Disclaimer haiku:
Swingin' Spidey is
All Marvel; Psycho is all
Mattel. And so on.

Bonus disclaimer: This is SO not my fault. I mean, yes, I wrote it, and the plot is largely a product of my own twisted little imagination, but I would never, never, never have had the idea on my own, which means ultimate blame (and/or credit) must lie with my dear buddy Alhazred. He dared me to write this! I had no choice!

Notes: If you've never seen an episode of Max Steel, it's cool; you don't need to be drowning in Max continuity to understand this. However, you do need to be familiar with the first Spidey movie.

In addition to the madness of the central premise, I built this fic around one specific nostalgia-inspired scene. Therefore, the 80's nostalgia-love flies thick and fast. Be warned. Be afraid. Be on the lookout for references to movies and cartoons. :)

So, if he ignored the fact that his best friend wanted to kill his alter ego, and he could barely even talk to the girl of his dreams for her own protection, and he had the world's most abusive boss, and his aunt was struggling to make ends meet, and people shot at him (with bullets both literal and metaphorical) every day - ignoring all that, Peter Parker thought his life was going pretty good.

But then, it was hard to feel depressed when you were thirty stories up and swinging on a single thin line of organic goo that could, theoretically, snap at any time. No, that was no time to be depressed.

Spider-Man executed a flip and changed to a new webline - freefalling at least five stories as he did - to get a better angle on the corner he'd be turning in just a few seconds. A distinct lack of traffic was just one of the many perks of being a bonafide superhero, although sometimes he supposed he'd trade it for a nice 401(k) plan.

His ears were still ringing from the tirade he'd been given at the Daily Bugle, which was, sad to say, just the latest in a long, long, long line. J. Jonah Jameson, editor and the aforementioned abusive boss, had pronounced Peter's latest batch of Spidey photos "barely usable" - high praise indeed - and then tossed a file folder at him and barked, "There you go, kid."

Peter had leafed through the assignment folder with the trepidation of someone who knew there was an explosive device buried within. In it he'd found a press pass, a few sheets of typed paper that he didn't bother to read, and a clipping from the Bugle itself about some concert. "Sir?" he'd asked, already anticipating the response.

"You have a problem with getting an assignment, Parker? You have a problem with me giving you a chance to suck more money out of my paper?"

"Uh - no, sir," he'd stammered. "It's just that this isn't - uh, not my usual, uh..."

"Diversity," JJ had boomed, waving his cigar around like a flag. "It's no good to focus on just one thing. Someday Spider-Man's going to be old news, and so will you. You need to diversify, start taking other assignments."

"Okay," Peter had said, not quite sure about this wildly uncharacteristic helpfulness. "Uh - thank you."

"Don't stand around thanking me - go take some photos!"

Peter had not been surprised to learn from Betty, JJ's secretary, that the Bugle's other notable freelance photographer had refused the job. Eddie Brock had seniority, so he could do things like that and walk away to tell about it, whereas Peter was still hanging onto the bottom rung for dear life and didn't dare to even dream of refusing the boss.

He was just itching for another opportunity to web JJ's mouth shut.

The sun was edging towards the horizon and the glare flashed in Spider-Man's eyes for a second as he dropped down to a convenient rooftop and thence to an even more convenient alley. A quick-change back into civilian clothes - courtesy of the web-spun backpack he'd been schlepping around since leaving the Bugle - and then Peter emerged onto the street, looking as normal as normal could be.

He didn't entirely want to be going where he was going, which was to visit Harry. Harry had moved into his father's mansion after Norman's funeral; Peter, for his part, had gone back to live with Aunt May, who he felt needed his company more. And besides, putting on a costume and fighting crime was arguably something only a crazy person would do, but sharing an apartment with someone who had sworn to kill Spider-Man would have been a little too crazy.

But he couldn't completely abandon Harry, not without betraying all the principles of friendship that he had, so every chance he got, Peter made the trip uptown to drop in on his former roommate. At least Harry had gotten a little less weird about life when he found out Peter wasn't dating Mary Jane.

Today, after being waved through security and riding up the endlessly boring elevator - not nearly as much fun as scaling the building would've been - Peter found himself wandering around an apparently empty house. Not even the butler was around.

"Harry?" he called out, shutting the door behind him.

It had been a huge, creepy place when Norman Osborn had lived there, what with the heavy, dark wood and the collection of exotic masks, and Harry hadn't done anything to make it less so. In fact, he'd added to the general haunted-house feel by keeping most of the drapes shut all day. Peter had no desire to be there by himself, and not only because he'd once carried a dead man into one of the rooms.

But Harry appeared on the second-floor landing, phone tucked under one ear and gesturing for Peter to come up.

Peter made sure his Spidey costume wasn't showing and headed up the stairs, into the room that had been Norman Osborn's home office and was now Harry's.

"-don't care if it's his head on a pike," Harry was saying to whoever was on the phone. "You have until Friday to get some results."

Peter raised his eyebrows to say, "What's up?"

Harry rolled his eyes and mouthed 'business' before returning to the phone conversation with a frown that made him look a lot like his father. "No, Friday. The deadline is not negotiatable. If you're getting paid by the day, I want it done in under a week. Are we clear?"

Running what was left of Oscorp had more or less consumed Harry's life. It was another reason that Peter didn't really enjoy these visits; the phone was always ringing and faxes were always coming in, to say nothing of the barrage of emails and other correspondence. Harry joked that he needed another secretary but couldn't afford one.

Peter thought the resemblance to Norman Osborn was starting to go a lot further than the frowns.

The phone call ended and Harry hung up with a melodramatic sigh. "I hate outside contracts. Oh, don't get comfortable - I've got a meeting in about five minutes."

"Gee, you could've told me before I hiked all the way out here," Peter said, genuinely annoyed beneath his joking tone.

"Sorry. What's that?" Harry asked, pointing at him with no air of remorse whatsoever.

It took Peter a heart-stopping moment to figure out what Harry was talking about, and then he realized it was the file folder sticking out of his jacket, and not a stray patch of webbed red cloth. "Oh. My next assignment." He pulled it out and handed it to Harry. "Jameson says I need to 'diversify.' In other words, the rest of the good photographers turned it down."

Harry nodded, flipping through the folder with superficial interest. "Hey, this is the concert Oscorp is sponsoring."

Now that was news to Peter, but somehow, he wasn't too surprised. His life had a way of twisting back and around on itself. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. That's who I'm meeting, one of the other sponsors. The PR guys kept saying we needed something else now that the World Unity Festival is kaput, so I figured, what the hell, it's for a good cause." Harry shrugged and handed the folder back to Peter, who knew that the Festival had been forever banned from the good city of New York because Harry's father had blown up several important sections of the surrounding buildings. Harry knew it too - just not the part about his father being involved.

The phone rang, forestalling any response Peter might have made, and Harry picked it up with another sigh. After a few seconds, he said, "Uh-huh. Send her up." He'd no sooner hung up on that one than the phone rang again.

Somewhat gratefully, Peter took that as his cue to leave and started for the stairs, giving Harry a brief farewell wave. A blonde woman in a business suit was getting off the elevator as he got on; the co-sponsor, no doubt. She flashed him a smile that was almost as bright as the gleaming red stars dangling from her ears.

And then he was riding back down, leaving the depressing, gloom-stricken Osborn mansion behind and wondering what Aunt May was making for dinner.