#also fwiw significantly less of a come-to-jesus dream and more of a ''damn you got Issues'' dream; at its core a dream about bodily autonomy

[softgrungeprophet]

I have no clue how long it will take to finish the fic this scene is from, so I am reblogging this drawing with the extended written scene in question below—

Partially inspired by but extrapolated and heavily modified from Kaine's death dream in Scarlet Spider #14 (though it is not a "fix-it").

In the nature of dream sequences, it is disjointed and surreal, and reflects Kaine's insecurities and fears.

Content warning for descriptions of: blood and injury, spiders, references to sexual abuse and rape (not depicted), disembodied verbal abuse, suicide imagery, and general issues of bodily autonomy and consent (or lack thereof):

—

Kaine felt like he was dreaming. Or maybe yet another not-quite-right prophecy, a false vision.

Or maybe just flashbacks.

Uncle Ben sat in his comfy leather recliner and patted his knee. "Alright, Peter, c'mon. Tell me what's wrong."

Small again, a child with big glasses and hand-me-down clothing that didn't fit quite right.

Peter curled up in his uncle's lap, burrowing his face into warm, familiar scents and fabric.

"I did something wrong…"

I don't remember what it was.

Kissed someone… fearful blue eyes. No, that wasn't it.

"How many people have you killed?"

Kaine stuttered back. "I—"

He was twelve years old, in a too-large medical gown, and his hair brushed his ankles, wrapped around him like a blanket.

"Please, don't—"

Miles Warren—the closest thing Kaine had to a father—leaned forward on his wheeled stool with scissors in his hand and a stern but almost gentle expression on his face, glasses glinting in front of warm brown eyes.

"You murdered a woman."

Louise stared at him accusatorily and he was twenty-six years old and his hair hung to his knees, dry and clean for the first time in months from her hospitality, and he was dying.

"I'm sorry…" I couldn't stop it. You told me you loved me. I needed you. I was so… so angry.

I'm sorry…

I'm so sorry.

"You poisoned me!" Ben Reilly glared at him. "You kidnapped Janine! You of all people—"

Janine shrank away from Kaine. Silent, wide-eyed like a child. For a moment she was a child. "Don't touch me!"

"You ruined my life!" Peter loomed over Kaine and he had fallen to the floor at some point.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"

He was twenty-seven years old, hair soaked in toxic blood. His birthday was on April Fool's Day. And he was dead.

It wasn't my fault I was brought into this world. I never asked to be born.

"This is what you wanted, isn't it? To die?"

The Jackal tilted his head, black leather, eyes gleaming behind glass behind gold-traced holes. Blue latex gloves, pulling tight.

Please…

"You know, you bring this upon yourself, Cain." Rose canes all thorns and dead heads. The Jackal stooped where Kaine lay and cupped his face in one hand. He smelled like blood and antiseptic soap. "It's your own fault."

If he was just more obedient, softer-voiced, if his hair didn't grow so fast, if his skin stayed whole, if he didn't make himself sick just by being alive, if he weren't so tall, if he could write without his penmanship resembling that of a child, all uneven and slow with tremors in his hands that only got worse the harder he tried to focus—

If he was all of that, Aracely would have died in August.

Warren pushed himself down on top of Kaine.

"No—!"

Everything went black-black-black, the barest hint of blue, the night sky. Dew drops glimmered like stars across the ultrafine threads that cut into his skin and the fluorescent fabric of his costume. Gleaming wires. It all shimmered barely visible, the moonlight catching at each string to make the spiderweb sing sub-audible poetry.

"Clone."

Kaine struggled.

The voice that greeted him was multi-faceted, but it hardened into stone as Spider-Man walked out from behind him, hanging by his feet from the ceiling.

"You want to know what I've been up to?" Peter dropped so he could face Kaine, his mask almost black in the shadows and the blue sections void. The white of his lenses seemed almost to float in the air like lights. "What went down with me while you were off flirting with the Tarantula in Colombia?"

He reached up—Kaine tugged at the webbing around his wrists, suffused with a sudden fear.

The mask came off, and Peter looked at him—eight glossy, round black eyes, chelicerae on his face iridescent in the pseudo-moonlight shadows, skull-countenance.

"No, that's not—"

Peter doubled over with a grunt through clenched jaw. Cried out, biting it back, and when he let his hands come away from his face all shaking he was just… Peter. Chest-heaving, ox-eyed, crooked-nosed Peter Parker.

A morbid rictus grin came over his face, blood on his teeth, and he said, "That's not mine, though."

In the manner of dreams, a waxy, wan spider which had not been there before now tiptoed across its web. Its body cast a shadow across Peter's face as he reached out, and when the moonlight fell upon him again he was one long slash of red, a sky-blue hoodie, and a perfect nose, all glowing faintly golden in the darkness.

Ben's bleached hair flopped into his eyes but he didn't seem to notice, caressing Kaine's cheek.

Kaine closed his eyes against the glow.

"What? You scared of your little brother?"

Fingertips brushed across his eyelids, and Kaine blinked his eyes open to find Ben barely a hairsbreadth away from him. Like looking into a mirror but the reflection was all wrong, just a taunt through Vaseline-smeared glass.

Jackal mask, dusk-blue hoodie, void. Only the gold glowed now, barely visible.

"You're not a real person. You know that right? Officer Layton having a fake birth certificate made for you doesn't make you legitimate."

"Shut up…" Kaine squeezed his eyes shut again. "Shut up."

"You're not a person… you're a weapon."

Kaine shook his head.

"You're not human…" (Spider.)

"I'm human—" He bit his lip, tasted metal. He knew his words were a lie.

"You're not even a man." (Other.)

You're a failed experiment, boy—No, no, you're not even that much. You're a dog. A whimpering little bitch, good for one thing and one thing only.

Kaine tore free from the spiderweb with a roar, shaking through his body, spikes jutting from his wrists.

He sliced through empty air. Ben was gone.

Just that spider, silent and half-translucent.

Kaine stood with his hair dripping and his clawed, spiked hands half-raised at his sides, naked and covered in blood from his throat to his knees, dripping down the insides of his thighs, tracing red to his ankles.

"Wow, is that it?"

"A—" Kaine drew in on himself, hiding behind his hair, or trying to. "Annabelle?"

She smirked. All wrong, on her face. Pitying, malicious.

"D-don't look at me…" Seeing all that he was and was not, miles of broken skin and disfigurement.

She hid a laugh behind her hand.

"I said don't look at me!"

Annabelle's expression turned to one of fear, eyes wide, fixed on… his face.

"M-monster!"

She fled.

"This is what you are, you know." The voice echoed around him, layered, but somewhere in there the voice of the man who had created him. "The Other lies within you, and it always has. It's an inextricable part of your DNA and all of your faulty wiring. Everything that's wrong with you, that's other. Your body, your brain, none of it is normal. Did you really think you could become one of them—a real person?"

The spider watched him with eight red pinpoint eyes.

"Peter rejected the Other. He ran to the Fantastic Four with his tail between his legs and begged for them to fix him. But it wasn't a part of him, originally. Not like you. Now it is. "

Kaine shook his head, dragging his hands through his hair and covering his ears as it spoke. Didn't make a difference though—the voice rang through his cells, not a real sound at all.

"He can keep rejecting it again and again… but it's in there now. Because you exist."

"Shut UP—!"

"Make me."

It stared at him, unblinking. Himself, now, a wavering reflection with eight glossy black eyes.

"Or join me. Embrace your Otherness. This is what we are."

"No…" Kaine hesitated at first, but then, stronger, said, "No, I won't. I won't—" He clenched his hands into fists. "I won't let you touch me!"

Glass shattered around his knuckles and his reflection disappeared with it.

So quiet, except for a little sound like tinkling bells. He stared down at all the shards at his feet, and reached up to brush his fingertips across the raised line of scar tissue on his throat.

"You really should just let it happen. You know it always ends up worse when you try to resist. I know you know this, because I know this."

Kaine whirled to face—

Same height. Less thin, less jutting ribcage. Tight t-shirt and arms bared, a tribal tattoo, a buzzcut, and Peter Parker's face. Unmarred. Beautiful, even. Not in a mirror this time.

"Right?" Not-Kaine's voice was smooth and deep, a little hoarse but not like the grinding in his counterpart's throat.

After a moment of staring, Kaine reached out, and the unscarred double facing him echoed the gesture. His skin was… warm.

"You're…"

"Me."

Kaine laced his fingers through those of his other self. This version of him made him feel frail in a way the eight-eyed mirror-image hadn't, and weak by comparison. The expression on his face was sad, though, just the same. Small notes of resemblance.

"…You… want me to give in?"

His doppelganger nodded, and whispered "Yes" like it hurt a little bit.

Kaine dug his nails into the back of Other-Kaine's hand and let out a snarl—

"No."

Neither let go of the other.

"Too bad."

That cut through Kaine like a knife, like a poisonous arrow.

"It'll happen anyway. You don't get a say. You never get a say." Pushing on him, squeezing his hand back so hard the bones creaked, increasingly irate. "You've never had a say, and you're never going to. No matter how much you try to convince yourself that you get to have free will, it's not true. Real people have free will… and you… aren't… real."

Kaine's face twisted—both of them—and the spike slammed into his solar plexus in a rush of pain.

He stood there, alone, with his own weapon jammed up underneath his ribs.

Did it count as a suicide if he was already dead? He hadn't meant for it to go in that way.

"Sálveme… Sálveme… Sálveme…"

That voice…

"I am going to die."

Kaine kept still, sound disembodied around him again.

"If you die, I die. Without you, I die. They rend me apart, like you."

Blood dripped from the wound in Kaine's torso.

"Do you want me to die?"

"…No." Kaine shook his head. He could feel everything crumbling.

"Do you want her to live?"

He closed his eyes, and after a long, drawn-out second, whispered, "…Yes."

Yes… I surrender. I give up. I don't have a say. My body is a weapon (tool, object, thing) and nothing else.

Behind him, the spider moved, drawing whispers from its web.

It touched him. The back of his neck, his shoulder blades, parting his hair out of the way. He didn't resist anymore.

tonal whiplash—a scene out of context.

Trying to draw 616 Scarlet Spider Kaine is so hard for me 😂 I think my problem was the cheekbones, which I tried to fix, so I think he turned out alright here. I'm just so used to drawing him smashed up. Obviously. Also. It's really hard to draw windowverse Kaine's nose in profile. I need to find some reference photos or something.

It's smeared off to the side lol (different WIP/sketch, making a scar reference lol—it actually came in handy for this pic a little bit)

Anyway, here are the lines without any colors—

beef

I did not necessarily originally intend to blanket everything in solid black, so there are lines that aren't visible lmao — but in the dream sequence thing this is part of there is a lot of pure darkness and voids of negative space so i was like, you know, i should probably invoke that here. I GUESS I could have colored 616 Kaine's pants dark gray or something but I decided to leave it all invisible so I could keep the palette simple and focus more on the... copious quantities of blood lol

tfw your hair is just soaked with blood. I was just about to say "in the nature of dreams, this isn't realistic, and his hair isn't actually soaked in blood irl" but then I thought about it for a sec and... no, it definitely is soaked all the way up to the back of his head because of the fact that he ends up lying in a pool of his own blood for like... at least fifteen minutes. if not longer. maybe thirty minutes?

it gets chopped to chin-length after this (when he gets ✨hospitalized✨ because he's ✨dying✨) on account of the blood being a radioactive biohazard and also a hazard in general (tripping hazard, tangling hazard, etc.)—the buzzcut in some other sketches I've posted is not until a week or two later and is something he does because of some complex emotions.

they go to a renfair like three weeks after this 😂

Anywho~

he is m— he is my poor little meow meow,,,