The metal floor is cold against my bare feet. A good anchor. Reality is cold. The hum of the multiversal stabilizers is a constant, low drone, a sound that has replaced the city's scream in my ears. I do not miss the city. This place is cleaner. The mission, purer.
My grappling gun is disassembled on the workbench before me. Each component is wiped clean of grime and potential failure. A catch that sticks, a wire that frays—these are the details that kill. I work methodically. The ritual focuses the mind. Behind me, the boy shifts in his bunk. A whimper in his sleep. He dreams of her. Gwen Stacy. A variable removed from the equation. Good.
When his movements become more deliberate, I do not turn. I hear the rustle of the cheap synthetic blanket, the creak of the cot's frame. He is awake. I continue my work, re-seating the trigger mechanism. A satisfying click echoes in the sterile quiet.
"Morning," he says. The word is small, fragile. An attempt to build a bridge over the chasm she left between us last night.
I glance at his reflection in the polished surface of a nearby monitor. Miles Morales. Young. Strong. Infected with hope. A dangerous pathogen.
His eyes are fixed on my face. My true face. He's looking for something in the shifting patterns of the ink. He will not find it. After last night's… discussion, the storm has passed. The patterns are calm, drifting with glacial slowness across the pale fabric. A frozen sea under a dead sky. Too still, he is thinking. I can see it in the furrow of his brow. He thinks it is a sign of damage. It is a sign of clarity.
He stands, stretching the stiffness from his limbs. "Rorschach… we need to talk about it."
"Talk later," I grunt, picking up a sheaf of printouts from the terminal. Dimensional energy signatures. Trail is getting warmer. "Hunt now."
"No."
The single word stops my hand. It is not spoken with the petulance of a child, but with the flat finality of a man drawing a line. I turn slowly, my full attention on him for the first time this morning.
"Gwen leaving wasn't just 'emotion'," he says, his voice gaining strength. He takes a step forward. "It was a warning. It's a sign that what we're doing—what you're planning on doing—is wrong."
"Wrong is a luxury," I state, turning back to the intel. "A word for men who do not have to clean up the mess."
"That's not what this is about! We have a code. Spider-People… we save people. That's the job. It's what we do. We don't get to pick and choose. We save everyone we can. Even monsters, if we can."
The ignorance is breathtaking. A beautiful, crystalline foolishness polished by a life of easy choices. I lay the papers down, the sound sharp in the silence.
"Codes don't stop monsters, kid," I say, my voice a low rasp. I face him again, letting him see the utter stillness of my mask. The utter certainty. "Cages don't hold them. They break. They escape. They replicate. They kill again. The only thing that stops a monster is a stop. The only thing that works is certainty."
His face hardens. The boyish softness recedes, replaced by a resolve I had not fully credited him with. He is weak, but he is not a coward. A more dangerous combination.
"'With great power comes great responsibility'," he says, quoting the dead man's creed like a holy text. "That's not selective. It's absolute. You don't get to decide who's worthy of being saved. The moment you do, you're not a hero anymore. You're just a killer with a gimmick."
"Responsibility," I counter, stepping toward him, closing the space between us, "is a mathematical problem. It is the preservation of the most lives. Your creed is a nursery rhyme. It feels good to say, but it fails in the face of reality. The Child is not just a person; it is a walking extinction event. A sickness that will spread from one world to the next. Saving it means condemning billions. That is the choice. There is no other."
"So we kill it? A child? We murder a kid because we're scared of what it might do? That makes us them! That makes us the monsters!" His voice cracks, shot through with a righteous fury. "If we stop trying to save everyone, we stop being Spider-Men. We're just… you."
The insult does not land. I am what is necessary.
"Mercy that risks more victims isn't morality," I spit, the words like chips of ice. "It's vanity dressed as virtue. It's a way for you to sleep at night, telling yourself you did the 'right' thing, while the ghosts of the people you failed to protect scream in your dreams. The choice isn't between being a hero or a killer. The choice is between feeling good and doing good."
I lean in closer. He doesn't flinch.
"We don't get to feel good," I whisper, the sound swallowed by the fabric of my mask. "We get to choose who lives."
The air between us is electric, a promise of violence. His hands are clenched into fists, crackling with bio-electric energy. My hand rests near the grappling gun on my belt. The argument has solved nothing. It has merely sharpened the blades we both hold. He sees a line he will not cross. I see a cliff he is willing to drive us all over. The chasm is no longer between us. We stand on opposite sides.
The door to the sub-level slides open with a hiss of hydraulics, cutting through the tension. Miguel O'Hara stands there, his massive frame filling the doorway. His red eyes flicker between us, reading the entire conflict in a single, weary glance. He does not look surprised. He looks annoyed.
He walks into the room, a predator invading a den of snarling cubs. He isn't here to mediate. He is here to reassert control. He stops, positioning himself directly between us.
He looks at Miles first. His voice is deep, resonant with the harsh static of reality. "Your idealism is a liability, Morales. You think you can save everyone. You can't. I've seen timelines collapse. I've watched worlds die, screaming, no matter what their heroes did. Some apocalypses are inevitable. The best you can do is choose which one."
Miles' face falls, the righteous fire in his eyes guttering under the cold wash of Miguel's words.
Then, Miguel's crimson gaze turns to me. His taloned fingers flex, just once.
"And you," he growls, his voice dropping lower. "Your certainty is just as dangerous. This isn't your city anymore, Kovacs. You're not alone. You need him. His abilities are the only reason we're even this close. If you break your team in the process, if you shatter your one indispensable asset because you can't tolerate a dissenting opinion, you'll lose before you ever reach the Child."
His words are a tactical assessment. Cold, logical, and correct. It is a flaw in my strategy I had not accounted for: the emotional fragility of the weapon itself. The boy is a tool, but a tool that can refuse to be used. A new, irritating variable.
Miguel glances at the chronometer on the wall. "The next dimensional echo is triangulating. We get the new coordinates in two hours. Be ready." He turns and walks out, the door hissing shut behind him, leaving a silence heavier and more fractured than before.
The fight is over, but the war has just been declared. I turn back to my workbench. My face is still, a placid surface of black and white. Unchanging. Uncompromising. But inside, a calculation has been made. The mission parameters have been updated. The boy is not an ally. He is an obstacle to be managed.
I pick up the final component of the grappling gun. I will get him to the Child. And when the time comes, if he still stands in the way of certainty, I will do what is necessary. One way or another, the mess will be cleaned up.
————————————————————————————————————
The rain fell in a steady, indifferent hiss, washing the neon glow of the city into long, distorted slicks on the gargoyle-pocked rooftop. A heavy silence pressed down, thicker than the low-hanging clouds, broken only by the distant wail of a siren. For Miles Morales, the silence was an accusation.
He huddled against a ventilation unit, the cold of the metal seeping through his suit. His fingers, trembling slightly, tapped the screen of his gauntlet. A recording flickered to life, a small square of warmth and light in the oppressive gloom. It was Gwen, from months ago, perched on a bridge railing, laughing as she recounted a botched takedown. Her voice was a ghost in the machine, full of a life and effortless confidence that felt a universe away.
"You just gotta trust the swing, Miles," the recording said, her smile brilliant. "It's not about where you land, it's about knowing who you are when you get there."
A bitter ache tightened in his chest. He'd seen Rorschach's methods tonight, felt the chilling pull of that absolute, unyielding rage. It was a shortcut. A dark, simple answer to a complicated world. He could feel how easy it would be to fall, to let the ends justify any means. He watched Gwen's laughing face, a beacon of the person he was—the person she believed him to be.
He shut the recording off, plunging the rooftop back into near-darkness. The city's reflection stared back at him from a puddle, a masked face he barely recognized.
"If I lose who I am," Miles whispered to his reflection, the words a quiet, unbreakable oath, "I'm not worth saving."
He looked across the sprawling metropolis, toward the sector where the other vigilante would be. The vow settled in his chest, heavy as stone. It wasn't about fighting him. It was about saving him. He would protect Rorschach from the monster he was so determined to become, if necessary.
Miles away, on a stark, industrial rooftop slick with the same cold rain, Rorschach was a study in brutalist motion. He worked in silence, his movements economical and sharp. He cinched a leather strap on his forearm, the click of the buckle unnaturally loud. He checked the mechanism of his grapple gun, his gloved fingers moving with practiced, unthinking precision.
He straightened up, facing the city's indifferent sprawl. For a disquieting moment, the shifting inkblots on his mask stilled. The patterns vanished, leaving a stark, featureless white, a blank canvas of pure, cold purpose. It was the face of the mission itself, stripped of all personality, all compromise. Then, like ink bleeding into water, the chaotic symmetry reasserted itself, a roiling testament to his worldview.
There was no room for doubt. The Child was a cancer, a source of filth that had to be excised. No half-measures. No moral debate. Only the scalpel.
He thought of the boy, Morales. He saw the hesitation, the bleeding heart, the crippling need to save everyone. It was a weakness. A flaw in the design. An impurity in the equation.
He picked up a piece of rebar, testing its weight, his grip tightening until his knuckles strained against the leather. The mission was absolute. All that mattered was its completion. Everything else—allies, ethics, the boy's misplaced hope—was just a variable.
And variables could be removed.
He cast a final, unblinking gaze across the city, his voice a low, gravelly rasp meant only for himself. He vowed he would end the Child, no matter the cost. And if Miles tried to stop him…
"…then he becomes part of the threat."