Pros and Cons of Anonymity
Disclaimer: Premise and characters belong to Marvel, I'm just playing with them.
Chapter One: Nobody by Day
"Parker!"
Peter grimaced at Flash Thompson's voice and let himself be shoved into his locker.
"Cast's off and you just got lucky that one time," Flash hissed in his ear.
'Well, there goes about thirty percent of the guilt,' Peter thought to himself. Flash had suffered a compound fracture when Peter, new to his powers, had used too much force to twist the bigger boy's arm behind his back. The injury had benched Flash for all but the first two games of the previous year's football season. Peter counted himself lucky that it happened in their freshman year. In their junior or senior year it could have messed up Flash's chances of getting a football scholarship and Peter didn't think he could forgive himself if his mistake had seriously impacted the other boy's life.
Still after the summer they'd had with the Avengers' Civil War, Tony Stark's death and Captain America's trial Peter hadn't expected Flash to still be hung up on his arm being broken nearly a year ago.
Flash dragged Peter away from the locker and sent him sprawling on the floor to their classmates' amusement.
"Didn't you get this out of your system last spring?" Peter snapped. "Yes, you can beat me up. Last year was a freak accident. You just fell over your own feet in your hurry to punch me, I admit it. Are you happy? Can I get to class now?"
"I'm not quite done yet," Flash replied cracking his knuckles. But before he could act on his threat another boy with curly, close-cropped hair pushed through the growing crowd and planted himself between Flash and Peter. "I wouldn't," he warned as Flash reached for him. "Lay one hand on me and I sic my dad on you."
Flash hesitated, "Count yourself lucky Parker, for having Osborn to hide behind." Within a few seconds the crowd had dispersed.
"Thanks Harry," Peter said accepting the hand up his friend offered. "But wouldn't your dad just get mad at you for keeping the 'corporate spy' from getting what's coming to him?"
Harry waved off Peter's concern. "Dad's totally over your internship," he said. "He was mostly ticked that SI poached you out from under him, he was going to offer you an OsCorp internship in your junior or senior year. You know, ninety-eight percent of students, college students, who intern with Stark Industries' R&D department take permanent positions with the company as soon as they graduate. And the only other younger student anyone has heard of SI taking an interest in is Harley Keener and he's basically the heir apparent."
"Your dad was nuts that night," Peter said.
"You didn't have to worry, I know my dad," Harry insisted. "Now that he's cooled off- and I need tutoring in math again- he's fine with you coming over again."
"He's not going to accuse me of using you to spy on his company again?" Peter asked warily.
"Totally over it," Harry promised cheerfully. "Now Dad wants me to use our friendship to get you to give up SI's secrets."
"Has anyone ever told you that how your dad thinks is scary?" Peter asked.
"Most people assume it goes without saying," Harry replied. "So, do you have time for a study session before Mr. Shaurer's 'This is how much you've forgotten over summer' quiz on Friday? Or are they keeping you too busy at SI?"
Peter consider his schedule, "I've got a meeting right after school," he said letting Harry assume it was with SI, "but if you don't have plans for dinner we could study while we eat."
"Great!" Harry exclaimed. "You call your aunt, I'll tell the cook to expect a guest for dinner."
The rest of school day passed quietly. Peter spent health, personal finance and American Lit going over his research notes from SI. As soon as the last bell rang Peter was off like a shot. Three blocks from school he ducked into a coffee shop that was busy enough to make him unnotable and with a restroom that had a healthy sized window opening onto a back alley. A short while later Spider-Man unlocked the restroom door and crawled out the window trusting the crowd inside to cover Peter Parker's disappearance.
Ten minutes later Spider-Man flipped off a street lamp to land on the steps of the police station. While his entrance garnered a few hostile looks there were also waves. "So you're going to be cleared for duty this weekend," the desk sergeant said as he buzzed Spider-Man in. "Excited?"
"A little nervous," Spider-Man admitted. "I still have to finish certifying. Then there's the formalities and talking to the victims. It'll be different, can't just let my mouth run. Some of the people I'd rescue were more scared of me than the mugger thanks to the Bugle. Now I have to stay until a uniformed officer is on the scene and try to talk them into pressing charges. I'll probably be too busy talking them out of macing me. And Captain Stacy says no using webbing to gag people I catch, it could restrict breathing and I can't hang them from streetlamps because it bends the lamps, even if it is funny, it gives the Bugle ammunition- Did you see today's editorial? Now Jamison's complaining because I didn't do anything about the old bird-guy knocking over that armored car Saturday. I just can't make some people happy."
The older man chuckled. "I can see why you're worried about not letting your mouth run," he broke in. "Captain Stacy and Colonel Rhodes are waiting for you."
"Right! Thanks," Spider-Man said and hurried up the stairs to Captain Stacy's office. As he did he felt a twinge of guilt, the elevator in the station was ancient and smelled funny. He and Harley were still months away from a prototype brace to get get Colonel Rhodes on his feet again.
"Spider-Man," Stacy said with a small nod as the superhero let himself into his office.
"Kid," Rhodes greeted him, "Sounds like you're going to be too busy to train this weekend."
"You guys have a lot of confidence."
"You've studied hard, you'll pass," Stacy assured him. "Now we just need to work out some practicalities when it comes to you and fieldwork."
Rhodes set a slim metal bracelet and something the looked like a pen-light on Captain Stacy's desk. "The problem with a mask is anyone can put it on," he said to Spider-Man. "Sure your abilities provide a certain level of security but they could be mimicked. To be able to work with you the police don't need to know your name and home address, but they do need to know that you're you."
He handed Spider-Man the bracelet and Stacy the pen-light. "The transmitter sends out a microburst of data, when it pings the bracelet it triggers a response. This is intended to verify Spider-Man's identity. It is not intended as a means of tracing him. To that end the transmitter is low powered. It has a range of roughly 100 yards, the length of a soccer field. It won't work through a pane of glass much less a wall."
Spider-Man turned the bracelet over in his hands, "Can you add a switch so I can turn it off while I'm not in costume?" he asked. "I've been carrying the suit around with me, just in case. I don't want to get outed because someone started wandering around pinging random people on the street."
Rhodes thought about it for a moment. "It's not a bad idea. Without the suit I doubt anyone would be able to pick you out of a crowd but, frankly, you sound young. If the bad guys found out about the transmitter they could conceivably use it to identify your school by testing it on assemblies."
"Why are you bringing the suit to school in the first place?" Stacy asked.
"What if I hear about an attack while I'm at school?" Spider-Man responded.
"What if I'm at a bank and someone tries to rob it?" Stacy replied. "I don't carry my gun twenty-four/seven."
"But if I can help-" Spider-Man started.
"You can't be on duty all the time," Stacy disagreed. "Even if the stress of trying to live like that doesn't kill you, it might kill someone else. Trying to be on alert all the time will wear you down, it will lead to mistakes. During school hours you are off-duty as Spider-Man. Your first responsibility while at school is to be- You, the you under the mask. You are not the only person who can save the day. I've got a whole department of trained, adult police officers," Stacy nodded toward Rhodes, "and I've got him on speed-dial. Recognize that you are one person, that you can't handle everything yourself and that there are people ready to help you, or we're not going to get very far with this deal."
Spider-Man looked down, chewing on his lower lip. "I get it," he said. "But you in the bank without your gun, you could still do something because of your training. Me, if I don't have the mask, I have to pretend to be helpless. I'm 5'8" and 115 lbs, if I do even a fraction of what I can do people will know I'm not normal. Plus I don't have time to stop by home to pick-up the suit on my way from school to here and I'm not showing up at a police station every day as me, I might as well not even wear a mask if I were going to do that."
Stacy grimaced.
"I've got Tony's spec for the upgrades on Redwing," Rhodes said after a few moments. "We could fabricate a few drones and have FRIDAY use them to keep tabs around your school. If anything happens in your neighborhood we'll get an alert hopefully before you hear about it. That way I don't have to ask you to standby and do nothing while people are getting hurt to protect your identity."
Spider-Man chewed on his lower lip, "It doesn't seem fair, my school getting special protection from the Avengers just because I'm there. I mean I should be taking care of my neighborhood so you guys can focus on places that don't have their own resident superhero, shouldn't I?"
"Do you know how Tony tracked you down?" Rhodes asked.
Spider-Man shook his head.
"As I said earlier, your voice gives away that you're young. A statistically significant portion of Spider-Man's appearances occur in a radius centered on your school. From there all he had to do was look for unusual events occurring within a few weeks before and after Spider-Man's first appeared, when the odds of you getting sloppy were highest."
"Flash's broken arm," Spider-Man said looking down at his desk.
"Yeah," Rhodes said. "Tony got your name and home address from the disciplinary notice the school sent to your Aunt. Took him all of three hours once he started looking for you. There's almost no one in Tony's league when it comes to both having the resources to gather data and having the mindset to analyze it… It might have taken me several weeks of focused effort to find you and maybe without knowing what Tony did I wouldn't have thought about your first appearance as a vulnerable point but you're not that hard to find, not in this day and age. Superhero spotting is a bigger hobby than birdwatching and every kid with a cellphone posts our pictures on Facebook when they see us in action. There's plenty of data out there giving away our behavioral patterns."
"I would much rather have your appearances point your enemies at my police station rather than your school," Stacy said. "Wouldn't you? We might not have your abilities but we can do a better job of protecting ourselves than your classmates could."
"Okay," Spider-Man surrendered. "No Spider-Man at school except as a last resort."
The meeting concluded with the decision that Spider-Man's first, official joint operation with the police would be a crack-down on muggers that weekend.
Then Spider-Man let himself out of Captain Stacy's window and swung off in the direction of the OsCorp building. A half-dozen blocks before he reached the obelisk of sleek black granite and dark tinted glass he found another spot to change and Peter Parker walked out of a quiet park.
As he got closer to his destination Peter's steps slowed. 'Harry's dad isn't even likely to be home at this hour and isn't it just pathetic that I can go toe-to-toe with Captain America but my best friend since grade school's dad scares me?'
Still… Peter remembered a night a couple of months earlier. He'd barely gotten back from Leipzig and wouldn't learn about Tony Stark's death until later that night.
"What's the formula for calculating an arctangent?" Peter quizzed Harry as the two boys sat across the coffee table from each other in the Osborn's living room."
"Umm… It's related to the tangent. How is it related to the tangent?" Harry said to himself.
Peter heard the elevator open, and made a gesture for Harry to continue.
"Inverse!" Harry exclaimed triumphantly.
Peter smiled, "That's-" Then he threw himself backwards as his spidey-sense screamed.
Norman Osborn kicked over the table between the two boys. "Little snake!" he snarled at Peter.
Peter backed away from his friend's dad shaking his head in confusion, "Mr. Osborn?" he asked.
"Disgusting little spy, sneaking in here, pretending friendship to get my secrets."
"Dad, come on," Harry protested putting a restraining hand on his father's arm. "Pete and I have been friends since we were five. You set-up the play-date. You know he doesn't have any sort of agenda."
Norman shoved Harry away roughly. "Traitor!" he hissed at Peter. "After I let you into my circle, siding with my competitor then crawling back here to suce out my secrets!"
"Is-is this about my internship with Stark Industries?" Peter ventured.
Norman threw a sheaf of papers in Peter's face and he took that as a yes.
Harry scrambled off the couch where he'd fallen and put himself between Norman and Peter. "Dad, so what? Pete got a good internship, you can't blame him for taking it."
"Ingrate!" Norman thundered.
"Um Pete, why don't you head home?" Harry suggested.
Peter felt frozen, Harry's dad had always been friendly, supportive of his and Harry's friendship despite the vast difference in their backgrounds. He'd known for year that Norman Osborn could be pretty machiavellian but he'd never seen the man like this before, never seen his temper, let alone had it directed at him.
"Peter, leave!" Harry ordered sharply and Peter ran for the elevator without thinking. His spidey-sense had him twisting to the side as the elevator doors closed and a bookend whizzed past him to shatter against the back wall.
Peter stared at the fragments whole way back to the lobby. A part of him said he shouldn't leave Harry alone with his dad, that he should put on the new costume Dr. Stark had given him and climb back up to the penthouse suite but it was Harry's dad, not some costumed villain or criminal.
The OsCorp building loomed up over Peter, he swallowed nervously. He'd called Harry the next morning, Harry had sounded okay but he suggested that it might be a good idea if Peter stayed away for a little bit. He hadn't seen Norman Osborn since that night.
Peter walked around the building to the less ostentatious residential lobby. Harry had once confided that OsCorp employees got a substantial discount on rent in the tower because his dad said it was easier to get people in for overtime if their commute was an elevator ride.
As Peter stood in front of the security desk waiting for the guard to decide to notice him he patted his backpack, the bulk of his costume was a reassuring presence. "Could you let Harry Osborn know Peter Parker is here?" he asked, half expecting to find Harry's dad had left orders that he wasn't to be allowed in. "I'm expected."
"ID," the guard grunted giving Peter a suspicious look.
Peter sighed and dug out his wallet, producing his student ID in lieu of the driver's licence he still didn't have despite having been eligible for almost a month. 'Maybe I could ask Colonel Rhodes to let me spend some of the time at the Avengers' Compound learning to drive,' Peter thought. 'Course having a licence won't change that Aunt May can't afford a teenage driver on her insurance. Still a licence would be nice to have.'
The guard scowled at Peter's ID for a few minutes before grudgingly calling up to the penthouse. Harry came down with the elevator, "You made it!" he said happily. "I was half afraid you'd bail, you never hang out around school anymore."
"I'm insanely busy," Peter protested.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Harry said as the elevator rose. "How'd your meeting go?"
"Good," Peter said. "I've got approval to move on to the next stage of my project."
"That's cool," Harry replied enthusiastically. "Can you tell me any details?"
"Sorry," Peter shook his head.
Harry shrugged, "Well, if Dad asks, remember to tell him I pressured you for them."
"I wish I knew if you were joking or not," Peter said.
"Only about forty percent," Harry replied. "You know Dad wouldn't have gotten so worked up if he didn't like you?"
"I could do with being liked a little less," Peter said thinking about the bookend. If it had hit, if he'd been a normal person he could picture going to hospital over something like that. "Nothing happened after I left, right?" Peter asked squirming uncomfortably.
"Of course not," Harry said quickly. "Dad ranted for awhile longer. I went to bed. We talked about a few days later once he was in a better frame of mind. It's just we've been friends forever and you know Dad can get a sort of possessive. You're practically part of the family, that's why he didn't take you going to work for a competitor so well."
"We have," Peter agreed. In kindergarten Peter had been classified as a gifted student. At his teachers' urgings his Aunt and Uncle had him tested and applied for scholarships at some of the more prestigious schools in the area. He'd been accepted and spent an absolutely miserable first month not fitting in. Then Norman Osborn had reached out to the Parkers, he told them Harry had been withdrawn since his mother's death the previous year and he hoped that Peter would be more empathetic than other children their age considering he'd suffered a similar loss.
The two boys got on well with each other and the friendship benefited both of them: Through Harry, Peter started fitting in better with his classmates. Peter's presence in any group tended to give the other kids something that wasn't Harry's lack of a mother to focus for the first few years. Once their classmates gained enough maturity to start curbing hurtful curiosity, Harry had started looking to Peter for tutoring in math and science. Both boys had expected Harry's father to take his lack of scientific ability badly but Norman hadn't seemed particularly surprised by Harry's inability to follow in his footsteps and just praised Peter for helping Harry keep up his grades. Peter had overheard his uncle comment a few times about the way the scholarships and placements Peter did and didn't get always seemed to align to keep Peter and Harry together but if Harry's dad was manipulating the system so they could stay friends Peter didn't see that it as a bad thing... Or he hadn't thought it was a bad thing until he'd seen Norman's reaction to him making a choice that didn't line up with the elder Osborn's plans.
"Getting exposure to more than one company before you decide where you want to work can only be good for you, right?" Harry continued.
And if not for the Avengers, Peter knew Harry would be totally right but the internship at SI wasn't just about his future career it was also about Spider-Man. He forced a smile, "Come Harry, I'm too busy to even be thinking about next year," he protested. "Let's get to studying. Um, is your dad home?"
Harry shook his head, "Naw, he's been working even later than usual lately."
Peter bit back the impulse to say 'That's a relief.'
Dr. Cho gave Pepper a stern look. "You need to take it easier. Reduce your schedule to something sane."
"I have a perfectly healthy schedule," Pepper protested.
"On average you work seventy hours a week, sleep six hours a night and eat twice a day," Dr. Cho pointed out. "You haven't taken a vacation day in more than two years, according to FRIDAY your closest acquaintance with the concept is flights to Europe or Asia, and you usually work on paperwork while you're in transit."
Pepper blinked at her innocently. "Tony's doctors thought it was great when I got him on my schedule."
"Knowing Tony, I'm sure it made them ecstatic but this is not a healthy schedule," Dr. Cho scolded. "And you're twenty-six weeks pregnant, you've just started your third trimester."
"If this is leading up to me giving up the one cup of coffee a day I'm allowed?" Pepper's eyes narrowed.
"You tell me you're feeling worn down," Dr. Cho replied, "and I'm telling you it's a marvel that you haven't collapsed! You need to cut back."
"I have a new product release for the third quarter, SI needs this out before Christmas shoppers get started. The body armor contract with the military will end in a few months and the board will have my head if I don't re-negotiate a decent profit margin instead of the deal they got for letting us out of our missile contracts. I've got two meetings a week with the government panel trying to create a version of the Accords to regulate superhero activities within US borders. There's the advocacy group for protecting the rights of underaged Enhanced that I started. Canada wants three more Arc Reactors for the Territories and Ecuador wants one on the Galapagos Islands and another on the mainland."
Pepper didn't sound like she was even close to being done when Dr. Cho broke in. "Can't Ms. van Dyne or Colonel Rhodes take on the US Accords?" she asked.
"Hank and James are already on the advisory panel, but Ross poisoned the entire cabinet against Enhanced individuals, even imprisoned and in disgrace he's still a thorn in our side," Pepper replied. "Hope's involved in the Advocacy group with me, along with Carol and Alexi. The two of them don't have the political pull to take our place but they are Enhanced themselves and once they're better known as Avengers they'll be highly valuable voices but not yet. SI's new head of R&D isn't just new, he's not Tony." Pepper's voice faltered. She took a deep gasping breath and then another, as if swallowing back sobs.
Dr. Cho stepped closer and put a comforting hand on Pepper's shoulder but the other woman brushed it away.
"I'm sorry," Pepper said after a moment. "I never know when it's going to hit me." She took a slower, more controlled breath, then continued. "Tony would have had the Arc Reactor projects on track with a couple of videos calls." As she spoke her voice began to steady. "He'd have personally handled promoting the new product release, kept us to schedule and had our distributors falling over themselves to help. But all our current head of R&D can handle is keeping the projects on schedule and even there I have to check up on him. The military contract is sensitive and I was the one to negotiate the previous deal, that would be mine regardless."
"I know finding the right person to delegate to isn't easy, I'm not trying to make more work for you," Dr. Cho sighed. "But if you don't do it now just think about what happens in three months when you go on maternity leave."
"Don't think I don't know that," Pepper sighed. "I'm honestly thinking about sending Marlena as Harley's proxy to some of the board meetings with Happy backing her. As Harley's mother she has some authority and she has the right presence, Happy's sat in on so many meetings he can coach her on what to say."
"If that would help, do it," Dr. Cho advised. "You're not going to get less tired this far into the pregnancy."
Notes: I'm think of pairing Happy up with Harley's mom, mostly because Pepper/Happy is fairly standard alternate pairing for Pepper on account of the comics which I'd like to eliminate up front.