Now
Peter Parker had a harem.
No. The symbiote had a harem. Peter just came along for the ride.
Yang Xiao Long lay beneath him, her sublime body perspiring with a sheen of sweat. Her leg was propped over his shoulder as he thrust inside her. Blake Belladonna curled to Yang's left, catatonic from all the attention Peter gave her. Cat ears folded, fluttering intermittently. Weiss lay on her back to Yang's right, a slender, snowy arm covering her eyes. Yang arched her back as Peter pushed and planted his seed inside of her. He pulled out. Like the others, cum leaked between her legs. Yang regarded him, a smoldering look adorning her face, drool lining her chin.
As rivulets of sweat soaked his back and chest, as he heaved for breath, and as he rested from running a marathon, Peter observed his women with satisfaction. They would bear his children. No, the symbiote's children. Peter lamented that he had fallen to its will, that the symbiote had also dragged the women into this burning, lustful hell, and hated that they would usher in the race that would supplant humanity and faunuskind.
And Peter hated most of all that he didn't care one bit.
So much for Uncle Ben's motto.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Alas, he wouldn't be the one to fulfill this vocation.
Then
Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider the same night he stepped on a puddle of goop that clung to his left shoe. That was two years ago.
"Aunt May," he said, "I'm not sure about this."
Wind swept the emerald landscape. Sunlight shone over the clear blue sky. Migrating birds journeying southeast cheeped overhead in acknowledgement of his deliberation. He dug his hands in his jacket's pocket, his sneaker snapping a twig underfoot. He read the tombstone.
'HERE LAY MAYBELLE PARKER, MAY THE BROTHERS GIVE HER REST.'
She always believed in the gods.
"I know," Peter said, responding to a chastisement only he could hear. "I'm sorry. I'll make up for it."
She had been killed by a villain he had let go.
Thou shall not kill, claimed the good few. Easy to say, hard to do.
Peter Parker was a dropout. He had spent the first two years playing hero, and only after sparing the man who would go on to kill Uncle Ben and Aunt May did he finally have a reality check.
He was broke. Everything they owned was burned in a fire. Even Uncle Ben's corpse was desecrated. Nothing lay in the casket buried next to Aunt May's.
The next day, his family's killer hung on a web noose stuck to the statue of Saint Elaise Arc's starburst Sword of Light.
Then
"Hey, webhead," Felicia Hardy said. She was a Schnee, on her mother's side, which came with snow white hair. Hereditary, apparently. She was a faunus, her retractable claws a benefit. No one other than Peter knew her faunus nature. She wasn't ready to tell her friends the truth.
Or so she claimed.
Truth be told, he thought she was just a cat burglar. "Hey, black cat," Peter said.
She sat beside him on the bench, hooking a slender arm over his shoulder, dragging him into a one-armed hug. She was his best friend. They tried dating once. It was miserable. The sex was nice, but the strings attached to it weren't. So they cut the strings. Now they were just-
"Why's my BFFWB sad?" she asked.
Peter scowled at her. She cackled, enjoying his petulance.
Best friends fucking with benefits was a stupid, redundant mouthful. The benefits already implied the sex. Why did she have to add the f?
Truth be told, they'd probably get married if they don't find anyone else. The love… wasn't like what he felt for Gwen Stacy, or how she felt for that unnamed lover of hers she refused to talk about.
But it was something.
"Do best friends who love each other platonically and just so happen to enjoy sex share the same relationship as true lovers?" Peter had asked her exactly once. She never stopped laughing about it.
A white glyph with patterns reminiscent of snowflakes shone beneath her feet. Peter shivered. Snow crusted his shoe. That's a new one. "Are you using Dust?"
Felicia beamed. "Glad you noticed. Cuz' Winter sent me three briefcases' worth as a birthday gift from her and Whitley and Weiss." Felicia sighed. "We both know it came out of her own pocket and without her siblings' knowledge, but it's polite fiction so whatevs."
Felicia went on and on about her cousins to the point Peter had a good grasp on them from description alone. Winter was strict, most of all upon herself. Weiss was a good singer, an even better fencer, and the best hotheaded debater on Remnant. Whitley was shy, kind, but now had his heart frozen and entombed in a glacier after several years with their father. It needed thawing, Felicia lamented, and only her visits ever soothed his soul.
Jacques Schnee was probably a good businessman, but not a worthwhile father if Felicia was to be believed.
He was a cool uncle though. Peter felt conflicted just thinking about him. Thankfully, Felicia changed the subject. "So… Saint Elaise. Poetic justice?"
"I don't want to talk about it," he said glumly.
Without missing a beat, she changed the subject. "Rhino and scorpion are doing a job later. Wanted to ask if you're in."
Felicia didn't know Peter wasn't a faunus. She mistook his webs as something he produced naturally, instead of a supernatural power unrelated to aura. Aleksei 'Rhino' Sytsevich and MacDonald 'Scorpion' Gargan were two faunus that when shown his traits mistook it the same way.
"What's the job?" Peter asked. Ale and Gar were hustlers. They were dropouts like him, with their faunus features unhidable unlike Felicia's, and thus had to do all sorts of ad-hoc work on the streets typically in courtesy of the White Fang or other faunus sympathetic organizations.
The White Fang made him grimace. A terrorist group that sometimes helped his friends...
Gah. Why did the world have to be so complicated? Things were much simpler when everything was black and white.
He missed being Spider-Man.
Then
Ale was a seven feet behemoth with a rhino horn protruding from his forehead. He sat on a workout bench lifting dumbbells. Five yards behind him Gar sat atop a steel horizontal ladder, sipping from a bottle of soda, his emerald scorpion tale dancing to music on his wireless earpiece. The gym was faunus owned, in the mean streets of Vale officially called the Laszlo, with the sobriquet of Grimm's Rump.
Peter and Felicia were by a dingy whitewashed table arguing over the job.
"Felicia, I am not stealing from anyone," Peter said, laying his half eaten cheeseburger on the tabletop resolutely. "We agreed on this. You stop stealing too, and I stop busting you. Remember your cat burgling days in that dominatrix outfit?"
"Like your red and blue was any better," she said, scoffing, nibbling on a fry. It was a crispy, batonnet cut potato oozing oil enough to drown a fat man in diabetes and high blood pressure and even a heart attack, Dark God willing. "For Gods' sake, Pete, chill."
"I'm just saying," he said. "Just because we'll be beating up some thugs doesn't mean we should take their stuff. It isn't right." Peter had once tried selling photos of his alternate self on places like the Daily Bugle. No one bought his shit and when his Uncle lost his job Peter had to do the triple F.
Find Funds Fast.
Also: Fuck, FUCK, FUCK.
If he was going to go superhero, might as well get paid while he was at it. He could have gone pro huntsman, but time was short and he didn't want to waste a second in school where he could be earning a lien instead.
"Gotta hand it to you, Pete." Ale groaned, setting the dumbbells aside and picked up the towel Felicia draped on his shoulder when they came by earlier. "Only you could make a moral dilemma on a job preconditioning battery and assault."
"Big words," Gar said cheekily.
"Someone checked their dictionary," Felicia added playfully.
"So Ale," Peter said, pointing a finger at him. "Which lawyer have you been hanging out with on your precious jail times?"
Ale flustered. "Fuck off, all of you."
"Returning to the topic," Felicia said, "Ale's got a point. These are corrupt cops. They're on a crook's payroll, and they harass faunus. Since what we're doing is illegal anyway, why be obstinate and not purloin their stuff?"
Peter once had to look up the meaning of 'purloin'. Felicia might be unaware of it, but due to her Schnee upbringing she sometimes fell back on her more in-depth mellifluence.
"Damn," said silverfox Peter Maximoff as he dashed into the room. Silver luster always trailed after him. He was a lean, silver haired man with tod eyes, a cocky grin and a mean looking gray metal gauntlet. His speed semblance was so overpowered the only reason Peter Parker won their first fight was due to his guile and multitude of powers including enhanced durability, his webs, and his spider sense.
Like Felicia, Maximoff easily blended with the human populace and avoided most of the discrimination Ale and Gar experienced. "What's our fearless leader going on about now?"
"Finally," Felicia said. "The Peters are here. We only need one on the job for the group to get paid. Wanna earn some lien?"
"Beep!" Maximoff crossed his forearms into an X. "I'm not a liar. I gave Parker my word when he kicked my ass and I'll always be on his side. What are y'all arguing about?"
Felicia groaned. "Oooh," she drawled. "Why did the two strongest people on our team be both a bunch of pussies?"
"They share names too," Gar said, crushing his cup, "the bastards."
Maximoff cackled. "Like fucking hell you're gonna bait me with that low level trash talk, Fel. Try harder and I might give a shit."
Peter updated Maximoff and watched his name-twin (curse you, Felicia) whistle appreciatively.
"I'll do it on my own, if ya like," Maximoff offered.
Peter considered Maximoff his third arm, due to how devoted the speedster was to him. Nonetheless, he wasn't one to abuse such trust and loyalty. "Felicia's right," Peter said. "We are the strongest members here. Only one of us is needed to safety net the job."
And he wanted some stress relief.
Some people were more secretive than others. Felicia for one hides her claws. Maximoff is open about his tod eyes. Peter hadn't told them he was Spider-Man, precluding Felicia, and he hadn't told them about his dead family either.
Gods be willing, he wouldn't have to.
Then
His spider sense combined with the symbiote enhanced it to something akin to echolocation and radar. Even in the darkness, with his eyes closed, his mind drew the environment in white webs against a black backdrop with him at its center. It had a short ambit, expanding where he focused, but maintained its protection on him.
This way he could further pretend he was a faunus.
Not that he ever is.
Their night visions and his spider sense: radar mode made traversing the dark roadway relatively easy. Disabled streetlights swelled like a drawing ahead of him and vanished behind him in his midnight stroll. From cracks overtop to strewn pebbles and drifting leaves the radar drew it all in detail worthy of an artist's museum. Felicia pretended to be human, holding his hand as he 'guided' her in the dark.
"We should unlock every faunus' aura," Maximoff suggested.
"No," Peter said. "Remember the Juggernaut Incident."
A human with no training and no affluence, his aura unlocked, became the second greatest enemy to humanity and faunuskind only after the Grimm. The combination of malice and semblance made him an unrepentant monster only slightly less than the Grimm because he hadn't acquired a generational worth of bodycount.
Peter and friends wore casual clothes. Jackets, jeans, and running shoes. Not that anyone would stop them, but if ever police officers did Maximoff would run interference and ensure the job's success. A single Peter was enough to finish the job. Two of them, well, the targets didn't have a shot.
The targets were cops. Eis Chalkwhite and Lias Pinkman. Color War names. Chalkwhite and Pinkman frequented an underground gambling den owned by an associate of Junior Xiong callsigned Fatboy Fisk. Fisk was a successful huntsman who Peter knew profited from crime. If he had committed any, however, it wouldn't be prosecuted under the court of law.
Peter had tried to take him down directly after incapacitating the hitmen he paid to terminate Spider-Man. Not only did the police attempt Peter's arrest, Fisk didn't spend a single night in jail, bailed out by his friend in the council.
The motherfucker.
Fortunately, Fisk didn't know Peter Parker was Spider-Man.
Peter and his friends stopped inside an alleymouth a klick from Fisk's gambling den. They extracted balaclavas and put them over their faces. Ale and Gar, due to their distinctive rhino horn and scorpion tail, Ale and Gar would remain in the sport utility vehicle one hundred meters from Peter's location. Ale and Gar had apps pinpointing Peter's scroll and he had one pinpointing theirs. Made it easier to find each other. He checked his scroll. Clicked the app. Opened a map. Two pulsing dots call-signed Rhino and Scorpion unveiled the street they were on: Fergerson, near a burger joint and a strip club.
"Cat," Peter called Felicia's sobriquet, "have you done a thorough background check on these targets?"
"Yes," she said confidently. "These pricks have done a lot of dirty shit. I even brought the evidence in my scroll and can corroborate it with stuff I've stolen from their apartments. Inadmissible in court, but eh." She shrugged. One of her purloined evidence was a dagger with the blood of a faunus that went missing a few weeks back. Allegedly evidence taken from the scene of the crime Chalkwhite kept for himself. If he had used it, the fingerprints had been wiped. Not that it mattered. Cops looked after their own.
"Quicksilver," Peter said. Maximoff gave a nod. "You take care of the surprises. Have the SUV ready. Cat, disable Fatboy's generators. I'll capture the targets."
Ever since Peter killed his first victim, he had felt a sense of relief. Weight lifted off his shoulders. He hadn't become a monster like Aunt May said. He was still himself. And if he killed the monsters within the kingdom as the huntsmen and huntresses killed the Grimm without, then all the better to protect the victims Vale couldn't save on its own.
Yes, the symbiote encouraged, kill them all.
Then
Peter didn't know how Felicia disabled the generators. But when she set the building on fire, he knew Fisk was going to be an angry man. Black smoke belched from the windows plumed skyward. Orange firelight lighted the darkened sector of Vale courtesy of Maximoff. He was scary. His semblance was too strong. Peter was fortunate to have him as good, if quirky, friend and ally.
Peter knew what came next. He sat on the backseat of Chalkwhite's cadillac when the two dirty cops hastily boarded their vehicle. Chalkwhite sat on the driver's seat, Pinkman on the passenger seat beside him. They knew the flaming den disgorging criminals and other assholes would draw Vale's Finest's attention and they wanted to be out of there before their colleagues had to turn a blind eye to these naughty pricks.
Chalkwhite's semblance turned his skin, well, chalk white. Pinkman's fingers always glowed with dormant energy he could expel into copious amounts of flames. He wore a fucking sunglasses in the middle of the night.
He waited until they were two klicks away from the raging inferno and the more raging Wilson Fisk glaring at his den aflame. Peter's scroll had a text-to-speech device he used to type a word the app voiced in a bland monotone. "Boo."
The men flinched. "Gods!" Chalkwhite swore. Pinkman turned behind him with his fingers raised, embers charging into fireballs. Peter ducked under the searing strike. It blasted the rear windshield into the roadway. Peter backhanded Pinkman's fingers, causing the next fireball to hit where it was aimed. Chalkwhite was set ablaze. His aura, a dull glow, absorbed the initial conflagration. Fire licked away at his aura. His own semblance, defensive in nature, unleashed a chalk white reflection of his semblance. Pinkman didn't possess control over fire. He could only create it. A chalk white fireball blasted him and he screamed. Blinded, the men crashed into a tanker. Fortunately, the tanker was carrying only water, which when its tank was perforated drenched the flaming vehicle, wetting the men.
Peter had already leapt out of the window after the backhand, slinging a web over a ledge, swinging above the street, webbing the truck driver out of his truck onto the sidewalk, then vaulting over and on the rooftop. He crouched there, watching the burned men flail in the water.
One day these punks would get their dues.
But until then, Peter Parker could make use of them.
Now
The gasping, perspiring, thoroughly rutted Yang joined Blake and Weiss in slumber. Peter sat on the bed near his lovers' feet, checking his scroll. He observed the gallery, stopping at one picture. It was the man who killed Aunt May and Uncle Ben, hanging from a noose of web stuck to Saint Elaise's starburst sword.
Peter called Pinkman. "Have you found him yet?"
"Not yet, boss," Pinkman stammered.
"I didn't give you a spot in the council to waste my fucking time." Peter growled. "Find Dennis Carradine's killer."
Whoever the hell killed Dennis Carradine attempted setting Spider-Man up with a web identical to his own. When Peter got his hands on Dennis Carradine's killer's neck he would snap it like a twig. Until then, he would have to wait.
He hung up and returned to his sow. Crawling over Weiss, he began sowing, coaxing gasps, her slender leg he set over his shoulder, the other curling on the mattress, and admired her writhing opulence.