Variant Strain

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In the end it had been Monopoly. Peter didn't even really get much of a chance to sit down and do the research he wanted as MJ had pushed him into the kitchen to help his Aunt with dinner preparation.

Then promptly chased him back out when it became clear that he was completely useless in the kitchen.

After dinner, they had sat around the living room. Anna had brought out a dusty old set of Monopoly and they'd played.

Aunt May had been a straightforward player. Land somewhere, buy the property, pass the dice. MJ took a vicious delight in charging people rent whenever they landed on her property and was known to snicker nastily whenever someone got charged a large amount. Anna on the other hand had been extremely distracting to Peter to deal with across a Monopoly board.

First of all, Anna was the sort of Monopoly player who would initiate complex deals and trades that he would swear were specifically designed to confuse people. Things like offering to three free landings on some of her properties in exchange for one free landing on the property that she'd just ended up on. Worse she could keep all of them straight in her head and would absolutely hold everyone to the letter of whatever strange deal she'd concocted. Peter had been the only one to actually manage to keep up with her strange financial manipulations, but the second and third items made it very hard... difficult. He meant difficult.

Second was that Anna Watson was wearing a loose, scoop-necked blouse that displayed a generous amount of cleavage. Made worse by the fact that since she was sitting on the couch. The low coffee table that the Monopoly board was on obliged her to bend over quite a bit to grab the dice... or move the tokens... or grab money from the bank. Every such instance was marked by Peter's roaming eyes doing their best not to focus on her. Or more specifically, certain spots on her that were revealed by the motion. Especially since he was sitting on the floor across from her.

He did not want to know or at least advertise that he was aware that she was wearing a beige bra. Something practical and solid, designed to give a woman of her assets some necessary support. It wasn't in any way lacy or overtly sexy... but it was extremely distracting for Peter.

The third item, was that this was the first chance Peter had to actually watch Anna and MJ interact in a social setting. Anna clearly doted on MJ and MJ loved her Aunt very much. Which was all well and good, except Anna was as physically demonstrative of affection as MJ was. So there was a lot of hugging on good rolls, a lot of shoulder slapping, hair ruffling, cheek-kissing and the occasional bit of snuggling. Peter could almost swear that MJ was escalating the little affectionate displays. She wasn't really doing anything too obvious, at least nothing Aunt May or Aunt Anna had caught on to, but Peter had seen that amused glitter in her eyes whenever Peter met her gaze.

Which happened a lot, since looking into her eyes was safer than looking anywhere else. He was just glad he'd been sitting with his folded legs under the coffee table. Where no one could see anything.

MJ had forgone the hoodie and the yellow bruises were still clear on her cheek. They were healing and maybe in a few more days would be entirely gone. The cut on her lip had scabbed over again since last night. Peter had tried very hard not to think about how she'd gotten them. He hoped she would tell him. Maybe he could do something about that. He wasn't doing much good with anything else.

When they'd wrapped up the evening, with Anna, unsurprisingly enough, having won, Aunt May had told Peter that Uncle Ben's funeral would be tomorrow.

That had been a kick to the gut for Peter and he'd marched into the den and numbly tucked himself in.

He lay there thinking. Breathing slowly while waiting for Aunt May and Anna to fall asleep. It had been just barely two days since everything had changed. He'd been selfish. He should have been worrying more about Aunt May, but with what had happened to him, it had been so... easy to just concentrate on what had happened to him. To just dig and search and piece things together and that way he wouldn't think about Uncle Ben.

Except he couldn't. The man who'd raised him for the last five years was gone and tomorrow they would be putting him in the ground. It would be good-bye. Then life would have to continue.

He didn't know how Aunt May would cope. She seemed to be... she'd enjoyed herself. Laughed along with them as they played, but every so often, she would get quiet. And tense. And taut. She'd draw herself tight, like a guitar string about to snap, but then Anna would say something, or do something and his Aunt would relax.

If Anna Watson hadn't been there, he really had no idea how Aunt May would have coped. MJ had done a great job in distracting him, he knew. She was... very distracting.

Which was another of those questions that you haven't been asking yourself, his voice suddenly piped up in his head. Why is she not freaked out by you? Why is she helping you? Why does she seem to be perfectly okay with cuddling you and touching you when you two only just met last night? Especially when she's seen what you can do? That has to make you think that maybe she's used to doing that kind of thing.

There was the mental equivalent of an embarrassed cough as an unfortunate mental image rose up from his subconscious. Not the tentacle thing, of course. The cuddling thing. You've seen enough TV to make a reasoned deduction about what happened to her.

A stubborn part of himself had to ask, then why was she flirting with him so much?

Cause you're protection, doofus. Her voice popped into his head suddenly. You're her Tiger. The biggest, baddest predator around and you promised to protect her, didn't you?

He didn't want to be a predator... and was she using him? Or was it just... he shook his head. He had more important things to worry about than a girl he was rapidly developing an attachment towards was trying to make him her personal body guard. Hell, he wasn't even sure he minded.

He had Gentek Security. He had the Thunderbolts. He had Hydra. He had questions.

Not enough answers.

Never enough answers.

He kicked the sheets off and caught his foot beginning to blur into tendrils with clear intent on absorbing the blanket and stared it down. Which was an odd thing to be doing, staring down his own feet. They settled back to normal with an almost embarrassed wriggling of tendrils. Control.

He sat up and stared at his hands. That was the thing. He barely knew his own capabilities. The bare handful of fights that he'd gotten into over the years mostly involved him getting his face pounded into the ground. Now, he was getting hurt, but he was certainly holding his own.

He was planning on trying to manage that sort of thing against however much security would be waiting for him at the end of the trail. He wasn't looking forward to it.

Maybe he had to reevaluate the whole trip tonight. He remembered Aunt May's face when she thought he'd put himself into danger. She can't stand the thought of losing you too, his voice drawled to him.

But he needed answers. He needed to know what had happened to him. Why Uncle Ben had to die. He had to.

He walked to the PC and booted it up, pulling up the research he needed in hopes of distracting himself until it was time. He could still hear the occasional thumping above him of bare feet padding across carpeted floors. Three heartbeats, all active and mostly awake, although Aunt May's was beginning to settle down. Anna... was taking a shower. He immediately did his best to focus on the computer and ignore what was happening right above him.

Then he glanced up again and wondered what the odds would be of him spontaneously developing X-ray vision were. His face burned both out of arousal and shame. Then another thought popped into his head, delivered in Cletus's reedy drawl, complete with leer, Y'know MJ's gonna be in that shower next after Anna's done.

He grit his teeth and considered the possible benefits of an ice-cold shower.

To distract himself he began typing in search parameters furiously.

Thunderbolt Mountain was actually the name of a joint Army/Air-force base located on the Colorado Plateau in New Mexico. The name referred not just to the base, but to the town that had grown up around it. The base itself had opened in 1965 and was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Some more searching only turned up a single passing reference to the place being the home to something called the First Biohazard Threat Unit which had been based out of Fort Detrick, Maryland up until Thunderbolt Mountain was established.

Peter leaned back in his chair at that. Fort Detrick was the center of the US's biological weapons programs from 1943 until 1969. That was the place where they'd allegedly developed Captain America during World War II. Peter remembered those old black and white wartime serials Uncle Ben had shown him. The man had a cheesy costume inspired by the American flag and a shield of all things. Of course he hadn't been anything more than a USO publicity gimmick, but the origin story for him that had flashed as part of the newsreel claimed he'd come out of the research from Fort Detrick.

The actual construction of Thunderbolt Mountain had begun in 1962, though. He began combing through possible references to those time frames and found a few... interesting items.

The first one that caught his eye was an outbreak of something that resembled mumps, but had a much shorter incubation period that had devastated the small town of Littleville in upstate New York in 1961. Troops from Fort Detrick had been present to help keep order. There had been a few dozen fatalities and a number of conspiracy websites claimed that the Littleville Fever had been caused by something that had gotten lose from Fort Detrick. The same sites also claimed that a few of those who had succumbed to Littleville Fever had been somehow twisted or mutated beyond recognition. Hydra, Peter was certain. Perhaps that was what had convinced the powers that be to move to middle of nowhere in New Mexico.

Except maybe it hadn't been far enough.

Middletown, Arizona, a town that was about two hundred miles away from Thunderbolt Mountain and the closest town to the base at the time of the incident, was destroyed by a massive fire that killed almost the entire population of the town in 1964. There hadn't been any details, but there was just something very... off... about how the incident had been reported. The item that had caught his attention had actually been the fact that Middletown had been housing personnel who were meant to be relocated to Thunderbolt Mountain when the construction was completed.

Peter clicked open a scan of a faded photo of three men looking at the camera, all were wearing lab coats. The title under the picture named them, Henry Pym, a blonde man with a lantern jaw and thick, heavy-set shoulders. Bruce Banner, a slight man with a messy thatch of brown hair and over-sized coke-bottle glasses, he looked at the camera awkwardly, as though he didn't want to get his picture taken... Peter felt an absurd moment of kinship with the man. The third was Johnathan Drew, a hefty, sad-faced man with dark hair who had one hand on the desk behind them. There was something familiar about the image, but Peter couldn't quite put his finger on it.

That had all been interesting, he told himself as he transferred the information to his phone. Not that any of it really gave him more info... except possibly that the Thunderbolts were called in when a Hydra outbreak occurred. It also seemed likely that they covered the incidents up.

Now it was in Manhattan. But that still left the question of how Gentek fit in. And why Ed Whelan had run. Well... hopefully he could find more answers tonight.

He was almost, but not entirely startled to find MJ's scent approaching him from behind. She had a well-scrubbed, clean smell to her. The lilacs from Anna's shampoo twining with her own natural fragrance. He glanced over his shoulder and she smiled at him and waved.

She was back in the white t-shirt she'd worn last night and the probably those little red shorts that refused to show unless she was sitting down.

"Ready?" She asked in a low tone.

He rose from the seat and shifted to his tracker wear. Black hoodie, black jeans and heavy workboots. He could understand why they wore it. It was practical and it blended well in the dark. "As I'll ever be. I'll hurry back once I've found what I can."

She pressed the pre-paid phone into his hand. "I've programmed my number on that so you can call me if you need me."

He nodded. "Uh... how am I going to get back? Should I call you and have you open the door for me? Or do we just leave the front door unlocked?"

"Well, I could leave my window open and you could sneak in that way." She winked. He blushed slightly, but with the hood up she probably couldn't tell. Probably.

"I guess that would work, but we'll still risk murder by both of our aunts."

"Well, actually, I had an idea. You can build metal things up in bone once you've absorbed it right?"

"Pretty much, yes." He replied, curious as to where she intended to go with this.

"Here." She held up a house key. "This is Aunt Anna's. Eat it, then spit it out. I think you should be able to make a duplicate."

He blinked in surprise at the idea and held his hand out. She put the key on it and a mass of tendrils briefly ran over the key. He wiped it on his sleeve then handed it back to her.

"Well?"

He held a hand up folding his fingers naturally into a position of someone holding a key and tendrils writhed, leaving him... holding a key. She eyed it critically and compared it to the one she had. "Perfect." She beamed at him. "Man, I wish I'd known you in freshman year."

"What happened freshman year?" Peter asked without thinking.

She waved a hand dismissively, "Needed to make copies of our math finals from out of the principal's office. Long story. Not important."

She hugged him suddenly and he stiffened, not sure if he was supposed to respond or not.

"Be careful, okay?" She murmured into his shirt... which was still him, so that felt very... pleasant to have her breath whispering against him, her lips brushing cloth that was his own skin... he wondered if she remembered that he could feel through the cloth.

"I will," He replied gravely.

"I mean it." She pulled away just long enough to look him directly in the eye. There was that hard, cold expression he'd only seen in flashes over the day.

"I'll be careful." He added after a thought, "I'll hurry back."

"You better." She said, still meeting his gaze as though trying to decide something.

She leaned in and kissed his cheek. "For luck." She said, then turned and hurried up the stairs.

He stared after her for a long moment before he made his way out the front door.

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