Disclaimer: I own nothing that you recognise (and I'm borrowing a couple of things you may not recognise from sources you simply may not be familiar with); be assured I'll identify anything relevant when it comes up.

Feedback: Always appreciated

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.

With that said, we now go back to Peter-Three's reality, as they confront the versions of the Fantastic Four from the 2015 film and deal with the final threat of the Sinister Six.

Scarlet Witch and the Three Spiders

"What?" Peter looked at the new arrivals with what even Wanda's out-of-practise people skills could see was genuine concern. "Dimensional anom- you can't just-"

"The last anomaly we dealt with nearly destroyed our world if we hadn't stopped the guy behind it," the thin man said, standing in a manner that made it clear he was the leader of this particular group. "We have a responsibility to stop-"

"And you have the right to give us a chance to explain things instead of deciding to condemn my friend for something she didn't choose and isn't responsible for," Peter cut the man off. "I get that you're some big scientific think tank, but this is someone's life we're talking about; you can't just decide that someone's that kind of threat-"

"And you don't know enough about what we do to understand what we're dealing with here," the thin man said with a pointed stare. "You're out of your league, Spider-Man; we are the professionals-"

"And yet you took this long to get involved in something that could have had global consequences?" Wanda said.

"We were trying to track you-" the blonde woman began.

"I think she meant the enhanced mercenaries who nearly triggered a potential global economic collapse?" Peter cut the blonde off with a cool glare. "Again, I respect you people as scientists working to save the future from our present mistakes or however you define yourselves, but if you're just going to sit around and do research you're not exactly helping anyone right now."

"Hey, the whole point of going independent was that we're not part of the military-" the apparent leader of this group said.

"And why does that mean you cannot do other things?" Wanda glared at the man. "Peter is not saying that you cannot do whatever scientific research you wish; he is simply suggesting that you should do more to deal with more extreme problems that conventional forces cannot handle in the present."

"That… is a good point," the large rock figure nodded at her.

"Ben!" the thin man looked back at the rocky Hulk. "You're meant to be-"

"I can be your friend and call you out when I think you're wrong," the large man countered as he looked at the group's apparent leader. "I get that what you do is important, but there are times I'd like to feel like I'm doing more than lugging around equipment while you work on reversin' this in your spare time."

"We were meant to be more than just military assets; I thought you agreed with that-!"

"And does that mean we just sit around and do nothing when we're not cracking the latest mysteries of science?" the rocky figure said, folding his arms as he looked at Reed. "You've been cranking out ideas for how you want to make the world a better place since I've known you; what's wrong with doing something that helps someone right now as well as working on something for the future?"

"And what if this one's going to be a new Doom?" the dark-skinned man said, looking at Wanda with a firm stare that made Wanda feel uncomfortable.

"She's been here for a few days already and all she's done is help me deal with these guys," Peter said, standing defensively between Wanda and the speaker as he indicated the fallen Sinister Six. "I get that this kind of thing may not be as 'glamorous' as your advanced scientific research, but sometimes it's important to actually help people here and now, not go on making weird science stuff out in the mountains that might help humanity later."

Wanda wasn't sure who these people were, but as Peter stood between her and this strange group of four, she felt part of a group in a way that she hadn't been since that final clash against Thanos at the old Avengers compound. She had told herself that she'd go back to speak with Clint in particular after she'd claimed Vision's body, but then everything had happened at Westview and she'd left because she wanted to better understand what she had learned about herself, and then it just became more and more awkward…

"We can't just ignore the threat of a potential incursion-" the thin man began.

"And Wanda's been here for a few days already without causing any problems, but the Sinister Six are working for a man who could cause a complete financial collapse in a few hours; that might be more important than whatever you think might happen," Peter cut the thin man off. "If you're going to stick around here, maybe you could help us make sure that particular problem isn't going to be an issue and then you can keep an eye on Wanda until we can get her home?"

"…Fine," the thin man said with a frustrated shrug. "I suppose it's probably safer if we focus on keeping the economy together so society doesn't have even more trouble to deal with…"

"What do you even need help with now anyway?" the formerly flaming man asked as he waved his hand at the fallen supervillains. "Looks like we already took down these 'Sinister Six' suckers-"

"But you didn't get the guy who hired us," a voice put in from behind the group. Turning around with the others, Wanda wondered how to react when she realised that the speaker was the bubble-headed man who apparently called himself 'Mysterio', his suit dented and twisted even if he didn't seem to be that badly injured himself. "Which is why I'm willing to let you use my tracker to find him."

"You were hired by someone?" Wanda asked.

"More he called in a few favours and paid us a considerable sum of money to get us to help him out after he helped Osborn provide our equipment, but… yeah, we didn't come up with this all on our own," the criminal nodded.

"And you just happen to have a tracker that will take us to this guy?" Peter looked sceptically at the other man.

"And you're willing to share it with us?" the rock-Hulk said, even as he flexed his shoulders with a foreboding glare. "Why?"

"I have a tracker because I've seen enough films to know that you don't just trust that someone operating for these kind of stakes would keep his word if we didn't get to him in time after completing our side of this mission," Mysterio explained, reaching over to open a hatch on one of his gauntlets and take out an object that put Wanda in mind of one of those old Blackberry portable computers. "And I'm giving it to you because if I'm going to go to jail whatever happens now, I'm not going to let the old man reap all the benefits of this little victory."

"Which means we still have time to stop him?" the blonde woman asked.

"He's not planning to release the catalyst until we've done our job, his plane's shielded from the EMP, and he would have been high enough to avoid the effects of the blast anyway," Mysterio said, as Peter walked over to take the device. "Based on the timetable he gave us, he should still just be preparing to take off, so if you're quick to follow the signal…"

"You get that you're still going to prison for all this, right?" Peter said even as he took the tracker and turned it on to study the screen.

"I'm prepared for that," Mysterio seemed to nod under his helmet. "Just so long as you give me access to a few streaming services in prison."

"You're seriously just asking for that?" the rock-Hulk said.

"Keep expectations reasonable and I can negotiate for more later."

"Yeah, whatever," Peter said, shooting some webbing from his wrists to properly pin the other man down before he turned to look at the others. "So are you with me and the Scarlet Witch, or do we have to waste more time arguing about if she's the 'problem'?"

In Fiers' view, there were few things more satisfying than when a plan properly came together.

Oh, working with common criminals such as the Sinister Six might be a bit of a comedown for him in some ways, when he'd associated with internationally famous figures in the past such as dictators and terrorists, but when the world was already adapting to accommodate the likes of Spider-Man and the 'Fantastic Four' he could accept a need for that kind of spotlight if it meant ensuring he was on an even field with his other enemies. The death of Osborn and Dillon and Kravinoff choosing to 'retire' had been a bit of a disappointment, but he couldn't expect others to have his level of commitment.

He had spent so many decades building an already exceptional yet discreet empire to a level that would surpass many of the most famous names in crime while simultaneously going to considerable lengths to stay in the shadows, but this would be the moment when he would surpass even his own past achievements. The scale of the upcoming catastrophe would make a mark on the rest of the world beyond anything he'd ever truly participated in- he'd been too young to make a proper impact on the Second World War, and Vietnam had just been a mess however anyone looked at it- but all that truly mattered was that he would profit from it.

He might have missed the chance to gain any kind of augmentation himself, but he couldn't ignore the facts; as much as he prided himself on his own superior breeding, genetic augmentation had been too risky after Richard Parker's attack of conscience, and most of the technology in Oscorp's labs was too dangerous for him to use personally given his own age. He had at least been able to fall back on his more traditional assets and hire others to act on his behalf, and the Six should be useful assets in the new world he was about to create. The EMP should go off soon, and once the catalyst had been deployed, everything would play out just as he had planned.

With the collapse of the American economy imminent, he would only require his collection of more classic treasures to keep the Six in his employ, and from there he could finally establish himself as a true power player. There would no longer be any need to operate from the shadows and rely on money alone to stay ahead of the law; he would be able to make the law for himself…

As he sat outside his plane, he prepared for the moment when the generator would be activated. Even with Richard's son doing his best to interfere for his own stupid reasons- why someone with all that power could only think to waste it as some vigilante Fiers would never understand- there was no way he could successfully defeat all six before the generator was set off, at which point the arachnid's precious web-shooters would be just as useless as so many other technologies would be. Even if he was in any state to go after the criminals once the EMP went off, the Parker boy would never be able to keep up with them before Fiers and his forces were ready to depart and release the catalyst.

The collected artefacts were secure in the plane, the vehicle itself was protected from any potential EMP fallout, the only possible threat to his plans would never be able to get here in time-

The sound of an approaching engine drew Fiers' attention from his thoughts, prompting him to glance up with a cautious smile. He initially expected that he would see the Six coming towards him, with Toomes and Beck carrying some of the non-fliers, but that hope became more cautious when he saw a strange aircraft that definitely wasn't something he had witnessed before now. He wondered briefly if it was some Oscorp project that young Harry just hadn't gotten around to sharing with him directly before their first big assault on the city, but that thought was ended when he saw the flaming figure alongside the vehicle.

He had only skimmed over reports on the so-called 'Fantastic Four', dismissing them as no threat to his plans given their relative isolation in their facility far from New York, but the image of a flying man who could control fire wasn't something it was easy to forget. He wasn't sure how they had become involved in events, but if even one of the team was approaching him right now, he had to assume that the rest had become involved in Parker's attempts to oppose his own plans. He turned to hurry back towards the plane, but found himself face-to-face with the red-and-blue form of Richard Parker's brat, a tension in his stance that Fiers hadn't often seen in the news reports he'd witnessed of the vigilante in action.

"So," the young man said with a low tone that again sounded far more serious than the usual reports, "you're the one who set up all this crap?"

"This 'crap'?" Fiers repeated with a grim shake of his head. "If you think to insult me by demeaning the scale of my scheme-"

"You were going to smash up the economy so that you could try and get rich?" the boy cut him off. "That's Goldfinger applied to modern concepts; you just hired the Six to make it all look cool."

"Nothing wrong with taking ideas where you find them," Fiers said, allowing himself a cool smirk. "Just because you dismiss my plans doesn't mean the core idea doesn't have merit… Peter."

To his credit, the boy only slightly flinched at the use of his name even as he continued to glare at Fiers.

"What makes you think-?" he began.

"Do not insult my intelligence by assuming I didn't realise who you were the first time you made your debut in that ridiculous suit," Fiers countered. "Richard Parker made it clear that his work was useless to anyone but his own flesh and blood; if anyone was going to acquire such powers, it would have been you. The only reason I never went after you before this was that the legal consequences of trying to bring you in weren't worth it before I knew what the spiders would do to your physiology, and afterwards I saw no sense in provoking a confrontation when you still didn't know I was a factor."

"Huh," the boy said, looking briefly bemused before his stance shifted in a manner that suggested he was glaring at Fiers under his mask. "And I'm guessing what happened to Harry wasn't a good advertisement for the idea that you could do anything useful with my blood anyway?"

"That… didn't help," Fiers was willing to concede, before he directed a cool smirk at Peter. "But that doesn't change the fact that I know a lot more about your family history than you do; if you want to know any of my secrets-"

"That's what I'm here for," an unfamiliar voice said. Fiers didn't even have time to turn around before some kind of red energy seemed to spread out and brush against the edges of his vision, coupled by a sense of something digging fingers into his mind. He tried to focus his thoughts on something else, vaguely recalling some mental techniques he'd learnt in the past to resist attempts at interrogation, but whatever was happening to him was something he'd never experienced before.

"You-" he tried to protest at this intrusion on his mind. "You- dare- can't-"

"I have fought worse," the unfamiliar voice said, before the red glow faded and Fiers found himself looking at the woman in red he had seen on his screens a few days ago, a cool stare on her dark-skinned face and the rest of the 'Fantastic Four' standing a short distance behind her. "And you have done a great deal to hurt my friend."

"I did nothing more than ensure my natural place-" Fiers began, only to be met by a slender fist to his face.

When he woke in prison a few days later, he would be particularly embarrassed at how he had fallen down so abruptly when struck by a relative non-entity nobody seemed to know a thing about. That lack of knowledge served as a source of frustration and comfort for Fiers at the same time as he witnessed everything he had built being dismantled by his inferiors, using information that had been delivered by the figure people only seemed to know as 'the Scarlet Witch'. Even if it frustrated him to have been struck by a nobody, Fiers could at least console himself that he could never have prepared for a threat that nobody else seemed to know anything about either.

Even when he thought back on those last days of freedom once he was sent to prison, he couldn't find any way that he could have done things differently and saved himself without focusing more attention on the woman in red, which was something he would have had no reason to do before he knew more about her. It was a frustrating reminder that even he could make mistakes, but if he was truly the superior man he knew he was, Fiers also had to accept when he had genuinely failed, rather than delude himself by blaming his loss on someone else's mistakes.

"Was that really necessary?" the thin man asked as the old man fell to the ground.

"He was responsible for the deaths of my friend's parents," Wanda looked grimly back at the thin man as she withdrew her fist. "I spent years blaming the wrong man for what happened to my parents, and I have moved past that as much as I can, but the concept… it raises several issues."

"…Thanks," Peter nodded cautiously at his new acquaintance. "That… if that had been me, I probably would have done a bit more damage than I should have…"

"The disadvantage of super-strength," the rocky man said with a shrug of his own. "It's never easy having to learn when you need to hold back… and of course, I had even more crap to deal with when I changed."

"All it takes is time," Wanda said, smiling reassuringly at the man. "One of my team had a similar transformation to your own, except that he spent years lacking control of his other state."

"Huh?"

"He could turn into a large green creature with superhuman strength but his own control over that state was limited to teaching it who was not an enemy," Wanda explained, smiling slightly at the memory. "When I last saw him, he had achieved a state of control over his transformed state that allowed him to be permanently green while retaining his human mind, and was essentially a celebrity despite his rough past."

"Huh," the rock figure said, looking at Wanda with a curious expression that was relatively easy to read even with his unusual features. "You think I could do that? Be famous like this, I mean?"

"He achieved that even after I was tricked into provoking him into going on a rampage in Johannesburg; if you haven't done anything on that scale, I think you can do the same," Wanda grinned at the rock figure.

"…Ben Grimm," the figure said, stepping forward and holding out a large hand towards Wanda. "Just realised we never really introduced ourselves."

"Wanda Maximoff," Wanda said, taking his hand as best she could. "And do not worry about it; we all had more pressing concerns."

"Quite," the blonde woman said, moving forward to extend her own hand towards Wanda. "Susan Storm."

"Johnny Storm," the flaming man said, touching down to join the offered handshakes.

"Reed Richards," the thin man said, his own arm extending out towards Wanda even as he stood a short distance away from her.

"…Well, since this guy already knows it anyway, I might as well," Peter observed, reaching up to remove his own mask. "Peter Parker."

It was a strange sensation to be standing in an aircraft hangar, his mask in his hand, surrounded by a group of relative strangers, but as the other five gave him reassuring smiles, Peter wondered if this sense of camaraderie was the reason Wanda had spoken so warmly about her time with the Avengers even after everything that had gone wrong back then.

He wouldn't give up on his sense of responsibility to the city of New York and its people, so he wasn't going to just leave the city to join Richards' think tank, but he could see the appeal of spending time with people who understood the burden and responsibility of unconventional powers…

AN 2: To answer a couple of possible questions in advance, Wanda didn't 'recognise' this version of Johnny Storm because she had no reason to be aware of Erik Killmonger back in her reality. I considered trying to include such a scene, but it would have just felt forced, considering that when Killmonger tried to stage his coup of Wakanda Wanda was on the run with the other rogue Avengers, and afterwards it's unlikely that T'Challa would have advertised his existence. She also shows no particular recognition of this version of Reed because he looks different enough from the Reed who was in the Illuminati that he doesn't immediately make Wanda think of him, particularly since his suit is so different that none of the 'Fantastic Four' actually have the number in question displayed anywhere on them.