Snuggles The Symbiote
Weaver couldn't swing from a thread. She didn't have web-shooters and her only means producing organic webbing was with her summoned spiders. So, in the interest of speed, Spider-Man was carrying her on his back.
"Hopefully," he said, "nobody sees this and starts rumors."
"I'm not in the mood for jokes right now," Weaver replied evenly.
"A bit of advice," Spider-Man said quietly. "The higher the stakes are, the more jokes you need to make. I've been doing this since I was about your age, and let me tell you, the biggest mistake you can make is let the bad guys know just how scared you are or how badly the stakes have you rattled."
The missing girl's symbiote, making disturbingly creative use of Ms. Marvel's power to move swiftly across the buildings with swift speed suddenly twisted mid-jump and stretched, changing the direction at which it sped across the rooftops by a sharp angle. With a thwip, spider-Man course-corrected. The space-warping Hulkette, Vista, had no problems. She just bent the fabric of space around her so that, from her perspective, she continued going straight without losing momentum. Luckily everything snapped back once she changed direction.
"So, if I said the words 'Space Gem' around Vista, would she know what I'm talking about?" Spider-Man asked. "Because I see her and I've got to wonder..."
"I don't know what that is." Weaver clearly didn't want to talk, which was a problem.
"Look, kid," he said, "the last thing you want to hear right now is a lecture from some adult who came out of nowhere but trust me, banter is important to being a hero. A well-placed quip or dad-joke can throw off a villain. Either they get mad and sloppy or they actually think it's funny and let their guard down when they laugh. and in situations like this," he quickly gestured about between swings, "a conversation on the way to the location of an emergency keeps you from panicking and imagining the worst-case scenario."
And to be honest, the worst-case scenario was pretty bad. Little girl vivisected and turned into a living piece of bad modern art bad, if the brief rundown that Alexandria had given them was accurate. The little girl who'd called out for his help once upon a time and he hadn't even known she existed. And Weaver's foster-sister, so she must have been feeling even worse than he was, even if she didn't show it.
"So if you don't want to talk, I hope you don't mind my stream of consciousness," he finished.
"Why are you helping?" she asked.
"What's that?"
"I mean... Why come out to another universe, just to help a bunch of people you've ever met? Why stick around once you knew they were okay? Why risk your lives for people in another reality?" She sounded genuinely confused. "I mean, I know that that's the heroic ideal, to be completely selfless like that, and Ashley speaks the world about you and the others, but you're the first people I've met over eighteen that actually tried to live up to it... the Director seems more concerned with weaseling out of her end of our contracts and I've uh... Lost a bit of respect for some people I used to look up to."
"I can understand that," he said. He thought about it for a second. "One day, I had a pretty busy day fighting criminals. Back and forth, back and forth all the way across the borough. I must have passed the same alley a dozen times that day. Finally done for the night, I swing by one last time but this time I see someone, a little girl. Maybe Ashley's age, asleep under a poster of me and using a newspaper as a blanket. It was a cold night, so naturally, I was concerned about the little homeless girl." Behind his mask, Peter Parker blinked back tears. "When I checked on her, she was breathing. But she was cold. Too cold. I rushed her to the hospital, but it was too late. She'd been sick and in the cold of the night... Organ failure. She was never gonna wake up. All they could do was put her in a warm bed and make her comfortable in her last moments. I stayed with her until she passed. She had a necklace that said 'Leah'. I don't know if that's her real name, but it's the name I remember her by." He sighed. "I don't know what it was that I meant to her, but I can't help but think that if I'd noticed her just a little earlier I could have saved her."
Weaver didn't seem to know how to respond. After a moment, she said, "I don't think that there's anything you could have done at that point."
"Maybe," Spider-Man said, "or maybe not. My head knows it wasn't my fault, but my heart says differently. And it wasn't just Leah. A boy with terminal cancer who just wanted to meet his hero before he died, and I'm left wondering if I couldn't have cured him: Not to toot my own horn, but my test-scores equaled the smartest genius and greatest inventor in the world in the same subjects and he was a full-time student who paid his own way while I was a scholarship case working a part-time job and doing this on top of a full course load. That man's a good friend of mine and he comes to me when he needs help with biology. If I'd had more time for schooling. More time and money for research, could I have invented something that could have saved his life?" He asked. "A young woman who died becuase I made a mistake? An innocent, hard-working family man who always made time for the less fortunate because I was too selfish and arrogant to trip a burglar as he ran past me?" Thwip, another turn. "A little girl, sick all her life, who saw her parents murdered in front of her, who was kidnapped and suffered horrible medical experiments for a year who called out for me to save her but who I didn't even know existed?"
Off in the distance, Spider-Man heard a crack of thunder, a screaming roar, and the sound of something heavy crashing into a body of water at at least a hundred and twenty miles per hour. This world's Thor must be weaker than the one back home. Odinson would have had that wrapped up fifteen minutes ago.
"I do this because people need me to do this. Because if someone gets hurt because I wasn't there to help, I feel responsible even when I know I'm not. And because I could never live with myself if I didn't do everything within my power to protect as many people as I could."
"With great power?" Weaver hazard.
"There must also come great responsibility," Spider-Man finished. "It was the motto of a man who I had nothing but love and respect for and I adopted it for myself... I just wish I'd understood it before... Anyway, there's a little girl who needs help. That's the only reason I need."
Speaking of people who needed help, the symbiote they'd been following stopped dead, looked down into the street, and hesitated. Since it'd stopped moving, he could see the cartoonish struggle of frustration on its face before it stomped and jumped down into the streets below.
Spider-Man caught up and landed around the same time Vista twisted a building down, and he took in the situation. a handful of civilians huddling behind an overturned ambulance. Mutilated bodies and dead paramedics littering the streets, and a fight.
On one side, a blond girl about Weaver's age in grey and purple firing blasts of green energy from the head of a staff that, suspiciously enough, shared the color scheme of the symbiote, and a boy of about thirteen in street clothes who was glowing pink and wrestling with the Carnage knockoff that Val Richards' Legally Distinct Avengers™ had rescued Ashley from earlier that day.
...Maybe he should politely inquire about getting an RFID tracking bracelet made for Ashley. He wasn't sure if her need to be rescued was a regular occurrence, but twice in the same day seemed to be a bit much.
In addition to the murderous symbiote hybrid, the other side of the fight held a crazed naked woman with a zebra-stripe pattern all over her body and a living white puppet made of white metal or ceramic. The girl with the staff was clearly exhausted trying to fend off the attackers from the civilians.
"Of course we encounter a blatant attack from multiple dangerous killers on the way to rescue Ashley," the symbiote muttered bitterly. "Of course things that Ashley would never forgive this one for ignoring even on her behalf."
In the time it took the symbiote to say that, Vista blasted the Carnage knock-off's head clean off with an orange-read beam of radiation.
The doppelganger of the killer released the boy he was wrestling with and rolled off of him. Then the headless corpse stood up and a new head formed from the alien slime.
"Ah, isn't that cute," he said through dagger-like fangs. "the itty-bitty tomato thinks she can fight the big boys." He laughed dementedly.
This, Spider-Man would reflect on later, was perhaps the worst thing he could have said. Within seconds, Vista began to glow, not the orange-red of before, but a burning, angry blood-red aura spiked up around her that crackled like fire with an occasional stream of energy rising out of it, not unlike a solar flair, only to crash back into the aura higher up. Throughout it, especially at the edges, were the occasional black circles of various sizes that were caused when particularly high concentrations of kirbons formed in a mass of visible energy.
Vista pulled her hands together at her side like something out of a Japanese Anime and with a shrill, high-pitched screech of adolescent rage threw them forward shot for a man-sized beam of white-hot energy that, even with the black spots caused by kirbons, was such an intense light that Spider-Man had to avert his eyes.
When he looked back, there was no Carnage knock off. There was a bit of melted asphalt where he'd been. And a five-foot radius circle around him... Luckily that had been a pretty corpse free part of the street.
Vista seemed remarkably calm now. "Well, I feel better than I have in weeks."
"Wow, remind me not to cheese you off," Spider-Man said. He wasn't normally one for killing, even complete monsters, but he wasn't exactly going to shed a tear for a copy of Carnage that lived down to the original's reputation.
"You guys will back me up that I killed him right?" She asked. "The S9 all have bounties on their heads and I just realized I have no way of proving I killed him. Did, did anyone get phone footage? I know I'm probably being insensitive but the more money I have saved away the faster I can get the hell out of my parent's house when I turn 18."
No one could answer, however, as the naked zebra lady, the Siberian as the breakdown on these punks called her even though she looked more like a zebra than a tiger, decided to stop standing around casually shrugging off every energy blast from Ms. Purple's staff when the distraction of her companion's death made them stop coming. Instead, she began to step around the ambulance to get to the cowering civilians.
The boy who'd been wrestling the Carnage knock-off flipped up and ran, grabbing the zebra-lady by the forearm. The woman jerked her arm back and seemed utterly shocked that she couldn't pull it loose from the by's glowing pink hand based on the fact that her eyes widened and her jaw fell open. "No!" The boy shouted. "Bad kitty!" and punched her.
There was sort of a popping sound and a visible ripple in the air and then, zebra-lady disappeared.
Ms. Purple looked at the boy. "How did you do that?"
The boy shrugged. "I dunno?" then he yawned.
"No, seriously, how the hell did you do that?" she asked again. "I know you're apparently infinitely strong, but The Siberian is... Look, I can only use my power for so many minutes a day, please don't make me waste it on... you genuinely don't know, do you?"
The boy shrugged again. "Molly once ripped a cloak made of darkness off a guy named Cloak after Cloak said that gods had tied and failed to do it."
"...Fuck it, I'll just chalk it up to an omnipotence paradox and be done with it."
The living puppet was slowly retreating, apparently realizing that he was outnumbered and outmatched now. A lesser hero would have let him run off, content to have saved the civilians that were left. But Spider-Man knew better. Alexandria had filled them in on who all of the Slaughterhouse Nine were, and he found himself particularly sickened by Mannequin and the threat he presented.
Thwip! A shot of web fluid bound the cyborg's foot to the pavement. As he turns around at an angle that would be impossible for most flesh-and-blood men to make to try and cut himself loose with an extended blade, Spider-Man leaped into the air and used a web line to grab a tire that had fallen from the ambulance and with a twist in the air throw it at Mannequin.
The tire impacted the cyborg hard enough to knock him all the way back and make his head impact the pavement with a sharp metallic smack. Slowly, Spider-Man walked forward.
"Ya know, Pinocchio," he said as he approached, "I've been told about you. How you used to be some bigshot hero who was gonna revolutionize the world. Moon colonies, perfect biomes. Clean energy. Drag the world kicking and screaming into post-scarcity." His spider-sense tingled. A blade extended from the foot of the cyborg's free leg, which shot toward's Spider-Man like a rocket on the end of a chain. Spider-Man jumped and flipped to the side, letting the bladed leg fly past him and then grabbed it by the chain as he landed. "and you could do it, too. Those giant monsters you've got trying to destroy this world were so scared of what you were capable of that one of them sabotaged your launch. You lost your family and the world lost a hero."
Mannequin tried to pull back his leg, but Spider-Man grabbed it with his other hand and pulled, causing the links halfway between himself and the cyborg to shatter.
Spider-Man started swinging the bladed foot like a flail. "And now you spend your life wasting that potential and trying to tear down everyone who tries to make the world even a little better." He let the foot fly, releasing it to soar and impale the cyborg's head, which Spider-Man had been led to believe was just for show at this point. As Manngequin reached up with one arm to pull the limb from his head, Spider-Man continued his march. "So... I have to ask you, the man who let the whole world down: Do you really think that this is what your family would have wanted?"
Spider-sense again. His leg no longer sticking out of his head, Mannequin threw the leg back at Spider-Man. Spider-Man casually batted it aside midstride. "Do you think you're the only one who's lost someone he loves? The only one who's been hurt?"
Spider-Man was standing over Mannequin now. The cyborg, one leg gone and one leg restrained, swung an arm at him, yet another blade extended while using the other to support himself. Peter caught the arm. "You know what I think?" He said as he crushed the metal or ceramic in his hands. "I think you're a coward. I think you're weak."
Spider-Man stomped on the other arm, shattering it and leaving Mannequin seemingly helpless. "Cynism. Tearing other people down instead of building yourself and others up? Letting the world get worse? Dismissing anyone who dares to hope or work for a better tomorrow as a fool and going out of your way to stop them? It's easy. It's safe."
Spider-Man crouched down and started punching the cyborg in the chest. "Going on after suffering a loss? It's hard, but you didn't even try." Punch. Punch. Punch. Spider-Man could start to see the seam between panels. "You gave up on the world. You gave up on life. Now you're trying to make everyone feel as bad as you do while walling yourself up away from the world. But knock knock, reality's at the door so open up." Punch. "The truth is? Knowing exactly how bad the world is. How unfair it all is, all the injustice and trying to do the right thing anyway, trying to keep going. To make the world a better place no matter what? That's hard. That's brave. You? I can't even crack a joke about you. You're too. Pathetic. To mock."
The chest cavity, the metallic or ceramic shell, opened up from the bottom and a glass tank fell out and started crawling away on crude, crablike legs. Spider-Man could see the organs occasionally pressing up against the glass and the human brain, the human brain with obvious scarring from where it had been surgically modified nestled within them.
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip. Web fluid sealed the tank in place. "I don't know if you can still hear me in there. Or if you could ever hear me to begin with, but if you know what I'm saying: I'm not gonna kill you. I'm going to make sure you face justice for all the people you killed and all the dreams you destroyed and—"
And orange, rocklike fist on the end of a stretchy blue and gold marbled limb crushed the webbed-up tank. "No time," came the voice of Ashley's symbiote. "Ashley's in danger. That will take too long. Stand on... Moral. High Horse when Ashley is safe. Ashley is near-by. Can make the rest of the distance on foot."
Spider-Man stared at the symbiote for a moment. "Fine," he conceded. "We'll check on the civilians and then get going."
Walking back to the overturned ambulance, Spider-Man noted that the boy from earlier had somehow fallen asleep. He got back in time to hear Ms. Purple's response to something she was asked.
"Yeah. I'm a thief. I burgle crooks, crooked banks, businesses that scam people, other criminals, and rich a-holes that didn't do shit to earn their money. I also end up giving a lot of what I earn doing that to charities. Just becuase I'm a criminal that doesn't mean I'm a bad guy. I figure you'd have known that after the help we gave you at the bank. Half my team is dead and our leader is planning to grab his family and leave town."
"Hellhound didn't make it?" Weaver asked.
"She preferred Bitch," Ms. Purple corrected. "And no. She bled out shortly after getting back to our lair. The dog she had with her didn't last much longer than she did."
"My condolences."
"My team's defunct and the boss doesn't seem to care," Ms. Purple finished. "Bruiser and I just figured that we had nothing to lose so we came out to protect the innocent and try to make the bastards pay."
"We're on a rescue mission," Spider-Man said. "We could use a few extra hands."
Ms. Purple pointed to her loudly snoring young teammates. "I think he's dead weight right now."
"I'll stay with him," Vista offered. "Someone needs to stay with the civilians anyway, and someone should probably call in that three members of the Nine got taken out." she pulled out her phone. "and uh, I think that I overdid it taking out Bloodbath."
As Vista made the call, Spider-Man and Weaver left following Ashley's symbiote, joined by the young woman who introduced herself as Tattletale.