Two weeks had passed since the incident with Flash, and Peter had spent that time adjusting to the reality of waking up every morning in the body of one of Marvel's most famous and most underrated heroes, carrying the memories of a first life that no longer existed while building something new inside the one he had been given.
The adjustment was going better than he had expected in some areas and stranger than he had anticipated in others.
On the social front he had managed to form some genuine friendships, which the previous Peter had apparently considered an impossible achievement.
Missy Kallenback had turned out to be genuinely good company, someone he had a great deal in common with, and Gwen Stacy had proven to be exactly as sharp and warm as stated. Two friends in two weeks was not a bad start for a Parker.
The even stranger development was that he appeared to be acquiring a stalker.
She was a redhead, and every time he was anywhere near her she would start walking toward him with the focused and unstoppable energy of the T-1000, and every single time something would intervene before she actually reached him and he would escape without ever having to find out what she wanted.
He had tried standing still once and waiting for a memory to surface that might tell him who she was, but nothing came back, which meant she was either someone the previous Peter had not considered important enough to store in the accessible memory bank or someone entirely outside the film timeline he was familiar with.
He had eventually started actively running whenever she appeared nearby, and he was beginning to suspect that whatever the previous Peter had done to irritate her, it had been significant enough to motivate a multi-week pursuit.
Setting the redhead mystery aside, the two weeks had been productive in ways that mattered considerably more.
Three things, specifically.
Point one.
He had researched Baxter thoroughly and found an internship pathway.
The door opened through a supervised interview with Franklin Storm himself, and if Peter could impress him the result would be a temporary position with a limited budget.
Making it permanent, along with a larger budget, required his research and inventions to make a genuine impression on both the company and the wider world.
This was not a problem.
He had memories from another life full of ideas, inventions, and research projects that had never existed in this universe, and a brain that could reconstruct and develop all of them. He had submitted his information.
Now he was waiting.
Point two.
He had not spent the two weeks only researching Baxter.
He had also gone through the medical books stored in the basement, the ones May had left down there from her years of nursing work, and had spent considerable time at the library working through whatever else was relevant to the research he planned to do both for himself and eventually for other people.
He had also cleaned his room, because the previous Peter had apparently operated on a system of organized chaos that only made sense to him, and Peter had no access to that particular mental map.
Point three was what he was doing right now.
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The basement had been visited three times in the past two weeks.
The first was practical, checking the drainage situation to make sure nothing was going to flood the way it had in the film and damage whatever was stored down there.
The second was tracking down the books May had stored there, which the previous Peter's memories had flagged as existing without specifying exactly where they were.
The third reason was what he was doing right now, on a Saturday morning with the house to himself, moving boxes carefully until he found what he had come looking for.
His father's briefcase.
He found it after twenty minutes of careful searching, arranged all the displaced boxes back into their proper positions, and carried it upstairs to his room.
Once inside he locked the door using the lock the previous Peter had installed specifically to keep May from walking in unexpectedly, which felt slightly unnecessary given that May was not home, but the habit of taking precautions when handling sensitive material was one he intended to cultivate rather than dismiss.
He opened the briefcase. The surface contents were the same as the film. He set them aside and found the hidden pocket.
When he reached inside he pulled out the document and set the briefcase down, and then heard the impact as it landed and frowned.
That sounded heavier than it should.
He picked it back up and examined it more carefully, finding not one hidden pocket but two, both of which he had missed on the first pass.
The first contained a badge and a photograph.
He looked at the badge and recognized the agency immediately, SHIELD, Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate, and the photograph was one of himself as a child with both his parents on either side of him.
He looked at it for a moment before setting it carefully aside. That one was going in a frame on the desk.
The second pocket contained another badge, different colors and a completely different agency from the first.
He turned it over to read the name on the back and found that it belonged to Mary Fitzpatrick, which was his mother's name, and the agency was not one he recognized from the film timeline.
He sat with that for a moment.
So his parents had lived the same life as their 616 counterparts. Two people from different agencies, different worlds in the operational sense, who had somehow managed to fall in love across the professional divide and build something together before the universe decided it had other plans for them.
He put everything back in its proper place except for the photograph, which he set aside to frame and put on his desk, and then turned his full attention to what he had originally come for, which was the genetic crossing formula his father had been carrying.
"00 Decay Rate Algorithm," he said quietly, reading through the first page.
"Connors became so obsessed with the regenerative application that he completely missed everything else this formula is capable of. Peter in the movie never took the time to study the underlying code properly, and that is why he ended up with a giant lizard destroying a school."
He kept reading, moving carefully through the document, and found something tucked between two of the later pages that he had not expected.
"This is a marriage certificate." He looked at it properly. "They got married in Russia. My mother was Russian, which means I am half Russian."
He considered that for a moment. "That might actually earn me some goodwill with Romanoff eventually... Interesting."
He set the marriage certificate aside and went back to the formula, and spent the next three hours working through every line of it with careful attention.