1. 'The Beginning of an End'

Summary: Takes place between movie 1 and 2. Piper Checker is about to be caught up in a tangled web. P/MJ

The End

New York City was just how she imagined it would be. It had the gray sky, dingy streets, permanent city scent perfuming air and myriad amount of little coffee stands she thought it would have. Piper had only just arrived at the New York airport. This scenery was quite a big change from her home in the south shore of Massachusetts. Her Dad got offered spot in a good law firm that wanted him to start as soon as possible, and he took it. Piper didn't blame him for that one bit. She wanted to move away from the state her mother was living in.

She couldn't really say that her parents were divorced because it didn't' seem right. Piper saw her mother only two times in her whole life. Right after she was born her parents had separated and she grew up living with her Dad.

Piper dismissed the unpleasant thoughts about her family situation from her mind. She let her brown eyes wander around the luggage moving in front of her as she looked for a less crowed place to pick her suitcase up from.

"Over here, Piper." Her father called out to her. He was in his normal Navy jacket holding a bunch of gigantic suitcases by his side. She pushed her way through the crowd of people looking for their own suitcases behind her.

They'd shipped most of their belongings up to the apartment a week earlier; most of the contents of the suitcases were clothes and personal belongings.

Piper said nothing most of the ride to their apartment. Mostly because she was tired, not being able to sleep in until noon on a Saturday is a terrible thing for a high school senior.

"Switching schools in the middle of senior year sucks too" She mentally added placing her head to rest against the cool glass car window.

Wisps of her blonde hair fell in her face. Her hair always did that because it was short and uneven. Her yellow strands barely touched her shoulders and her bangs were various lengths and normally clipped off to the side to keep them from being irritating, but that didn't stop it from falling all over her face.

Piper tapped her foot on the car floor for lack of anything better to do. The laces on her so called "combat heel-less boots" tapped against the black boot making a small but audible noise.

She had seen the new apartment before, it was much better than the condo she had previously lived in, heck A LOT better. It was showy and just made the statement that anyone living in it had a boatload of money, which wasn't exactly true in Piper's case. The company her father worked for paid for it; yeah, it goes to show you lawyers end up pretty well off. It didn't seem like a home though. She wondered if she could get used to it. Not that she would live there for very long anyway. She was going off to college in the fall. "Just half a year away" she reminded herself.

Piper's father, Edward Checker, saw the look of bored resentment on his daughters face. He wanted to make conversation to comfort her in some way but he knew her responses would only be "Yeah" or "Whatever you want." It was hard for him to help Piper out; sometimes she was very close to him and clung to his every word. She was his daughter, the little girl he used to tuck into bed every night. But there were times now when she would be so distant he had to wonder what was going on in her mind. It was hard for him to understand a teenage girl.

He couldn't help but worry; he was her father after all.

Ed turned the deep gray leather steering wheel of the new red rental car and veered into the parking lot of the apartment building. Piper stretched for a moment and got ready to unload the car and haul some of her luggage up the front entrance stairs to the elevator since their apartment was more than four flights of stairs up. Piper pushed open the door of the car and felt the cold air around her. She pulled her jean jacket on tighter.

"It's pretty cold here for the beginning of March." Piper silently thought remembering the weather back home. "That's not your home anymore Piper, get over it" She told herself and went up the elevator to her new home…

"PARKER! You better have some damn good excuse on why these pictures of Spiderman have blotches on them!" the person known as none other as "Mr. Jameson"

Peter Parker was lost for words as he endured the dull, yet always loud un-rhythmic yelling of Jameson.

The truth was that the film he'd used had been corrupted from a nerve gas from last person he'd been fending off. He hadn't realized it until the photos had been developed and it was too late to use them. Of course he'd told Jameson that the film had been corrupted (not how) but he would not listen. Peter hoped some of them might be salvageable with a little skill through Adobe Photoshop.

He could not however seem explain this in a way Jameson would congruently understand.

"I'm sorry Mr. Jameson, sometimes you just get a bad role of film" Peter said drawing on a rather lame excuse.

Throughout the whole conversation random people working at the Daily Bugle had been walking in explaining their problems to Jameson. After they had gotten about four words out about their concern, Mr. Jameson told them exactly just how they could solve it in not so nice terms. Jameson was like that, his main concern was making money, had it not been for the newspapers selling out for copies about Spiderman, Jameson wouldn't have bothered with Parker at all. In fact Jameson reminded Peter this every single day he had the misfortune of bringing him pictures.

"Make sure you get some in tomorrow Parker, I don't care how many roles of film you have to take to get a picture. I won't take excuses."

"Yes sir." Peter said leaving the office and closing the door. He leaned against the wall and sighed.

"Sometimes I think the Green Goblin wasn't as scary and evil as Jameson."

He sighed and figured he should start his patrol (and new photo shoot)

"Guess its time for my real work"

And Peter vanished from the workspace known as the daily Bugle.

Piper looked out the window of her new room. The room itself was just fine; it was bigger than her old room but it didn't seem very home-like.

Her new living space had pink walls with a white border and a sitting window for looking out at supposedly scenic city- but really it was more like a scenic overview of the parking lot. The bed was adjacent to her one window and it was so far the only piece of assembled furniture; sheets, boxes, and assorted parts of a bureau were in sprawled out along the walls of the new room. Her bright white sliding closet doors were open waiting for Piper to hang up the clothes folded in her suitcase. The closet was small and quite ordinary and by the smell of it she could tell it was newly painted. Overall, it was part of her new very ordinary life.

Piper kicked off her shoes to the side of the room and paid no attention to the thumping sound they made on the white carpet. She sat on the windowsill looking out at her 'new life'.

"New school, new people…This should be good...this should be…not so lonely…I wish my life wasn't so boring…" She commented silently. Her computer was not set up yet, and she desperately wanted to log on AIM to talk to her not so 'old' feeling friends. She didn't even have a cell phone; her Dad promised her one when they moved but so far she was still cell phone-less.

Idly she watched from her window her Dad carry up the last of the items into the building and wondered what they'd be having for dinner tonight. Possibly they might eat out. Piper wondered what sort of restaurants there were around here. She wondered if there were any good Curry places around.

Her idle thoughts were interrupted by the screeching sound of tires outside. Piper's eyes darted across the yard to see the rental car being driven hastily out of the parking lot…

"What!" she questioned aloud inspecting the surroundings of outside. There was a figure outside and it was on the ground.

Piper needed no incentive to get down the stairs to go outside. She jumped down one flight wincing at the sound and painfully absorbing the shock with her feet and then dashed down what seemed like an endless amount of stairs until she reached her destination of the door. Thoughts raced through her mind. That couldn't possibly be her father out there… "No, it couldn't be" she decided firmly as she forcefully pushed the door open.

It didn't bother her now that it was cold out and goose bumps on her arms proved it. The goose bumps weren't from the cold however. Strands of her hair obscured her vision as they fell forward in front of her face. Her knees gave out on her and she sank to the ground.

It was him…and there was no denying it.

"I've got to be calm…I need a phone…I need a phone!" she said aloud. Piper cursed her lack of a cell phone.

Piper opened up the door again resisting the urge to run to her father and cling to his body, but she knew that would do no good. Bystanders and her apparent neighbors were gawking already. An imaged flashed suddenly into her mind as she remembered there was a pay phone in the lobby so she ran towards it as fast as she was able, fumbled for change she had in her pocket from lunch at the airport and dialed 9-1-1 quickly.

"Hello? Hello!" she choked into the receiver. She paused a moment, no response. After a few more seconds that seemed like hours and finally voice recording played over a machine. Piper slammed the phone back on its receiver. Fortunately the one of the bystanders had apparently called the ambulance because one had just rushed onto the scene.

Again she ran outside just watching everything in its total surrealism.

She didn't see anything in normal time; it was all in slow motion as she watched.

Somehow one of the paramedics told her that her father had been shot in his left leg and he would indeed be okay. Piper nodded; still not believing this was going on all around her. They put him on a board and lifted him into what the EMTs called 'the bus'.

How could it be? The person she loved and cared about most could get hurt? That could and should never happen to her…never. Or so she had thought and now it seemed more real than ever.
This would never make the news. Peter, or rather Spiderman had seen a police chase of a red car and he lent a hand, scoring a few pretty good photos in the process. He knew however, Jameson would not be happy at such an 'insignificant' reporting. He wished Jameson would see that it was important to somebody, that he had helped somebody, not just a meaningless face.

Not many people understood this; it was why Peter made it his own agenda to help those that were considered everyday insignificant problems.

The 'Super Spider' had its own agenda. It was lonely without its fellow friends from the lab it came from. After finding it had the ability to escape its glass prison it was out in the open world, free to crawl around and fend for itself. Maybe even make friends. The spider liked that life.

Right now the Spider decided now would be a good time to make one of its temporary web homes outside of a window; however it found it cold so it figured it would be better to go inside where it was warm. It crawled through the open window and into a small room and saw a girl and a man in the bed.

The spider crawled down in search of warm place to spin its home. It leapt up onto the chair the girl was sitting in beside her father. The girl was half asleep with her head tilted toward one shoulder. Her facial expression said everything, with her discontent look imprinted on her face.

The spider crawled up the girl's warm arm in order to get a better view of the room. The girl was waking from her drowsiness but immediately noticed an itchy feeling going up her arm. She turned her head just in time to see a blue and red thing crawl up her sleeve to her shirt. She definitely felt something moving around on her back.

The girl frantically moved her arm around in hopes of destroying what ever was now on her back. She began to panic once more.

"OWWW!" The flailing girl yelped as she felt a sharp pain shoot up her back, it felt like a piercing pinch.

Gritting her teeth she grabbed the nearest magazine and began whapping her back with it.

The Spider had had enough of this; it escaped from the girl and leapt onto a chair arm beside her. The girl caught the movement from her peripheral vision as she slammed the magazine onto the offending creature as hard as she humanly could.

The Spider, who was sorry to give up its residence on Piper's back; did not expect to see with its eight tiny eyes that its final moments would come from eight tiny images of a Britney Spears Pepsi ad squishing it into the next great beyond.

She instantly dropped the magazine that had bits of mutilated bug parts implanted on the cover. She examined them for a moment wrinkling her noise in disdain, then by careful inspection she identified exactly what the creature that she had wildly crushed was.

"A SPIDER?" she squealed and dropped the magazine screeching. "Did it bite me?" she whimpered.

Normally Piper would NEVER whimper but she had a terrible fear of spiders. Piper had what she called mild arachnophobia (or not so mild), but that was her secret- and no one who wanted to live would ever know it. She tried to avoid all types of the arachnids at all costs.

Piper nervously rubbed her back in fear of what had just happened to her. "At least I'm in a hospital…" she mumbled to herself trying to find some small sort of comfort in such an obvious revelation. An unexpected wave of dizziness nearly knocked her from her feet. She stumbled a few steps as her head began to throb like it had been slammed into an invisible concrete wall. Her vision began to blur in and out like someone was uses her eyes as a focus on a microscope.

"That can't be good…I'm just going to sleep it off; I'll be fine…" Piper sleepily thought unable to think clearly from the toxins entering her system. She stumbled into the chair she had been previously occupying and she dosed off restlessly next to her father.

2. The End- 'Who? Spiderman?'

The morning sun was exceptionally blinding to Piper Checker. Waking up in her father's hospital room from sleeping in a chair was not, in Piper's opinion the best wake to start off a new day. She groaned rubbing her eyes. The teen then kneaded her knuckles into her neck, it was sore from being propped up again her shoulder all night. When she moved her head to the side it made a painful cracking noise.

"Glad to see you're awake sleeping beauty." Her father commented cheerfully and amusedly sitting up in his hospital bed.

"Oh yes, I had a fantastic nap." She thought about being more sarcastic but she didn't want to be impudent to her father. Piper yawned and stretched a little before rising to her feet. As she stood up her eyes wandered around the hospital room. For a moment she examined her surroundings and did not find even one flower vase or cheesy "get well" card, not that they knew anyone to receive a card from yet anyway. She felt a wave of sadness from that.

"So how are you feeling Dad?" Piper asked concerned for her father. She realized more than ever it was just the two of them.

"Almost back to normal, the experience wasn't fun though," Piper's father answered. He could tell how concerned she was, it was true he was still in pain but he did not want to worry his daughter.

"Yeah, no kidding" Piper rolled her eyes at her Dad; she thought he was back to normal since he was already teasing her like normal.

Piper thumbed her hand in the direction of the door.

"I'm getting some food, I'll be back"

Piper figured there must be a Dunkin Donuts near by, after all in Massachusetts there was one just about every mile.

"Where are you going?" her father questioned

"To Dunkies to get much needed caffeine and a no doubt nutritional and tasty breakfast of fried sugar filled pastries; things that a hospital would certainly not approve of you consuming." Piper grinned at her father as she slung her pocketbook around her shoulder.

"Oh, in that case, get me a large cream, no sugar and a let's see…why not- a double chocolate donut, okay?"

Piper nodded "I thought you might say that" she grinned again and left the room. Gently, she closed the creaky door trying not to make a loud obnoxious sound. "Damn old hinges" when she went to remove her hand from the doorknob it stuck. Literally it wouldn't come off the silver metal knob. So naturally she tugged harder causing the door to knock against its frame. Piper winced at the noise.

"Come on, gimme a break; where is this stuck-" The brown-eyed teen began to grunt pulling her hand more forcefully. Apparently she had said it too loud because a voice from behind her answered her.

"The vending machines are that way, if you want a kit-kat that is" A masculine voice said from behind her.

Piper turned her neck around to get a good look at the guy.

"Oh very funny" She remarked ignoring his bad joke and forced a smile on her face while tugging her hand on the doorknob trying to make it look like it wasn't stuck.

The man in front of her wasn't tall, but he wasn't short, in fact he was only a little taller than Piper herself. His hair was a normal color brown and his facial expression was soft and sort of humorous. Not to mention he had a cute sort of charm about him.

"Need help?" he asked, with his crystal blue eyes smiling at her.

"Eh…I got it, thanks anyway" Piper lied. "I could use some directions though."

Piper decided to give her next tug to free her poor stuck hand a little more force; in the process she managed to free her hand and break the hinges on the door. All that was keeping the door from falling off now was her hand that was holding it up.

"I think this door is broken" Piper said pointing at the broken hinge with her free hand, trying not to look as if she had broken the door. She wasn't so sure this guy bought it though.

"I guess so," the guy said raising and eyebrow.

So instead Piper 'opened' the door and left it leaning it against the wall.

"I don't know how I managed to break that" She thought to herself.

"So…could you tell me where the nearest Dunkin Donuts is?" she asked the man.

"Dunkin Donuts?" He responded, "You must not be from around here; Star Bucks is about the only coffee shop here."

"Star Bucks? I guess that'll do" Wasn't it a coffee shop too? She had never been to one before.

"Are you gonna walk there?" the man questioned.

"My Dad's rental car got stolen" Piper responded. Not that her Dad would have let her drive it. Even though she had her license she wasn't all that great a driver.

"Did this happen yesterday? Was your Dad the one who got shot?" the man questioned before realizing he had been slightly rude.

"Yeah, but he's okay" Piper said listening to her stomach grumble. She wondered how he knew about what happened, was it in the papers?

"Oh, I'm Peter Parker from the Daily Bugle and I'd like it if I could get a picture of you and your Dad for the paper," he said taking a camera out from a backpack he was toting with him.
"Apparently your car was stolen by a famous auto thief; this is before Spiderman busted him".

"And because I need to add you two into a photo I took of me doing it in the process because you weren't on the scene," He silently commented to himself thinking of how much this photo would subdue Jameson.

"If you take me to a coffee shop you've got a deal" Piper bargained.

"What's your name?" Peter asked.

"Piper Checker"

"You've got a deal then, Piper." He said as they shook hands.

After Piper and her father and her had their photos taken as Peter promised, they set out to the nearest coffee shop they could find.

"So who's Spiderman?" Piper questioned as they walked outside exiting the hospital.

"You've got to be new here" Peter answered her chuckling.

"I moved here yesterday" Piper feeling a little out of the "New York loop"

"That explains it," He responded turning on the corner to the next block.

"I moved here from Massachusetts" she told him as if that was an explanation for her not knowing who Spiderman was.

"Are you still in school?" he asked.

"I'm still in the middle of senior year" Piper said knowing that the next question would probably be "Where are you going to college?"

"I go to NYU, I'm a sophomore." Peter offered.

Piper looked a little shocked; she would not have guessed that he was a sophomore in college. Peter seemed a little geeky; he looked like a person that had always won first place in a science fair.

"Here we are" Peter said as they arrived in front of a Star Bucks.

"Thanks for the directions" Piper nodded, even though they had only had to go about two blocks.

"Thanks for the pictures" He responded, "I have to get going though, can you find your way back alright?"

Piper nodded. She only hopped she would not be robbed of her precious coffee. She entered the European style coffee barista curiously looking for donuts but to her sadness found none. She did not find anything familiar about the place. She had no idea how to order…anything.

"I'll have um all…large…err I guess, tall coffee with cream?" Tall sounded like the same thing as large plus it seemed to be cheaper than the other sizes that were ridiculously expensive. She didn't know why she was paying this much for coffee. "And an iced coffee, extra cream and sugar? Ah…two muffins…"

Somehow she managed to get her food items and walk back. After she got about half a block she remembered:

"I never got to find out who this Spiderman was"

"So when are they gonna let you out?" Piper asked taking a bite out of her muffin.

"Not until at least tomorrow, and we still have to finish unpacking." Her father said reminding himself of all the work they had to do. He curiously eyed the small coffee Piper handed to him but didn't say anything.

"If you want I'll catch a cab home and start it" Piper offered.

"If you really want to…" Ed said in a sort of undecided voice.

"Really, I'm very bored here dad" she said trying to convince her father.

"Okay, I'm not stopping you" he sighed, "Just be careful, okay?"

Piper nodded reassuringly at her father. "You know if I had a cell phone…"

"Piper…"

"Bye Dad! I'll be fine!"

No matter how hard Piper tried, she just could NOT signal a cab to aid her in her search for a ride home. So instead being run over while trying to hail a cab, she wandered around the city streets to find a less busy place to grab a taxi. However, she sort of got lost, but that did not bother her because she found a bookstore and more than anything she loved to read. So she entered the shop, found an interesting book, bought it and sat down in the corner and read it. She figured she'd stop after a few chapters to try to catch a cab again but she just couldn't put the book down.

And when she finished the book it was just nearly five o'clock.

"Whoops" she said leaving the store.

Using her better logical she decided to go back to the hospital. Using her "not-so-good logic" she turned down one of the very many cliché dark alleyways in which she was sure she went through on the way to her bookstore excursion.

"Oh shoot" she cursed realizing she was lost. She leaned against the damp brick wall. "I am SOOOOO smart" she muttered.

Her hand stuck to the brick…again. Piper put her other hand on the brick it stuck too. A crazy idea occurred to her. She thought she was losing her mind. But she went with it she was a risk taker.

She moved her hand up. It stuck again, then she did the same with her right hand and before she knew it he was climbing up the wall. When she reached the middle, she looked down, Piper was pretty high up, but this did not faze her and she continued her climb.

She was breathless by the time she reached the top of the building.

Piper examined herself; everything looked normal except for the bump on her back from the…spider bite? She was also pretty bright. Being able to put two and two together quickly, she wondered what exactly that spider was.

She looked at her wrists there were definitely patches of skin there that weren't there before and then she remembered how she'd ripped off the hospital door this morning…

"It's from that…thing!" Piper shuddered. Then a crazy thought occurred to her "Am I turning into a spider?" The blonde haired girl gulped, the idea of turning into a spider did not at all appeal to her.

Piper wondered how she was going to get down; if she could only get to a taller building she might have an idea of what direction she should head in. Carefully she climbed down the same way she got up and decided to scale the adjacent taller building.

Upon making her way to the top she was glad she didn't think about falling at the height she had just climbed. She hadn't realized she made her way up on top of what seemed to be a roof top garden. It was absolutely beautiful, nature's magnificence in an unlikely place.

She had never seen anything like it before, there was a cherry tree was in full bloom at the center of the rooftop garden and a marble bench was placed next to the pink flowering tree. There were all sorts of pretty flowers just starting to bud and a whole section devoted to different kinds of roses. She wondered how the gardener was able to grow them. The best part was, that even though she was so high up she could see the buildings around her and the evening sky.

The scene was breathtaking; and as she enjoyed it she suddenly noticed she wasn't the only one enjoying it. There was another person hanging on a flagpole on the building next to the rooftop Eden. It was on the building Piper had just crawled off from. She could only make out some of the person's silhouette and nothing else; the sunset was blocking the view. Piper shielded her eyes from the light slowly sinking off in the distance.

The figure must have noticed her because the person brought their hand out in front of them and a sticky white strand attached itself to a granite statue in the garden. The figure swung over to her in a graceful motion that would have made even Tarzan look like an elephant swinging from a tree.

The sun was still blocking her view, but the golden orb had almost set so she could see the person was wearing something red and blue and definitely had a mask on. The masked person landed agilely over onto the roof she was on and began to approach her.

"Who are you!" she wondered aloud.