The compliment floated through the rain-soaked alleyway like a misplaced note in a symphony of chaos. "Nice Spiderman suit, kid."
Peter managed a jerky nod, his throat working around words that tasted like copper and ozone. The streetlamp above them flickered, casting jagged shadows that moved wrong—stretching too long, twisting at angles physics couldn't explain. The man didn't seem to notice. Just kept walking, humming some pop song Peter's alternate selves had probably heard in a dozen different apocalypses.
His palms itched. Not the familiar prickle of his spider-sense, but something deeper—cellular, like his DNA was unraveling stitch by stitch. A trashcan across the street warped momentarily into the shape of a laughing child before snapping back to steel and rotting lettuce. Peter squeezed his eyes shut, but the afterimage lingered.
Peter's eyelids snapped open to the sound of shattering glass—not from the alleyway, but from inside his skull. The vision of Benji crumpled against brickwork dissolved into rain-slick pavement, but not before Peter felt the phantom weight of small fingers going slack in his grip. His breath hitched, ribs suddenly too tight around lungs that remembered holding a child who'd never existed.
A taxi's horn blared three feet from his left ear. Peter flinched so hard his shoulder blades cracked against wet brick. The driver shouted something obscene through rolled-up windows as tires sent up a curtain of oily water. For one vertiginous moment, the droplets hung suspended—each one reflecting a different screaming face. MJ with a bullet between her eyes. Gwen falling. A dark-haired pair of toddlers with Wanda's hair and Peters eyes dissolving into a fire pit
Peter dug his nails into his palms until the sting grounded him. "Here and now," he muttered through clenched teeth. The words tasted like blood—he'd bitten his tongue at some point. "Just the rain. Just the alley." He focused on the ache of his knuckles, the way his soaked suit clung to his thighs like a second skin. Real. Tangible.
Peter's fingers traced the rusted seam in the alley wall—a jagged line his alternate-self's muscle memory recognized like a lover's scar. He reached a dumpster that stank of rotten produce and motor oil, but beneath it... "Here," he whispered, voice cracking like the pavement beneath his feet. The industrial dumpster screeched when he shoved it aside, revealing a keypad so weathered it looked like part of the brickwork.
His hands moved without conscious thought—left index finger hovering over digits he'd never consciously memorized. 1-5-2-8-. The keypad beeped twice, then emitted a sound like a dying refrigerator. For three heartbeats, nothing happened. Then the wall hissed open just wide enough for a starving man to slip through sideways.
The safehouse air smelled like gun oil and dead dreams. Peter's enhanced vision adjusted instantly, painting the space in grayscale clarity: A single chair upholstered in 90s-era leather. A desk with a CRT monitor thick with dust. A door on a far end corner with an old password key-pad. And on the wall— a photograph of Nick Fury shaking hands with a silver-haired man whose face kept changing in Peter's peripheral vision. He blinked hard, but the man's features kept sliding—sometimes clean-shaven, sometimes bearded, once horrifyingly young with Peter's own eyes staring back.
"Nonono, not now—" Peter pressed his palms against his temples as reality stuttered. The desk flickered into a hospital bed for three nauseating seconds. He tasted bile, felt the ghost of IV lines taped to his forearm from a memory that wasn't his. When he opened his eyes, the safehouse had stabilized, but the shadows clung wrong—stretching toward him like pleading hands.
Peter slammed the hidden door shut, hearing the hydraulic seals engage with a wet hiss that sounded more like a dying breath than machinery. His fingers twitched toward the Spiderman emblem on his chest—not in pride, but with the revulsion of a man peeling off plague-ridden bandages. The suit clung to him like a second skin gone septic, its vibrant colors muted under the safehouse's flickering fluorescents.
The wardrobe in the corner might as well have been a sarcophagus. Peter wrenched it open only to recoil as a slurry of mildewed fabric sloughed off the rail like necrotic tissue. A single tie—Fury's? Someone else's?—hung limp from a hook, its silk eaten away. The stench of rot and stagnant water hit him like a physical blow.
"Of course," he muttered, fingertips brushing the disintegrating remains of what might've been a jacket in another decade. "Because why would anything be easy?"
His reflection in the wardrobe's corroded mirror fractured into a dozen versions of himself—some suited, some bleeding, one horrifyingly clad in a straitjacket. Peter slammed the mirror shut before it could show him more. The movement sent a cascade of rust flakes drifting downward like metallic snow.
Then something caught Peter's attention, hung on chair, a Vietnam era green jacket.
Pristine olive drab fabric draped over the office chair, sleeves folded neatly as if waiting for someone who'd never shown up. Peter ran his fingers along the collar, half-expecting it to dissolve into dust like everything else in this godforsaken safe house. But the material stayed stubbornly real under his touch, the inner lining still smelling faintly of gunpowder and stale cigarettes.
"Spider-Rambo," Peter muttered, sliding his arms into sleeves that fit with eerie precision. The weight settled across his shoulders like an old friend's hand. He caught his reflection in the shattered remains of a security monitor—Spider-Man's iconic red and blue clashing violently with the military surplus aesthetic. "Just missing the headband and—" His fingers twitched toward his own short-cropped hair. "Christ, I'd need about twelve months and a time machine to 1985 to pull off the proper mullet."
A sharp pain lanced through his temple as the safe house flickered—for one nauseating second, the desk was gone, replaced by a rusted jungle gym where two dark-haired children swung lazily in the afternoon sun. Peter gripped the chair's armrest until his knuckles turned white, breathing through the hallucination until the safe house walls solidified again.
"Okay," Peter muttered, pressing his palms flat against the desk's scarred surface. The wood grain swam beneath his fingers, resolving briefly into Sanskrit runes before dissolving back into oak. "I'm having a really bad Tuesday."
A stray fact surfaced—Stephen Strange's voice, crisp and clinical, lecturing some forgotten apprentice about temporal psychosis symptoms. Peter latched onto it like a drowning man grabbing driftwood. Disorientation between timelines. Mental manifestations of psychic trauma. He exhaled sharply through his nose. "Bingo." he celebrates to himself, thanking the memories of a Peter that apprenticed under Strange.
he now had a name for what was wrong with him: temporal psychosis
Peter let out a ragged laugh. "Well," he muttered to the empty safehouse, flexing his fingers as they tingled with residual magic, "looks like I'm living that Bitter Sweet Symphony song lyrics right now:—a million different people from one day to the next." The cracked ceiling above him seemed to pulse in agreement, its water stains morphing momentarily into the face of an old man he knew was Ben Parker.
He caught his warped reflection in the broken monitor—Spider-Man suit, military jacket hanging open, eyes flickering with stolen memories. "Difference is," Peter said, slamming his fist against the desk hard enough to send rust flakes dancing, "I'm gonna change my mold." The desk held firm this time, no phantom children appearing in its grain.
"Progress," Peter muttered, rolling the word around his mouth like a sour candy. He spread his arms wide, military jacket flaring dramatically. "Ladies and gentlemen, witness the miracle—I hallucinated slightly fewer dead kids this time." he pushed off of the desk, knees popping like firecrackers and starts to accept standing ovations from an imaginary crowd "Thank you, thank you—no, you may not take pictures" he pauses giving the empty bunker a charming smile "You cant cause you're not real"
His stomach chose that moment to growl loud enough to echo off the moldering walls. Peter pressed a hand to his abdomen, half-expecting to feel ribs through the spider-suit. "Right. Food. Because obviously what this mental breakdown needs is expired military rations." He kicked open a rusted footlocker with more force than necessary, sending a cloud of dust motes swirling in the flickering fluorescents. "Come on, Fury. Even your sadistic ass wouldn't stockpile MREs from the Cold War—"
Peter's fingers brushed against something that wasn't a foil-wrapped meal brick. The footlocker's contents shimmered like heat haze for one dizzying second before resolving into a sight that punched the breath from his lungs—
Peter's fingers closed around the belt's worn leather—not just any belt, but a cloaking rig so old the S.H.I.E.L.D. insignia had faded to a ghostly imprint. The same model Natasha had given Elaine in another timeline. His thumb found the pressure switch near the buckle, the grooves worn smooth by fingers that weren't his own.
The belt shimmered in his grip, cycling through camouflage patterns like a dying chameleon—urban gray, desert tan, the sickly green of a 1970s hospital wall. Peter exhaled sharply through his nose. "Christ, Fury. You really did hoard every piece of Cold War junk that—" The words died as his spider-sense pricked his wrists. Not a warning. A memory.
the memory hit—not like a flashback, but a sucker punch to the temporal lobe. Suddenly he wasn't in the safehouse anymore. He was kneeling on a cheap house carpet, adjusting the cloaking belt while scolding a five-year-old whose green-tinged chubby little hands kept fiddling with the buckle.
"Elaine," his own voice echoed from somewhere outside his skull, with forced patience, "if I catch you using this to sneak extra dessert again, I'm reprogramming it to play the Soviet national anthem at full volume every time you engage stealth mode."
Across the memory's grainy edges, Jennifer Walters leaned against their kitchen counter, stirring coffee with the kind of long-suffering amusement only mothers of metahuman children could master. "You realize you're negotiating with a kid who inherited my stubbornness and your sarcasm, right?" Her eyebrows climbed toward her hairline when Peter-from-the-memory opened his mouth to protest. "And don't think I didn't notice who caved when she turned those big puppy green eyes on you last week."
Peter's breath hitched as the memory dissolved, leaving his fingers clutching empty air where Elaine's shoulder should've been. The safehouse walls bled back into existence, but the scent of Jennifer's coffee—burnt and aggressively unsweetened—lingered in his nose like a cruel joke.
Peter's fingers twitched against the belt's worn leather—still warm from the memory's phantom grip—as Jennifer's voice echoed through his skull like a half-remembered song. *"You can't say no to your little green."* The nickname landed with the weight of a vibranium shield to the ribs. Elaine had hated it, insisting she wasn't *little*.
Peter's knees hit the concrete floor. The cloaking belt dug into his palms—too sharp, too real—as he folded forward around it like a dying star collapsing inward. His shoulders shuddered violently, military jacket straining at the seams where phantom muscles remembered cradling sixty pounds of lifeless child.
The belt's buckles bit crescent moons into his palms. Good. Pain was tangible. Pain was *now*. Not then. Not the memory of Elaine's cooling forehead pressed against his collarbone. Peter pressed his forehead against the belt's weathered leather, inhaling the scent of gun oil and—Christ—*grape juice* that shouldn't be there after decades in a footlocker.
Peter's fingers tighten around the belt buckle—his knuckles white as the hospital sheets they'd draped over Elaine's broken body. The memory surfaced like a corpse in a river: that sickening snap still echoing in his skull, the way her little hands had twitched once, twice, before going still forever. And him. That grinning, red-eyed monster
Peter's fingers curled into fists, the Cloaking belt still clutched in his grip as phantom knuckles remembered the sickening crunch of Morlun's nose collapsing. The memory hit like a freight train—each impact replaying in slow motion: cartilage yielding, bone splintering, those crimson eyes widening in shock before delight as Peter lost himself to the rhythm of vengeance. Over and over until his hands were slick with something thicker than blood, until Morlun's laughter turned to gurgles, until—
The memory crystallized with brutal clarity—daylight slicing through the shattered roof of their brownstone, blood pooling between broken floorboards. Peter's knuckles were raw meat, Morlun's shattered teeth embedded in the flesh. The ancient vampire had been laughing through the ruin of his face when the Quinjet's floodlights carved through the wreckage.
Peter turned, just for a millisecond, and that pathetic parasite escaped, he kicked Peter off of him and jumped into a portal to only-god-knows-where dimension, Peter knew he should've followed him, he should've jumped after him right then and there, but when Elaine's tiny fingers twitched again—just once—he dropped to his knees beside her instead, gathering her limp body against his chest. Jennifer found them like that two hours later—Peter rocking back and forth on the ruins of their home, Elaine's cooling green skin pressed against his.
The divorce papers came six months after the funeral. Jennifer's signature was shaky where she'd crossed out "Parker" and written "Walters" with enough force to tear the paper.
Peter spent the next year drowning in bottom-shelf whiskey and he'd wake up in strange apartments with no memory of how he got there. The only thing that sobered him up was the night he webbed up a mugger outside Elaine's old preschool—only to realize the "mugger" was a janitor taking out the trash.
The look on the poor guy's face when Spider-Man vomited vodka bile all over his shoes was almost funny. Almost.
Somehow—miraculously—Jennifer took him back after three years. Or maybe she just pitied him. Either way, Peter woke up one morning to find her curled against his chest, her breath warm on his collarbone. He'd wept into her hair that day, the first honest tears he'd shed since the funeral.
Of course, that's when he went and got himself killed.
Because nothing says "I love you" like taking a gamma bomb to the chest two weeks after reconciling with your ex-wife. Peter could still remember the way Jennifer's scream had cut through the battlefield static—raw and primal in a way that made his spider-sense shriek. The last thing he'd seen before the blast was her lunging toward him.
Peter snorted against the belt leather, shoulders shaking with something too jagged to be laughter. "Classic Parker luck," he muttered to the empty safehouse. "Finally stop drinking yourself to death? Here, have an actual death instead."
The safehouse air tasted like gunpowder and mildew. Peter inhaled sharply through his nose, counting the exposed pipes overhead until the pressure behind his ribs eased. Twelve pipes. Seventeen rust spots. One flickering fluorescent that buzzed like a dying cicada. Real. Tangible. Here.
Peter let the belt slip from his fingers—watched it coil on the concrete like a dead snake. The leather was still warm where his grip had left indents, still faintly sticky with grape juice from a memory that shouldn't exist. He flexed his hands, half-expecting phantom blood to drip from his knuckles.
There was nothing he could do. Not for little Elaine, who was dead in every reality that mattered. Not for that Jennifer, who was worlds away in a timeline where she'd probably—hopefully—moved on from the trauma of burying their daughter and then him. He wasn't arrogant enough to rip open dimensional wounds just to reopen hers. Some griefs were meant to stay buried.
somewhere in the recess of his mind he heard the disgusting laughter of a dimensional hopping vampire—A soon to be dead— dimensional hopping vampire, to be more specific.
He picked up the belt from the ground, his fingers tightened around it with sudden, brutal clarity. The leather creaked in protest—but this time, it wasn't grief twisting his grip. It was purpose. He inhaled sharply through his nose, letting the stale safehouse air scrape against his teeth. Then he opened his eyes.
The belt slapped against his hips with the satisfying click of a shotgun racking. Peter didn't need memories to know this rig—his fingers moved with muscle memory honed across a dozen lost timelines, adjusting straps and toggling hidden compartments. The cloak engaged with a staticky shimmer, turning his outline into a heat-haze mirage for three glorious seconds before sputtering out like a dying lightbulb. "Fantastic," he muttered, smacking the buckle twice. The belt coughed up camouflaging his figure. "Good enough I guess…" he turned off the belt and moved with purpose.
The armory door hissed open at his approach—not because it recognized him, but because Peter's palm found the biometric override pad without conscious thought. His fingertips tingled where they brushed the corroded metal; some other Peter in some other hell had memorized this sequence.
The smell hit him first—gun oil, undercut with decaying rubber seals. Then the lights flickered on, revealing a treasure trove of Cold War leftovers and S.H.I.E.L.D. castoffs.
The armory stretched before Peter like a museum of forgotten violence—rows upon rows of gleaming barrels and polymer grips arranged with the clinical precision of a morgue drawer.
Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting long shadows from the MP5s hanging in neat ranks. A rack of Barrett M82s stood sentinel near the back, their stocks polished. Peter's footsteps echoed as he moved past them all. He ignored the pulse rifles humming in their charging cradles. Didn't glance at the vintage P90s with their alien curves.
The Mossberg 500 called to him from the shotgun rack like an old lover—its pistol grip worn smooth by hands that weren't his own, yet somehow were. The steel receiver felt colder than it should've when his fingers closed around it. Familiar in a way that bypassed conscious thought.
"Hello, beautiful," Peter muttered, thumbing the action release. The pump slid back with a sound like a bones breaking—smooth, but with just enough resistance to remind you it could kill.
Peter's fingers closed around a box of 12-gauge shells —the cardboard rough against his injured gloved hands, the contents rattling with promise. He shook it once, the shells inside clicking together like teeth in a predator's jaw. Satisfied, Peter reached for a Combat knife that was conveniently hanging on a sheath in the rack meant for shotguns.
He opened the box open with his thumb, spilling the shells onto the workbench where they rolled to a stop against his palm. His fingers moved with the precision of a surgeon as he began etching runes into the brass casings with the tip of the combat knife.
The knife tip sparked against the twelfth shell casing as Peter finished the final rune—a crooked sigil that glowed faintly cobalt before sinking into the brass. "There we go," he muttered, blowing nonexistent shavings off the etched metal. "Magic shells. Because regular ones weren't ridiculous enough."
The shells pulsed once—twice—in his palm before settling into an ominous hum. Peter loaded them into the Mossberg with practiced motions, each click-clack of the pump action sending a ripple of distorted air around the chamber. The shotgun felt heavier now. He exhaled through his nose—half-expecting the breath to frost in the suddenly charged air—when the memory hit like a sledgehammer to the frontal lobe.
Doc Ock's metal arms whirring in the dark. The stench of hydraulic fluid and stale takeout. A warehouse with rusted I-beams and—
Peter's fingers tighten around the shotgun's grip as the vision crystallized: Ock's secret lab beneath a defunct fish market, its entrance hidden behind a mural of dancing squid. The exact coordinates bloomed in his mind with nauseating clarity— Memories from that six-month period when Otto Octavius had worn his skin like a cheap suit.
"Well," Peter muttered, slamming the Mossberg's action shut with a snick that made the safehouse lights flicker, "guess I owe Otto one hell of a fruit basket... too bad he is dead"
Peter's knife hovered over the shotgun's receiver, its tip glowing faintly from residual magic. "Alright" he muttered, tracing a sigil that looked like a drunken mathematician's attempt at cursive. "Let's make this thing vanish like my dignity after that karaoke incident" The rune flared cobalt before dissolving into the steel with a sound like ice cracking in warm scotch.
The Mossberg shimmered once—not vanishing entirely, but becoming something the eye slid past like a bad memory. Peter grinned. A neat little trick, only thing is that it doesn't work on living things, and you also have to be constantly channeling magic into it.
Peter activates the cloaking belt to match the shotguns invisibility
"Perfect. Now nobody will see me coming." He paused, considering the belt's flickering cloaking field. "Unless they look directly at me, in which case—" The belt spat static and died again with a sad electronic whimper. "Fantastic."
He slapped the buckle twice. Nothing. Three times. A half-hearted shimmer that made him look like a heat mirage over a landfill. "Christ, Shield Couldn't spring for the deluxe model?"
Peter adjusted the belt, fingers moving with muscle memory stolen from a timeline where he'd actually read the manual. The cloak stabilized—mostly—casting his outline into a blur that might pass for a trick of the light if no one looked too closely.
Peter switched off the belt with a sharp flick of his wrist. The camouflage shimmer dissipated like cigarette smoke in a stiff wind, leaving him solid—visible—real. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the weight of the Mossberg press against his back through the military jacket. The shotgun wasn't just loaded now; it was hungry. The runes etched into each shell pulsed against his spine like a second heartbeat.
Flaring his connection to the Web of Life would be like lighting a bonfire in the multiversal darkness—Morlun would come running like a starving dog to raw meat.
Peter exhaled sharply through his nose, watching the dust motes swirl in the stale air like lazy fireflies. Meditation—just the thought made his spider-sense itch like a healing fracture. He could do it. Had done it, in other lives where he'd worn the sorceress robes instead of this goddamn military surplus jacket.
Problem was, opening himself to the web of life left him feeling like a concussed astronaut. Not exactly optimal when facing a vampire who could punch his spleen out through his back.
The flare was a dinner bell. And Peter wasn't in the mood to play menu.
Peter considered just doing it briefly, maybe holding the connection with Web for 30 seconds. But it probably wouldn't be enough to get Morlum to show up. It would make him look, sure, but it would not hold his attention
"Think, Parker," he muttered, rolling a shell between his fingers. The rune pulsed faintly against his thumbprint. "How can I bait him into coming without..." His reflection in the chrome receiver of a shotgun in the weapons rack grinned back at him—not his grin. *his* A Peter who'd been adept at hunting prey like the predator spider that *he* was in a timeline that no longer existed.
The answer came with the brutal simplicity of a sniper's round: he can be the flare, but he doesn't have to be the bait. there is plenty of that around:
Miles' exasperated eye-roll, Cindy's razor-edged smirk, Gwen's upside-down perch on a fire escape. Ben's sardonic salute. Anya's combat-ready crouch. A whole goddamn spider-colony infestation crawling through New York's walls, any one of them capable of serving as Morlun's bait if properly dangled.
The armory's flickering fluorescents buzzed like angry hornets as Peter stalked toward a cracked monitor displaying S.H.I.E.L.D.'s logo. His fingers danced across the keyboard with the muscle memory of a thousand midnight hacking sessions, pulling up dossiers that shouldn't exist in this timeline.
The monitor's flickering green glow painted Peter's face in fractured light as city-wide surveillance feeds bloomed across cracked glass. His fingers moved with the precision of a bomb technician—one wrong keystroke and this antique S.H.I.E.L.D system would fry itself into oblivion. The seventh camera feed resolved into a grainy rooftop view of Brooklyn, where Miles Morales' distinctive red-and-black silhouette paused mid-swing, head tilted like a hound catching a scent. Peter's spider-sense prickled at the base of his skull.
"Looking for something, kid?" Peter muttered, tapping the screen to freeze the image. Miles' posture screamed tension—not the coiled readiness of a spider on patrol, but the restless energy of someone searching.
Peter's fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up three more feeds in rapid succession: Cindy Moon scaling a water tower with unusual urgency, Gwen Stacy crouched on a gargoyle scanning the streets below, Ben Reilly's scarred knuckles flexing as he paced a Queens alleyway. Each frame told the same story—spiders scattered across the city, hunting.
The fifth feed made Peter's breath hitch. Anya Corazon's lithe form crouched atop the Chrysler Building's eagle gargoyle, her black suit drinking the moonlight. Even through static, Peter could see her fingers drumming against her thigh in that impatient rhythm he'd recognize anywhere—two quick taps, a pause, three slower ones. Morse code for "P.S." Parker-Signal.
The realization hit Peter like a shotgun blast to the chest—Miles checking storm drains, Cindy tracing power lines, Gwen lingering by subway vents. They weren't hunting criminals. They were hunting him.
The monitor flickered violently as Peter's fingers dug into the keyboard. Twelve more security feeds bloomed across the screen—each showing a different Spider-Person moving with that same unnerving coordination. Even through the static, he could see Ben Reilly's jaw clenched tight as he tore open a manhole cover, could practically hear Anya's muttered Spanish curses as she jammed her fingers into a junction box. His reflection in the cracked glass stared back at him—haunted eyes, military jacket hanging open, shotgun slung across his back like some dime-store mercenary.
The Time Stone's temporal psychosis had done more than fracture his mind—it had turned him into a goddamn homing beacon pulsing across the Web of Life connection all spiders shared when it hit him.
Every spider in New York had felt it.
Peter's fingers trembled against the keyboard. Good thing he had been locked by the Avengers. Morlun probably hadn't come for him because facing the Avengers would've been suicide—even for an ancient, dimension-hopping vampire.
Peter's lips curled into something too jagged to be called a smile as he surveyed the armory's cracked monitors. The spiders were already hunting—which meant Morlun wouldn't be far behind. The bastard had a nose for distressed arachnids like a shark for blood in water.
"At least I won't have to send out invitations," Peter muttered, rolling a glowing shotgun shell between his fingers. The runes pulsed in time with his heartbeat—hungry. But baiting a trap required finesse, not just throwing spider-kids into the woodchipper and waiting for screams. He needed something specific. Something that would make Morlun careless.
Peter stared at the glowing shell in his palm, the runes pulsing like a slow-burning fuse. The monitor's flicker painted his knuckles green as he clenched his fist around the shell—hard enough that the brass should've crumpled. It didn't. Magic had a way of making things stubborn.
He exhaled through his nose, watching the dust motes swirl in the stale air. Of course they wouldn't help. Gwen with her no-kill rule tighter than her web-shooters. Miles and his wide-eyed idealism that hadn't been crushed out of him yet. Even Ben, scarred and cynical as he was, still played by some vestigial code of honor.
If Morlum attacked first, maybe... but they would no agree going for an actual hunt.
Peter flexed his fingers around the shotgun shell, feeling the runes pulse like a trapped insect against his palm.
The no-kill rule. He spent lifetimes—literal goddamn lifetimes—defending that code with his teeth and bloody knuckles. He practically Wrote the damn thing in blood across a dozen timelines.
The no killing had its purpose—Peter knew that better than anyone. Heroes weren't just glorified thugs with better branding; they were the ones who carried the light when everything else went dark. He'd seen the alternative in a dozen timelines—worlds where Spider-Man crossed that line and became just another monster in the shadows.
"With great power comes great responsibility" wasn't just a motto; it was the foundation every Spider-Person built themselves upon, brick by bloody brick.
The moment you started putting bullets in skulls, you stopped being the guy who pulled kids from burning buildings and became the reason they needed saving in the first place.
Peter couldn't ask them to help him with this, not going to even try to convince them. Heroes must remain Heroes... so he will just have to borrow one of them. Will they fell bad? —'well duh' — he is going to be kidnapping one of them. Being kidnapped is not funny, but at least they can keep their conscience clean.
The obvious option would be Silk—Cindy's connection to the Web of Life would make her the perfect lure. Problem was, too many of the alternate Peters and Cindys had their flings—even kids at some point. Being close to Cindy for extended periods might start triggering his temporal psychosis again. Same thing with Gwen, though at least with her he'd never had any kids across the multiverse.
Thank God for that, Peter thought sarcastically, flexing his fingers against the shotgun's stock. Small mercies.
Peter's fingers drummed against the shotgun stock—tap-tap-pause-tap-tap—as he considered the flickering surveillance feeds. Miles Morales' lanky frame dominated the center screen, vaulting between fire escapes with that ridiculous parkour flair Peter secretly envied.
The kid had more spider-powers than a goddamn buffet—invisibility, venom blasts, that weird bio-electricity thing that made Peter's fillings ache just watching it. At this rate, Peter wouldn't be surprised if the kid sprouted wings tomorrow and became some kind of dragon-spider hybrid.
"Christ," Peter muttered, watching Miles stick a three-point landing that would've made an Olympic gymnast weep. "What's next, Miles? Fire breath? Laser eyes? Maybe a prehensile tail to match the attitude?" He snorted, adjusting the cloaking belt.
Peter watched Miles execute a flawless midair twist through the surveillance feed, the kid's silhouette cutting across the moonlit skyline like a red-and-black exclamation mark. "And the prize goes to..." Peter muttered, smacking the flickering monitor twice before the image stabilized. He leaned back in the creaking office chair, shotgun resting across his knees like a sleeping predator. "Congrats, kid. You've won the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience..." His fingers drummed against the Mossberg's receiver.
"Getting targeted by Spider-Rambo."
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Done for now....
Things to address
1. Where is history going
Peter is leaving New York. doesn't mean he will stay out of NYC forever, he will return a few times, but wont stay long.
-Peter is not going to become spiderman again-
*what is he going to do after after leaving?
still working on that but so far I'm leaning towards two possible outcomes:
A. Having him travel around, first the country and then the globe.
it'll be like road trip. he'll be just trying to collect something(stamps, landmark pictures, snow gloves) something that will seem silly and with no value, but for him will serve as a focus. also just because he is done with the hero life doesn't mean the hero life is done with him...
the X-Men and the Mutants of Krakoa want him and will try to find him. There is also the love interests who might get exposed to some hurtful memories from other timelines by an unstable Wanda
B. Peter settles down on a remote location
with *Remote* I mean from NYC. it could be the Mojave desert, it could be Colorado, or even do a Wolverine move and go to Canada. after he settles, there would be a time skip of at least 5 or 6 months and then some events would force him to have to interact with hero world again
Even if I don do the *Peter settles on a remote location* thing on this history, I might be doing it for an spinoff. Basically and Alt history in which Peter not only sees all the memories from different Peters, but also gets transported to the DC universe
3. This Peter is OP
He has 995 years of life experiences. At least 750 of those as Spidermans of many types, the rest either as civilian, scientists, or soldiers
This Peter is —to put it bluntly— a John Leon S. Wick Kennedy with Spider powers.
Hand to hand: on this history he is literally the deadliest in hand to hand, no contest. Facing him is like trying to destroy a concrete wall by throwing a chicken egg.
Unless its something on the level of the hulk, Peter could probably Fuck them up without breaking sweat.
Imagine Wesker vs Chris and Sheva on the hangar cinematic.
Fire arms: he is expert marksman and sniper..... already made the comparison with john Wick and Leon Kennedy
Melee Weapons: Leon Kennedy level... he can wield swords too but with only above average ability.
Magic: he has a vast knowledge of the arcane arts and black magic... the problem is that his magic energy is *capped*. When it come to magic he relies mostly on on the use of runes to enhance Items. not gonna be one-upping Doctor Doom or Doctor Strange.
Smart and technological knowledge: On this he is on par with Otto, the problem is that he doesn't have the same drive. Peter doesn't want spend his days tinkering with things anymore.
Mutan ability: all I'm going to say for now is that is OP too, but is also the reason why his magic energy is *capped*.... it has to do a lot with Wanda.
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As I said already mentioned Peter is the deadliest fighter
you'll see what I mean on the next chapter.....