left to my own devices.

[swing]

Peter can't wait to go to college. That isn't such a strange sentiment, he supposes. Most kids his age are eager to leave high school. But they aren't looking forward to more schooling. In this way, Peter has always been strange, nerdy, whatever. But really, he can't wait. He loves everything about this place. No one cares how old or how tall he is, no one calls him a nerd or tries to stuff him in a locker, no one even knows his name. After years of bullying at Midtown, anonymity was the best that he could hope for at Darrow High. But at the community college, he doesn't feel like such a loser for sitting alone at lunch. Here, people will respect his space. Here, he's unafraid to raise his hand in class when he has the answer. Here, the fact that he's younger than most of the other students makes him envious and impressive. He can stretch his legs and breathe here. This is the place for him.

He would never dream of staying a second longer than necessary at Darrow High. But after class today, he hangs around the college, walking along the path until he finds a place to sit and get started on his homework. He's hard at work, scribbling in a notebook under the shade of a large tree, when the back of his neck begins to tingle. It isn't his Spidey Sense, thankfully. That's all he needs, for some d-bag villain to invade his only sanctuary. No, it's something else. A pair of eyes trained intently on him. He looks up and a woman he's never met is staring back at him, looking very sad. He doesn't know what to do or say.

"Uh, hi?"

Idiot.

Comments

[swing]

Those were terrifying words to hear when you happened to be Spider-Man. He already had two clones that he knew of here in the city. Some unseen force must have taken minimal pity on him, because neither Kaine nor Jessica resembled him too closely. But he worried that it was only a matter of time before some version of Octavius, in some messed up universe out there, perfected the process and made a perfect copy. Or nearly perfect; Peter in every way except the one that matters most. His mind, his abilities, but not his conscience. A dark mirror. It was exactly the sort of thing that madman would do.

The woman before him looked sad, though, not frightened. And Peter knew enough about the doppelgänger phenomena here in Darrow to feel at least momentarily relieved. Miles had recognized him from the papers, his identity posthumously revealed to all. (Still not sure how I feel about that, by the way. Not gonna think about it.) But this woman said she knew him, or the person he resembled. It probably wasn't Peter Parker or Spider-Man that she was looking for.

He climbed to his feet and stood for a moment, stretching out his limbs. "I'm Peter," he said, lifting his hand in a quick wave. "Sorry about my, uh... face."

[unseentides]

"Kathy," I said, and shook my head, feeling guilty that he felt a need to apologise at all. I was the one that had stood there and made the both of us uncomfortable, after all. I knew that the right thing to do would have been to ground myself with the reminder that Tommy was absolutely dead, absolutely not in Darrow, and walk away. But it turned out it was so much easier said than done.

"You've nothing to be sorry for. I'm... sorry that I reacted the way I did. I should have expected it to happen here eventually. I've met three men that look almost identical, but none... well, none like the person you look like."

Hearing him speak settled me, though, kept my chest from growing too tight. It was harder, though, to keep the visual of him and that last little wave out of my head. It hadn't been all that long ago.

[swing]

As Kathy spoke, Peter realized just how important this person he resembled must be to her. It made him feel even worse, despite her insistence that he had nothing to be sorry for. If he excelled at anything, it was feeling guilty.

He wondered what he would do if it happened to him. In a way, it had, with Abby, but since Gwen was in the city, it wasn't such a painful encounter. Harder to imagine was someone who resembled Mary Jane coming into his life. No doubt he would handle it with far less grace than Kathy here.

"Darrow certainly seems to have a penchant for lookalikes," said Peter. He couldn't figure out why. His best guess was that the powers that be around here got off on thoroughly unsettling the population. He definitely had the evidence to support his hypothesis.

[unseentides]

"It does," I agreed. I thought of myself and my resemblance of Irene. I thought of Paul, and Luke, and Jacob. They'd been so different, though, so uniquely themselves despite the uncanny nature of their likenesses, while Peter... Peter could have been Tommy when he was his age. At least until he opened his mouth and spoke with that accent. I shook my head again, like it might shake the memories out of my mind. Like it might free up space for rationality.

Of course it didn't. Darrow had a tendency to defy rationality, after all.

I wished it wasn't so hard to leave, but I figured the best I could do was take attention away from his resemblance to Tommy. I didn't want to unsettle him more than I already had. "You've met some of them, the lookalikes?"

[swing]

"I have," nodded Peter. He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth slightly on the balls of his feet. The idea of someone out there sharing his face would have made him uncomfortable enough on its own, he thinks. But it was made even more unsettling as it called to mind his past experiences with nefarious cloning experiments. He tries to put those thoughts out of his mind; he didn't want to deal with the nightmares later on. "This girl I met here, she looks just like my friend Gwen, only her hair is a different color."

[unseentides]

"I think it might be the cruelest trick this city plays on us," I pondered. It helped that he'd met some lookalikes himself, even if I wouldn't have wished it on him. It just made all the difference that he knew I wasn't crazy. Or, at least, crazy for thinking he so resembled someone departed. Someone so far away. Then again, maybe I was a bit mad, if I couldn't make myself leave. "Especially when the ones we encounter are... pictures of people long gone," I added.

[swing]

"Oh, I didn't realize your person was, uh..." Peter cut himself off with a shake of his head, his lips pressed together in a thin line. It was even weirder to think that he was walking around resembling a dead man, even though he was, technically, dead as well. Maybe there were a finite number of faces and after a while, different universes had to resort to borrowing from others. What did it say about him, and this place, that a concept like face recycling seemed almost plausible? It probably said that he needed to get out of his own head. "I'm sorry," he added in a soft voice.

[unseentides]

"No," I said, shaking my head, guilt growing. It wasn't his fault that he looked like him, after all, but it was my fault that I'd decided to project my pain onto him. At that point, I shouldn't have ached so much for Tommy, anyway. It's not as if the loss had been unexpected. Still, the heart could betray all logic, all rules of time. "I'm sorry for bringing it up."