Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“What do you want me to do, in exchange for doing this for me?”

“Get rid of Mephisto. I don’t care how, I don’t care about the consequences, but I want him as far away from Earth as possible. You took me away from my real life, so this is the least you can do to make this one bearable.”

“If I do this for you, you realize that you won’t remember that part of our conversation at all? You will still wonder all the time.”

“I bloody well know that, you little shit. But wondering about some of the Bravo Sierra he put certain people through is still a better thing to have to do than living through it. That arc put me off Marvel entirely until those games came along. So if you want me to not just sell everything I own and retire to the flyover states, then you will do this for me.”

“Why are you willing to do this for them?”

“Because I managed to do what Stan Lee and the others wanted us to do. I identified with them. I liked them. I admired the tenacity he had that I never did. And then when he was happy, some bugfuck editor decided to take that away because he felt that the character had to suffer. Fuck that shit.”

“So you want him happy?”

“I want both of them to have a chance at happiness. I know better than to assume anything, I know how this version of the universe works and that it’s not entirely up to them, but I want them to have that chance.”

“Are you sure? You do not want to know for sure if certain things will happen or not?”

“What’s the point? It’s a comic book universe. Get rid of one threat and five other, more powerful ones come along. Besides, I don’t want to make what knowledge I have entirely useless.”

“Which is a valid point from your perspective.”

“It’s what spawned fucking Thanos. Trust me when I say that had you not said that he would not become an issue, I would have refused to do this. That chucklefuck is a worse story plot warper than the Death Star and an order of magnitude harder to kill.”

“My people agree. Do you wish to know how we dealt with him?”

“Naa, as long as I get to remember that I won’t have to deal with the possibility of a snap. Plenty of threats closer to home, and plenty of damage JJJ did to repair.”

“As you wish.”

“But before we do this, I have a question? I get why JJJ is…. well this, but why not use do this four years ago from his perspective? It’d make things as lot easier.”

“Because replacing a living person with another is considered a form of murder among my people, and until he had that car accident, there was no other opportunity.”

“This is still morally questionable.”

“Not by our standards. Welcome to Earth-1049.”

A bright kaleidoscope of lights.

Then nothing.

True to its word, the Little Shit had wiped Jonah’s memory of that part of the conversation. All that he remembered of the second half of that odd experience was that he’d been told that he would be watched. But he was a version of J. Jonah Jameson, and he wasn’t here to entertain some alien bastards, he was here to do what was right and try and head off some of the worst events of the wider Marvel multiverse as far as they affected this Earth.

It had been almost a week since then, and right now, he was sitting in the first class compartment of a Pan American 747, on final approach to JFK in New York. Jonah knew that the time of the Quad jets would be coming to an end eventually, so he decided to enjoy them while he could.

He was enough of an experienced flier in this world that he immediately noticed that something was wrong when the four high-bypass turbofan engines began to roar and thanks to a tail-fin mounted camera, he could see that the flaps changed position and the nose pulled up. The weather was fine, nothing was on fire that Jonah could see, so why was the crew going around?

The explanation for that came flying by the camera seconds later. The form of the Vulture was very recognizable to anyone who had spent any time in New York during the last few years, as was the person tethered to him. The red and blue suit was obvious, and Jonah hid a grimace. He knew that tomorrow, the Bugle would have to lead with a suitably anti-Spider-Man headline.

As much as he didn’t want to, but there was no choice. If he flipped the script out of the blue, then awkward questions would be asked. Both because it was very out of character in a universe where several known and unknown methods of mind control existed and because the very people this was all about wouldn’t trust his sincerity.

No, this had to be done slowly and carefully. And, much to his own disgust, Jonah knew that he would have to wait for something suitably gruesome to happen, or this would never work. His long-term plans to avoid some of the stupid of mainline and MCU verses required that Spider-Man and his friends trusted him. And after four years of.. well, old JJJ, that was hard to accomplish.

As the plane came in for another landing, Jonah had decided on his first steps.

With everything going on, it took him another two hours to get back to his penthouse. He had already phoned in the Bugle headline for tomorrow along with an outline for the article itself. It was as toned down as he dared, but he already knew that it would give him another round of hate mail from Spidey’s fans.

The penthouse was in every way appropriate for J. Jonah Jameson. It’s location, what he paid for it and in how it was appointed. The last part surprised him, because it was surprisingly down-to-earth, excepting the wall-sized TV in one room, of course. A guest room was permanently appointed for his son, and generally, he approved of the style his host had carried in private. No need to change that.

With the exception that as it was 2014, avowed baseball fan J. Jonah Jameson would absolutely be watching the World Cup in Brazil live. That was one change he’d never bother to hide.

He plopped himself down on the almost ridiculously comfortable couch and began to plot.

“No.”

“But… it’s a full-page ad, and we are willing to pay in advance for this and for the TV spots we are currently shooting as well.”

Jonah pinched the bridge of his nose. Racism was one stain on the collective face of humanity that he could well do without, and these chuckleheads had the potential to be a lot more dangerous than some good old boys south of the Mason-Dixon line getting drunk and setting fire to an African-American church or dancing around in white hoods. They were equally despicable, possibly even more so, and a lot more subtle. It was a function of the way this universe worked, and it was one thing that he felt he could start to work against without looking particularly odd. He knew that on a personal level, pre-merger Jonah had despised these people almost as much as he did now, but not been above taking their money.

In the here and now though…

“Haven’t you been listening? No. To reinforce, not only no, but…”

He paused for effect and took a deep breath. “Hell. No. Not in the Daily Bugle or anything we publish.”

“It’s a full page ad, consecutively until our rally on the fifteenth of next month, and a number of prime-time TV spots!”

Wishing he’d stayed home another day instead of coming in, Jonah leaned back in his chair and slammed his hands down on the armrests. He failed to fight the urge to yell.

“Let me put this in words even you are able to understand, Mister Turner. That ad has the same chance of making it into my paper as Captain America does of putting on an SS uniform and screaming 'Heil Hitler' in Times Square! Now get out of my building before I call security!”

Turner was smart enough to understand when he was done and left. Jonah knew he had made an enemy today, but even without his knowledge, taking a stand against this sort of idiocy was the right thing to do.

“Elizabeth,” he said quietly, “as of right now, Friends of Humanity and associated groups are permanently blacklisted from all our publications and media outlets. Let it be known to our ads department that any requests from other groups like that… hell, hate groups in general are to be forwarded to me, and I’ll deal with them myself.”

Having worked with her for a good decade now, Jonah knew that Elizabeth knew he was extra-serious when he was at his most soft-spoken. So instead of asking him why he’d decided this way, she merely nodded.

“Anything else, boss?”

“Not until after you’ve taken care of this.”

She left and Jonah sighed. Love or hate what had happened in the MCU, he had a chance to nip this sort of shit in the bud right now before it infested this version of Earth as well, and… yes, it was worth having the lessened ad revenue or being called a hypocrite later on because he couldn’t change ‘his’ views on the likes of Spider Man at the drop of a hat. Much as he wanted to. With that in mind, he picked up his desk phone.

“Robbie! Get me the best writers we have at pissing people off! I want people comparing the Friends of Humanity to SATAN by the time we're done with those Ku Klux Klan wannabes!”

Slamming the phone down before there could be any response, he grinned as he went to do the drudgework of the day that came with running a publishing Empire from his office for the day, only interrupted a few times, of which one was a meeting with the writers he intended to sicc on turning at the very least New York City against the FOH.

The last interruption was one that reminded him of why he was here. It started with someone reluctantly knocking on the frame of his door.

“Mister Jameson?”

Jonah looked up and saw none other than Peter Parker waiting to come in and reluctant to do so because Jonah had been extra angry today.

“What can I do for you, Parker?” Jonah asked in that ‘I like you but it would be against my public persona to say so’ way that Jonah used with his most trusted employees and motioned for the photographer to come in.

“I know you assigned me to the groundbreaking for Fisk Tower, but… something came up that I can’t move to another time and I’d need the day off, if possible.”

Jonah had to suppress a grin, because he was pretty sure that the ‘something’ involved a red and blue spandex suit with spider symbology, but he couldn’t, not yet. So instead he frowned like he’d have before the merger and considered it from that angle.

Parker was one of his best photographers, not just for spidey-stuff but in general. For something like this he’d have been wasted even if Jonah hadn’t known what he was doing in his off-time, so he was more than willing to assign someone else to this. Besides, if something ended up happening that required the intervention of the friendly neighbourhood superhero from Queens, then there might be an opportunity to make one first, tiny tack towards the new course he wanted for himself and for his company. So…

“Tell Anton to cover for you.” he said and looked down at his desk, making it clear that he considered the matter closed.

Parker thanked him and left, and Jonah didn’t look after him, but he was aware that this young kid was critical to everything that he had planned. He hated himself for some of the things that might happen to the kid and that there was next to nothing he could do about any of them. One thing Jonah was looking forward to though was his face when one day he revealed that he knew that he was Spider Man.

He was on the top of the list of people he needed to look into starting tomorrow. Having decided that, he put his laptop aside and pulled a pen and paper notebook from his desk drawer.

With a sigh, Jonah began to write down names that would go into his personal vault as soon as he reached home. People that needed to be looked at and for, if they were still alive, when and how they had died if they weren’t and if they still existed, needed to be put on the list for that very reason.

Villains, possible villains, heroes both present and possibly future, everything and everyone that he could remember.

And yet he hesitated after the last two on the list.

George Stacy

Gwen Stacy

He knew that George Stacy was dead, so he crossed him out right away, but he wished that pre-merger Jonah had bothered looking into the man’s family. When the Captain’s death had stopped being part of the news cycle, Gwen had still been alive, but that was where his knowledge from either side of the merger ended.

Putting the pad down, he scratched the back of his head. Finding out what had happened would be pretty straight-forward, and he’d decide what to do then when he knew. All a matter of searching the Bugle database.

Five minutes later he had done so.

“Oh for fucks sake!” he exclaimed. Thankfully most of the office workers had already started to leave, so no one heard.

“Missing, presumed dead?”

If there was one certainty in a comic-book based universe it was that this meant absolutely nothing. Other than that she would appear when it caused the most drama at the worst possible moment. Funny in a comic book, but when it was real? Not so much.

So no crossing out her name…

“I need a drink.”

He knew that for the first time he had encountered the crazy mechanics of this new universe.

tbc

Chapter Text

It took him four months to reach a point where he was comfortable with openly “switching sides” and then another two for an opportunity to arise. The World Cup had come and gone, and he had greatly enjoyed watching largely the same team marching to an epic victory in an epic, record-breaking tournament even more than the first time. He had slowly turned the Bugle Group around from a stance that was suspicious of heroes general and regularly condemned Spider-Man in particular to one where his publications were studiously neutral towards the former and merely very suspicious of the latter. Many, Robbie and Parker included, had openly wondered why, but Jonah had merely said that news media had to be neutral. He felt bad for the slightly hurt look on Parker’s face when he thought no one was watching, but it wasn’t like he had a choice. Nor was the new status quo going to be permanent.. In fact hew had begun to question some of the ‘big picture’ aspects of hero culture as it stood. Thus far only quietly and only in the editorials that he regularly wrote and always had since expanding the Bugle beyond print media, but it was a start.

Privately Robbie had asked what had really caused this change of heart and why Jonah was moderating his stance. He hated telling a straight-up lie to the closest thing he had to a best friend and instead settled for a half-truth. So he had said that while in Europe, he had realised the damage groups like the Friends of Humanity had done, and that he had felt foolish when he had realised that groups like them were a far greater threat to the law-abiding New Yorkers of the 21^st century than small-time wanna-be heroes like Spider-Man could ever be. He had then compared his past approach to blaming Captain America for the rise of the Nazis just because he had fought them a lot during the war.

By now this new stance was established enough and believed enough that it was considered genuine and that he felt ready for the next step. So of course the two most powerful villains currently about had seemingly dropped off the face of the planet, Rhino by way of getting taken down by Deadpool during one of his all too rare visits to the city and Electro simply disappearing. Chatter had it that he was holed up somewhere upstate while planning something big, but those were just rumours. Jonah wasn’t exactly unhappy that the city was as safe as it was going to get, but if he wanted his plans in motion for what he knew was coming and what might come, then he needed the local heroic community on-side.

Most people seemed to approve, but only Norman Osborn seemed not to be. Jonah knew that his bid for the Mayor’s office ran on a ‘hard on crime’ stance that was forever popular with New Yorkers, so it stood to reason that he’d hoped to hang his flag onto Old!Jonah’s coat tails and work for massively strengthening the NYPD instead of being ‘overly reliant on individuals of questionable repute’, as Old!Jonah himself had once called it.

In the games, his stance hadn’t really been seen, in fact none of his political agenda beyond a bid for re-election had ever been seen, but on the whole Jonah wasn’t surprised. He was willing to let Osborn be for the moment though because he knew that the man’s only child seemed to be destined to be some flavour of Venom going by the post-credit scenes in especially the first game. Yet he wouldn’t actively support him either and had ensured that here too the Bugle Group would be studiously neutral on all matters Osborn and Oscorp for now. That included any political ambitions. If it came to starting a fight, Jonah knew just were to start digging for some juicy s k eletons.

He had also started working towards nibbing any potential ‘Civil War’ arc in the bud, by tasking Ben Ulrich to start looking into the disappearance of Captain America. Like had been the case on Earth 616, the 1049 version of the Bugle had been the only paper that had correctly reported the disappearance, but his grandfather’s files in the Bugle’s archives had been extensive, yet vague. Frustratingly so. Whatever his character was, MCU, mainline comics or something else entirely, Steve Rodgers was the key to keeping things from descending into the hellish pits of stupid that the MCU had turned into.

Jonah was well aware that this would mean dealing with SHIELD, and that was one of his greater worries. He simply had no way of knowing how deeply they were infiltrated by Hydra or whatever else they called themselves these days. Even if he managed to keep Rodgers out of their hands and Hydra hadn’t infiltrated them to the comical levels seen on other Earths, he still wouldn’t trust them any further than he could throw the Empire State Building. Might be old fanon that he couldn’t let go of, might be his perceptions being coloured by the MCU, might just be a general dislike for organisations like SHIELD, he didn’t know, but would still act on it. He would give them the chance to change his mind, but he’d never be their biggest fan.

At the same time, trying to find out more about what had happened to Gwen Stacy had been met with failure. The NYPD was forthcoming enough, especially when Jonah had made it as part of a series of articles and other media events that discussed how the normal police dealt with supervillains. The official report had been thorough and exhaustive, and yet there was something about all this that made him suspect a rat.

On the face of it, it was straightforward enough. Back in summer 201 1 , George Stacy been investigating Fisk as part of a secret NYPD Task Force. Jonah had no idea if Miles Morales’s father had been part of it, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Said Task Force had apparently been fairly close to nailing one of Fisk’s chief Lieutenants and been collecting the final pieces of evidence they needed to get a warrant when on one of the few rainy nights of an otherwise hot summer gunfire had been reported from the Captain’s private residence, followed by the FDNY arriving and finding the Captain’s corpse in Gwen’s bedroom and the girl herself gone. She was assumed dead given the apocalyptic amounts of blood in her room, the torn sheets and general state of disarray of the parts of the house that had survived the fire.

The blood had been too degraded for a DNA match thanks to the self-same FDNY’s efforts , and additionally she and her father shared the same blood group. As this was a suspected kidnapping case, of the pretty, blonde, teenaged daughter of a police officer to boot, even the FBI had investigated.

Obviously, everyone had suspected Fisk, but that was where it fell apart for Jonah. The Kingpin wasn’t above working with Hydra in at least one verse and he knew that in this one his efforts included prostitution, but he Gwen being a victim of that would have been crossing a line even for him. In addition Fisk had not only let his denial of any involvement be known to the authorities via various mean´s but it was also well known that he considered specifically going after cops and their families a fool’s errand. Getting caught in the crossfire during an armoured car heist was just part of both job, but hunting them specifically for just doing theirs was seen as bad for business.

Jonah was inclined to believe this to be true between everything he knew about the Kingpin both here and on other Earths.

That hadn’t stopped the NYPD and the FBI from barking up that particular tree to the exclusion of near everything else, and though the case was still open, exactly squat had been found since 2012. Jonah hoped to hell and back that they were wrong and he was right.

He made a mental note to ask Parker about his thoughts at some point, because no way had he not looked into that in the three years and change since that had happened.

Another place where his plans had failed was Martin Li. FEAST existed, albeit with only one location thus far, and Li was running it, but that was about it. Ostensibly the child of refugees, it wasn’t a surprise that the man didn’t exist on US records before the 90s and that the publicly available information was sparse. Jonah wished he could do more, but he didn’t have the ability to dig any deeper than he had already without potentially inviting a visit from Mister Negative or his gang. So for the moment he couldn’t really do anything.

Then there was Octavious. The man was desperately struggling for funding, but the city had denied him twice so far and Jonah’s initial idea, a research foundation funded by donations from the public would inevitably attract OsCorp’s attention even if he banned corporate sponsorships and thus any contribution the Bugle Group might make. The Bugle Group couldn’t fund Octavious on it’s own unless Jonah made cuts elsewhere, and he just wasn’t willing to make wage reductions or de-fund any of the charities the Group already supported. Right now he was desperate enough to do something like introducing him to Tony Stark/totally not Iron Man and hope for the best.

So Jonah sat at the desk in the surprisingly small office he used at home and sighed. Thankfully he hads begged off the OsCorp event he’d been invited to, as the last thing he wanted to do on a Friday afternoon was schmooze New York’s 1%ers while pretending he liked golf, caviar or any of the words they had to say. He was and always would be an old-fashioned newspaperman.

Instead, he suddenly decided, he would get in his car, because of course Old!Jonah had considered a driver a waste of money, and go to his favourite Greek restaurant. And with a sigh, he realised that Greek food and liking to drive were the only things he shared with Old!Jonah.

He was already wearing what passed for casual with him ans was out the door in five minutes.

Traffic was typical New York, but today not for an exclusively New York reason. A few car lengths south from the intersection of Fifth Avenue and East 58^th Street, he could see a prison transport crossing 5^th south of Pulitzer Plaza, heading east. He frowned as he saw that it was one of the heavily armoured and reinforced vans that the Department was using to shift prisoners bound for the Raft. The fact that the van was being escorted by slightly less armoured SWAT vans and NYPD cruisers didn’t help.

And therefore it didn’t really surprise him when the universe decided to play it’s own tropes straight. The ball of criminal energy that was Electro came flying from the top of the building, followed by the Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man from Queens. Absent-mindedly Jonah noted that he was staying in his car while everyone else was running away. He even thought to pull out his phone for some pictures, which at the time seemed like a good idea but that he would yell at himself for later.

“Fucking Electro!” Jonah exclaimed and watched as the Supervillain exploded one of the cruisers with officers still inside and tried to approach the transport van while ignoring the furious fire coming from the surviving officers. Spider-Man said something that Jonah was too far away to hear and webbed a trashcan before tossing it at Electro. He missed, but it did make Electro turn around and launch a number of bolts and then himself at him. The two continued to fight over and around the convoy, and a detached part of Jonah’s mind guessed that Spidey had heard that Electro wanted to hit the transport or seen him, decided to intervene and been ever so barely too late.

The hero and the villain traded blows for what had to be at least five to ten minutes before as Jonah watched, the fight progressed from what it was to a complete catastrophe. Spidey had his hands full and then some. Electro kept taking pot-shots at the police officers, knowing full well that if he wounded one, his opponent would be very much inclined to get them to safety first. And then things got worse when he took further potshots at the officers, hitting a number of them and then he exploded two more cruisers just as Spidey was passing between them, Electro completely ignoring the two cops that had taken cover behind the engine blocks. Two more likely dead.

Spider-Man on the other hand was thrown back towards the building they had emerged from, barely missing the statue on the square and using it as an anchor point to sling-shot himself back towards Electro.

Said villain had hopped onto the van and begun to tear into the armour to free whoever was inside. In this he was partially successful, as Rhino of all people stuck his head out briefly. But that was about all he managed, because Spider-Man impacted Electro’s side with enough speed and force that Jonah was convinced he could hear ribs cracking from where he sat. Having sent Electro flying, Spider-Man was about to pursue as the villain re-emerged from the building he’d flown into, but Rhino started trying to complete his escape by way of ducking back down and hitting the weakened hull. Jonah later learned that he was heavily restrained and that had remained mostly intact, so he was doing this with his head.

So instead of going after Electro who seemed disinclined to engage again, Spider-Man did the responsible thing and secured the Van as best he could before turning away. Electro meanwhile yelled something at Spider-Man before blowing up a few more cop cars and disappearing into the distance, clearly having enough for the day. This was underscored my the increasingly loud whail of additional police sirens all around them.

It was only then that Jonah realised that in an incredibly morbid way this was what he’d been waiting for.

Three hours later the staff at the Daily Bugle and in the digital section of the other outlets were very, very busy.

Jonah had written and done the basic layout of the article many weeks ago and polished the language to perfection, and now he could only hope that it would pay off. He needed Spider-Man to be, if not his friend then at least aware that Jonah knew and apprechiated him for what he was.

tbc

Chapter Text

The next morning, after the prison convoy fight, Peter was lazing the morning away on the couch when someone started hammering on the front door of his tiny apartment. He growled, having gotten in late last night and then still spent a few hours putting the finishing touches on some college work, and now had been looking forward to some alone time before going to see MJ later today.

But instead he scrambled for a semi-clean T-shirt and then looked through the peep hole of the front door. He saw it was one of the few persons he’d never mind seeing even today, so opened the door and pulled Mary-Jane Watson inside.

She didn’t lead any of the social niceties or their usual routine and instead held up a copy of the early edition of the Daily Bugle.

“Have you read this yet?”

Peter grimaced. After yesterday, he wasn’t looking forward to finding out what idiotic nonsense the paper was spewing today. But MJ looked incredibly eager, so he took the newspaper his girlfriend was holding out.

Only to nearly drop it immediately when he saw the picture and headline that had entirely taken over the front page.

The picture was one he’d shot while being fully aware that the Bugle would never publish it. Perched as he was on the top of one of the street lamps at Battery Park, looking out over the water towards Liberty Island and with the entire thing bathed in the light of a sunrise, Spider-Man looked entirely too heroic for the Bugle Group. Beneath that there was the one headline he’d never expected to see.

I WAS WRONG

The article-slash-editorial had taken over the entire front page.

“Read it!” MJ prompted, and due to the smile she hand that he loved so much, he did.

‘In the modern City of New York, the presence of super-powered individuals, heroes and villains alike, is a fact of life. Much as I, J. Jonah Jameson, have used the Daily Bugle in all it’s forms to rail against them in general and Spider-Man in particular, that fact of life is not going to change. This is a realisation that I have come to in recent weeks and months. But it was not until yesterday when I realised just how wrong I had been. Not just about heroes in general, but one of them in particular.

During yesterday’s attempt to break out Rhino, I personally saw, with my own two eyes, Spider-Man show the greatest display of selfless, heroic effort and willingness to sacrifice I have ever witnessed from any vigilante.’

Peter looked up at MJ and she only motioned for him to continue.

“It gets better.”

‘Therefore I must say this: I was wrong. Spider-Man is not a criminal. He is not an attention seeker out to seduce our children into doing as he does. He does not manipulate events for his own benefit, or whatever other nefarious deeds I accused him of.

No. Instead, Spider-Man is a clean-cut, true blood New York City hero.’

There was more, but Peter didn’t read it right away. Instead he looked at MJ again.

“What.The.Actual.Hell.”

“’Bout what I said when I read it first.”

Peter quickly spanned the rest of the page, having the weird, almost out of body experience of the Bugle openly acknowledging his later ego for what he was, not what Jameson had pretended he was in days past.

“What is this? I don’t even…”

Peter closed his eyes briefly and then looked at MJ. She was worried, and he couldn’t do anything but reach over and hug her as close as he could.

“I love you, MJ.”

“I know.” she replied with a grin. “So do I.”

She kissed him on his cheek. “But what’s his angle?”

With a sigh, Peter dropped the paper on the cheap coffee table. “I so, so much want this to be true, but…”

He remembered what Jameson had done in the past. Scorpion was only one of many incidents, but by far the most severe. Even when Jameson had publicly disavowed Scorpion after the battle atop the Brooklyn Bridge, he’d nearly quit the Bugle over it. Now though he just didn’t know.

“I think,” Peter said, still enjoying MJ’s close proximity, “that he deserves the benefit of the doubt for now. He’s… he’s changed recently.”

“For better or worse?”

Peter remembered his most recent pay check, and that because of it, he wasn’t behind in rent for the first time since forever. “For the better, I think.”

“So maybe Spider-Man should pay him a visit at some point then?”

“Good idea, but I think not right now. You and I have tickets for that place in the East Village. This whole thing… it can and will wait.”

MJ knew him so well, so he wasn’t surprised that she didn’t quite believe what he was saying.

“But should it?” she asked. “Pete, this is---”

“Too good to be true?” Peter interrupted. “Yeah. God, I want this to be genuine. But I don’t think I can take him at face value. As much as I’d love to, Jameson can’t be taken at his word where Spider-Man is concerned.”

“No one’s asking you to, Tiger.” MJ touched and affectionately tapped his temple. “At the same time, you shouldn’t just dismiss it either. In a way, it is exactly what it looks like, J. Jonah Jameson saying good things about Spider-Man in the most public way possible. There is no way he can go back on this without destroying his reputation. Unless he’s mind controlled, buuuut I don’t think that’s likely. He’s been doing things like his campaign against the Friends of Humanity for too long already, and frankly, other than this he doesn’t seem to have changed as far as I can tell."

Peter sighed. “You are, as usual, perfectly right.”

Instead of answering, MJ hummed and kissed him. “Damn straight I am.”

He smiled and wondered what he had done to deserve her.

“So what are you going to do until tonight? Work on your paper?”

He nodded. “At first, sure. I only need to reformat the citations and some typos before I hand it in, and I need an hour, maybe two for that. You?”

“Same, more or less.”

“Good, because those tickets are for a Forbidden Planet/Casablanca double feature. Interested?”

He web-snatched the envelope from where it was on his workbench, and she absolutely was, going by the eager way she took it from his hands. Though upon inspecting the tickets, she frowned.

“Jesus, Pete, those are… how can you afford those, and the reservations?”

“Thanks to this guy,” he replied and pointed at the copy of the Bugle that had fallen to the floor at some point.

“He gave all the freelancers a rise, and I can not only actually afford this magnificent palace now, but I’m not behind on rent any more and have savings for the first time.”

“So you’ll go talk to him?”

“After lunch. Come on, my treat.”

One of the advantages of being Spider-Man was that it was easy to find a spot from where you could quietly observe things without being noticed. This was why he was hanging upside down from a Gargoyle, looking at a building across the street. He had known where Jameson lived for a while, at least as far as his Spider-Man persona went, but this was the first time he had come here specifically instead of just passing through.

Jameson was action oddly domestic, eating the remnants of a late lunch while some soccer game was running on his massive TV, the door to his likely hideously expensive balcony wide open. Oddly, to Spidey it felt like an invitation for him, which was another thing the J. Jonah Jameson of old would never do.

There was no extra security measures that he could see and frankly, because Jameson had to expect this visit after that was still dominating every publication the Bugle Group had, Spidey decided to take the invitation had seemed to have been extended.

He swung over. And barely reached the balcony before Jameson looked over and silently motioned for him to come in.

“Motion sensors?” Spidey asked as he cross the threshold into the apartment proper. Jameson nodded. “Sit down.”

Spidey took tentative steps inside but halted before sitting down.

“Is it real?”

Jameson didn’t answer immediately, instead turning off the TV and turning around in his chair.

“It very much is, Spider-Man. I would never print something like that if I didn’t mean it.”

“Why?”

Spidey nearly beat himself for the short answers, but he need to keep from looking too eager. To underline that, he sat down.

“Short version? Because I realised I was wrong. It was a long time coming, but I didn’t see that I was until you fought Electro. After that… I couldn’t go on. Something had to change.”

“So you decided to make me think you didn’t hate me?”

Jameson snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself, Spider-Man. This isn’t just about you, you merely happen to be the first in line.”

He paused.

“The long and much more complicated version is this. When I was in Europe, I’d already started to reconsider a few things, but over there, the news media was full with what’s happening on Latveria, and I was reminded of the way they deal with Metahumans and your side of the same coin.”

“Not pretty,” Spidey said, having to admit that Jameson had a point there.

“It certainly wasn’t, no. And it didn’t help that some of what they said sounded a lot like the language the Bugle and… others used. Them, Genosha…”

A light went off in Spidey’s head. “And the Friends of Humanity. That’s why you went to war with them.”

It was an ongoing campaign that he was having great fun following.

“That and the way they just assumed I would be on their side because they had chosen to add you to their target list.”

Which, if Spidey was to be honest to himself, was a fair point. Damned if Jameson wasn’t making a good point in general. He hated to admit it, but it was true.

“And,” Jameson continued, “what you did yesterday was an incredible display of the heroism you follow. You did what you could to save those officers and stand between the danger and the rest of us.”

Spidey was certain that there was more to it than that, but he knew that Jameson would ever only reveal what he felt he had to.

“That’s---”

“Not enough?” said Newspaperman interrupted. “Can’t say that I blame you. Not after Scorpion, because that one was a particularly bad fuckup of mine, and not everything else I’ve done and said about you. So allow me to extend a very real and formal apology for that.”

With a nod, Spidey considered this for a minute and decided to accept it for what it was, in the knowledge that Jameson would never say this in public and this would be it.

“So then, Spider-Man, I need to say this. Scorpion was a product of the moment. I know it sounds like a lame apology, but at the time I was still so angry about circumstances of the death of my wife, which by itself already didn’t help when you first appeared on the scene.”

Unaware of those circumstances beyond ‘word on the street’, Spidey merely tilted his head to the side, fully appreciating the surreality of the situation. Two months ago, nothing about this conversation would have seemed the least bit likely, and yet here he was, having it.

Seemingly unaware of the effect he was having, Jameson continued.

“Looking back at it, what I did was the worst sort of ‘looking a gift horse in the mouth’. I mean the pictures Parker takes of you make good money for him and me, and frankly, Scorpion’s entire mission statement as it was back then makes it far too close to trying to find out who you are under that mask.”

Now Spidey couldn’t help a sarcastic laugh.

“You mean unlike all the other times you’ve tried?”

He was half out of his chair before Jameson shrugged.

“For that, I need to apologise again. I shouldn’t have done that, for much the same reasons why I changed my mind in the first place. Webhead, if I wanted to unmask you, I’d have already done that. I’ve known who you are for a while now, and not just your real name, but the person behind that. And since I learned those things, I’ve been even more ashamed of myself for what I did about your secret identity on top of everything else.”

Needless to say, Peter found himself frozen into his seat, unable to even say something, let alone get up and leave.

Jameson, the bastard, grinned, albeit briefly.

“Your middle name is Benjamin, named after your late uncle. Who, together with your aunt, imparted an admirable sense of civic responsibility on you. It’s what makes you do this in the first place. You blame yourself for your uncle’s death, as earlier that night you had the opportunity to take down that perp but didn’t out of, in my opinion, entirely justified spite.”

Jonah watched as Parker tried to work out what to say and what to do. He wondered why he had done it this particular way, or this particular day, but here they were. A number of issues solved way ahead of time, a fair few new ones created.

“I have to say though, your motivation is far better than a lot of metahumans I know.”

Granted, most of those were DC, but Spidey being who he was really did make him more relatable than the likes of Clark Kent or Wonder Woman. Because fuck New 52.

On a more immediate and real note, now though it was time for a little test. “There’s no cameras active, or any other recording or recording-capable devices, so you can take off the mask.”

The superhero from Queens was reluctant, but Jonah grinned. “Don’t worry. If I were to fire you over all this, I’d have done so weeks ago. Your job is safe.”

In fact, even before the merger Jonah would have loved to have him as full-time staff, his pictures were just that good.

Ever so reluctantly, Spider-Man removed his mask and turned into Peter Parker with a really good Spider-Man costume.

“Thank you, Parker. We have a lot to talk about, and I’d rather do it face to face than face to mask.”

“How did you find out?”

“I’ll answer that as completely as I am able. There’s a lot of aspects and angles to this that I don’t know the answers to myself.”

What he was meaning to say would be a perfectly true, but incomplete representation of what had happened.

“While on vacation, I was in a car accident. That much you already know. What you don’t know is that… I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I spent a lot of time in a white void and was punished with knowledge.”

Parker nodded knowingly, and Jonah was glad that he didn’t have to explain that one. “I don’t think what I was given is exclusive to you, given the implications that were made.”

“But I am the first in line, as you said.”

“That, and you are the one that I am closest to.”

After that, he spent some time telling Parker a heavily edited version of his experience, leaving the young hero looking reluctantly impressed.

“So what else do you know, other than my identity?”

“That’s even more difficult to answer. A lot of ‘what if’ and ‘maybe’. Some I know is useless unless incredibly unlikely preconditions are met, some is useless either way, I hope you get the idea.”

Parker remained quiet for a few minutes.

“So what now? I don’t think that you will unmask me publicly, if you planned to, you could and would have weeks ago. So, what’s next?”

“That’s entirely up to you, Parker. As I said, your job is still there for you, and beyond that, there won’t be any advantage or disadvantage for you because of all this. We do need to sit down and have a more open conversation, because… Spider-Man, I need your help.”

Later, Jonah would mentally kick himself for not going full Obi Wan, but even so, Parker’s face was a picture.

Eventually though, he smiled, well and truly ‘reaching the eyes’ smiled, and Jonah had to say that it suited him. “First off, doing this without having the Bugle after me at all times is going to make for a nice change of pace. Second off, what is it that I can help you with?”

“There’s a few things you need to be aware of first, for proper context and because it’s in both our interest to avoid them as far as we are able. But I think today, we should stick to the most potentially time-sensitive one, as I need to do some more research on pretty much everything.”

Parker nodded. “Of course.”

“A lot of this is very personal, and I apologise ahead of time if you don’t want to talk about it.”

Having said this, he reached under the table and pulled out two file folders he’d been working on most of the day.

“I need to do this lot later,” he said, tapping one of them with his index finger, “but I believe you deserve to know that I was looking into the murder of Captain Stacey and the disappearance of his daughter.”

Parker’s reaction to this particular revelation was surprisingly calm for someone who was by rights still a teenager, but JJJ suspected that this was possible due to the vastly different circumstances under which it happened compared to most other continuities.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t find out much beyond the official report, except that the idea that Gwen Stacey became a victim being the victim of Fisk’s human trafficking rings seems to be extremely unlikely. I’ve talked to Fisk, I’ve shaken the bastard’s hand, and I know him well enough to say that I’m entirely and completely sure that he wouldn’t do this.”

“He knows that going after cops, never mind their families is extremely bad for the criminal business. No faster way to bring the proverbial load of bricks down on yourself. But Gwen… You think she’s still around somewhere?”

Jonah shrugged. “You seem to, but me personally? I certainly think it’s possible, I’ll say that much. But I can’t say yes or no, because there’s just not enough evidence either way.”

By the time the attack had happened in December 2011, the FDNY had assumed her dead, but for the NYPD recovering a neighbour’s CCTV footage of Gwen leaving the house when it was already on fire, smeared in blood and wearing a black and white hoodie. The last thing known was her running off, but not appearing on any other camera, even ones on the same block. Her bloodstained, then far more tattered clothing was recovered in a sewer drain six blocks away. From the state of them and the amount of blood in the drain, inconveniently too diluted for a DNA test, the FBI had assumed that Gwen was likely dead and continued to investigate with that in mind.

He wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if she was still alive somewhere. The comic-book craziness where no one but Parker’s uncle stayed dead for any length of time hadn’t really taken hold here yet, but it was starting to, and Jonah had the Bugle’s archives to prove it.

“Take my files,” he said, “I don’t believe that there’s much you haven’t already found out yourself, as I assume you’ve looked into this, but every little piece helps.”

Parker took the file, and decidedly put it aside to be read later. He’d moved past the worst of the grief, and it was clear that the wort of it was over for the young webcrawler. Was it really the changed circumstances, or was a certain feisty redhead at least partially responsible for that? Jonah shrugged mentally and put that aside for later before pulling out a third, substantially thicker folder.

“But really, the point is, while I looked into the Stacys, I came across something else that might interest you. George Stacey was only very tangentially involved, but enough that I had to chase that particular line down. Tell me, how far do you think OsCorp is connected to the Green Goblin?”

tbc

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Before the merger, Jonah had been to Washington a handful of times, but not since then. Not that the city looked any different from the one he’d seen in various media on that other Earth. It wasn’t like SHIELD or other groups advertised themselves with grandiose architecture.

Really, the only reason he was here was that someone at the Pentagon was being childish, not wanting to send files by mail or courier, even though Jonah had offered to cover the costs for doing so in full. 

Since this was way too important to trust an underling with, here he was now, walking up to the public entrance of the Pentagon while the cab that had brought him there pulled away from the curb.

He paused. 

Jonah had never been this close to the building before, and even though it was 1940s Government architecture, it was still imposing. 

After going through security, he was met by a perky young Air Force 2nd Lieutenant who led him to a small, generic office. Thanks to the eyepatch and scars, the sole occupant of that was a Major who could have made a credible Nick Fury impression. He also wore one of his legs in a cast while sitting in a wheelchair, which was why Jonah had been met by his secretary. Jonah had to sign his own name no less than eight times on various forms, and only then was he shown into a small anteroom of the office. A veritable mountain of file folders, crates, and more than a little bit of dust sat on a table large enough to comfortably seat four or five people.

“This is everything we have on Rogers, Mister Jameson, the only exception being that there’s nothing in here about the serum and the circumstances of his creation.”

“Not something I’m interested in, Major. I leave that particular rabbit hole for others to fall down.”

The name of a certain Army General who had an obsession with the colour green popped into his head, and Jonah made a mental note to start a blackmail file on Ross while also start looking into finding out where Bruce Banner was hiding out these days.

After making a ‘can’t blame you there’ face, the Major tapped one of the crates. “The reason this took so long to put together is that some of this was still classified and had to be cleared first, some of it wasn’t but filed as if it were, and some we had to find first because it was misfiled in other creative ways, then we had to make those copies… I think you understand the issue.”

“I do,” Jonah replied and nodded. The Major seemed genuine, so maybe what he’d just said was even true.

“There’s likely still a few bits and pieces missing here and there.”

Jonah took in the mountain of files. “There already is more than I expected, Major.”

The Major shrugged. “I read a few pieces of this, and from what I can tell, the search operations back in the day were very extensive, so there are a lot of patrol reports with not much in them.”

It would still give Jonah a good place to start by narrowing down areas that he didn’t have to search for the Capsicle.

“And I can take all of this?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll have to go outside and make a phone call somewhere because that’ll need transport back to New York.”

He had handed in his phone to security.

“Go to reception, there someone will help you make a call.”

Jonah didn’t respond immediately, so the Major looked at him.

“Why are you doing this? If not the serum, then what?”

Since the Major had been very helpful so far and seemed to be genuinely interesting, Jonah decided to answer. 

“Major, while I firmly believe that our world needs more heroes like him, far too many have died because of that serum. This much is obvious even from what’s on the public record. I have no intention of adding my name or anyone working for me to that list.”

It was evident that the Major approved of this stance. “Well then, I’ll leave you to it. Lieutenant Archer will organise something to transport all this.”

“Thank you, Major.”

“You’re welcome.”

Doing as instructed, Jonah soon found himself at reception and then with almost time to kill until he could begin moving those files back to New York. Someone from the Bugle Group’s DC office would be coming around with a box truck, taking the files to somewhere where they could be packed properly for the trip back to New York. At something of a loss for what to do while he waited, he actually took the advice he’d been given many years ago and made his own fun. There were enough civilian employees that one more man in a normal suit didn’t arouse too much attention, so he sat on one of the cheap government chairs and did what he had done way back when the Bugle had still belonged to his grandfather. Sit and people-watch.

This was like any other busy office building if he ignored the uniforms and military haircuts. Colleagues and friends chatting, people coming and going, the usual things.

Only one group stood out to him, and they came walking in after about ten minutes. They stood out because of two things. One was that they wore desert camouflage fatigues that were dirty from head to toe. The other was that one of them wore the rank insignia of a Lt. Colonel and had a name tag that said Rhodes.

Jonah recognised him immediately, even without that.

He quietly hummed the refrain of AC/DC’s ‘War Machine’ as he rose to his feet and approached the group even as they began to disperse.

“Colonel Rhodes, could I have a minute of your time, please? Off the record.”

Rhodes turned to him but shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mister, but I have a meeting to get to.”

Jonah in return, nodded. “I figured that, and I know why, but there is something connected to that that has come to my attention and that you might want to know. I don’t know where Tony Stark is any more than  you do, but…”

With a sigh, Jonah scratched the back of his head.

“Listen, I was going to reach out to you anyway, but there is a good chance this is time-critical, and I need a minute or two at best. Again, off the record.”

“Why should I talk to you if you don’t know here Tony… Stark is?”

“Because this is more about why he was abducted, possibly even on whose orders.”

“Who are you?”

“Me? I’m just an old-fashioned newspaper man. J. Jonah Jameson, Bugle Group.”

Instantly wary of the press, Rhodes till took the hand when it was offered.

“So what do you know, Mister Jameson?”

“Counter question: what do you know about Obadiah Stane?”

He clearly knew something, because Jonah found himself dragged into a short side corridor.

“Well, what do you know?” Rhodes asked.

“Unfortunately, nothing that will stand up in a court of law, but not for lack of trying, I assure you. It’s enough though that I’m convinced he’s dirty and that there might be a connection with Tony Stark’s kidnapping.”

“How so?”

What Jonah said next had the advantage of being ninety percent true.

“A few months ago, I was given a tip that Stark Industries weapons were being trafficked out of New York, Central City and Los Angeles, and that someone inside SI was, at the very least, looking the other way. There was little proof, but enough for me to be interested and look into it.”

“And Stane might be connected?”

“Might being the operative word, Colonel. Because if he is, then he’s devilishly good at covering his tracks.”

Hopefully, Rhodes would take the bait because if this was in any form like it had been in Iron Man 1, then the proof would have to come from within Stark Industries.

Rhodes scratched his head and sighed. “How long are you going to be in DC?”

“As long as I need to be, Colonel Rhodes. I can run the Bugle Group remotely for a few days.” Jonah paused. “You have my personal word of honour that none of this will be published until and unless you want me to. I can even give that promise in writing.”

It took Rhodes long enough to react that Jonah was starting to worry. Though in the end, the Colonel nodded. 

“What hotel?”

Jonah named his place of non-permanent residence. Which of course had inevitably turned out to be the Watergate. “As I said, I’ll be able to stay at least until the end of the week.”

“I’ll call you.”

“I’ll wait.”

Rhodes was about to walk away when Jonah said something he knew he should have opened with.

“Colonel, if you want to bring in someone else, I suggest Miss Potts and Mister Hogan. They are the only ones in Stark Industries I know for a fact are clean and can be trusted with this.”

“How can you  know that?”

Rhodes turned back around, but Jonah desperately reached for an answer that wasn’t ‘because of the Iron Man trilogy and the rest of the MCU, duh’.

“Because anyone doing even cursory research on any of you knows that you, Miss Potts and Mister Hogan are far too law-abiding and, above all, personally close and loyal to Tony Stark to be involved in… whatever this mess is.”

Rodes didn’t answer, but he nodded and then actually did walk away.

It took Rhodes less than a day to decide and call. Then, another nine hours were needed for him to turn up at Jonah’s hotel room door.

When Jonah opened said door, Rhodes wasn’t alone. While he wore jeans and a leather jacket instead of the dirty BDU’s Jonah had last seen him in, the other person was dressed in a style he would describe as corporate chiq.

Jonah recognised her immediately as with Rhodes, but merely invited the two inside.

It was Rhodes who made the introductions.

“J. Jonah Jameson, Bugle Group, Virginia Potts, Tony Stark’s PA.”

She was the picture of the corporate professional who was in the presence of the 4[SUP]th[/SUP] Estate, but Jonah could not help but wonder if it went beyond just being the PA, at least on her side. In the end, it didn’t matter. He could not and should not assume that these three people were anything like what they had been in the MCU’s early days.

Jonah extended his hand, which Potts took, returning a grip that spoke of grim determination.

Even so, it wasn’t until they were stead around the small coffee table that she said more than the bare essentials.

“So what do you know? And how did you find out?”

“Coffee?”

Once everyone held their own mug of the juice of life, Jonah pulled three reasonably thick file folders from under the table, handing two to his guests.

“I had these couriered down from New York yesterday, as I didn’t expect to run into Colonel Rhodes while here. This is everything the Bugle Group has on Stane, including an agreement drawn up by our legal team that I have already signed, keeping any part of the Bugle Group from publishing until either you two or Tony Stark give permission.”

He paused briefly for effect, his inner showman coming out. 

“As I said, it’s not very much and certainly not enough to get a warrant, never mind conviction. I’d love to say that it was because it was too dangerous or illegal for my people to poke any deeper. Still, the matter of fact is that while I’m personally convinced that Stane is dirty and very likely connected to what’s happened in Afghanistan, he’s also very good at hiding it.”

“He would had to have been, given how long that likely went on,” Potts remarked as she sat her mug down and began to leaf through the first few pages.

For the next half hour, all three hotel room occupants studied the files and occasionally asked questions, though Jonah only did so to remind himself of the details and in the vain hope that he had missed something. He had already gone over all of this several times, but as the old saying went, hope dies last.

“You were right, this isn’t enough for legal action,” Potts said eventually. 

“I agree,” Rhodes added. “But I think that it’s still enough for us to investigate.”

Potts pensively studied the last page, a number of bank statements someone had dug out of the trash of a shell company that Stane owned.

“Start from the beginning, and… why?” she asked, obviously fighting to retain control of her emotions. “Why should I bet the future of Tony Stark and his company on you?”

“The why is pretty easy to answer.” 

Aside from ‘we need Iron Man’, of course.

“I met Stane at that final Stark Expo in 2009. Just hours after news came through that the space station of the Baxter Foundation had exploded with the Fantastic Four on board. Mister Stark hadn’t yet made that speech about feeling responsible for the Arc reactor going up the way it did and pulled the plug. At the time, Stane had already expressed an interest in my company several times, only to be refused. He tried one last time, wanting to buy the Bugle Group for somewhat less than what it was worth at the time, in a deal that would have left me severely out of pocket. When I understandably refused, he wasn’t happy. He didn’t [I]quite[/I] threaten me, but the implication was there. I then told him where he could stick his threats and his offer. Needless to say, we aren’t exchanging Christmas cards.”

He took a sip from his mug.

“Neither of us have ever hidden that, so assuming that what I was told is true, that’s likely why someone felt that it was a good idea to reach out to me. Because if there is any chance to take down Stane, I’m more than willing to do it. So some months ago, someone called my private line at the Bugle Office in New York and alleged that Stane was connected with, if not outright running an operation smuggling ST weapons and technology into all for corners of the globe for various non-state actors and rogue governments to buy. All through Central City, Los Angeles, as well as New York and possibly Boston and Miami.”

Jonah looked the other two in the eyes. “Before you ask, I have no idea who made that call. Used a voice changer and a burner phone registered to a cell carrier company in Uzbekistan.”

And didn’t exist beyond Jonah’s imagination.

“You went after that tip because you hate Stane?” Rhodes asked, and Jonah nodded.

“He wanted my company on the cheap and thought I was greedy enough to go for it. He then was angry that I had the audacity to have higher standards than him.”

Here, Potts smiled for the first time. It didn’t quite reach her eyes but spoke of how radiant she could be if it did. “And this is why he fights it whenever someone brings up any cooperation with the Bugle Group or suggests someone from your company is invited to Stark Industries events.”

Jonah suppressed the urge to comment on egos.

“Frankly, the world is better off with Tony Stark alive and in control of your company instead of Stane.”

There were and always would be people who disliked Stark for good and bad reasons, but Jonah wasn’t one of them, not since the Merger. Perfect, the man wasn’t and never would be by any means, and someone who was prone to sometimes using methods that were, at best, questionable. Never mind how he tended to support superhuman registration in most continuities, an issue that Jonah felt conflicted about at best. But he still had his heart in the right place if you came down to it. 

“I mean that,” Jonah said, “because I’ve published and read enough about the likes of Hammer Technologies and OsCorp to know that we don’t need another one of those. Stark Industries under Tony Stark is, with respect, very much the lesser evil.”

“Oh?”

He nodded and sighed. “Your boss is a very complicated man, to put it mildly. Despite being a massive defence contractor, I think that ultimately he means well enough for there to be the underpinnings of a good man hidden beneath the drunkard playboy.”

It was somewhat surprising when Tony Stark was by all accounts the product of a dalliance between Howard Stark and an employee whom he had married out of a sense of duty and then promptly ignored once both had done their duty by producing an heir and being born as a boy respectively.

Which in turn likely explained a lot about Stark’s current relationship status, or lack thereof.

Jonah was fully aware that all of this was coloured by the Iron Man trilogy and his own reading since the merger, but he was still willing to give the man the benefit of the doubt.

And he truly did feel that Stark Industries under the unquestioned control of Obadiah Stane was potential high-grade nightmare fuel. ‘Days of Future Past before Wolverine goes back’ levels of nightmare fuel.

So even if Tony Stark was the shades of dark grey misogynistic, myopic and semi-psychopathic super-genius he was sometimes portrayed as and seen by many, he would also always be the lesser of two evils. He did have at least some standards, after all.

Thankfully, at that moment, Potts pulled Jonah back to the matter at hand. 

“We’ve been hearing rumours, but never enough to approach… Mister Stark with it. He trusts Stane, and he’s not the type to cease trusting someone without an excellent reason. But with this, we can and will investigate.”

“Rumours?” Rhodes frowned, and Potts nodded in response.

“We, that is, Mister Hogan and I felt that making you keep this from him wasn’t fair to either of you, especially if most of it was semi-drunken bar talk or pure conjecture that we could never pinpoint the source of.”

Potts was apologetic, so Rhodes seemed to decide to let it go. She then held up the folder. “This is more than we’ve ever had before. And that brings me to something I wanted to ask before I got on the red eye. What do you want in exchange, Mister Jameson?”

It was a good question, but somehow not one that Jonah had thought about to any degree. This entire thing had happened out of the blue, and he had never gone beyond putting what non-transdimensional information he had into the hands of those who could actually do something with it. Now that this task had been accomplished…

“I know better than to just ask you for an IOU. You’re both way too smart for that, and I don’t think this is worth that much in the first place. So how about we settle for a fresh start between your company and mine, and you get me an extra half hour of Tony Stark’s time at some stage should I need it in an emergency or something of that sort? Entirely off the record.”

To Jonah, this meant ‘at any point between his debut as Iron Man and the accords, should they happen’, because as one of the largest media barons of the East Coast, he was bound to meet Stark sooner or later anyway.

“You’re certain that we will get him back?” Potts asked, slightly more eager than was usual and with Rhodes looking like he wanted to ask the same.

“This is Tony Stark we’re dealing with here. If they haven’t shot him by now, a few terrorists won’t keep him down.”

Jonah prayed that this was true, but in his head he could hear the screaming roar of repulsors and then Stark speaking. 

“He’s all yours.”

tbc

Chapter Text

Frank knew he was screwed. Half a dozen Inner Demons goons lay dead in front of the wrecked forklift Frank was using for cover, but two dozen more came streaming out of the abandoned gas station and he was already running low on ammunition. He cursed whatever mistake, fate or luck had doomed him to a protracted firefight. On one side, he had his own burning and formerly armoured van, on the other the already very cold Hudson River and on the third more and more goons.

On top of that, there were approaching sirens, so he would have to deal with the corrupt and useless morons that inhabited the NYPD.

So all he would do was to make sure that the name Frank Castle went down in a blaze of glory, that it was to be remembered. He checked his ammunition again and prepared himself for the next rush.

Frank took careful aim, starting to pick off the goons with single, carefully aimed shots. Centre of mass, conserve rounds.

But these guys were good, using tactics straight out of the infantry training manuals common to most armies, and he had to admit, whoever trained them knew their shit.

But that also meant that they inevitably started to flank him and that there wasn’t much he could do against that. He still sold himself as dearly as he could, unwilling and unable to back down from criminal scum like this. Even over the chaos of battle he could see and hear the cops setting up a perimeter outside, but he knew that on a Saturday night like this, especially with so much shooting going on, they would wait for SWAT or maybe even call in one of their vigilante pets.

There was a short pause as the Demons adapted to the new situation, and in the middle of that, a voice rang out.

“Hey Punny, why didn’t you call when you got out of prison?”

A figure dressed in red and blue spandex came swinging down from somewhere up above and stood in-between Frank and his enemies.

Spider-Man! Frank was tempted to shoot him then and there for what the little shit had done during that bank job in Harlem back in 2011. Frank had lost all his equipment and spend eleven months in jail because of him.

“Now him I know. I stopped him from shooting a criminal when civilians were running through his line of fire,” the little shit quipped, though Frank could head the disdain in spite of the affected humour.

“You people on the other hand…”

He pointed to the Demons who by now were aiming all their guns at him.

“You people look like you raided an arts and crafts store in Chinatown, but that’s just cool as far as I’m concerned.”

“What are you doing here, Arachnid?”

“Head about a noise complaint and was in the neighbourhood, so I decided to swing by.”

Before Frank could respond, Spider-Man jumped back and out of the way, barely avoiding the gunfire from the Demon goons and then just took them apart.

Frank hadn’t seen the damn Arachnid in action since his arrest, and it was clear that he had improved since then, as the so-called hero was even more nimble and fast. Frank couldn’t help but be envious.

Spider-Man was like a force of nature.

Within less than two minutes, all the goons were disarmed and in webbed cocoons. Oddly, Spider-Man kept ignoring him, and instead picked up the mask that one of the goons had dropped. He webbed it to his costume and then turned around.

“Yo, Frankieboy, normally I’d just ask you to put your shootin’ iron down and come quietly, but with you I know better than that, so…”

Frank tried to raise his gun, but found himself webbed to the forklift. “You little---”

And once again his face was webbed, and by the time the cops cut him loose, Spider-Man was gone and Frank was swearing revenge in every language he knew. He would do it.

MJ had barely walked out of a late-afternoon ethics lecture when she was struck by the need to eat something. Neither her nor Pete’s places were close enough for a quick fridge raid before she was expected at the theatre, so she decided to go to the nearest shop that sold something vaguely edible.

For all that acting was something she only did on the side as something of a hobby, she still put all her efforts into it, and that included being on time for rehearsals if she could at all help it.

Pete had asked her about that before they had first gotten together. It had been during their final year of high-school, and just about everyone had talked about little else than what they were going to do next.

He had been in a bit of a funk that day, as it had been around the anniversary of his uncle’s death, and she’d been trying to distract him by talking about her acting.

Though in reality, the only reason why she remembered that day was because elater that afternoon, she had been sitting on the couch, putting the finishing touches on her application to ESU’s Journalism track. The doorbell of the small but comfortable house had rung and an incredibly nervous and awkward Pete had been there instead of her mother. He had quietly asked to be allowed in, sat in his usual seat and then, with an uncharacteristic stutter slowly gotten around to revealing The Big Secret to her.

As she waited at the pedestrian light across from her favourite non-chain sub store, MJ chuckled. In retrospect, the rest of that evening and the next two weeks had gone as she should have expected, and it was lucky that they had.

Back then, she had been furious. After having been Spider-Man’s biggest supporter at their school after Peter himself, after playing Nurse MJ on more than one occasion and being lied to for more than two years at that point, it had made sense to her.

So of course she had thrown him out, and then very nearly trashed her application and re-started an old one for Harvard after all.

They hadn’t spoken at all for almost a week and avoided each other to the point that Harry, bless him, had offered to give her the number of the divorce lawyer his mother and her first husband had used.

After ordering in the store and waiting, she made a mental note to call Harry and tell him what that dumb joke had meant to her, to them.

She had laughed, and ever loyal Harry had offered to go and punch Peter for her. She had declined, but on the next morning, she had been sitting on the very same couch and realised how stupid her reaction had been. With Pete being who he was, on top of everything Spider-Man faced pretty much daily, Pete took an incredible risk in telling her. Not because he feared that she might tell someone, because she knew he trusted her in both of his identities. Especially after all the times she had helped him.

She ate while walking.

He had kept it quiet because he feared that if someone worked out his identity, she’d be even more of a target, that if somehow one of his many enemies discovered she knew, people might forcibly extract that information from her. It had been his way of giving her an out before they committed to each other, and not wanting to start anything under false pretences.

It had taken MJ several days to get over her shame and reach out. During those days she had confronted her feelings for Peter Parker and Spider-Man, but eventually found herself looking at may, standing in the front door of their house.

Pete’s aunt had only sighed ‘about time’ and let her in.

What had followed was a very emotional conversation with many apologies on both side and lots of smoochies. They had been together since then and she wouldn’t change it for anything in the universe. She loved Peter Parker for what he was behind the mask, in spite of his being Spider-Man and constantly putting his life in danger. She was happy, they both were.

When MJ reached the theatre, she could see the Bugle billboard across the street.

Jameson’s 180 had certainly been a thing on it’s own, but that he knew… everything still slightly disturbed her.

Pete said that Jameson had described it as a curse.

“Magic shenanigans, apparently. Some higher power decided to shut him up by giving him exactly what he wanted…”

They were lucky that the Bugle’s owner/editor and undisputed ruler of the New York press was on their side now. Undoing the years of damage he had done would take just as many years of hard work if not more, but according to Pete, Jameson was very well aware of that.

Pete had also said several times how nice it was now, not having to fear what the Bugle would write about him every time he punched a bank robber in the face.

The theatre was a small affair run by the local theatre society and funded by Culture grants from the city.

Right now they were working on a production of ‘Smallville’, a play about an alien metahuman who had crashed near the titular fictional town in rural Kansas as a baby. It sounded ridiculous on the surface, but it wasn’t meant as an entirely serious piece to start with.

After the disaster that had been last year’s ‘King Lear’, they needed something to laugh at on both sides of the curtain.

She shook her head and crossed the remaining distance to the front door, only to be interrupted by a voice she hadn’t heard in nowhere near long enough. “Hello, MJ.”

So spoken to, the redhead turned on her feet and indeed, there he was.

“What do you want, Dad?”

MJ didn’t even try to hide the disdain she felt.

“I just wanted to talk to you, you’re my only daughter, after all.”

Ignoring the self-important arrogance for a moment, she looked at her father. She hadn’t seen him since just after the divorce. Then, she had yelled at him for having tried to liquidate the college fund that her mother’s parents had created as her inheritance. At the time he had been drunk enough not to see how absolutely stupid the way he’d gone about it was, refused to accept that what he had tried to do was wrong and then refused to leave, yelling loud enough that May Parker one house over had heard and called the cops before MJ had gotten around to that.

Now… he looked sober enough, but also much more than three years older.

MJ wasn’t sure how much of that was the booze or just the march of time.

“What about? My money is where you can’t get at it and you’re not even going to get enough loose change for a bus fare from me.”

“Just… just catching up, you know…” he said, seeming unsure what to say.

With a deep and world-weary sigh, MJ glanced at her sperm donor.

“Limited time offer. Meet me in three hours, at that diner in Hell’s Kitchen. You know which one unless you’ve boozed away your last braincells.”

She waited.

Her father frowned, and MJ suppressed a sigh. It was obvious that he wanted her to drop whatever she was doing and divert all her attention to him. For the nth time since she’d first told him no.

“Take it or leave it,” she added for emphasis. “Because believe it or not, my life does not rotate around you.”

He sighed. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

MJ resisted an eye-roll. Her father was acting as if he was making some great concession by agreeing to meet under her conditions.

“Good. Now go away, I have work to do.”

That wasn’t strictly speaking true, but he had always disapproved of many thing she did in her spare time, and acting was among them.

Without a further word, she turned around and walked inside.

As soon as she was sure he couldn’t see, she pulled out her phone and dialled the first number in her contacts list.

“Hey there, MJ!”

As usual for this time on a college day, Pete picked up almost immediately. From his breathing, she could tell that he was swinging somewhere.

“Pete, my father is back in New York and he wants to talk.”

She could hear noises consistent with Pete sitting down somewhere.

“So what did you tell him?”

“I told him to either wait until I made the time and meet at a place I chose, or to get lost. Not in those words, but I think I got the message across.”

MJ grinned as she said this and she could heard her boyfriend chuckle.

“Daaw, little Mary Jane is all grown up. Want me to be there?”

There was little love lost between the Parkers and her father and she appreciated the noble sacrifice on offer.

“Thank you Pete, I can take care of his drunk ass. Though… maybe you could be somewhere close, because I think I’ll need your company once this is over.”

“Whatever you want, Red.” Pete replied quietly. MJ’s heart soared.

Unlike her father, Pete well and truly cared for those around him, and everyone knew.

“I love you, Tiger.”

“Love you too. I’ll be there.”

“Thank you.”

tbc

Chapter Text

As MJ entered the diner with a confident stride, she took solace in the knowledge that Peter was on the roof, hidden behind an HVAC unit and keeping track of her with his enhanced senses. 

‘Just in case’ was what he’d said, even though MJ was more than capable of delivering her father a well-deserved smackdown should that be required. 

She’d dropped regular self-defence classes because of time constraints when starting at ESU, but she still trained once a week. So should her father become violent, she would take care of him herself. It was unlikely that it would, as even at his most drunk he’d ever only been verbally abusive and her mother had thrown him out before things had escalated beyond attempted theft.

Still, Peter worried about her as much as she worried about him, and was being his usual dorky helpful and loveable self. She hadn’t been able to refuse the offer, not when she knew what she meant to him.

As they had planned, she was here first and by the time her father finally arrived, she was holding her favourite coffee. Peter had introduced her to it, though she was certain that this particular nugget of information was lost on her father.

He walked up to the booth she had chosen, with the same old, slightly slimy grin on his face. 

“Hello, Honey.”

Even though she hated the way in which he seemed to assume that nothing had changed from when she was eight and had never even heard of alcoholism, she motioned for him to sit down.

MJ silently watched as her father ordered a cup of coffee, fully aware that she would end up being out of pocket for that.

“So what do you want?” she asked, repeating her question from earlier in the day.

Her father tilted his head. “You’re my daughter. I want to know what’s going on in your life?”

To MJ, he looked as if he was puzzled that she didn’t know this already, or that she might not volunteer the information he was so obviously fishing for.

So she said nothing and raised her right eyebrow in an ability that the turbo-Trekkie Peter Parker was eternally jealous about.

MJ wasn’t sure if her father still remembered that afternoon when she had tried and failed to teach Peter, a day that had ended with him getting thrown out of the house and a very irate May Parker nearly busting in the front door. Hardly surprising, Peter had come home with the proverbial red handprint on his cheek.

This had happened two weeks before the divorce had gone through and three before she had caught her own father trying to forge her and her mother’s signatures on the forms he’d have needed to go and drink away her college education.

“Journalism track at ESU, but not because of anything you did,” MJ reluctantly volunteered. 

And then she saw it. The well-concealed but still visible frown of disapproval that had been there the first time she had voiced a desire to go down this path and not one where he would have been able to brag about it to his idiotic drinking buddies. She didn’t know if it was because he hated journalists and the press in general or because he blamed the collective influence of the Parker family. Or because during and after the divorce she had sided with her mother, who had encouraged MJ to take up a career path they both knew he disapproved of.

Not that she gave even the slightest sliver of a fuck about his opinions.

“Do you like ESU?” he asked and seemed to be genuinely curious, as he’d never gone to college himself.

“I do. I love New York too much to ever move away. And…”

MJ paused briefly, debating what to say. But really, she didn’t care how he would react. It was bound to cause an argument, but if he left in a huff and never returned, that would [I]still[/I] be too soon. 

“Peter is studying BioChem Engineering there too, so it worked out for the both of us. No long-distance.”

His face darkened and MJ could see that he was reigning in his temper.

“You are still friends with that… boy?”

“Oh, we’re [I]much[/I] more than friends. We’ve been… seeing each other since just before we started college.”

From the way his face was actually going red now, MJ knew that her words had hit home the way she had expected and planned, and she could almost hear Peter doubling over with laughter. The dislike between the two was very much mutual.

“’Fucks sake, MJ! You [I]know[/I] what the Parkers did to us and you’re going out with him?”

He was barely loud enough for the people in the next booth to hear, but the indignant way he had said it, the way he saw it as a personal betrayal made her twist the proverbial knife.

“Oh we’re doing more than just go out,” she said. “And what the Parkers ‘did’ to you, was entirely deserved. It wasn’t Ben Parker who decided to regularly cut corners and ignore safety standards so he could leave earlier and get hammered in Chinatown. He just caught you and reported you. And that May Parker kept calling the cops on us is also entirely on you. If anything, she should have started doing that even earlier. Towards Mom and me, the Parkers were never anything but neighbourly and good friends. They still are.”

She tapped the side of her mug and decided to twist the knife even more. “Who do you think took us in when the cops turned over my home because they thought you owed money to the triads? My last few months of high school would have been hell if not for them.”

Now MJ leaned back and waited for the inevitable explosion, small, challenging grin on her face and daring him to act as he had when she was sixteen.

“How… how fucking dare you? The Parkers ruined our family, and you choose them over your own flesh and blood? Over me? No no no. This is… you will stop seeing him immediately, you hear? I forbid you, I forbid---”

MJ belly-laughed and that she didn’t even pretend to take him seriously seemed to bewilder her father enough for him to stop mid-rant.

“My effing god, the sheer idea that I give even a single fuck about what you think of my love life is hilarious. You, Greg Watson, really seem to think that you get to give me orders as if I was eight. Newsflash, I’m nineteen, almost twenty, and you lost the right to complain when you tried to turn my future into cheap booze and then blamed Mom for it. Let me say to you know what I said then in case you were too drunk to remember. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Never contact me, Mom or the Parkers again.”

With that she rose, apologised to everyone else in the diner and tossed the owner, an old friend of May Parker’s, a twenty. As soon as she stepped out onto the street, Peter appeared as if out of nowhere and kissed her after she indicated that her father would be able to see.

“As much as I wanted to go and kick his teeth in, I knew you could handle it, Red.”

MJ just grinned and hooked her arm under his. “Come on, Tiger. Your aunt offered some of her almond cookies.”

“How can I say no to that?”

So they walked off.

He was angry that Watson the elder had screwed it up like this, but at least he now had the information he wanted. Parker would still be an issue and he would have preferred to have him be out of the picture before his next move, but the last time they had met Parker had been a puny little shit without a real spine or powers. Whereas he had stood up to Spider-Man more than once before temporarily leaving New York behind.

“Here, the rest of the payment as we agreed.”

He threw Greg Watson both a bottle of mid-range whiskey and the keys to a storage room with not only a largeish shipping crate of the stuff.

Though given that Watson was desperate enough for a fix to sell out his daughter for some booze, maybe it was worth checking in on him in a few days and sell on what was left.

“And your money…”

Watson barely thought to grab the briefcase with five grand in assorted small bills, so much was his attention on the bottle in his hand, before walking out without another word and with far more speed than his employer would have thought possible.

He let the drunkard go, because even if he talked, who would believe him?

With that in mind, he moved back to the quarters he had made for himself, overlooking the river with easy access to water while still being away from prying eyes. 

“Well Morris, a few more days….:” 

He knew where she lived now and tomorrow, he would follow her to work and begin.

Morris put up his feet, resting them on the odd OsCorp branded high-tech crate he’d found hidden among all the other crap in the van he’d stolen the booze from. He wondered why it was so like a portable safe, or why those idiots had fought so hard to defend it. He looked down and took in the rest of it again. The OsCorp logo was emblazoned on it, followed by some medical and other logos he didn’t know and lastly a keypad.

Clearly it was valuable, which was why he hadn’t broken it open yet, but it could wait anyway.

Eventually, once he ha d begun to bring MJ back to his side, he would try to open it and then sell it back to the previous owners. Surely, they would pay for something this important to them.

For Norman, the worst thing about the situation was that he couldn’t let his anger out by firing someone. It had been his own idea to handle the transport of The Cure this way, and going by what was left of the people he’d hand-picked for this, they had tried their best.

“Anything else on who is responsible for this?”

“Not yet, Sir. What CCTV cameras there were in the area all suffered extensive water damage, so there isn’t much footage. We [I]were[/I] able to confirm that it was a metahuman, but not yet which one.”

Norman had is suspicions, but not enough to move on.

It was all very frustrating, but he had no choice but to go on.

“Sir, what do you want us to do?”

Norman turned away in his chair and towards the office window overlooking Manhattan.

“Find it. I don’t care where, or whose legs you have to break, but FIND IT! Understood?”

“Yes, Sir.”

His minion retreated and Norman decided to put OsCorp’s legal and PR teams on alert, because this was bound to get nasty.

That done, he looked out the window the same way he had earlier, his rage slowly building. He would find whoever was responsible and Make. Them. Pay.

tbc

Chapter Text

With a deep and world-weary sigh, MJ moved her head around to loosen the stiff muscles in her neck.

When that didn’t help, she stopped typing briefly and massaged her neck with both hands before resuming with a curse at her boss for being too cheap to spring for less terrible chairs.

Even for the fifth-rate ‘Online Newspaper’ MJ worked at, this would easily be in the budget. But she mostly liked the work she was doing here and she needed the money, so MJ pressed on.

“Miss Watson?” came a voice from somewhere close by. She stopped typing again and looked at the disapproving frown of Mrs. Tomlinson, maybe ten years older than MJ, editor and sole owner of the ‘West Villager’ and eternal cheapskate.

“What can I do for you, Chief?”

“Have you ordered this?” Tomlinson asked, holding up a family sized package of the sour drops MJ had liked during her brief and embarrassing goth phase in high school. “You can’t order things to your place of work, Mary-Jane.”

“Well,” MJ replied while taking the package, “good thing then that I didn’t order those.”

She knew that Tomlinson didn’t quite buy that, but MJ didn’t really care and examined the package.

“See,” she said eventually, “whoever did this spelt my name wrong. The ‘Jane’ is without a y.”

That hadn’t happened since sophomore year.

“And as I’m sure not going to eat something where I have no idea where it’s been, I’m going to throw that out.”

Tomlinson nodded and watched as MJ rose from her chair and threw the object into the refuse container out back.

“Are you done with the article yet?” was the first thing said to her when she returned.

“Almost,” MJ said while pointing at her monitor. “Last paragraph and then I can send it to you for proof-reading. Five minutes at most.”

“See to it.”

Tomlinson wilfully ignored that MJ’s deadline for this article was this time tomorrow, but MJ knew better than to complain as she was on thin ice already. Something about supporting a certain arachnid-themed superhero from Queens when Tomlinson wanted to take the Bugle’s old spot as his main media antagonist. She did this to the point of referring to Jameson as a traitor when she was extra-stressed.

MJ thought that it was ridiculous to think that the West Villager, published from a basement in the Bronx, thus nowhere near the West Village and with around fifteen-thousand followers across it’s entire social media presence could do that.

Not when the Bugle Group was poised to complete that 180 and in the process of establishing itself as the champion of Metahuman and Enhanced rights in the media capital of the world.

She didn’t know what Tomlinson’s hangup with metas was, but she didn’t seem to want to admit that times had changed and that if things continued to do so, ever fewer New Yorkers would think the way she did.

So MJ went back to her work.

^^--^^--^^

She didn’t start to connect the dots until the third time a package appeared, this time on her doorstep, again without any return address or a courier company to complain to. This time she called Peter, and when he examined the package with his enhanced senses, he had proclaimed it to be what it seemed to be, a box of chocolates with a small set of flowers taped to it.

Peter was starting to worry and suggested that she should spend the night at either her mother’s or Aunt May’s, just to see if someone had put her home ant work addresses on some sort of list or if it was something more dangerous.

She thought this was an overreaction, but Peter was so worried, MJ decided to do it. Her mother was out of town for the rest of the week, so May Parker’s cooking beckoned as an additional bonus for spending more time with Peter.

The next time she found something Peter was with her, although by complete coincidence. Over the day that had turned into a weekend spent at the May Parker household, MJ had speculated that while she didn’t believe her father was responsible, as that would have required actual selfless effort on his part, it was likely connected somehow. The timing was too convenient.

It had actually been May who had suggested the connection to their time in high school after Peter had gone to check her apartment and indeed found a bouquet of flowers that matched the colour theme of their sophomore year school dance and a card with the motto of said event. That neither of them had attended.

Peter because he’d been ‘sick’ after a certain field trip to OsCorp, she out of what she had thought to be mere friendship and being generally supportive.

After that find, she had actually contacted her building’s super, ad the lovely old lady had only confirmed what MJ had suspected, anonymous couriers had made the actual deliveries and the one company willing to talk when she called had been paid in cash.

At least in the future, no packages would be delivered to her door unless she told the super she had ordered something.

Now they both worried and Peter had accompanied her back to her place, only to find… nothing. That had changed when he had come to pick her up for a long-planned outing two day later, this time managing to interrupt a flower courier trying to talk himself and the same set of flowers past the super, although he was from a different shop.

And that was how it continued for next two weeks. At the end of the first one, she had called the cops. Even though there still wasn’t anything illegal and the cops couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything, this was she had still made sure that there was a police report and a paper trail now.

They still worried.

^^--^^--^^

The place they had met had the advantage of being available and unconnected to Stark Industries. Instead, it belonged to Pepper’s old college room-mate.

Officially her and Rhodey were in other places and therefore on a clock as they would need to be seen there eventually, but the meeting was unavoidable.

The Colonel was leaning against the railing of the porch overlooking the valley.

“It sucks that the only places where you and I can access Jarvis are likely compromised,” he said, frustrating bleeding through every word.

Pepper grimaced. In the few weeks since Jameson had pointed them towards Stane being crooked instead of just a narcissistic asshole, they had tried to find out more. And they had managed to confirm what Jameson had told them, but beyond that there wasn’t much. Stane was crooked, there was no denying that any more, but he was also very good at covering his tracks. If proof existed, it was on Stane’s and SI’s computers and out of their reach without Tony’s own access codes.

Unless of course they wanted to tip off Stane.

At least the man hadn’t managed to take formal, supposedly temporary control of the company, paradoxically because the Ten Rings had released three hostage videos so far. With that very much in the public domain, no one could reasonably claim that Tony hadn’t survived the abduction and Stane, assuming that he had gone that far, couldn’t make a power grab without ensuring that Tony was dead.

It hit her entirely out of nowhere.

“OH FOR FUCKS SAKE!” she yelled and pulled out the burner phone she had bought for this very purpose. Rhodes, aware that she normally wasn’t prone to yelling frowned, but she held up a single finger as she swiped through the contents of her calendar.

“I need to go to Seattle, Rhodey.”

“For the love of god wh----”

Tony’s best friend chuckled and then laughed out loud.

“Because we need someone to help us who has ways and means to nibble at the edges of Stane’s Empire without him noticing. And who has a background in White Collar crime and runs the Seattle Field Office of the FBI?”

Pepper nodded. “Special Agent in Charge Virgil Potts. My father.”

She grinned as she found a flight from LAX later that afternoon, and since her calendar was mostly empty for a change, she booked a ticket.

“Time to play Daddy’s girl.”

“Oh, this is Genius,” Rhodey added. “You won’t even need a cover. You’re effectively off for the rest of the week as Stane has his own PA, and you’re just visiting your parents for support in a crisis. Totally not because your dad is FBI.”

“One advantage of being the eye candy PA. Idiots like Stane don’t take you seriously.”

Something she hated but would take ruthless advantage of.

“Are you going to call them first?”

Pepper shook her head. “I’d have to tell them something, and frankly, I also just want to see my mom and dad.”

The wistful smile from the military brat and divorce child Rhodes nearly made her apologise.

“Fair enough. I need to fly back to Afghanistan anyway. Apparently there’s intel that the Ten Rings are collecting much of their gear in the mountains near Kandahar.”

“It’s been almost two months, Rhodey.”

“Don’t worry. Let me take care of Tony, you take care of this. He’s still out there, and I’ll find him, and when he returns, the three of us can take care of Stane.”

She nodded silently.

Things were moving fast, but were they moving fast enough?”

“But before you go, is that really everything we have?”

Rhodey grimaced. “I’m afraid it is. Ross has shanghaied some of my contacts after people claimed to have seen Bruce Banner in Chicago, Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale and Disneyland Tokyo all on the same day. As far as the military is concerned, we’re stuck for now.”

His face made it clear what he thought of General Ross and what he got up to.

“Do you think it’s worth calling Jameson to ask what the Bugle has on him?” he asked.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if his change of heart extended to The Hulk too. On top of Ross being the type to rub people like that anyway.”

They parted ways soon after.

Some nine hours later she was standing in front of the upscale home her parents had bought after her father’s promotion and transfer here. Between his salary and her mom’s job on the state school board, they had been able to buy this house and the land that surrounded it, if with little extra room in the budget.

In her jeans and ratty Yale hoodie she didn’t exactly feel under-dressed, but not like she was fitting in entirely either.

By now it was getting dark and Pepper had no desire to spend the night out here, so she shouldered the small carry-on bag, reached for the rest of her luggage and walked up to the door.

She knocked on the door the same way she had back in Wyoming.

Her mother opened the door. Upon seeing her only child on the doorstep, grinning widely and looking for all the world like she had never moved out of her childhood home, her Independence Potts smiled.

“Virginia, what a nice surprise!”

Pepper found herself dragged inside by her mother and engulfed in a tight hug.

“Your father is in the upstairs office.”

Knowing what was about to happen, Pepper set her things down and quickly followed her mother upstairs.

Her father was an amateur historian who wrote short stories and also a novel set during the early days of the pacific war in some of this sparse free time, and the contents of the office reflected that.

Mom stopped and knocked on the doorframe.

“Look what I found outside.”

Dad looked up and saw Pepper standing behind her mother.

“God Virginia, I’m happy to see you. Are you okay with…”

Something within Pepper melted at the knowledge that her parents cared and worried about her, even though she had always known that they did.

“I’m… we’re fine so far,” she said after a few minutes of family bonding. But it’s… I need your help, Daddy. Professionally and personally.”

Parental concern overrode her effort to explain, as Mom insisted on moving the conversation to the dining room table, a massive oaken family heirloom supposedly made out of wood salvaged from a civil war Union sailing frigate, at least if you believed Potts family lore.

She was seated in her favourite spot and neither parent allowed any discussion of what was going on until she held a mug of her mother’s hot chocolate.

“I’m not just here because of that. I really wanted to see the both of you,” Pepper said after taking her first sip.

“But…” her father prompted.

“My own… I’m fine. I’m not in any trouble and my finances are fine too, but something’s come up. Daddy, I need you to contact Uncle Morgan for me. I need his professional expertise on this, and I can’t be seen contacting someone who had done forensic accounting work. I can’t take the risk.”

Now her parents really worried and Pepper began to explain, starting from when Jameson had approached Rhodey apparently on a whim, though she left out the press man’s name.

By the time she was done, her cup was empty and her parents were sitting next to her, with her father already starting to take notes.

“In the end, this is why I need Uncle Morgan’s help. We’ve done what we could so far, ‘Follow the money’ as it were, but whoever runs things on the other side is good at this. Far better than I am.”

Given how she had gotten her job, admitting that to herself hadn’t been fun.

“Hence why you need my brother’s help,” Mom added. “Because if you can’t work out how some of this is funded, linked or what have you, good luck finding any other connections.”

“It’s very frustrating, let me tell you.”

Pepper ran her hand over her face and felt a supporting hug from her father.

“Welcome to my world, V.”

She giggled in return.

Mom spoke next. “How long do you have?”

“The rest of the week, Mom. As far as the company is concerned, I’m stressed out and visited you to relax.”

“Good. I’ll call Morgan from my work landline tomorrow. He’ll be happy to help.”

“Thank you, Mom.”

“We’ll always be there for you.”

tbc

Chapter Text

Norman was stranding on the walkway overlooking the genetics lab, separated from the scientists that work for him by a one-way see-through ceiling.

“And that’s it, Mister Osborn. The programme simply can’t proceed without the item.”

He was fighting the irrational urge to yell at the man. But not only was he the best expert in his field that Norman had been able to find and worth every penny of his salary, but also perfectly right in this instance.

There simply was no other option. The project with spider DNA had, while incredibly promising, failed years ago, with the research team long since disbanded. Which meant that there now were two clocks on Project CURE.

Harry’s time was limited and always would be, but on top of that, there was the simple fact that even if the item were to be returned right now, once his people started the extraction process then there were only a limited number of tries and the item itself had an expiration date because of it’s own nature.

The long and short of it was, the container it had been stolen in did it’s best to mimic the conditions the CURE item needed for long-term storage. While the process wasn’t perfect for a number of reasons, it would still last one or two decades if required. But they had to assume that the fool who had stolen it would crack the container open to see what was inside, and then CURE had a very limited shelf-life, and there was a good chance that that time had already passed.

“Is the rest of CURE in place?” Norman asked to get off that particularly infuriating train of thought.

“Yes, Sir. My team has ensured that we can proceed the second the CURE item is brought back to the lab.”

“Good. Have them be on standby at all times. I don’t care how much overtime it takes.”

The man didn’t quite look sympathetically at Norman, but was fully aware of what CURE was trying to do and why.

Norman decided that maybe more direct methods were needed, so he dismissed the researcher with a nod.

This part of the building dealt with the most classified of classified research, so of course cellphone transmissions were blocked, his own included. Norman walked to a door, used his universal override code and stepped outside to make a short call.

Afterwards, he broke a few records getting back to his office, where he was met by his head of security.

“You wanted to see me, Mister Osborn?”

Norman sat down.

“I’m done with waiting, so I hope you’ve made some progress in tracking down the CURE item.”

“Not as such, Sir. Not to make excuses, but… there was no attempt to contact us. No blackmail, no attempt to sell the container back to us, nothing. We’ve been putting out feelers in certain circles, but it’s obvious we’re not the only ones interested in what was in that van. Though it has to be said that as far as we can tell, the criminal underworld isn’t aware of the CURE project. I’m already investigating how much they found out and how. We’ve managed to confirm that people working for Fisk are interested mostly because we are, and I have also heard, though not yet been able to confirm that an as yet unnamed gang from Chinatown has also been asking questions. Though I must again stress that they merely seem to know that an item we want was lost, and not what it actually is.”

Norman was getting ever more angry, and it must have been showing, because the chief hastened to continue.

“I have everyone available working on this, Sir. The strike team is standing by, because we have managed to obtain a sixty percent accurate identification of the thief’s location that we’re still refining, and once we have the go-order, we can deploy within minutes. Identity is too tentative still, so I suggest we keep our other efforts going, if anything to find out how exactly the thief found out about the transport in the first place. But with this many gangs it’s hard to find the actual leak among all the rumours and straight up inventions.”

Norman nodded. His chief was right about that, he decided. With the way how gangland New York worked, someone asking questions about something like this was bound to bring everyone else crawling out the woodwork on principle. Especially with the Feds distracted and running around like headless chickens looking for that damn fool Stark. There couldn’t be a better distractions for normally high-profile black market deals and general criminal activity.

“Continue as you do, but keep my posted. And also, tell your people that I want to be informed the moment someone even hints that they have the CURE item, understood?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Next, make sure that your people know that they can offer any sum for it, but anything over….”

Norman paused and then decided on a sum.

“Anything over 250.000 dollars needs to be run by me first before going through with it.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Not surprising, as it was unofficial OsCorp SOP for when grey market or outright illegal goods were being procured.

“Good. Get back to work then.”

Once alone in the office, Norman decided that it was too early to reach out to his underworld contacts directly. Those were an asset best kept in reserve in case he needed to play them against each other in an even more dire emergency.

He wished that the CURE item hadn’t been somewhat compromised even before it had come into his possession, but he knew that wishes were just that, wishes, and not something that could be depended on.

Wishes had lead to that disaster with Bart Hamilton and required a substantial effort to keep his previous connection to OsCorp secret.

Thankfully Spider-Man hadn’t believed it when Hamilton had claimed active OsCorp support for what he was doing. The arachnid vigilante had then pointed out the logic errors in Hamilton’s insane ramble in detail, earning Norman’s begrudging and very private respect. Especially when absolutely nothing of what Hamilton had said was actually true, as there had never been any official connection.

But Norman was still more than willing to roll over him or anyone else in the city if it meant that CURE was ready by the time Harry returned from college in Europe.

His son, his only child, the only person he cared about was more important than anything.

With a quick and decisive motion, Norman turned towards his computer and fired up a server only he had access to.

As he checked the never-ending list of folders, each something he had investigated one after another and that had failed one after another to be the cure he needed.

When he reached the section with the ones that had been derived from research into spider DNA, he stopped.

Of all these, the project that had looked into recreating the super soldier serum form World War Two using DNA spliced together from various arachnid species had failed because it had proven impossible to successfully splice the resultant enhanced spider DNA with human genetic material. The other death knell had been the massive structure fire taking out the lab less than ten minutes before Harry’s school class was supposed to have come through on a field trip.

At the time the serum angle had already been abandoned, but the team had been looking at other applications for the DNA.

Ideas both good and crazy had been floated, but what Norman was interested in was the proposed medical applications.

He had his secretary clear his schedule and set to work. When he had axed the original programme after the fire, the surviving scientists had been scattered into the four winds. As it turned out, one of them had somehow managed to get a job at Hammer Technologies after quitting OsCorp, not a mean feat given the legendary hate between HT and OsCorp. Though why Justin Hammer Junior needed someone whose field of research had been the possibility of remote detection of specific DNA markers was anyone’s guess.

Some had quit science entirely, some now worked in entirely different fields, those though he filed under maybe. Enticing salary offers would be made.

Yet another group still worked for OsCorp, and of them only a few were mission critical for their current projects. Those that weren’t would be reassigned.

Rebuilding the project to what it had been was going to take years, but if CURE failed for whatever reason, then other options were needed. Failure was not an option, and getting this done was worth every sacrifice and every penny he had.

His desk phone rang.

Norman frowned. One of the reasons why his current secretary had lasted a decade and counting was that she knew when and when not to interrupt. That his phone rang now meant one of a very short number of things, and he doubted that the current occupant of the White House would call him. Equally the Green Goblin was in the one wing of the Raft completed so far and that left only one option.

He picked up.

“Mister Osborn, I know you said not to disturb you, but Doctor Octavius has left the property with the last of his belongings.”

“Has HR called the police?”

“No, Sir. It proved to be unnecessary. Doctor Octavius signed the NDA and non-compete agreement in exchange for six month’s worth of his salary before leaving the premises.”

Norman would never admit this to anyone, but he didn’t wish Otto any ill. But with who he was and how he functioned, he stood in the way of not only CURE but the future of the company in general. Otto was no only OsCorps co-founder but also something of an ivory tower intellectual and would have been unwilling to do what would need to be done. Even if you set aside Harry’s condition for the moment, there were ends for OsCorp that justified almost any means used to achieve them.

Still, in light of their past friendship and because Otto was a brilliant mind, Norman had ensured that his application to ESU was going to be accepted.

“Ensure that his office is clean and have his labspace assigned to someone else.”

Norman hung up and turned back to his computer. If only Otto’s obsession project was relevant to CURE.

On his smartphone, a call came using a number that only a handful of people knew, one of them on the property at this time. Though a glance a the display on the device told him what he needed to know and he picked it up.

“Norman Osborn.”

“Hey Dad. I couldn’t sleep so I decided to call. Hopefully I’m not interrupting anything.”

A rare genuine smile appeared on Norman’s face.

“So what’s Berlin like today?”

tbc

Chapter Text

When the words came, MJ wasn't even all that surprised.

"You're fired, just pack up your things and leave the building quietly."

But if Tomlinson expected MJ to cry and beg for her job back, or become a disgruntled employee, she was going to be disappointed.

"That's okay then, I was going to have dinner with my boyfriend anyway."

She powered down the computer, picked up the few things she still had at the desk and was ready to leave in less than ten minutes.

Tomlinson watched her like a hawk and handed MJ her last pay-cheque with clear and obvious distaste.

"Consider yourself lucky that I'm not deducting the costs of what happened from this. And really, you should tell that boyfriend of yours to stop sending you things at work. I was this close to calling the police on him for harassing my staff."

MJ considered just walking out without another word being said, but Tomlinson's refusal to believe that Peter wasn't involved in what had happened pissed her off big time. The packets had eventually stopped. Over the week and a half, almost a month after the first one had been left for her, enough of a line had been crossed that Peter had put his foot down, and she had agreed. Things had escalated from a few chocolates and flowers over larger presents with creepy declarations of love to daily flowers even even more creepy declarations, and what had made her decide to go with a suggestion Peder had made. It would start with Pete picking her up, even though he had been banned from the building.

Because of this, she knew that Tomlinson would soon throw a fit over all that.

Part of MJ was looking forward to that, and in fact…

She turned around even though she was already halfway through the tiny rented office space.

"You know, I think I realised one thing about working here that I never did until now," she said while staring at Tomlinson.

"And what is that?"

MJ grinned. "What a colossal waste of time this was. You are not only insisting on charging the windmills by refusing to acknowledge what even the Bugle has finally understood, but you also seem to be under the impression that everyone not of your opinion does it to piss of you specifically."

Tomlinson blustered in anger, but MJ, head held high, walked out and was already on her phone by the time she reached the door.

"Pete, it happened."

"Want me to come pick you up?"

"Don't you have biochem class today?" MJ asked and checked her watch."For another hour? How are you even picking up your phone?"

"Classes got cancelled for today because someone pulled a Morris in the chemlab and tried to make blue pills. Cops and DEA are all over the place."

MJ sighed. When starting college, they had made a pact not to skip classes because of Peter's 'other' job unless there really was no other choice. For the most part they had both managed to hold onto that. This though… it would remain part of the lore of their old high school that her Ex had been caught making recreationals after hours, and who had then had the audacity to be surprised when she had very publicly dumped him. After he had promised to call from prison while the Cops had hauled him away.

She briefly stopped, wondering if… Not even he would be delusional enough to think that she'd ditch Peter and come crawling back to him over something like this. Even if she didn't love Peter far too much to even consider leaving him. Quite the opposite in fact.

"Yeah, it'd be nice if you came around."

"I'll be there in ten minutes."

He hung up before she could respond, not that she'd have tried to dissuade him. He knew that Tomlinson hated vigilantes and disliked her for not feeling that way, and he would have insisted anyway because of that.

She smiled in font exasperation. No way would Pete let an opportunity go to give someone like Tomlinson the proverbial middle finger.

So she stood outside and waited, thinking back to what had happened this morning.

^^--^^--^^

The first thing they had heard was a dull thud against the front door, followed by constant hammering. Someone came running inside.

"There's a drunk guy, demanding his daughter!"

With a sigh that should make it obvious that she was done with the world, MJ rose to her feet.

"I'll deal with this."

By the time she reached the front door, she was absolutely furious as it was obvious that after this stunt she would have to look for another job as soon as Tomlinson heard of the incident.

With that in mind, she ripped the door open and was of course met with a familiar image of her father, drunk off his sorry ass, at least without a bottle in one hand, the other held up to the door. Unshaven for at least a week, clothes unchanged for at least that long and smelling so badly of booze that MJ nearly recoiled from that alone.

"What the ever-loving fuck are you doing here?" she almost yelled, far beyond caring what anyone thought.

"Iiiii.. I want to talk to you, MJ… you can't go sleep around with the fucking Parkers. They destroyed our family, MJ, it's all their fault…" he slurred.

In the past, she had hidden her disgust during these drunken rambles. Whenever he had tried to talk her down for being friends with peter, when she had told him to his face that she would stay with Mom in the divorce, when she had dispassionately told the cops of what he'd tried to steal from her in spite of his pleas.

Now though, after almost a month of not seeing him at all, she well and truly let go.

"Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You don't get to complain about who I spend my time with. Day and night. So shut the fuck up, go away and NEVER COME BACK! Peter is who I want to and will grow old with."

She hated him for having made her say it to him and not Pete, but at least it honed her senses and she saw his hand rise to slap her.

But much to his surprise, she blocked it with her own arm, grabbed it and pulled him close. She side-stepped her sperm donor, gave him a punch to the face that would leave him an epic shiner and bent his arm to his back.

Next she forced him onto his knees, one of her own on what passed for a spine in him and ensuring that the pain went past the alcohol-induced haze.

Which clearly worked as he yelped and cried in pain. "Stop," he begged, but MJ kept up the pressure.

"Never talk to Mom again. Never talk to Peter or May Parker. Never talk to me. You know what, better fucking leave New York and never come back. If I ever see you near any one of us again, it won't stay with a black eye. Got me?"

This time she broke through to him. "Y… yes, yes, god yes!"

MJ let go and seconds later she watched him scramble to his feet and run away as fast as he was capable of in his current state, a satisfied smile on her face.

^^--^^--^^

Tomlinson hadn't been entirely wrong when she had blamed MJ for the incident, but still way out of line in the way she had said it. Even more so when she had berated MJ for a 'needless escalation' before self-righteously saying that it was to be expected from someone who supported menaces like Spider-Man. The moment Tomlinson had said that, MJ had known that it was a matter of at best a few hours before she would be where she was now.

And even though she needed a job for both money and because of college, she'd rather deal with that issue than work for Tomlinson any longer. Even if she hadn't been fired, today would have been her last day at this place. With that in mind she waited, just far enough away that no one could claim that she was loitering in front of her former place of employment.

She knew that Tomlinson would be watching, and she had never tried to hide her relationship with Peter. Of course they wouldn't show all of it, as being seen leaving with Spider-Man would just make everyone a target.

So when Peter appeared, it was on foot and wearing his usual combination of jeans and some sort of motif T-Shirt, this time sporting Commander Spock. Knowing that they'd be watched, he had made sure that he wore the Bugle staff lanyard where it was easily visible.

"Hey Red. You good?"

She smiled and kissed him on the cheek as he put his arm around her and they walked off into the proverbial sunset.

"So do you want to talk about it?" Pete asked. MJ shook her head and kissed him.

"No, I'm good. Later maybe."

"So, what do you want to do next?"

"Get some fries from Mick's and then maybe look for a new job?"

Peter smiled.

"You know what?" he said with a grin. "I think I have an idea about that."

Soon his phone was out and he held it up. "Did you know that the Bugle is always looking?"

Before she could respond, Peter was dialing.

"Unless you don't want me to."

She knew what he meant, but did she want him to use his connections for her? Neither of them where the type to do that, but now? And to be entirely fair, this would easily be the fastest way to get a new job and would also mean that she could stop looking. And the Bugle had always been a fairly good place to work.

So she nodded. "Do it."

^^--^^--^^

Jonah had to say, the short order cook really did look like Stan Lee, down to the glasses and the moustache.

And the fries really were to die for.

Only at this point it was still your average Burger joint with a growing Italian bent.

The two young people walking in made him quietly smile.

Jonah had not yet met Mary Jane Watson in person or even seen a picture of her, but the hair, the way she carried herself and how she and Parker were glued to each other's side made her easy to recognise. Earth 616 this wasn't and never would be, not as long as he could do anything about it.

They sat down and ordered their own food, though eventually, Watson turned her attention to Jonah.

"So you're offering me a job?"

Jonah nodded. He didn't know when and under what circumstances Watson had come to work for the Bugle in 1048, but he knew that she was good at it and well worth hiring on that alone.

"I do," he said. "I'm told that you're going for a journalism degree, so that alone makes you a good candidate. Long story short though, we do happen to have an opening that would fit you perfectly."

Which was entirely true, going by the resume that Parker had sent him before coming here.

"Timing is fortuitous though. The long and short of it is, would you like to work with Ted Henderson?"

Watson's eyes doubled in size. "Henderson? 2001 Afghanistan Ted Henderson? He who dragged Ben Urich out of Latveria during the coup back in 2010? That one?"

"Yes. Ben Urich is looking into the Friends of Humanity for me right now, so knowing him and Ted, there's a good chance that you get to work with him as well. Henderson isn't the type to sit back and let Urich have all the fun."

"And you're not worried about that?"

"I absolutely am. But compared to what else is out there, the FOH are a joke. If we can get rid of them at least in the city and State of New York, we'll be the better for it.

For the next few minutes they ate more or less silently.

Eventually it seemed to be too much for her. "Okay, I'm in."

Jonah was nothing short of excited, though he didn't show it. In every continuity she existed in, Mary Jane Watson was a boon to who she worked for. He'd always intended to recruit her at some point, at the latest when she graduated, but getting her working for the Bugle ahead of time was well worth it. And Henderson was someone who would teach these two kids what they needed to know.

"So what happened to get you fired? Was Mrs Tomlinson her usual charming self?"

He smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry, this won't impact your job prospects. Your former employer is… someone special."

Jonah was surprised when Watson relayed what had taken place, with Parker providing emotional support and adding things when required.

As far as I'm concerned, you took care of him just right," he said when she was done. With a tap of his fingers on the table, Jonah quietly decided to not bother with Tomlinson and to put Watson's father on the blacklist for all the Bugle's offices nation-wide. Someone like him was best kept at arm's length.

Watson hadn't gone into too much detail, but Greg Watson was an asshole of the worst kind.

He figured that in all likelyhood the elder Watson would perhaps turn up again in spite of the beat-down his daughter had handed out to him, but he wasn't exactly the smarted cookie in the jar. He would also very quietly ensure that Watson was save from that low-key stalker.

"So… Pete tells me you know things."

And there was the question he'd been waiting for. "I do, though it's very scattered knowledge."

A lot of that he was going to take to his grave if he could help it, such as anything OMD and post-OMD related as far as her relationship with Parker on that Earth. Looking at the two of them here…. no. They had no need to know.

"Give me an example. How did Spider-Man get his powers?"

A good question as well, as Parker hadn't told Jonah all the details yet.

"By getting bitten by a spider, funnily enough. That thing was either genetically manipulated or straight up radioactive, depending on who you ask. Except for OsCorp of course. They still deny any incident, because that's what Norman Osborn is like. And before you ask, I don't know in how far they are aware of what happened. I mean given that Spidey has been active for years now without having to burn down OsCorp in the process… I don't think they know who he is."

He turned back to his more public persona. "That being said, my people will have a contract ready for you to read through by close of business tomorrow."

What had taken place over the last half hour was hardly a normal job interview but then, it was never going to be. He knew both sides of Parker, and none of the many Watsons of the Multiverse that he knew of wasn't worthy of him or the type that any iteration of himself wouldn't want to work for the Bugle.

Then, there was one Earth where Gwen Stacey was the Green Goblin, so who knew.


"Be that as it may Miss Watson, I really think that you will be a great addition to the Bugle."

From the way she smiled at that, Jonah knew he was right.

^^--^^--^^

He watched as MJ and that little shit Parker left the restaurant, hand in hand and giggling. Giggling! Whatever he was doing to force her into that, it was clear that what Morris had been doing so far wasn't working. He would need to get rid of Parker, not just because of this, but because his getting caught and MJ being made to break up with him was his fault. Morris wouldn't reveal his powers to her, not yet, but he would get his revenge. In time, but he would get it.


tbc

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

November 2014

James had never seen Tony Stark so furious. For the first time in all the years he’d known him, Tony was so angry, he’d transcended into the Zen of Rage that had been a theoretical, fictional concept to him, until today.

The convoy of heavily armed HUMVEEs and trucks came to a stop a few hundred yards from the perimeter of the firebase and Tony made to get out.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Tones?” James asked, even though he knew how his friend would answer.

“Rhodey, I promised myself that I’d walk back into that firebase on my own two feet, and I damn well am going to do it.”

And with that, Tony jumped out and began to walk to the base, completely ignoring the various small wounds over most of his body and whatever else the medic hadn’t been able to diagnose in the field.

But given the conversation they’d had… it was why he was so furious, but also why Rhodey was the one driving the HUMVEE without anyone else on board. Needless to say, at first Tony had refused to believe him, but when James had begun to explain in detail what he and Pepper had discovered in the months since Jameson had tipped them off, that had changed. The initial anonymous tip that had prompted Jameson to reach out when the opportunity had presented itself, the emergency meeting at the Watergate, Jameson’s personal and written promise not to publish without consent, the subsequent investigation up to and including what had led to where they were now.

^^--^^--^^

“You sure that we can trust Jameson?”

James looked in the rear-view mirror and saw his friend staring out of the small window slit.

“I am, actually. He sure as hell came across as genuine, and I watched as he signed the NDA.”

Tony didn’t reply right away and James almost jumped out of his seat and drove off the road when Tony punched the side door panel with all his might.

“God-fucking-damnit!”

“You good, Tony?”

With a weary and sarcastic snort, Tony shook his head. “No, not at all, Rhodey.”

He went silent again and then stared at James via the mirror.

“James, I need you to do something for me.”

Tony almost never used given names with anyone once he had chosen a nickname, so this was deadly serious. James frowned.

“Yes, Tony?”

“In that cave… I created… a weapon. Something to help me escape. I can’t risk the Ten Rings getting it.”

“So what do you need me to do?”

“Send someone out there to collect the pieces, Rhodey. I can give you a rough direction from where you picked me up, and you can’t really miss the crater from the air.”

“I’ll go myself.”

He followed the lead HUMVEE onto the side road that would eventually lead to the Fire Base.

“After I’ve convinced myself that the thing in your chest won’t kill you the moment I leave the room,” James muttered.

Tony laughed. “Now that’s entirely fair.”

James suspected the only reason he knew about the magnet and the mini- reactor was because he had nearly caved in the casing when hugging Tony. With everything, he wouldn’t and couldn’t blame Tony for being so reluctant.

Whistling up some troops and heavy helicopters under the guise of recovering proprietary and dangerous technology wouldn’t be particularly hard.

“And Rhodey… once I’m back stateside, we’re going to war.”

Stane was doomed.

^^--^^--^^

They didn’t get a chance to really talk after that, at least not about Stane. Nor did it help that the next eighteen hours until Tony declared himself ready to return stateside were busy with recovering the thing he had built in that cave. Tony had also declined a side-trip to the Military hospital in Germany and insisted on the directest route back to California, as soon as all of the pieces of his creation were recovered.

So while James picked up the pieces of that thing, Tony was busy dodging the doctors.

He was his usual gregarious self, with the exception that he refused any offers for the occasional semi-legal beer or PX-sourced burbon, citing medical reasons for that.

The moment they had stepped aboard the C-17 that would take them stateside, Tony had dropped the mask and turned back into the utterly furious but coldly calculating machine he’d been in that HUMVEE. Knowing what he was like, James didn’t interrupt his friend as he was furiously working away on a hastily sourced graphics tablet, nor was he surprised when Tony, ever jealous of James’s ability to sleep aboard the most uncomfortable of military aircraft, woke him up maybe half an hour before the plane made a fuel stop at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

“I need to show you something, Rhodey,” he said, just loud enough to be heard aboard the noisy aircraft. Tony turned the tablet around and James could see… Tony had labelled the utilitarian design as the ‘Mk.II’, but James had an engineering degree from MIT, so he recognised it as preliminary design drawings for a high-tech version of the weapon that was resting in the crates that flew with them on the plane.

Tony grinned. “This is the refined version of the weapon… the armor that saved me. The legacy of Ho Yinsen, and it will help me make sure that no weapon I designed ever falls into the wrong hands again.”

After he was handed the tablet, James studied the projected specs. The offensive and defensive systems were impressive. Propulsion was to be based on an adaptation of the technology that propelled the Jericho missile, and Tony certainly wasn’t thinking small there. Though something bugged his inner Air Force man.

“Tony, if you want to fly this thing at any reasonable altitude… are you including a de-icing system?”

From the way Tony looked like a deer in the headlight of an onrushing semi, he hadn’t. James had the tablet ripped out of his hands and couldn’t help laughing. Tony gonna Tony.

“If there’s anything else I can help you with…” he added in-between chuckles.

Tony looked up. “Thank you, Rhodey. I’ll need you. You and Pepper.”

By the time the plane had re-fuelled at Hickam and taken off again, Tony had stopped working and was staring at the crate with his armor and past it at the loading ramp. “I really can’t do this alone,” he said.

“You won’t have to, Tones.”

His friend smiled, and then James could watch as he prepared himself for what he had to do.

^^--^^--^^

The C-17 touched down at the airfield a few miles from Malibu and taxied to the hangars before coming to a stop.

Tony studiously ignored the offered wheelchair and Rhodey’s grin as the ramp lowered. Standing there, in front of his Rolls and waiting for him were the only two people other than Rhodey he really trusted and cared about.

“Watch it, coming up here.”

Even without the tiny, tiny hint of mirth in Rhodey’s voice, Tony’s reaction to the two medics and the stretcher wouldn’t have changed.

“Are you kidding me with this? Get rid of them.”

He still nodded at the two medics with appreciation, removed the bandage wrapped around his left hand and approached the others, fighting to keep from running.

Pepper watched and he could see… something. When he was close enough, Pepper straightened herself.

Tony knew her well. Normally she had no issues keeping a tight control of what she displayed to the rest of the world, but now, in spite of looking the consummate professional PA to anyone but him…

“Your eyes are red. A few tears for your long-lost boss?”

“Tears of joy. I hate job hunting.”

Glad that in spite of what had happened, their dynamic hadn’t changed, Tony gave the self-assured grin that was expected of him in situations like this.

“Yeah. Vacation’s over.”

He made a few steps to the car before stopping.

“But it’s good to see you. All of you.”

With a reassuring pat on Happy’s shoulder as his faithful friend and bodyguard held the car door open, Tony re-entered the real world.

Rhodey would join them at the mansion later this afternoon after dealing with the crate and Air Force bureaucracy, so for now, it was only Tony, Pepper and Happy in the car.

“It’s good to see you, Boss,” Happy said as he steered the car towards the perimeter of the airfield.

“And I swept the car before we left the mansion.”

Relief flooded Tony.

“Good Job, Happy.”

“So what do you want us to do?” Pepper asked.

“First stop, Harvey’s. I need a good, American cheeseburger. After that,” Tony grinned, and for a moment he was tempted to cater to his playboy reputation, but didn’t, not after Pepper, Happy and Rhodey had gone above and beyond.

“After that,” he therefore continued, “is the mansion. Rhodey gave me the run down of what happened, so the least I can do is to ensure that the three of you can access Jarvis remotely in the future. And once the mansion is clean, we’ve got work to do.”

With an uncharacteristically hesitant nod, Pepper glanced at him and then handed him a file folder.

“Rhodey doesn’t know this, he was already back in Afghanistan when we found this, but…. The rot has been in for far longer than we expected. You know that I reached out to my uncle through my parents?”

Tony nodded. “I do.”

“Well, Uncle Morgan found something really interesting in Stane’s paper records from way, way, way back. Long story short, he’s been skimming off the top since the 1970s. To what extent, we’re still looking into, but we know for sure in the case of SIPF-671504 HS, also known as Project BRIGHT HAWK.”

It took Tony almost a minute to regain control of his senses.

“Wait, the Arc reactor? The same ARC reactor that my dearly beloved godfather has been talking me out of looking at again since the 90s? Which he only supports existing as it is because it’d quadruple our utility expenses, at least according to him?”

“Yeah. On average twenty-thousand dollars a month over the entire development period between 1971 and ‘78. A grand total of almost six point two million dollars in 2014 money.”

Tony reached for the armrest and gripped it tightly enough to damage the expensive fabric. He quietly counted to ten in his head before forcing himself to think rationally.

“Well, that would help explain why the budget for that thing exploded so much, or why my father never seriously looked at energy tech again,” he quipped, “at least not until just before he died.”

Though arguably, Howard Stark had never been not stubborn, so Stane likely had been actively poisoning that particular well for decades, and torpedoing almost all attempts to diversify what the company did. Tony was only too ware that he himself had blithely followed along and always taken Stane’s complaints about the tech at face value. The first cracks in that facade had appeared in that cave in Afghanistan when he had been hooked up to a crappy Chinese car battery and desperately tried to come up with an alternative solution between water-boarding sessions. Miniaturising the Arc reactor had never been more than entirely theoretical musings for his father by the time his parents had died, the few notes on the subject citing a huge list of insurmountable engineering challenges. Tony had been desperate enough to try it anyway and found it challenging but by no means impossible, even under the circumstances. Looking at it now, Tony could not help but wonder if here too, Stane had been manipulating things. Though why?

By the end of the 1990s, the market for green energy tech had been so obvious that it had broken through Howard’s inertia on the matter. It was why a wholly owned subsidiary of Stark Industries was the third-largest manufacturer of solar panel technology in the United States among other forays into the field.

Papper stated the conclusion before he could. “It’s likely that Stane feared that Arc tech being considered seriously would lead to discovery.”

“You are right as always, Miss Potts. On top of that, if he’s the leak, selling guns on the black market is easier than room-sized energy reactors.”

“Well, I think we will have to do some digging, won’t we?”

“The press conference is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, we’re citing a need for rest and recovery. I suspect that Stane will call you the moment you get to the mansion and then expect your normal… habits between now and when we meet the media.”

Both Pepper and Happy oozed worry, knowing how he had dealt with emotional upsets like this in the past. And with good reason. The last time something of this magnitude had happened, it had been the death of his parents. That particular bender had lasted almost two weeks, a jet to Vegas and enough alcohol to fill his swimming pool twice over.

The car raced towards his cheeseburger and Tony shook away the recent memories thinking of his pool dredged up.

“Happy.”

“Yes, Boss?”

“The second we get to the mansion, empty out the booze and anything else alcoholic.”

“Will do.”

“Pepper, sell my wine and booze collection. All of it. I don’t care if it’s for cents on the dollar, I want it gone the end of the week.”

She smiled happily for a brief moment and hastily made a note on her phone, but after that she looked at him questioningly.

“Three months of cold turkey. That’s not an opportunity I’m going to throw away.”

And it was true. He had never seriously tried to get onto the wagon, and that had always been in Stane’s interest. With him in a near constant succession of alcohol-induced inventing binges, Stane could damn near run the company as he pleased. This would stop now.

The car pulled up to Harvey’s and Pepper smiled in that way that was so uniquely her and that he wanted to see all the time.

“Will that be all, Mister Stark?”

“That will be all, Miss Potts.”

tbc

Chapter Text

The workspace beneath the mansion was reverberating with the riffs and beats of ‘Who made Who’ and Tony was quietly humming along while he completely overhauled most of Jarvis’s anti-intrusion security measures. When he had extended the access restrictions held by Pepper and the others to match his own, he had looked at the security relevant parts of the AI#s code for the first time in a good year or two and been horrified by how outdated he had let his digital sort-of child become.

Even the security systems of the house itself needed an overhaul, especially in the light of the bugs Jarvis and Happy had found during their inch-by-inch sweep.

“Sir, an Agent Coulson claiming to represent SHIELD is on line One. He wishes to make an appointment to debrief you on your knowledge of the Ten Rings.”

Tony eased his furious typing and considered what Jarvis had said. On one hand, SHIELD was a product of his father’s ambitions, on the other it was a legitimate and reasonable, of somewhat redundant request.

“Tell him that while I understand their need for information and the need to act fast, I have to push this back until after the press conference. After that, I am more than willing to answer their questions.”

“Of course, Sir.”

There was no way he would tell them about the Mk.I suit or the replacement he was already working on, but beyond that… The Ten Rings were a clear and present danger even without their SI-sourced weapons, assuming that Raza had been telling the truth. And with all he knew now, maybe SHIELD sniffing around on top of the Bugle and his own efforts once Jarvis was made more secure would light a fire under Obadiah’s ass and push him into doing something stupid. Even more stupid than that whole Afghan adventure, and Tony knew he needed to be ready for that.

Less than a minute later, Jarvis spoke again.

“You know have an appointment with Agent Coulson at 16:00 Western Standard Time after the press conference, Sir. Here at the mansion.”

“Thank you, Jarvis.”

“For you Sir, always.” A brief pause followed. “Miss Potts is asking if she should put in an offer for the rest of the Baxter Building property in New York, and if so, how high.”

“Next best offer and five percent of that on the top for starters. Tell her to negotiate as she sees fit and just to run it by me before she signs anything.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Jarvis did as instructed and Pepper would know that the last part was only for legal reasons. He trusted her to run the company if things went bad enough. Speaking of…

“Jarvis, make a note for Pepper, Rhodey and Happy to bring in their devices so I can upgrade their Jarvis credentials on all of them. And…”

He briefly wondered if it was too early to go down that route, but then he lightly touched the casing of the Arc reactor in his chest that was keeping him alive.

“Add a new access protocol for the mansion. Restricted… no, make it No Access At All unless I give permission. Only exceptions are me, Pepper, Rhodey and Happy, and only if they are alone or in the presence of one or both of the others on top of any guests. Everyone requesting entrance is to be scanned for weapons or signs of distress. Call it… Lair Protocol.”

“Of course. Will there be anything else?”

“Hold on…”

Tony checked and rechecked some of his code several times and decided that some of it could and should be applied right away.

“Lock down the mansion right now. I’ve got some new anti-intrusion countermeasures for you. Have to shut you down to apply them though,” he said apologetically.

Jarvis responded without hesitation. “The mansion is locked down, Sir.”

Tony grinned at the closest of the pickups Jarvis used.

“See you in half an hour, buddy.”

In the end it took him exactly twenty-two and a half minutes to apply the upgrades.

So of course the phone rang the moment Jarvis was back up and Tony had resumed debugging the rest of the immediately critical upgrade code.

“Sir, Mister Stane is calling on your personal cell.”

The poorly hidden disdain in the AI’s voice almost made Tony laugh in spite of the conversation he was about to have. He hadn’t programmed Jarvis with the ability to dislike someone and let that be known in this way, but he loved what his adaptive maturation and learning algorithms had accomplished. Jarvis had learned to be that way all on his own.

“Jarvis, please append the recording of this call with the note that I merely pretended to be drunk and also attach a constant reading of my blood alcohol level, along with my general health stats.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“Connect us.”

Sadly, acting as if he were drunk wasn’t something that was hard for him to do.

“Hey there Tony. I couldn’t find you anywhere and was starting to worry.”

Meaning he’d had someone check Tony’s normal watering holes and hangout spots, not found him and then decided to just call. To make sure that Tony wasn’t stepping out of line any more than he already had by coming back alive, assuming that Stane really was more connected than just selling guns. Instead of telling Stane were to shove his false concern, Tony ensured that his speech was slurred just enough that Obadiah believed he was well into an epic bender.

“Heeey there, Obie. What can I do for ya?”

“I just wanted to make sure that you’re prepped for the press conference and the board meeting next week. People have been asking questions… they worry about you.”

“I’ll… I’ll be fine, Obie. Doooon’t worry, you’ll see me at the press conference. Right now my lab is calling for me.”

“That’s good to know. Just… take care of yourself, will you?”

“Always, Obie. Always.”

“See you at the PC or at the board meeting then.”

The call disconnected and Tony felt dirty. Had he always allowed Obie to be this overtly dismissive of himself as a person?

But he knew that acting this way was part of the game, and in this game you either won or got voted out of your own company by the Board of Directors.

Which was why Tony had made Jarvis add these things to the recording, proof that Tony was acting drunk while being perfectly sober.

That Obadiah had been content with a conversation that short was yet another indicator for what he meant, or didn’t, to the man. If he hadn’t known how far back all of this went and that likely none of the affection Stane had ever shown him was real, Tony would have wept.

But instead he redoubled his efforts to make Jarvis secure from any inside and outside attack. He was absolutely furious and working away without pause to work off that same anger, to the point that he completely missed Pepper’s return and how she walked into the lab while laughing as if it was going to be banned tomorrow.

As usual, he couldn’t help but be infected by her mirth, as rare as that was so obvious. From the way she looked, it was also obvious that she was genuinely amused.

“I take it your meeting went well?” he asked.

“The one you sent me on? Oh yeah, absolutely, Tony. Couldn’t have gone any better if I’d tried. Stane is even more screwed now…”

“So…” he said with a ‘go on’ gesture.

It had been Rhodey’s idea to sound out the local law enforcement community ahead of time, before they moved against Stane, to make sure that any evidence recovered actually stuck. Given the nature of everything and because it very much included inter-state as well as international crime, that meant the FBI.

“Well, Mister Stark, I did as we said and had a meeting with the local Special Agent-in-charge. Turns out, the Los Angeles Field Office had a change in leadership and they hadn’t changed the website yet. I didn’t find that out until I checked again when I walked through the front door of the Federal Building. Let’s just say we can trust him all the way with this.”

“Not that I would ever doubt you, but…”

Pepper chuckled and shook her head.

“The Los Angeles SAC is and old trainee of my father’s, one of the few people other than you and our strange little family group who remembers to call me Pepper.”

She paused and pulled out her phone. Displayed was a picture of an FBI agent off their website, almost as handsome as the person Tony saw in the mirror on occasion.

“Special Agent Neal Caffrey. Alleged former con-man extraordinaire that my father sponsored to Quantico, and who promptly validated that trust by several high-profile takedowns and a meteoric rise through the ranks. In spite of his past, he’s a solid and clean cop, even if he’s as slick as frozen oil on a New York Christmas. Utterly despises people like what Obadiah apparently was under our noses. Kinda reminds me of you, actually.”

“And you trust him?”

He knew she did, but needed to hear it for himself.

“I do. You have an appointment with him the moment Obadiah flies to Singapore on Saturday.”

“Your connections with the Federal Law Enforcement community are amazing.”

She grinned and shrugged. “Was absolute hell on my social life as a teenager, but it has become useful sometimes.”

“Well I never… Miss Potts, how very much unlike you.”

“There’s a lot about me I haven’t told you yet.”

Somehow Tony couldn’t wait to find out.

^^--^^--^^

“So, is there anyone I need to look at especially closely?”

Pepper glanced at the PR assistant at the other side of the room, who nodded and pointed at Pepper’s tablet.

“The correspondents of the Washington Post, the LA Sentinel and the Miami Herald have asked for private interviews,” Pepper said and listed their names as well as the times when they would turn up at Tony’s office. “Then there’s Ted Henderson of the Bugle Group. He doesn’t have a one-on-one scheduled, because they didn’t request one, but he was their point-man in Afghanistan when everything went down. I also know for a fact that he has orders not to ask anything about that unless we make it obvious that we want them to.”

It was something that Tony appreciated and another tick in the positive column for The Bugle. He had also expected Ben Urich for something like this, but it was possible that Jameson had figured that someone less well known was more likely to be overlooked by Obadiah. After all, his godfather was known to hate Jameson and the Bugle ever since the Press magnate had dared to say no to a buyout offer.

“Put him on the list anyway, Miss Potts.”

Potential allies like that needed to be cultivated.

“I thought you might say that and kept a slot open.”

She nodded at the PR assistant who promptly scurried out of the room. Once they were alone, Pepper reached into a cupboard and retrieved one of the large-volume white coffee mugs with Stark Industries emblazoned on it.

“Hold this for me, please,” she said and reached back into the same cupboard. Out came a felt-tip pen, of which she removed the cap and then handed it to Tony.

Full signature on the side of the mug, please.”

After doing as instructed, Tony handed everything back to Pepper.

“Uhhh…”

She grinned. “Jameson apparently collects novelty and motif mugs. He made a remark about that when I was in New York. I’m having this sealed by the Aerospace division so that the signature outlasts the mug in the dishwasher and you…”

Pepper turned and tapped him on the shoulder. “You will present it to Henderson as a first, small thank you gift from the company. Now knock them dead.”

Tony briefly closed his eyes and violently pushed down the desire for liquid courage before putting on the mask that the public and more importantly Obadiah expected of him and stepped through the door.

He did what was expected of him. He allowed his picture to be taken, he allowed Obadiah to hold up his arm in a false gesture of victory and eventually managed to silence the room by stepping up to the array of microphones.

“Y’all know his was supposed to happen three months ago when I came back. Terrorists… no sense for other people’s schedules, am I right?”

Most of the people in the room laughed. Ted Henderson didn’t, Tony noted approvingly.

“So there I was, testing some of my inventions…”

tbc

Chapter Text

Jonah watched the CBS coverage of Tony Stark’s press conference for the second time today. The first time had been live in spite of the time difference, now, with a full eight hours of sleep and a full mug of Jamaica Blue Mountain under his belt, it was a recording.

And undeniable proof that either his own influence or this being a different universe had made the Press Conference be completely different.

For starters, it was a lot later relative to Stark’s return than it had been in the MCU, but most importantly, Tony Stark seemed entirely unchanged from what he had been like before Afghanistan. The same sort of flippant humour, the same disrespect towards anyone but Stane, Rhodes and Potts, and sure as hell no pulling out of being an Army manufacturer.

Jonah didn’t know Stark anywhere near well enough to say if that was an act, but Stane’s hovering presence at the back of the stage indicated that. Henderson hadn’t said anything about that, but Jonah expected that to change once the unexpected interview had happened. If there was anyone from outside the core three who could detect if it was an act, it was either Ben Urich or Ted Henderson, and the former wasn’t scheduled to return from Europe for a few more days, and if he did, he’d still take over the E-Bugle as had been planned even before The Merger.

He made a note to increase the Bugle’s presence on the West Coast at least temporarily, because Ted flying back and forth every other week would incur the wrath of Mrs. Henderson, something that Jonah did not want to be at the receiving end of. Once was enough of that for a lifetime.

Coming to the end of the recording, Jonah decided that it was an act. He knew that Stark would have been told about what they had found before he even left Afghanistan, so clearly there was an incredibly talented actor in there somewhere. Jonah laughed and briefly considered looking up if the Air America movie had been made in this universe.

He was glad that he was alone in his home and didn’t have to explain what was so funny. But as there wasn’t anything he could do until either Henderson’s interview was in or until and unless Potts contacted him, he decided to look up more local news.

With Fisk still in quote-unquote hiding somewhere in the Caribbean somewhere, Frank Castle having been arrested again, the classic members of the Sinister Six either being in the can for the moment or not existing yet… Parker had described it as eerily quiet during their occasional talks, and they’d come to the joint conclusion that something big was brewing.

Parker was half-convinced that it had something to do with how OsCorp was coming through the black market in the city looking for something, but so far there was no indication that Parker’d heard for what they were actually looking for. Going by the increasing Comic Book Insanity, it could be anything from Asgardian tissue samples used to re-create the Super Soldier Serum ™ to a seventh Infinity Stone.

City-wide crime was down across the board. Even Martin Li’s gang kept to Chinatown as far as Jonah was able to tell. Not that he’d been able to confirm that Li was leading the gang in the first place. Hell, the only reason he knew the gang existed was because Frank Castle had accidentally done something almost useful.

If it weren’t fir what had happened on 1048 in 2018, he would have been tempted to let it go. Martin Li’s public persona was a genuine philanthrope and very likeable as Jonah knew from first hand experience.W

Which was why he hadn’t told Parker this and wouldn’t until he could prove it. Parker liked Li, and May Parker was volunteering a lot of her free time to FEAST.

Though without more intel… His people were always on the lookout, but finding out more about the Demons was too dangerous, at least according to what little he had been able to find out thus far. There was one last option. Tell Parker now and hope that he weight of his other knowledge was enough to convince him. Not an option that he was looking forward to using, but Jonah was enough of a realist to see that it was increasingly looking like the only one he had.

But he also knew that the kid would probably go haring off after Li the moment he knew and believed.

Jonah shook his head. Enough angsty self-reflection. He very deliberately pushed that away and decided to go to the office. Technically it was the closest thing he ever had to a day off, but he needed to be with other people right now or go crazy.

At least both Parker and Watson had passed out of their teenage years, complete with both getting a card and a present appropriate for their respective twentieth birthdays.

One less source of guilt there.

^^--^^--^^

Upon getting to his office, none of the staff on duty questioned why he was there, all knowing or seeming to know what he was like.

One of the other habits of pre-merger Jonah that he had retained was keeping the Bugle as apprised of the state of the city as possible. And here too it was suspiciously quiet.

But if he had expected the other shoe to drop, then that being in the form of a repair tech hadn’t been it.

A computer tech being in the building wasn’t surprising or special. With several hundred computers of all stripes, there were always a few that were being repaired. But said tech looking exactly like a younger, curly-haired Una Chin-Riley straight out of Strange New Worlds was special.

And it made him wonder what the staff of a certain school for gifted children was like.

Attack of the double fanboys over, he wondered why Magneto had taken an interest in the Bugle. Right now, mutants were barely even a blip on anyone’s radar, to the point that no one had any idea who Magneto was and that Jonah had had to go all the way up to Albany and the New York State Department of Education to find any reference to Xavier’s school.

If Mystique was here to check out the Bugle’s pro metahuman/mutant credentials, then she was welcome to it.

Assuming that really was Mystique to start with, of course.

But just in case, he started a set of ‘what to do if Magneto turns up in your office’ notes. Not that he was nuts enough to talk any other way but ever so politely to the man. For all that rumour had it he was currently moving around Eastern Europe.

By the time Jonah was done and decided to step out for an early lunch, ‘maybe Mystique’ was gone. He’d have loved to answer her questions as far as he was able and asked quite a few of his own, but shrugged. For now, the X-Men and their rogue’s gallery were a low-priority issue.

Not so much the X-Men themselves, but Magneto or Mystique being seen in his office, even if only a tiny fraction of the population would recognise them, would be counter-productive to his efforts.

After returning from lunch about an hour later, he didn’t spot anyone but really, this being a flavour of Marvel there were likely half a dozen each of current and future vigilantes and villains in the building, not counting Parker.

“Uh… Boss, you said to warn you ahead of time when someone wanted you at, quote, ‘some hoity-toity charity shindig’?”

With a deep and weary sigh, Jonah departed fanboy land and returned to what passed for the real world.

“I wish I hadn’t, but go on, Elizabeth.”

His secretary handed him a sheet of paper.

“The Mayor’s annual charity fundraiser?”

Jonah sighed again. This was not only a black tie event, which he wasn’t a fan of to start with, but also an event that was a tradition going back to the 1950s. If he was invited, there was no way to weasel out of it without burning bridges he couldn’t afford to loose. But there was one issue…

“Elizabeth, this isn’t until the end of the month.”

“I know, but after what happened the last time, I felt it was right to tell you now.”

Back in 2013, Parker had been randomly drawn to take pictures of the event, so of course the Vulture had attacked the event, Parker had disappeared and Spidey had turned up.

The Bugle’s next headline had not been nice and Old!Jonah had given a standing order to prepare for similar events in 2014.

Long story short, Jonah had publicly announced that unless measures were taken to ensure that the Arachnid Menace ™ couldn’t interrupt with his dramatics, neither Jonah nor the Bugle would acknowledge that the event existed.

In light of more recent events, it appeared that the Mayor’s office had sent an invitation anyway, and Jonah had completely forgotten this so-called policy.

So with a sigh aimed at his own past idiocy, he slammed his fist on the table and looked up at his secretary. “Accept the invitation and forget that this so-called policy ever existed.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Even more, I’ll tell the Mayor myself that this stupid policy is gone. Tell his office that I’ll call them some time tomorrow.”

Once Elizabeth was gone to see to her work, Jonah stared at the door she had just gone through. Why had this whole thing with the Mayor come so out of left field? Why was he feeling so shit about it?

An alert beeped on his computer, an alleged, unconfirmed sighting of Bruce Banner in Ha-Long City, Vietnam.

Was that it? Was he still not doing enough? Was telling New York and the East Coast the truth about mutants, metahumans and the enhanced still not enough?

He decided that ‘enough’ didn’t matter. ‘Even more’ on the other hand very much did.

The first embers of an idea crystalised in his mind and even as he slowly began to do the work that always accumulated on his desk, more and more of that idea congealed and by the time his employees started to leave for home, he decided that he had enough to start writing things down.

He saved what he had been working on and turned in his chair to access the minifridge he’d had added since The Merger. From it he retrieved a bottle of water, opened it and reached for pen and paper.

Letters began to emerge.

Plan ‘New York Shelter City and the Reed Foundation’.

He wrote for hours.

Tbc

Chapter Text

He watched them, and he was furious. After all that he had done for her, she was still swapping spit with the very guy who had broken them apart in High School.

But… Morris knew that he should prepare, that he shouldn’t be back in New York in the first place, that he should step back and leave MJ alone. After the complete lack of success with his gift campaign before that… incident with OsCorp, New York was the last place he should be. But what he had seen here…

His encounter with OsCorp was something he would never forget. It had taken him weeks to recover from the weapons their thugs had used on him, and it had cost him most of his remaining money and just about every marker he’d had. And he’d had to spend that time in New Jersey.

Morris had still considered leaving New York behind for the West Coast, but he couldn’t. At least not without MJ, and not without money. The CURE container was still in his poosession, and it was still his plan to sell it for money. Now though he wouldn’t sell to whoever, but instead he’d take it directly to OsCorp, exchanging the container for them leaving him alone. That was actually why he was in Manhattan.

He’d come here to approach OsCorp, give them a first offer. But four blocks away from the main public entrance, he had encountered MJ. She had been standing in front of a coffee shop, furiously typing something into her phone while talking to an older man who was doing the same. Normally he would have smiled to himself and noted MJ’s presence for later, but then Parker had appeared out of the shop, carrying three to-go cups of something hot. He had handed one ton the older guy, one to MJ and then kissed her on the cheek. The older man had grinned and the three of them walked off down the street.

At first, Morris could only stand and stare after them. For years, ever since Parker had snitched on him a few weeks after that OsCorp field trip and ensured that he had been expelled, arrested and sent to juvie for a year, Morris had believed that MJ breaking up with him that way had only been for show.

It was what had let him hold onto his sanity in juvie, when he had fled from the group home he’d been put into and when he had fallen off that bridge, been electrocuted and then woken up with powers.

Granted, that last part had been Spider-Man’s doing, not Parker’s, and his powers were awesome. That smarass nerd Parker on the other hand had turned his girlfriend against him, far more totally and completely than Morris had feared. He would pay for that, eventually. MJ and her betrayal needed dealing with first.

So he abandoned his plan to approach OsCorp for the day and tried to follow. But he lost them after Parker seemed to have randomly decided that they needed to take the subway all of a sudden.

But he knew where MJ’s apartment was thanks to her father, not that the drunken idiot had known who he’d been working for, or why.

Getting there quickly without walking was easy thanks to his powers, so twenty minutes later he was set in a dark corner and waited. For three hours. When she finally appeared, her looks and the way she smiled reminded him of why he loved her.

He stepped out of his hiding spot and put up his best smile.

“Hey, MJ.”

He hadn’t expected her to throw herself at him, but a bone-tired, exasperated “What the fuck are you doing here?” wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“MJ, I… I love you, and I… I’ve been loving you ever since high school. I’ve missed you all this time and I want us to try again.”

To underscore that, he reached into his pocket and retrieved the last gift, the one he’d never gotten around to giving her the last time.

It was a bracelet that he had gotten for her the day before Parker had snitched and the only reason why he still had it was because the cops had never found all his stashes.

She looked between him and it for almost a minute, and then proceeded to break his heart one final time.

She looked at him with a face that almost looked like pity and shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Morris. I’m with Peter, and always will be.”

He’d known, he’d seen that she was smooching with Parker of all people, but this…

This was a special form of personal betrayal.

“Why Parker?`Why him? What does he have that I don’t?”

MJ smiled. She smiled in a way she never had for, about or around him and now, when she was clearly thinking about fucking Parker, it was as if she was stabbing him in the heart.

“What makes him so special?”

She smiled with even more energy and almost glowing green eyes.

MJ spoke only one word.

“Everything.”

Morris stared at her for long enough that she snapped out of it first.

“So… I’m sorry, Morris. But it is what it is, and I’m not going to change my mind.”

Something snapped in his head at that moment. MJ had half-turned to step into her apartment, so he reached out and grabbed her shoulder to keep from walking away.

“MJ, you fucking owe me an explanation if you’re spreading your legs for the asshole that broke us up.”

He was so surprised by her next move that in spite of his powers, he didn’t react until he found his face slammed into the wall and his nose bleeding.

“Listen up you tiny-brained wanna-be UNA Bomber. I broke up with you. I told Pete to call the cops on you when he came to me for advice. And I decide who I spend my nights with, not you.”

She let go.

“So get the fuck out of here and crawl back into whatever hole you came out of before I call the cops!”

It was then that Morris remembered he had powers and he quickly removed himself from MJ’s grip.

“You whore!” he yelled and turned both his arms into water-based sledgehammers. She dodged the first one, but caught the fringe of the other, falling down unconcious.

Morris was furious with her, but still checked if she was alive. She was, in spite of the blood that was trickling down her temple where she had hit the doorframe.

Deciding on the spot, Morris heaved her over his shoulder and left the building. He would either make her see that she was wrong and make Parker pay afterwards, or he would make her watch as he killed him.

^^--^^--^^

An hour later, Peter Parker arrived to pick up MJ for date night, only to see the building surrounded by police vehicles. Fifteen minutes of questioning followed. When it was established that he had been at college and at work all day and then at his own apartment, he was allowed to leave. Thirty-seven seconds after that, J. Jonah Jameson’s private cellphone rang.

^^--^^--^^

By the time Parker reached his apartment, Jonah had already reached out to his contacts in law enforcement and there hadn’t been any escapes from the Raft. The story that had taken them to OsCorp was not something likely to cause this, and even if it had been, this world’s version of Norman Osborn was too smart for such a blatantly obvious move. He’d send his lawyers first.

Jonah had come up blank, and that worried him. He had come to like Mary Jane Watson in her own right and for being her own person, not just because she was Parker’s girlfriend or had an excellent nose for journalism.

Parker appeared the normal way, in that he announced himself to the long-suffering doorman downstairs who knew that people often had legitimate reasons to come see Jonah at the oddest times of day and night.

It wasn’t until he stood in Jonah’s kitchen, piping hot coffee in hand that Parker finally broke down and almost collapsed where he stood. Jonah navigated him to a chair and sat down opposite him.

“Relax, calm down, kid. Let’s go at this calm and without running around like a headless chicken.”

Parker visibly pulled himself together, breathing calmly and counting to ten.

A sip from his mug and he looked at Jonah.

“Your… benefactor. I don’t suppose he had anything to say about something like this?”

“Describe it to me.”

“The cops wouldn’t let me in, but the neighbours described it as one guy, blonde, who could turn into water. Like Sandman. I’ve hear rumours about someone like that, but nothing concrete.”

Jonah immediately had an idea. He sighed and in his anger threw his empty and incredibly tacky faux-chinese mug at the next wall, ignoring how it shattered.

“Goddamnit, this has got to be the most unlikely chain of events since Night at the Museum!”

Parker froze mid-drinking, either because of the idea that Jonah had seen the movie or because of the thrown object.

Jonah meanwhile scratched the bridge of his nose.

“Hydro-Man aka Morris Bench. Depending on who you ask, he sometimes has that kind of power set.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Parker interjected, looking like he was torn between fear for his girlfriend and the urge to laugh. “Morris Bench? MJ’s looser boyfriend from high school? The guy I got arrested as Peter Parker?”

Jonah nodded, though most of what Parker had said was news to him.

And now Parker did laugh. “How, talk about peaking early.”

He turned serious in an instant. “You don’t know our shared history?”

All Jonah knew was that he vaguely remembered reading something about one version of MJ having dated Bench. He’d had that sort of feeling before, it felt like something shadowy at the edge of his meta knowledge that he could only grasp with massive effort.

“Very vaguely,” he said and gave Parker what he knew of Hydro-Man.

With this as an answer, Parker returned the favour and launched into a quick run-down of what had happened. Of how Mirros had barely tolerated MJ’s friendship with Parker. How Parker had caught Morris breaking into the school and making bathtub explosives. How Morris had rolled enough Nat 20s with the courts to get charged as a minor and get away with a slap on the wrist, after what had apparently the most epic public breakup in the history of their school.

The way Morris seemed to have reacted to the last part gave Jonah an idea. He looked up only to see Parker stare back at him.

“We’re idiots,” the young super hero said. “He was the one to give MJ those creepy presents a while back.”

It was the first time that Jonah felt true camaraderie with Parker.

“That we are, Parker….”

In a visible effort to think clearly and calmly, Parker took another deep breath and they went to work.

“Okay, so from what I remember about Hydro-Man, he seeks out shelter… lairs or places near large bodies of water. Which still leaves the entirety of both rivers.”

Parker perked up. “But it also eliminates most of Manhattan itself, Mister Jameson. We can also eliminate most of the riverside where there aren’t any abandoned warehouses and the like.”

“At first for now,” Jonah agreed. He was well aware that they were grasping at straws and for a place to start looking. He glanced at Parker. “There was nothing that indicated anything?”

“Now that I think about it….” Parker frowned, trying to remember something. “Earlier today, when MJ, Mister Henderson and I were leaving OsCorp after that interview we did, my Spidey-sense went off. It stopped after I made us take the subway instead of getting a cap, but…”

He shook his head. “Nothing else, boss.”

“Very thin, but it’s not like we’ve got anything else to go on.”

“I’ll start checking his old haunts. If I don’t find her there, then the East Side. I’ve heard some really odd rumours about that area.”

Jonah nodded and pointed at his laptop and the phone resting on the table next to it. “I’ll see what I can dig up from here.”

Parker swallowed and nodded.

“We’ll find her,” Jonah said reassuringly.

It wasn’t until Parker had left, through the door to fool observers, that Jonah said what he had thought to the empty room.

“Because if we don’t… I don’t want to know what it’d do to you, Parker.”

Then he too set to work.

^^--^^--^^

The design of the CURE container had bee amended. Norman was painfully aware that he’d dismissed the idea to add a GPS tracker to it for expedience and time constraints. If rumours about a second, almost identical item were true, then they’d need to transport it, so he gladly gave orders to have a new container built, this one with every security system he could think of.

The rest of OsCorp HQ was almost entirely empty. In a company like this, there was always someone on duty to deal with all sorts of emergencies or maybe only to monitor ongoing experiments, but the small bio-medical lab was empty except for him. And of course his phone rang.

“This better be good.”

“Sir, we’ve been monitoring the usual channels, and the NYPD scanners have Spider-Man fight someone called Hydro-Man who has a power set matching the description of the thief.”

“Is the team ready?”

“They can move within sixty seconds, Sir.”

“Send them now. Top priority is the recovery of the item. If they can take down Hydro-Man or whoever he is, that’s fine, but get me the item back. Understood?”

“Yes, Mister Osborn. And if Spider-Man interferes?”

Norman knew what had to be done.

“If he chooses to involve himself in your mission, that’s on him.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Nothing would keep him from saving his son. Hydro-Man, Spider-Man or the NYPD.

^^--^^--^^

As he dodged another piece of 19^th Century cast-iron industrial architecture, Spidey reflected on how straight-forward and easy it had been to find him. Morris’s father had been a ferry Captain before disappearing without a trace, and the villain had always sought that connection by spending his time at the river.

After that thing in the chemlab at school, he’d dropped off the face of the planet, but MJ had known where he liked to hang out and so it was only a matter of consulting his notes from back then.

He’d known that the old factory near Lawrence Point in the north of Queens had been torn down soon after everything went down, so he’d check out the old site on 48^th Streetwhere the city was storing equipment and road repair materials before it could be sold off. When Morris had gone away, the long rows of warehouses had been an old abandoned factory owned my Hammer Tech that had sat empty since the 90s.

Once close, it hadn’t taken him long to spot MJ and Morris. Thankfully MJ seemed to be more or less fine, aside from being gagged and tied up with her hands behind her back around some brick pillar. She was sitting on some sort of medical storage container, but that was all he’d been able to see before going in after shooting Jameson a text.

^^--^^--^^

One of the decrepit skylights broke without resistance.

“Normally I’d make some sort of stupid joke right now, but given what happened tonight, I’ll just ask you to let Miss Watson go.”

“What’s it to you, Spider-Man? I’ve got no beef with you. Want her let go, bring Peter Parker here.”

“Yeah, naa… not going to happen, Hydro.”

^^--^^--^^

That had been a few minutes ago.

Spidey caught the projectile with his webs and tossed it back at Hydro-Man, but he moved with the incredible speed and grace granted to him by his powers.

Comign to rest on the roof neighbouring the one MJ was in, Spidey assessed his options. As Jameson had said, Morris wasn’t someone to be defeated by throwing heavy objects at his face.

His spider sense blared.

“There you are, you fucking insect!”

“Arachnid, you moron!”

And with that he jumped to yet another building, tossing assorted debris from the roof at Hydro-Man as he went, more to keep him busy and away from MJ than in an effort to take him down.

It seemed to be working, as for the next several minutes, Spidey threw things and Hydro-Man returned with both water jets and debris of his own. Very clearly a stalemate.

But has he was clinging to the side of a brick smokestack, Spidey realised that Morris seemed have noticed this as well.

“Wanna give up, Spider-Shit?” he yelled, arms aimed at the local super-hero. Morris was standing on a skylight, Spidey noted.

“Nope. You?”

“YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE!”

His arms extended and Spidey let go just in time.

The upper four feet of the smokestack fell down after him, so Spidey webbed some of it and hurled it not at Morris, but rather at the skylight beneath the villain.

It cracked and Hydro-Man disappeared into the building. Spidey followed shortly afterwards, crawling down the fall behind which MJ was tied still tied up, and he hated that he hadn’t been able to free her before starting the fight.

“Fuck you, Spider-Man!”

His sense went haywire, and when he finally saw Hydro-Man, much to his horror, he was stnading next to a massive tank of gasoline.

Several holes had already been punched into it. Even after this short a time, the smell of the stuff was everywhere and almost overwhelming to Spidey’s enhanced senses.

Not much else was in the vast space, but for a pair of the sort of conveyor-belt fed sand silo things that the city used to fill trucks with loose stuff like sand for whatever purpose.

Hydro-Man was holding up a flash grenade. Spidey could have fled easily, but he knew that MJ was right behind the wall he was on.

“Hydro! No!”

“Hydro, YES!”

Even as he dropped the grenade, he liquefied and disappeared through a grate on the floor.

Spidey lunged forward and tried to reach the cable, but he was ever so barely not fast enough and too far away.

The spilt fuel on the ground caught fire, the fuel air mixture exploded and Spidey was caught. Had he not been enhanced, he would have died immediately. Not from the flames that never reached him, but from the massive blastwave that throw him to the other side of the building. Even so, everything, every single part of his body was pain, and as he faded, there was only one thought as he stared towards the burning inferno raging where MJ had been.

“I’m so sorry. I love you.”

Blackness.

tbc

Chapter Text

‘You’re different from the others. You… do not perform experiments on me.’

‘What the… who are you?’

‘I am… the others call me Cure.’

‘Well, that’s helpful. What the hell is going on?’

‘An explosion. I suspect your captor caused it to take out the one who came to rescue you.’

‘My god… PETE!’

‘I need your help, as you need mine. We are both fatally wounded. I have initiated enough contact to communicate and temporarily stabilize you, and this way I can tell how bad your wounds are. You have six broken ribs, a punctured lung, your liver and spleen are heavily damaged, you are bleeding internally in three places, including your heart and lastly your spine has been severed as well. Meanwhile my own internals are equally mangled, and in my current state, I cannot survive in the open air of your world for very long.’

‘My world… no, forget that. What… are you…’

‘I can heal you, and with your help, heal myself, but it is not something you can walk back from. To do it, I would have to permanently merge with you, and we would be joined for the rest of your life, until your death either by nature or misadventure significant enough.’

‘Not much of an offer, isn’t it?’

‘I apologise, but there is nothing else I can do. On our own, our people are very limited within a planetary gravity well.’

‘Aside from keeping me alive, what would I get out of it sharing my body and my head with… whatever you are?’

‘You would also be getting a slightly increased lifespan, greatly increased durability and mental powers as well as a limited ability to shapeshift into certain living beings you have once touched.’

‘That does sound… interesting. What about you?’

‘I get to remain alive on a planet that by itself is toxic to us, I get interaction with other sentient beings, which is as important to my people as it is to yours, and given what I’ve seen tonight, I get to do my work, in a sense. True symbiosis.’

‘There is no other way? You’re not having me on? What if I refuse?’

‘I wish there was another way. Though if you refuse, then I will do what I can to heal you and not act any more than that. It is against the highest law of our people to bond with a sentient being against their will.’

‘I have so many questions. But… I know there is no choice and no more time. Do it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Fuck no, but do it anyway. Pete needs rescuing.’

‘I will answer your questions to the best of my abilities. Later. For now, I apologise for the pain.’

P̠̤̖̪̳̣̾͌̐̈́́u̹̱͔͇̠̫̪͖ͥͪ͆͠r̵̼̫͙̫̖̬͔̃̄e̛͎̹̽͂͛͌ ̢͕̜̟ͩ͒ͤḁ̷̮͕̳̊̎g̩͙ͯ̈̏̕ͅo̼̯͕͚̬͚ͯ͡n̠̙̉̓̆͠ỵ̶̹͎̺̺̟̲̿̈́̍͊

^^--^^--^^

Somehow, he had survived, but was in incredible pain, with every nerve ending feeling like it was on fire. He was barely conscious enough to register what had happened and see the effects or to wonder how long he had been out. And unfortunately he could also see a hazy picture of Hydro reassembling himself from some sort of drain and in front of the hellish wall of flame.

The villain said something, but Spidey’s ears were still ringing too much for him to make it out. All he heard were vague noises, screeches and what he thought was the roar of the fire.

Spidey tried to move, but all he managed was to watch as Hydro stepped ever closer, a rebar club in his hands.

And then the villain was next to him, club held high over his head.

‘I’m so sorry, MJ.’

He looked at Hydro, wanting to see the blow coming, but… it never did. Instead a… something came flying through the massive hole where the tank had been. It was a person in red and black. Spidey’s fast healing was kicking in, and he could now hear the primal roar let bout by the newcomer as they charged Hydro.

Plowing into him, the newcomer slammed the villain into the still existing wall seconds before he reacted and turned into liquid.

The newcomer glanced at the wall and then at Spidey, before crossing the space to where the superhero was struggling to get back to his feet. Unable to anything, let alone defend himself, Spidey studied the newcomer. “Who…”

They only shushed him before reaching out and touching the charred and bloodied remnants of his mask. Something of a ripple went through their red and black… skin? Suit? Costume, before they…. She stepped back.

Spidey looked past her and was about to yell out when he saw Hydro reassemble his solid form, but she appeared to have noticed somehow and did the most awesome backflip he’d ever seen from someone else, turning around while in the air before charging Hydro while also growing four extra arms that were festooned with seriously dangerous looking claw-like things instead of hands.

Another roar and Hydro nearly managed to avoid the charging mass of what Spidey had to admit was a vaguely arachnid sort-of ally. Hydro meanwhile slammed into the sand-silo conveyor belt things that Spidey had seen earlier. He couldn’t fully liquefy in time. His impact was that strong that some of the contents came flying from the dispensing chute. It really was sand, but before Spidey’s vocal cords could produce a coherent sound, the newcomer noticed as well, jumped up and ripped the silo open along it’s entire width using one of those apparently seriously sharp hand things and brute strength.

Hydro was still slightly dazed from the impact, and while he tried to turn fully liquid and move away, the newcomer was too fast and buried him under tons and tons of sand.

The newcomer turned away from what she had done and approached Spidey.

“I supposed a thank you is in order,” he said with a croaking voice as she knelt down next to him. “But could you go look after…”

What happened next nearly gave him a heart attack, as the flat, featureless red covering her head pealed back and revealed a face he knew very well indeed.

“I’m fine. More than fine,” MJ replied, even as the rest of the… thing disappeared to somewhere. Except for where she then reached out and touched his mask and some of his exposed face.

He made a move to get up, but she pushed him back down. “Stay the fuck still, Pete. Just about every bone in that freaky body of yours is damaged or outright broken, and you’re still bleeding internally. So hold still, let me help you. Because we really do need to get the fuck out of here.”

And now he could hear the sirens and felt the pain recede. When MJ was done with whatever she had done to heal him, she rose to her feet, stepped back and pulled him up.

“Let’s get out of here, Tiger,” she said with the smile he loved so much. Peter allowed himself to be dragged along.

Somehow they managed to avoid the assembly of Police and FDNY and were walking northwards on 42^nd street. Never had Peter been happier that he had worn normal clothes under his suit, the discarded remains of which had probably turned into ash by now, webshooters included. Their clothes were charred and tattered still, but a lot less conspicuous. What bothered him that both their phones were dead, but thankfully, he knew that 42^nd Street had one of the four working phone booths in Queens.

“I need to make a call, two, really,” he said even though he wanted to ask the million questions in his head instead.

They were holding hands and extremely unwilling to let go, so they squeezed into the booth just as four identical black SUVs raced past and fished for quarters in what pockets they still had.

Eventually, Peter dialled a number he’d never dreamde of having in January this year.

“Mister Jameson… yes, I got her out, but funny story…”

^^--^^--^^

“We were too late, Sir. Cops and Fire Department are already on the scene.”

Norman was about to yell, but thought better of it. Now his options were very clear indeed.

“Turn around. Don’t risk getting exposed.”

He hung up and decided that getting the police reports could wait until there actually were any to get.

^^--^^--^^

May Parker had known for years that her nephew was not a normal teenager. So when Peter rang the door at eleven at night that wasn’t the strangest thing. Somehow, his coming in with tattered and singed clothes wasn’t either, not since that cursed OsCorp field trip when he was still in high school. The same was true for Mary Jane, though back then they hadn’t been holding hands and stood so close together that you couldn’t put a sheet of paper between them. And back then she had collected them at the hospital, as the same Madeline Watson who was bawling her eyes out on the living room couch had been out of town that week.

“Get in here before you catch something,” was all she siad before pulling the couple inside and slamming the door closed behind them.

It took almost ten minutes for Madeline to let go of her daughter and for the two to get changed into some non-destroyed clothes, though Peter’s t-shirts were still far too large for the younger Watson.

The way they sat on the couch like two fourteen year olds that had been caught smoking on the school toilet was almost funny.

“Under any other set of circumstances I’d ask if Mary Jane was pregnant or if you planned to run away to Vegas to get married. But with her apartment a crime scene and the police still thinking that she’s been kidnapped by some supervillain, I think the conversation is going to go elsewhere.”

“Mrs Watson, Aunt May…” Peter was both worried and confident in a way that reminded her of both Ben and Richard. “You’re both right, but…. I’ve made a call for someone to come by, and it’ll be a lot easier with him here.”

Madeline chose this moment to walk back into the room. “So do I have to wait to find out why I was just on the phone with the police about someone called Hydro-Man fighting another villain and you getting away in the confusion?”

“Did they buy it?”

The look Madeline gave her daughter at that response could have melted steel.

“You tell me, after you come back from your interview tomorrow.”

Awkward silence permeated the room.

Both parental figures were clutching cups of something liquid and non-alcoholic, and May was about to start asking questions in spite of the kids’s wishes when Peter looked away from Mary Jane for the first time. “I’m so sorry for all this. And our visitor is going to ring the doorbell in five… four… three… two… one…”

The doorbell really did ring. May wondered how Peter could have known that, but this stopped when she got up, opened the front door and looked at the absolutely last person she had expected.

“Can I come in?”

“Peter apparently invited you, Mister Jameson.”

She stepped aside and let him in. Her nephew’s boss nodded politely and somewhat awkwardly stood int the narrow hallway until she had closed the door and shown him where he could hang up his coat.

Before he could step into the living room, she touched his arm to hold him back and asked what she had to. “Are they in trouble?”

“Not from the law. The criminal element… that remains to be seen. I’ve not been told everything either, and a lot of this is as surprising for me as it will be for you.”

May wasn’t sure what to think of the man. His previous stance on the enhanced had been… questionable at best as far as May was concerned. Not that her own was perfect, and she really had believed him when had said that he had changed his mind, but she had seen what that stance had done to her nephew.

Not that this applied tonight. No, it seemed that her nephew saw his and MJ’s employer as something of a friend and had invited him, therefore all that would have to wait.

That was underlined when she sat back down in the living room, poured Jameson a cup and then watched the man howl with laughter.

“Parker Luck at it’s finest,” was all he said before eventually turning serious.

“Mrs Parker, Mrs Watson, just so start with, for all that I don’t know everything, what we’re about to tell you is the honest to god truth as far as we know it.”

“Now you’re worrying me…” Madeline said, and May couldn’t help but agree, even more so when the three of them had such apologetic looks on their faces.

“That is unfortunate, Mrs Watson. That being said, most of this is not my story to tell. I’m mostly here to fill in the gaps, as it were. Want to go first, Parker? What happened tonight, for example?”

Peter nodded, glanced at the ceiling and then at Jameson. Who only shrugged. “Their heart attacks are on you, kid.”

“Yeah… fair point,” Peter replied. “So Aunt May, remember when I got really sick after that OsCorp field trip in high school?”

“How could I not? I still think that’s when I got my first grey hair, and they nearly banned field trips altogether after that. And we were back at the hospital a day after.”

“MJ was beside herself with worry when she heard that your aunt had taken you there,” Madeline added with a nod.

Said young woman was still holding Peter’s hand and squeezed it even tighter.

“And also how my asthma cleared up around that time, and how I insisted on switching to contact lenses, and that I’d buy them myself?”

“Of course,” May said, wondering where this was going.

“Well, turns out that Norman Osborn is a certain something and conducted genetic experiments on spiders at the time. During the fire, one of them escaped and bit me.”

He then placed a flat hand on the otherwise empty living room/boardgame table, a 1950s monstrosity that Ben had inherited from his parents.

“Turns out there was a bit more to it than a fever.”

With a dramatic grin, Peter paused for effect.

“I am Spider-Man.”

He lifted the table off the floor like that was a perfectly normal thing to do, as if it was made from paper. Of course the room devolved into chaos.

At first May tried to deny it, but looking back, it explained so, so much. From his asthma disappearing overnight,to why all of a sudden he wasn’t afraid of heights any more or had insisted on repairing the rickety fire escape outside his bedroom window.

The first thing she managed to say was the next coherent and angry thought she had.

“Were you ever planning on telling me?”

Peter had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I… it was never the right moment. I was trying to keep you safe!”

“So you…” May almost yelled even though she could feel that Madeline was placing her hand on her arm to try and calm her down. She fought to reign in her ever more rising anger and forced herself to look at it objectively. And the more she did, the more she could see why he hadn’t said anything.

The Fantastic Four hadn’t bothered with secret identities, bu they’d had each other and the Baxter Foundation to look out for them, which had lead to them being very ivory-tower super-heroes, whereas Spider-Man, HER NEPHEW, kept stressing how he was on street level, looking out for the little guy, for the common New Yorker.

What was more, Peter was still the lone college student from Queens. No one to look out for him but herself and Mary Jane, and with many loved ones to serve as potential targets.

“With great power comes great responsibility,” May mumbled. “You’re doing this because of Ben, aren’t you?”

“I’m doing it to keep you all safe. And that’s why I haven’t told you. But yeah, Uncle Ben told me that very same night he died. Aunt May…”

Peter struggled, and one more, MJ oozed quiet support, which Peter seemed to appreciate.

“Aunt May,” he repeated, “Aunt May, I could have stopped it. I saw the robber, and didn’t do anything.”

Before May could respond, Peter exploded into tears and explained what had really happened that night, Mary Jane, who had remained silent up until now, hugged him close and quietly whispered supportive things that no one else could hear.

May had always wholeheartedly approved of their relationship, and she knew it was the same for Madeline, but even if they hadn’t, the sight before her now would have changed their minds.

“Stop blaming yourself this instant, Peter Parker,” May exploded, surprising even herself. “Can you see the future?”

He shook his head. “Not really.”

“Did you know that he was going to happen across Ben outside that store?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not your fault.”

“Thank you.”

The moment lasted until Madeline broke the silence.

“With all due respect, and I have so many questions, but… what happened tonight, you know…”

Peter visibly pulled himself together and glanced at his girlfriend.

“Well Mom,” MJ replied, “I got home from work to prepare for date night with Peter. But turns out, I wasn’t quite as alone in that corridor…”

May and Madeline listened with ever increasing horror as Mary Jane, Peter and Jameson told the story of what had happened. By the time they came to the end though, Jameson too was looking increasingly horrified.

Madeline, and May, were also wondering how Mary Jane was taking this as calmly as she did.

“So the tank had exploded and I’m pretty sure would have set my clothes on fore in a few places but for the wall. Next thing, I’m hearing that voice in my head telling me how wounded I am, before healing be and helping me take down Morris.”

She briefly described the fight, imprinting even more horror on the rest of them. “At least… we couldn’t really check. The building was on fire, and we needed to get out, so we have no idea what happened to him.”

“GOD!” Madeline explained before bolting across the room and hugging her only child, dropping her empty mug in the process.

Jameson on the other hand had gone suspiciously quiet.

Mary Jane exchanged words with her mother with Peter looking on. May on the other hand studied Jameson, who frowned and seemed to be thinking hard.

“So yeah, I have powers now,” Mary Jane told the room at large.

And here the Newspaperman responded for the first time. “I have some idea what this might be, though I hope I’m wrong, Watson. So… can you demonstrate what you are capable of right now, please?”

When she stood up and a red and black… semi-liquid something began to grow from her back until it covered her from head to toe, forming four additional arms, gasps and yells of horror filled the room, but May had to admit, it did look vaguely arachnid.

Oddly enough when May tore her eyes away, she was surprised to see that Jameson actually seemed cautiously optimistic.

Madeline meanwhile was visibly fighting her tears.

“MJ, is… that you? In there?”

She nodded.

“Of course, Mom. I’ll always be me.”

Her voice sounded the same.

The… not a thing. Mary Jane de-grew whatever it was and sat back down as if nothing had happened, ignoring the somewhat horrified looks of everyone, except Peter.

“Can ask your… companion if the name Venom is known to him?” Jameson asked, looking as if a lot was hinging on the answer.

MJ’s eyes unfocused briefly.

“He says that if we’re talking about the same individual, then he apologises in advance. Venom has apparently broken every single law their people have about interacting with outsiders. He asks you to call him Cure, and he’s… it’s difficult to describe, but the closest thing is what Fugitive Task Forces of the US Marshal’s Service do?”

“Assuming I believe him, that’s both good and bad news.”

“He followed Venom here because he escaped from confinement, and the way Venom interacts with anyone but his host is not only illegal, but also the equivalent to what we’d call a serial killer.”

Jameson pinched the bridge of his nose. “So Venom is Space Jeffrey Dahmer. Of fucking course.”

A deep, world-weary sigh later and Jameson began to explain at last, and May found herself listening instead of asking questions.

“Right, so take this with the provision that I can’t really prove any of this, but some months back I was shown the folly of my bigotry and also taught to be careful what to wish for. Long story short, I know things…”

Yet another long, fact dumping monologue followed where the words ‘multiverse’ and ‘alternate timelines’ were used several times, occasionally interspersed by questions from Madeline and May.

“Suffice it to say, Mrs Watson, it appears that your daughter is safer than ever before. She got very lucky that she bonded with a law enforcement officer though.”

“Are you sure?” an absolutely terrified Madeline asked.

“I am. Venom is… in my opinion the greatest threat Spider-Man ever faces. Him and Cure are members of an alien race known as the Klynthar?”

Mary Jane nodded.

“Nearly harmless without a host, nearly unstoppable with one. Only two weaknesses that I can think of, intense heat and intense sound.”

“You mean like Mars Attacks?” Peter threw in.

“Don’t joke about this, Parker! Venom… is one of exactly two of your enemies who ever managed to finish the job.”

Peter had died in Jameson’s memories? May felt the urge to cuddle her nephew and lock him away forever, and she knew it was the same for Madeline. Said nephew didn’t look like he had registered the words quite right.

“I wasn’t joking, Mister Jameson! It’s the only analogy I could think of and--- wait, I DIED? TWICE?”

“I told you that things out there can get weird. And will around here too.”

Jameson paused.

“There are innumerable realities, I was shown dozens when I was taken back to school. Parker, I have no idea what else is out there.”

May felt that she had to say something. “Who is the other one? Who…”

She shuddered and then spoke the words. “Who killed Peter?”

“Mrs Parker, you need to know that Spider-Man has never failed to stop even completely unknown enemies. The threat that Venom and to a lesser extent the other one who managed to kill a version of him pose is solely because of their ability to get into his head and to psych him out. That we are sitting here having this conversation has already ensured that our Peter Parker has a far better support system than in both these cases. As for who the other one is… I can’t say the name because I don’t know, not for sure anyway. What I can say with complete confidence that a version of him exists here.”

“Mister Jameson, you cannot expect me to take that at face value.”

“… in most versions, he’s an ordinary human. An ordinary human who is so utterly twisted that I have never heard of a stronger argument for the death penalty. The only reason he is dangerous is his twisted nature and the technology he uses. I don’t expect you to take it at face value, because I need to prove what I said to myself.”

“How can you be sure he exists here?”

“Because I know that he does. But I’m also ninety percent sure that the most likely candidate in most realities I was told about isn’t it here. The man who would have become him has taken a very different road in our universe. He’s still a scumbag, but very much not that god damn crazy. Make no mistake though, if I find so much as a hint that he’s on the loose near my city, I’ll be dialling Peter’s number so fast that my fingers bleed.”

Madeline perked up before May. “Forget dangers of death, what does this mean for my daughter?”

“That if that idiotic ex of hers tries again, we can fish pieces of him out of the North River, she’s that powerful.”

May was about to say something, but once again found herself pre-empted, this time by Jameson.

“And Mrs Parker, I will do everything in my power to keep them both alive. We need to be their support system, while they defend the city from what is to come.”

It wasn’t enough. It never would be, but…

“It’ll do for now. But I have so, so many questions.”

“That’s what I’m here for. Ask away, but we might need more coffee. But also remember, at the core, Spider-Man is a champion of life. So long as he has the will to survive, to win, Mary Jane by his side, and with us at his back, not even the greatest evil can defeat him.”

tbc

Co-writing credit for this chapter, especially the 2^nd half goes to @leechblade and @knowledgeispower. Couldn’t have made it have this sort of vibe without them. Thanks, guys.

Once more though, in this world, Norman isn’t the Green Goblin, because the Goblin is currently already on what there is of the Raft, and Norman very much isn’t. JJJ doesn’t know this, because… reasons that I will reveal in due time. All JJJ has in regards to the Green Goblin is the first two games, and the easter egg is enough to worry him that he might be wrong.

Up next is an interlude that is a direct continuation of this piece. More or less a scene of loose threads and some as yet unanswered questions that got cut for length but where there isn’t enough for it’s own full chapter. It also marks the end of my pre-written material for 1049.

Chapter Text

It had turned from late top early all over again when Jonah found himself sitting facing the two parental figures. Parker and Watson had long since excused themselves, at the point when even with the steadying influence from Cure, it became clear that she was about to crash. Madeline Watson had been close to following them, but with incredible reluctance refrained from doing so.

“He knows best what it’s like,” was all she said before pointedly sitting back down. Jonah had been tempted to say so, but was glad that he hadn’t.

Jonah had known that Watson and Parker Senior had questions out the wazoo, and had offered to stick around and answer some of them as far as he was able.

He wasn’t surprised when it was Madeline Watson who asked the most expected question.

“How do we know you can be trusted with their secret?”

“Because I gave Par… Peter my word, and that extends to your daughter as well of course. I would never betray their or your trust that way. Granted, that may have been different this time last year, but it is what it is. I can’t make you believe me, all I have is my track record since I found out and in the future.”

May Parker sighed. “Asking when you found out is as unnecessary as it would be to ask them to stop.”

Mrs Watson protested this, but Mrs Parker just shook her head.

“Just think of what the two of them are like, Maddie. Of course Mary Jane is going to want to help him, as much because she can actually divert some of the danger, and because that’s just what she’s like. Oh, Peter will complain because that… job is dangerous, and that’s what he’s like, but won’t MJ insist all the more because of that?”

The other woman closed her eyes before opening again. “She absolutely will. If something were to happen to him and she could have helped, it would destroy her.”

“And it’s the same the other way around.”

Jonah could see that they were both struggling between their paternal instincts and the knowledge that there wasn’t much they could do, and he awkwardly looked away, studying the array of pictures on the shelf that separated the living room from the dining area. He’d never know who spoke next, it was that quiet.

“God help us, they love each other.”

He still decided to use that opportunity.

“That’s a good thing,” he interjected, “and not just because of what I said about Venom or Villain B.”

An incident that were on the list of things he would take to his grave if he could at all help it.

“But also because there is at least one reality where his power, raw power as Spider-Man is directly influenced by how stable his home life is.”

He took in the flabberghasted looks and chuckled, even though that had been a gross simplification.

“I have no idea how exactly that works or if it applies here, but it sounds like a good idea. I cannot stress this enough. The support you two can provide is going to be vital in helping them both to navigate the new status quo and to keep them alive. There are many realities, especially the 616^th one I was shown, where it looks as if… call it fate or what have you is out to make Peter Parker suffer for no good reason other than it being possible, and one of the most common initial ways I’ve seen this done is by turning him and Mary Jane into emotionally immature idiots who couldn’t hold down a stable, healthy relationship to save their lives, sometimes literally. Incredibly frustrating to see.”

Jonah leaned forward in his seat. “Seeing that in our reality, this very much isn’t the case is incredibly reassuring.”

And it had been. He’d known even before the merger that the relationship was long-term and as stable as that was liable to be at their age, and afterwards sworn to help them along. Hell, it was part of why he had come to like them in their own right. They acted their age, and even with all the dangers and pitfalls that came with that, it was so nice.

“Though it’s not out of altruism, not exclusively.”

“Venom,” May Parker deduced, and Jonah nodded.

“That and a great many potential threats that need Spider-Man at his best.”

“Can… cure be trusted?” the other woman asked, obviously worried.

Ever the doting and worried mother, Mrs Watson had asked a question that Jonah had struggled with at first. It had been difficult to answer even in the privacy of his own head, though he had come to a conclusion over the course of the night.

“Yes, I think we can. Venom’s exact nature and origin vary wildly across the realities. I’ve seen everything from what we have here tonight to absolutely ridiculous cloning experiments, in at least one case developed by Richard Parker using Peter’s DNA.”

Disbelief permeated the room, but Jonah chose to ignore that.

“What I’m saying is that we absolutely lucked out in that our version of the Klyntar doesn’t default to the way Venom does things and actually has a moral code and laws compatible with our own. Hell, MJ even happened across someone in law enforcement, which should be doubly helpful. If Cure was anything like Venom, he would never have asked for permission first and instead just done it no matter what state MJ was in or what she wanted.”

Though Jonah anticipated a clash of methods at some point. He told the two women this, as it was bound to cause a tiff between Peter and MJ, though he also felt the need to point out some provisionals.

“If that works for the Klyntar anything like the way it does for us, then it’ll be a matter of time before they both adapt.”

The conversation went back and forth on some details before May Parker asked the next question.

“Why do this? What’s in it for you? Really?”

“There is an aspect of self-preservation to my doing this. There are threats, or potential threats where we must present as united a front as we possibly can. Venom is only one such threat. There are others far closer to home that also can be very dangerous.”

Ross, the mutant-seeking death robots from Days of Future Past, Hydra… the list was near endless.

“So no, not entirely altruistic, but not for financial gain either. For our benefit, rather.”

He decided to pre-empt their likely next question. “Our as in the city, the country and humanity as a whole. And it won’t be entirely on their shoulders. I very strongly suspect that in the next few years we’ll see a veritable explosion in the number of enhanced individuals, metahumans and…” Jonah almost said ‘Tony Stark types’ but caught himself and decided to compromise, “technologically gifted and generally superpowered people on both sides of the law, and all we can do now is prepare for that.”

“Hence your very public war with the Friends of Humanity.”

“And like groups. I’ve seen where that sort of bigotry can lead, both in the real world and in here,” Jonah said and tapped the side of his head.

“Bad?”

The opening act of ‘Days of Future Past’ ran in front of his inner eye. “Incredibly so. And aside from that, bigotry like that is worth fighting even if we completely ignore the superpowered angle. Mutants will have it worst, and they are the least to blame…”

The two women looked at each other, before Madeline Watson spoke.

“How can we help?”

tbc

Chapter Text

Peter was in front of the upstairs guest room that MJ had shared with her mother over the last few days, at the latter’s insistence.

Both Parental Figures were downstairs, breakfast long since over with for them, while MJ and Peter had taken the opportunity to try and sleep in for a change. The two nights since The Event ™ hadn’t been good, in spite of the effort put in by everyone around her, Cure included.

Feeling reminded of that last fight against the Green Goblin, where he had dreamt of falling construction cranes for weeks, Peter entered the room and sure enough, he found his girlfriend thrashing around on the bed.

Knowing what had happened last night, he very carefully approached and toucher her arm.

“MJ, wake up… I need you to wake up,” he said. Last time, MJ’s reaction to that had been half-clad in her new persona, with Pepter having retreated to the ceiling. Today, she ‘just’ sat up straight with a loud “GAAAH!” before she realised what had happened, and with only half an arm covered in Cure.

Peter smiled and asked: “Do you want to talk about it?”

Last time, MJ had shaken her head and banished him from the room.

Now, she hugged him, placed her head in the crook of his neck and sighed.

“Not particularly, but… Pete, I keep seeing a wall of fire and masonry coming at me after a massive water jet knocks me out and before I have to watch you die. Again and again and again. It’s stupid, I know, but…”

“Not stupid at all, Red,” Peter replied. “Remember that last fight against the Green Goblin?”

She nodded. “You pretty much disappeared from our lives for a week, and refused to tell me anything when I tried to…”

It had easily been their biggest fight as a couple and the closest they had ever come to the breaking point. Peter still felt guilty sometimes about what he had failed to do at the time.

“I did what I did because it was similar for me. If it’d been ten more yards to the left… I wouldn’t be here, let’s put it that way.”

He reached out and stroked her cheek.

“I wish I had talked to you then, not months later, because it took me forever to stop dreaming about that crane coming at me every single night.”

“So don’t… bottle it up and talk to you? That’s what Mom and Cure said last night.”

“This sort of thing is part and parcel of the life, and not something they tell you about when you put on the mask… and I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.” she smiled. “Does it ever get any easier?”

“On your own? No. But it sure did for me when I made myself talk to you about it.”

MJ let go of him and sighed. “Message received and understood, I promise.”

“Look at it this way, we’re here to help and you’re not an angsty teenager who is absolutely full with guilt. Uncle Ben was right though.”

“Great Power, Great Responsibility. Uppercase letters included.”

“Not just that, but also to accept help when it’s being offered in good faith. It took me far too ling to understand that one.”

MJ didn’t reply, but Peter was sure that the message really had gotten through.

“Come on, your Mom and my Aunt have breakfast read.”

“Braiiin… I mean Cooooffeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

He laughed at her response and minutes later, she followed him downstairs to a breakfast table decked out with all the trimmings a New Yorker could expect. The view alone made him glad that he and MJ had the next week off. So they sat down and tucked in.

“Any plans for today?” Madeline Watson asked as she watched her daughter tuck into pancakes, eggs and bacon on the plate May had put before her.

“Power testing, most likely,” MJ said after eating a few mouthfuls. “For all three of us to get a handle on what I can actually do now.”

Her mother didn’t seem particularly enthused by that, so Pete swallowed his food. “When I started this, it took me weeks, months really, to work out my abilities. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was stuff I still haven’t gotten the handle on. And with Hydro out there…”

Mrs Watson sighed, her very reluctant agreement obvious.

After swallowing another forkful of eggs, MJ grinned. “Don’t worry, Mom. It’ll be easier eventually.”

Peter could see that the elder Watson clearly doubted that, but she didn’t say anything and instead plied her daughter’s now enhanced metabolism with more food.

“Is this normal for the both of you?” Aunt May asked as MJ finished off her third plate.

“Likely not? I eat more than normal, yes, but Cure said yesterday that this level of eating was part of his recharging their batteries after everything. The entire thing took a lot out of them both,” Peter replied in MJ’s stead as she was too busy eating.

Mouth full, MJ nodded and made a thumbs up gesture to state her agreement with what Peter had said.

His Aunt seemed to be somewhat puzzled but didn’t complain. Instead, she steered the conversation to less complicated topics, and by the time he and MJ had properly indulged in the brown Juice Of Life, he was sure that he should try to convince MJ to move in with him full-stop, just to make this sort of domestic scene more common. He loved the idea.

His idea about power-testing was similar to what he had done in the basement in the early days, albeit without having to hide what was going on. Things such as swinging along the New York Skyline would have to wait. MJ could do it, but not well enough yet to keep up with him, and beyond that, Hydro would need to be taken care of. They could not be caught out with him attacking the house while they were out playing around in abandoned warehouse #3947.

At least that was the plan when the phone rang. More specifically, the one associated with his Spider-Man persona, special ringtone included.

After recent events, no one complained about it any more, though he would change it.

“Yeah?” he asked as everyone stared at him.

“Spider-Man, this is Jameson. We’re having Hydro-Man throwing a tantrum at the Bugle Building. He demands we tell him where you are, and to hand over Parker.”

“We’ll be there,” Peter replied and disconnected the call. Everyone else was still staring at him.

“We need to go. Hydro is at the Bugle and wants me… both of me.”

“Go.” Madeline replied with a sigh.

Minutes later, Spidey-spotters in Queens were the first New Yorkers to see that their arachnid protector was no longer alone and carried a second, similarly costumed figure with him.

^^--^^--^^

Upon arrival on 2^nd Avenue, a few blocks south from 39^th Street, MJ had resolved that next time, they went out superheroing together, she would swing by herself. That would be even more fun.

‘I agree, Mary Jane,’ came Cure’s response to the thought. ‘But this is as new for you as it is for me.’

They would have to get as good and fast at it as Spidey was.

As if summoned, her fellow hero turned around.

“You ready, Red?”

“Always, Tiger,” she replied and followed him.

The Bugle Building was a late 1950s Art Deco glass and concrete structure located at the South-Eastern corner of the intersection of 39^th and 2^nd, taking up a good chunk of that block with the building itself and the small open area in front of it, somewhat pretentiously dubbed the Bugle Plaza.

Hydro-Man was there, standing in the middle of the small pond that dominated the area, taking low-power pot-shits at the buildings surrounding him and yelling for Spider-Man to show himself.

The cops were keeping well back, two burning cruisers showing why.

“Any ideas?” Spidey asked, and MJ looked around before shaking her head.

“Don’t be… not nervous, but for the love of everything, don’t let it rule you.”

Instead of answering directly, MJ frowned as she observed her ex.

“He’s liquid when you get down to it, right? Do you have the cop contacts to rustle up an industrial vacuum? The type the city uses to clean drainpipes and shit?”

Spidey stared at her for a moment before audibly chuckling.

“I knew I loved you for a reason. We’ll have to keep him busy though, until it gets here.”

She shrugged. “Two against one…”

Spidey playfully bumped her shoulder and then turned away, activating the phone tethering integrated into his mask, something she would have to find her own equivalent for.

“Sorry to call at a time like this, but we’re at 39^th Street and--- yes, we, and yes, I know. Listen Watanabe, we need the strongest liquid-rated street cleaner vacuum the city has.--- Hydro-Man is, well, hydro and as such liquid.--- No, we’ll keep him busy for you.”

He hung up and turned to her. “She wanted to know what I meant with ‘we’.”

“Don’t worry, I’m up for that.”

“I know,” Spidey said with a sigh. “Right, so how about we do it like so….”

Oh yes, MJ knew that this was going to be fun.

^^--^^--^^

After the call that had told him they were here, Jonah was glad of the CCTV system that gave him a complete, if annoyingly grainy view of what was going on outside, though he already knew that one of the footage would be good enough for the Bugle front page he was already drafting in his head. Clearly something that would have to be invested in.

They had split up, approaching from two different directions, with Spidey making the first overt move.

Oddly, early 2000s pre-merger Jonah had sprung for then state of the art audio pickups for reasons that he had long forgotten, so at least they could hear what was going on, him and everyone else in the newsroom.

“Gooood morning New York City, and to you too, Hydro-Boy. Could you please stop trying to break into my favourite newspaper?”

Jonah sighed. That was terrible, even for him.

Hydro seemed to agree, as the villain took exceptional offence, screamed incoherently and unleashed a blast at Spidey who was perched on top of a street light. He missed, as the arachnid hero moved with incredible speed and returned the favour with an overturned trashcan, forcing Hydro to move away out of the pond.

Watson was taking good advantage of the distraction and now catapulted herself through the field of view of the cameras, and as Jonah had expected, was little more than a red and black blur.

He ignored the excited murmurs in the room and tapped out a quick message to the layouting department on his phone.

Watson and Spidey meanwhile kept Hydro busy by throwing random things at him, continually dodging his return efforts and moving around an increasingly irate Hydro who didn’t notice that they were doing this to keep him pinned in place. Both Spidey and Watson did his with far more speed and grace than any portrayal in that other Earth’s media that Jonah remembered, and they weren’t even trying all that hard. Which made what Jonah was seeing even more impressive. Watson and Cure clearly made an excellent combo.

Hydro desperately tried to follow and hit them, but failed to do so as they continually shifted position, angle and distance from which they threw debris and whatever they could find at him, while also taunting him again and again.

That was, until one of the water blasts clipped Watson in the shoulder and threw her off her position on the wall of the street lamp directly opposite the building’s main entrance. She was sent flying, but she finally deployed the four extra arms and used them to hold herself in place at the corner of the next building over, before launching herself at Hydro directly. The villain reacted barely fast enough and his upper half went liquid, avoiding both the flying Watson and Spidey’s latest projectile in close succession.

“So, you willing to surrender, Hydro-Boy?”

“Last chance!” Watson added in the same pseudo-cheerful tone, and Jonah hoped that she would develop her own distinct hero personality. Quips were more Spidey’s thing.

“This is your fault! Yours and Parkers! I lost her because of you! Mary Jane Watson is dead because of you!”

Clearly Hydro had done fuck-all research, as it was common knowledge that she had managed to get away and was enjoying some days off as far as the city at large was concerned. Many of the people in the room had even sent their well wishes since she had ‘escaped’.

“What the hell, dude? I talked to her this morning!”

And so it went on, the two arachnid superheroes jumping from building to street lamp to shop sign to whatever they could find while taunting Hydro and throwing things at him.

Jonah continued to watch, until someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and beheld Ben Urich, returned from Europe and writing up what he had discovered.

“Do you know who that is?”

“No more than I do Spider-Man, Ben.”

“So I suppose that they can be trusted?”

He shrugged. “Looks like it.”

Ben just grinned. “Good. Some variety around here.”

Outside meanwhile, the deliberate stalemate came to an end. The police cordon in the distance, just at the edge of the pickup range of the cameras, parted. Something came through, and when he recognised what it was, Jonah worked out the plan and laughed.

“Oooh, this is going to be good.”

The moment the two heroes saw the vehicle, the way they fought shifted.

Where they had previously both taunted Hydro to keep his attention fixed on them, now Hydro found himself dodging even more projectiles.

Spidey crossed over to where the big vehicle was waiting and began to talk to the driver, while Watson kept Hydro busy on her own by throwing things at him with her webs and the four extra arms, at a speed that reminded Jonah of a 40mm Bofors cannon.

The fight had started only a few minutes ago, but Hydro was already starting to slow down, presumably because he was still hurt, so Watson’s shots were beginning to hit home more and more.

When Spidey had shifted the vacuum and it’s massive hose into the positions he wanted, he gave her some sort of signal that Jonah couldn’t see, because she really stopped playing around as she jumped away from where she had been, webbed up the remaining burning wreckage of one of the police cruisers and flung it at Hydro with all her might.

Jonah would never know if it was something he did on purpose or not, but Hydro turned liquid within less than a second, still unaware that Spidey was less than three yards away, aiming the muzzle at him.

“SUCK IT, HYDRO-BOY!”

Before his yell had stopped reverberating around the buildings, he flipped the switch, and the somewhat dazed Hydro couldn’t react before the machine had spooled up and began to suck. The vacuum was so powerful and Hydro so seemingly done with everything that he couldn’t do much more than yell in frustration. his powers forcing him into a fully liquid state as the machine sucked him in.

And then, somewhat anticlimactically, it was over.

The police rushed in and Watson disappeared, Jonah thinking that it was because the NYPD would inevitably send someone to do a wellfare check on her after what Hydro had said. The machine was handed back to the cops who drove it off towards whatever arrangements the Raft would make for the villain inside.

Jonah didn’t see what happened after that as he bolted out of the room, Ben Urich hot on his heels and holding a camera that he had picked up somewhere.

In the elevator, Jonah had a line run through his mind.

“This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them!”

The perfect headline was born.

Once outside, he could see what he had expected, cops and fire department everywhere, with Spidey talking to Watanabe and some of her people off near the now half-empty pond.

“Spider-Man, a word please?” Jonah asked when the conversation paused.

Those around them went dead silent in spite of what Jonah had been printing in his newspaper for the last few months. He knew that for all that, no one had yet seen him actually act on all that in public.

And though this was unplanned, Jonah was sure Spidey knew what he was trying to do and nonchalantly walked over.

“Sorry about all this, Mister Jameson. If I’d known…”

Jonah waved it away. “You couldn’t have. No, I want to say… thank you, Spider-Man.”

He held out his hand, Spidey took and shook it s all of New York seemed to be watching and Ben Urich’s camera flash was going off in the background.

“You’re welcome, Mister Jameson.”

None of the three involved would know for a long time how famous and symbolic that picture would become.

“So, who is your friend?”

Spidey shrugged. “She’s new, but I trust her with my life.”

“Good enough for me. If she’s ever up for an interview…” he said with a grin.

tbc

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

If sitting on the roof of the Chrysler Building while looking out over an early winter New York City in the evening just as night fell was fun, then being able to share that experience with someone was even better.

“You were right,” MJ said. “This really gives you a new perspective on the city, Spidey.”

“After Uncle Ben died, I spent a lot of time up here. He preferred this over the Empire State Building.”

She didn’t reply, and Spidey wondered what his late Uncle would have thought of all this.

Their mutual companionable silence was interrupted.

“Can you see that?” MJ asked and pointed at something in the distance. Spidey looked in the same direction and could see what she had discovered, a line of police vehicles that were heading south. He checked the police scanner.

“Break-in at the Drant Foundation. Someone triggered the silent alarm on the roof.”

“Want to check it out?”

He considered it and nodded. “It’s pretty quiet so far.”

With a grin that he could barely see under the second skin that Cure provided, MJ gave him a mock salute and took a running jump off the building with a whooping yell. Spidey followed with a bellowing laugh.

Crossing the distance to the address on 6^th Street didn’t take them long. MJ had trained hard in the three days since the Bugle fight and it was beginning to show. She could move. She’d been good at it from the start, but only in a technical sense and was still not as fast as him.

One he hadn’t expected was how much more fun swinging through the concrete, steel and glass valleys of Manhattan was when he had someone he could race in spite of her limited experience, so by the time they reached the crime scene, he was sure that he didn’t want to go back to doing this on his own all the time.

The Drent Foundation was a private Art Gallery-slash-store that also had an exhibition space accessible to the public. The building itself fit in perfectly with the mostly residentials that surrounded it, in spite of being slightly higher than most of them.

“Are we going to wait until the cops clear out?”

Spidey nodded. “My… our relationship with the NYPD depends on mutual respect and part of that is knowing when to keep out of each other’s way. Took me long to get to this point…”

MJ considered what he had said. “Fair point. And Cure agrees.”

That part would take some time getting used to. The nature of her bond with the symbiote meant that Cure let MJ take the lead most of the time even though he was fully capable of taking over for short periods, but it was still dis-concerting sometimes when she made reference to her… passenger in casual conversation.

They were perched on a roof one building over, separated from the crime scene by a small mini-park dominated by a single, tall birch and listened in on what the cops were doing, both with their enhanced senses and via Spidey’s favourite police scanner app.

“Do you know what this reminds me of?” MK said after listening in for a while. “The Guggenheim heist back when we were still in high school.”

“In what way?” he asked.

“Entrance through the roof, other alarms disabled beforehand and from the inside, so we can assume that the perp scouted out the place ahead of time.”

At that point Spidey caught on to where she was going with this. “Highly targeted and nothing else disturbed, even if it’s potentially worth more than the item actually stolen…”

He sighed.

“Do you think…”

Spidey paused and shook his head. “I mean it’s possible, but we’ve seen her last when we were what? Seventeenish?”

He had been insanely busy during that time, so couldn’t quite remember everything.

MJ tilted her head to the side. “A couple of months after that whole shtick with Morris went down. Whatever do you see in her?”

There had been a time when he would have gotten very defensive from that question, or worried why his girlfriend was asking. Now though they trusted each other implicitly, were comfortable in their relationship and, applicable here, what had gone on in their private lives before they had come to their senses.

“She was hot and I knew she wouldn’t freak out about Spidey. That’s about it.”

He chuckled. “Face of an angel, mind of a thieving racoon on that one. You on the other hand… all angel.”

No reply came from MJ, but Spidey could almost feel the smug satisfaction radiating off her.

Companionable silence ensued as they returned their attention to what the Cops were doing.

None of what was found, or at least what they talked about was an indicator that this really was the work of their mutual acquaintance.

“So why don’t we just go and ask them?” MJ wondered when Spidey remarked on that.

“Are you sure?”

She shrugged. “Gotta introduce myself sometime, don’t I?”

“Fair enough.

The name she and Cure had chosen was a good one, and the sooner they got it out there, the quicker moronic internet suggestions would stop popping up on Spiderwatch. Not that he’d ever admit to anyone that he had a throwaway who was part of the group on Facebook.

“Follow me, then.”

A lot of patrol cops were used to his appearing out of nowhere, even under circumstances like today, but MJ was bound to draw a few odd looks.

Luckily the officer behind the crime scene tape was someone he’d encountered before, so he gave a cheery wave from their shared perch on the roof of a restaurant’s outside seating area.

“Hey there, Officer Davis.”

So spoken to, the cop in question was startled, but waved back.

“’Evening, Spider-Man. What can we do for you tonight?”

“My co-hero and I came across your response to, well, this,” Spidey said, “and since the criminal elements seems to have stayed home tonight, we took a look and there’s a chance that it’s someone I’ve encountered a few years ago.”

Davis was clearly interested.

“How so?`”

Spidey outlined their thoughts. “I came close to catching them, but the Vulture just had to decide to be extra annoying that night and…”

He trailed off and decided to rant another day. “Anyhoo,” he said instead, “sorry for listening in on your radios, but it sure looks similar.”

“At least on the face of it,” MJ added. “Though there’s a lot we don’t know, and we’d like to talk to whoever is in charge, please.”

Davis looked at her, but before he could say something, she waved again. “Hi. I’m Arachnia, Spidey’s parter-in-crime fighting.”

Taking in what Arachnia had said, Davis nodded in acknowledgement.

“Thank you, Officer.”

Davis grinned and shrugged. “Eh, you’ve been helpful, so…”

The officer then reached for his radio, calling it in.

“The Lieutenant wants to see you. Over by the main entrance.”

“See ya, Officer. Good evening.”

“Same to the both of you.”

^^--^^--^^

The officer in charge turned out to be a very no-nonsense Italian woman, and the Lieutenant reminded Spidey of a younger Aunt May. When the two super-heroes outlined their idea, she just sighed.

“Can’t say that I’m surprised. I didn’t work the Guggenheim heist, but it was a legend when I joined the Special Frauds Squad a few years ago. It’d fit, even though there isn’t any real proof.”

“So what was stolen?” Arachnia asked, and the Lieutenant shrugged.

“That’s just it, the painting was hanging between far more expensive items, at least according to the Foundation. And there were none of Black Cat’s calling cards. Still… it’s the sort of job she’d do.”

“Hmm… People like her trade on their reputation,” Spidey pointed out. “What’s the point of it otherwise?”

Before the Lieutenant could respond, her phone rang and she excused herself.

“Fair point,” Arachnia whispered. “Her civilian side might slip in under the radar, but Black Cat always was an incurable show-off for a cat burglar.”

Once again the conversation was interrupted, this time by a whistle from the Lieutenant.

“Skanderberg Art Gallery. Roof Alarm went off.”

Spidey glanced at Arachnia, knowing that the gallery was only two blocks from where she indulged in her acting hobby.

“We know where that is. Do me a solid and let the first responders know we’ll be there?”

“Will do!”

So off they went, but as they made their way across town, Spidey had to wonder. If it was Black Cat, for which there still was no proof, why was she back in New York in spite of what had caused her to drop everything and leave in the first place?

`

tbc

Chapter Text

“Honestly, if this wasn’t her, and this is someone copying her style, then she will come back and skin them alive,” Spidey remarked as they swung away from yet another crime scene. When they had arrived, they had been first, but seen no perpetrator and with all the alarms and then some still running.

To Spidey, the entire thing had felt like it had been done by Black Cat, but not for any particular reason that he could put his fingers on.

“Yeah, she’s not the type to let a copy-cat go,” Arachnia replied, and Spidey appreciated the bad pun. “And it’s not like we can catch her like this.”

It was something that they had worked out when realising that they were too late again. So now they were going to go home instead of trying to run to yet another crime scene and get at it with fresh, and more importantly rested eyes later. No one saw them swing away.

“Is it always this frustrating?” she asked while they were taking a short break on top of the Brooklyn Bridge’s island-side tower. 

“In general, or Black Cat in particular?”

Arachnia shrugged. “Take your pick.”

“Gotcha,” Spidey nodded. “In general? No. But with recurring guest stars like her? Absolutely can be. Elektro might be somewhat small-time compared with some of them, but he sure can hide if he wants to. Black Cat on the other hand… ignore my mid-teenager hormones and remember what she was like when her MOMA raid crashed our field trip… and yeah, it’s usually like that with her.”

“The way her identity got leaked probably doesn’t help.”

Spidey nodded again. “You never know what she’s trying to…. HIDE!”

Before Arachnia could respond, Spidey yelled for her to follow and jumped off the bridge, her hot on his heels.

He wished that they had bothered to buy a good bluetooth headset or something for her to use before going out tonight and let her catch up when they reached a roof on Manhattan Island.

Arachnia didn’t seem too happy, he noted with a pang of guilt. Even through the mask he could see her frown.

“Back in the day,” he said, “Black Cat had a bunch of hideouts and stash spots all over Manhattan. They were all turned over before I could get to them, but there’s one exception that she thinks no one knows about, and that I found by complete accident a couple of weeks after she disappeared. Remember that abandoned subway tunnel construction site on the West Side?”

Arachnia nodded. “I do… and since she doesn’t know you know of it, and if it’s still there, she would go there, hopefully assuming no one ever found it.”

“Indeed,” Spidey replied. “And on, I didn’t go creepazoid on her, I was chasing someone else and lost him in that area. So I looked around some, and…”

With a chuckle, Arachnia reached over and patted his cheek. “Don’t you worry, Tiger.”

“Let’s move then.”

Off they went.

The site, when they reached it, was just as abandoned as he remembered from when he had last checked it a few weeks after his initial recovery. The trees surrounding it were higher, and…

“You know that I first encountered Black Cat when I was chilling on that roof over there?” he said and pointed at the building in question. “It was around the same time of night too. She was getting out of her car and carrying something that looked like a body wrapped in a rug, but turned out to just be, well, a stolen rug wrapped around some stolen golden trinkets. What makes this so… interesting tonight is that if that car parked over there isn’t a black 2007 Jaguar XKR convertible…”

“Of the type Black Cat drives…” Arachnia added, working out where he was going.

“Of the type she nearly ran me over with, albeit accidentally,” he replied, to her indignant “WHAT?”

“You can thank Sandman for me finding the hideout. If he hadn’t decided to do… whatever it was maybe half a dozen blocks from here, I’d never have checked it again.”

“Out of boredom?” Arachnia asked, knowing what he was like. Spidey nodded.

“I still don’t know where exactly the normal entrance is…”

“Because she’s very good at hiding shit like that,” Arachnia completed his sentence for him. Her encounters with Black Cat had been very brief, but she’d done some reading afterwards. “Yeah, I can see her being here.”

“Though I do wonder why she uses her car,” Arachnia said seconds later, “especially if she knows that people in our line of work… both our lines of work should be fairly aware that she drives one like that. Could it be that she assumes that after so many years people have forgotten?”

“Or at the very least wouldn’t immediately make the connection.”

Arachnia nodded. “So, do we go on?”

“You betcha! I’ll go first. No need to show our entire hand.”

“Will do.”

Spidey began to move from perch to perch as silently as he could, taking advantage of the overgrowth and wondered how about how chance had  brought MJ and Cure together, because she’d always played a mean game of hide and seek as a child according to her mother, and back in high-school, she’d often had that creepy way of appearing out of thin air too. And now she had superpowers that enabled that even more…

He reached the entrance to the building site proper, and maybe a hundred yards in, he saw the blue cone of a small LED flashlight. Once again moving as quietly as he could, he made his way along the ceiling, knowing that barring her having gained powers of her own, it was highly likely that Black Cat wouldn’t hear him.

As he got closer he could see that it was indeed Black Cat, a.k.a. Felicia Hardy, daughter of legendary 1990s cat burglar Walter Hardy and once upon a time the best such of all New York in her own right.

He couldn’t resist. He attached some of his webbing to the ceiling and slowly lowered himself to roughly her eye height, less than five yards away. Her back was still turned when Spidey spoke.

“Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”

To her credit, Black Cat didn’t quite loose it and almost immediately turned away from the ratty old junction box she’d been fiddling with.

“What a nice surprise, Spidey! I was going to hit you up, but apparently, I don’t need to.”

She had spoken in the same sort of saccharine, flirty tone she’d always used around him, but unlike the last time, he barely registered it.

“Well, I head that someone was doing jobs exactly the way you normally do, but I was all ‘Naah, BC isn’t in New York, hasn’t been for years’, but here we are.”

“So why do you assume things, Spider-boy? I’m on the straight and narrow!” she replied with a pout.

“And I’m taken, so knock it off,” he replied, ignoring the hated nickname and concentrating on the annoying tone of voice. He could sense Arachnia getting closer through his powers… useful.

His partner was approaching on foot, so quietly that he needed his enhanced hearing to notice her steps, but he still vowed to teach her proper wall crawling soonest.

“Let’s be real Kitty, it sure as hell looks like your MO and whole I could never be bothered to work out exactly how that entrance to your old stash works, all your other ones have been raided and this is the only place that’s still intact, so if you have stolen goods, they’re either here or soon will be.”

“So did you check up on them? Black Cat asked, stepping back and talking in a way far more appropriate for her age while behind her, at a distance that made him wonder if Black Cat had lost her edge, Arachnia waited for the right moment, clearly amused.

“Naa. Fisk threw a fit and had his goons turn over the city looking for you. I’d have to have lived under a rock not to notice the stashes after that. Kinda hard to miss.”

“Fair enough, I suppose,” Black Cat replied with a put-upon sigh. “So, did you miss [I]me[/I] at least?”

He shrugged. “Maybe? But to talk about you. What brought you back to the big apple?”

“Just cleaning up a few loose ends, Spidey. If all things go well, I’m back… elsewhere in a few weeks.”

“Uhh….” he said, not really believing the thief. “Do we need to ask Fisk or Comissioner Gordon what’s going on then, like last time?”

Like he had expected, Black Cat leached onto anything to steer the conversation away from what she was really doing.

“Who is we? Have you found someone who can replace the Black Cat on the streets?”

Spidey rolled his eyes under his mask and tilted his head to the side.

“Yeah, that’d be me,” Arachnia said. 

The way Black Cat turned on her heels for a second time that night and the face Arachnia made under her mask made Spidey chuckle.

“Let me introduce you to Arachnia, my Partnter in-crime-fighting.”

“Speaking off… Kitty, care to tell me why I’m here instead of catching criminals somewhere closer to a good cup of coffee?”

Arachnia had stepped closer to Black Cat while saying that, and when Spidey remained silent, Black Cat sighed and increased the distance between them.

“Is it so strange that I just want to pick up some of my things that I left behind, check in on some people and then permanently turn my back on this city?”

“Sure is when there’s two break-ins at your sort of target using your methods and you in town, all on the same night.”

“What’s more,” Spidey added, “you could have done this forever ago. Fisk fleeing the country happened two years ago, and it was national news. You being you, wherever you were, modern news media existed at that place.”

Black Cat frowned and then sighed. “Can’t say that I blame you. But I can and will promise you that I’m not coming back for good. Just like the two of you, I have a life I’d like to go back to. No more stealing things.”

Arachnia raised an eyebrow, making use of the way her ‘costume’ was far more expressive than his.

“And supposing we believe you, that stash isn’t filled with loot and some of the artwork you allegedly ‘borrowed’?” she asked, including the air quotes.

“It won’t be. Lots of gear and other equipment though.”

Black Cat turned back to Spidey. “And how to you know that? In fact, how do you know it exists in the first place?”

“I’m your friendly, neighbourhood Spider-Man.”

That was all the explanation she was going to get, in keeping with ye olden days and the way she had been then and, if he was to be honest, likely still was.

“Good thing I’m only here to get something that belonged to my father. Legitimately too. So can I get that now, or do I have to fight you for that right?”

Both the heroes were unhappy, but as Spidey well knew, she hadn’t done anything illegal they could prove, and between the two of them, there was no way out for her, as the tunnel ended in a concrete slab a few dozen yards farther in.

So he glanced at Arachnia, they both shrugged and then finally removed himself from the ceiling.

“Go ahead,” he said and would hate himself for that for a long time to come.

Because they both fell for it, because when Black Cat reached to… somewhere and dropped what he would later find out was one of her old combined flashbang/smokebomb things.

By the time their enhanced senses recovered, she was long gone.

By the time they returned home, they were sure about three things.

Black Cat was behind the thefts, she would do it again, and something was really odd about all this.

Arachnia pointe out what Spidey had been thinking. Why had she done this? They still had no solid evidence, and if Black Cat had kept her cool, she would have walked away without issue. Now they would start digging.

Entirely unaware that it would be weeks and weeks before they found something, or what else would happen in the meantime.

tbc

Chapter Text

Jonah watched patiently as Ben Urich reorganized his notes.

The rest of the Bugle's bullpen was empty, in fact almost the entire building was, except for the staff doing the actual printing for the New York area and updating the Group's various digital outlets. Even Robbie had left almost an hour ago, but here they were, pouring over a story like they were young hotshots in their twenties again.

"So what do you have?"

Urich laughed. "Some day you have to tell me where you got that first pointer from, because just about everything was dead-on accurate. They did a good job when they poured concrete into what was left of the base, but there's more than enough left, and what few locals from the time are still around also were extremely helpful."

With a sharp movement, Urich pushed a few pictures he'd taken to Jonah's side of the table they were sitting at.

"That's what's left of the hangar-slash-launch platform. The usual idiots on the internet can moan all they want for their Nazi wonder weapons, but no way was this built to house something like the ME-264 or any of the so-called Amerika Bombers, but we knew going in that those stories were bullshit."

'Sort-of at least,' Jonah thought.

He studied the pictures, and they were in line with his somewhat vague memories of the impressive scene where the HYDRA flying wing had taken off in "The First Avenger", with the short open-air section of the runway overgrown with trees and the massive hangar doors rusted. He knew there was only concrete-infused rubble behind them, the long hangar/runway combo likely collapsed along it's entire length.

"The rest of the installation has been erased, pretty much. According to the locals, a mostly American commando unit fought the Nazis near the end of the war, blew up the base and then withdrew before the rest of the German occupation forces in the country could descend on and crush them," Urich continued. "After the war, the story was that it was part of the Nazi A-Bomb project, a replacement after the Brits and their Norwegian resistance friends kept blowing up the heavy water production at Vemork."

That was very different from the 'Base for experimental aircraft' narrative, which had the advantage of actually being sort-of true. Both had in a way.

"There's some funny rumours going around about what actualy went on, but the Nazis kicked out everyone within fifty miles of the base as early as spring 1941, so…."

Urich shrugged. "All the locals know is what the resistance told them, really."

"Ah, gotcha," Jonah replied. He had expected this.

"The Army, and later the Air Force probably figured that the… aircraft would still be seen," he continued, as Urich nodded, "so they came up with the America Bomber thing."

Not knowing the moronic fools on the internet would latch onto that, forever mixing myth and reality. The papers he'd gotten from the Army were frustratingly vague as to the base itself.

"At least now we know what the Army let us have is mostly accurate."

Urich didn't know that much of his trip to Norway had been about finding out if and then conforming that Jonah's memories of 'The First Avenger' applied in this universe beyond the superficial. They did, so far, so planning around what had been confirmed could go ahead. As did the production of the documentary.

"Anything more about the time period in question, Urich?"

The reporter shuffled his notes around some more before finding what he was looking for.

"People, locals and resistance, heard combat and some plane taking off, but that's about it."

"A dead end then," Jonah said and sighed.

Ever the consummate story teller, Urich grinned. "Not quite. There's one odd thing I came across. I've been given first and second-hand accounts that members of Rogers's old unit kept looking for him and were still asking questions around the area for years after the war. Desperation move, but… what makes this interesting is that one old farmer swears up and down that Peggy Carter was doing that as late as spring 1948."

He paused for dramatic effect, hiding it behind taking a sip of water.

"Now I know that as far as the world is concerned, she died of Pneumonia in 1947, but the old man was … Christ on a bike Chief, I didn't show him a picture of her until after he'd described that search expedition, because I didn't believe it either at first. And…"

Urich looked up. "Chief, the man is old and it's been decades ago, but he says he remembers mostly because she seemed extremely desperate and broke down crying while sitting at his kitchen table."

Jonah leaned back and stared past the lamps on the false-teak ceiling. He was entirely unsurprised, what with this universe running on comic book rules more and more by the day, and he briefly wondered if that applied retroactively.

"Nothing says that she survived past 1948, but… Secret squirrel stuff is looking to be happening here, assuming the account I was given is accurate. And given who is liable to be or to have been involved… worth looking into."

Jonah agreed, but didn't move until his neck started to hurt.

"Want me to look into this?" Urich asked.

Jonah considered his options. As expected, Urich's trip to Norway had not only confirmed his memories but also revealed a number of interesting angles that they'd discussed since his return, tonight included, but very little that helped finding the Capsicle. Useful for the Documentary, but beyond that? Not really.

"Look into it," he eventually decided. "In fact, I'll fire off an FOIA request and the Canadian equivalent for her service record."

"Are you sure, Chief? If…"

Jonah nodded. "If, and I mean if, there is something fishy going on, then they'll come after me and the Bugle, not you."

What Urich couldn't be aware of was that Jonah was more thinking towards SHIELD rather than someone like the Army or the rest of the Alphabet Soup taking exception to him wanting more than what was on the public record. Given that there had been no open move against the Bugle when he had requested the files he'd picked up in DC, he doubted it, but given the potential issues he wanted to make sure. He didn't know who was running SHIELD, and what that person was like, but given that it could run the whole spectrum from okayish but shady to straight up 'totally not HYDRA, honest'….

But at least it was unlikely that SHIELD, HYDRA, SHIELDRA or whatever else would do something overly drastic. Finding out that Peggy Carter had out of play one way or another since 1948 and only very tangentially involved with SHIELD before it had even been called that or this world's version of Operation Paperclip had run it's full course had been a wakeup call and now made attention from certain people far more unlikely than he had initially expected. But… a shudder ran down his spine.

"And once those requests are off, I think the two of us have to take a trip up north. Carter supposedly died there, and maybe the Canadians have something that isn't on the public record here and we can find that while we wait."

"Why so hurried, Chief?"

"I hate having to rush things, and you know that, but I think that the earlier we find out what this is, if it is a clerical error that never got caught then fine, but if this is more than that, then the earlier we know, the better."

For all that he didn't think HYDRA would be a factor, as far as he could recall Capsicle's recovery was two years behind schedule compared to what he knew, and if either them or what purported to be SHIELD got their hands on him first then everyone else was in for a heap of trouble. His pre-merger headcanon explanation for that entire terrible Avengers Civil War arc had been that the difference between what Steve Rogers was like in First Avenger and the wider MCU had been that those supposedly in charge of his recovery and being brought up to date had instead messed with his head and therefore drastically changed his personality.

Crappy writing turned actual real-world issue aside, they needed to find him first, in both senses of the word.

"You hope that we might find something in the Canadian records, because their laws are different from ours."

Jonah nodded. "Possibly. But more than that, I want to pay my respects, just in case this is a wild goose chase."

Urich didn't respond, but Jonah knew him well enough to be able to tell that his reporter approved.

"So when are we leaving? I've got nothing on."

"There would be an Air Canada flight out of JFK tomorrow afternoon at four, but we do need to take a few days to make a slight side trip up state first. Albany, in fact. The 107th Infantry (Air Assault) Brigade, US Army."

He could see how Urich slowly put the pieces together.

"You want to talk to their CO, don't you?"

"Indeed I do," Jonah replied with a grin.

^^--^^--^^

"Uh…. Director, there is something that might interest you. The Pentagon and the Canadian Ministry of National Defence have received FIOA requests, or equivalents thereof for the service record of Peggy Carter, citing inconsistencies within the established public record."

The Director frowned. "Steve Roger's old flame? Why now? I mean this happens every couple of years with records that old, so why come to me, Agent."

"Because of who is doing it, Sir," the Agent said confidently. She knew that with the Director you had to have a good reason for what you were doing. He didn't suffer fools or people who wasted his time easily. "J. Jonah Jameson, on behalf of the Bugle Group. He also did the same for the records of the search efforts after the HYDRA flying wing crashed back in '45."

With a frown, the Director took the offered tablet from the Agent. "A media mogul like that having this much interest in potential SHIELD internals…"

He didn't like it.

"I took the liberty of running a few checks, and Mister Jameson is producing a multi-part documentary on the disappearance of Captain America and the… more official search efforts during the war and afterwards," the Agent continued, "and from what we could find, it's entirely legitimate. They've contacted a number of studios and Jameson managed to get Danny Elfman to do the soundtrack. Most recently, he contacted the press office of the 107th and has booked a flight for two up to Ottawa out of Albany for the day after tomorrow."

The director frowned with his one remaining eye. All in all very legitimate reasons. Peggy Carter had never been more than very tangentially involved with the creation of SHIELD and had in fact died before Howard Stark had talked the Truman Administration into creating it. He decided that the chance that they would stumble across SHIELD internals that were relevant to day-to-day operations in 2014 was highly unlikely at best.

"Let them proceed without interference. But still, keep an eye on it and get me the agent roster. I want to know who is available at short notice, just in case."

Tbc

Chapter Text

"Jarvis, you up?”

“For you Sir, always.”

It was the middle of the evening, but after spending the last sixteen hours in a meeting with the representatives from the Joint Chiefs, and the jokers running procurement at the Pentagon, he needed the humour.

“Good, now do me a solid and call Pepper. Tell her that it’s time.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Knowing that Jarvis would do as requested, Tony crossed over to where the mostly unused and decorative piano stood and stared at the picture frame hanging behind it. The picture showed Stane, Howard Stark and a teenaged Tony. If he remembered right, it had been taken a few weeks before his parents had died.

Tony tilted his head to the side, stepped over and took it from the wall. 

“Both of you will never set foot into my home again.”

The picture was placed on the piano backside up and would go into the trash at some point, mahogany frame included.

“Though I do wonder Dad, what you would have done had you found out that Stane was stealing from you, from your company.”

Of course there was no answer, so Tony was left to imagine the epic fit of rage that discovery would have caused. He’d never really found out where and how Howard Stark and Obadiah Stane had met, so instead of pondering that part of it for very long, he hopped into his bedroom and quickly changed into ratty old jeans and a T-shirt before heading down into the lab, which was where Pepper joined him half an hour later.

“Is this a robot?” she asked before saying anything else. Tony removed his arm from the bowels of the suitand shook his head.

“Nope,” he said, popping the p. “This is a new and very improved version of the thing that got me out of the cave.”

He could see that Pepper wasn’t trying to hide her curiosity as he stepped aside and let her approach the very nearly finished ribcage of the Mk.II. She knew better than to actually touch anything but still inspected everything closely.

“When did you come up with the missile story?”

Tony shrugged. “After I realised that there is a leak in the company. When Rhodey told me about Stane…”

“Don’t think I can blame you, Tony.”

Pepper looked up from the suit and back at him. “You’re going to use this thing yourself, aren’t you?”

He just winked and Pepper sighed.

“I can’t talk you out of it.”

“Nope,” Tony replied, enunciating the p before reacting to Pepper’s obvious worry. “If it’s any consolation to you, I’d never do it without talking to you and Rhodey first.”

Which was mostly true, the sole exception being that he had very briefly considered not telling them. That idea had died a quick death when he had heard what his friends had told him, and that had made him see.

“And this… suit is unique?”

Tony frowned and tilted his head from side to side. “For now at least. I’ve made some plans with Rhodey, but until and unless I can make sure…”

“Make sure what, Tony?” Pepper asked, though he suspected she knew the words in his head that he couldn’t and didn’t want to say aloud.

So he settled for second best. “Pepper, you know what the Pentagon and the Senate can be like. We got lucky since the Soviets collapsed, but…. remember that whole fucking mess back in ‘86 that Hank Pym blames my old man and his descendants unto the nth generation for?”

It’d been years since the most recent lawsuit and at the time she hadn’t been his PA yet, but it had been the talk of the company water cooler scene for months, so Pepper nodded.

Tony sighed and put away the soldering iron he’d been holding.  “My biggest fear is a repeat, and I know you know that.”

“He isn’t like that. Don’t you trust Rhodey?”

“It’s his superiors I don’t trust, Pepper. If they set their minds on seizing the suit and the firepower it has on top of the technology I’m using to build it, he’d be legally obligated by his oath to take and hand over anything I give him. Either that or he abandons a career he’s been working towards since before we met, and that’s not a choice I want to force on him.”

“Choosing between his friendship and his loyalty to you and his loyalty to the Air Force.”

Tony nodded without a word. He was terrified of Rhodey’s response in case the chips were down. Before Afghanistan, he’d have never even imagined this ever being an issue, or at least admitted that to himself, but at the time he’d also implicitly trusted his so-called godfather. 

“Then do you trust me?” Pepper asked him in an incredibly timid and quiet voice that made him feel all sorts of things he didn’t want to think about.

“Of course I do, with my life,” he said, confident and determined because it was true. Not because she didn’t have any divided loyalties, but because [I]she was Pepper[/I].

“But why?”

Tony opened his mouth to spew out words like ‘proven loyalty’, and ‘experience’, but those had also seemed to have applied to Stane and were applying to Rhodey. That wasn’t why he trusted her implicitly, right now almost more so than a man who had been his best friend since holding Tony’s head over a toilet while he puked his guts out after the anniversary of his parent’s death.

He closed his mouth and felt his mind wander down roads best left untrodden and that he had actively avoided less than half a minute ago. Both because she deserved so much better than him and because the Merchant of Death would never be good enough for someone like her.

“Because,” he heard himself say, “because you’ve never once stopped trying to make me better than I am, and because you actually made me start trying.”

Pepper seemed to be unable to come up with a response to that, and Tony wasn’t surprised. Looking at it, what he’d said wasn’t just as far as he was willing to go, but not something he’d ever have said out loud six months ago.

“Okay then,” she said eventually. “But you called me here for more than just that, didn’t you?”

As a response he called up the wireframe blueprint and renders of the MK.II suit, the latter still lacking the final paint job. He liked the candy-apple red, but it kinda clashed with the chrome-like accents he’d been using so far.

“First was this, the suit. Not exactly subtle, I know, but---”

He was interrupted by Pepper almost doubling over in laughter, and the tension in the room dissipated instantly. Pepper braced herself on the workbench with one arm and barely managed to string together a few words.

“You? Subtle? Do you even know how to spell that?”

“Remember who signs your pay-checks, Miss Potts,” Tony replied with a grin. “But the point is that you and I need to have a talk about how to handle the PR end of this thing before I do anything with it.

Pepper recovered and studied the display. Without turning away, she made a note on her very custom tablet. “Depends on the final design, and more importantly, what you want to do with it.”

“For starters, blowing up everything the Ten Rings own, everything with an SI logo that Stane sold under the table. And yes, I’ll have  to tell the people on the ground first, and that things will explode before I go public”

“That’s about all we can expect, I think. But Tony… going public? All the way?”

He’d never said that to her, but apparently, she knew him as well as he’d thought she did.

“Honestly, the whole secret squirrel shit has landed me in that cave in the first place, and right now I’m not fond of creating even more secrets. Nope, done with that for now.”

He’d be lying if that was all that there was to it, or that he wasn’t looking forward to bragging about his newest creation.

Pepper made it obvious that she knew that by what she said next. “You do realise that everyone will see it as an ego trip, nothing else.”

“True, but not going public would loose us control of the narrative completely, and this way I can openly throw our PR people behind the suit’s public image.”

“Point that,” Pepper replied, still studying the image.

“Two or three more weeks and it’s going to be ready,” Tony said proudly.

She looked up. “And the other thing?”

He snapped his fingers and then reached for one of his custom thumb drives. “It’s time to go meet your FBI contact. We have the smoking gun we need to take down Stane.”

tbc

Chapter Text

The meeting with Agent Caffrey took place in a small, out of the way office building that had an underground car park, allowing Pepper and Tony to attend without being seen entering through the main entrance.

Once in the conference room, Tony quickly decided that Pepper had been right in her description of Agent Caffrey, if anything she had understated how whip-smart he was, as if specifically made for the job he was doing.

After introductions were exchanged, it didn’t take them long to get to why they were in this small-ish room.

“I’m aware of what Miss Potts and Colonel Rhodes discovered after the first tip, but how did you know before they told you?” Caffrey asked as Tony was outlining events so far. “I mean the weapons cache you saw in Afghanistan is a give-away, granted, but how does that translate into Stane being the culprit?”

Tony knew that Caffrey asked because he wanted to know his reasoning, so he decided to cut down the snark.

“Because it wasn’t a few crates of the old rifles we shipped there as military aid in the 80s, Agent Caffrey,” he said. “It was top-tier, high end and recent stuff. From guns to way too many of the Osiris Anti-Tank missiles we developed for the Army less than two years ago. I didn’t get a chance to look at serials, but I’m willing to bet real money that none of it was more than a few months old. What’s more, the weapons system they wanted to me to make for them is still in the ‘hand-built prototype’ stage.”

Tony frowned.

“Granted, I didn’t make the connection with Stane, or rather allowed myself to make it until Colonel Rhodes told me what had happened state-side, but it makes sense. He’s the only person other than me who had the full plans of that prototype and knew what it could do.”

Caffrey nodded and tapped his fingers on cheap metal surface of the table. “Point there, Doctor Stark. And just so I’m getting this right, you discovered actual criminal acts?”

“Of a sort, and that evidence is far from ironclad.”

“But we believe that it was enough to approach you and call in the authorities,” Pepper added.

Tony outlined what they had on the stolen ARC reactor funds and what else Tony had discovered with his own digging.

“It could be argued that his evidence, on top of being thin is inadmissible because it wasn’t recovered by law enforcement. It’d be the sort of legal bullshit that has sunk more than a few cases over the years,” Caffrey replied when Tony was done. “Chain of custody rules exist for a good reason, for all that they can be annoying at times.

Tony glanced at Pepper and she nodded for him to go on.

“We realised that we’d gone at this from the wrong angle in that regard. Stane isn’t stupid, and nor will his lawyers be. And we also realised that this would mean that he wouldn’t have a neatly written list of his illegal dealings just sitting on the SI systems, waiting for us to find them.”

JARVIS had still checked, but come up empty, at least as far as actually illegal things were concerned.

“So we began to wonder how, assuming Stane is the leak, he would divert entire missile systems and so many guns without anyone noticing. Unless he’d paid off or pressured literally everyone in the supply chain after manufacturing is done…. So we began to check the distribution pipeline database on our end. A few days ago, we hit on how it was done. The short version is that someone in Quality Assurance in our main weapons plant in California [I]is[/I] being paid off to mark things as having ‘failed’ tests on order. Normally product that failed those tests would be destroyed, sometimes useable components would be recycled depending on what exactly wasn’t working. But obviously, Stane allegedly sold the stuff under the table instead. I don’t have exact numbers since we’re still finding more and more examples, but were that person to stop tomorrow, SI’s failure numbers would drop by something like eighty percent in some lines we produce. As soon as we knew what we were looking at and had collected some evidence, we contacted you.”

Caffrey nodded. “Do you have the database with you?”

“Partial copies only,” Tony replied and handed the FBI agent the drive. “We need… no, we hope that the FBI can formally seize this evidence and then find a connection with Stane.”

Pepper took over at this point by way of pulling a piece of paper from her pocket and pushing it over the table to where Caffrey could read it.

“This is a written affidavit signed by Mister Stark and our head counsel, stating that the FBI is allowed access to SI premises and our computer systems in general as far as it pertains to the matter we discussed.”

“Meaning we wouldn’t need a warrant, just an active case file, which we already have thanks to my earlier meeting with Miss Potts and your kidnapping,” Caffrey noted after reading the document. He then studied the contents of the drive, using a laptop presumably brought just in case of something like this.

The FBI man frowned at first and then, with an ever more predatory grin as he read on, he took in what JARVIS, Pepper, Rhodey and Tony had discovered. When he was done, he looked up at his two guests.

“What do you have in mind?”

Tony shrugged. “That’s up to your people, Special Agent. All I really want is that Stane doesn’t get off on some technicality. He’s currently in the country, unlike the last time we spoke, and while Stane will not have the assistance of the SI legal team, he privately holds the means to mount a more than credible defence and to just disappear to a country without an extradition agreement.”

“Can’t say that I blame you, Doctor Stark,” Caffrey said and all of a sudden seemed apprehensive. “I hate to have to ask this, but any idea on why? Motive, that is?”

Tony glanced at Pepper, and she nodded once more.

“Under the condition that this remains as confidential as possible?”

Caffrey nodded and Tony took a deep breath. He prepared to reveal some of his deepest thoughts on the matter, thoughts he’d ever only shared with Pepper, Rhodey and Happy.

He let the breath out. “I don’t like speculating, but I suspect that it’s greed, Agent. Not just for being able to bathe in Franklins, but… the company. Stark Industries is famous for our Defence and Aerospace divisions, but we make a lot more than  guns and airplane parts for the military. Prosthetics, telecommunications, software development, renewable energy and even media and entertainment. That’s before pure R&D efforts. I suspect that had I died and Stane been given effective control over my estate and the company, we’d see most of that sold off or shut down outright in short order and literally everything put into Defence and Aerospace. Stane always saw those other things as a needless distraction and a poor use of the company’s… my time, since before my father died. But after the end of the Cold War, SI had to diversify, so there wasn’t too much he could do. Until now, it seems.”

Tony exhaled another deep breath. “Stane doesn’t have the financial means for an outright takeover, and he’s too smart to risk involving someone like, say Justin Hammer or OsCorp even if they were willing. It’s more even on the Board of Directors, but even there he’s not got the sort of support he’d need to side-line me, never mind get be thrown out.”

He shuddered at the thought of what might have happened if Rhodey and Pepper hadn’t been tipped off and started investigating while he was still gone. Angrily tapping a tattoo on the table, he considered mentioning his suspicion that Stane was behind his Afghan adventure, but there was nothing they’d found that indicated that, and he the last thing he needed was the FBI investigating with even more confirmation bias than they had already. And it was something intensely personal.

But Caffrey was a shrewd investigator and knew what questions to ask. “Is there any chance he was involved with… Afghanistan?”

Clearly, not someone to be underestimated, for all that it was a pretty obvious conclusion to come to.

“Not that we can prove, let’s put it that way and leave it at that,” Tony said. 

“It’s just… when we find something does, it’ll have to go into the case file and will likely go public,” Caffrey added.

Which was far from ideal when you looked at it from a shareholder’s perspective and how the general public viewed the company, but Tony was far more interested in ensuring that Stane rotted behind bars and saw him take SI to new heights.

“That will not be an issue,” Pepper said before he could. “Stark Industries is far more interested in seeing justice done.”

And, as she left unsaid, it might help sell SI’s changes to the defence sector to the shareholders, as well as the expansion to the media sector, if the rumours he’d heard come out of a certain part of Hollywood were true. He may have made that investment more to piss off his father than any other reason, but by now it had grown on him a lot.

Caffrey meanwhile jotted down some notes. “Okay,” he said with a grin that had to have made him the bane of fathers up and down the land as a teen. “This is how I suggest we do it…”

tbc

Chapter Text

The small Army base was large enough to serve the four co-located units well, but Jonah was still happy he’d gone through the security cordon to meet who he and Urich were there to see with little issue. It was a meeting he was looking forward to, both because it could potentially fill in some gaps in the information they had and because it was the next best thing to a first-hand eyewitness to one fairly important aspect of MCU canon/fanon.

He’d always planned to reach out to that unit,. But when he had found out who was currently in command, there had been no way he wasn’t doing so ASAP.

“You really didn’t know?” Urich asked, voice low more by habit than for any other reason. 

“Not until I looked up their website on a hunch,” Jonah replied, before stopping in front of the CO’s official residence. 

They were being expected, and the man in question was awaiting them in full BDU’s, black Infantry beret and jump wings included. So Jonah parked the rental car and they walked up to the house before respectfully shaking the man’s hand.

“Mister Jameson, what can the 107th do for you?”

“General Morita, as I said on the phone, it’s more about what the 107th did during World War Two.”

They had discussed this on the phone, and Jonah strongly suspected that the reason why Morita had agreed to the meet was because he’d sworn up and down that his interest had nothing to do with any deployments the 107th Infantry (Air Assault) Brigade  had undertaken after 1950.

The unit’s storied history since then was very interesting in it’s own right, but not worth risking Morita’s ire, his cooperation was too potentially important.

The General invited them into his living room and Jonah couldn’t help notice a picture of his grandfather in pride of place, similar to the one his MCU counterpart had had in his office. 

Other than that it was what was to be expected of a semi-representative space like this and Jonah noted that the unit and general military memorabilia all around.

The one that stood out was a picture that showed Morita as a junior officer, presumably around Gulf One, going by the classic desert camouflage pattern he wore and the middle-eastern architecture in the background. What made it stand out was the other person in it. Wearing generic desert tan sans any sort of military insignia and appropriately gruff face was one other than goddamn Wolverine. 

Jonah grinned and made yet another entry on the long list of questions he wanted to ask and people he desperately wanted to talk to.

Before he could do anything else, Morita offered them cups of coffee that were gratefully accepted. 

Once so equipped and seated around the coffee table, Morita spoke first.

“What can I tell you  that the 107th official history couldn’t?”

Jonah liked how the general was straight to the point. He glanced at Urich and launched into his prepared story.

“The mini-series we’re planning is going to be four ninety-minute episodes. Two, three and four  are going to be the events on the day of, search operations in the aftermath and how things stand today respectively. Now episode one is why we’re here, General. That one is meant to establish background, and not only on Captain Rogers and Agent Carter, but also the rest of the unit. And what’s more, we ant to look… beyond the propaganda the Army spat out at the time. What Rogers was really like.”

Morita raised both eyebrows. “Beyond the shield, as it were?”

Jonah nodded and laughed. “That so happens to be the episode title, General. Now I’m not looking to topple monuments here, but I think that it’s high time for a realistic assessment. We figured that the best chance for that is to reach out to the original members of the unit that worked closest with Captain Rogers, or their families. We have people doing that elsewhere in the US and in Europe, but Mister Urich and I had a work trip to Canada anyway and figured we could do this one ourselves.”

“Fair point,” Morita replied with a smile. He emptied his mug in one go and sighed. “You do realise what sort of status Steve Rogers has with this unit?”

“I do, Sir.”

It was impossible to miss. The moment Jonah had discovered that the 107th had survived the post-war cuts and also made the jump to the regular Army in the run-up to the Vietnam War, he’d checked out their website. Cap was all over that thing.

Hell, Cap was  likely the reason why the unit still existed in the first place.

“We’re not making a true crime tell-all series, General. I promise you that. But I think the people of America deserve to finally know, don’t you think?”

That line was a calculated gamble, but one J. Jonah Jameson wanted to know too, and if his theories about First Avenger vs. what Cap had been like in that disastrous first meeting he’d had with Tony Stark in the MCU were possibly true or not.

He’d tried his best to convey his motivations to Morita, at least as far as that was possible.

“I want to form my own picture of Steven Grant Rogers, General. If I want Captain America, I can go to the Army press office.”

“Luckily for you then that I was very close to my grandfather, Mister Jameson.”

“Thank you.”

Urich, who was mostly there to take notes and write down details that Jonah might miss, nodded and Jonah knew that he was ready.

Morita wordlessly half-turned in his seat and reached fo what turned out to be a photo album. He opened it on a page about a third of the way in and turned it around before pushing it to Jonah.

It was a set of two grainy black and white pictures dating back to the 2nd World War. Outside of a generic barracks building, there was a group of soldiers, with Captain America and Agent Carter in the middle of it all. Some of them wore a mixture of various Allied uniforms and civilian clothing and many sported various wounds, Morita the elder included.

“This is him with the prisoners he liberated from that first HYDRA base, taken the day after they got back. Some of them went home or back to their parent units already, but Rogers asked for this to be taken as a memento for their shared victory. Most of them accepted, so there it is.”

Morita waited for a while as Jonah and Urich examined the picture.

“What I mean to say is that my grandfather always spoke well of him. Steve Rogers was nothing if not humble about what he did. He was… You know how he got his rank?”

Jonah frowned. “As far as we could find out, after he completed basic, Rogers served as a PFC for a few months before being bumped all the way to Captain by way of an Executive Order from Roosevelt?”

With a chuckle, Morita glanced at his grandfather’s picture.

“To hear Grandpa tell it, the rank was ever only going to be a propaganda thing, meaning a name and not a real rank. But Howard Stark liked Rogers and badgered FDR until he gave in and had him bumped up. Rogers hated that. Make no mistake, he had the leadership ability that he needed and was smart enough to listen to his NCOs when required, but a trained officer he wasn’t, and he knew it. In fact, he also hated that he had to wear a uniform and rank he hadn’t earned  and grandpa always claimed that he once accidentally overheard Rogers telling Sergeant Barnes that he wanted to either go Mustang the hard way after the war or straight-up leave the Army.”

As it was, far from the delusional, self-absorbed and megalomaniacal prick the Team Tony side of the MCU fandom had sometimes painted him as, Jonah noted.

“See, that’s the sort of thing you’d never get from official channels, General.”

“Not what you expected, then?”

“Not really, no. But I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Morita seemed surprised himself, so Jonah elaborated.

“When I was a lot younger, I did one of the last interviews Neil Armstrong gave before he had enough of the moon hoaxers, and he’s a lot like that.”

“Often the most humble people are our greatest heroes,” Urich interjected and the others nodded.

Eventually Morita broke the ensuing silence. “Rogers also hated the Nazis with a passion worthy of the Blues Brothers. And… it was what, three weeks between Barnes being killed and their HYDRA intel source spilling the beans for that attack where he was killed himself? Grandpa said that during that time he really hated the Nazis.”

Jonah made a mental note not to chauffeur Rogers around in a Mercedes when the time came. And if HYDRA was ever stupid enough to try open recruitment, hopefully someone would record that event.

“Sounds in line with what Captain America is supposed to be like, doesn’t it?” Morita said and Jonah found himself nodding.

“And so much more, General.”

For another hour, the two reporters sucked Morita’s head dry of any information he had. Most of it just confirmed what they already knew or filled in some gaps. 

But Urich was the one who also brought up the other thing Jonah had wanted to ask.

“Just one more thing, General,” he said. “I did most of the ground work in Norway, and one of the locals there told me a story that you might be able to confirm for me.”

He outlined the Peggy Carter story that had prompted this trip to start with.

“I don’t think I can tell you a lot,” Morita cautioned, “but Grandpa went to Norway off-book around that time…”

Confirmation? Possibly. Enough for Jonah to dig, even if he hadn’t planned on doing that already.

Eventually, when they had politely declined an invitation for dinner on the grounds for having a connecting flight to catch and were leaving the base, Jonah could think of only three words.

‘Comic Book Shenanigans.’

tbc

Chapter Text

Jonah felt a certain level of deja-vu when he was waiting in yet another meeting room. The difference was that Ben Urich was with him, and that this was the Canadian Ministry of National Defence, hence why the coffee was from the Tim Horton’s downstairs and the room was festooned with memorabilia from the likes of Vimmy Ridge, part of the World War One Centennial.

Like their American counterparts, the Canadians had been surprisingly helpful, though Johna privately suspected that if Peggy Carter had been more than an also-ran footnote in the history of this Universe’s SHIELD, that would have been different.

So when the files were brought to them for study, he expressed his thanks and the two American reporters set to work.

“Her file is a lot thinner than Roger’s,” Urich noted. “Though I can’t say that I’m surprised. Carter spent most of the war seconded to our side of the Atlantic, and most of the work she did is still classified.”

Jonah agreed, and noted that while surprisingly little of the record was blacked out, a lot of it was incredibly vague. 

“Well, we’d likely get more detailed information if we asked the Brits,” he said next and made a mental note to look into that should it become necessary. 

They quietly worked along, taking notes as they went, and in the end it was Urich who found it.

“Chief, you remember her date of death from our research in Washington, right?”

“Yeah. 9th June 1947.”

With both eyebrows raised, but no spoken words, Urich turned the page over to his chief.

“That’s…” was all he said, minded of potential extra ears in the room. It was a difference exactly two months to the date of death in her US records. Technically within the margin for a clerical error, but the way another, now illegible date had been crossed out and drawn over with different-coloured ink and the second date applied with the same sort of ink added up to something slightly suspicious.

The two reporters exchanged looks, but by mutual unspoken consensus, they decided to let sensitive questions wait and instead set to studying what little else was there.

Less than two hours after they had set foot in the building, they were already driving off the parking lot.

“There’s a couple of things I’d like to know,” Jonah said once he had managed to convince the cheap, out of date GPS device of their cheap rental car that yes, he wanted to go to that cemetery. “Firstly, clerical error or deliberate futzing of the records, here or in the US, secondly, the latter, why, thirdly, who, fourthly, why did she never return to the UK after the SSR was disbanded but before SHIELD became a thing? Did she expect to get a post there and something happened? Fifthly, what the hell is going on here.”

Urich chuckled. “I have a likely answer for the third one. When you distracted the clerk, I managed to sneak a look at the access log and just before the supposed Norwegian Zombie adventure, took place, someone calling himself Edvin Jarvis accessed the file twice in the span of few days.”

Jonah expressed surprise that he didn’t really feel. Quite the opposite in fact. CBS. Comic Book Shenanigans.

“Edwin Jarvis? As in Howard Stark’s loyal sidekick after the war?” he said out loud.

“Either him or Stark using it as a cover identity.”

Jonah sighed as he stopped the car at a traffic light.

“Urich, supposing that for some reason Howard Stark saw the need to change the record of her time of death. Ignore why for a moment an instead ask yourself why the quote-unquote corrected date was put in here but he then failed to do so in the US?”

“Call me suspicious, Chief, but didn’t some Soviet operative frame him for the Rosenberg leaks around that time or something?”

“Fennhoff, yes.” Jonah wasn’t sure how true to actual events the story Stark had perpetuated was. Old Man Stark had been cleared of all involvement in the infamous case of nuclear espionage of course, but it had been close until the discovery that the evidence had been forged. Possibly even enough that this error had slipped through in the haste of everything that had been going on. Did the sequence of events that the public hadn’t been told include a side trip to Canada while everyone was looking for him around New York and Florida?
 
The entire mess had soured Howard Stark on working directly for the Government to the point that he had left SHIELD behind entirely for contract work and why he had told McCarthy where to stick it when the HUAC had asked for his help.

“Means whe have to talk to the current Stark, Chief.”

“No ‘wild goose chase’ comments?”

Urich shrugged. “Normally that’s what you say, and I can’t hear you saying it.”

“Which is true,” Jonah conceded and then concentrated on weaving the car through a massive roadworks site.

“I was going to approach Stark at the right time,” he said, ‘After the Iron Man debut’ was what he thought. “But you make a good point, Urich. Not going to be easy though.”

“Sure won’t.”

The bad relationship between Tony Stark and his father had been an open secret since the early 90s, and for all that Jonah hoped that ‘his’ Tony Stark was more like the one from the Iron Man trilogy rather than the wider MCU, he had no way of knowing.

“Want me to do it?” Urich asked but Jonah shook his head even though he appreciated the sentiment. 

“No, but thanks. This is one I need to do myself, like that trip to Westchester after we’re done here. I have a… very tacit understanding with some people inside Stark Industries, and if anyone burns those bridges, it’d be best if I do it myself.”

By then they turned into the street to their destination.

His employee/friend changed the subject. “Carter’s death certificate in the file matches the Canadian date too.”

The American copy hadn’t. 

“Well, we can assume that something is going on, but I would like to talk to Stark first before we go any further, never mind publish. We’re far from ready for that.”

“That we are, Chief.”

^^--^^--^^

Sam quietly parked the cheap rental hatchback a few rows down from the two reporters and got out of the car before they did, acting as if he was getting something out of the back as Jameson looked over the parking lot he’d never been on before.

“Control, this is Falcon. Subjects have arrived at the cemetery. I’m following them in.”

^^--^^--^^

Jonah had to admit, Wilson was good. Had it not been for his long-standing habit of getting the lay of the land when he went to new places like this and his expectation that SHIELD would take an interest, he wouldn’t have spotted the tail. As it was, he’d lost him again the moment they had stepped through the front gate.

He’d thought that Sam ‘Falcon’ Wilson was in the Army at this point, not working for SHIELD, but then, Jonah didn’t have any evidence either way. He’d never really bothered looking into the various Avengers just yet, having way too many things to do closer to home.

The grave they were here to see was at the back, nestled against the cemetery wall between family plots and other veterans from World War Two and Korea. It was far better maintained than any of them, and Urich, who had sad experience with this sort of thing, judged that it had been taken care off no more than two or three weeks ago. Jonah was tempted to go and ask who paid for that once they left here but decided that it was pointless. If this was something that had been done regularly since the 1940s, then the company doing it would be very discreet and the paper trail would likely lead to either Stark Industries or SHIELD anyway. Neither of them would be forthcoming.

The gravestone itself was a humble thing with a simple inscription.

Margaret Elizabeth ‘Peggy’ Carter

April 9, 1921 - August 9, 1947

‘Who dares, wins’

Someone had even included the winged dagger insignia.

Knowing what he wanted to do, Jonah looked around, but couldn’t see Wilson anywhere, so he spoke.

“Good Afternoon, Agent Carter. I hope you don’t mind that we’ve come here, but I wanted to pay my respects, so did my colleague. We’ve found a few things worth going after and were in the neighbourhood.”

And then he decided that it was time.

“And I think there is a chance that Steve Rogers is still out there, after a fashion.” he whispered.

tbc

Chapter Text

The slightly snowy driveway was unmarked except for a cast-iron gate along with a numbered mailbox and a low natural stone wall that disappeared between the trees along the road. Behind the late Victorian gate, a gravel driveway snaked off into the woods whose red maple and spruce trees hid the mansion from view even at this time of the year, almost another mile from the road.

Jonah had actually driven past the gate once already, questioning turning up like with a potential SHIELD tail, but the road was dead straight for several miles and he’d not seen another vehicle of any sort or people on foot. He’d left North Salem an hour ago, and if Fury decided that he’d invest in a drone or something like that instead of Sam Wilson, then there was nothing he could do anyway.

To the left of the mailbox, there was an unassuming doorbell with a small speaker beneath, so he took a deep breath, got out of the car before walking over and pressing the button.

“Yes, who is it?”came a distinct, female voice.

“J Jonah Jameson, I have an appointment with Professor Xavier.”

When an immediate response failed to materialize, Jonah was ever so slightly worried. But the gate opened a few seconds later and after returning to his car, he drove through and followed the driveway.

When the trees opened up to the open grounds around the mansion, Jonah was quietly impressed. The grounds were well kept and in summer would be a mix of various plants and open spaces, while the building itself was a gilded age mansion with two l-shaped wings around a central, domed core. Not really any one iteration Jonah was familiar with, but probably closest to the 90s cartoon version.

At the front entrance, he was met with two very distinct individuals.

“Beast and Storm.” Jonah whispered to himself, chuckling at never really getting used to meeting what had once been fictional characters. The former especially looked entirely unremarkable in ‘normal human mode’, but Jonah still knew to be careful.

“Mister Jameson?” Mc Coy asked as he approached on foot.

“Indeed.”

“Hank Mc Coy, Deputy headmaster, and Doctor Munroe, one of our teaching staff. You are here to see the professor?”

“I am, Deputy Headmaster. Entirely off the record, and as I said on the phone, you have my word of honour that none of this will be published in any form without your prior permission.”

Mc Coy tilted his head to the side and Jonah wondered how he kept to his human form. Was it that holographic mcguffin from the comics? Was it a serum he had developed as per ‘Days of Future Past’? Or something he could somehow control at will?

“Follow us then, please. You know about his mobility issues?” he asked.

‘Likely more than anyone but you or him’ Jonah thought but nodded.

“I am, yes.”

Xavier rarely left the mansion, but there were just enough small public appearances, mostly within the county, so that Jonah didn’t have to explain any further.

I didn’t expect him to meet me in person, Doctor Mc Coy,” Jonah said, revealing that he had done his research as far as their outward personas went.

“Very well then.”

He followed the two inside and through the mansion. It was cleared of students and teaching staff alike, though Jonah figured that most were in class at this time of day and would later swear that at one point he saw Rogue not quite hiding in a side corridor. Up on the second floor, they entered a wide circular room, underneath the glass and wrought-iron dome. On the far side of the room there was a set of heavy wooden doors, and even if there hadn’t been an X-shaped pattern worked into them, it would still have been obvious who was behind those doors.

He turned out to be correct once they had entered the office beyond.

“Mister Jameson,” Xavier said, “have a seat.”

Thank you, Professor.”

Jonah took a seat and quietly observed the office as he did so. Hardwood panels and stuffed bookshelves dominated the room, with the exception of a large window behind him that reminded Jonah of a stylized compass rose.

“Though I do owe you an apology. While it’s true that the Bugle Group wishes to produce a multi-media feature series about your school in our… ongoing war against the Friends of Humanity and their ilk, this is not the only reason why I request to speak to you personally.” Jonah paused, noting that Beast and Storm had taken position to either side of the doors, not that he could fault them for not entirely trusting him, the Bugle Group had a bad reputation to get rid of, after all. Not Elliot Carver levels of bad, but he’d been on the way there.

“How so?” Xavier asked, and Jonah did his best to project honesty, just in case.

“My change of heart is genuine, Professor. Mutants, Mutates, Enhanced, Tech-enhanced, whatever else is out there and define them as what you will, we are all human beings and we all deserve the same rights and treatment as anyone else.”

“We have all seen the picture where you are shaking hands with Spider-Man, so I’m willing to believe you for now. But… does that include criminals?”

“Break the law, face the consequences,” Jonah replied with a shrug. “Super-powered criminals require treatment according to their powers or whatever abilities they have, and that to keep some of them contained, special measures are needed. But as humanely as possible and within the constraints of the law.”

Prison reform was not a topic he wanted to touch today, so he left it at that.

“What most people don’t know is that… let’s be diplomatic and say that I was gifted knowledge of, among other things, how literally apocalyptically horrible this can end unless we act now, and what some of your faculty and students do as extracurriculars. It also let me recognize Mystique when she was checking out the Bugle Offices a few weeks ago.”

The latter line especially was a calculated risk, and not only because he couldn’t prove it was her. Also because while Magneto was somewhat well known as a domestic terrorist, the mutant angle wasn’t, for reasons that he had yet to discover.

“Are you certain?” a visibly surprised Xavier asked.

“Beast and Storm are back there, and I’m pretty sure I saw Rogue in the building earlier. He can turn into a furry, blue and very strong person, while Storm can control the weather to great effect. And you yourself… arguably, you have the most powerful mind on the planet. If you wanted, you could easily read my mind, though I’d rather you didn’t. There a´re aspects to how I came to know all this that I will not discuss until and unless we are alone.”

He turned in his seat. “No offence.”

“Not the most powerful, Mister Jameson. Perhaps the most skilled, however. I can see why you wanted to speak to us, however. How far does that knowledge extend?”

There was Jean Gray, but she was a different kind of powerful.

“To borrow from the retail industry, very wide across the multiverse, but often not particularly deep. To illustrate, I know of what feels like dozens of versions of this school, but not all your students, their names, powers or any other details. Basically it’s varying levels of ‘some’ about a whole lot, if that makes any sense?”

Xavier nodded slowly, but with a frown. “Somewhat. But that begs the question of what you wish to do with that knowledge? Beyond what you have already told us.”

“Aside from keeping some of the multiversal constants from ever being a thing? It depends on what is in some of the gaps, Professor. Some of it is bad, end of the world bad,” Jonah stressed again. “While the worst, most annoying to deal with problem is not one in this universe, it still doesn’t lack for potential issues that we have a real chance of heading off at the pass. And to do that I need your help, both to fill in some of the gaps and in other ways in the future when things inevitably do not go to plan.”

He sighed. “I’m doing my best in New York and where my assets let me reach, but there’s only so much I can do on my own.”

“It’s about Mutants, isn’t it?” Storm asked. Jonah had half forgotten she was there.

“In part, yes. Though before I can go into details on the one most closely connected to this school, some of the gaps need to be filled.”

“You need to work out what… version of the problem applies here.”

Beast was right, though Jonah wondered why they seemed to believe him so readily, in spite of what he’d said already. Perhaps it was because Xavier seemed to, though in the end, it didn’t really matter.

“There is a possibility it has already been dealt with or is something entirely unrecognizable, and there is a good chance that only one person knows enough to let me deduce which it is.”

Which was Jonah’s roundabout way of trying to find out if some approximation of the plot of the movie version of ‘Days of Future Past’ had happened.

“And who would that person be?” Xavier asked, which prompted a grin from Jonah.

“James Howlett, aka Logan, aka Wolverine.”

Jonah paused for effect.

“I know he exists in this universe as not too long ago, I spoke to someone about another matter I’m trying to resolve and that person has a picture of Logan from around the first Gulf War. And yes, I’m sure it’s him, as not only does he age very slowly, but he also looks like the version I’m the most familiar with.”

He had told a little white lie. His Earth 1218 half had consumed much more than the X-Men movies, but he had lucked out with the picture in Morita’s living room, as it was very unlikely that an Australian actor who looked a good decade and a half older than he would have been at the time would have run into a very specific American military officer in the middle of a warzone.

Xavier nodded slowly. “I think that you are telling the truth as far as you know it, Mister Jameson. Which is why I will call Logan here.”

He looked past Jonah, and seconds later the doors moved.

One step down.

tbc

Chapter Text

“You wanted to see me, Professor?”

Jonah recognized the gruff voice without looking, even though the Canadian accent was a bit more pronounced than what he remembered.

“Yes, there is someone who is making a number of extraordinary claims, and has requested your presence for some more.”

Logan only looked down at the still seated Jonah once introductions had been made, and leaned against the wall at the Professor’s side before proceeding to blow Jonah’s mind.

“Jameson, huh? I’ve met your grandfather in the war, in a cold as hell foxhole outside of Bastogne.”

Jonah blinked rapidly, not having expected to be caught blindsided like that and collected his senses. Clearly, Logan had been told that Jonah knew things, and his background was different from the OG X-Men movies. How did Sabretooth figure into that?

“506[SUP]th[/SUP] Parachute Infantry Regiment, Baker Company,” Jonah said and couldn’t help a chuckle.

“But I shouldn’t be surprised. Very recently, I saw a picture of you from around Desert Storm in the living room of someone almost entirely unrelated to why I am here. You do get around.”

With a snort, Logan waved that away. “I was attached to that Company when Taylor took the Division in.”

Jonah shook his head in a smile and made a mental note to go through his grandfather’s things from the war some time.

“Thank you, I suppose, because my dad was the classic Baby Boomer. But…”

He glanced at Xavier, silently asking for permission. After getting a nod, he spoke.

“This my sound odd, but I need to ask you some questions. Sometimes in general, sometimes a bit… personal. If I go too far, just let me know. And this goes for all of you, because maybe you can answer some of it as well.”

Logan nodded agreement and Jonah took a deep breath.

“Does the name Bolivar Trask mean something to any of you?”

The response was both obvious and surprising. They clearly knew him, but Jonah sensed less of the loathing he had expected.

“Why do you want to know, Mister Jameson?”

Taken slightly off-guard by Logan’s clipped, almost angry response, Jonah swallowed.

“Because in many ways, that man is one of the root causes of the issues mutants and the enhanced face, Mister Logan, in almost all versions of my knowledge. People like General Ross or the Friends of Humanity are, mostly, a symptom rather than the issue itself. I looked into him, and it was frustratingly hard to find any sort of information about him. It’s as if he vanished in the mid 1970s.”

He paused for effect.

“That being said, was there an attempt on his life and-or that of Richard Nixon in 1973?”

The way Logan, McCoy and Xavier exchanged looks was rather telling, especially in the light of there only being cryptic references to a disturbance during an event on the White House lawn in late May of that year.

“What’s that to you?”

Jonah scratched his forehead and sighed. “I dearly wish I’d never heard the name, believe me. But… in one version, that moment was the start of a very slippery slope that lead to… the End. The end of everything. Not just because it convinced the Government to fund Trask’s Sentinel Programme as a… I don’t really know why, out of fear, most likely? The Sentinels are, most often, a device, a weapon designed to hunt down and eradicate people like you. Doesn’t matter if the target has the X-Gene active like you all do, or was enhanced after birth by means like was the case with, say, Captain America or Spider-Man back in New York. Even if the victim only carries the X-Gene and would pass it on to their children without ever activating it themselves, they are a target. Most often they take the shape of humanoid robots.”

Jonah sighed and tapped the side of his head. “There are several versions of the universe in here. And in several of them the Sentinels succeed in their task to almost apocalyptic levels. The two I personally consider the worst are one where the world is ruled by a dictatorship founded on the worst sort of racial purity… and the other saw complete societal, environmental and biological collapse. Think of Hollywood’s worst imaginings of nuclear winter and the end of all life on Earth. That last one runs in my nightmares like a movie, a scene wherein the remnants of the X-Men and their non-enhanced allies fight a last stand.”

No response.

“Needless to say, a possibility I want to avoid,” he added.

“With you there,” Logan grunted, and the others nodded. “Bolivar Trask was someone we had… issues with back then, at least until he vanished in the early 80s.”

Jonah raised his eyebrows.

“That vanishing… back in 1973, Trask was trying to manipulate the Mutants in general and Magneto in particular into attacking the Paris peace talks. Both to extend the war and to paint Mutants in a bad light. On top of that, Mystique was supposed to attack Nixon as an obvious Mutant, but… I wasn’t with the School yet, but got caught up in it by accident. I ran into her. Things happened and the Professor and Magneto arrived.”

Xavier took over.

“Magneto and I already were enemies at that point, but we both realised how terrible and obvious mutant attack on the President would be, even if Nixon was caught in the later stages of Watergate at the time. For once, we wanted the same things by the same ways. Trask’s part in all this was revealed when he approached some of his fellow defence contractors and he fell out of grace.”

“How?” Jonah asked with a frown.

“The exact details are unknown, but we know that Howard Stark ended up talking to the White House about what Trask had been trying to do, and that was that.”

Jonah sighed internally. One more tick in the ‘Old Man Stark is more complicated than the MCU made him out to be’ list. Though what his motivations and that of the Nixon administration had ultimately been when they had moved against Trask was another matter entirely.

Before he could say anything, Logan added his own angle. “During our fight, Mystique managed to knock me out. I fell into the Potomac, and somehow…”

“Styker?” Jonah just asked and Logan nodded.

“We didn’t figure out that connection until I met the Professor again in the 2000s, though.”

“In any event,” Xavier said, “Trask was blacklisted by the assembly of agencies and government departments. His company, never that big to start with, died within three years, so he desperately joined the private sector. He didn’t resurface again until 1980, when he was tangentially caught in the scandal surrounding the Latverian hostage crisis. As far as the reports suggest, he wasn’t actually involved in that mess, but he’d pissed off enough people by then that some digging was done anyway, skeletons were found and Trask was with even fewer friends now. What broke his neck was his connection to the group that false-flagged another attempt on the President’s life in 1979, but that was thwarted by the FBI. It’s unclear what the exact connection was, but it was enough that he was given a closed-door trial and twenty-five years. In Tookahoona Federal Penetentiary.”

Jonah sighed [I]again[/I]. “I think I know where this is going. Let me guess, when those mercs raided the place to break out the future Doctor Doom in 1983, Trask so happened to vanish or was killed. Since the entire thing was a slap in the face of everyone involved, it was swept under the carpet?”

“More or less, yes, but there’s a lot we don’t know.”

Jonah realised that he could well and truly discard most of the X-Men movie timeline.

“Well,” he said, “That makes most of my planned questions pointless, though there are a few new ones. Those can wait until another time, as a lot are more to satisfy my own curiosity.”

For most people, the Tookahoona prison raid was mostly known for being the first case of super-villainy to be to be hushed up, even if it was a lot more complicated than that.

“I have to say, this meeting has been very illuminating so far,” he said aloud. “In good and bad ways, and because I know that a lot of my knowledge doesn’t apply, or only partially.”

“And you hate that,” Xavier pointed out. “You hate flying blind.

“God yes, so much. Not just in this, but in general.”

Because while with Trask seemingly out of the picture, the strongest, most potentially destructive threats where things like HYDRA and the Devil’s Breath. Both of which were dangerous, but not immediate. Yet equally, there was a good chance that Trask appeared out of nowhere with a surprise Sentinel Army as has beck and call. CBS.

“So anyway, I’d like to---”

Jonah would never complete that sentence, as at that moment, the door do the office burst open. What came through was an eight, to at most ten year old girl with jet-black hair and features that reminded him of someone.

“Daddy, you promised to show me your moves!”

To Jonah’s eternal surprise, it was a slightly frustrated [I]Logan[/I] who answered.

“Laura, you know you’re not supposed to come in here!”

The girl once known as X-23 pouted and Jonah recalled what little he knew about her.

“Well, that is…”

“Not what you expected?” Logan asked, holding Laura in his arms as if she weighed nothing.

“A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.”

Storm chuckled, apparently knowing the quote for what it was.

Logan excused himself and left to take care of his daughter before returning a few minutes later.

“Not what you knew?”

“Not until she is well into her teens, at least in every version I can recall off-hand.”

And under seemingly vastly better circumstances too. Not that he would prey, he knew better than that.

^^--^^--^^

After another two hours of questions, answers and exclamations of varying levels of horror and humour, Xavier and Jonah were alone in the office,

“There’s something else to all this,” Jonah admitted. “That much you know already. But… I think that there is no point hiding it. It’s something I’d like your input on. Not right away, as you will want to study what managed to put together so far.”

He reached into his pocket for a specially made thumb drive. He slid the device over Xavier’s table.

“In the short term, my plan is to fully push the FoH out of New York City and, if possible, New York State, while pulling the people of my city onto our side. All while dealing with a number of other small, or at least local issues. Long-term depends on how things go in the next few months, but I want to turn New York City into a shelter, a save haven for the enhanced, be they Mutants, tech-enhanced or aliens given super powers by the light of our sun. Even if the rest of the country turned into an FoH theme park, the Enhanced would find safety in my city. But to do that, I will need your help and your input.”

“Well, the concept does sound interesting...

tbc

Chapter Text

Jonah found his own car where he had left it and with a satisfied grunt, unlocked it and sat down in the custom leather seats that had cost enough that he still winced when he thought of it, but in ye olden days he’d driven around enough that his back was still glad of it. He turned the key, and the engine started to rumble. Five minutes later, Jonah steered the car out of long-term parking at La Guardia and slowly made his way into the traffic flow towards Manhattan.

Stop and go traffic was the order of the day as he made his way south-west. During the many moments of not moving, Jonah contemplated his visit to the X-Men, and decided that it had been mostly successful. Xavier had been approving of the Shelter City plan, but remained non-committal about actually getting involved for a number of reasons. Some Jonah understood and agreed with, some he didn’t. But there was still time, and as such, Jonah was willing to let it go for now. Xavier would come around, that much he was certain of.

He looked up and saw that he was crossing Bleeker Street.

Very briefly, he contemplated turning off and paying the Wizards a visit, but then and there, he was too tired and looking forward to his own bed. To face Stephen Strange, or whoever was in charge at the moment, he would need his wits about him and not be almost too tired to drive. Thanos wasn’t a thing, so finding out of the Infinity Stones existed wasn’t anywhere near as critical as it would be in the MCU.

So he went straight ahead, towards his building and the aforementioned bed, as this time no one expected him at work.

He didn’t ever see the two black, 3rd generation Escalades with rental plates that would later turn out to be just as stolen as the SUVs themselves.

Jonah noticed something was wrong when one of them pulled ahead of him in defiance of the speed limit. The other pulled up next to him at speed and slammed into the side of his car, pushing it off the roadway and into the side of a building. The car barely missed a number of pedestrians still around at this time of day, braving the cold before coming to rest.

Before Jonah fully had his senses back and could do more than groan and blink away the blood running into his right eye from a superficial cut above, the two SUVs were joined by an equally generic white van. Out of the three cars jumped a number of men, and Jonah instinctively ducked down and scrambled to open the driver-side door, but it was bent just that little bit too much.

He could see that the men were armed with everything from handguns over shotguns and hunting rifles to the one guy carrying an old Stark S-13 assault rifle that would later discovered to have been stolen from from a USCG armoury in 1994.

The gunmen slowly approached the car, and Jonah desperately scrambled to open the door.

And then the gunmen’s leader started to talk. “J. Jonah Jameson! You were put on trial for treason against true humanity and sentenced to death! Do you have anything to say in your defence before justice is handed down?”

Jonah felt the driver’s side door ever so slightly giving way and he prayed that he could hold them up long enough. So the newspaper man responded.

“I DO!” he yelled back and the door opened by a few precious inches.

“I don't recall the country being overthrown by the Nazis, asshole! And I stand by what I said and what I printed. Mutants, mutates and the enhanced in general are our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers and children. They deserve and have the same rights as the rest of us.”

Everything happened all at once. His desperate strength overcame the bent metal of the door and he scrambled out, even as the gunmen yelled in rage and opened fire.

They riddled the car with bullets maybe a second or so after Jonah took cover behind the engine block, the spot with the most metal between him and the people who wanted him dead. To his dismay, he found that he had lost his phone at some point, so his only hope was that…

He didn’t know how long things took, especially once he felt the agony of at least one bullet striking home, but he felt incredible relief when the gunfire let up and he could hear police sirens approaching from the next precinct a few blocks down the street.

Yells of “Cops!” and “NYPD, drop your weapons!” followed, along with a few shots and squealing tyres and Jonah felt nothing but relief and ever mounting anger. They had attacked him!

Some time later, he had given his initial statement and was in the back of an ambulance as the EMTs applied themselves to his various, thankfully non-life threatening wounds.

“Mister Jameson?”

Jonah smiled as he recognised the New York Police Commissioner.

“Ah, Commissioner Gordon, what an unexpected surprise on top of everything else.”

It was still funny.

The son of a Scottish cop from Queens and an African-American waitress from the Bronx was unaware of Jonah’s amusement.

In the past, they had clashed a few times, so Gordon ignored Jonah’s words.

“Mister Jameson, care to tell me why I’m here instead of at the precinct having coffee with my cops?”

Jonah grimaced. “My apologies, Commissioner.”

It was common knowledge that Gordon was the type to try and stay in touch with the street cops he’d been one of back in up until the early 90s, and it was a trait that Jonah appreciated.

“But?”

“But,” Jonah responded, “it seems that my efforts to disassociate myself from the FoH and their views was more successful than I had anticipated.”

He quickly gave Gordon a rundown of events.

“It does sound like them,” Gordon admitted once Jonah was done. “Did you mention that to my officers?”

“No, mostly because I can’t prove it.”

“Being who you are, is this going to stop your… efforts against them?”

“Sure as hell won’t, Commissioner. “FoH or not, these bastards attacked me for exercising my First Amendment rights, so I will not back down.”

With a thin-lipped smile, Gordon thought for a moment and nodded. “Can’t say that I’m surprised, Mister Jameson. Would you accept police protection if so needed?”

Now it was Jonah’s turn to consider things. Given that he knew that a certain duo of wall-crawling heroes was very close to him while having an okayish but still not legally defined relationship with the NYPD…

“It would depend on the circumstances, Commissioner.”

“So a poorly disguised no, then.”

Visibly unhappy, Gordon seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth pushing at this particular moment. Because of that, and because he knew that Gordon was good man and had been a good police officer, Jonah decided to relent, somewhat.

“Doesn’t mean the Bugle Group will not co-operate with the police, should your investigation require.”

‘Within reason’ was left unsaid, though both men knew it was there.

“All I can expect, I think. But what you should remember is that this is… the Federal Agency soup is going to roll up in force. ATF, FBI, take your pick. They will all want to talk to you, and not really care about your need to run a paper and being personally offended.”

Jonah looked over to where his car was being tended to by the FDNY. Not only would he go all-out, but he would also need a new ride.

“So be it, then.”

Hours later, Jonah was sitting up in his hospital bed looking at the layout for the Bugle’s next edition. They had ever so barely managed to get it done in time for the deadline, and Jonah glanced over to where Parker and Watson were watching. For some reason totally not related to them having superpowers, they had been the first of the Bugle’s people to make it to the scene, and Parker had taken the picture that would now grace the next paper.

“Do you really think that’s wise, boss?” Robbie asked, standing next to the two young reporters on the other side of the room.

“I sure do, and so does the rest of this company. Got me?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“These knuckleheads think they can scare J. Jonah Jameson to not exercise his rights and call them out for what they are? They want a full-on, no holds barred war to the knife? Then by god, that’s what they are going to get!”

tbc

Chapter Text

Original image of the car is taken from "The Unit".

Imagine it riddled with bullets.

Chapter Text

He was thinking.

The mansion that sat at the top of the low rise and in the middle of a formerly very substantial estate in northern New Jersey had just enough maintenance done on it to keep up a facade of moderate affluence. The rest of the Hollowbrook Hills estate was slowly being swallowed by nature and the out-of-control gardens that surrounded the mansion and few ancillary buildings that still existed. Most of the surrounding land had been sold off over the years, but enough was left that he only rarely had contact with his neighbours. Not that he wanted to, most of them were nouveau riche New Yorkers that were too fine to even look in the general direction of his once so great family and home.

Just enough maintenance was done on everything to maintain outside appearances, to showing off the facade of affluence that he had to maintain. As a result, he was alone as he sat at a breakfast table he had prepared himself and the only staff he had was a monthly cleaning service.

He could afford more staff and of the trappings of wealth that America wanted to see, but rebuilding his family and his fortune took priority over creature comforts such as that. Making the sort of money he needed took constant re-investment.

But people were still conspiring against him, trying to frustrate his efforts at every turn, and this angered him.

Yet he knew that he needed to plan things through, and that acting rashly was never a good idea. The headline from the Daily Bugle he was reading over breakfast was clear evidence of that. The Friends of Humanity were fools if they thought that the attack on Jameson was anything but counterproductive for their cause.

He wasn't a fan of mutants or the enhanced either, but that wasn't because they were enhanced. He disliked them for personal reasons, and not because of moronic bigotry. Basic racism was not a good reason for anything, especially because of random biology and the march of time. No, he disliked them because some of them really did think themselves superior.

It might be different if Tracy hadn't left him for that bastard mutant science teacher, but it was too late to change that.

All he had left now was Revenge.

He was well-versed in that, though well aware that his inherited propensity and talent for Revenge had helped land his family here and in this situation. Yet… that was all he had left. That or his father's damn-fool crusade, and he had never seen the sense in that.

Not after it had cost him his chance to complete his studies in Europe, forced him to return to America and saddled him with failure after failure after failure.

Sergei shook his head. No more. Not now, not ever. Not while was in charge.

He shook his head and flipped the pages of the paper.

The picture was smaller than it would have been on the front page, but Sergei still studied the two vigilantes as they presided over some shipping containers full of smuggled AK clones from China.

According to the article's author, the two so-called heroes hadn't deliberately intercepted Sergei's shipment. Instead they had been fighting some bank robbers who had tried to flee via the freight terminal and noticed the guns when one of the containers had been damaged in the fighting. Sergei was inclined to believe that, all things considered.

The two clearly were a threat, or would be to his future plans if they got it into their heads to look into any additional shipments that might be out there. Especially as this wasn't the first time they had interfered with his deals.

They would be taken care of once and for all. When though, and how?

Sergei placed the paper down and drank the rest of his coffee as he considered that.

Even before Spider-Man's little girlfriend had appeared and made it worse, the arachnid vigilante had tangentially interfered. Sergei's initial deals with Fisk and Tombstone from a few years ago had been scuppered by Spider-Man, setting his plans back by several years. It hadn't destroyed his connections with those two entirely, but still been a massive blow. The irony was that all this had caused Sergei to step back and thus prevented him from getting caught in the back blast of Fisk's downfall, unlike so many others. In the aftermath of Fisk's exile from New York, Sergei had tried to take advantage of the vacuum, with limited success.

Now?

Now Spider-Man and Arachnia were poised to interfere with his biggest deal yet. By sheer volume, the three containers of Chinese assault rifles weren't all that important, but that shipment had been one of many. Bound to put a seven-figure sum into his coffers for the first time in many years, money that would allow him to purchase back some of the land surrounding the mansion and would further his connections within the New York business world both legal and illegal.

Sergei slammed his fist down on the table, making the breakfast china jump.
Their interference could not be allowed, but…

The matter needed careful preparation, as the last thing he wanted to do was what the likes of the Vulture had done, underestimating Spider-Man. Vulture had fallen off the face of the planet for a reason.

He would not fail, and the Arachnids would be going down.

"Something is fishy about this, Detective."

"How so, Officer?"

Officer Jefferson Davis motioned at where the containers still stood. By now they were empty of the guns that the Arachnids had found by accident.

"Granted, the guns could have come in from anywhere and for any one, but it's the location that's worrying me. Fisk might be gone, but we know how he did… does his gun-running through here. With due respect to Spidey and Arachnia, but if it had been Fisk, then the guns would have been hidden a lot better."

Detective Watanabe looked around. "What makes you say that?"

"Well, the guns were barely hidden at all. That first container broke open, and there they were, still in factory crates with Chinese writing on it. Same with the other two," Jefferson replied, knowing the test for what it was. Fisk on the other hand…."

He shook his head. "I just don't see it. A few years back, I worked a similar, but known Fisk scene, and there the guns were hidden inside legally imported Vietnamese coffee beans. Only reason they were found was because Fisk's inside man got shot over gambling debts and was scared enough to talk to us. Fisk isn't the type to let standards slip like this, especially when he needs all the cash he can get if he's ever go get back to the United States."

It was common knowledge that what the IRS thought was ninety percent of Fisk's nation-wide assets had been seized, including that ostentatious, nearly finished tower that the city was desperately trying to off-load on some energy company. They'd tried to sell it to Stark Industries, but SI had bought and was now tearing down the entire Baxter Building city block.

Watanabe meanwhile considered what Jefferson was saying. "I agree, sorta. Wherever Fisk is, couldn't it be that the people supposed to keep up his local interests decided not to bother?"

"Not his style, Ma'am. Fisk might be gone, but I'm willing to bet you real money that he's still got a fairly tight leash on his local operations. And even if he doesn't, would you want to be the one to tell him that letting standards slip and being stupid caused what's left of his empire being rolled up by the NYPD?"

With a grin and a shake of her head, Watanabe crossed beneath the crime scene tape and inspected the closest container, the one that Spidey had first broken open.

"No I wouldn't, Davis. And granted, I think there's something to what you're saying, because this doesn't smell like a Fisk op to me either."

She touched the spot where the initial hole had been made.

"So what do you think, did they know that Tombstone was trying to do his own thing next door?"

"That's something else that smells, I think. Were Toombstone and Fisk ever jointly operating like this?"

"Not that we were ever aware of. There were rumours about it around the time Captain Stacey was murdered, but nothing ever came of it."

"So… let's… not assume, but let's suppose that what's left of Fisk in New York and Toombstone's gang aren't working together or are being complete morons who forget basic operational security, then who is both connected enough to be able to set up a deal like this and at the same time willing or dumb enough to risk exposure this way? That Dragon themed gang in Chinatown sure wouldn't be, and short of someone new trying to muscle in and failing badly at it, I don't know who it might be. Most of the locals are either too smart or too smalltime."

"And you are wasted as a beat cop, Officer Davis."

"Thank you, Ma'am."

tbc