Disclaimer: Everything you recognise here either came from the MCU films or the original Marvel comics, but I hope you enjoy the results anyway

Feedback: Feel free

AN: This takes place almost exactly between Age of Ultron and Civil War, looking at the night after Peter Parker made the great mistake all versions of him end up going through at some point…

The Legacies' Triad

While some moments of history can vary from world to world, at the same time there are some events that are such a core part of the very fabric of reality that they will almost always try to make themselves happen even amid everything else. Whether it be from an independent experiment that was more successful than any could have expected, a chance accident, a side-effect of a corporate research project, a convergence of science and magic in the right place at the wrong time, or some variation of any of the above, it was essentially inevitable that a certain young man will gain remarkable powers after an encounter with an enhanced arachnid, and be required to suffer a great loss before he will use those powers properly…

Listening to Aunt May still sobbing in her room, Peter wondered when he would stop hating himself.

It had all seemed like so much fun… it had been so cool when it first happened. Sure, he'd felt like crap the afternoon of that trip to the science museum, when he'd first felt the bite of what had to be one of those escaped research spiders they'd just been talking about. He had spent the rest of the day feeling like he was fighting to stay awake as his head felt like it was becoming thicker and heavier throughout the trip, forcing himself to take notes as he walked around the lab.

Once the trip was over and he had caught the bus back home, he had basically collapsed onto his bed, only to wake up the next day to the bemusing sight of new muscles all over his upper body. He'd had to focus on getting to school at the time, but when he started to realise the more spider-like aspects of his new state, such as getting his hand temporarily stuck to walls or reacting to attacks before they happened, he began to think about the wider possibilities of what had just happened.

It wasn't hard to work out that the genetically enhanced spiders had been responsible, but when he tried to do some additional research on what the lab had been doing, the talk about the spiders' potential venom had been enough to put him off the idea. He could just about speculate that something had been 'off' about the venom of that particular spider, but for all he knew there could have been some mistake in the process that created that particular spider, or some kind of fluke in his own biology that meant it had this kind of effect on him. He'd read all kinds of theories about why nobody had been able to properly recreate the super-soldier serum since Steve Rogers became Captain America, ranging from Doctor Erskine making last-minute changes he never wrote down to something interesting about Rogers' physiology itself, but either way, he wasn't going to risk telling anyone else about it.

He'd read enough of those reports Doctor Banner had given after joining the Avengers about how the military had spent years hunting him for the secret to recreating the Hulk even though the odds of Banner even surviving that experience had been slim, never mind that the Hulk wasn't exactly controllable at that point in his existence. Spider venom wasn't quite as dangerous as gamma radiation, but the basic idea still applied; if he told too many people about what had happened to him, he'd never forgive himself if someone tried to copy it and ended up poisoning themselves.

He'd genuinely been thinking about telling at least a few trusted people about these changes at first, such as Uncle Ben or Ned or even Kate, but he'd become so caught up in learning more about what he could do and how it all worked… and then he'd had that idea to make himself artificial webbing, and he'd ended up staying late at school putting the chemicals together in the chemistry lab. He'd even grabbed a pair of goggles from the workshop class and managed to make a few additions to help him focus through his new enhanced senses (he hadn't even realised he'd stopped wearing glasses until Ned asked him where they were), and then he'd spent the next hour or so practising with his new creation. He'd even managed to catch a car thief while he was out testing the webbing, swinging down and knocking the guy down with one punch (after using the webbing to create a quick 'mask' for the lower half of his face, along with a woollen hat to cover his hair). The web-mask had worn off after a few minutes, and he'd spent so long working out how to make the formula last longer as he kept swinging that he'd forgotten that he'd arranged to meet Aunt May for something (he couldn't even remember what that had been now), and by the time he got home…

How could I have been such a jerk?

Ben had just been talking about how he shouldn't get caught up in high school pressure to conform or change, and Peter had let his powers go to his head and started yelling something about how Ben couldn't understand him and he didn't need to hear this stuff from someone who wasn't even his father…

That part really hurt Peter when he looked back at that final night; Uncle Ben and Aunt May had raised him for over a decade, and he acted as though none of that mattered just because Ben wasn't his direct biological father? Just the idea that Ben and May weren't good parents just because May hadn't actually given birth to him was such a… God, he couldn't even think about how harsh he'd been at that point, and all because he'd been stressed out about working out what he could do now?

He'd just stormed out of that argument like it wasn't worth finishing, like he didn't need to bother explaining himself to Ben and May after he'd spent all that time out for no obvious reason, and what had he done? He'd gone off to the corner store to get something to eat rather than bother going back for dinner, and then found that he couldn't even do that because he was a few cents short of what he needed to get himself his desired snack.

When that thief came in and stuck the cashier up, it was as though Peter's old ideas of heroism got pushed aside in one moment of bitter frustration with someone whose only 'crime' was maybe taking too much pleasure in sticking to the rules when it wasn't as though he had any way to know that Peter was having a bad day. Grabbing his snack from the counter in frustration, Peter had stormed out of the shop after the thief had taken everything in the register, not even really paying attention to the crook until he heard the gunshot from further down the street.

He only realised that Uncle Ben had been the victim when he looked in the direction of the shot and realised that he recognised the man now lying on the ground. Peter had caught up to the thief in a couple of superpowered jumps and trapped the man with the complete contents of an early webbing cartridge before he could get away, but it was clearly too late for him to do anything for Ben. All he could do was crouch over his dying uncle, trying to stammer out an apology that he wasn't even sure his uncle could hear, and then…

A small part of Peter knew that he'd been lucky that there was nobody else on the street at that time of night and the thief had been looking the other way when he used the cartridge, so he at least didn't have to worry about someone revealing that he had powers if they were called in as witnesses, but the rest of him… God, this was all his fault…

They hadn't even had the funeral yet, and Peter already wasn't sure how he and May were going to do this. It wasn't as though May didn't work, but Ben had always been the main earner, and even if Peter's school fees were covered up to graduation that didn't give them a lot of long-term options. The amount of guilt Peter had felt about just taking that snack after seeing Ben die in front of him basically guaranteed that he wasn't going to use his powers to try and steal money, which left him with basically nothing he could do to help as he knew May wouldn't even consider the idea of him dropping out or getting some kind of after-school job that would stop him focusing on his studies.

Help…

The more Peter thought about that word, the more he realised that was the important part of this current mess.

He couldn't undo the past, and he wasn't going to be able to use his powers to change anything about his social standing at school without raising too many questions- just losing his glasses was probably going to get a few people wondering what had happened even if they wouldn't ask about such a minor detail- but if he had these powers… if he was had the ability to make a difference…

Didn't he also have a responsibility to do it from now on?

He couldn't tell anyone about it, of course; May would freak if she knew what he was planning to do, Ned would just enjoy the idea but he wasn't sure his friend would really get the issues with it, and Kate was so much a fan of the Avengers he worried she'd insist on joining him when she'd never actually been in a real fight yet…

But he had the powers to do some damage in a fight, the speed to avoid getting hit in return, and the smarts to come up with a few new tricks beyond just hitting the other guy a lot. He might have failed to save his uncle, but he wasn't going to make that kind of mistake again; if he was going to use these powers, he was going to make sure nobody else would have to go through what he'd endured…

AN 2: In advance, the next time we see Peter will be after his role in Civil War, which will have had an impact on his perception of his role as Spider-Man and his relationship with his friends, but I won't bother looking at it directly as Kate's friendship didn't have any real effect on Peter's own actions in that film.

Coming up next, events jump to a few weeks after the Battle at Leipzig Airport, as we introduce the third member of this particular dynamic…