Chapter Text
New York’s night sky was an angry and accursed thing. Lightning flared and thunder rumbled amidst the clouds, but there wasn’t a drop of rain to accompany it. All fury and no grief. Peter frowned beneath the tattered remnants of his mask. The weather never seemed to echo his own sentiments.
Or, maybe it did now, and he didn’t want to accept that.
He trudged up the hill, dead grass faltering beneath his footsteps. He’d spent so long on the ground these days that he tended to lope rather than swing, but though he was among buildings again the cemetery was too far out of the way. It was an innocuous, and lonely place. It suited them.
They were the only ones in the world that were as he had left them, now. So, he’d come here first, before he went anywhere else. He could try to figure out the whys of it later.
Benjamin and Maybelle Parker. Precisely as he remembered them, and silent beneath the earth. Except the dates on their headstones were wrong, and his heart grew just a little more sick. It was a shame, he thought, as he hunched before May’s grave and compared his uncle’s and aunt’s dates with his own memories.
The end of Ben’s life was precisely where it should have been, to a combination of both his recurring shame and yet temporary relief. He had, at least, not made things worse. Even though he had never been there to begin with, there was still no-one there who was willing or able to stop the man who took his uncle’s life. Even if he was never born this time around, his life had at least not made things worse. The difference…
The difference was that May’s death came so soon after Ben’s. His aunt was sick, he recalled. Somehow the two of them powered through, and he scraped together the money for the treatments and the bills. When she passed it was years after that, with a smile on her face and holding his daughter’s hand. Without him, she couldn’t have possibly survived that long. Her friend Anna, next door, could only have helped so much. And May could only have accepted so much.
But even with this in mind a dark voice, his own voice, still murmured in his head. The dates were still wrong, and this time around May Parker had passed less than a month after her husband did.
He gave a weak and ghostly smile, because it wouldn’t do to sob. “You hung on that long, just for me?” he asked. He was still sane enough to not expect an answer.
“It’s as if every time I see you, you’re a bit more amazing. A bit more spectacular,” he whispered.
He cleared his throat as he stood straighter, his voice ringing more clearly in the empty graveyard. His own private moment. “I’ve… been away for a while,” he began, hesitantly. “Or maybe, I think it’s more likely that I was never here to begin with.”
“Where I come from, Ben’s brother Richard had a son with his wife Mary. And… that would have been me. Peter Benjamin Parker. After Richard and Mary passed, I’d have been raised by the both of you.” If the graves had anything to say, they remained silent on the matter. Flickers of white lightning blazed in the sky.
“In his darker moments… one of many… Nick Fury once confided in me that if it weren’t for the two of you, and then MJ, and then the kids… that I’d really be a terror. That if I wasn’t so burdened by a combination of guilt and sentiment, I’d end up as some sort of monster.” Peter sighed, as thunder crashed.
He trembled, but with what? Sorrow? Anger? Was there any difference between those two feelings for him anymore? “And now, here I am. Unfettered, apparently. Unleashed. There’s nobody left anymore, there’s no more me anymore, and now I’m a bullet loosed.” He knelt and gripped the twin tombstones, as if he were gripping their shoulders.
“But no,” he said, smiling a little again. “Nothing’s changed at all. That’s how precious the two of you were to me. Even if you never had those moments, I still did. So, I’ll keep doing right by you both, even if I’m a stranger now.” He stood up. That was enough time for a bit of self-pity and catharsis.
“It was nice meeting you both. And goodbye.” He gathered the remnants of his red and black jacket to himself, while the rains permitted themselves to fall. New York’s skyline still glittered through the murk, and it had been too long since he’d seen it.
---
It must not have been that long, Peter surmised. It must have only felt like forever, with how quickly he was returning to himself. His web-shooters were improvised and jury-rigged things these days, and the last pair had broken down before he could replace them. But his agility and his clinginess remained, as he indulged in one of the few unambiguous perks of being Spider-Man. He simply ran sideways along a high-rise, only a flickering shadow amidst Times Square. It was time to shake the rust off and get his bearings again.
Avengers Tower and the Baxter Building had returned, which made welcome sights despite himself. But he halted when he saw Fisk Tower, still proudly bearing the Kingpin’s name. It was only years ago, as Peter remembered it, when Matt Murdock had been pushed too far and did the unthinkable, destroying himself along with the Kingpin. In his memories Wilson Fisk was buried and the building became another arm of Roxxon, and then Hammer Industries, and then finally Stark. So what year was this?
It'd been too long since he’d fed himself, again. The hunger pains were practically background noise for him, and he’d lost weight. But compared to the wasteland that he’d somehow departed, New York was a smorgasbord of wasted food, leftovers, and discarded newspapers.
By now he’d eaten far worse than the discarded but still fresh hot-dog in his hands, and it seemed that one of his less utilized spider-powers was a far stronger stomach. Whatever slurry of meats comprised his meal, he didn’t need to catch and cook it himself, and now it came with condiments besides. Things were already looking up.
He leafed through the various detritus he was able to gather on his reunion with the city. He casually flung aside discarded copies of the Times and the Globe back to the streets below before getting his sticky fingers on an old favorite. The Daily Bugle, once again. Though he couldn’t tell how recent the issue was, at the very least it was reassuring that all of them were dated well before the year he remembered leaving behind.
He might have more time to work with than he’d hoped.
For once, he was not a front-page topic. Unsurprising, given the circumstances. Instead… there was an article by Fredrick Foswell? Foswell was still alive? And Chief Editor J Jonah Jameson, who could never possibly die. It was a typical tirade for the Bugle, but the subject matter was different.
“The Slingers, Well Meaning Misfits or Teenage Terrors?” Peter mused to himself. These were new, yet very familiar, faces.
‘Well, there goes a potential plan of calling myself something other than Spider-Man this time around. You kids are lucky that I can’t sue people behind a mask,’ he thought to himself, his mind wandering to strange places again. ‘No, claiming intellectual property theft from an alternate timeline wouldn’t work either.’
The rest of his brain was turning in a much more serious direction. He’d made four other identities over the years, as part of a convoluted quadruple bluff after being framed for murder… by Norman Osborn… who was also likely to be alive doing who-knows-what…
‘One thing at a time. Don’t rush.’
The four identities were retired when he was able to clear his name… Prodigy, Hornet, Dusk, and Ricochet. But then a group of four later appeared that seemingly appropriated those discarded identities and reputations. And apparently, they still existed in this timeline, even though he was never around to create those identities in the first place. They were a mystery to him even the first time around, but at the time were simply something he chose not to investigate further.
But now it was clear that they were more than just a group of teenage imitators.
‘Curioser and curioser.’
They were, at least, making more of a name for themselves this time around. To the extent that the Bugle could be objective, they were at least giving the likes of Boomerang and Stilt-Man a hard time. Which was worthwhile, and inherently funny besides.
‘Focus.’
The faces that were absent were more important than the ones that were present. He needed to run the list and see who was missing.
The Fantastic Four and the Avengers were as he remembered them, which was both a relief and a shame. He’d at least have liked to have Johnny Storm or Captain America to lean on.
Daredevil was still around, and apparently hadn’t snapped. ‘I need to watch for him-,’ he thought before he shook his head. ‘I need to watch OUT for him. I’ve got to make Fisk a higher priority, make sure he’s sorted out before he drives Matt insane this time.’
‘Sort him out how, Peter?’ a dark voice, his own voice, asked him.
He crushed that thought mercilessly. He’d already been forced to do worse than several of the plans that ran through his head to deal with Fisk. And all those potential plans agreed that the first thing Peter needed to do was to get on Fisk’s radar and make him angrier at Spider-Man than he ever was at Daredevil.
‘Good. Proceed.’
---
New York was still a hellhole, but it was also still his hellhole. He still needed a pair of web-shooters for quicker traversal but could easily leap from roof to roof with sheer muscle-power amidst the rain. It was a familiar feeling for him, something he’d often needed to resort to after over-extending himself and running out of web-fluid in his younger years, before revisions in his formula and his improved accuracy made that mostly a thing of the past. It was a sweet feeling, one that evoked a sense of nostalgia and lost youth.
Then it was shattered by someone’s scream.
Hesitation had been flensed from him a long time ago. The same thing happened to fear and panicked impulsivity. He simply homed in on the cries, quickened the pace, and set his mind and body to work. He was a machine again, running on a routine he’d practiced hundreds of times. A surgeon with a scalpel.
‘First. Get vertical and get a visual.’
He crested the top of a building and leapt as high as he could, while quickly homing in on the source of the screaming. As he plummeted during his descent, he had a better visual on the figures below. Three figures were below him. Even his vision was bad in this much rain but there was clearly one woman being advanced on by two men.
‘Assess.’
He couldn’t make out whether any of the involved parties were armed at this time. As he couldn’t rule out whether guns were in play, he needed to assume that potentially everyone was. Which meant he needed to intervene as quickly as possible rather than wait and assess further.
‘Interpose and interrupt.’
No one engaged in a fight ever expected a third party to suddenly fall out of the sky and leap into the middle of a situation. Even a professional gunman would hesitate for a couple of crucial seconds as their brain tried to make sense of a sudden and surprising development. And most of New York’s armed and dangerous were anything but professional, or even remotely accurate. True to form, the two men reeled back.
‘Check hands, then faces.’
The two men in front of him were armed with knives, not guns, while the woman was at best brandishing a purse as a shield while stumbling back. He’d identified the aggressors and the civilian, and now that he’d pegged the civilian as a minimal threat at best he focused on the aggressors. They were unmasked, wide-eyed, and clearly taken aback.
‘Disarm.’
He’d been stabbed enough times to not take even kitchen utensils lightly. In the brief window of time where their autonomic nervous systems were just starting to process a new threat, both of Peter’s hands simply encircled and then crushed their wrists. Their knives—
‘Switchblades.’
Their switchblades clattered to the ground, as he both felt and heard their wrists fracture amidst their howls of agony.
‘Given grip strength and bone density, the average expected recovery time is eight weeks.’
He squeezed a little harder.
‘The average expected recovery time is now twelve weeks.’
Good enough. Unless you were on SHIELD’s payroll or an Avenger, it was hard for a man in a costume to ever make an arrest stick. In his younger years, he felt that if nobody died, then he’d have done his job.
‘But now you always make sure to break a bone, you old pro!’
Putting these men in cells long-term was next to impossible, even if there wasn’t a masked man with superpowers muddying the waters further. Getting them off the streets for at least three months while they rethought their lives was the best that he could manage. A mere concussion would take a little over a week to recover from. Thus the most veteran vigilantes, who therefore were also the most cynical vigilantes, always emphasized limb dislocation.
Or else they’d long since lost their minds and cut loose in the style of Punisher or Wolverine.
‘Reassess and clear the scene.’
The fight had left the two men, whose faces carried a combination of agony and terror. They fled out into the streets, leaving their weapons behind them. He didn’t let his guard down and focused on the woman. He’d had enough scared victims take swings at him over the years that he couldn’t assume he was in the clear just yet.
“T-thank you,” the woman said. A clear sign as any that the situation had deescalated, and his Spider-Sense was at ease.
‘The time to resolution was roughly eight seconds, rounding up...’
That was good if he was operating on a normal person’s scale, but sloppy for someone with enhanced reflexes like his. He needed to shake the rust off. If the weather were clear and he still had web shooters, he could’ve resolved everything in less than half the time.
‘Lastly, reassure.’
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need help getting home?”
It took a while for the woman’s mouth to form the right words. She was somewhat on the younger side, in her twenties to early thirties. She hardly looked wealthy, which meant that she was likely local to this part of the city.
“No, I-I’m fine. What do I do? Do I call the cops?” She was confused, disoriented, and uneasy.
“Just get home.” Nobody was going to care about an aborted mugging in Mott Haven, least of all NYPD.
She nodded her head, looking both relieved and exhausted before she rushed off into the rain. “Thank you, Ricochet!” she called back, one last time.
Peter blinked, beneath his mask “Actually it’s Spider—” but she’d already left, “—Man.”
It was stupid for him to feel even a little bit bothered by that.
---
He was on foot now, pulling off his mask and tightening his jacket, vaguely wondering why he was suddenly starting to worry about his secret identity again, when even Peter Parker was now an enigma.
‘Because it’s familiar, you’re feeling nostalgic, and you’re sort of an idiot.’
His tendency to self-deprecate was also returning to him, like a welcome old friend. From the frowns and grimaces of the pedestrians nearby he looked every bit as homeless as he felt and smelled like it besides.
‘Water was very hard to come by for a while, people,’ Peter thought, defensively.
His enhanced senses were already able to point him to enough loose change to pay his way to a few hours in an internet café. Compared to what he was dealing with before, being homeless in New York City was a walk in the park for Spider-Man.
‘To think you used to dread eviction.’
“Awh come on, guy, not tonight,” said the greasy looking kid at the reception. “At least come back during someone else’s shift…” he pleaded. At this time, it was always better to be polite than confrontational.
He looked him in the eye, making best use of a fatherly tone of voice that he’d never gotten to use since—
‘Don’t get distracted.’
“Sorry son. It’s just e-mail and a few job applications tonight, I promise,” he said, in a tone that was smoother and more articulate than most of NYC’s hopeless cases.
The kid’s face set into a line. “It’s not porn, right? We’ve got all those sites blocked, and I’m gonna call the cops if you-”
Peter tried not to grin as he imagined what sort of insanity someone running an internet café this late in the night would have to deal with. There was always someone worse off than him, at least. “I promise.”
“Hokay.” The kid seemed to relax, at least a little. Peter guessed that he didn’t seem to be all that shady, as far as a homeless person went. “I’ve got some coffee ready, if—”
“I won’t be able to pay,” Peter said quickly.
“Yes, obviously,” the kid said testily. “But I’m making more than I need anyways. So.”
“Sounds good,” Peter said, shoving the loose change into the kid’s hands. “You never say no to anything free in my line of work,” Peter said wryly.
“I’m this close to giving the hobo life a try,” the kid chuckled back. This time it was Peter’s turn to smile. He was enjoying this. He was finally having a casual conversation with someone that wasn’t some life-or-death matter. Somehow, he was homeless, forgotten, alone… and yet, absolutely thrilled. Life was, in the tiniest way, starting to look up again.
It seemed to show on his face, as the kid, Gregory (he looked just like how a Gregory would, Peter thought), continued to engage him in casual conversation even though Peter was a reeking mess. The stench of homelessness paled before Peter’s genuine and unfaked interest in a kid named Gregory.
“So, how’d you get to this point, Pete?” Gregory asked, as he handed him a cup of coffee.
“A long series of bad decisions and worse luck. And none of them were even drug related,” Peter said, as he absently fed all the names he could remember into several search engines and scanned as much as he could.
“That’s alarmingly vague,” the kid said… mostly for humor, but Peter could pick up traces of unease. Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Hobo or not, it was late at night and Peter was still strange. And every night the news reported on another death caused by one mutate or another, costumed or not.
He let some seriousness enter his voice, as he told at least a partial truth. “I used to be a CEO for a while.”
“Ah…” Gregory said sagely, accepting that as an explanation Peter would rather not elaborate on.
In truth, Peter would happily joke about the rise and fall of Parker Industries. There were other things that he would rather not get into. “You like superheroes, Greg?” They were already good enough friends that they could call one another Pete and Greg.
“Nnnnot when you’re one of the ones caught up in it, y’know? I’m not a paranoiac who reads the Bugle, but I’d say that I usually see them as a sign to run like hell.” Greg said with a shrug. His was a common and, to be fair, entirely rational sentiment.
‘You’re a little scared of yourself too now, aren’t you?’
“Same,” Peter admitted. “But they’re still fun to talk about. Better than celebrity drama.”
“You’re not looking up the right drama then, man! Hear what happened with Mary Jane Watson?” It felt like a knife had rammed itself into Peter’s heart. He wasn’t ready for this, so suddenly.
“Let’s not talk about celebrities right now, okay?” Peter said, trying to keep his voice sounding more bored and indifferent rather than cold.
Greg shrugged. “Okay, yeah. It’s just the same old stuff for her anyways. How about-”
“She’s doing okay though, right? MJ Watson?” Peter said, suddenly finding himself searching her name. The knife in his heart was now twisting, he was definitely ready for this now, he decided. He desperately needed to know everything.
“Uh…” Greg seemed weirded out before he took another sip of coffee. Peter wracked his brain, deciding he’d rather not lose out on more conversation right now.
“I used to know her…” Peter confided, in a whisper. “CEO, right? I was a much bigger deal than I used to be now.”
“Oh, shit. For real? Did you and her…?” A slightly suggestive note entered Greg’s voice. What was his previously dead wife up to these days, Peter wondered.
‘When had I become Cyclops?’
Peter wasn’t sure how to answer the question. A sequence of phonemes vaguely like “Ye- ugh, um, nnngghhh…” came out of his mouth before he noncommittally waved his hand side to side.
Not even he was sure how he was supposed to answer that now.
“Sounds pretty complicated…” says a bemused Greg.
“She lived nearby, we dated for a while,” Peter said, finally electing for another half-truth. “I… when it ended, it wasn’t the best time,” he finished, lamely. All technically true. “It’s part of why I’ve hit rock bottom right now.”
“Whatever the story is behind that, I think you could sell it to the Bugle,” Greg finally said.
“Right, so, back to interesting things about Mary Jane and away from me.” Peter said, desperate to move on.
Feeling pressured, Greg blurted it out. “She broke things off with the Human Torch, and he burnt her apartment down!”
“What?” Peter changed his mind. This was a much worse hell than the one he left behind.
“W-well, the Fantastic Four’s press release says it was the Wizard, and her press release says that she broke things off after Torch burnt the place down fighting the Wizard, but the Globe says…”
Peter let Greg’s voice fade into background noise as he clicked through the articles. Mary Jane’s place burnt down and that was bad, and she was dating Johnny Storm at the time, which was arguably worse. But at the very least, that seemed to all end in the sort of catastrophe where nobody died or tweeted something completely insane online. And there were pictures of the Wizard, Bentley Whittman, getting dragged off in cuffs in the aftermath.
“Well, better the Wizard than Doctor Doom,” Peter muttered absently.
“Doctor who?” Gregory asked.
“No, that’s a TV show.” Peter said, his mouth once again moving faster than his brain.
His brain was too busy panicking.
A quick search for Doctor Doom or Victor von Doom or even Latveria itself turned up next to nothing, which was a far cry from a man that was far more likely to one day start a nuclear war than Kim Jong Un. All he could find were searches related to Latveria, an obscure Balkan polity that was folded into Socialist Yugoslavia before getting split between Romania and Symkaria, after all the various wars and ethnic cleansings the Balkans suffered during the 90’s.
Victor von Doom had also returned with him from hell, and therefore he also no longer existed in this timeline. And neither did Latveria.
And that meant that Doctor Doom was also out there, and likely not coping well.
“Thanks Greg!” Peter said abruptly. The smile he gave the kid was still more sincere than fake. As starved for human connection as he was, he genuinely appreciated the help and the chance to talk to someone. “You here again tomorrow?”
“Yeah…?” Greg said.
“That’s good. I’ve still got a lot to catch up on, and I’d rather have someone willing to share coffee with me than not.” Greg smiled at that, despite himself.
‘He has poor self-esteem,’ Peter thought. ‘He doesn’t think people would want him around. He’s grateful that the weird homeless man liked him.’
That, while sad, was nothing to hold against him. Peter was the weird homeless man who chose to like him, after all.
“If I’m ever on my feet again, I’ll pay you back for the coffee,” Peter said firmly. He’d meant it, even if Greg didn’t think he did.
Now though, he somehow had to reunite himself with Doctor Doom. And with no Latverian castle to hole up in, there were only a handful of places that the misanthropic shut-in could be reliably found. Especially if he also woke up in New York.