Variant Strain

- - -

If Peter were to be honest with himself he was half-dreading and half-hoping what he would encounter when he poked his head out of the bathroom.

.Aunt May had woken up briefly, hours ago, just long enough to be reassured of the situation, given more painkillers and to join them for a small dinner of fried spam sandwiches, which Gwen admitted was about the extent of her culinary skills. Peter picked at his. He felt he shouldn't have been hungry, given just how much he'd... consumed... not too long ago, but somehow his body's appetites just kept going, despite his conscious mind's attempts to curb it.

In the end, he'd finished it anyway and had seconds.

It was past one in the morning. Given the stresses of the day, everyone had decided to turn in right after dinner. Everyone else had fallen asleep. Aunt May and Anna had the twin bed in the guest bedroom. MJ had the living room couch and Peter had been relegated to an inflatable mattress in the Stacy basement. Smack in the middle of Detective Stacy's workshop which smelt of dust and sawdust and untouched power tools.

It was cool in the smothering dark and silence, but his senses sharpened, giving him the entire scene in shades of grey and every sound and scent of the others in the house came to him easily. He could hear the heartbeats and breathing of the others settle into sleep quickly in the floors above him.

He envied them.

He'd tried to sleep as well, but there was just too much going on. Too many thoughts, and not all of them identifiably his, to let him settle down to sleep. It didn't help that he didn't even feel tired. Barely any sleep the night before, running to and from Manhattan, his Uncle's funeral, fighting monsters on and off all day... between all of that, he should have been wiped.

Instead he found himself persistently awake. So much so that he found himself reading through the restricted files Hank had provided him while he let his phone charge up.

Once he'd finished them, he was even less inclined to sleep.

If anything he shivered and wondered if he'd ever be able to sleep again.

Doing what he was doing in the basement's tiny half-bath was his way of taking his mind off of things. Once he was done, he figured, it might even settle him enough to sleep.

He felt that there probably was something vaguely wrong in what he was doing as he snapped another photo but it beat the alternative, which was to lie down in the middle of the dark basement workshop and do nothing but think dark thoughts and listen to the strange voices.

The noise of the air mattress shifting startled him. He'd been so caught up in what he was doing that he hadn't really noticed her arrival until that moment.

He sucked in a breath and recognized the scent.

He poked his head out of the bathroom then and found the single bare bulb for the basement lit. In that dim light, he could make out MJ's head poking out from the nest of blankets and comforters he'd been provided with on the inflatable mattress. She smiled at him then. Small and shy and oddly vulnerable.

"Hi." She'd said.

"Hi, yourself." Peter replied uncertainly. He stood in the open bathroom door watching her.

"It's freezing down here," She said, eyes on him. "And you're naked again."

He glanced down at the T-shirt and pajama bottoms he appeared to have on, then glanced at her. "Uh... I guess I just don't notice it much now."

She flipped down a corner of the heavy down comforter that was on top of her and beckoned him over. She still had the material firmly pulled up to her chin, but he caught a glimpse of pale white shoulder in the movement and swallowed hard.

"Uh... are you..."

"I'm freezing. You aren't." She gave him a lazy, teasing smile, "Warm me up?"

He walked over shakily and slipped in under the covers with her, putting his phone down on a workbench that had been right next to the mattress.

He slipped in and immediately she scooted over, wrapping an arm around his chest and settling her head against his shoulder. She smelled wonderful. The heat flowed out of her into him as she snuggled closer and he realized mostly with relief, but not without a tiny bit of disappointment that she was actually still wearing a large shirt and some sort of loose shorts. Her shoulder had only shown because the shirt's neckline had been badly stretched out at some point and hung loosely enough that it fell over one shoulder.

He also noted idly that the shirt had originally belonged to Anna Watson, because he could pick up her scent on it as well.

The mingled scent wasn't helping his suddenly overtaxed hormones any good.

Did he even have hormones like that anymore?

In any case, she was fully dressed. Safe. Maybe.

Or she likes havin' someone else take her clothes off for her, Cletus supplied with the mental equivalent of an eyebrow waggle.

With your teeth, the Hunter added with a small growl that had to do with unfamiliar appetites.

A mental presence that he recognized as Donna also helpfully provided images on how to manage using only lips, teeth and tongue to unhook a front clasp bra... which made him wonder how she would know... until he realized that she was giving it to him from the perspective of someone watching her own bra being removed in that way.

Then he also realized that MJ was not wearing a bra under her shirt and promptly commanded everyone to shut up while he turned his attention away from this extremely fascinating fact.

She pressed a hand against his chest and murmured, "You're tense."

"Um... mind wandering. I guess." He replied vaguely, fighting down how much he was enjoying just having her against him. "And... um... you know..."

"Betcha I could get you to relax." She murmured teasingly as she nuzzled into his neck, "Never had someone cuddle against you like this before?" She asked a moment later.

"No. Never." He replied, but images flickered in the back of his mind of other people, other selves all doing things like this... in one case from both perspectives simultaneously... but that was them and he was him. He clung a little tighter to her.

She made a small pleased sound as his arm tightened possessively around her shoulder. "We haven't had a chance to talk since yesterday. I guess it's the day before now, isn't it?"

"Yes." He nodded and sighed, "There's... I found out a lot. This whole thing is messed up. Bellevue. All of New York. Hydra. The Thunderbolts. Everything about it."

"Do... do you want to tell me about it?" She murmured quietly. Tentative once more. Scared.

He licked his lips. Why was she scared? He was the one scared of her. Or more precisely he didn't understand her, which had turned quite easily into a sort of fear. He didn't understand and he wasn't even sure he could. She had been nice to him. They seemed to have enjoyed one another's company... and she hadn't even blinked at the thought that he was an inhuman monster that had killed her father. She'd wanted it. Wanted it badly enough that letting her watch him do it had earned him a declaration of love.

She needed help. He wasn't sure if he was the one to give it to her, but in the whirlwind they'd been caught in, he realized he needed her just as badly. He had to talk to someone who wasn't in his head. He needed to make sense of things and she was the only one who even came close to seeing what he had seen. Perhaps Dr. Pym might have been able to offer some perspective, but there was something off-putting about the man, something slightly shady that even MJ had picked up on that made it difficult to trust him.

He glanced down at her as the silence stretched and grew brittle. He realized the she was staring at him. Her eyes were large and luminous in the dim light.

Terrified. Not of him as a monster, but of what his reply to her would be, he realized.

She was gnawing on her lower lip again and she seemed about ready to bolt. Her heart was thunderous in his ears and the scent of her filled him. She shifted. It was a prelude to slipping out of the blanket. He could tell. She dropped her gaze and he could tell she was shifting her weight, preparing to go.

Let her, his own voice drawled. It'll be safer for her. Safer for you. You can't afford to nursemaid her dysfunction, you have enough problems.

On the other hand, he couldn't just abandon her, could he? Reject her like that when she'd... He shivered as he realized just how badly damaged she must be to cling to him like she had.

With great power comes great responsibility. It wasn't just in the strength to dead lift a car. She had given him great power over her. She... she really wasn't prepared to deal with the world, he guessed. He held power over her that she had given to him... and he had a responsibility to her.

He was pretty sure that wasn't what Uncle Ben had meant that for, since he mostly used it as a joke, but if you repeat something often enough, the lesson sticks. She wanted him to take care of her. She seemed to have taken that fact as gospel now. That he would come to her rescue.

Her personal monster. Her Tiger.

Maybe it was an unhealthy thought... but for right now... without any other way to get her help, maybe it was all he could do... right?

Or you're looking for justification to do what you wanted to anyway. His own voice drawled in clear disgust.

The decision seemed to release something within him. A sense of wordless, fierce possessiveness roared down his spine. His arm, of its own accord tightened around her. He pushed his face into her hair and took a deep breath, savoring her scent and the feel of her against him.

She squeaked then, stiffened for just a moment and shivered, before she melted against him with obvious satisfaction. He kissed the top of her head and murmured. "Sorry, there's just a lot to go over. I... I'd like to talk about it. It's a lot of messed up."

He pulled away and looked into her eyes, which were shining and tender once more. He gave her a small, grim smile. "I'm a whole lot of messed up." He told her.

She nodded, shifting away from him slightly and laying on her side. She looked into his eyes, her own very bright, very serious and she said gravely. "I'm here for you. Talk to me."

So he did. He told her about what had happened when he'd left her last night. Had it really only been 24 hours since that time? He'd told her about finding Manhattan saturated in Hydra scent. Fresh and vibrant. How he'd found the Hive under Bellevue. Jessica Drew. The fight against the Hunters. Hank Pym unlocking the door for him. He told her about what had happened at the police station. About the fights. Running to their rescue. He told her about Hank.

She had listened and nodded. He was sure his retelling had been rambling and disjointed. Skipping backwards and forwards as details were recalled then slipped in off-sequence. He talked non-stop for over an hour, giving it to her as clearly as he could.

Then he told her about the files that Hank had given him.

"They're pretty much an outline of what the US Government has done over the years to weaponize and use Hydra." Peter said quietly. "It kind of mostly fits in with what my research turned up on the Thunderbolts from last night."

She smiled a little. "Alright, I'll bite. What is Hydra? Where did it come from?"

They were sitting up. No longer quite cuddled together. MJ sat at one end of the air mattress, one of the comforters wrapped around her shoulders like an over-sized shawl. Peter sat cross-legged, outside of the blankets. The mild cold was bracing and helped him focus. He had the blankets off to make it easy to gesture.

Peter spoke, "The files don't really spell it out. I've was able to do a little searching on my phone. Some stuff kind of fits with what's in the files. Basically, in 1942, Dr. Abraham Erskine is smuggled into the US. He was originally involved with a... human improvement program there. Eugenics. Surgical alterations. Early attempts at direct genetic modification... There's a lot of nasty stuff implied."

"I probably don't want to know, do I?" MJ asked, making a worried face.

Peter shook his head, "Probably not. In any case, he was accompanied by a Russian teenager, who identified herself as Natasha Romanov."

MJ frowned slightly, "She's important because?"

"Because she's probably the source of the first samples of Hydra in the US. Romanov Strain. She mostly displayed enhanced strength, speed, coordination, endurance, and a healing factor. A lot like what I had when I first got infected, but without the feeding tendrils."

"Ah. Did they say where she got it from?" She asked.

Peter shrugged. "She claimed that it ran in her family. It's speculation on my part mostly. She claimed to be a descendant of the Romanov royal family. The only surviving granddaughter of Tsareivich Alexei Nikolaevich."

MJ interrupted, "Hold on. I watched Anastasia. The Romanovs were all dead in 1918. Except for Anastasia." She paused then made a sour face, "Except that was just a movie?"

"Something like that."

"Why do cartoons have to lie to me?" She sighed dramatically, which made Peter laugh.

"This part's all speculation but it kind of fits... Alexei had hemophilia. He was treated by Rasputin, the mad monk of legend. Now, if you watched the same Discovery Channel specials I did..."

"... which I did not." MJ grinned.

"... you would know that conspirators, afraid of the influence Rasputin had with the Romanovs, set about to kill him. Pretty much over the course of one night, he was poisoned, shot, strangled, stabbed, beaten and it finally took drowning to finally put him down."

MJ looked thoughtful. "That sounds kind of familiar."

Peter nodded. "And Alexei responded so well to whatever treatments Rasputin gave him that when they tried to kill him with his family, he was shot repeatedly and stabbed with bayonets, but simply wouldn't die. He finally stopped moving when they shot him in the head... but when people came back later and found the bodies of the royal family... Alexei simply wasn't there."

"So you're thinking Rasputin had the initial strain and passed it to Alexei... who then passed it down to his granddaughter?" MJ asked.

"It makes sense. Erskine figured out that their unusual resilience and exceptional physical skills were the result of the Hydra virus in them." Peter gestured, "The US grabbed him right before the Nazis could and we put him to work trying to see if the Hydra virus could be made to do their work in other people."

MJ shuddered.

"The virus has a very limited life outside of a living body. Any samples that they were going to use had to come straight out of poor Natasha. They got careless. They bled her too much. She died a month after..." Peter shook his head and grit his teeth, "They had a few surviving samples, but none of the original with her gone. They were able to cultivate what little they did manage to salvage in rats... that was what they called Strain Alpha. They got successful results... so they decided to go ahead with human trials."

MJ snuggled deeper into the comforter and caught his serious expression. "What happened?"

"Being in the rats changed it. Strain Alpha wasn't as... stable... as the original Romanov Strain." Peter replied. "In 1942, Erskine tested it in a temporary facility in Maryland called Camp Cathcart which was just a short drive from Fort Detrick. They injected live Hydra into three hundred volunteers. Soliders and civilians both, wide variety of ethnicities. Natasha had been born with her Hydra infection. Erskine had no clue how things were going to turn out introducing it to an already fully grown organism."

"Go on."

He nodded, "About half of those simply went to sleep and never woke up again. Of the ones who didn't end up comatose, around ninety ended up... affected. Some physical enhancement, but all higher thought shut down. Physically perfect apathetic, mindless shamblers. The remaining became aggressive. Hungry. Some of them suffered even more extreme physical mutations... closer to early versions of trackers. They ended up with a bare handful that got the improvements they hoped for and still managed to remain... well... sane enough to be of any use."

"How many is a handful?" MJ asked in a small, horrified voice.

"Four." Peter replied. "Four successful results out of three hundred. That's not counting the other eighty people who were killed by the aggressives. That included Erskine and everyone else involved in the original research. The Army covered it up by claiming the dead were lost in action in Europe."

"That's terrible."

"Terrible enough to convince Washington to stop messing with Hydra." Peter said with a nod. "At least for a while."

MJ reached a hand out of the comforter and gave Peter's hand a comforting squeeze, "I wish I could say I was surprised... but I'm not."

Peter spoke, his voice gone hollow, "In 1961, Dr. Philip Masters somehow managed to convince their higher ups that they had the answer. A new strain of Hydra. Designated Strain Beta. Much less aggressive. Longer shelf-life outside of a human body. They were sure it would work where Strain Alpha had failed."

"They wanted Super Soldiers for Vietnam?" MJ asked.

"Pretty sure that helped push the decision. Except this time, they were so sure that they would get better results if they had a larger testing population to work with." Peter continued.

"Oh." MJ realized what he meant.

"They tested Hydra Beta on the population of Littleville, New York. They told everyone it was a flu shot." Peter growled. "Told them that it was going to help them. That they could expect some flu-like symptoms... that it would be normal and that they shouldn't be alarmed."

MJ squeezed his hand harder.

"The websites I found that talked about Littleville fever barely scratched the surface. They only knew about a few of the fatalities. They didn't know about the rest going into extended comas. Or the riots that broke out when aggressive walkers started tearing apart homes to build... well... they'd be hives now, but they blunted the Hydra's aggressiveness and virulence to some extent. They had to build the hives manually... the infected were using the sleepers to incubate more of the virus. To ready it to spread. There were a lot less major mutations, but the ones that did break through were far worse than anything that showed up during the Alpha Strain."

Peter sighed and looked down. "Troops from Fort Detrick had it almost contained, but the whole town was a powder keg of infected. That was the first time they'd seen the infected coordinating. The Army was set to have the town bombed to stop the infected from breaking out."

"Did they?" MJ asked.

Peter smiled ruefully, "In the end, it actually took an infected high school physics teacher to stop it. Poor guy developed a strain that leached the calcium from his bones, but at the same time built a massive number of neural cross-connections in his brain. Turned him into a super genius overnight. He figured out the virus from first principles and developed a way to somehow shut it down and flush it out of an infected person's system."

"There's a cure?" MJ asked, "No. Wait. If there were we wouldn't be having this problem. So, let me guess. He's the only one who knew what he did?"

Peter nodded, "Dr. Richards was already dying when he stepped out in front of the Army troops maintaining the cordon around Liddleville. He managed to tell them he had the infected 'nullified', but didn't have time to explain what he actually did. I think there's still samples of his notes around, but the files I have don't tell me what was actually on those notes. Between that and whatever happened to Middletown, Arizona, with strain Gamma in 1964..."

"What did happen?" She asked curiously.

Peter shrugged. "I don't have any details. It was the worst, though. Only three people survived it. It was bad enough to prompt the US Army to put together an organization whose only job is to keep this stuff contained."

"The Thunderbolts." MJ supplied.

"They didn't quite give up on studying the stuff. Trying to get it to do more, that sort of thing. Except they farmed that out to private companies like Gentek."

"Work done by people like your mom." MJ noted.

"Exactly." Peter heaved a sigh. "Things changed again in the early nineties. The equivalent of the Thunderbolts in Russia, Oruzhiya Plyus... Weapon Plus... folded due to budget cuts. Unlike the Thunderbolts, their focus was less on containment and more on trying to develop Hydra to it's fullest possible expression. They wanted to see just how far Hydra could take the human body. Their results were... weird."

"Like how?" She asked.

Peter gestured vaguely, "They bred the specific strains to create a higher incidence of manifestation of specific packages of mutations. They had six specific strains that they could reliably breed that they considered the most dangerous. They called the 'Zloveshcheye Shest'. The 'Sinister Six'. Each one named after the first infectee to survive the full transformation. Smerdyakov, Trackers; Kravinov, Hunters; Drago, Vultures; Syetsevich; Rhinos... and two more I haven't run into yet. Gragan, the Scorpions; and Octavius, Omega."

She quirked an eyebrow, "Omega?"

He said defensively, "Hey, I didn't pick the nicknames."

"So why are the American Thunderbolts using Russian names for the infected Strains, anyway?"

"I was getting to that. Weapon Plus's superiors, not aware of what exactly they were working on had no idea what would happen without the containment they were providing. The head of Oruzhiya Plyus, General Alexei Alanovich Shostakov, contacted his American counterpart General Glenn Talbot and offered him the whole operation, lock, stock and barrel."

"You're kidding."

Peter shrugged. "That's what the notes said. So they folded Weapon Plus into the Thunderbolts. Right in time to use some of the Russian methods involving having a Tracker along on operations."

Also right in time to offer me that shot, Cletus added.

"And so here we are." MJ finished for him.

"Here we are." He said spreading his hands out.

"That does still leave a lot of questions."

"I know. I was planning on asking Hank again, but he's not picking up." Peter glanced over to where his phone was charging.

"There's one question in particular, though." MJ said, letting a slow smile spread on her face.

"Er... what's that?" Peter asked, edging back uncomfortably.

"I heard your phone's camera in the bathroom," She grinned. "What were you taking a picture of in there?"

"Oh." Peter relaxed slightly. "I... um..." He flushed slightly.

"Is it anything you can show me?" MJ said still grinning, "Cause if you were taking naughty pictures of yourself as a girl, I gotta tell you--"

He interjected, "That's not--"

But she continued, "-- All you had to do was ask me," She winked at him and let the comforter dip down enough to show her bare shoulder once more.

Peter sputtered and shook his head hurriedly, "No, no! It wasn't-- I--" He reached over to where his phone was and tapped it into the gallery section then handed the phone to her.

She frowned, then paled as she realized that one of the small thumbnailed pictures was of her father. There nearly twenty other photos. Head shots of men and women with the bathroom wall as the background. They were of varying ages and ethinicities, none of whom she recognized save for a pretty redhead that had been the unmutated form of the female Tracker that Peter had shown her. She looked up at him, confusion plain on her face. "What's this?"

Peter looked down at his hands. He mumbled, "That's... that's everyone I've killed. At least everyone who I consumed." He winced, "At least one of those I consumed, but didn't kill myself. So I don't know if he counts, but he's on there anyway."

MJ seemed stricken as she stared at him, "Why?"

Peter met her gaze, "So I don't forget them." His voice was quiet, but there was an edge to it. As though he was daring her to judge him for it. "I... I never even got to see what they looked like before... you know... before they got turned."

He gestured to the phone, "Every one of them was a person before they became a monster. Every one of them deserves better than for me to just... forget. I don't know if I can explain it to you any better tha--"

She scooted closer, flapping the edges of the covers around him as she pulled him into a fierce hug. "No, I get it." Her voice was calm and gentle. She let go of the hug, sliding her hands up to cup his face. "You're still afraid you're going to go hungry and mindless like the rest of them, aren't you?"

"It's not impossible." Peter said looking into her eyes. "Maybe I've just been lucky. Maybe I'm going to just... snap any moment now. You've seen what I can do, MJ. How can you stand to be around me?" His voice turned raw and pained at his last question.

"Because I have seen what you can do." Her eyes were shining once more. "I watched you kill my father. Put him down like an animal."

He shuddered at her expression and wanted to look away, but she wouldn't let him. She had his head between her hands and he didn't think he had the strength to do it. "I'm not proud of that MJ."

"Maybe not," She said, "But you know what I saw you do not one minute after you did it?"

"Um..."

"They started shooting at you. The marines started taking pot shots and you picked that car up and I thought you were going to throw it at them. It looked like you were just about to."

"I almost did." He muttered, flushing slightly. "I wasn't thinking."

She held his gaze, her eyes fierce, "But you didn't. You caught yourself. You set it back down, used that to block the bullets and you ran. You didn't want to hurt them, even though you could have."

"That doesn't..." He muttered, blushing harder. His heart was hammering under the intensity of her gaze.

"Yes, it does. I wish you could see it."

He snorted, "I could still just give in any minute."

She smiled at him once more and gently kissed his lips. "Because you're a good man. The first really, good decent man I've ever met. Because you won't let it happen. You're strong Peter... I can see it. So strong that even after everything you're sane and good and..." She kissed him once more. Gentle and sweet. "Don't doubt that. You won't end up like that, Peter. You're just too strong."

Stronger than tears that voice murmured in his head once more.

One that he'd mistaken for his own that first night. One that hadn't spoken much, but he'd felt it drifting around in the back of his mind. Someone Ed Whelan had consumed, perhaps? Some remnant of one of Ed's victims, maybe? Did Ed even have victims? He seemed like such a... an inconsequential nebbish. It was hard to ascribe any sort of sinister act to him.

He shivered and MJ pressed harder against him, as though trying to will him to believe in himself just on the basis that she believed in him. Or that's what he thought it could've been like. He didn't even have a drill, he thought inanely.

Despite himself, he let himself take comfort in it.

She held him for a long minute and he was grateful for it.

When she let him go, she picked his phone back up, "The pictures... that's just very... you." She looked at them once more and noticed, "Ed Whelan's not on here?"

He smiled weakly, "You interrupted me while I was just about to do his picture. Although to be honest, I'm not even sure how he ended up in me... I never even met the guy."

"How do you know... um... if you don't know how they looked like, how do you know to look like them?" MJ asked curiously.

"It's one of my wonderfully weird new reflexes." Peter said with another shrug. "I can just sort of... feel... them now. The whole sets of features that forms each person. It wasn't so obvious when I had a smaller sampling, but now, though..." He trailed off and gestured helplessly at the phone to which MJ nodded. "I've got two more left. I think. I thought Ed Whelan was the last one, but there's at least one last face left after him." Which he had to admit to himself was strange.

She held the phone up, finger on the camera trigger and nodded to him. "I can take them for you."

He nodded back and let his heartbeat spike, his body blur and he took on Ed Whelan's ratty face.

She took the shot and asked, "Last one?"

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. "Last one." He agreed.

He blurred and he felt his body resettle around him. Female this time. Very slender. Almost painfully skinny. Short, auburn hair. Pale skin. This body felt taller than his own. That was about the extent of the impression he got before MJ took the shot and passed the phone back to him.

He shifted back to his own form and stared at the resultant photo.

"What's wrong?" MJ asked, "I mean it wasn't that bad a picture was it?"

"No." His voice was flat and he ran his tongue across his lips. "That's not it."

"Do you know who it is?"

"Yes."

She rolled her eyes in exasperation, "Well?"

"MJ, that's my mom."

- - -