“Gotham, you are one miserable city.”

Miles was mid swing in the heavily graffiti-covered rooftops, when his luck threatened to go from bad to worse. It wasn’t another mugging, or anything remotely criminal (shocking!) that set his danger senses ablaze. No, it was the thunderclouds looming overhead.

No way was he spending another freezing night on an abandoned fire escape. He needed shelter, and fast.

It had been exactly one week since the portal had spat him out in the wrong place, winding up in Earth-38 instead of his home dimension—Gotham, or as he affectionately dubbed it—the multiverse’s hellhole.

It has been one week since he last saw Gwen.

One week since everyone turned on him.

It has been one dreadful week since he last talked to his parents.

He wondered if anybody was looking for him, but he dreaded the answer even more if they weren’t. Maybe this was Miguel’s idea of a happy ending, dumping him in the one dimension where nobody knew him.

And oh, what an eventful week it had been. He suuuuure loved Gotham (do you want fries with your sarcasm?). Whenever he made sarcastic quips, he imagined Gwen saying them instead. At least he wouldn’t be so alone if she were here.

He's been chased through the hellhole by the Bat guy and his never-ending flock already, and he’d been accused twice on two separate occasions by some Robin-adjacent sidekick about working with Black Spider. Or the League of Shadows. He had no idea who any of these people or organizations were, and he didn’t want to find out. He narrowly avoided being sent to Arkham on these baseless accusations.

His feet touched down on a rain-soaked rooftop, the streets below relatively abandoned at this time of night. No sign of any Bat or Bird adjacent heroes either, Miles didn’t feel like shaking off stalkers tonight.

Another thing he noticed in his week-long vacation stay here: the heroes sure loved to stalk him in and out of his suit. He had already found and crushed several trackers placed discreetly by them, and his senses always went off when he walked around the city in the daytime. At least only one patrolled during the day, he learned that in his research—some hero named Signal, while the rest were nocturnal owls. Great.

Living here meant skipping school, and while that wasn’t great, at least the nosy vigilantes weren’t snitches.

Speaking of, he still needed somewhere warm tonight.

Miles squinted across the valley of looming skyscrapers, which soared high like Gothic pillars in a dystopian comic book. His sharp eyes caught sight of an open window in an empty apartment, and his heart soared.

Bingo.

Shooting out a web with a faint thwip towards the building’s rooftop, he leveraged himself off the ledge and swung downwards in a wide arch, straight into the abandoned living room. Immediately, he could feel the warmth already returning to his bones when he landed.

“Home sweet home.”