A lot changes in a year. Clichéd I know, we spandex wearing suppliers of truth, justice and (insert modern replacement here) spout them every day. They get used a lot for a reason.
They're true.
See, it used to be simple. I'd go out in my skin tight side show costume I designed as a lonely, awkward fifteen year old back in August 15th, 1982, and fight the other side of the almost overnight meta human/ mutant population ( I think meta human's the word now).
While Flash Thompson and those Happy Days rejects he used to pal around with were trying to get in some underage drinking on a Friday night, I was trying to keep the fact I was one of these Masked Masters of Mystery beating the hell out of each other on every other major news channel a secret from, in the following order: the divided and jaded public, my fear mongering tyrannical jerk hole of a boss, and the woman who raised me.
My Friday nights were spent trying to survive against what would later turn out to be some of the finest in bloody thirsty lunatics and the occasional small time designer with a gimmick and a need for a quick buck.
It wasn't easy, I mean for God's sake I went up against Doctor Doom before I was even considering college, but I knew where things were on the surreal little social scale that was bound to develop somewhere among all the spandex and laser eyes and adamantium shields and lycra (I think Matt was the only one wearing lycra back then. I know the red parts were leather, but he's always been understandably touchy about the yellow thing).
I knew how it was supposed to go.
The Fantastic Four: Doctor Doom, Galactus ,The Submariner (sort of) and who ever else was coming out of the cosmic inter dimensional wood work at the time.
The X men: Magneto, The brotherhood of evil mutants, all those other small time mutants who were looking for a position in the high paying world of hurting people while dressed like Elton John's worst nightmare.
Daredevil: The Purple man, Mr Fear and the Unholy trio.
Yeah…
Matt doesn't talk about his early career much, outside of Pre-Kingpin mob bosses.
I knew how things worked.
It was simple.
It was supposed to be.
Years after all this had established itself as status quo, I found something that changed this perspective built up over the years in the mind of a fifteen year old dressed as a spider. It's not so simple. Not really.
The other side of the meta human/ mutant population have lives.
Just like I do when the mask comes off.
A lot can change in a year.
Fast forward to the good old twenty first century: I'm an Avenger, which is like being a member of your favourite football team even if you don't like football, the itsy bits spider that started it all might have been an itsy bitsy magical spider fairy, and I no longer have to spend a good twenty minutes over a Bunsen burner brewing the strongest, yet most impractical, adhesive known to man because I can shoot it out my hands now.
(I haven't tried to see where else this ability may occur on my person, and do not intend to conduct any experiments.)
Big changes, and before that I got married and was going to have a baby girl. We won't go there.
My point is, even after all this, I still thought that was the way the spandex would keep going; they break into a bank, I leave them in the vault for New York's finest.
The year before all this, even before the magic web out of my hands stuff, I found out the super villain class is more than just the black on the chess board.
Adrian Toomes, known as The Vulture fifty per cent of the time, has a grandson. Who had leukaemia. Who needed an operation. Which required a million or so dollars. Which I prevented Toomes and Electro, the dim bulb that walks like a man, from escaping with.
I cleaned things up as best I could after that, J Jonah Jameson's blood money on my masked head coming into some good use, other than stopping idiots in cheap rental Spider-Man costumes winding up dead trying to make it on CNN.
That kid was one of the few cases I've heard about, right up there with little Tim Harrison, Toomes actual had something that could be human emotion in his eyes…I couldn't not do something.
But I've seen the other side of the equation.
It's not so simple, not always.
This is dangerous thinking for a guy in my position. It's like hearing something about a co-worker you don't like. You feel you should say something, but you don't know what. You don't know if you should. The fact this co-worker can fry you with their nasal hair doesn't help.
I don't let it get in the way, these people put lives in danger, I can't afford to. But you don't let something like that go, even if you end up putting a fist through the glass jaw of this kids grandfather.
That year changed a lot.
I thought I helped. I thought by now someone who does what I do would have figured out how to do that and keep the status quo. I thought I was smart enough to know what to do.
It's Friday night and the feelings right.
Did you know Adrian Toomes and Herman Shultz drink at the same bar?
--
"For the love of god, when will you people leave me alone!?"
Concrete shattered, raining down onto the street in front of the Barnes and Nobel store, glass storefront window shattering almost seconds after, the typical result of a shock wave blast when someone really tried.
Plenty of property damage, no casualties. No Spider-Man.
"Don't be like that Herman. I missed you."
Spider-Man landed on the tip of a streetlight, comfortable in a crouch that could snap a tiger's spine, ready to spring to the remains of the previous building if things didn't get too bad.
"I mean, so many of the guys I go up against recently…you know the type…Hydra, The Absorbing Man, hell, this week I watched a speck of dust disintegrate right in Galactus' eye…those were the times I found myself thinking 'It has been so long since I went out and had a really good game of tag with the Grizzly, or the Rhino…maybe the Grizzly and the Rhino? Nah, I know what I'll do…I'll see if my old drinking buddy The Shocker is up for a night out. That guy was da bomb back in college.' You gotta make time for the average Joe, am I right?"
The only result of Shultz's screaming was the protests of the street light, screeching metallically in protest as it bent at an angle that would mean a man would never have been able to walk unaided.
"Right."
Confidence disguised weariness beneath the mask as Spider-Man put an extra kick into the flip, surveying the scene at one of many familiar angles of the upside down world.
He upgrade those little fridge magnets since last time? That's a hell of a hit. God, when was the last time?
He landed with the practised ease of some one who survived leaping five feet on a daily basis, moved like a bullet when the next shock wave splintered asphalt in a sudden wave of dust and debris.
"Stay the hell away! You hear!? Away!"
Shocker was getting desperate, getting unpredictable with a weapon that could crack a skull as easily as it could crack a safe. Wrap up time.
"Can't help it Shock. It's the quilt. I just wanna take you home and hold you all night."
The quilt and the gauntlets it protected it's wearer from had caused a hell of a lot more damage than usual, Shultz's sprint across downtown from whatever crime scene he'd just created leaving shattered windows, smoking walls and trashed cop cars as a trail that had caught Peter's attention from his usual ark over the Financial District.
Not the first time Shultz had rethought his techs capabilities, yet the fashion nightmare of the yellow and brown suit was as tacky and familiar as ever. The duffle bag was new though. Probably the reason the Shocker crawled out from under whatever manhole cover he'd been bunking under.
Spider-Sense. Right where he was about to land.
Damn…
Spider-Man's back jolted and flared, bones rattling under the shockwave. The pile of rubble he bounced off didn't help. Neither did the store front window.
Oh yeah…he upgraded. Osborn or that chick behind the Latveria mess, but he upgraded.
Wailing sirens gave way to the shuddering thunder bolt sound of Shocker's gauntlets, breaking glass and tearing metal. Ignoring the flaring in his back, he leapt the shattered glass, bounced, and landed atop the overturned squad car. The door came off easily enough, the still officer inside laid carefully on the asphalt. No blood. Yet.
The Shocker was a sprinting figure in the distance, duffle bag bouncing and flailing with each desperate step down a far alley.
If he upgraded the gauntlets, he upgraded the shock absorbers.
The car door struck almost directly at the middle of Shultz's back. Crook and duffle bag flew like startled pigeons, the bag going straight up while the crook bounced twice before clanging off a streetlight. The bag arched, starting to rush towards it's the ground.
"No! No!"
A webline snagged it in mid air, a crouching Spider-Man dangling it in front of himself from his position on the right alley wall just above a rusted fire escape balcony.
"I know, I hate it when you drop your bag and people step all over it. Society huh? I do despair. Say, that looks like a nasty sprain. Let me help you with that."
Gauntlets were suddenly wrapped tight against each other under a mass of webbing. Shultz strained madly, like a trapped animal, hunched under the weight of his crisscrossed arms.
"Give me that! Give me that you little jackass, or so help me God…!"
A wad of impact webbing (Thanks Ben.) smacked into the Shocker at chest height, sending his head bouncing off the asphalt.
"Quiet Herman, grownup thinking over here."
Shultz's roar of "No!" almost made him drop the now open bag, but he kept going, reaching in and searching. His hand brushed against mostly fabric and scarps of tissue paper, both smelling of antistatic and plastic. He knew that smell…
"Get out of there!" The Shocker propped himself up on one arm, shifting like an earthquake in layers of brown and dirty yellow vibro fabric. "Get the hell out of there you eight legged freaky shit!"
Okay, what's in here that freaks an already freaked out super con like Shultz? He's been desperate about a job before, but still…
His hand closed around something metallic, drew it out.
"Odd taste in jewellery, Shocker."
"Get the hell away from that!"
"I'm a kleptomaniac Herman, not deaf. So…what is this exactly?"
'This' was clearly a cylinder of something, "Lab" written all over it in invisible ink so as not to distract from the black and yellow utility pattern running around the centre. Turning it over revealed not only a series of numbers and a small red cross bolted to the bottom (or top since that section was more curved like a thermos flask) but also that most of the weight seemed to come from what felt like liquid inside but made a slight scraping noise like metal on metal.
"Since when do you go stealing medical supplies Shock? Or is this the new Japanese video game craze and none of my internet friends told me?"
The reinforced soles of the Shocker's boots scraped off the asphalt and dried old news papers as he staggered upright, rippling slightly as if made out of a heat haze.
"Go to hell wall freak! This has nothing to do with you! Get away from that!"
"Uh, uh, uh…"
Spider-Man waved a finger.
"Let's use our inside voice."
The scream almost drove him off the wall, Shocker thrashing even more against the webbing plastered across his arms. The heat haze effect increased with a low viiimmmmmm that rang in the back of the skull, the web strands shaking…
"Don't!"
Spider-Sense painted the world in a burst of images.
Shultz, the impact wave pulling together around him out of fattening air, the fire escape screws wrenching loose in a shower of rust, the determined look on the cops turning the alley corner turning to shock as the (hopefully) thick enough web net sprouted in front of them, the dust rising from the spreading cracks in the brick work…
It was ultimately the fire escape that saved him, bursting loose like Dorothy's house in the tornado and bowling him into it as the shock wave sent it rolling out of the collapsing wall, shielding him from the spine bending vibrations as the wall buckled inward like an ulcer in reverse.
It took him a second after emerging from the rubble to realise he still had the canister, one of the cops was on the ground next to the sagging net clutching his face, and that the Shocker was gone.
An open manhole was just begging to be jumped down, but the nearest hospital was ten blocks away and the cop was groaning louder, ending in pained sobs.
He stashed the canister in a quickly spun web sack before gently hoisting the cop into the crook of his arm and negotiating a system with his partner (who turned out to be that kind of partner as well) to let a vigilante do what should have been his job.
He set off towards Bellevue, fast but not too fast, the canister's weight bearing down on him guiltily the whole way.
Logan is going to love this.
--
The bar with no name was quiet in the late afternoon. As quite as it ever got anyway. Deadpool had showed up and departed via the Juggernaut's fist, last seen over Red Hook and accelerating.
Regulars, in so far as a bar frequented by meta human fugitives had regulars, were mostly B through E list. Boomerang and the Spot argued over the drone of the single television mounted over the bar, 8-Ball and Constrictor bumbling through a haze of pride and alcohol about the one time they went up against the Thing in Canada, a complete fiction but it was fun to watch.
No one paid attention to the old man, huddled in a booth between tables shared by the likes of Gibbon and Batroc the Leaper. Tired eyes…one of them anyway, stared at the old black wood table surface without really seeing it. Although he hadn't looked at the clock slipping loose from the far left bar wall since he'd entered at a time too early to be too early in the morning, Adrian Toomes felt each second as a physical thing, a universe at super speed, born instantly and fading in a red poof of comic dust even sooner than that.
If Spider-Man or the Owl wouldn't kill him…this might. He considered in an almost drunken way if actually ordering a drink would be worth it.
He heard 8-Ball throwing up inside his giant snooker ball head, a hollow sound like the one time an inexperienced rookie had gotten his hand stuck in the machinery at the factory all those years ago and had it bludgeoned down to powder thin bone before collapsing loose in a writhing heap, and decided against it.
All eyes, masked and glowing alike, turned as the side entrance, the real entrance to the building, banged open. Uniform stained in ungodly colours, the Shocker staggered in like a pineapple in ugly yellow industrial plastic colours, brown areas a lot more brown.
Silence reigned for a grand total of three minutes before Constrictor made the first crack.
"Hey Shultz…thas a…thas a nice perfume ya wearing…what are ya, gay?"
The laughs came hard and fast, drowning out the sound of the mercenary sliding to the floor and the metallic wire whir as he set of his left hand coil in the process.
"Jeez Shock, Rykers dosen't have showers no more?"
"Ah, nobody'd be caught dead in Rykers! Dropping the soap is only the start of your problems!"
"I don't think he thinks they're problems!"
Insulated boots squelching some new form of life into the floor, the Shocker lumbered his way through the laughter, sagging into Toomes' booth in a near boneless heap.
"Assholes."
"Yes." Toomes agreed, unphased by the angry hiss "They're assholes. Where is it?"
Shultz's blue eyes shone guilt ridden from out of the grime.
"Adrian…"
"What happened to your gauntlets?"
Metal scraped off wood as Shultz almost hid the remains of his pride and joy underneath the table, a dirty yellow child with a contaminated hand in the cookie jar. This just kept getting worse and worse. Of course Toomes had noticed it first. He was no Tinkerer but vultures had sharp eyes.
"Had to amp 'em up. The max. Totally, completely. Almost blew myself to absolute shit but…"
He let the gashes across the near seamless material of the gloves under the ragged metal speak for themselves, now wrinkled and peeling like a layer of dead skin, revealing red raw zig zag patterns beneath. He tried to sink lower into the chair, failing to hide the moon crater sag in the costumes chest, rippling out over the tunic. He'd braced but his hands had been webbed close together, one charge building and bouncing off the other, each wave generator eating into the other and almost pushing the mesh of his costume into his skin until it burst and bled. It had been like taking a tank route in the chest, or taking one and surviving, which was worse. Not as bad as this though. Nowhere near.
"You got away? You got it?"
The ice was cracking in the old man's voice, the tones of the utterly defeated trying to disguise it as hope. Shultz couldn't meet that one watery flint eye.
"It was him. Wasn't it?"
Shocker didn't even bother asking either of the obvious questions. A strand of still dissolving webbing here, the fact no one could have screw this up half as much here…
"I got the crap blown out of me, practically. Barely made it into the sewers, almost cracked a rib. I got the bag, but I only realised it was empty when I came up in Harlem. He must have taken it or I blew it up or…"
He did look up this time, tugging the mask off with a near nerveless hand and letting it flop onto the table like a dying leaf. Toomes' face was unreadable, a hook nosed slab of flint.
"Jesus Adrian, I'm…"
The table rattled as the old man stood up with surprising speed. His entrance was just as fast, long jabbing bird strides that got him out into the back alleys scarring the world outside the bar and earning only a few glances before various mad inventors, genetic experiments, renegade mutants and costumed mercenaries before they went back to their cheap alcohol.
Shocker almost ran into him trying to catch up, mask flapping like the loosing side's flag.
"Adrian come on, your suits faster but he's different now, you'll…"
He almost squelched into the old man's back as he stood on the sidewalk corner, solid as a gargoyle, gnarled pianist's fingers clenched.
"He's gone too far this time Herman."
Shultz hesitated, then shrugged.
"Been going too far for years, man. I know this time is important and all…"
"Herman…"
Toomes didn't turn around but the Shocker was certain he wouldn't have been able to read his face even if he had.
"Who could you call up in next couple of days? Personal contacts, not job handouts through Hammerhead."
"Outta town or…specifically? To him?"
Hunched shoulders tensed.
"Specifically."
Shocker rattled of a list of names. Three of them caught Toomes' attention, made him brake out that crooked smile, like an earthquake across his tight lips.
"Try and talk to them, tell them I want to talk to them if you don't hear back from me tomorrow. You still in?"
Shocker drew back into grimy alley shadows. A car went past and the distant echo of engine and wheels lasted all through the hesitant four minutes it took the other super criminal to respond.
"Same job?"
"Oh yes."
"Then, yeah, I'm in. For this we probably all are. But Adrian…what you're doing…be careful, huh?"
"Herman, really. I'm always careful."
Then the bony arms flashed out and the old man was gone in an explosion of green wings.
--
"Why is there a Kree commando laying on the couch?"
Peter blinked some more. The mass of silver and metallic green didn't go away.
//Bob found him loitering on the far reaches of the solar system. Single ship as far as we could tell, but Cap put in a call to get Reed Richards to check it out before Hill tried to get her oddly masculine hands all over it.//
Iron Man led Spider-Man out of the living room and into the labyrinth of plush corridors making up the honeycombs of Stark Tower.
The helmet came off with the non existent hiss of oxygen and microscopic metal. Tony brushed a straggle of ruffled hair out of his eyes with a gauntleted hand and Peter's fingers tingled with the sympathy of mutual hood hair as his own mask slid back.
"We tracked the escape pod to Florida and Cap and Jessica flew out to bring him in. They rendezvoused with Carol…"
He hesitated at Peter's confused expression.
"Ms Marvel. She'll be over for Christmas and she's great with Jessica, so don't panic about one of us handing out her identity like that. She's great with people no matter what she thinks. Got a history with the Kree which is why our poor guest is going to have a hell of a headache when he comes to."
"Spy?" Peter asked.
They hadn't seen any extraterrestrial activity since the entire shoot out with the Kree and the Skrull with the Young Avengers, and given past experience Peter wasn't sure he wanted to stay as one of Earth's Mightiest and face the music of the spheres head on.
"Entirely possible."
Tony seemed far too off-hand about the entire thing, perhaps deliberately so out of an attempt to reassure the new avenger or just for giggles, so Pete decided to get down to business and go off and find something normal to revel in. He held up the canister, dangling it under Tony's moustache.
"Think you can help me check this out? I snagged it off the Shocker, and since neither me or the cops found him I figured I might as well at least figure out what he was shaking up this time."
He'd have to watch that, he was an Avenger now, not one of the Superfriends. Tony took the canister, weighing the metal in his isolated fingers.
"You took evidence from a crime scene?"
Peter turned off, opening the door to his and MJ's room.
"Yeah, and aren't we the Avengers? Don't we also have a super secret crime busting computer?"
"You have a multi million dollar customized schematics computer." Tony's face was grim. "I can give this thing an industrial go over, but no promises. It's a pretty domesticated model. None of this was built for forensics or super heroics."
Sure. Peter thought, letting the little issue of the criminal database, hall of armours, fully equipped med lab and quinjet hanger slide for the time being.
"Give me ten minutes to get out of armour and I'll get on it."
"What do I look like, a sidekick?" Peter called from where he was crouched by the dresser. "We'll get on it when I get back."
Tony frowned. Peter pulled his mask back over his head, now dressed in a cleaner spider shirt, bristling slightly.
"I've gotta go to school."