Chapter 8
He gestured at Stuart Halberstadt. “Here’s your guy!” he insisted. “You want the third? Here he is! It’s a hologram! How else do you think the third guy snuck into the building? It’s Tony Stark!”
Halberstadt scowled at Peter. “What? Do I look like Tony Stark?”
At the Avenger’s name several of the scientists muttered to each other. Some paused in the act of freeing the Scorpion from where he decorated the glass wall separating the late Ock’s office from the corridor until the henchman started spewing curses that set them hastily back to work. One of them had extracted a blowtorch from somewhere and was using it to fruitless effect in an effort to burn the webs away. All it accomplished was to make the brute howl.
“What are you doing?” Parker hissed, mindful of being square in the sights of twenty different weapons.
Peter ignored him and addressed the irate Halberstadt. “That’s what a hologram is, duh. What were you gonna do, walk in as yourself?”
“This is horse shit!” A vein was popping in the apoplectic scientist’s head.
“It sure is, Stuart! Or should I say: Stu-ark?”
He then looked at the scientists attempting to burn off the web fluid and lied encouragingly, “Keep at it—you can burn it off if you make the flame really hot.” He tried not to giggle when the Scorpion roared a second later.
“This is ridiculous!” The man threw his arms around wildly, “I’m me! He’s clearly trying to make you suspect me! You better not have wrecked my car!”
“No! I’m turning you in!” Peter stuck his bloody forefinger a mere inch from the reddening forehead and shouted, “and I’m jumping ship! You roped me into this mess! I’m team Kingpin now!”
“What?”
“I’m switching sides!” Peter bellowed to the room at large. “How do I sign up? Is there a sheet? Can I get on the mailing list?” Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, he spread his hands to the armed audience, who looked at each other. “Do you hold a job fair?”
“Are you serious?” demanded Halberstadt. “NO!”
“I don’t know if Mr. Fisk is hiring at the moment,” came a plaintive offering from the peanut gallery.
“Can you keep my resume on file?”
“Kathy’s in HR, she’d know. That’s Kathy.”
A stout woman in the crowd cheerily waved a weapon bigger than she was.
“KILL. THEM!” Halberstadt screamed at Tombstone.
“Shut up, Stark, I’m in an interview!” Peter snapped at him, then wheeled to the stone-faced henchman. “Do you think I’m here by choice? They dragged me here! I tried to steal that megaconductor too, remember?”
It was just enough to pause Tombstone in the act of tightening his finger on the trigger. His eyes flicked suspiciously to the bearded scientist, who realized the shabby idiot was being taken seriously.
“Shoot him!” he yelled.
“No, shoot him!”
“Shoot them both!” said a curly-haired woman, earning dirty looks from both of them.
At that suggestion Tombstone decided he wouldn’t be keeping Peter’s resume on file, but he’d open up a job position nonetheless. A Glock in either hand traveled to aim between their eyes. Gibbering, Halberstadt fell back.
Damn it, now Peter was going to have to rescue his ass.
Tropes came in handy. No matter how often they popped up during his career, their effectiveness rarely delivered diminishing returns. Affecting a horrified look, Peter pointed at the ceiling and yelled, “OH MY GOD!”
It actually worked. Every person in the room froze and looked up. Peter shot a web at the ceiling overhead where he knew the ventilation shaft threaded like an artery and yanked down hard. Half the ceiling came crashing down, obnoxious light fixture and all, showering the scientists and sending them running for cover in the dust and debris.
Sometimes that Parker luck found a penny, because a fair island of ugly ceiling landed on Tombstone’s head. It wouldn’t take him out, owing to whatever freaky circumstances had gifted the brute with strength beyond the average human, but it bought enough time for Peter to hoist Ock’s desk and chuck it at his head as soon as he emerged, coughing, from the rubble.
The desk knocked the henchman off his feet. Webs relieved him of his Glocks, delivering them to Parker’s outstretched hands.
“I was thinking this place could do with some redecorating,” Parker snickered at all the mess. With a quick effort he snapped the weapons in half and tossed them to the floor.
Some brave souls had remained in the room, and the ungrateful woman they’d spared from the Scorpion raised her weapon to aim it squarely at Peter.
Then a concussive blast threw them all back. Peter turned to see the curly-haired woman standing with her palm outstretched, ready to fire another from the repulsor concealed behind the hologram.
Deciding this was well above their paygrade, the techs scrammed out of the office, leaving the Scorpion howling against the glass partition he was still webbed to.
“You really hated being that guy, huh?” said Peter, before he doubled over in a spasm of glitching. It didn’t last long but he felt winded as he rolled over, peering up through swirling dust.
Tony Stark’s face loomed directly over him, blocking out the office’s glaring inustrial blue light filtering through the clouds.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” said Iron Man sardonically.
Peter giggled from the floor. “You know, I kind of did.”
“You were pretty sure that wasn’t me, right?” Stark squinted at him before the mask glided up to shield his face.
“Duh. You hated that Volt.”
“Fair enough.” Stark began to scan the area. “And I hate showing up to a party wearing the same clothes as someone else. One of us was going to have to change.”
“Where’s the computer?” said Parker, searching around for it worriedly.
Without looking and from flat on his back on the floor, Peter fired another web that tugged the remainder of the vent out and down, like one of those worms out of Dune, to slope toward him with a protesting screech of metal. The computer slid down the shaft and into his waiting hand.
“Can we go now?” he groaned.
The only answer was a rat-a-tat of metal on glass, sounding like someone sliding their nails down a chalkboard, shattering the wall. Finally free, with pieces of glass wall still sticking to the webbed spots, Scorpion raised himself with a bellow and delivered a lightning blow aimed at Parker’s head. The kid yelped and jumped back, firing webs at the metal tail which was made less ridiculous for being so deadly.
Iron Man raised his hands and shot a beam of pure energy that made the suited man stagger. His tail lashed in a frenzy and then he did something neither of them expected: as his tail whipped in a wide arc, it released a series of pointed darts that raced through the air.
Both Peters shrieked and ducked as the darts shot over their heads and embedded themselves five inches deep through the remaining walls like ice picks. Iron Man, less mobile, stood braced as they ricocheted off his armor and fell to the floor, leaving small cracks in the metal.
The tips were stained a bright green and were almost certainly poisonous.
“Okay, I’ve changed my mind. Let’s do your civic duty,” said Peter, clutching the computer after a quick check to make sure it hadn’t been punctured.
Simultaneously he and Parker fired webs that seized at the Scorpion’s face and tail. He reeled back, clawing at the web fluid, his tail unable to load any more darts. Equipment and stupid modern-looking furniture went flying as he crashed through them.
Stark had wheeled to deal with the other grunt. Tombstone had regained his feet by then and this time he held one of the Chitauri weapons Kingpin had been so diligently collecting. He aimed it at Iron Man and pulled the trigger.
Fortunately it was only a stasis weapon, but it was enough to freeze Iron Man as though he were suspended in a kind of miasma. Stark groaned, not unduly concerned. By the time Peter and Peter had finished webbing up the Scorpion, Tombstone had drawn yet another handgun.
“Do you get those from a freaking vending machine?” Peter demanded.
Tombstone sneered a wordless reply. Peter saw his sharpened teeth flash and click, then the hand holding the gun began to droop, and the henchman lurched.
“What…”
Then Peter saw the dart. It glinted innocuously from where it had lodged in an arm. Teetering, Tombstone felt around his shirtsleeve for the dart and pried it out with one shaking hand. His grip on the Chitauri weapon loosened and Iron Man dropped twenty inches to land solidly on the floor, feet apart and repulsors already thrown up.
How deadly was a lethal poison to an enhanced individual? Peter had seen many answers to that question over the years. Tombstone slumped to the floor and both the remaining Glock and Chitauri gun clattered out of reach.
Peter reached for them slowly, keeping his eyes on Tombstone, and took the bullets out of the Glock’s chambers before snapping the gun in half as Parker had done. The Chitauri weapon he slid aside with one Converse.
Iron Man glanced at the Scorpion, who seemed pinned for good this time, before commanding Friday to send the police and an ambulance.
There was nothing to be done if the dose was lethal, but Peter drew near to Tombstone anyway. The henchman had lapsed into a state of semi-consciousness and lay prostrate on the floor, breathing shallowly. Peter put his fingers to the man’s neck and felt a weakened but stubborn pulse.
“Hoo boy, are you ever lucky,” Peter murmured to him.
Parker webbed his hands and ankles for good measure, then kneeled next to Peter.
“Will he die?” the kid asked.
In the question Peter heard himself. Though he’d been a witness to death, far too many times, at no point in his twenty-two years in this gig had he ever accepted it as a given. Not even for men like Tombstone, who doled it out so casually to others.
He was grateful to Parker for caring.
“I don’t think so,” he said, putting a hand on the computer again. “But he’s done crashing the party.”
Halberstadt was still on the floor, winded but not seriously hurt, raggedly inhaling drywall particles as he clutched his sides.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” Peter said over his shoulder.
Halberstadt groaned. Parker webbed him up too, because he was a bad guy working alongside a bunch of bad guys for an even badder guy. Alchemax was pretty much done for once the D.A. sorted out just what the hell was going on around here.
“Are these guys a headache in your universe too?” Parker asked.
These guys and many others. “They keep me on my toes.” When they weren’t knocking him off them.
“Backup’s on the way,” said Stark. He glanced at the computer at Peter’s side and made the disparaging noise you’d expect from a tech giant. “You think that thing has Minesweeper?” He went over to intimidate Halberstadt. “Where’s Fisk?” he growled.
“Like I’d say! That’s suicide!”
“Is he in his tower?”
Halberstadt coughed up some drywall and struggled to a seated position. “You’d better hope not. If he is, it might be worth leaving him there.”
The Peters looked at each other.
Next to Thanos hardly anything seemed scary these days. Nonetheless, Peter wasn’t jazzed about the thought of waltzing into a 75-story death trap. His imagination conjured up the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only Peter was Indiana Jones and Fisk was the giant boulder chasing him down carpeted hallways strewn with sharpened pikes and trap doors.
Was Peter expected to stick around that long? He had some decaying cells to resuscitate and but once they were hale and healthy again it hit pause on his biological countdown to extinction.
Still crouched, he flinched as the atoms in his hands weaved in and out of dimensions, trying to clench his fists as though it would corral them back into shape. His entire outline fizzled and shifted like a signal lost in static.
“What the hell is that?” barked Halberstadt, scooting away as if the condition were contagious.
Peter opened his mouth to deliver a snide reply but it snapped shut again as the seizure intensified and he almost panicked as he felt his atoms stretch further than ever, as though magnetically repelled by each other and desperate to get away.
“Hey, are you—” he heard from a distance, filtered through interference from twenty other dimensions.
The shorting stopped as suddenly as it had started and Peter rubbed his neck. He tried not to let his alarm show on his face: for a moment it had almost seemed as though his entire arm had existed separately from his body.
“Oookay, Twilight Zone,” said Stark with the flippancy he always used to mask strain, “mind sticking to one television channel?”
“I think my rabbit ears are askew,” Peter mumbled.
He shook his head and looked at the bewildered man. “What kind of—”
A loud alarm blared over his words. Red light pulsed in the office and hallway, then came a woman’s cool voice: “Code Halcyon. Code Halcyon. You have sixty seconds.”
“Halcyon?” Peter and Stark said together even as the Spider-Men got to their feet. What a dumb color for an emergency code.
“You’re in for it now,” said Halberstadt, with a simpering smile, his eyes on the computer Peter held.
Parker hoisted the now-unconscious Tombstone over his shoulder fireman style. “What’s Code Halcyon?”
Halberstadt laughed, and nodded at the computer. “Let’s just say you won’t have any need for that.”
“You know, Stuart, you suck,” said Peter. He held the computer under one arm and scooped up the scientist under the other. Distantly the wound in his shoulder yammered a protest, but it barely registered. “We going?”
Fortunately the rest of the facility seemed to have evacuated. There was always a chance someone had gotten stuck in the crapper but there wasn’t time to go knocking on bathroom stalls.
Iron Man dragged the Scorpion behind him in the grip of a kind of tractor beam Peter suspected at a glance had been adapted from the Chitauri tech they were still sweeping off the streets. The beam was unwieldy and the brute kept smacking into corners and walls to Stark’s total disregard.
“Where’s the exit?” Parker shouted as they ran.
Peter yelled back, “This way! Follow me!”
They ran down a bunch of halls, Peter gripping the computer and the asshole under each arm like barrels, and tumbled into the large glassy cafeteria he remembered from his last field trip here. Nobody sat at the round tables with their coffee, newspapers and laser guns this time, but the bagel plate remained and Peter ran past them with regret, his hands full.
“Balcony ahead!” he warned.
“Code Halcyon in effect,” said the recorded voice. “Ten seconds remaining.”
“Shitshitshitshit,” panted Parker.
Now that they were in open space all three of them surged ahead, causing Halberstadt to yelp as they crashed through the glass wall—everything in this friggin’ place was glass, why were tech companies like this—and reached the balcony, leaping for the railing as the seconds counted down to nothing from outdoor speakers, jumping for all they were worth—
If it were a theme park ride, this would be the moment the camera snapped a picture of their faces, looking like they’d looted the souvenir shop and run for it, frozen in midair as the cool calm female voice said “zero” like the entire place wasnt’ about to blow up—
They landed in heaps in the snow, except for Stark, who’d flown straight out.
Peter and Parker covered their charges and waited for the blast.
There was a whumpfff that emanated from somewhere within the facility like it’d broken wind, then—
Nothing.
The Peters uncovered their heads and stared back at Alchemax, then each other. Both became vaguely aware of Halberstadt still screaming his head off.
“You can shut up now,” said Peter, feeling weirdly jilted out of a cool explosion. “Where’s the kaboom?”
“What kaboom?!” screeched Halberstadt. “It’s a fucking EMP! Did you think the whole place would go up?”
“Yes!” Peter and Parker said indignantly.
The scientist wriggled in Peter’s grip and was gracelessly dropped in the snow. Iron Man descended to ground with the Scorpion in frustrated tow.
Landing, Stark commented casually: “Well, that was anticlimactic.”
Halberstadt was attempting to get up but only succeeded in rolling over onto his face. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said irritably into the snow, “it’s a data-wiping EMP. It wipes out every computer on the premises. What else would you expect?”
“We’ve seen too many movies,” said Peter.
“Yeah,” said the kid, “where’s our explosion?”
“Two of you are two too many,” grumbled Stark.
.
.
Peter watched from a distance, at the edge of the woods while sitting on the same rock he and Miles had crouched behind in the last universe. Swarms of newly appointed S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and S.W.A.T. teams and a myriad of other acronym’d units flowed in and out of Alchemax, arms laden with equipment and confiscated weapons.
They wouldn’t get much out of the data-wiped computers. Explosion-less Code Halcyon or not, Peter was massively grateful they’d gotten Ock’s computer out of the EMP’s reach. It sat beside him now, Stark having conveniently forgotten to hand it over to the agents now taking charge of the scene.
Lab-coated scientists and techs milled around. Many had escaped into the woods; a handful might have made it, but authorities had already come swooping in to pry most of them out. Some were already being taken away in handcuffs while others seemed willing to cooperate.
Tombstone was taken away in an ambulance, heavily reinforced and monitored closely by War Machine. Without his exosuit, the Scorpion proved less of a threat and limped under his own power under the watchful eyes of many rifle sights. He clambered into the back of a truck and heavy metal doors slammed shut on his scowl.
Parker jogged lightly up the slope to where Peter sat putting pressure on his shoulder with a bandage they’d swiped from an ambulance. “They’re being taken right to the Raft,” the kid said. “Scorpion’s suit isn’t going with him.”
“Their lesson learned,” said Peter wryly.
Parker glanced at the drying tracks of blood going down Peter’s sleeve. “Are you okay waiting til we get to the compound to look at that?”
“Oh, sure. Drop in the bucket.”
He’d sooner have a hairdryer to wave at his soaked canvas sneakers and wet ass.
Despite all that he was actually in a pretty good mood. Dare he admit he’d even had a little fun? The escapade reminded him of working with Miles and Gwen and the other Spider-Things, and, more distantly, moments when he’d even rubbed shoulders with the Avengers if the situation called for it.
A hiss made him look over at Parker, who pointed to his suit and giggled, “Built-in heater.”
Peter had never developed one of those. He’d toyed with the idea of a butt warmer once but had abandoned the project after an early model had singed his buttcheeks so red MJ had laughed herself to tears.
Relaxing, Peter stretched his toes and felt kind of stupid for being wound so tightly earlier. It wasn’t fair to project the future in his universe on the present here. All it served was to interfere with what seemed a more promising friendship; he did not want to be the catalyst that fractured it, like stomping on a butterfly back in the Triassic era and turning everyone in the future into mothmen or whatever.
After all, even if it was a side dish to their civic duty they were helping him get home.
“I guess the suit’s okay,” said Peter with a grudging smile.
“And hey, at least Mr. Stark took out the Instant Kill Mode,” said Parker with a little laugh.
The kid kept smiling, looking ahead at the distant authorities wrangling stray techs into cop cars and vans. Only when Peter’s silence prompted a sideways look from Parker did the kid see that the smile had been wiped from the man’s face.
“Kill Mode?” said Peter after a very long moment.
Something in his voice made Parker wary. The kid didn’t reply at first.
Peter repeated, quietly: “Kill Mode?”
The kid muttered, “Enhanced Combat Mode.”
“Oh, Instant Kill is a feature? And what," said Peter, "does that entail?”
“I don’t know,” the kid said testily, “I never tried it out, okay?”
He squirmed in the face of Peter’s taut jaw and admitted, “Look, Ned and I hacked the suit when I first got it. We didn’t know about the stupid Training Wheels protocol, I just wanted to take out the tracker. All that stuff is gone now.”
“So,” said Peter evenly, “you’re saying he put a Kill Mode in your suit and didn’t tell you.”
“Can we not talk about this now?”
Peter gauged him a long moment. “What if you’d activated it accidentally?”
The kid slid off the rock and insisted, unconvincingly, “I had it under control.”
Bullshit. By skipping the manual he might as well have jumped onto a bucking horse.
Kill Mode? After all the shit he and Parker and every other Spider-Man gone through to preserve life, all life, it felt a slap in the face and it wasn’t even his suit. That commitment had kept Peter going in the worst times; it had been what made him pull on that onesie every lousy evening in his studio apartment, the thing that kept him from throwing it in a trash compactor. The idea that life mattered so damn much he’d never willingly take it himself, never willingly let it be taken from others.
If Spider-Man ever decided to become an executioner, he didn’t need Instant Kill to do it. All he had to do was stop pulling his punches.
“He made me a suit once, too, you know,” Peter said in a low, fierce voice. “Ask him what contingency he put in yours. Ask him about overrides.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Omega Omega Epsilon Nine, chanted the words in his memory, filtered through a mechanical suit.
“Have you killed anyone?” Peter asked him suddenly.
Everything felt like it depended on the answer.
Just how big an influence were the Avengers on him? Peter remembered too well his own uneasiness with the Avengers’ methods, which remained nonlethal until they didn’t. Neither side really got the other’s objection: Peter had accused them of getting lackadaisical in their judgement of when the situation required lethal force, becoming complacent with what they called a necessity; more than once they’d indicted him on counts of naivete and a reluctance to do what his positions required of him.
Shaking his head either in frustration or refutation, Parker had opened his mouth to reply when Stark came flying up. His helmet receded as he touched down. He looked pleased and didn’t notice the warning look Parker shot at the older Peter.
“Rhodey asked if you could add webbing to Tombstone’s restraints,” he told Parker. “Probably don’t need it but they’re not taking chances this time. It’d be kind of embarrassing if they broke out twice.”
Parker swung off after a fast glance at Peter, who remained on the rock, eyes ahead and pressing the bandage to his shoulder.
“There’s no chance they’re getting away this time,” said Stark with satisfaction. “Hap’s coming up to loan ‘em a pair of my new nano-tech binders. They adjust their grip the more someone struggles.”
“You do think of everything,” said Peter, his eyes on the activity.
Some giveaway made Iron Man slant a look at him before returning his attention to the commotion, where the Scorpion was swearing loudly at the grim-faced officers. “You know, we haven’t had a chance to shoot the breeze, but I’m inferring, here,” he gestured between them, “from the joyless reunion, that maybe we’re not such pals in your universe.”
“We haven’t done karaoke in a while.”
Stark appeared to teeter on the edge of suppressed, maddening curiosity. Peter felt tired and wanted to go home.
At last Iron Man shook his head. “I gotta say, I like our version of you a lot better.”
Peter gave him a thin smile. “That’s funny, I was just thinking I liked this version of you about the same.”
.
.
He’d never been in this room before. Peter sat on a table like he might in a doctor’s office, but otherwise he could have been in a video game. Holographic displays rotated, popped up, and closed. The tech in the office was so sophisticated that half of it did not even exist as corporeal equipment, but could be conjured up in the air and waved away at will.
Bruce Banner hovered in a corner, examining the massive amounts of data now rolling in from Ock’s computer and every so often throwing curious looks Peter’s way. Parker still wore his mask, but Peter strongly suspected Banner had connected the dots. He had seven PhDs, after all, and his lack of probing questions around the matter of the stranger’s identity seem to confirm his suspicion of Spider-Man’s.
When Peter had arrived Banner had injected his throbbing shoulder with a painkiller. It was now nicely stitched and bandaged, and Peter thought it’d recede to a bruise the next day. His accelerated healing abilities rendered most injuries as temporary inconveniences—save for his broken back, which would have been a spinal catastrophe and certain death for anyone else.
“I’m just gonna, ah, run this over to Tony in the lab,” said Banner in his soft voice, jerking his thumb awkwardly at the door. He gathered up his tools and left, throwing a last curious look over his shoulder when he exited.
Parker removed his hood casually enough that Peter figured the kid had reached the same conclusion as to Banner’s suspicions. Bruce was pretty benign, and Parker could handle that however he wanted.
He’d been the only other Avenger Peter had run into and he’d be fine, honestly, if it stayed that way. The compound was lightly staffed today. Perched on a nice expanse of land, the facility was designed with an eye toward both function and form, imposing without tipping over into gaudiness. Every line of the place engineered an impression of perfect competence.
“Well, you’ve got two of the smartest guys around working on your case.” Parker unwrapped a Ding Dong he’d unearthed from a yellow Jansport backpack. “I bet it won’t take them long to figure it out.”
He did not need to say, It can’t take them long.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve got an ‘internship’ at Stark Industries,” the kid added, using air quotes, “but it’s mostly Avenger stuff. I wish I could have, like, an actual internship. The stuff Mr. Stark comes up with is cool.”
He said it in a tone designed to frame his mentor in the best light, conscious of their charged conversation from earlier. Obviously he regretted bringing up Instant Kill, even as a joke.
“Just remember, kid,” Peter said to him lowly, “you’re Spider-Man without him.”
Parker looked at him for a long moment. “Yeah, I know,” and he sounded annoyed. “D’you think I’m his, like, superservant or something? ‘Cause I’m not.”
Peter sat back on the table and crossed his arms. “No, you just do what he says, call him ‘Mr.’…”
“Because I’m respectful.”
“Does he see you as an equal?”
“You’re letting your, I don’t know, bias get in the way here,” Parker said angrily. “I’m sorry you’re not pals with the Avengers in your universe, and maybe it’s not even your fault—you seem like…like they let you down or something—but that’s not the way it is here.”
“No, they’re so much more harmonious,” Peter snapped. “Oh wait—Sokovia happened here too. So did the Accords, and the split—though I’ll grant you, it cleaned up so much better in this universe. In mine? In mine, it didn’t end at some gentlemen’s disagreement. It was a civil war, and we all got dragged into it.”
At some point every bitter ounce of resentment that had built up over the years had crept into his words; he was startled to find himself on his feet and on the edge of emotion.
There was a long moment while he looked away and sat back in the squeaking chair, embarrassed to have lost his cool.
“What side were you on?” said Parker at last, anger gone.
Peter laughed harshly. “Doesn’t matter. I never should have gotten involved at all.”
Why had he? He’d been in his twenties, a veteran of the trade by then. He’d thought: well, finally—at last they had to take responsibility. Maybe he was a vigilante—and boy, did the Avengers let him know it—but he’d been street level and he cooperated with the police. He’d cared about making their job easier. Following the law as closely as possible, not tampering with crap unless he had to, never using lethal force.
Not like the Avengers.
But then, somewhere along the line, he realized it had become less about responsibility than about control. By then, it’d been too late to pull out bloodlessly.
And after the blood had been mopped up and the sides reconciled, every one of the Avengers had looked at Peter with doubt in their eyes.
Stark begrudged Spider-Man for jumping ship. Captain America did not trust Spider-Man the way he did the ones who had stood with him since the beginning. He did not even trust Peter the way he trusted Tony Stark, with whom he’d fallen out. There was no long history of friendship Peter could offer as proof of his sincerity.
It ended as it always did with them. Peter stood on the outside looking in, with nothing more to show for his idealism than a headache, a heartache and a broken back.
He didn’t realize he’d gotten lost in memory until the kid’s voice cut across his thoughts.
“Look, ah,” and Parker’s tone was conciliatory, “I’m just trying to make stuff work here. You know how bad the split could be. If I can keep something like that from happening again by playing nice, shouldn’t I?”
Peter looked at him, then gave a small, hoarse chuckle and nodded. “Yeah, you should.”
“Besides…look, maybe you would have been right once, but I’m an Avenger now. An equal partner. I take the same risks as anyone, and you’re right—I have the most to lose, because I’ve got the most to hide. So…my opinion matters, and that means I’m going to disagree with them sometimes. I’ve disagreed with them already. I have the right.” He spread his hands. “I always did.”
Feeling strangely drained, Peter nodded. He hoped this universe took a different track, because he remembered saying something similarly confident in the face of MJ's doubts. None of them had really expected the Avengers to implode then.
“You want a Ding Dong?”
What was he, five? Peter considered the little cake Parker held out. “Yeah, thanks.”