FIRE!

A Tale of the Marvel Universe

by DarkMark

Part 8

PARKER

So now you're wondering where I came in, right, kids?

Simple enough. The whole thing caught me flatfooted. I had no idea of what was going on, until well after the thing was underway. And that was too late.

Spider sense? It warns me about immediate danger, young 'uns. Not much good about detecting long-range evil plots of bad guys who were half a city away from me. If it went off at every evil thought within a hundred miles, I'd never have gotten to sleep.

Okay, well...to begin, I'd done my four years in Empire State, and in 1970, several big things happened. First, both me and Gwen graduated. We were wondering what the heck to do right then. She was going to look for a job as a marketer for some of the big fashion chains in the Garment District. I used to kid her about having a Women's Wear Daily chained to her wrist. As for me, I had to decide whether or not to apply for graduate school or to try and get a job. But I got an interview with Stark Enterprises out on Long Island and got in as an apprentice chemist. The pay was darned good. I didn't see Mr. Stark very much, though.

Gwen and I had been dating a long time, but I just hadn't gotten around to popping the question. I guess I was scared to. There was a girl named Betty Brant that came before Gwen...I lost her to another man. I still don't know if the fact that I had to keep a secret, and she seemed to know it, had anything to do with it.

Plus I guess I...well, this is kind of hard to talk about, kids...I had a habit of losing people that mattered to me, except for Aunt May. My parents died before I even got to know them. Then there was Uncle Ben. I still feel the pain of that one, believe it. Especially when I...ah, dammit, I just can't talk about it right now. I'll try and tell you some other time.

It took another death to kind of straighten things out. That smells, but that's the way it was.

Gwen's father, Captain George Stacy, was the one who died. I saw it happen. Couldn't much avoid it. I was fighting Doc Ock back then...that's Dr. Octopus, to you...and I'd made Ock's tentacles go haywire with a couple of gimmicks I planted on him. It was supposed to make him easier to fight, but it didn't quite turn out that way. When not even Octopus can control his own metal tentacles, you had double cause to watch out.

We were fighting on a rooftop, and Ock's arms demolished a chimney. It sent the pieces falling over the side of the building we were fighting on, and most of the rubberneckers below got out of the way.

All except for one kid, who was paralyzed by fear.

Captain Stacy was on the scene. He saw the kid. So did I, but I was too high up to do anything about it. He launched himself at the boy just like he was an Olympic runner...this from a man pushing seventy, and walking with a cane. And he shoved the kid out of the way in time. Saved his life.

But he couldn't save his own.

The bricks from the chimney...they came down right on top of him.

I saw it.

Right then, Doc Ock could go to hell, as far as I was concerned. I jumped down from the top of the building, hooked my web onto the side of it, and swung down so fast I hurt my ankles when I hit. The only thing I could do was dig him out of the rubble. He was busted up pretty badly inside. I could tell. There was a doctor's office in the next building, so I picked him up and walked up the side of the wall with him, figuring it was the quickest way to get him there. Somebody downstairs hollered that I was the one who brought those bricks down, that I was the one who killed him.

But I really didn't give a damn what they thought.

We were on top of the building when Captain Stacy begged me to stop. I didn't know if I'd hurt him or not, picking him up the way I did. But I stopped, and wondered if I should have.

I guess it wouldn't have made any difference.

I still remember what he said. As if I could ever forget it.

He said, "It's Gwen. After I'm gone, there'll be no one to look after her. No one, Peter, except you."

He knew who I was.

He knew that Spider-Man was Peter Parker.

He told me to be good to Gwen, that she loved me very much. And those were the last words George Stacy ever said.

There was nothing left to do except go to the doctor's office, which I did, and have him call the coroner, which he did. I saw the doc's eyes bug out when I swung in. He wasn't used to guys opening his window from the outside while sticking to the building wall. But that wasn't important. I just got the job done, then went home on my webs. I couldn't stick around and answer questions.

Thanks to that, I came under suspicion of murder for a year or so. But they determined that the fault was Octopus's, so I was cleared eventually. Before the eventually, I had to dodge a lot of cops, and a lot of heroes who worked with me had to pretend they hadn't. We did a lot of that, believe me.

In the meantime, I made a life. No. We made a life. Gwen and I. It was a life that, maybe three or four years before, I would never have believed could have happened to Peter Parker. We found love. Both of us, kids...we found love.

It was like...I could riff on this for all night, and never get to a tenth of it. Abandoning the fear of being with someone other than yourself. Getting courage enough to accept somebody else, and hoping they accepted you, and finding out they did and more, and more... My words. They're inadequate. Maybe that's why I was a photographer.

When I was a kid, I was, well, lonely. I'm sure you can relate to that, in a way. If there was anything that looked like an inside, I was outside of it. Whipping boy for the block, jerk target for Flash Thompson and the football guys, dandelion fluff to be brushed off the shoulders of the girls I tried to get. That happens to lots of guys. But when it happens to you, you're the only one in the world it happens to.

It started easing up a bit when I met that wonderful woman, Betty Brant...I'm not scared to call her wonderful, even though I never married her. She was my friend, even my girl, or sort of, for a while. I've told Gwen about these things, and she understands. She even approved. She met Betty, they're friends, and they both agree about certain aspects of my personality. Don't ask which.

Then I went to college, met Gwen...not exactly 'met', more 'encountered'. She hit it off pretty well with Flash Thompson, who'd managed to get a scholarship to ESU at the same time I got mine. Neither of them, nor Harry Osborn, who was a rich kid and part of their clique, had the time of day for me. So how did we all end up being best of friends within a year? Heck if I know. Some things just happen.

Mary Jane Watson happened. She was the cute redhead in the neighborhood, and for awhile it was me and MJ and Harry and Gwen, or sometimes Flash and Gwen. But we did a tradeoff somewhere in there, and Harry got MJ, while I got Gwen. Ms. Stacy started out as a prep queen, all nose in the air and all that. But she got over it. She...thawed. So did I.

What happened to Flash? Well, his grades weren't so good and the 'Nam War was on and he was prime draft bait. Flash wasn't the kind of guy to go to Canada, God bless him. He got his number called and he went and did his job for Uncle Sam. And yeah, he saw action. It changed him. Changed anybody that went over there. I was just lucky I didn't get my ticket pulled. Fighting super-villains is one thing. Killing...that's another.

But by that time we were friends. Why? Because I stood up to him after awhile, and he respected that. He also learned that, like it or not, he wasn't going to be able to play football forever, and he was going to need to find a life to make for himself. And he didn't know what to do, just then. So he went into the Service. If they hadn't called him, I think he would have volunteered anyway. We gave him a big send-off at the Coffee Bean, which was the place in Greenwich where we used to hang. Then we didn't see him for awhile, except when he sometimes got rotated home for awhile on leave.

I asked him, once, what he saw over there. He just got a look that I'd never seen in a football player's eyes, even when they were facing the toughest team in the conference. I didn't have to ask what brought that on. He just told me, "Pete, I'll get back to you on that." He never did, and I never asked him to.

He got lucky. He made it home with all his body parts intact. I knew a few who didn't.

And Harry? Well, I'll tell you about him some other time. I'll get back to you on that. Trust me.

But I was talking about Gwen, and the way it felt to be able to come home to a woman, to somebody in your house who actually loved you...all the problems of putting up with each other, cleaning up after each other, working out the bills, trying to fit all the stuff of two people's lives in a five-room apartment, arguing, reasoning, pleading, then making over each other like bandits...which is something you'll learn about when you join the University of the Gutter, trust me, kids...and knowing you wouldn't trade any bit of it for a seat on the board of Chase Manhattan, or a chance at winning a five billion dollar Lotto. And I'm serious about it.

Love. All our inadequacy of description is summed up in that one lousy word. Love.

And it is gratifying, very much so, to learn that somebody else loves you as well. Especially when you don't think in your wildest that you're the least bit deserving of it.

But Gwen is good at seeing stuff I can't.

So how did she find out about me? Oh, God. You think you can keep that stuff secret when you're married? You can't. Believe me, you can't do it even with spider-sense.

I had to get into the apartment before we had properly moved in, choose a place behind a ceiling panel, make sure it was sufficiently spacious, and stash my Spidey costume up there, along with my darned web-slingers, the belt, the camera, the whole nine yards. Dusty? You don't know the half of it! And when I did that, I had to pray that somehow, my darling blonde five-foot-six doll of a wife wouldn't somehow, someway, be drawn by some instinct I have no inkling of its existence to go to the one ceiling panel that was suspicious, poke it up, and see a red-and-blue uniform up there with a black spider and a whole buncha dust bunnies on the chest. Most likely, she'd get hit by falling web-slingers, too.

The worst part of it was that I felt bad about keeping things from her. But, hell, we were just starting out. How do you tell your new bride that you've been risking your life for years, swinging off tall buildings, dusting your pink little knuckles off the jaws of Kraven the Hunter and the Sandman and the Vulture? She might not have liked it even if I'd told her about meeting Dr. Doom.

Oh, yes, I did meet him, kiddies, and he almost killed me. That's for another time. Let me get through this, okay?

I found out in short order that it wasn't going to be the way it was when I lived in Forest Hills. Then, when I wanted to go out for a swingdown down uptown, just to clear out the cobwebs...that's a joke, son...I could tell Aunt May or, later, Harry Osborn that I was just going out for some air. They assumed I meant a walk. I didn't elaborate.

But now that I was married, life was like, well, work and home with Gwen. Plus some outings on the weekends seeing Aunt May, or some of the old friends, or a few of the new friends we were making at Stark. Most of it, though, was just getting acclimated to one another. That takes time, and when it does, you have to let a lot of the old stuff go hang. Such as web-slinging.

It got so bad, J. Jonah himself posted a big banner headline on his rag, The Daily Bugle: WHERE IS SPIDER-MAN? He claimed that I was in hiding, either too chicken to show up and catch crooks anymore, or planning some big bad evil thing to do to the city. Like maybe web shut all the pay toilets in town, or something. A couple years back, I would have busted into his office, webbed him to the ceiling by the seat of his pants, and left. I did that more than once.

But I didn't do that anymore. I was happy. Happier, anyway, than I'd been for most of my life.

And I was wondering if, somewhere along the line, something would take all that happiness away. Just like that.

Gwen saw me like that sometimes, and held my hand and asked me what was wrong. I told her some of it, told her that since losing Uncle Ben, I was scared of losing things. So I held her even harder and told her I never, ever, ever intended to lose her. She held me back and said she never intended to get lost. And that was good.

But there were times when I'd be watching TV with her, and they'd break in to the Bob Hope Special or something with a special bulletin. The camera guys would be out, panning on some crazy super-hero fight. Lots of times they couldn't recognize the parties involved, but I usually knew them, unless it was some new guy trying to make a name for himself. I'd really sit up and study the screen when those came on. Gwen asked why, and I just told her what she knew: that I'd made a lot of money from the Bugle by taking pictures of Spider-Man, and that sort of stuff interested me. She gave me a curious look. I kept my peace, as much as I could.

And I wondered if something bad was going to happen, because I wasn't out there.

Because I knew what had happened when I hadn't stopped a burglar from making it to an elevator, one time.

It was five months on into the marriage when I started going out for air. When I did, it was like I'd never left off. I cut loose with the biggest display of nighttime webrobatics the Apple had seen in years. I put on a show around the Chrysler Building they're still talking about. I went down and stuffed a bunch of guys holding up a liquor store into three individual garbage cans, and webbed 'em face-down. Just for fun, I took a 13-year-old kid for a jumping ride aboard my back and made it across one of the biggest intersections downtown in just three jumps. I made him promise not to tell.

At the end, I swung down by the Bugle building and left 'em a little message in webs on the front wall: SPIDEY'S BACK. They got a bunch of good shots of it before the hour was up and it dissolved. I think I could hear Jonah Jameson yelling for five blocks. That way, I knew he was happy.

I didn't know for how long I'd be back. I just knew that I felt like me again, holding onto a long string of webbing, shooting out another to a building across the street and swinging on that, making like Tarzan all across town, with the wind in my face and the lights close-up and the rubberneckers downstairs pointing up and calling my name and probably calling a bunch of other names as well. I was hoping I'd see Thor or Daredevil or Iron Man or even the Human Torch somewhere along the way, and get to wave hi or something, at least. But, nope, it was just me that night.

I was Spider-Man again.

And I loved it.

No super-villains that night, no Mysterio or Rhino or Shocker or Kingpin. But that was all right. Being Spidey wasn't always about villains. Lots of times it was just about being in the wind.

But only Spider-Man would know about that.

There was one other thing I found out about, when I swung past a big clock.

I'd been gone over four hours.

You think there aren't things scarier than Dr. Doom? Try imagining what your wife is going to say when you've been AWOL all that time, and you'd have to tell her, "Um, dear, I've been swinging on my web around the Chrysler Building, several hundred feet above the ground. Oh, yeah, and there was this bunch of punks I nabbed trying to heist a liquor store, and I gave a kid a ride across the street and webbed the front of the Bugle Building. Other than that, nothing much."

I can get around places pretty quickly. But, even with my kind of speed, it does take time to get from downtown Manhattan to where we were living. I never was Superman. Plus I had to get changed into my civvies, make my way around to our apartment building, hoping that nobody had seen...my spider-sense was good about tipping me off to stuff like that...and then take the elevator up, and, worst of all, unlock the front door and open it.

Gwen was there as soon as I'd opened it. She gave me the worst sentence I'd ever heard from her: "Peter, where have you been?"

She was looking at me with eyes that had all the pain in the world, and they were doing a great job of reflecting that pain right back at me. She was standing there in a pair of jeans and a blouse and her hair wasn't even styled right, and I can tell you, kids, she took a lot of pride in her hair. She wasn't wearing her shoes and the TV was on and a couple of pop cans were open, one of them on the carpet, and she had never done that. She was neat. But that night, she had done it. There was also a half-eaten bowl of mac 'n' cheese on the table, and I didn't even want to contemplate what signals it signified. I knew them already.

What was she saying to me?

Peter, how could you have left me this long?

How could you have been gone four hours without even calling?

What were you doing out there, without letting me know, when we've only been married this short a time?

And, yes, I have to say it. There's always that implied question, when something like that comes down:

Were you out with another woman?

I don't think I smiled. I don't think I would have dared smile, at that time, not even to try and blunt things with a joke. I told her, "I was catching air, Gwen, and I just lost track. You know how it is. I've been kept inside a lab or this place for so long, I just had to do some walking. You know. That's all, just walking."

She stared at me and said, "You catch air for four hours and you don't even call me?"

I told her I was sorry, and she said, "You're more than that, Peter. What were you doing out there? What were you really, really doing?"

I sighed and put my hands on her shoulders and she moved away, back into the apartment. I said, "Darling, let me in. I'll try and tell you. There isn't that much to tell."

She said, "There is. If you tell everything."

I said, "There isn't everything to tell. I was just out, honey, and it took awhile for me to know how long it'd been. My feet went off without permission."

She looked at me and said, "Are you sure it was just your feet?"

I managed to get inside and shut the door. I locked it and said, "Gwen, I resent that implication."

She wasn't quite near me, and she looked like she both wanted to and didn't want to be any closer. "And does it matter what I resent, Peter? Does it matter that I've been worried about where you've gone?"

"Gwen, it was only four hours."

"It was only four hours while you never called me or let me know what happened or anything. Peter, a walk around the neighborhood doesn't take four hours. If you met somebody or had something to do, I would have expected a call from you. It's not like..." She couldn't quite answer, right then.

So I said, "It's not like what, Gwen?"

She said, "It's not like we've been married a long time. It's not like I can get used to this sort of thing."

I said, "I'm sorry, Gwen, and I know how inadequate that sounds. Believe me, I was not doing anything I shouldn't...well, I don't think I was, anyway." That was meant as a joke, and it was as bad a mistake as ordering sliced ham for a bar mitzvah.

We said some other things. A lot of other things. I don't think we were being nasty, kids, but we did manage to hurt each other, not even wanting to, but in the kind of way that you make your partner know that you want them to feel your pain. And we did. That was the hell of it. You can't avoid feeling her pain, or her yours. Sometimes, I think that's the real reason why people get divorced: they have all they can do just being responsible for their own pain, not somebody else's.

I was wondering if the walls were adequately insulated enough to keep people on the other sides from hearing us, but it didn't matter, because we were in this thing to the end. She was crying and I was trying to touch her and she didn't want me to, and then she had her head on my shoulder and she was saying something of what she really meant: that she'd lost her mother a long time ago and she'd lost her dad a year ago and if she was going to lose me, she wanted it to be now or never at all, because she didn't think she could take losing that much anymore. She had been hoping for some gains, but now it just looked like another loss.

And that's when I turned the corner.

I pushed her away from me gently, still looking at her, and knew just what I had to say and do.

I said, "I know all about your father's death, Gwen. I know. I was there."

She couldn't say anything. She was still teary-eyed, but her mouth was open, and she must have been telepathing questions to me. I was receiving them all loud and clear.

"I was there, Gwen," I said. "And while I was there, I was wearing this."

That's when I tore open my shirt.

I think she almost fainted then. I reached out to take hold of her, kept her upright, but I didn't hug her just yet. I wanted her to see what she had to.

She had to see that blue-and-red shirt with the web pattern and the spider on the chest.

I was rushing in there with words, getting there before her questions could. "I tried to save him, Gwen, but even I couldn't do it. I tried. I saw it all. He saved a child, Gwen. He gave his life to save a kid."

She was beating on me with both fists and yelling, "Stop it! Stop it!" over and over again. She was screaming. But I had to run the gauntlet. Didn't really have a choice.

I took her by the arms and maybe I had to use a little of the old spider-strength to do it. But that wasn't what turned the trick.

I told her, "I can't stop it. Because the last thing he told me, Gwen, before he died, was that he loved you very much, and when he was gone, there'd be nobody to look after you. Nobody but me. Nobody but me, Gwen. Nobody but me."

That stopped her.

I told her I'd promised George Stacy to do just that thing, even though I'm not sure he heard me when I did it. That I was never going to stop doing it. And that he said one thing more: that he knew she loved me.

And about a second later, she was holding me so tightly that I don't think a grip that could have kept Kraven the Hunter at bay would have done any good against her just then. She was crying, but in a different sort of tone. It was the right kind of tone, at last.

I don't think she was alone, either.

The next thing I remember, kids, was that both of us were sitting on the floor. We had our arms around each other, and I think we were both still kind of trembly. As a matter of fact, I know we were.

We got around to talking about a lot of things that night. I told her how I'd become the Spider-Man, all about the radioactive spider and the burglar and my Uncle Ben, and she felt even sorrier for me than she had before. I told her how I'd made the web-shooters and how some of my powers worked. The bit is, Gwen had met Spider-Man, too. I'd saved her and her father once from the Kingpin. She'd seen me before then, when I had to keep Kraven from kidnapping Harry Osborn. Like it or not, most of my friends did get drawn, one by one, into the web of Spider-Man at one time or another. So she knew, finally, why what had happened to her had happened.

There had also been a time in which I'd gotten kind of addled by a virus and had walked in on her, her dad, Harry, and MJ, and had told them I was Spider-Man. Later on, I passed it off as me having a delusion. I have a feeling Gwen was wishing a little bit that I was still delusional.

She was saying, "I am having such a hard time dealing with this, Peter. I'm having such a hard time, getting my mind around it. I, I just don't know what to do with it."

I said, "That's not the problem, Gwen. The problem is: what do we do with us?"

She said, "I've got to know for sure, Peter. I believe you, but I want to see it with my own eyes."

So I stood up, took off the rest of my civvies, put on my mask and gloves, did a standing somersault, and landed with my feet sticking to the ceiling. I don't know if anybody called the super, but I never heard from him if they did. I sprayed webbing on a Monet print on the wall, and told her the stuff would dissolve in an hour with no muss, no fuss. Then I walked across the ceiling and held out both my hands, upside-down to her.

She took them.

I asked her, "Are we still together, Gwen? Your call."

She sighed and said, "We're still together, Peter. As far as...I won't say this doesn't change things. It has to. But I still want you. I still can't see anyone whom I could love as much as I love you. Even if...even if I've just found out I'm the wife of Spider-Man."

That's when I grabbed her, turned her as upside-down as I was, and hugged her tight. Her hair was hanging down towards the floor, but I don't think either one of us minded.

Later on, she asked what I intended to do about Spider-Man. I said, "I don't know that I intend to do anything about Spider-Man. I just know that I like cutting loose and swinging all over the city, every once in awhile. Like tonight."

She nodded...we were in bed by then...and said what was really on her mind. "You have to fight people," she said.

"Sometimes," I said.

"People with super-powers. People who are trying to kill you."

"Lots of times," I said. "And they haven't done it yet."

She put her hand on mine and said, "But they might, Peter. Everybody's only got so many chances, and if you keep doing this, you'll finally come to your last one."

"And if I don't," I said, "I'll come to another guy who I should have stopped before he could get in an elevator, and then go murder somebody. Or some other guy who might be waiting to drop a chimney on an innocent man."

She shivered, and I didn't blame her. "I don't want to hear about great power and great responsibility again, Peter. All I know is that I want you alive, and here with me. I don't want to have to see a news show of, of Spider-Man fighting the Sandman, and knowing its my husband out there almost getting beaten to death."

I sort of spread my hands. "What can I say, Gwen? There's only so many of us out there, and a lot more of them. If Spidey hadn't been around sometimes, a lot of people would have been in a lot of trouble. Dead, sometimes, even. Including you."

"Yes," she said. "Including me. But there's something more, Peter. Something more than that."

I could get the drift from her tone. But you can tell when a woman wants you to ask "What?". So I did.

"I'm pregnant, Peter. We're going to have a baby."

At that, I said, "Hoo boy," and "That's great!", more or less at the same time. And I don't remember really anything else I said after that, until I fell asleep.

I didn't quit being Spidey. But I did cut down. Way down. And, some months after our little conversation, I did deliver Gwen to the hospital...in a cab, not on a webline...and she blessed us with a little girl we named May.

Okay. That's enough stage-setting, kids.

Are you ready?

Because now we get to tell you about the Fire.

To be continued...