Issue Eight
"By Any Other Name… Wouldn't Smell As Sweet"
"Peter! You're sweating. Come inside and sit down. I'll get you some lemonade."
"I was at the gym, Aunt May. Of course I'm sweating."
"Is that a bruise? Peter have you been hit? Ben! Benjamin Parker, Peter's hurt!"
Peter shrugged Aunt May's maternal grip from his cheeks and tossed his bag on the floor. He pushed back a flap of wet hair from his forehead and looked at her intently. "I'm fine," he assured her. "But I would like that lemonade."
"Well, of course, Peter. Ben! BEN!"
Uncle Ben's footsteps pattered down the staircase in the hall. Peter could hear his slippers flapping against the wood floor.
"May? Is everything alright?" Ben put his hand against the wall to catch his breath. Peter saw his uncle's asthma surfacing, and for a minute, felt a surge of enthusiasm for all his exercise. But when Aunt May gave him his lemonade, he handed it to his uncle first.
"What's the matter?" Ben asked again.
"I went to the gym," said Peter. "Since then, most of the modern world has entered a third world war, New York was torn from the earth by an alien subspecies, and the four horsemen have summoned the apocalypse. I mean, or I just exercised for once," he sneered, staring at his Aunt May dramatically.
She threw a dishrag at him.
That evening, Adrian Toomes threw a wireframe sculpture of his mechanical wing designs across his office. The plastic model collapsed into nothing more than a tangle of junk lattices on the floor. Bestman, he thought, Osborn. Fuck them. Who needs them? Who needs them? I designed this on my own. I lost my job, but I didn't lose my mind. My sense of reason. They want to see wings, I'll show them wings. I'll show them—
Then he remembered the package Norman had sent him. A photograph. A fucking photograph of his designs already in production at Oscorp. They stole his designs. They stole his designs and they burned his office, and they weren't even subtle about it! They practically branded the Oscorp logo to the walls.
A clay mock-up went flying off his desk in the same sweep of Toomes' hand that cleared all his blueprints and rulers. He tore the photograph of Oscorp's interpretation off his bulletin board and slammed it to the tabletop.
His long, spindly fingers pressed the Polaroid edges to the varnish. My designs. I… God… years I worked on these. Years.
Beneath the picture, in delicate handwriting, was the name "Icarus."
Original. But Icarus is a cursed name, Norman Osborn. Some dreamers get burned. Some dreamers fly too close to the sun. These wings aren't bound by your petty business plans. They're wings, Norman. Wings. And I'm the only one who's gonna let them fly.
And so was born the last day that Adrian Toomes went home to his wife and kissed her good night. When she'd fallen asleep, he crawled from the bed and opened his closet, where he pulled apart his two oldest suits and took the DVD collection off of the shelf. Where six thin disc cases should have been was the handle of a 9mm handgun and a silencer nozzle.
He put them together, walked out of his house in his pajamas, got in his pre-loaded car, and pulled into the night.
You're gonna burn, Icarus Project. You lit me on fire, and I'm gonna drive your stolen work into all fifteen million degrees of our forsaken Sun. And then, Norman Osborn, we'll see who's flying high, you delusional son-of-a-bitch.
Burn.
Fucking burn.
"Oh, Peter," said Gwen. "I'm not good at these games, and you know it."
"You're not even trying," Eddie said, leaning over the arm of the sofa and lightly flicking his wrist back and forth. "It's Wii. You literally just play tennis. It doesn't take any skill."
"No," she said, throwing a pillow at him. "I'm fine at video games. I'm a scientist, Edward. Computers are how I do. But tennis… you got me there."
"Relax, Gwen," cooed Peter, as he took another slice of pizza in his hand, and pulled on his coat.
"Don't speak to me, Peter. You're leaving because you're too tired to keep winning! Seriously," she said, throwing the WiiMote to the floor, "I hate boys."
"Gwen!" shouted Eddie, leaping up. "Gwen! You scored!"
"What?"
"You scored! You threw the controller and it… look... you scored, Gwen!"
She stared at the tally for a solid minute and then at the remote on the carpet. Finally, she turned to Eddie and glared. "I hate this game. I hate it. I wanna play Pokemon. I wanna catch an 8-bit Pikachu and feel proud of myself. Where's your Gameboy?"
Peter headed towards the door. "I'll see you guys later."
"Bye, Peter!"
"Later, bro."
Peter walked into the night and felt fall's first strong winds. A tight breeze pushed his coat backwards. He squinted against the wind, and grabbed the door so that it didn't slam against the wall inside.
"Okay," he said, leaning inwards to grab the knob, "I'm really leaving now."
It was about a half-hour walk across Midtown Manhattan. The night was dark and solemn. The wind struck up every so often, and Peter could feel his nose starting to run. Every so often he stuck his hand to one of the buildings just so he could assure himself his abilities hadn't disappeared.
But they were more than abilities, weren't they? They were powers.
Powers. What a kick-ass word that was.
When he finally came across his neighborhood, it was nine o'clock. The streetlamps were golden warm against the blue mask of the evening sky. Most of the houses in his lazy town were asleep.
But as he passed his neighbor's yard, and straightened it's precariously leaning trashcan, he heard the front door swing open with such a berth that it crashed against the siding on the front porch.
"Eugene!" screamed a woman's voice from inside.
Flash Thompson came barreling out of the door, hardly staying upright, and charged across his front yard toward the street, where his glaze-red Porsche sat parked against curb. Peter fumbled with his balance as he uprighted the garbage and stared at Eugene Flash Thompson reaching for his keys.
"Flash?" Peter said.
"Peter?" For a minute, Flash looked like a lost animal. He just stared at Peter, holding his keys limply in the air. The last time he had used Puny Parker's real name was never. Maybe it was the shock of this slip-up, or the surprise of seeing Peter, or just his inability to distinguish between his keys, what with that tiny-ass brain of his, but whatever the problem, Flash was—for the first and last time—completely unguarded.
But in just as little time, he flipped Peter the finger, found the black-crowned key, and was in his car, revving down the block.
Peter waved the smell of monoxide from his face and turned around to go inside, utterly lost for words. When he came in, Uncle Ben had fallen asleep on the armchair in the living room with the television on, so Peter helped him up to his room where Aunt May was reading an Agatha Christie novel in bed.
Peter kissed her good night and then locked himself in his room.
It's time, he thought to himself, as he pulled old Halloween costumes from their boxes, sweatshirts, swim clothes, whatever he could find. A name. And not just any name. A name that inflicts fear. Like… the Black Widow.
No, that's stupid. That's a girl's name.
Goggles? Can I use these? Since when did I own goggles? I don't even swim.
Arachnid. Arachnid Boy. Arachnid Man. The Crawler.
Sweatpants? Lame. I need give. Shorts. No. Warm-Ups? We'll work with it.
The Spider. Spider-The. Spider-The? Am I retarded? Webslinger, Wall-Crawler.
Dammit. Think, Parker. Think.
Simple.
Plain and simple.
Just plain and simple.
And in that instant, with no more thought and no more fuss, Puny Parker, neighbor of Flash Thompson, pupil of Kurt Connors, and best friend of the Oscorp Heir, Harry Osborn, became the Legendary, Web-Slinging, Wall-Crawling…
Spider-Man.