Chapter Text
Spider’s Man They Get Everywhere.
My name is Peter “Pete” Benjamin Parker and this is my story: when I was 12 I went on a laboratory tour for science camp and was bitten by a strange spider, I was feverish for days which scared my Aunt May and Uncle Ben, but when I recovered I had fantastic powers! I could climb walls with nothing but the tips of my fingers! I could lift the family car when I tested one night in the garage without even trying! I could shoot sticky spider webs from my wrists, run faster than freeway traffic, leap moderately sized buildings in a single bound, I was finally powerful.
Two weeks later my Aunt and Uncle’s bodega was robbed at gun point and he was shot by a criminal when they thought he was reaching under the counter, I was hidden under the counter by Uncle Ben but I could see the robber in the security monitor he had run right past me after stealing a purse earlier that day. Uncle Ben told me he loved me and my aunt right before he died, but what echoed through my mind was a saying he had tried to impart to me the week before. “Peter with Great Power comes a Great Responsibility to use that Power responsibly.”
The robber was a man called Norman Osborne he had a kid my age called Harry, apparently Norman’s father had gone bankrupt and the family never recovered, Norman decided the world owed him something because if his father hadn’t fumbled he would have been rich. I learned the world doesn’t owe you anything, not because of how good you are, not because of how hard you work, not because of how much money you have, if you want something or if you deserve something. You have to learn to get up when the world knocks you down.
Norman Osborne went to jail for killing Uncle Ben. When he broke out after a science experiment on prisoners turned him into the superpowered madman the Green Goblin just after my 18th birthday, he killed the judge from his case, the prosecutor, the defence lawyer, the Bailiff, and then he came after the witness that put him away, me.
After Uncle Ben died I skipped a few grades or y’know all of them and got my GED and Aunt may used the Life insurance money to send me to college (go bobcats), at the same time the Fantastic Spider-Boy began swinging the streets of NYC and Manhattan. I studied genetic engineering and engineering in a double major with a minor in electronics and computing. Did you know some spiders can sleep for minutes at a time throughout the day to make up a full eight hours of sleep and still react to stimulus if necessary? That was fun to find out. Micronaps for the win.
I graduated with honours and NYC had a 18% drop in street level crime thanks to Spider-Boy and then my graduation got crashed by Green Goblin getting his green butt handed to him by Spider-Boy and I missed out on giving my valedictorian speech. Luckily nobody noticed Pete didn’t arrive until after the Goblin was in custody again. Aunt May got a great shot of Spider-Boy swinging in and kicking Goblin off his glider while flashing a peace symbol to the crowd, it almost looked like he was posing solely for Aunt May.
Around that time Aunt May started a hobby of selling pictures of Spiderman and other Heroes to the newspapers, her arguments with Jay Jonah Jameson about his portrayal of Spider-Man were legendary.
When I was 18, I hit Spider puberty. Not too different from regular puberty, hair starts growing in weird places, you start getting bigger, growing new limbs, your fangs come in out of the back of your hands, spider fangs are modified pedipalps did you know. A certain Canadian claimed I was stealing his schtick, A certain other Canadian kept trying to buy my bath water. Yeah it was a lot to process let me tell you, I went from 5’9 and 70 kilos to 6’9” and 140 kilos in an excruciating three months, I got very good very quickly about hiding the extra two pairs of arms and not so great about dating.
So Spider-Man was born, I changed my twitcher handle and announced to my fans that I had had a bit of a growth spurt. Weirdly the anti-mutant groups never seemed to bother me very much. Luckily I worked for Tony Stark at Stark industries so my bosses didn’t make a big deal about my growth spurt as long as I got my work done in the R&D department. Luckily Tony didn’t believe in internships you got paid in money not experience working at stark industries it was also basically the only place that would hire an 18 year old fresh out of college.
For a couple years it was good I put a lot of criminals and villains behind bars, Rhino, Scorpion, Sandman (I may have bought the medical debt of a little girl with a loving incarcerated father and cleared it, you can’t prove anything it was anonymous.), Vulture, Hammerhead, Shocker, Tombstone, Doc Ock, the Lizard, Kraven the hunter, and a few dozen others it seemed like a new rogue popped up or broke out every other week but I kept getting back up when I lost and kept putting them behind bars. Sometime it was easier to fix the reason they were criminals than others, a treatment I was developing to reverse the extra arms worked perfectly to restore doctor Connors from the Lizard even if it did nothing for me except make my venom even better for harmlessly knocking out humans and sped my regeneration up even more.
And then things got complicated, the Chitauri invasion led to the formation of the Avengers and even though I fought in the battle of New York, right alongside them, I didn’t get to join because Shield wanted my Identity and I wouldn’t give it to them. But the Avengers still called me an honorary one and I hung out and ate their food and wrestled with the Hulk in the Avenger’s tower training floor.
20 years old and constantly counter hacking an international defence agency like SHEILD every few days finding more and more dirty laundry in the organisation and quietly slipping it to other white hats was basically how I spent that year before the hydra thing came to light and SHEILD popped like a soap bubble. Helping Steve and Tony basically rebuild SHEILD from the rubble was stressful and just when I thought things were on track the XMEN crashed into my life.
Sidenote but the XMEN are weirdly racist if you don’t have their fancy little X-gene and god forbid you be a geneticist with a mutation, you’d think I ate their puppy. I still helped them out occasionally like when magneto tried to turn the statue of liberty into a mutant making beacon, or that time time travel happened then didn’t happen then always did and didn’t happen then a sidereal time traveller made everything worse and then Deadpool saved the day and prevented the future where the time traveller originally came from creating a new future… it was a very weird day.
Occasionally the fantastic Four would ask for my help but mostly they were professionals and could handle themselves, except that time Reed nearly got suckered into a secret society… twice in one year is crazy work. Because of one of those I installed a little computer in my head that prevents telepathic communication and control with that sociopath in the wheel chair rolling around I felt like it was a good choice.
Then Ultron happened and Vision was created I wasn’t too involved in that but I spent a lot of time in the aftermath getting Tony to stop accepting responsibility for things he had a tangential connection too at best, I mean Pym was the one who did most of the coding and loki’s sceptre did the rest, I did threaten to shove that staff somewhere Thor would regret if he didn’t get off his high horse and bring his brother back to earth for a proper retrial after the mind control was revealed to be entirely the sceptre.
After the UN decided to bypass their own actual governments and create the sokovia accords. That lasted maybe three months before we uncovered it was being directed by HYDRA, AIM, Mutant supremacist agitators and human supremacist agitators. Once that was dealt with I went to Tony and Steve’s wedding it was lovely even Bucky was crying but when Tony turned and put a ring on his finger as well just as the priest said you may kiss the groom I thought Aunt may’s camera flash was going to break. Pepper agreed to be their surrogate, anyone who doesn’t see that for a cover is blind to how those four look at each other.
Then there was Thanos he was a giant pain in the ass and I decided never to trust Strange about the odds at the same time I was falling to dust in the most excruciating manner.
Five years later I stood over Thanos’s dead body the infinity gauntlet on one hand and I knew exactly what I needed to do even as Strange told me to give it to Tony, I snapped my fingers and all of time and space rewrote two Nebulas, two Gamoras, the death and destruction that Thanos had caused reversed as his body his armies and myself all crumbled to dust as the stones of infinity were warped back through time to their resting places.
“Tell Aunt May I love her.” I told Tony taking off my mask to him for the first time, he’d never forgiven Spider-Man for missing his wedding on spider business but Pete Parker was his best man right next to him when he said his vows. I got to see his gobsmacked face staring at my smiling mug just before my eyes turned to ash and I was in a void.
I chose this, the stones demand a sacrifice to work, I couldn’t exist in the world and bring back everyone that Thanos had hurt the soul stone would not release its prizes so easily, so I cast myself out of the weave fully expecting oblivion.
So why am I in an alley that smells so very terrible as a spotlight with a stylized bat shines overhead and sirens blare some emergency warning.
I guess the why doesn’t matter because with Great Power comes Great responsibility. I put my mask back on and web swing towards that shining beacon because I’m Spider-Man and someone somewhere needs my help.