#why isss billie blurry ???

[ssstupid-sssnake]

explode them?

(ssslight flasssh warning)

[xshow-me-some-moxie]

We’re Back...with Snacks

["Cin! Still— ah, damn it— still with us, doll?"]

{"…Yes. What isss— Happening. To us?"}

["We couldn't answer that, not really, just as in the dark as Cin when it came to this particular brand of dimensional travel. We're going back, Cin."]

{"Back. …Home?"}

["It should have been, a few weeks ago it would have been. But, a lot changed in a few weeks. Now when we thought about home it wasn't our empty cave and alimony checks we thought of, but a pair of fierce purple ({"Blue."}) …purple eyes, a wicked smile, the best natural instincts we've ever seen, and a serious need for someone to watch out for her so she didn't run herself into the ground. The only one who would miss us in our universe was Aunt May, and God knew she was the last person who needed us. May was the strongest, most independent person we knew, she would understand why we had to leave."]

{"Ssso…back. Then home. Again."}

["Yeah, Cin, we're going back."]

Going back took Noir nearly two years.

After a painful reentry to his apartment, the first thing he did was check that Carcinogen survived the transition, and when she was no worse for wear he took in his apartment and was mortified. It was a disaster. He wasn't particularly meticulous when it came to cleaning (especially because the FBI boys who stopped in more often than he liked always left the place a mess, so what was the point?), but this was bad and…extensive? It wasn't just a mess made, but things had been moved, the dust patterns different all around the room.

It was like…

Behind his mask Noir's eyes narrowed and then he was moving to his bedroom, throwing the door open. The sight he was greeted with had him scowling, nothing was where he left it. Someone had been living in his apartment. Noir was getting a headache, and that was before he found a calendar and realised that three years had gone by.

After that Noir decided to get very drunk before he figured out what to do next.

It took Noir nearly a year to get his affairs back in order after having been gone for three years. He wasn't sure how the other him had managed to inhabit his life for three years, but he'd managed to gum up the works in a spectacular manner. And while he wasn’t planning on staying in his dimension longer than he had to (or coming back, for that matter), Karn had made it clear it would take time to locate Gwen and so Noir was forced to ungum the works while he waited.

Quite a bit of the next year was spent in Loomworld, Noir doing his best to not let Carcinogen goad him into actually shooting Karn. The Master Weaver was having trouble locating Gwen and Noir had no patience for it. The only thing that kept him from pulling the trigger was the fact he knew he couldn't get back to Gwen without him…and he didn't want to deal with Billie's reaction— he was betting it would be more than his Disappointed Face.

Finally, the day came that Karn found the proper thread and informed Noir that he found Gwen. Noir spared only the time to pack three web sacks, one full of junk food that he knew his girl would appreciate, one full of his own essentials including a spare suit and his winter gear (and the recipe for egg creams which he had had to wrangle out of a bartender he knew), and the other full of lead.

Noir had assumed the trip back to Dollface's dimension wouldn't be that bad as he'd travelled via Karn's web more than once in the past, but this was different. Heat followed at his back and when he appeared on the rooftop of his building he immediately collapsed the burning getting worse despite the fact the rain was coming down in sheets.

"Aaargh!" The sound of his yell was dampened by the rain, Noir curling into a ball, fingers dragging at his shoulders and neck. His skin felt like it was on fire. Like he could feel every single one of Cin's millions of tiny legs and they were all red hot.

["Cin, why—"] "Damn it!" ["Why are we hurting us?!"]

{"NOT US. Hurtsss, Noir. Sscared."}

Writhing on the rooftop Noir realised just how much trouble he was in. If this wasn't Cin, and it wasn't him, it had to be something with this kooky bubble and since it turned him into a vampire last time he wasn't looking forward to whatever it was doing this time.

["We had never felt pain that bad—"] in his life. It was ["like we were being ripped apart from—"] the inside out. The only thing he knew for ["certain was that the source of the pain was—"]

{"NO!"}

Noir screamed as the symbiotic mass wrapped even more tightly around him— whatever was going on in this dimension was causing his body to reject the bond which made the symbiotes hug feel more like death. ["We can't take this, Cin! Too much—"] "more and we're going" ["to kill us!"] Despair was in both his voice and his thoughts, not wanting to break the bond, but it was becoming more and more clear that if they didn't they weren't going to survive.

{"…Leave alone?"}

Noir grit his teeth even as he forced his hands to pat his pockets, desperately searching for the flask he kept on his person. ["Not—"] "for lon—" ["g. We promise."] Shaking hands had finally managed to find the flask, but his fingers were trembling too violently for him to unscrew the cap. "Damn!" This time when he yelled Carcinogen yelled with him, the sound terrifyingly inhuman as dark tendrils lashed out at the rain.

["Please, Cin, if we—"] "die then Cin is" ["alone forever. No Noir."]

For a moment he thought Cin's immediate fear of being separated from him was going to outweigh her desire to keep him alive, but then three thin tendrils reached for the cap of the flask twisting it open. Noir's entire body sagged, relief mixing with the pain. ["Thank you, Cin. It won't be"] "for forever." Only until Noir figured out what the hell was going on.

{"Noir."}

As much as Noir had learned about symbiotes in the past two years he still wasn't sure if they felt emotions the same way people did, but even through the pain and the fear he felt himself get choked up and it wasn't because of the pain. ["We know, Cin. Us too."]

The cap flipped open then and Carcinogen streamed inside, ejecting the web sacks she’d been storing in her mass onto the roof next to Noir and consuming the egg cream the flask had been filled with to make room for all of her. As the last tiny spider crawled inside a black tendril snaked out of the mouth, grabbed the cap, and pulled it down, twisting it tightly closed from the inside.

As the immediate connection between them broke Peter was in a completely different kind of pain, the physical replaced with that of loss and the feeling of being utterly alone for the first time in two years. Curling himself around the flask Peter wasn't sure how long he shook before he was all cried out, but he was definitely soaked through by the time he sat up.

Now that he wasn't in massive amounts of pain (just bearable amounts, the effects of the rejected bond lingering) the man was able to take in the world around him and he realised immediately that he was no longer enhanced. He couldn't hear anything but the rain pounding on the rooftop, and when he looked at the web sacks next to them they were blurry blobs more than sacks.

["No wonder w—"] 

Peter swallowed hard, letting that train of thought go so that he didn't have to think about the fact that he was once again an 'I' instead of a 'We'.

Thankfully, despite losing Carcinogen's suit, Peter wasn't completely naked, his trench coat and fedora the same ones he had always worn. His movements were slow as he dragged the sack with his own belongings in it to him, tearing it open with some difficulty to extract his original black suit. Changing out in the rain wasn't the smartest idea he'd ever had, but he couldn't bring himself to care. 

Once he was dressed he gathered up the bags with a bit of difficulty, forgetting what it was like to move without preternatural balance and agility. He was at least able to carry the weight. He wasn't as strong as he normally was, but he'd been tall and broad even before the spider bit him and he still seemed to possess the muscles he had gained from two decades of web swinging and punching bad guys.

With Cin's flask safely tucked away in an inside pocket of his trench Peter made his way down the fire escape. Even moving slowly he nearly slipped on the wet metal twice, and it was a relief to reach his window. Jimmying the window up Noir ducked inside, immediately tripping over a hamper someone had left in front of the window, curling in on himself as he rolled, landing on his back near the middle of the living room, grimacing behind his mask, the web sacks scattered over the floor around him.

"Dang nabbit, Dollface!"

@spideyygwen