Chapter Text
You know, in all of his childish daydreams of having superpowers, Peter Parker never would have expected this to be his life.
About eight months back Peter had been bitten by a spider on a field trip and gotten really sick. It sucked. For like a week he could hardly move and when he got up... powers.
After goofing off with his powers for a while, Uncle Ben got killed and Peter became the amazing Spider-Man. Since then the avengers nearly broke up, but apparently talked it out while beating up an old hydra base. Even though they got a couple new avengers on the team, they still took a hit in popularity, so Ms. Potts decided Mr. Stark should get an intern to generate good publicity. Peter would love to say that the spot went to the best man. The smartest applicant. The cream of the crop. But, nope. Instead, the internship of his dreams went to none other than...
“What’s up, Puny Parker!”
Flash Thompson.
That’s right. Peter’s own home-grown, no-good, high school bully, Eugene “Flash” Thompson, had been selected for Peter’s dream internship. Flash's parents had doled out money to make Flash seem like the perfect applicant, so he had been selected to go work with THE Tony Stark. And the best part about it (other than all of Peter’s hopes and dreams being crushed)? Flash’s bullying didn’t stop. If anything, it got worse. Flash had the support of practically the whole school and those who didn’t support him generally stood back in fear.
“Hey, Pete.” Peter’s best friend, Ned, who (like him) ignored Flash’s call, was the only one who knew about his secret identity. He found out about a month ago by accident. He had taken to helping Pete as they slowly developed better tech. “What did you do last night?”
“You know me, just surfing the web.” Peter replied with a small smirk. “I got Karen some new code.” Oh, yeah, Karen, Peter had been working on her for a while but last month Ned helped him with the final touches. She was Peter’s AI who was a slightly more relatable version of Mr. Stark’s Friday. So far she was running smoothly and Peter was continuously adding code and functions to her interface.
“That’s cool, I got that Lego set from my birthday started.” Ned smiled as he talked, happy to be by his friend’s side.
“You guys are such nerds.” Came from Michelle Jones who was a couple lockers to their side. She was an odd one but kind enough and she hated Flash about as much as Peter, so she was in his good books.
“Hey, at least we’re better than some people.” Peter countered, causing Michelle to roll her eyes and walk away.
Peter smiled as he and Ned went to their first class of the day. Things were good. Even if it did hurt to wonder what could have been if things went differently. Things were looking up and Peter was going to keep helping where ever he could. After all, he was Spider-Man.