Mint and Chocolate

Screaming was never a good sound to wake up to. I jolted upright, only to be thrown back against a bed when restraints engaged against my body. I felt incredibly sluggish, turning my head to see a white liquid going into an IV in my hand which burned. 

“ET?” I said hoarsely, looking around wildly, feeling my eyes not focusing. Everything seemed to be shaking that I tried to look at for several seconds. 

Strange’s cloak perked up from the chair, hovering over to me and falling across my body. I realized with dread I was in some private hospital room. I was naked under a gown. Panic ripped through me. 

I was thrashing as alarms started sounding, the cloak nervously poking me. I just started straining more, grunting as I was trying to will myself out of the binds. I’d worked all the way up to growling when my door opened to reveal Dr. Strange. He had a white coat on, and loafers. 

That sight was enough to give me pause. I stared at him, slack jawed as the cloak leaped onto his shoulders. He firmly shut the door behind him, sitting next to my bed once he silenced the alarms. 

“Where are they?” I snarled, rage boiling over with shame realizing I was powerless again. 

“I don’t know,” He said quietly. “When we tried to do an MRI on you, it didn’t go well. They escaped, from your body and as best we could tell the hospital.” 

“Escaped,” I repeated, sounding broken. “What’s wrong with me then?”

“Well, you’d hemorrhaged into your pelvis. I’m not sure what ET was doing to you but once they left you decompensated very fast. It took five units of blood and a very long surgery to pull you out of it.”

“Were you there the whole time,” I whispered, he startled and released the bindings so I could properly sit up. Strange sat down with a heavy sigh. 

“Obviously I didn’t do your surgery,” He started with a wave of his hand. “But I told them I was your uncle so I could stay around, I figured once ET left you’d want some explanation.”

“What about Parker and the fabulous four?” I ground out bitterly, picking at the blanket. 

“I don’t know,” Strange admonished. “I haven’t checked in, it was more pressing you got medical care… since I’ve already failed to save you from harm once from the sounds of things.” I could feel the flush spreading up my face.

“I, uh, didn’t mean to be like that,” I murmured. “I just wanted to save–um, how long do I need to be here?” I caught myself from saying save Otto. I honestly had no idea why I even wanted to save him. I knew nothing about him really. But something drew me to him, like I knew him. 

“The hope is not long,” Strange offered. “A few days maybe? But now you’re awake, I should go check on Parker, make sure he got the last of them before we contain the spell again.”

“Dr. Strange,” I grabbed the cloak when he got up and he sat back down. “If you find ET, can you let me know if they’re okay? I owe them for keeping me alive.”

“Sure, kid,” He nodded sagely, opening a portal and stepping through without further comment. 

I nearly jumped to the ceiling when my door opened again not a minute later, a pale woman with vomit trailing down her shirt came in with a limping gait. On second thought I scrambled out of the bed, ripping out my IV along the way. I picked up the bible from the bedside table, which was lighter than I wanted it to be. 

She moaned, blood dribbling from her mouth as she shuffled towards me. There was a sickly quality to her whole presence, eyes cloudy and unfocused and a clearly broken right arm she held to her side. A dark bruise was on her chest, which I saw under her thin dress too, dipping between the remaining tatters. 

If I’d had more presence of mind, the idea that I was imagining this would have crossed my mind. My mom had been mentally shattered when she came back from the Snap, unable to accept me having aged, that she hadn’t, had missed five years of my life where I kept myself going. Usually Rosaline Reed had been a strong woman, but she never recovered. 

This creature woman moaned again, moving her non broken arm towards me. I threw the bible at her, hearing a horrible crunch when it connected to her chest. I cursed the alarms for being silent now. I threw whatever else was there, a phone, remote, everything making a disgusting sound when it hit. 

Finally I was backed into the corner, her moaning and smell overpowering me. Not knowing what else to do, I put my hands on her deformed chest to push back. But as soon as my hands touched her skin that black bruise moved. In a heartbeat I felt ET crash over me. 

“GALEN,” They roared, the woman crumpling, very much not alive. I stared at her body, finally noticing a body tag on her toe. That was enough I puked, feeling ET squirming across my organs. 

“ET,” I wheezed, wiping my mouth and holding my gut. It took a second but I realized there was a huge wound on my lower abdomen, I assumed from the surgery. I pulled the gown up seeing blood staining it. 

As I watched ET’s purplish black hue pulled over it, pushing the staples out and closing it. I looked at the woman again, gagging. ET nestled in around my heart it felt like, purring happily. 

“What the fuck,” I hissed, having to step away from her. I was looking around the room wildly for my clothes. They were nowhere, I was throwing open cabinets and the like in a fit. 

“MRI hurts us,” ET sounded thoughtful. “Magnetic resonance, felt like we were dying. We are sorry, we had to get out… and the whole morgue was a playground.”

“You ate a bunch of dead people’s heads didn’t you,” I whispered furiously, clutching the blanket to me.

“It seemed reasonable,” They offered. “Dead recently, not using their organs, we needed more to help keep you strong. We failed to heal you once already, and you are dear friend.”

“What I really need is clothes,” I grumbled. “We have to find Otto before Strange sends him back.”

“We can help,” ET said firmly, enveloping me. I stared at them, they’d put me in a hoodie and jeans but I could feel it was just them stretched over me. With a heavy sigh I looked at the body again then the door. 

“I will need proper clothes,” I admitted, ET squeezing me a second. 

“We understand,” They managed to only sound a little disappointed. 

“Now how do we get out of here?” I ventured, peering out the window. I felt a smile pull at my lips that wasn’t entirely mine as ET swallowed my head. I frowned underneath.

In a fluid motion, Venomette punched through the window, slipped out and vaulted down the side of the hospital. Somehow we were only a couple of stories up in the Manhattan hospital. Once we touched down, blissfully in an alleyway, ET pulled back into a hood. I shuddered in the chill, and they hastened the pace. 

We walked to a nearby T station to get to my house, the one my mom had bought shortly after my father died and she found out she was expecting. Mom had been some sort of hobbyist artist, but her work sold handsomely when she chose to make something. She was one of those forces of nature that whenever passion took her it held only briefly. 

Mom rarely spoke about my father, and only had one picture of him she showed me once when I begged. She’d kept that photo in the locket on her neck forever, shaped like an octagon of all things. The only thing she perpetually told me is he took his height to the grave and that he had been brilliant. I never found out his name, or even what he happened to be brilliant at. It was like he was a ghost she’d made up.

When I was almost a teen, I’d overheard her talking to her mom about it on the phone. It was typical of them to argue about him, even if he wasn’t around anymore. Grandma seemed to blame him for mom moving away from Michigan, and for dying, leaving us alone. I’d at least pieced together by then he was some sort of proficient math guy. He’d made some patents which sold as part of his estate when he died, though mom had been his sole beneficiary. I still didn’t even know if they’d been married. 

Once she died, when I found her in her bed, I’d taken the locket. I hadn’t scrounged up the courage to go through anything else. Her room had a nice layer of dust by now. I’d go in it every so often, change the sheets for no particular reason. Grandma was dead by now too, so it was just me and the ghost of mom. 

“Your mom hurt you,” ET said pointedly. I stretched my legs out in the seat, pretending to adjust nonexistent earbuds. 

“She did her best,” I offered, knowing I wasn’t convincing them. It was kind of hard when they knew my thoughts and most likely my memories. During her passions, I often got overlooked. It went on so long once my uncle came, which had turned into its own horrors. Grandma was the one who came from then on, like a sentinel as soon as I would call. Nobody discouraged these passions though, because they made enough money for a year or more. And then in a few weeks, maybe a month, Rosaline Reed would be back to mom of the year. 

Always at my recitals, plays, games, volunteering events. She’d made sure my participation in outside school activities took up so much time I usually got home just when she finished dinner. I’m not sure why she didn’t want me to learn to cook, but I didn’t argue with her. Getting into college had been easy, partially because half the world was not competing, but because of how extensive my resume was. She’d come back during my what was my sophmore year of college, unable to cope. 

Once, when I was up late studying, she’d stood in my doorway for an hour staring at me hunched over my sound and particle physics books. Then she’d tried to take the books from me, telling me I couldn’t study that. When I’d fought back, trying to calmly explain I was in college, for the eighth time that day, she'd thrown the book at my head, breaking a lamp. Grandma had died during the Snap, when it had just been us here. Mom hadn’t been able to process that either. 

I pulled myself out of my thoughts to see I’d made it to the front door. I blinked several times realizing the door was locked and my key was who knew where. My head hit the solid wood with a thunk, but ET just slithered under the door and opened it. 

Shrugging, I went inside. I flicked a light on, startling myself since I’d been looking directly at the picture of mom above the switch. ET grumbled against me, urging me upstairs. 

I went slowly, realizing yet again I had not eaten today. Once I was at the top of the stairs, I felt them pull off me, leaving a tether to my lower back. Weakly, I went into my room and started pulling on clothes. Vaguely there was sound from the kitchen, followed soon by the smell of something cooking. 

“Are you an angel, ET?” I whispered, zipping up my black hoodie from the theater. Staring at my boots, I weighed the options of steel toe compared to the sleek glow in the dark ones I’d recently splurged on. 

“Dinner!” They announced, from downstairs. My eyes went to the black tendril which was rapidly enlarging as a face appeared in the doorway, a plate of breakfast food from my freezer balanced on their head. I felt my eyebrows reach my hairline as they put the food down smiling with rows of shark-like teeth. 

“Is that what you look like?” I asked, reaching out a hand to touch the closest thing to a cheek I could see. ET was purring in that guttural way, their eyes were almost a shade of mint, devoid of pupils. 

“One of the ways,” They said, the teeth moving. “It is Venomette’s face.”

“That’s really cool,” I said, feeling around, poking their teeth. “I noticed the black hue kind of shifts too.”

“We are colors imperceptible to your human eyes,” ET said factually, nudging me to start eating. “We appear black since that is devoid of color, but really we can take on any color.”

I was just using my hands to eat, since utensils seemed to be out of possibility for a sentient alien goo. It tasted amazing, somehow, but I tried to keep my pace slow since I still felt weird. ET just hovered around the room, never losing that tendril linked to my back. 

When I was done, I saw them staring at the locket on my desk. I walked up to them, petting the head. 

“That’s it, that’s the only evidence I have of the man that mom said was my father,” I picked it up, focusing on the latch but not moving to open it. I hadn’t since she’d died. It felt like I was violating her wishes. 

ET suddenly perked up, hovering over to my window and looking intently. Then they coated my skin, face reflected in the mirror, a solid mintish white circle in the center of our chest. I looked down at it, seeing it vaguely pulsing. 

“What’s the matter?” I asked, looking up again, seeing them narrow our eyes. 

“Something is awry, Spiders need help, so do the others,” ET said carefully, it felt like we were staring at each other. I swallowed hard, looking out the window. 

“We can do that, right,” I put a hand over where the scar would have been if that surgical wound had been allowed to stay. “It won’t hurt me? I’m not really interested in dying tonight.”

“We can protect you now,” ET said with confidence. 

“I mean, you did pretty well before too,” I patted the white blotch on my sternum. We walked over to the window, opening it to crisp night air. We smelled Parker, or something like him very briefly, before honing in on the boy we’d met earlier. We sighed as we took a crouch in the window, barely fitting. 

“We need to be sleek,” ET proclaimed, smiling ridiculously at the glowing shoes. We adjusted our shape, melding into a more lean, tall frame. Now I was smiling ridiculously too, being taller was awesome. 

In unison we agreed to jump, borrowing from Parker and swinging through town. We tracked the scent of him, briefly picking up another similar musk before it disappeared. We rolled in the air, diving between two buildings as we made quick work of lower Manhattan. 

It felt immensely satisfying when we saw our reflection, the shoes glowing faintly. Though that was distracting, and we took a hard landing on the next rooftop, spraying rocks over the side. 

“Woof,” We said, barely breathing hard, hands on our hips. We peered over the edge, waving down to the people who’d been showered with gravel, cursing us. When we focused again, squinting at a building in the short distance, bright light was starting on an upper floor. 

Then the glass exploded outward, a familiar eight appendaged silhouette coming with it. Without a conscious thought, we vaulted towards Otto, redistributing power to our legs. 

We cleared the last building, not missing the Bugle truck outside below us. Our last jump had us on the building, cracking glass under the force. We watched as Otto took off, lights following him, as we remained in the shadows. 

We took a moment, hearing destruction above, watching it below, realizing there were a ton of people in the building. In a breath we broke through the glass under us, slipping in to see someone with a phone up, filming. We blinked, looking around, hearing nobody else. 

“Could ya put that away?” We asked roughly, walking past as they kept filming, following us. We pulled open their door, finding a fire alarm and pulling it. People started poking their heads out immediately but stopping short when they saw me. 

“Who are you?” The guy filming asked. We put a hand on his shoulder, towering over him, and pushed him into the hallway, closing his locked door in his face. I had ET pull back, and we slipped through his apartment up from a porch, making the leap up to the next one. We kept jumping up, looking for the Spider. 

The fire alarm was really pissing off ET, who was writhing inside. I hummed a melody, trying to think over the alarms too. I watched people flooding out, debris flying from above. We kept going up. 

Finally, we were perched on a balcony, looking into an apartment without a wall than it should have. We could hear the alarms way less up here, realizing they were the larger, more expensive places. ET sluggishly folded over me, not increasing our height or bulk really. 

We stepped down, opening the glass door, hearing a fight immediately. Our shoes kept us quiet as we snaked through, suddenly hearing that horrible laughter from the theater. That got our spine straight, Venomette becoming bigger in response. He’d hurt us, hurt people we cared about. 

“Just go May!” Parker cried, right when he slid past the door we were in the shadows of. A shorter but powerful man strolled by, making our heart stutter. He had on a tattered green coat, a purple hoodie peeking out. Somehow he missed our presence. 

“It would be better to watch right now,” ET warned in our head. “There are still civilians to protect.” We nodded, which seemed dumb for a flash but we backed out to the balcony again, surveying people. We dropped down, the heights no longer giving me pause. 

The concrete cracked under the impact, but we splayed some black over an opening, stopping its collapse and people hurried out. We stayed in the shadows, watching people leave and occasionally looking up at the wreckage to block bigger pieces. Jameson’s voice was echoing in the parking lot, saying a lot of horrible things. A sandstorm was frenzied past our spot, an obvious electric outage following Sparky as he went out into the world. 

Our mind wandered to Otto, looking critically at the marks from his tentacles. Suddenly though a large explosion shook the ground, encouraging the rest of the evacuation to hurry. We took that moment to slip into the foyer perimeter. 

The two men crashed through the ceiling, a stairwell door flying open too. We immediately started towards the woman who came out, clutching a bag to her chest. The alarms were silenced, whether they weren’t working anymore or had a timer we didn’t know or care. Our power was rising up again. 

As soon as we could reach her, we put a hand over her waist and pushed her back into the stairwell, shutting the door as another explosion went off. Then we heard the damnable glider. She hit us in the crotch with a quick knee, but when nothing happened she looked up, mouth frozen before a scream. 

“None of that please,” I said, holding a finger to my mouth. “You’re in danger here, you need to get out.”

“Peter’s in there fighting Norman!” She yelled, trying to punch me now. We leaned down towards her.

“You’re just mundane,” I said skeptically and she nodded curiously. “So leave the fighting to us.”

“You’re just a kid in a Halloween mask!” She snarled, trying to push past me again. I put a hand on her shoulder, keeping her in place. 

“Nah,” I said, letting Venomette recede into me. ET was still frazzled, so it seemed to be me driving. This lady stared at me, fear registering across her features. 

“What the hell are you?” She pulled some device from her bag, pointing it at me. I recognized it as some sort of sound machine, quickly swallowing it in a black fist and crushing it. She just pulled something else out, which I immediately recognized as an arc reactor from Iron man. 

“Ok, so, put that away,” I said casually but my heart was in my throat. “Look, I’m trying to help, okay.” As soon as I said it I heard another bomb start ticking, I swore. Venomette surrounded her in a cocoon, the blast ripping through the stairwell as we hugged her to us. 

It hurt like a mother, fire and shrapnel piercing us. Then his laugh receded, the sound of his glider taking off. We stepped away from her, Venomette going for tall and lean as we slunk into the foyer. 

We followed moans, finding Peter and pulling debris off him. He had a huge piece of metal in his belly, which we webbed down once we pulled the rebar out of him. That woman appeared next to us, but we blocked Parker from view for a moment, pulling another concrete slab from his twisted leg. ET recommended webbing that too, so we did. They encouraged us that his healing factor would kick in. 

“May?” Parker said weakly, and we backed up. She collapsed next to him, purposefully not looking at the damage. We left them a moment, seeing Jameson starting into the rubble. That made up step in front of their tender moment again, Venomette swelling again, keeping a more masculine shape. 

“What the devil are you?” Jameson roared, cameras pointed at us. We just narrowed our eyes. 

“It looks like a shark,” One of the cameramen offered. 

“Since when are sharks black!” Jameson had no volume besides ten. “And that’s not racist, it’s biology!”

“J. Jonah Jameson,” We growled and he looked at me with newfound interest. I felt May and Peter moving behind me. We took several steps forward, his camera crew backing up but he held stalwart. 

We kept walking forward until all eyes were on us, giving May and Peter a chance to slink away. Jameson was looking up at us, microphone in hand, holding it towards us. 

“So, who are you, what friend of Spider-Man are you?” Jameson’s voice was annoying. 

“Who are you,” We growled. “Ruining the life of a child? We protect, you destroy.”

“Strong words for a big man,” He thundered, moving to poke us with the microphone. 

“Weak words coming from a little man,” We growled, flashing teeth. His cameraman took another healthy step back. We raised a hand, shooting a web over the lens. Jameson stuttered a moment, sending spittle flying. 

“You attacked us! Cops, arrest him!” Jameson howled, but we just jumped over him, shooting a web to take us on Otto’s path. We followed the tentacles’ marks up and over buildings. It took some time but we trailed him to a university. I devoured some fast food one the way, ET chanting in my head the whole time we got looks from the teen staff manning it at this hour. I don’t think I had ever eaten so much in my life.