Enhancement
Peter
I hopped out of the car excitedly. “Hi Mr. Stark! Thanks for inviting me.”
He smiled, but I could tell he was worrying about something. “Always good to have you, kid. I’ve got a bit of a project for you, if you’re up to it.”
“Of course! What is it? Web fluid? Nanotech?”
As Tony explained his plan, I nodded along enthusiastically. This was even better than what I expected. I'd been dying for a chance to talk to my scientific hero.
Bruce
The light knock at my freshly rebuilt door startled me out of my reverie.
“Come in,” I called, closing the book whose pages I had stared at unseeingly for the past hour, perhaps more.
“Hi, Dr. Banner, it’s me, um, Peter, Mr. Stark invited me over to work on stuff this weekend and I thought maybe if it wasn’t too much of a bother, well, I’ve been reading, trying to, anyway…” The kid was bursting with energy and enthusiasm as he thrust the book at me. “Mr. Stark said maybe if I asked nicely, you’d help me with my Spanish. I found a bunch of articles on bioengineering that I really want to read but I don’t know enough of the science vocabulary. Will you help me with my Spanish?” The words came out all in a rush.
I knew Tony had put him up to it, but I couldn’t mind, not when Peter seemed so happy about it. “Okay.”
Peter stopped mid-preparation for another run-on sentence. “Really?”
“Of course. ¡Adelante! No se quede en la puerta.” (1)
After an hour of scribbled conjugation charts and enthusiastically jotted down notes that led easily into multilingual banter, I found myself flipping through Peter’s Spanish textbook in a lull of conversation. A giant green tree arching over a bright but somewhat haphazardly built street caught my eye. I hummed in surprise at a pleasant memory. “Un país maravilloso.” (2)
“Guatemala? You’ve been there?” Peter set aside his notes and scooted closer on the floor where we had ended up in order to spread as many papers as possible around us.
“Briefly.” I scratched at my ear thoughtfully. “The land is breathtaking and the people are welcoming and generous.” For a moment, I could almost feel the dazzling sunlight on my skin and smell the warmth of fresh fruit mixed with the bitterness of burning grass the next town over.
Peter watched me without prying or answering, simply leaving open space if I was willing to add more. It was surprisingly freeing.
“I’d been working in a soda plant in Brazil,” I began, “trying to lie low. The general who had been overseeing the radiation resistance project I’d worked on managed to track me down again, and I ended up going green for a while. Next thing I knew, I was in the rainforest somewhere, and nobody spoke Portuguese.” I cracked a smile. “The moral of the story is that it’s important to know key phrases in as many languages as you can.”
“I’ve got a decent grasp of Spanish, and some French, and a lot of Latin, though that’s not likely to help me if I wake up in a different country, but I want to learn more,” Peter agreed earnestly. He frowned. “Sorry if this is too personal, like you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to—but if you transform in one country and switch back in another, you wouldn’t have anything with you, right? How do you get back where you started? Or I guess if you’re being tracked how to you get to a new place and start over if you have nothing?”
“I’ve gotten used to starting over. In Guatemala, though… that time was tough, since I hadn’t been expecting to leave Brazil yet. I’d been there almost a year without drawing attention to myself or breaking anything. Of course, I should have realized that never lasts. Normally I’d be able to find work, but that time I wasn’t presentable enough to get a job and the energy it took to transform for a couple of days wore me out so I ended up begging for a day or two until I could clean myself up and work.”
“Have you been to a lot of places?”
I shrugged. “I’ve been to a variety. Usually I try to make my way somewhere remote enough to minimize damage if the other guy comes out, but where I can do some good for the local people. It makes everything feel like less of a waste.” The amount I’d readily managed to tell Peter about life on the run surprised me. It wasn’t a topic I talked about much, if at all, with anyone. “Okay, my turn. Tengo curiosidad. Qué es la historia de la araña? (3) How does a straight-A Queens kid end up night-timing as an Avenger?”
Peter blushed. “I mean, I’m not technically an Avenger. Mr. Stark asked me to join the team once, but it’s not really my scene. I just keep an eye on small-scale crimes and stuff like that, because I can and it seems like if I can, it’s up to me to take care of the people near me, you know? But I’d be uncomfortable with doing anything official what with the Sokovia Accords and everything. I’m not registered or anything so I keep a low-profile.”
“That’s probably wise. I’ve seen what people are willing to do to people like us, Peter, and I don’t want you to have to go through that. Tony’s your best ally, there. I know he’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe and out from under a microscope.”
“Yeah, he’s awesome,” Peter agreed. “Can you believe I used to run around in an old hoodie I’d decorated with spiderwebs before Mr. Stark made my suit?”
I cracked a smile. “¿En serio? (4) That must have been quite the sight.”
“I’m still surprised anybody listened to me in that get-up. Although my web-slingers were pretty cool despite the rest of it.”
“¿Cuando empezaste a tener las calidades de una araña?" (5)
“Couple of years ago. I had just started at Midtown, and we went on a field trip to this lab that was working at the time on the effects of different kinds of radiation on plants and how that might affect their viability in space travel—which was super cool, by the way—and partway through the tour, I felt something pinch my arm and smacked it. Wiped spider guts off on my pants and didn’t think anything of it the next morning when I woke up so sick. I was puking my guts out, and I think I had a fever, but I just assumed I got the flu, you know? So I didn’t go to the hospital. And Aunt May was away on a work trip but I didn’t want her to worry so I didn’t tell her. Then the bite started looking weird, so I panicked a little bit, but at that point I started feeling really weird, too, like inside my bones. Like something was stretching.” Peter hesitated. “I don’t know, maybe I was just really out of it from the fever. I know it doesn’t make sense.”
“No, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” I encouraged him. “The sensation you’re describing reminds me of how I feel when the other guy takes the wheel. Did affect your awareness or perception at all?”
“Only by heightening my senses,” Peter explained. “And sometimes I get really strong goosebumps if there’s danger. To be honest, it’s not a great combination with my anxiety. For the first couple months I was so overloaded I could barely deal with school. I quit band because there was just too much sensory input. I could hear every key and valve move and it was hell. But as I gradually figured out the things I could do now, and designed my web-fluid and shooters, and finally started swinging around the city—it was the perfect release for all of that overload, and I felt so much freer.” He shrugged. “Not as exciting a story as one might expect, but that’s how it happened.”
A knock at the door interrupted our conversation.
“Come in,” I called.
Tony poked his head in. “Hey, I’ve got some Thai food waiting in the kitchen. Anybody hungry?”
Peter perked up immediately. “My metabolism would like to be clear that the answer to that question is always yes.” He glanced at me. “You’ll join us, right, Dr. Banner? ¿Por favor con una cereza en la parte superior?” (6)
I looked at Tony, who was standing in the doorway with a trademark smirk. “Can’t say no to that, can I, Mr. Stark,” I said pointedly. He certainly knew that I would find it more difficult to excuse my way around his protege, and had planned on it.
“Wouldn’t want to disappoint the teenage vigilante,” he agreed, molding his face into a more serious expression.
I grabbed the crutches Vision was insisting I use around the compound and sighed. “Thai it is, then. Lead the way, Spider-Man.”
Peter
As we made our way down to the kitchen, I smiled to myself at the sight of the two bantering animatedly ahead of me with an easy camaraderie. Mr. Stark seemed less stressed than when I’d first arrived, and Dr. Banner was actually smiling. Mission accomplished.