Chapter Text
The thing is that no matter what, Jefferson Davis was always one of the more straight-laced cops.
Just like how other cops apparently ran red lights sometimes (which he never did), by the year of all the upheaval with Spider-Man, Jefferson was one of the last cops who still actually disapproved of him. Everyone in the PDNY would have to answer as such if questioned by the media, since it was the official stance the organization pushed, but the truth was that for most people Spider-Man had just become a part of New York like anything else. To imagine the city without him was ludicrous. And besides- as many of his friends had privately confessed, they wouldn’t care to actually go up against the villains that Spider-Man faced themselves.
But no, not Jefferson. He was always strictly by the book- the law was the law, and no one should be allowed to take it into their own hands. It was the principle of the thing- if Spider-Man wanted to help people, he should have done it the normal way, with no mask and full accountability. He maintained that stance for years, even after most people stopped agreeing.
And then, well...the unthinkable happened. Spider-Man died.
Thinking about it in retrospect, Jefferson is almost ashamed but willing to admit that he came to rely on Spider-Man as much as anyone else. Just as he would always complain about Spider-Man at any opportunity, he always assumed that there would be a Spider-Man to complain about. Casually swinging around the city, appearing in a news story, singing his stupid Christmas songs on the radio in December, and showing up to save the day before zipping off into the sunset.
And suddenly, in the middle of the media fallout of Spider-Man’s death, with people’s tributes of how he saved their lives flooding social media and the face of this 26-year-old kid being projected on every screen everywhere, he can’t quite...keep the conviction going as strong as it used to.
To be honest? No one can.
The first time he walked into the police station after the news broke, he could see people watching him as if they still expected him to attack Spider-Man even after the kid was dead - and well maybe he disliked Spider-Man, but no, never enough to do something like that. The police department released no statement commenting on Spider-Man’s death at all, because legally, they can’t support a technical criminal. The absence of disapproval is all the acknowledgement they could give.
And then, after days of frantic meetings and discussions of what they’re going to do now, how is the PDNY going to throw together a force capable of taking on, god forbid, the Green Goblin or something in the place of Spider-Man- after the quiet opening of the legally-mandated investigation into the death of one Peter Parker- then. Then, the new Spider-Man.
The entire day that he first appeared is still a blur. Spider-Man still hadn’t left New York’s collective system, seeing as nine out of every ten news articles were about him and people kept calling in to tearfully report Spider-Man sightings, when a whole new “earthquake” started happening. And Jefferson didn’t live in a Spider-Man-protected New York for ten years for nothing- someone was obviously causing it.
The PDNY had managed to come to about zero consensus on what to do in the day since Spider-Man died, but someone had to do something, so he’d run down there himself and been faced with a swirling mass of colors and buildings. And then, someone in the middle of all of it- in an unmistakable suit, no matter the colors.
For about ten minutes of the almost depressingly small Spider-Man fighting- fighting- is that Wilson Fisk?- Jefferson is utterly useless. He doesn’t know where this new person came from and he doesn’t even know for sure that it’s not just a random powerless kid in a costume until Jefferson sees him shoot out some- electricity? And the fight is doubly terrifying because Jefferson can’t even begin to do something, and there’s a whole half minute where the person gets knocked down and doesn’t get back up and he starts thinking that maybe he’s witnessing the death of a whole new Spider-Man, right now.
And if he gets caught up in it and tries to shout encouragement that they probably won’t even hear in the moment, well, no one needs to know that.
The explosion and the revelation that it was Fisk afterward is in itself a thing and a half, combined with the new Spider-Man (who up close is very obviously a teenager) coming out of nowhere to hug him and speak in a fake-sounding accent and tell Jefferson that he loves him, and that’s...well, that’s something to figure out. Dozens of people flood the streets in a way that’s totally unsafe because they’ve heard about the new Spider-Man, and for a moment Jefferson can understand what the others must have seen when they looked at the old one; someone brave and willing to put their life on the line to help people with the powers they were given.
Jefferson looks at the new Spider-Man and hopes for the city’s sake that he knows what he’s doing.
———-
#NewSpidey is number one trending on Twitter. Miles Morales has inadvertently sort of gone viral, and he has absolutely no one to tell about it.
Obviously, he can talk about Spider-Man in general to anyone. But there are about 8.6 million people in New York who know Spider-Man generally instead of personally, and Miles is...not one of them anymore?
To be fair, it’s not like his whole life has changed immediately and dramatically or anything. He’s not having wild boss battles every day a la Fisk- things are much calmer than that, something he's honestly glad for. According to May, villains seem to work in cycles? So he’ll have at least a week or something of relative peace before another absolute catastrophe starts happening, which is great, because Miles really needs that time to do all the first-week homework he kinda missed.
And also, to get used to having people start cheering every time he goes around as Spider-Man. And to figure out how to work through the fact that on the day of the Fisk fight, he was riding high on adrenaline and pure motivational confidence and managed to pull it off, but gaining the skill and experience the others had was going to take a while. A while while.
Miles has already gotten more guidance on how to be Spider-Man than most spider-people probably ever get, but there’s still a lot of stuff he’s having to figure out on his own. Honestly?
There’s so much stuff that Miles doesn’t know that he’s starting to wonder if he should make a list.