Mayday's Hero
Part III of V
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fanfiction, so the characters and concepts are all borrowed from other people (mainly Marvel, a little from the movies). I'm not keeping anything for myself, and I'm not making any money off of this story either.
A/N: You'll probably figure it out on your own, but you might like to know in advance that this chapter tells the story first from Mayday's POV and then from Peter's.
Mayday found herself climbing on the monkey bars after school as usual with Travis the next day. Faced with the daunting prospect of no one to play with during morning recess, she'd decided pragmatically that she simply couldn't stay mad at Travis. He was always annoying whether he wanted to be or not, and he probably hadn't meant anything by his Santa Claus comment after all. Besides, he was fun to hang out with. So she'd asked him casually while they were lining up for morning assembly if he still wanted to play Spider-Man with her, he'd said "Sure," and that was that.
Janeen, however, was another matter. Mayday had thought her face looked pinched and unhappy all day, but, despite catching her eye many times, Janeen made no overtures in her direction, and Mayday decided that if Janeen didn't apologize for being a traitor, then she wouldn't be friendly to her either. Now Janeen was sort of hanging around near the monkey bars too, appearing rather forlorn as she pretended to play hopskotch by herself, but Mayday hardened her heart and looked the other way.
Today Travis and Mayday were climbing as quickly as they could to see who could get to the top of the monkey bars first. Whoever won the race would get the prize of being the masked superhero in their game.
"I'm Spider-Man!" announced Travis predictably, even though he was nowhere near the top yet. It was just like him to try to change the rules as soon as he noticed that he wasn't winning. Mayday opened her lips to disagree vociferously, and then observed that Janeen was listening to them, probably hoping that they'd get into a fight and stop playing. Keeping one eye on her former best friend, Mayday decided she'd better let Travis have his way, even though he nearly always got to be Spider-Man when they played.
"If you're Spider-Man, then I get to be a supervillain," said Mayday agreeably. She was further up the side of the dome than Travis. At least she'd win the race.
"Deal," conceded Travis, giving her a wide gap-toothed grin through the monkey bars. His hair fell in his eyes again and he paused a moment to brush it away. "Which one do you wanna be? Doc Ock? The Green Goblin?"
"Nah," said Mayday, still climbing. "I'm gonna be the Lizard. I've got sharp teeth and claws and I'm gonna bite you." She gnashed at him for emphasis. Now they were both crawling over the curving top of the metallic dome, but Mayday was far ahead. She knew she was going to reach the center first.
"Spidey never fought no villain named the Lizard," Travis stated definitively.
"Thought you said he wasn't real," Mayday said triumphantly, reaching the top at same moment. "I won!" she declared, carefully getting to her feet again and standing tall.
"Okay, okay, you won," acknowledged Travis, as he finally reached her. "And he isn't real – so I guess you can make up some dumb villain called The Lizard if you want."
Before Mayday could retort that the Lizard was also real, and really scary, she was interrupted by the approach of three new kids. One of them was the soft-spoken Angela, another was the chubby black-haired boy from yesterday, and the last was a boy she didn't know, another freckled, curly-headed kid who looked a lot like Angela.
Angela ignored Travis and Mayday, making a beeline straight for Janeen. "Hi," she said cheerily.
"Hi," said Janeen in a subdued voice.
"Can we finish the game from yesterday?" Angela asked. "My brother Eric wants to play too," she added as an afterthought.
"Hi, Eric" said Janeen. "Hi Kendall," she said to the chubby boy. "Sure," she said to Angela. Then, looking defiantly up at Mayday, she called out, "Hey Travis – d'ya want to finish playing Princess Power with us?"
Mayday held her breath. "Nah," said Travis indifferently. "We're playing Spider-Man."
"Not him again," sneered the black-haired boy whose name was Kendall. "I told you before, he's just a big fake."
"Is not!" exclaimed Mayday adamantly, deciding that she didn't like this rude boy, this Kendall, one bit.
"Is he the one with the red and blue tights?" the new boy, Eric, asked his sister in a confused voice.
"Oh yeah," Travis said, snapping his fingers, "I forgot about the stupid suit." He gave Mayday a teasing look. "It's kind of a rip-off of Superman, doncha think, with those colors?"
"Hey, now," said a cheery voice from somewhere above them, "Don't knock the red and blue pyjamas."
Mayday turned her head. The rest of the children looked up and froze. They were all flabbergasted at the sight of a masked man wearing a tight red and blue outfit crisscrossed by black lines and with a black spider on his chest. His head resting on a gloved hand, he was lying, in the most relaxed way possible, along the narrow top of the high courtyard wall.
"Spider-Man!" exclaimed Mayday in delight.
Twenty Minutes Earlier ...
Peter Parker had been crouching, upside down and out of sight, in the shadows created by the overhang of the school roof, for so long that his legs were cramping. It was a good thing that the blood didn't run to his head, because if it did, he would certainly have grown dizzy by now. Yet this position was necessary, since surprising a handful of school children behind their caregivers' backs suddenly seemed like it was going to be an incredibly delicate operation, with a level of difficulty that approached breaking into a shielded high security installation without triggering an alarm.
After a full, exhausting day of lecturing and supervising labs, and a quick, last-minute averting of a city bus accident on the way over to McVeedy Elementary, Peter had arrived at his daughter's school only minutes before the final bell rang. Trying to stay out of sight, he'd alighted on the roof of the ancient school building, and then crawled stealthily under the overhang, positioning himself at the perfect vantage point of Mayday's favorite corner of the playground, the monkey bars. Then, when the bell had rung, the school buses had filled up and departed, and the children in the afterschool program had come out to play, he had realized just what a bad, what an insane, idea this plan was.
Given what he knew of their attitude to ordinary strangers, the children's guardians – and perhaps even the children themselves – would probably freak out at the sight of a masked, costumed stranger dropping into their midst out of nowhere. In fact, the moment he appeared and the daycare workers saw him, there would be pandemonium; the police would be called, and the traumatized children would be herded into the building away from him. Once again he would probably, and this time justifiably, be taken for a dangerous, sinister childsnatcher by the adults around him. And, while he didn't mind alarming thieves and lowlifes, the last thing he wanted to do was become the stuff of children's nightmares.
That's no way to maintain a low profile, Spidey, he thought wryly to himself. He recalled the long-ago day when, shortly after they were married, MJ had suggested to him that his life, both his lives, might be easier if he stopped selling photos of himself to the Daily Bugle. Continue being Spider-Man, she'd suggested, but keep a low profile. He'd laughed at the absurdity of her idea, since the two concepts were, in his opinion, mutually exclusive. Easier said than done, he'd quipped, but on a whim he'd decided to try her suggestion for a brief time anyway.
Her advice had come at an opportune moment. For once, he could afford to listen her, because an independent film that she had acted in for next to nothing had turned into an unexpected critical and box office success, leading to other good parts, and he himself had just landed a coveted internship as Dr. Connors' primary research assistant. It was not a job working as one of the lowly lab techs, the job that he'd been fired from in his first year of college, but a well-paying position with flexible hours, which involved coordinating other R.A.s and techs as well as working closely with the good doctor himself. Combining their incomes, he and MJ had actually begun to earn enough money to live on comfortably for the first time since they'd gotten together.
Mary Jane's idea had turned out to be more than a sensible piece of advice; it became a gift that just went on giving. Not only was The Daily Bugle the main source of Spider-Man's bad publicity, but ironically enough, it derived much of its fodder from the photographs that Peter Parker sold Jameson. Take away the photographs, and you were left either with nothing or else with merely sketchy, often contradictory, reports from eyewitnesses and survivors. In time, some of these accounts became incredibly far-fetched, referring to improbable "Spidey sightings" and encounters that he knew for a fact hadn't ever happened. Before too long, due to the lack of any decent corroborating images, he'd ceased to be front page news. No one else could get a clear picture of him, and despite a few spectacular battles with other superfreaks, he largely managed to avoid video cameras as well. Gradually, as the stories about him grew wilder, he stopped making the legitimate news almost altogether.
Oh, Spider-Man still spent a lot of his time, too much time, rescuing people, breaking up fights, stopping crimes and pounding the odd crazy super villain – but the only people who knew about these events, apart from MJ, were those directly involved, and a surprising number of them were cooperative if he asked them not to say too much about him. Come to think of it, Mayday's report that some of her school friends thought he wasn't even real was truly gratifying. Spider-Man was apparently starting to pass into the realm of urban legend. Not only did this make it easier for him to carry out his mission, but it had the added benefit of keeping his family safe – well, safer – too.
But now all of these positive developments were about to be blown to hell because he was going to show up, in broad daylight, in costume, at his daughter's school of all places. Was he crazy? He reminded himself, again, that what looked like a good idea when he was lying, drowsy and contented, in the arms of his lovely wife, surrounded by intoxicatingly fragrant clouds of her dewberry bodywash and floral shampoo, rarely, in fact, turned out to be such a good idea in the cold light of day. All those perfumes must have gone straight to his head, along with rosy lips and a pair of roguish green eyes.
Then he thought of Mayday's small, wistful face at supper last night and sighed.
Well, at least it wouldn't be the first time he'd made a fool of himself for love, he reflected. Nor the last, probably. Maybe with extraordinary finesse and caution, and a little bit of luck, he could pull this endeavor off without embarrassing himself too much.
The difficulty was getting down there, near to Mayday, without being seen by an adult. He knew from Aunt May that normally all of the daycare workers, except for the one or two who patrolled infrequently at random, stayed out of the sun, gossiping in the shade of the big tree at the opposite end of the schoolyard from the monkey bars. But today two of the counsellors were standing and talking right in the middle of the yard, commanding a clear view of the whole area. Unless he went around the back of the school, away from the courtyard and the children, they would see him.
Compounding the problem, Mayday and her little friends weren't even at the monkey bars. Of course today would have to be the one day she'd decide to do something else. Instead, Mayday and a brown-haired boy were laughing in the middle of the courtyard, not two feet from the daycare workers. A third child, a little girl with a long blond ponytail down her back, who might have been Mayday's twin except for the hair-color, was hanging back from them, trying to look as though she weren't listening to what they were saying.
But after a few more frustrating minutes of this uncertainty, Peter's luck began to change. Mayday and her friend Travis and the little blond girl whose name he couldn't remember turned and headed toward the monkey bars. Then two children near the swings began arguing about something and shoving each other, and one of the counsellors rushed over to settle their dispute. The other one watched her go for a moment, and then walked over to the big tree to join the rest in the shade.
Yes! He was in business. Surreptitiously, he reached down and crawled around the corner of the school building to the side that faced the street. Remembering his earlier embarrassment at the suspicions of an overzealous caregiver, he shuddered mentally at the thought that his desire to please his daughter, to be a hero for her, could end ignominiously in a worse humiliation, with him being kicked off the school grounds in front of her, this time as Spider-Man. Then, mentally bracing himself, he looked up and down the nearby road, watching a delivery van make its slow way around the corner. As soon as it was gone he cast a hasty web line, which caught a brownstone apartment building, and launched himself swiftly across the street, towards a long low building – a supermarket? – that faced the school.
Alighting on its gravelly roof, he rapidly skidded behind the oversized sign, and then peeked around it at the school. He couldn't see the children now, but he could see the top of the high brick wall that guarded them, and hear the echoes of their excited voices. Three cars drove by while he tried to decide how to get across the broad four lane street unseen. It was too wide for him to be able to jump directly onto the wall even with a running start, and swinging across would be awkward because there was nothing high enough for him to snag nearby – and then he noticed a set of high telephone poles, one on his side, and one across the street, right beside the corner of the courtyard wall.
Maybe, if he was quick ... as soon as the thought crossed his mind, he leapt onto the nearby telephone pole, rapidly scaled it almost to the top, and sent out a webline that snagged the other pole. Then, as the light changed down the street, releasing a line of waiting cars, he dove off his pole, heading not for the corresponding telephone pole, but the school wall beside it. He landed lightly on the outside face of it, near the top. Peering over, he oriented himself with the monkey bars, and began rapidly crawling along the wall until he was right beside them.
What a joke, a grown man in red and blue lycra breaking into a school yard in the middle of the afternoon, and acting as though it were some kind of stealth operation. He felt like a dork. He knew he'd always had a knack for embarrassing himself, but fatherhood had certainly led him to some new lows.
"-- Spider-Man!" he could hear a boy's voice declaring. He started, thinking for a minute that he must have been spotted by the kids, until he heard Mayday's bright voice pipe up in response, "If you're Spider-Man, then I get to be a supervillain." Huh. How weird was it to hear kids, among them his own daughter, pretending to be him, and making plans to play out his battles?
"-- wanna be? Doc Ock? The Green Goblin?" Mayday's companion was asking.
"Nah," came Mayday's voice, "I'm gonna be the Lizard. I've got sharp teeth and claws and I'm gonna bite you." She actually made little growling sounds. Peter felt a bit bemused to hear her. Maybe she hadn't been as traumatized by the Lizard as he'd feared. Or maybe this was some new way of dealing with it, now that she'd articulated her memories to her parents. Intrigued, he pulled himself up onto the top of the wall, which was only about six inches wide. He crouched there silently and watched his small daughter nimbly reach the top of the monkey bars.
She was an amazingly good climber for a child who was not quite eight, he thought, frowning a little beneath his mask. Then again, she always had been. He recalled that she could climb out of her crib before she'd been able to walk; he'd often find her standing on the floor beside her crib, holding herself upright by hanging onto its bars. She'd chortle with happiness when he'd come into the room, scoop her up and put her back in, making him suspect that she'd only gotten out of the crib in the first place to get her parents' attention. Once or twice, in sheer frustration, he'd resorted to creating a mesh web of very fine, almost invisible strands, and stretching it over the top of the crib, just to keep her in her bed.
A new group of children had showed up at the monkey bars in the meantime. To decrease his chances of being noticed before he was ready, he stretched himself out comfortably along the narrow top of the wall, waiting for an opportune moment to break into the conversation. He still really hoped that he wouldn't frighten any of these kids when they finally saw him.
" -- just a big fake," a kid was saying in a sneering voice. Peter's ears perked up.
"Is not!" his daughter was insisting. She was adorable standing upright on the monkey bars with her fists clenched like that. With all that long, red hair, she looked an awful lot like a miniature version of her mother when she was mad.
"Is he the one with the red and blue tights?" a curly-haired little fellow was asking.
"Oh yeah," said the dark-haired boy who was sitting on the monkey bars next to Mayday, snapping his fingers, "I forgot about the stupid suit. It's kind of a rip-off of Superman, doncha think, with those colors?"
He couldn't have asked for such a good opportunity unless he'd created it himself. That's my cue, Spider-Man thought, a bit nervously.
End of Part III
A/N: Constructive criticism is always useful and much appreciated. Or, if you simply want to tell me that you liked it, that would be good too. Thanks for reading!
