Chapter 4

New, much shorter, chapter.

If I had to give this a timeframe, which I hate to do since the logistics give me a headache and make me panic with Author's Ineptitude™, then I'd put this around the time of Spider-Man 2099 #1.


Bank robbery.

-Don'tCallMeMikey99.

It is in the apparently timeless tradition of Spider-Men (and women, though this seems to be largely limited to the unfortunate girl versions of me) that when there is personal business to attend to, responsibility will rear its head and bark. Loudly.

Being a good ten years behind in a certain effort, I was making up for it to feel good about myself and it was showing. I made strides in my countless repetitions of telling myself New York had a veritable litany of heroes to take care of it, and that having died in the line of duty – again – I deserved to take a week off, seemed to be helping. So did the sex.

It wasn't the first time I had bit the bullet, of course, but it was the first time I made it as far as I had. First was in limbo with those party animals Death her/it/himself, and Thanos, the killophile. The second happened quickly enough that the next thing I knew I was popping out of my own arachno-sapien stomach, alive and better than ever.

The third was stuck in a jungle with… the Other, an entity with a flair for the cryptic and dramatic. A real charmer.

It ate me.

Long story short, I realized that I had a lot of days to sit back and relax. Days which I had never taken advantage of and, if gained by death in the line of duty, had to be multiplied by four. They were a lot more seductive if I could spend my all of my time in my bedroom, also making up for lost time. Superhuman stamina goes a long way.

Unfortunately I didn't get paid for what I did, so no paid leave. I had to work. Still, those days off with Anna were pretty swell. That morning in particular I walked out of my apartment with a pip in my step and wide awake, and an even wider smile.

Anna however skipped breakfast and walked gingerly, being more than a little full. The morning commute was easy for me, but not so easy for her. We could have driven there in her car, but the prospect of getting to work after one of my ownemployees (a fact that was still surprising to me), was not a seductive one.

Anna fortunately managed to keep her 'breakfast' down, so I didn't want to have to explain to anyone why my suit had undigested white spew on it. She was more than a little queasy afterward, but the dirtiest look she shot me was, 'Are you happy?' I was.

Miguel once told me: "We jump around fighting bad guys for free, we have to be insane," and he was right. I am a little insane. My reward for this insanity was action, just not of the PG variety.

Leaving the city in my fellow Spider-Man's hands was the responsible thing to do. That is, responsible for me. He was a good Spider-Man, though maybe it's because he comes from 2099 where you need to be a good anything in order to survive.

Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that he didn't joke very much, or because his costume is really confusing at first glance. I imagine questions like, "You don't look like Spider-Man though?" Get really old. It's probably why he had sarcasm down to a science.

I trusted that that if I counted on him, he wouldn't let me down. That was something that I can't say I gave many.

I couldn't afford to divide my attentions between the two sides of my life and with Mig's help, I didn't need to. The choice was a no brainer; it wasn't just responsible, it was smart, something I needed to be - stupid CEOs don't have very good careers. They either end up under the thumb of someone else, or a figurehead. Or dead.

It was with a fire in my eye and roaring in my stomach that I refused to be any one of those. I'd been through too much to end up like that. If there was one thing I was through with, it was rolling over.

I knew I couldn't be Spider-Man forever. Though my powers, as it turned out, would keep me in my physical prime for… a long while, a fact I attributed to my healing factor, there would come a time when I finally tired of it, no longer shackled by a twisted sense of responsibility, or simply died again. Whichever one came first, or both in a freak accident of happenstance.

I wasn't thinking about jumping in front of a bullet anytime soon, but looking back at my life, I lost my powers a lot. And with the bullet thing came memories of watching an aged Peter Parker get shot in the back in the middle of a rainy cemetery that still had me pretty wary.

I wouldn't have thought this way before dying. I suppose Otto had done me a favor. Thing is, I'm so stubborn Death herself can't stop me. …For long, anyways. Don't tell her that, though. Him, it, whatever. She's a sweetheart, entropy of the Earth, I love her to- anyway, as it turned out, I have the singular ability to get under 'her' skin, or cloak, or bone marrow, just enough to have her chase me down on principle. That one target she can't hit, and when she does, it is foul play and rescinded. It's the spider-sense. It's called being Amazing.

My attitude was now a far cry from what it had been in my younger days. I still knew that eventually Spider-Man would cease to be, but thought he'd fall in a blaze of glory. Or dead in an alley because "Kid, you're in over your head."

But until then I'd keep going, because even on his worst day, even back then, Peter Parker was a tenacious jackass, because he was supremely hard to squash.

Spider-Man was vilified, hated, and I thought he wouldn't be remembered. When you have people like Captain America and Thor, bombastic, heroic, larger than life figures like Tony Stark and beloved celebrities like Dazzler, who needs a scrawny kid from Queens who lacks the sense to layer up in the winter?

And without enough sense to supe up his costume every couple of years? By the time I was twenty-two I was still running around in a full-body onesie. I could have been using my web-fluid as short term armor for years.

My balls were the size of twenty pound weights and more brass than a trombone for doing that kind of crap. Ben was right to chase me around with a couch.

But I was wrong. I have inspired others and there is a long line of spider-people that stretch the centuries, spanning millennia. Because of me. That's pretty fantastic.

I had met a little less than five years into my career, the Spider-Men of 2099 and 2211. If there was ever an accolade to be had, that was it. To a younger me, it was momentarily uplifting, but my nasty habit of not letting myself stay happy had attracted a lot of bad things.

Still, Achievement Unlocked: You're going to be Kind of a Big Deal.

I didn't feel 'guilty' anymore and with a sound mind, that was a fifty ton weight off my shoulders. Nothing I hadn't lifted before, but it was a heck of a relief not to have to.

Still, part of me, an old, faint, fading part of me thought I was Spider-Man, and a license for an extended vacation was not one for permanent absence. I had a duty to-

But no, I really didn't. The paramedics, law enforcement, the firefighters, they had a duty. An obligation. A, and I laughed to myself at this, a paycheck. Respect. I had a decade of guilting myself into it and the only duty I had was to my company, to my career, and to myself. But with those other things gone, what reason did I have to be Spider-Man anymore, what drive?

The answer really is rather simple. I enjoy helping people. Making sure they got home to their families. Making sure that the brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, dads and moms out there got to see their loved ones again. I enjoyed helping because I could. Because if I did, someone might be saved.

That was something I hadn't realized when I was holding myself accountable for a handful of deaths. With the guilt gone, I found that being good… felt good. As selfish as it sounds, I'd be good because I deserved good. But I'd also be smart.

"You did good, kid. So proud of you," was something Uncle Ben had said to me whenever I achieved something. It didn't matter if I got an A+ on a test or just didn't fall in with the wrong crowd, or had managed to fix the broken TV and the flickering lights, or even when I was bullied a lot, snapped and chased after my bullies for troubling May.

Those words never lost their weight, never lost their meaning, and always made me feel like the luckiest kid on earth, but I had forgotten them. I wouldn't do that again. Instead of 'power and responsibility', it'd be what Ben always told me.

But I wouldn't stop being Spider-Man. That's impossible. I'm the- well, not the one, or the only, not anymore. But I am the original, the OG, the amazing… me. And it is just too fun to piss people off.

Sneaking up behind a gang of thugs and webbing their feet to the ground, webbing their hands to each other's crotches? Interrupting supervillains mid-monologue! Getting pigeons to crap on crooked cops! Being that jack-in-the-box to heroes with sticks up their asses and just being in Jonah's line of sight.

I couldn't give that up. If nothing else I would be annoying the hell out of Jonah and any relative that took after him for decades. That's what he earned.

So, as I had told May, a break was necessary. I had a lotto catch up on and more accurately, a lotto learn. If I had been forced to balance my duties as the CEO of Parker Industries and as Spider-Man, something that hadn't had any satisfactory outcome when I worked at Horizon, I know for a fact how it would have gone.

With a half of a lifetime in balancing my webslinging with my jobs, my relationships, I knew Spider-Man always came out on top. Anna, as loyal and dedicated as she is, would have been the overworked secretary. Getting none of the credit and all of the headaches, covering for me and doing her best to run the company on her own.

I couldn't have that, couldn't and wouldn't be incompetent like that. I couldn't leave her to that. She was a part of my life, and my responsibility to my life was a responsibility to her, to my company, and to my people.

I wouldn't let them down, but I once thought that Parker and Spider-Man couldn't be in two places at once. Even after the entire clone thing, the idea was farfetched because my own clones seemed to have had the sense to change their names and subsequently avoid the clusterfuck of bad luck that Peter Parker attracted to himself. Even Parker himself didn't want to help… himself.

Considering how much of a jackass I was to them, I don't blame them. I was kind of a Dick, but fortunately for them, they didn't attract the same luck as strongly. Ben never let it get him down and Kaine… well, Kaine just didn't care.

Again though, I was wrong. Kaine had been there for me, Ben had, Miguel had, and for the first time in a while Peter Parker could count on Parker, and on Spider-Man, be it the sensational, reluctant, or futuristic variety.

For Miguel, he had taken his duties as Spider-Man seriously. He felt no small amount of guilt for not being able to stop my death, or even find out in time. It seemed like guilt and responsibility were a prerequisite for just about any Spider-person. The man who had been willing to rewrite the entire timeline to save me, even if it meant taking on an entire corporation led by me, was guilty.

Granted, doing all of that was also to preserve his own home, but it is still a pretty tall order.

Miguel is a great friend. He's also stubborn, which is also a standard Spider-Person trait and a hard one to squash. He was checking the boxes next to all of the most sought after Spider-Man traits, something that looked very good on his superhero resume. I didn't doubt that his own sense of guilt, or responsibility, was hitting him pretty hard. One of those two things always gets us.

He was where I had once been, making me realize that history really does repeat itself. Even if you're from the future and stuck in the past, it doesn't care. His life was about as empty as mine used to be. Crappy apartment? Check. Crappy job working for an asshole boss? Check.

He had a small triangle of friends. That is, me, Lyla, his AI companion, and himself. In between his duties as Mike O'Mara, a conspicuous name if I've ever heard one, a scientist working at Alchemax, and his time as the latest Spider-Man on the scene, I doubt he got much chance to sit down and breathe.

Knowing what resides in his apartment, I think it was for the best. The brick walls were growing some sort of green something, and it wasn't moss.

But Miguel wasn't doing it for the very same reason I did, and should have dedicated myself years ago rather than guilt. Miguel was doing it because that's who Spider-Man was. That's the man history would remember me as. That's the man who inspired him.

Even his reluctance to admit that couldn't stop that tidbit from making my day. He wasn't a man of many words and had a distaste for making long, heartfelt speeches just as much as Kaine and myself. He gave his own truncated version of what I am positive was a spirit rousing speech, however.

"I've got a legacy to uphold and… yeah. All that. Can we go save people, now?" We really needed to work on the noble proclamations, but he was coming along. I even got him to start quipping! Finally.

Being Spider-Man brought with it bad luck, though it became steadily apparent to me that that could be changed. Not ignored, but weathered, like Ben Reilly had done. Keep your head up, rainbows after rain and all that good stuff.

Horrid luck, or anything that was reserved for those unlucky schmucks that look like me, included but was not limited to death - something I, my brothers, and the alternate universe versions of me can all attest to.

I hoped Miguel didn't have to deal with that. His luck was a bit slapstick, so he was better off. His luck was of the kind that got him stuck in a bank to deposit a check so he could have enough money to outfit his apartment with more than a lawn chair and ketchup in the refrigerator… only to have the bank get held up.

You can't make that stuff up.

I was close to suiting up and going to help – old habits die hard, and Miguel had been there for me. I'd do the same.

But, I had faith I had in my fellow Spider-Man. He could handle it, the city was in good hands, and I had my own responsibi- duties to deal with. Ones I could not afford to sweep to the side, as I had so often done in the past.

It was time to go to work, and I stepped through the doors of the building. My building.


I enjoy getting Peter out of that mire of non-growth he's been in for so long. If nothing else, it makes me feel better, and I sincerely hope some people enjoy reading it.

The more he does distance himself from that, the more similar he is to a certain swear-jar frequenting (I'm not)Spider-Man(!)?