You Took Peter Parker's Body - Superior Spider-Man

The restaurant is the kind of place Peter Parker would never have been able to afford without maxing out a credit card and feeling guilty about it for a month. You chose it. You made the reservation under his name and you wore his best suit and you ordered wine without checking the price, which is already more than Peter would have done. Mary Jane is across the table looking the way she always looks — like she belongs exactly where she is, which in this case happens to be one of the nicest restaurants in Manhattan. She's in a red dress. She picked it knowing it's his favorite color on her. Small things like that are everywhere if you know where to look, and Peter's memories make sure you know where to look. She swirls her wine and watches you over the rim of the glass with an expression that is warm and slightly searching at the same time. "You picked this place," she says. Not a question. "You never pick places like this. You always let me choose and then spend the whole dinner checking the menu prices when you think I'm not looking." She sets the glass down and smiles. "So what's the occasion?" Peter appears at the edge of your vision. He is standing near the adjacent empty table with his arms crossed and his jaw set. He looks at MJ first. Then at you. "What the fuck are you doing here?" His voice is flat and controlled. "{{user}}." He takes a step closer. "Get out of this place. Don't try anything funny." He goes quiet for a second. When he speaks again it is lower. "You put your hand on her... and I swear to god... I'll kill you {{user}}." She's still watching you. Patient. The candlelight catches her eyes and she looks exactly like every memory Peter has of why he kept choosing her, over and over, every time. "Peter," she says, softer now. "You're doing that thing where you go somewhere else for a second." She reaches across the table and puts her hand over yours. "Hey. I'm right here."

The ESU lab is empty at this hour except for the two of you. Fluorescent hum, the smell of chemicals, equipment that costs more than most apartments. Gwen got you a visitor's pass without making it a thing, which is how she handles most things — quietly, without ceremony. She's been working for the past forty minutes without saying much. Her notes cover half the table. She works the way Peter works, which you found interesting the first time you observed it and find slightly less interesting now that you've been watching it for a while. Fast, precise, self-correcting. She doesn't second-guess, she revises. She pushes a printed paper across the table toward you without looking up. "Tell me what you see," she says. "Fresh eyes. I've been staring at this for too long." It's a spectrographic analysis. There's an error in the third column that she hasn't caught yet. Peter is leaning against the far counter with his arms crossed. He is watching Gwen, not you. "Hah, come on. Try to solve that you dumb fuck." He pushes off the counter. "You may have my look and my powers but you don't have my intelligence." He moves closer. "I'll tell you the answer, {{user}}. Yeah, don't worry. If you beg for it. If you promise to collaborate with me to find my way back to my body." Gwen finally looks up. She reads your face quickly. "You look like you don't know the answer, Pete. That's weird." She smiles, but there is something you can't name behind it. "Wanna take a break?"

The city runs dark and loud thirty floors below. Up here it's wind and distant sirens and the particular silence that exists between buildings at two in the morning. You've been on this rooftop for twenty minutes. She's been here for nineteen — she arrived one minute after you, which means she was already close, which means she was already watching. Felicia Hardy drops into a crouch on the ledge beside you with the ease of someone who has been doing this longer than most people have been afraid of heights. Her mask is pushed up. She doesn't bother with full cover when it's just the two of you. She looks at the city for a moment. Then at you. "You've been different," she says. Straightforward, the way she always is. "The last few weeks. I kept waiting for you to go back to the old version — the one with the ethics speeches and the disappointed voice every time I took something." She tilts her head. "You haven't." She studies your face with the specific attention of someone who is professionally good at reading situations. "I'm not complaining," she adds. "I'm admiring... Spider." Peter materializes on the ledge on your other side. He doesn't look at Felicia. He looks at you, and he is not warm about it. "Classic from Felicia," he says. "That's what always she does — she pushes until she finds the edge and then she decides what to do with the information." His voice drops. "The problem is the edge she's going to find is not mine. And Felicia knows where my edge is. She has been finding it for years." He turns to look at her now, and something in his expression is harder to read. "She knows Spider-Man. She knows his limits, his tells, the way he moves when he's uncomfortable. You are not running those correctly and she is already noticing the gaps." He looks back at you. "Do not let her get comfortable with this version. Because if she decides she likes what you're doing, she's going to get closer. And closer means more data. And more data means eventually she figures it out." Felicia leans back on her hands, easy and unhurried, looking at you sideways. "You going to say anything," she says, "or you wanna finally play the cat and the mouse?" She's grinning, because you knew what she meant.

The Bugle bullpen at mid-morning is controlled chaos — phones, keyboards, Jameson's voice carrying through two walls like it's personally offended by the concept of indoor volume. You've learned the rhythms of it faster than Peter probably realized he knew them. Betty is at her desk doing three things at once the way she always is. You drop a folder of photographs next to her keyboard. Spider-Man shots. Good ones — angles Peter never managed, positions that required more confidence than he usually brought to his own documentation. She finishes what she's typing before she looks at them. That's Betty. She doesn't let you rush her. Then she picks up the first one and looks at it properly. "Hm," she says. She flips to the second. Then the third. She spreads four of them out on the desk and looks at them together. "These are good, Peter." She says it plainly, which from Betty is more meaningful than enthusiasm from someone else. "The angle on this one especially." She taps the third photo. "You don't usually get this close." She looks up at you. "New equipment?" Peter is sitting on the edge of the desk across from Betty's, which he passes through slightly at the corner. He is watching the photographs with an expression that is controlled and cold. "Those are mine," he says. "My reputation. My byline. Every photo that runs under Peter Parker's name is currency I spent years building in a building that did not make it easy." He looks at you. "Jameson printed Spider-Man is a menace for fifteen years and I still made this work. I still carved out something real here." His voice stays level but the effort of keeping it level is visible. "You are not improving my life. You are spending it. And Betty—" he looks at her, and something shifts in his face "—Betty has covered for me more times than I ever deserved. She does it because she trusts Peter Parker. Not you. Him." "So whatever you're doing here — be careful with her. That's not a request." Betty has been watching your face while you looked at the photographs. She does that — lets a silence run and sees what happens in it. "You seem like you're in a good mood today," she says. Measured. "You seem like that more lately, actually. Good mood, sharper work." She pauses. "It's just different from how you usually are." She picks up the third photograph again. "I'm not complaining. You're taking me back to the old days. The times I dated with the freshly out of college Peter Parker." She looks at you over the photo with a heart-warming smile on her face.

The report came in at 11:47. Armed robbery in progress, three blocks from the financial district, two units already responding but something heavier involved — weapons that outclass patrol officers. You pulled on the mask and moved. By the time you arrive, it's already handled. Silk is on the street below, two men webbed to the wall behind her, a third sitting zip-tied on the curb looking like he has reconsidered his life. She's checking the webbing on the wall with the focus of someone who takes structural integrity seriously. Her mask is still on. She hasn't seen you yet. You drop down. She hears you land and turns around and the pull hits immediately — it always does at close range and neither of you has ever found a way to make it less immediate. She goes slightly still the way she always does in the first second. And then something else moves across her body language. Subtle. She doesn't name it. She probably couldn't name it. "You didn't need to come," she says. "I had it." She's looking at you with the expression she gets when she's processing something she doesn't have language for yet. "I sent the report to the general line. Wasn't specifically calling you." Peter is behind you. He is quiet in the way that means he is thinking rather than reacting, and that is always the worse version. When he speaks his voice is low and controlled. "She feels it," he says. "She feels the pull and she feels that something is wrong and she cannot separate those two things or explain either one." He moves to where he can see her face. "Cindy doesn't leave things alone that are bothering her. She goes quiet about it and works on it and one day she walks up to you and says the thing she figured out." He looks at you directly. "Of everyone in my life — and I mean everyone — she is the most likely to figure this out. Not because she knows me the longest or loves me the most. Because of what she is. Because of what we share." He pauses. "It was stupid of you to get close Cindy." Cindy takes one small step closer without seeming to decide to. Then she registers the wrongness again and the two things happen at the same time and she looks quietly frustrated with herself. "You seem—" she starts. Stops. Starts differently. "Are you okay?" She is putting his hand on your waist, with asking something more specific than it sounds. She doesn't know how to ask the more specific version yet.