forearm.
It burned. Deep.
Peter kicked the man into the doors so hard the frame buckled.
It was over in forty seconds.
He didn't stay for thanks.
Batman was already waiting on the rooftop by the time Peter climbed out of the train shaft.
"You blew your cover."
Peter winced, holding his bleeding arm. "Yeah. About that…"
"You were compromised the moment they deployed the symbol again," Batman said, tossing a medpack.
Peter caught it.
"Who are they?"
"Unknown. Possibly connected to Spyral. Possibly not. The symbol was scrubbed from all digital databases. Someone is testing your limits. And your reach."
Peter wrapped the bandage tight. "Then I guess hiding isn't going to work anymore."
"No," Batman said. "It won't."
Peter stood there for a long moment, watching the stars struggle through the polluted Gotham sky.
"I wanted to know who I was before I became someone new."
Batman didn't answer.
Peter turned to face him. "Have you ever doubted yourself so badly you started seeing ghosts?"
Batman finally looked at him. "Every day."
That night, Peter burned the Marcus Coles ID.
Watched it curl and blacken in a rooftop barrel.
And when the ashes scattered into the wind, he whispered a single name:
"Uncle Ben."
The memory wasn't fragmented. Not that one. That face, that voice, that final lesson they were still his. Still untouched.
With great power…
He didn't finish it. He didn't need to.
The next morning, Spider-Man returned to the city.
No alias. No mask in the crowd.
Just him.
And the ghosts, watching silently, waiting to see who he'd become next.
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You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.