Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it came from the films or the comics, even if I flatter myself that I've put my own spin on things.
Feedback: All constructive comments or appreciative observations are welcome
AN: I apologise for the delay compared to my usual update pattern; RL issues meant that I just didn't have as much time to write as usual, but I hope to get back to a more regular pattern now.
AN 2: Thanks are due to Elvenheart65, who inspired a particular detail in this chapter.
The First and the Last
"So… that guy was responsible for Colonel Rhodes getting his original suit?" Carol looked thoughtfully at Peter as they sat in his small apartment, Carol on a chair while Peter sat at his small desk to look at the news article about Justin Hammer's trial, each of them back in casual clothing. Once Carol had returned to Mount Rushmore, it had been easy enough for Carol to take the former industrialist to prison even when also carrying the armour, Peter coming along to basically provide a recording of Hammer's testimony thanks to his suit. Carol had gone to visit Maria while Peter returned to his own flat, but after each of them had taken a couple of days to deal with their own business they had met up at Peter's apartment once again.
"From what I read after the Expo, it was more like he was hired to make some additions to the suit after Mr Stark had already created it, but… well, from what I heard his modifications didn't do that much," Peter shrugged, smiling slightly at the memory of seeing the original War Machine armour make its debut (he hadn't been in the arena itself at that time, but he'd watched it on one of the screens in other parts of the expo). "He basically just stuck a few more weapons on the armour, and from what Mr Stark told me Hammer's more personal additions to the suit didn't even work."
Peter fought down the urge to wince at the fresh reminder of Tony Stark's death. He couldn't go through life constantly missing the people who had been lost in the Snap; he had to allow himself to remember the more pleasant memories without focusing on… how it had all ended.
"Anyway," he said, determined to focus on the cheerier parts of this current memory of his life pre-Spider-Man, "after Hammer got arrested for his role in the Expo attack, I think my uncle commented that Hammer might have wanted to rely on the Rimmer defence when he was reading about the court case later…"
"Rimmer defence?" Carol repeated curiously.
"A term he came up with from this sci-fi comedy show he used to watch," Peter explained, still smiling at the memory. "Long story short, this Rimmer guy in the show's accused of over a thousand counts of manslaughter for causing the deaths of his spaceship crew, but the other characters set up a cross-examination that proves Rimmer has such a massive ego despite being utterly incompetent at everything that he basically felt like he was responsible even though nobody would have given him that kind of power in the first place."
"OK…" Carol nodded, looking thoughtfully at Peter. "So in this show… people basically argued that this Rimmer guy wasn't guilty of accidentally killing people because he was such an idiot nobody would have ever put him in a position where he might have done it?"
"Pretty much," Peter nodded. "Uncle Ben told me that he felt Hammer's best chance was to basically admit that he'd been such an idiot he'd genuinely not realised that the terrorist he was dealing with could be that dangerous."
"Well, I guess they can't all be that Hammerhead guy," Carol grinned in admiration at her friend.
"Huh?"
"He might have been a local crime boss, but at least he had a plan that sounded smart; nobody else would have known about what he was doing if you hadn't gotten curious."
"…Thanks," Peter smiled carefully at her, as though he wanted to be sure she wasn't just humouring him.
"Just the truth," Carol grinned, before looking at him with a more casually curious expression. "Getting back to the topic of Hammerhead, have you heard anything more about that guy?"
"Him having vibranium apparently made it a bit trickier than just having him arrested like a regular crook, but according to Colonel Rhodes we still have a few contacts in Wakanda who are willing to take responsibility for the whole thing. Black Widow sent me a message about how there's apparently some debate about whether it's worth actually taking the vibranium out of his skull, since there's the whole legal issue that Hammerhead apparently didn't steal it himself and he didn't do anything bad enough that anyone in Wakanda wants to kill him to get it back…"
"Tricky to know where to draw the line sometimes," Carol said, a briefly wistful tone to her voice before she looked curiously at Peter again. "So, if Hammerhead's raising a few questions, is there any news regarding how that Justin Hammer guy even got out of prison? It feels like working with a terrorist should get a bit of a longer sentence than… what, eight years?"
"From what Colonel Rhodes told me, he basically took advantage of his old connections to launch a new appeal and persuade people that he was over his past mistakes and wanted to get back to 'helping make America great'," Peter explained, shaking his head disdainfully at the idea. "Colonel Rhodes thinks Hammer was trying to basically take advantage of… well, everything that happened recently… to try and set himself up as some new hero."
"Set himself up?" Carol repeated, before her eyes widened. "Hold on; are you saying-?"
"He gave those guys the idea to go after Mount Rushmore so he could stop it?" Peter finished. "I mean, to give Hammer credit, I think he honestly thought he could stop them actually doing it, but he still gave them the bomb they would have used, and it could have actually gone off if we hadn't been there first."
"Seriously?" Carol looked at Peter incredulously. "Did that guy honestly think we'd just… let him into the compound after he stopped some terrorists blowing up Mount Rushmore? Even if we believed that he just found out about some warped terrorist attack by chance, I can't see anyone trusting him on the team after what he did to Stark, and I'm only just hearing about it!"
"It's like my uncle said, I guess," Peter smiled wistfully at the memory of that long-ago conversation. "Justin Hammer is just smart enough to know he's a tech genius, but he's also not smart enough to realise when he's out of his depth."
"Especially not if you destroyed his armour like that," Carol noted, giving him a friendly smile. "No offence, but I can't see you defeating Colonel Rhodes in a straight fight, so if you beat something that big…"
"Yeah, I wasn't expecting that either," Peter conceded with an understanding nod. "I asked Colonel Rhodes about that after he'd had a chance to look it over, and he told me that apparently Hammer's armour… well, he missed a few steps when making it."
"Meaning?"
"The actual armour was pretty tough, but the joints were a lot weaker."
"Allowing you to take it apart by focusing on them," Carol nodded in understanding, before she smiled. "So even if he'd made it onto the team, Hammer would have been in trouble if someone just shot him in the right place?"
"One of many reasons why the guy's an idiot," Peter smiled, before he turned around to open a new window on his laptop. "I think they've started posting stuff about the trial online; care to check it out?"
"Sure," Carol grinned, moving to stand behind Peter as he brought YouTube up on the laptop. Her still-fragmentary memories of her past on Earth were enough to leave her simultaneously impressed at how far her world had come since she'd been exposed to the Tesseract's energy and bemused at how far they still had to go given everything she'd seen in the wider galaxy. Still, she was doing her best to find time to judge Earth tech on its own merits; the more time she spent with Peter in particular these days the more Carol appreciated the relative 'simplicity' of her world of origin, finding forms of entertainment that didn't focus on raiding other worlds.
"Huh." Peter looked curiously at a video that appeared after his latest search, declaring itself to be about 'The Truth of Justin Hammer'. "What's this…?"
"This is an outrage!" a bald man with a small grey moustache declared as Peter opened the video, glaring out of the screen. "A man who has served his time tries to give back to the world, and some masked upstart thinks he can claim the credit and blame a dedicated American industrialist who just wanted to help? Justin Hammer is an American patriot dedicated to making this country great again-!"
"And that's enough of that," Carol reached over to click away from the video.
"Uh… shouldn't I-?" Peter began.
"Peter, take my advice; if you focus on the people who hate you you're not going to get anything done," Carol said, giving him a firm stare. "I've had to deal with people who don't always like what I do, but you can't obsess about how people will react if they're determined to believe the worst of you."
"But isn't it good to get an idea of what you did wrong-?"
"Not when you're dealing with someone who is so utterly convinced you're wrong that they wouldn't listen to anything you have to say," Carol cut him off, even as she gave him a small smile. "Wanting to improve is one thing, but that guy… it sounded like he was defaulting to the idea that Spider-Man was in the wrong from the start. You know you stopped Justin Hammer doing a bad thing, and everyone who matters understands that. Listening to someone else who doesn't get it won't do anything but make you feel bad, so don't do that to yourself."
Peter couldn't stop an uncertain expression crossing his face at first, but that thought was cut short when Carol pulled him towards her and gave him a brief but intense hug (he was not enjoying the feel of her body against his; she was just a friend).
"You did everything right," Carol said again as she stood back, still smiling reassuringly at him. "You stopped the terrorists, disarmed their bomb, took out Hammer without anyone else getting hurt, and exposed him as the lying fraud he is. Seriously, there was nothing there that you could have done differently unless you'd known Hammer was going to be there from the start, and we both know you'd never have let him get that far if you'd had that kind of advance warning anyway."
"You… you're sure?" Peter fought down the faint sense of tears in the corner of his eyes as he looked at Carol, appreciating her faith in him even as he didn't want to interrupt the moment.
"Hey, maybe you slipped up once or twice if that ferry story I've heard is accurate, but we all screw up; what's important is learning from the big ones," Carol affirmed, the warm smile on her face stopping Peter's brief sense of shame at the memory of that particular close call. "You did the right thing now, and that bald guy had no reason to say otherwise except that he just didn't like you. If the rest of the team want to give you constructive criticism after a difficult mission, that's one thing, but if this Jameson guy was so convinced you're the bad guy and Hammer was somehow the 'good' guy, he's not worth listening to."
"…Fair point, well made," Peter smiled back at her (and his eyes did not flick down to her chest). "Thanks, ma'am."
"That's what I'm here for," Carol smiled back (Peter had no idea where 'ma'am' had come from and was glad she didn't ask about it), before she reached into her jacket pocket and took out a pager. "And on that topic, I thought you should have this."
"Huh?"
"I get that things have moved on a bit since those days, but back when I first came to Earth… well, Nick Fury gave me the other one of these in case I was ever needed back here," Carol explained, taking another device out of her pocket to show it to Peter.
"Huh," Peter said, confusion replaced by curiosity as he examined the two pagers. He admitted that he'd only seen these things in the occasional film- that White House Down movie came to mind- but he was fairly sure there were a few extra bits on these things that didn't look like the stuff that was normally on a pager. "So… he could call you with this?"
"Yeah…" Carol said, her expression a bit more solemn as she studied the pager. "I… don't know why he didn't call me earlier…"
"Well, to be fair to him, the last two big Avengers-level things happened so fast that he probably decided you couldn't get back here fast enough to make a difference even if you were here, and everything else… well, we always handled it, right?" Peter shrugged, before he looked more awkwardly at her. "Not that you're not- we're all glad to have you here now-"
Peter could only blink in shock when Carol leaned over to give him a brief kiss on the cheek and stepped back to smile at him.
"Thanks," she said with a grin, before she turned their attention back to the pager. "Anyway, that's why I want you to have this; of everyone I've met on this team since everything happened… well, it's not that I have a problem with any of the others, but you're… well, you're definitely my friend first; everyone else feels more like a teammate."
"So… if I have this, I'm the one who can call you in if something happens that needs your attention on Earth?"
"Or just if you… want to hang out," Carol shrugged. "I mean, I'll keep in contact with everyone else on a more regular basis, but you're the one who can call me between scheduled check-in times if something comes up at the last minute."
It didn't make up for everyone he'd lost when everything went wrong, and maybe it was a bit selfish, but this assurance that someone thought he was special… that on a team that still included the likes of Captain America and Thor, someone thought that he was the one who was worth being the contact for a woman who'd spent the last couple of decades saving other planets…
"I…" Peter looked thoughtfully at the device. "Well, I might look into making an upgrade or two if that's OK; the pager thing's good for nostalgia, but things have picked up since…"
"Hey, if you come up with something better, I'm all for that; this is just what I've got at the moment," Carol explained with a reassuring smile. "I could mix Kree tech with Earth tech first time around, but with everything so much more complicated now… well, if you can make your webbing by yourself before anyone started sponsoring you, I'd be interested to see what you come up with here."
Looking at the simple faith in her face as she spoke, Peter wanted to say something more than just 'Thank you' to this person who made him feel valued and admired in a way that somehow made him feel better about himself than even Mr Stark had ever managed to make him feel… this person who made him feel so many things he wasn't sure how to explain… this friend who already meant so much to him that she almost made up for everyone he'd lost in the Snap…
"Thanks," he said at last, putting the device in his pocket as he smiled at Carol. "I'll… well, I'll get back to you when I have something new, OK?"
"I'm looking forward to it," Carol grinned back at him.
Their holiday might not have gone exactly as planned, but Peter couldn't complain about the results; they'd done some good, saved a famous landmark, stopped an idiot's attempt to become an Avenger, and Peter had been assured that a good friend thought highly of him even above other Avengers.
Maybe it was a bit petty of him, but even if people like Jameson were going to criticise his way of doing things, it really felt good to get that kind of praise from someone he actually trusted…