The light in the Core Room was supposed to be a comfort. It was woven from the very fabric of existence, a million-million realities braided into a single, incandescent cathedral. Tonight, it felt like the flickering fluorescent of a hospital waiting room. Sickly. Anxious.
I stood on the central dais, the weight of a hundred stares pressing down on me. Below, a sea of Spider-People, a vibrant, chaotic tapestry of red, blue, and black, shifted with restless energy. The air was thick with accusation.
At the heart of the chamber, a holographic map of Earth-104 pulsed. The Rift, a jagged tear in spacetime where the Weaver's Child had fed, throbbed a venomous purple. It was a wound that wouldn't close, and every eye in this room saw it as a monument to our failure. To my failure.
"I know what you're thinking," I began, my voice amplified by the room's acoustics. It sounded too young, too thin to carry the authority I was supposed to have. "I know what it looked like. But the Totem was already lost. The moment the Child consumed it, that variant of Peter was gone. Rorschach… he acted under duress. He made a call to stop the infection from spreading."
My words hung in the air, hollow and unconvincing even to my own ears. He hadn't just stopped it. He'd executed a host, a Spider-Man, without a second's hesitation. The memory was seared into my brain: the cold finality of it, the silence that followed.
A sharp, clear voice cut through the murmuring crowd. "When did execution become our mission statement?"
Every head turned. Gwen Stacy stood with her arms crossed, her hood down, her expression carved from ice. Her question wasn't aimed at the room; it was a dagger thrown directly at me.
The chaos I'd been trying to contain erupted. The crowd became a living thing, breathing in Gwen's anger and exhaling a cloud of doubt and fear. The split wasn't a slow fracture; it was a seismic schism.
"He's unstable!" Jessica Drew's voice, always the anchor of reason, was strained. She stood beside Gwen, her posture rigid. "We don't know what contact with the Child's influence does to a person. Rorschach could be a carrier, a sleeper agent."
Spider-Girl, Anya Corazon, nodded in fierce agreement. "We can't have someone that volatile in the field. He's a liability."
From the other side of the room, a gruff, cartoonish voice piped up. "Liability? He saved our bacon, see?" Spider-Ham stood on a floating console, his tiny fists planted on his hips. "While the rest of us were wringing our hands, he did the dirty work. That's called courage, pal."
Silk, her movements fluid and silent, materialized beside him. "Ham's right. It was a hard call, maybe the wrong one, but it was decisive. The Child was learning from that variant, using him. Rorschach cut the connection."
Spider-Man Noir, a silhouette of shadow and smoke, tipped his fedora. "Sometimes you gotta cut off a limb to save the body. It ain't pretty, but it's the world we live in."
The voices crashed over me, a tidal wave of conflicting loyalties. I looked for a neutral face, a steady point in the storm, and my eyes found Pavitr Prabhakar. He hadn't spoken, his gaze fixed on the wounded map. He looked smaller than usual, the vibrant optimism that always surrounded him diminished to a faint glow.
He must have felt my stare because he looked up. His voice, when he finally spoke, was so quiet it seemed to absorb the noise around it.
"If the Web itself is infected," he said, his words heavy with a reluctant philosophy, "maybe it needs people who can do what we can't."
His statement landed with the force of a physical blow. It wasn't an endorsement of Rorschach, but an acknowledgement of the darkness we were facing. A darkness that might require a different kind of hero. The weight of every voice, every argument, every valid point, settled on my shoulders. This wasn't a monster I could punch. This was my family, my team, tearing itself apart, and I was the one who was supposed to hold it together.
The meeting dissolved without a resolution, the assembly splintering into tense, whispering factions. I found Gwen later, on the observation deck. It was our spot, a place of quiet where the swirling cosmos of the Web unfolded beneath a transparent floor. We'd spent hours here, talking about home, about music, about everything and nothing. Tonight, the silence between us was a chasm.
She was staring down into the kaleidoscopic rivers of light, her reflection a pale ghost on the surface.
"I had to try and keep them together, Gwen," I said, my voice softer now.
She didn't turn. "By saying nothing? By defending the indefensible?"
"It's not that simple. Rorschach is… a tool. A dangerous one, but maybe one we need. The Child is evolving. It's not just a monster anymore, it's a mind. It's learning from us."
"And what do you think it learned today?" she shot back, finally spinning to face me. Her eyes were blazing. "It learned that we're willing to sacrifice our own. That our morals are negotiable. You're not leading, Miles. You're hesitating. It's moral cowardice."
The words stung, sharp and true in a way I couldn't deny. "I can't afford to make him an enemy. If he goes rogue…"
"You're already treating him like an enemy you have to appease!" she retorted, stepping closer. The space between us crackled. "You think he's a weapon. But weapons don't have limits. They don't know when to stop. They only escalate. What happens next time? When the person infected is one of us? Is it me? Is it you? Will you stand by and let him make that 'hard call' then?"
I had no answer. The thought sent a cold dread through my gut.
Gwen saw the conflict in my face and her expression hardened, a flicker of disappointment replacing the fire. "I can't be a part of this if that's the path we're going down." She turned and walked toward the exit. "I'm filing a formal declaration with Jessica. We're moving to have Rorschach removed from active operations. You'll have to make a choice."
She left me alone on the deck, the beautiful, infinite Web suddenly feeling like a cage. My Spider-Sense tingled at the base of my skull, a low, persistent thrum. It wasn't a warning of an attack, just an overwhelming sense of being watched. I scanned the shadows of the corridor she'd disappeared down. Nothing. But the feeling remained. He was always nearby.
From a darkened alcove overlooking the observation deck, Rorschach watched Morales stare into the void. He'd heard enough. The girl's voice, sharp with misplaced principle. The boy's, soft with indecision. It was all so predictable.
Later, in his spartan quarters—a gray cube he'd claimed in a forgotten sector of the Nexus—he opened his journal. The worn leather cover was stained with something dark. He uncapped a fountain pen, the nib scratching harshly against the cheap paper.
Division spreading. Predictable. Infection doesn't just feed on flesh—it feeds on doubt. Stacy is a vector for moral outrage. Morales, a breeding ground for hesitation. Their principles are a sickness in a time of war.
He paused, then drew a spiral symbol beneath the words, a tight, controlled vortex. But this time, something was different. A droplet of black ink escaped the perfect line, bleeding outward into the fiber of the page like a spreading stain. He watched it, his face unreadable behind the shifting blots of his mask.
"I don't know what to do."
The five people gathered in my small tactical office—my emergency council—all looked as wrung-out as I felt. Silk sat cross-legged on the table, a picture of calm that didn't quite reach her eyes. Jessica Drew leaned against the wall, her arms crossed, her face a mask of weary professionalism. Noir was in the corner, enveloped in a haze of cigarette smoke, while Ham paced anxiously on my desk. Pavitr simply sat, tracing patterns on the holographic interface.
"If I punish him, if I bench Rorschach, I lose Ham, Noir, and a dozen others who think he's a war hero," I admitted, running a hand over my head. "If I don't, I lose Gwen, Jess, Anya… the soul of this team. I lose half the people I trust most."
Silk tilted her head. "It doesn't have to be a binary choice. Keep him in the field, but under strict observation. A partner. Someone to be his conscience."
Noir took a long drag from his cigarette, the cherry glowing in the dim light. He exhaled a plume of smoke. "You don't leash a hound like that," he muttered, his voice a low rasp. "You let him loose when you need something torn apart. You try to put a collar on him, he'll just chew off his own leg to get free."
"He's not a hound, Noir, he's one of us," Jessica countered, though her tone lacked conviction. She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "But Silk's idea is the only viable compromise. We can't afford to fracture now. I'll make the declaration conditional. Rorschach continues operations, but his next mission is under my direct command. I'll be his partner. I'll be the leash."
It was a bitter pill for her to swallow, I could see it. For all of us. A compromise that pleased no one, a temporary stitch on a wound that needed surgery. But it was the only move I had.
"Okay," I said, the word tasting like ash. "We'll do it that way."
As the group began to file out, a sudden tremor ran through the deck plates. The lights in the Nexus flickered, dimming to a deep amber before slowly returning to their normal luminescence. A faint, subsonic hum vibrated in the air, a deep bass note just below the threshold of hearing. It was there and then it was gone.
Silk froze, her head cocked at an unnatural angle. "Did you feel that?"
Noir stamped out his cigarette. "Just the multiverse groanin' under the strain. Nothin' new."
But Silk was shaking her head, her eyes wide. "No. That was… different. It was like a heartbeat."
No one else had heard it. But as I stared into the empty air where the vibration had been, my Spider-Sense prickled. It wasn't the sharp jab of immediate danger. It was a slow, cold crawl up my spine. The feeling of a fundamental rule being broken. The sensation of change.
Rorschach closed his journal. The ink stain on the previous page had stopped spreading, a dark, ugly blot on the paper. He picked up his pen again.
Leadership fractures. Predictable outcome. Morales—idealist infected with empathy. A fatal flaw.
Web trembles. Something is listening. The Rift is not just a wound. It is an ear.
Something learning.
As he shut the book, a thin, black tendril of ink seeped from between the closed pages, creeping like a living thing over the leather cover toward his gloved hand. He didn't seem to notice.
Far away, in the silent, cosmic abyss where the Great Web was thinnest, the Weaver's Child pulsed. It drifted in the void, a being of stolen light and endless hunger. A thousand new eyes blinked open across its amorphous surface, each one reflecting the faint, distant light of the Nexus.
A voice, no longer a cacophony of whispers but a single, articulate echo, rippled through the darkness. It was learning to shape thought into sound, mimicking the cold, efficient syntax it had just observed.
"Leadership… fractures…"
Another pulse.
"…Fatal… flaw."