Archive of Our Own

The last sentinel hit the ground like a felled redwood, sixty feet of purple-and-chrome wreckage folding at the knees and then toppling forward into what used to be a Chase Bank on the corner of Lexington and 42nd. The impact sent a plume of white dust across the intersection and shook car alarms awake for three blocks. Peter felt the vibration travel up through the slab of concrete he was sitting on, a chunk of overpass the size of a delivery truck that had come down early in the fight, and he let it roll through him without moving.

He was too tired to move.

His mask was pulled up to his nose. The lower half of his face was caked in dust and dried blood, some of it his, most of it not. He breathed through his mouth because his nose had been broken about forty minutes ago, sometime between Doc Ock's third tentacle catching him across the face and the moment a sentinel's palm beam had clipped his shoulder and spun him into the side of a city bus. The nose was already setting itself back, cartilage knitting with that deep, itchy heat that meant his healing factor was working overtime, but his ribs were slower. Two of them, maybe three, on the left side. They ground against each other when he inhaled, a sick little click he could feel more than hear, and the skin over them was swollen tight and hot to the touch even through the suit.

He sat there and looked at what he'd done.

Lexington Avenue was unrecognizable for six blocks in either direction. Storefronts gutted. Cars flipped and burning. Fire hydrants sheared off and flooding the gutters with water that ran grey with concrete dust and streaked with something darker where the sentinel fluid had pooled. The air tasted like ozone and copper and melted plastic, and through it all the distant, ragged sound of sirens coming closer, always coming closer, never here when you actually needed them.

The sinister six were scattered across the wreckage like discarded toys.

Vulture was closest. He lay crumpled against the base of a streetlight thirty yards away, his wingsuit sheared off at the harness, both arms bent at angles that arms were never meant to bend. Peter had caught him mid-dive and slammed him into the asphalt hard enough to crater it. He could see the outline of the impact from here, a shallow depression in the road with Toomes's body curled at the centre of it, breathing but not conscious.

Electro was further up the block, face-down in a flooded gutter, his containment suit cracked open and sparking weakly. Peter had shorted him out by driving him bodily into a ruptured water main. Rhino was on his side in the middle of the intersection, the front of his armour caved in like a crushed beer can, wheezing through what Peter was fairly sure were six or seven broken ribs and a collapsed lung. Sandman had been scattered so thoroughly that it would take him hours to pull himself back together. Mysterio's helmet was in three pieces on the sidewalk, and the man himself was zip-tied to a mailbox with industrial webbing, jaw visibly dislocated, out cold.

And Octavius.

Otto was propped against the remains of a taxi cab fifty feet away, all four tentacles sheared off at the harness and lying in separate heaps around him like dead snakes. Peter had ripped them off one by one. He remembered that part clearly. He remembered the sound each one made, the shriek of metal parting from metal, and the way Otto's face had gone white and then grey, the neural feedback hitting him like a stroke each time. Otto's chest was sunken on the left side. His breathing was shallow and wet.

Peter looked at all of it, the broken men and the twisted metal and the six blocks of urban devastation, and felt nothing that resembled satisfaction. His hands were shaking in his lap. The knuckles of his right hand were split open to the bone, already scabbing over, and the webshooter on his left wrist was cracked and leaking fluid in a slow, sticky drip down his forearm.

He'd saved them. The civilians. The mutants the sentinels had been targeting, a family of four huddled in a subway entrance, a teenage girl whose skin was blue and who'd been cornered in an alley by two of the smaller hunter-killer units, an old man with six fingers on each hand who'd been pulled from a crushed car. He'd saved them all. He'd thrown himself between every beam and every tentacle and every charge and he'd saved them, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten, and his phone had been destroyed somewhere around hour two and…..

The rock caught him square in the chest.

It was the size of a tennis ball, a chunk of loose concrete, and it bounced off the spider emblem and clattered down between his knees. Peter's hand closed around it reflexively, his fingers tightening before his brain caught up, and he looked up.

The man was in his fifties. Grey suit, blue tie, dust on his shoulders. Expensive shoes. He was standing at the edge of the police cordon that hadn't existed twenty minutes ago, and his face was the particular shade of red that meant fury rather than exertion. Behind him, a loose knot of eight or nine people. Some in business wear, some in casual clothes, all with their phones out, all with that same look. The look that said they'd been watching from behind something safe and had emerged now that the danger was gone and the only thing left to hit was the man sitting on the rubble.

"You're a menace!" the suit shouted, jabbing his finger. "Look at this! Look at what you did to this street!"

Peter stared at him. The rock sat in his open palm.

"There are people dead because of you! You led them here! You always lead them here! My office is in that building!" The finger swung toward a glass tower with its lobby blown out. "My car is under that!" Toward the overpass rubble. "And you're just sitting there like you're on a goddamn coffee break!"

"Somebody call the Bugle," a woman behind him said, loud enough to carry. "They need to see this."

"Where's the accountability?" another man chimed in, phone raised, recording. "You smashed half the block and now what? You just leave?"

Peter's jaw tightened. He set the rock down carefully on the concrete beside his thigh and looked at the cluster of faces behind the cordon tape. His ribs clicked when he breathed.

Where were you? he thought.

The thought bloomed hot and ugly in the centre of his chest.

Where were any of you?

He was an Avenger. He had the card. He'd stood on that tower with Thor and Steve and Tony and he'd earned his place there a hundred times over. And when the sentinels came screaming down out of the sky over Midtown, when six of his worst enemies hit the same grid at the same hour like a goddamn coordinated strike, where was the call? Where was the quinjet? Where was the thunder?

Nowhere.

Thor was off-world. Stark was in a board meeting or a bunker or whatever the hell Stark did these days when the problem wasn't his. Steve was in Washington. The others were scattered across missions and continents and dimensions, and the alert had gone out, Peter knew it had gone out, because he'd triggered it himself twenty seconds into the fight while Doc Ock's tentacle was wrapped around his throat, and nobody came.

And the X-Men. God, the X-Men. There were mutants dying in the street today. A teenage girl with blue skin hiding behind a dumpster while a ten-foot robot tried to burn her alive. And where was Krakoa's glorious mutant nation? Where were Cyclops and Wolverine and Storm and all the rest of them with their island paradise and their resurrection protocols and their gates that could open anywhere on the planet in seconds? Sitting on their island. Sitting on Arakko. Living their golden age while their people burned in Manhattan, and Peter, Peter who wasn't even a mutant, Peter who had exactly zero stake in mutant politics, Peter who could barely pay his rent, had been the one to throw himself between the girl and the beam.

And S.H.I.E.L.D. Don't even start on S.H.I.E.L.D. A sentinel deployment on American soil and the world's premier intelligence agency was missing in action. No helicarrier. No tac teams. No support. They'd show up tomorrow with a clipboard and a debrief and a stack of liability forms and they'd want to know why he'd used excessive force, and he would sit there and not say what he wanted to say, which was that he'd used exactly enough force to make sure nobody else died while the rest of the planet's protectors were busy doing absolutely anything else.

He put them all out there. Every single time. He put himself out there. Broken ribs and broken nose and broken knuckles and a shattered webshooter and a phone he'd never get back, and the reward was a rock thrown at his chest by a man in a grey suit whose biggest sacrifice today was a leased Audi.

The suit drew breath for another volley, face mottled red from his collar to his hairline, a vein pulsing at his temple like it was trying to escape.

"You're a bastard and a murderer, you hear me? A goddamn murderer! Those things came here because of you, because freaks like you attract freaks like them, and when the lawsuits start flying I swear to God I'll make sure your name is on every single..."

The slap cracked across the intersection like a gunshot.

The man's head snapped sideways, his sentence dying mid-word, and for a full second every phone in the crowd went still. The woman who'd hit him was five foot nothing and seventy if she was a day, her white hair matted flat with blood and plaster dust, a gash across her forehead held together with nothing but dried red and sheer stubbornness. She wore a housecoat over a floral dress, both ruined, and her orthopedic shoes were caked in grey mud. She was shaking. Her whole body was shaking, from the adrenaline or the cold or both, and she looked up at the man in the suit with eyes that could have cut rebar.

"You shut your mouth," she said. Her voice was thin and it trembled, but it carried. "You shut your filthy mouth right now."

"Lady, you just assaulted..."

"I was in that bank." She jabbed her finger toward the gutted Chase branch, where the sentinel's torso still smoked in the lobby. "I was at the counter when the ceiling came in, and that man." Her finger swung to Peter, still sitting on the slab. "That man held it up. He held the whole ceiling up on his back while we crawled out, and one of those robot arms hit him so hard I heard something in his body break, and he didn't put it down. He didn't put it down until every last one of us was clear."

The suit's jaw worked. Something ugly moved behind his eyes, the particular fury of a man who'd been publicly humiliated and needed to redistribute it fast. His hand came up, open-palmed, reaching for the old woman's shoulder.

He never got there.

Peter was off the slab and across the distance before the crowd registered the blur. His left hand closed around the suit's wrist and squeezed, just enough, just past the point where the small bones shifted against each other and the man's brain understood exactly how close they were to powder. The suit's knees buckled. He hit the asphalt hard, a grunt punching out of him, and Peter leaned down, the lower half of his face still visible beneath the pushed-up mask, dust-caked and blood-streaked and absolutely still.

"Look at me."

The suit looked. His face had gone the colour of old milk.

"You see those six men over there?" Peter's voice was quiet. Conversational. The kind of quiet that made the people closest lean in and then immediately wish they hadn't. He tipped his head toward the wreckage without breaking eye contact. "Every single one of them is going to be breathing and eating through machines because they made the mistake of hurting people in front of me. On a good day. When I was being careful."

He let that sit for a beat. His grip didn't tighten. It didn't need to.

"You were about to put your hands on a seventy-year-old woman who just crawled out of a collapsed building. So I want you to think very carefully about what I'm telling you." He leaned closer. Close enough that the suit could see the swelling around his broken nose and the blood dried black in the creases around his mouth. "If you touch her. If you so much as breathe in her direction again. I will leave you eating from a tube. Just like them."

The suit's throat clicked. He swallowed, dry and convulsive, and his eyes darted to the crowd behind him, looking for backup, looking for the outrage that had been there thirty seconds ago. He found nothing. Every face had gone blank. Every phone had dipped an inch. The woman who'd wanted to call the Bugle had taken a full step backward. The man with the recording phone had lowered it to his side, still running but forgotten.

They'd heard Spider-Man crack jokes while buildings fell on him. They'd heard him yell puns at the Rhino mid-charge. They'd never heard this. This flat, scraped-clean voice that sounded like it belonged to the man who'd torn four actuator arms out of their housing one by one.

Peter let go.

The suit crumpled sideways, cradling his wrist against his chest, and scrambled back toward the cordon on his knees. Nobody helped him up. Nobody said a word.

Peter turned to the old woman. She was still shaking, still bleeding from the gash on her forehead, and she was looking up at him with an expression he'd seen a thousand times on a thousand different faces in a thousand different ruined blocks. Gratitude so raw it looked like grief.

"You okay, ma'am?"

"My hip hurts," she said. "And I lost my purse."

"Paramedics are close. I can hear 'em." He could. Three blocks east, threading through the debris. "Someone'll find your purse."

"Don't you listen to those people." She reached up and gripped his forearm with both hands, her fingers ice-cold and surprisingly strong. "Don't you dare listen to them."

His throat closed. He wanted to accept her words…he really did. But sometimes….

Three sounds, actually, arriving almost simultaneously from three different vectors, and every one of them was too late.

From the east, the familiar turbine whine of a Quinjet dropping out of cloud cover, repulsors flaring blue-white as it banked hard over the Chrysler Building and decelerated toward Lexington. The Avengers livery was crisp and clean on its hull. Untouched. Pristine.

From the west, the deep, stomach-shaking thrum of a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier pushing through the haze above the Hudson, its shadow darkening six blocks of Midtown at once, running lights blinking in steady sequence along its massive ventral array. A full tactical response package. Gunships detaching from wing pylons. Tac teams prepped and sealed in drop pods.

And from the north, cutting lower and faster than the other two, the unmistakable razor silhouette of the Blackbird, matte black against the grey sky, its engines cycling from cruise to vertical hover as it swept over Central Park and banked south toward the devastation. The X-Men's jet. Krakoan tech gleaming along its leading edges.

All three converged on the six-block scar of Lexington Avenue like wolves arriving at a kill site after the fight was done and the meat was cold.

Peter stood in the middle of it and watched them come. His ribs clicked. His nose throbbed. The webshooter on his left wrist dripped fluid down his fingers in a thin, steady line.

The old woman looked up at the sky from her piece of curb, squinting against the downdraft, and said what Peter was thinking.

"Well. Isn't that something."

The S.H.I.E.L.D. tactical teams hit the ground first, black boots and black body armor pouring out of the drop pods in disciplined four-man stacks, fanning across the wreckage with rifles low and medkits slung over their shoulders. Paramedics followed thirty seconds later, the red-cross vests bright against the grey dust, already triaging the worst of the civilian casualties along the south end of the block where a chunk of sentinel had come through the roof of a Starbucks. Maria Hill directed traffic from the middle of the intersection with sharp, clipped gestures, her earpiece crackling, her face set in that particular expression she wore when she was cataloguing everything that had already gone wrong and assigning blame in real time.

Peter watched from his slab of concrete as the Avengers dealt with the sinister six.

Iron Man's faceplate was up. Stark looked clean. Rested. His hair was perfect. He and Cap hauled Octavius onto a reinforced stretcher while Vision phased the severed tentacles into a containment unit, each one wrapped in a suppression field that hummed faintly blue. Black Widow zip-tied Mysterio's wrists behind his back with professional disinterest, checked the dislocated jaw, and flagged a medic. Thor hefted Rhino onto a flatbed like a sack of grain, Mjolnir dangling from his belt, his cape without a single scuff on it. Hawkeye perched on the roof of an overturned delivery truck, covering the perimeter with a nocked arrow, scanning for threats that had been dealt with hours ago.

None of them looked at Peter.

Hulk stood apart, arms folded, watching the cleanup with that permanent scowl, and Peter caught him glancing over once, something close to guilt in those green eyes. She-Hulk was helping the paramedics lift a collapsed wall section off a trapped car, her expression tight. Peter looked at both of them and felt nothing sharp. They hadn't been on the call. He knew that. Jennifer had been in court. Banner had been in containment after last week's incident in New Mexico. They were here now, and they were doing the work.

Across the street, the X-Men had spread out in a loose perimeter around the mutant casualties.

Cyclops directed. Of course Cyclops directed. He stood with his arms crossed and his visor gleaming, coordinating Storm and Jean Grey as they moved through the debris. Storm's eyes were white, wind curling around her fingers as she lifted rubble off a crushed storefront where two mutant teenagers had been cornered. Jean wrapped the blue-skinned girl in a telekinetic cocoon and floated her gently toward a waiting medical station the X-Men had set up on the sidewalk. Their medical station. Separate from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s triage line. Separate from the civilian wounded.

Peter watched Jean glide past a human woman sitting on the curb with a compound fracture of her forearm, bone jutting white through the skin, and keep moving.

He watched Storm clear rubble from around the old man with six fingers and then step over a human teenager with a gash across his scalp that was still bleeding freely.

He watched Cyclops direct Emma Frost toward a mutant family huddled near the subway entrance, and he watched Emma pause, glance sideways at a cluster of human wounded the S.H.I.E.L.D. medics hadn't reached yet, and he saw her jaw tighten. She peeled off from Cyclops's vector without a word and crouched beside a human man whose leg was pinned under a car door, talking to him in a low voice, one hand on his shoulder.

Wolverine was already three blocks deep, carrying an unconscious human woman out of the wreckage of a deli on his shoulder. He set her down next to the paramedics, said something gruff to a medic, and went back in for whoever was next. He hadn't checked species first.

Wanda worked beside the S.H.I.E.L.D. teams, scarlet light threading through her fingers as she stabilized a collapsing wall long enough for agents to pull two people free. Human people. She looked exhausted, and she'd only been here ten minutes.

Peter sat on his slab and watched all of it and felt something building in his chest that was older than today.

Nick Fury's boots crunched over rubble. Peter heard them coming from forty yards out, the distinctive, unhurried stride of a man who believed the situation was handled because he had arrived. The leather coat. The eyepatch. The permanent, carved expression that said I have been managing crises since before you were born, son, so let's keep this professional.

"Spider-Man." Fury stopped six feet away, hands clasped behind his back. "I need a full debrief. Threat origin, timeline, engagement sequence, casualty count. Walk me through it."

Peter looked at him.

The silence stretched for three seconds. Four. Five. Long enough for the agents flanking Fury to exchange a glance.

"Where were you?"

Fury's chin tilted a fraction. "We mobilized as soon as…"

"Where. Were. You?" Peter stood up. His ribs clicked. He didn't flinch. "Five hours, Fury. Five hours. I triggered the Avengers priority alert at 11:47 AM, I know because I was watching the clock on the First National building while Otto Octavius was trying to crush my windpipe, and that alert hit every S.H.I.E.L.D. frequency, every Avengers comm, and every allied network on the eastern seaboard."

"The helicarrier was in dry dock for…"

"I don't care." Peter took a step forward. "I don't care where the helicarrier was. I care where you were. I care where anyone was. Six of my worst enemies hit the same six blocks at the same hour with planned coordination, and three sentinel units deployed on American soil targeting mutant civilians, and for five hours the only thing standing between all of that and a body count in the hundreds was me."

Fury's eye didn't waver, but Peter saw the micro-adjustment. The slight shift of weight onto the back foot. The hand that drifted a centimeter toward his hip and stopped. Behind him, four agents had gone very still. Peter could hear their heart rates, every one of them elevated. He could see the nearest agent's thumb resting on the retention strap of his sidearm holster.

They'd never heard him like this. None of them had.

"A hundred and seventeen," Peter said. "That's the number you're going to put in your report. A hundred and seventeen dead. I counted. I counted every single one of them because I had to choose, Fury. I had to choose who I could reach and who I couldn't, and seventeen people are dead because I am one man and you have a goddamn flying aircraft carrier and you weren't here."

"Spider-Man, stand down." Fury's voice dropped half a register. "We'll debrief properly and…"

"Don't tell me to stand down!"

The agents' hands moved. Peter saw every one of them. Five agents, five holster straps unsnapped in near-unison, fingers settling on grips. His spider-sense hummed, a low, ambient thrum, registering the threat and dismissing it in the same breath.

He didn't care.

"You want a report? Here's your report. Vulture hit first at 11:43. Electro and Rhino thirty seconds later from opposite vectors. Sandman came up through the street at 11:45. Mysterio dropped a dome over six blocks at 11:46. Octavius waited until I was already bleeding to make his entrance. Sentinels arrived at 12:15, targeting mutant signatures in the civilian population. I fought all of them simultaneously for five hours with no backup, no air support, and no extraction for the wounded. Seventeen civilians died. I broke sixty-three bones across six men. I held a ceiling on my back for four minutes while people crawled out under me and I felt my spine compressing and I kept holding it because there was nobody else."

He was breathing hard. His ribs ground together with each inhale.

"Put that in your file."

"Spiderman." Steve Rogers's voice, coming from Peter's left, even and careful and carrying that particular steadying tone that worked on green recruits and shell-shocked soldiers. Cap had his hands up, palms out, the shield on his back. "Spiderman, take a breath. We're here now."

"You're here now." Peter turned on him. "Now. After it's done. After I did it." His gaze swept across them as they approached, Stark with his faceplate still up, Natasha a step behind Cap, Thor holding Mjolnir loose at his side, Hawkeye dropping down from his perch. "You know what I got for Christmas last year, Steve? A priority Avengers card with a direct line to the team. For emergencies. I used it today. Did it ring?"

Stark opened his mouth. "The board meeting ran long, and by the time FRIDAY flagged the…"

"A board meeting." Peter's voice was quiet. The same quiet from before. The suit on the curb flinched at the sound of it. "Tony. A board meeting."

"The situation was developing faster than our intel could…"

"People were dying, Tony. In the street. While you sat in a chair."

"Aye, the lad has cause for anger." Thor stepped forward, Mjolnir hanging at his side. "I was beyond the Bifrost's reach. I came the moment Heimdall…"

"And you, Barton? Nat?" Peter's eyes moved to them. "What's your excuse? Too far? Too busy? Too much paperwork?"

Natasha said nothing. Her jaw was set, her eyes steady, and she held his gaze without flinching. She had the decency to not try to justify it. Clint looked at the ground.

"Spider-Man." Cyclops's voice cut across the intersection, crisp and authoritative, carrying that particular tone of a man accustomed to being obeyed. He crossed from the X-Men's triage station with Storm and Jean flanking him. "We need to coordinate on the sentinel wreckage. The technology is Krakoan priority, and we'll need to…"

"Don't."

One word. Peter turned to face him, and something in the way he moved made Cyclops stop mid-stride.

"Don't you dare walk over here and talk to me about Krakoan priority."

"The sentinels targeted mutants. That makes this…"

"That makes this what, Summers? A mutant issue?" Peter laughed. The sound was raw and ugly and had no humor in it at all. "There it is. That's the line, isn't it? That's always the line. Mutant issue. Mutant jurisdiction. Mutant sovereignty." He gestured at the X-Men's separate triage station. "You've got your own medical tent twenty feet from the S.H.I.E.L.D. line and your people are walking past wounded humans to get to it. I watched Jean float past a woman with bone sticking out of her arm."

Jean Grey's face went white. "I was prioritizing the most vulnerable…"

"She had a compound fracture, Jean! She was sitting in the street bleeding!" Peter's voice cracked on the last word and he hauled it back under control through sheer force. "You used to be better than this. All of you used to be better than this. Xavier's dream, remember? Or doesn't he care anymore? Coexistence? Protecting a world that fears and hates you? When did that stop meaning everyone?"

"You don't understand the political complexities of…" Cyclops started.

"I understand that you have an island. And a planet. And resurrection technology. And gates that open anywhere on Earth in seconds." Peter stepped toward him. "I understand that you throw galas, Scott. Black tie. Champagne. Celebrating the mutant golden age while your people were burning in Manhattan today, and I, a human, a baseline, nobody human who can barely cover his rent, was the one who threw himself in front of the beam for a girl with blue skin because nobody from your glorious nation could be bothered to show up."

Storm's expression shifted. Something cracked behind those white eyes.

"I have always come when you called." Peter's voice dropped. "Every time. Genosha. The Morlock tunnels. Utopia. The Brood. When the whole world turned on mutantkind and every other hero hemmed and hawed about politics, I showed up. Every single time. Because it was the right thing to do, and because people were in danger, and I never once stopped to check whether they had an X-gene first."

Cyclops's visor glowed faintly. His jaw was locked so tight the muscles in his neck stood out like cables.

"And today, when I was bleeding in the street fighting sentinels, actual sentinels, the thing you claim to exist to fight, you had to hear the word sentinel to scramble a jet. You didn't come because I was in trouble. You didn't come because civilians were dying. You came because your brand was under threat."

"That's not…"

"You got everything you ever wanted, Scott. The island. The nation. The respect. And somewhere along the way you became exactly the thing Charles spent his whole life fighting against. You drew a line between us and them, and today a hundred and seventeen people died on the wrong side of it."

No one spoke.

Wolverine had come back from the wreckage with another survivor over his shoulder, a human kid, maybe sixteen, bleeding from a head wound. He set the kid down with the S.H.I.E.L.D. paramedics, straightened up, looked across the intersection at Peter, and gave a single, slow nod.

Emma Frost was still crouched beside the man with the pinned leg, holding his hand and what looked his sons while a medic worked the car door free. She hadn't looked up. She didn't need to.

Just then the suited man came back.

Peter heard him before he saw him, the rapid click of expensive shoes on broken asphalt, the elevated heart rate, the self-righteous huff of a man who'd found reinforcements. He rounded the corner of a gutted newsstand with Maria Hill at his shoulder and two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents flanking them along with his cronies, his wrist cradled against his chest in a makeshift sling fashioned from his blue tie, his face blotchy and swollen where the old woman had struck him, and his eyes bright with the particular courage that came from standing behind someone with a badge.

"That's him." He jabbed his good hand at Peter. "That's the one. Commander Hill, I want him arrested. Right now."

Hill's jaw was set. She held a tablet in one hand, angled so Peter couldn't see the screen, and her eyes moved between the suited man and Peter with the flat, clinical calculation of someone running numbers she didn't like.

"He threatened me," the suit said, louder now, playing to the phones still recording from behind the cordon. "He grabbed my wrist, he threatened to put me in a hospital bed, and I have witnesses. I have footage. It's already online. Check your feeds, Commander. Check them right now."

Hill looked at Peter. "Spider-Man. Is what he's describing accurate?"

Peter opened his mouth.

"That man tried to hit me!"

The voice was thin and fierce and came from behind the S.H.I.E.L.D. perimeter line. The old woman in the ruined housecoat pushed through two agents who parted for her out of sheer reflex, a white bandage taped across the gash on her forehead now and a borrowed cane in her right hand, her orthopedic shoes still caked in grey mud. She planted the cane in front of her and jabbed her free hand at the suit.

"He threw a rock at Spider-Man first. Then he was screaming in his face, calling him a murderer, and when I told him to stop, he raised his hand to me. He was going to shove me, or worse. Spider-Man stopped him. That's what happened. That's all that happened."

"Lady, you're delusional. I never…"

"He's lying."

The blue-skinned girl. She stepped out from behind the X-Men's medical station with a thermal blanket still wrapped around her shoulders, her eyes huge and dark and furious. She couldn't have been older than fifteen. Burn marks traced her left arm where the sentinel beam had grazed her.

"Spider-Man saved my life," she said. Her voice cracked on the word life. "He jumped in front of a sentinel for me. A sentinel. And this man threw a rock at him while he was sitting there bleeding."

"I was in the bank." A heavyset man in a torn polo shirt limped forward from the civilian triage line, one arm in a proper sling, his face grey with pain and dust. "He held the roof. He held the whole goddamn roof on his back. I crawled out under him. I heard his ribs break and he didn't put it down."

More voices. The old man with six fingers, bandaged and leaning on a paramedic. A woman with two children pressed against her legs, all three of them streaked with dust. A construction worker with blood dried black down the side of his neck. A mutant teenager with scales along his forearms and a split lip. They gathered behind the old woman like a tide coming in, humans and mutants together, and their faces were hard and certain in a way the suited man's courage could not survive.

"You leave him alone," the construction worker said, pointing at the suit with a hand missing two fingertips, old injury, not today's. "You and your cameras and your lawsuits. You leave him the hell alone."

"Back off from him," the scaled teenager added. "All of you. S.H.I.E.L.D. too."

The crowd behind the cordon shifted. The energy changed. Peter could feel it the way he felt vibrations through a web, a structural tension pulled taut, one wrong move from snapping.

Hill looked at Fury. Her voice dropped, pitched for his ear alone, but Peter heard every word.

"Sir. The clip's already viral. It hit Twitter four minutes ago. Thirty million views and climbing. CNN picked it up. BBC. Al Jazeera. The optics are catastrophic. Spider-Man bleeding and broken after a solo engagement, no backup, no response for five hours, and the first thing he gets is a civilian assaulting him and S.H.I.E.L.D. showing up to arrest him for defending an elderly woman." She turned the tablet so Fury could see. "Senator Harding's office already called. Twice. If we don't handle this correctly…"

Fury's jaw worked. Something ugly moved behind his eye, the particular fury of a man who understood he'd been outmaneuvered by a situation he should have controlled from the start.

"Spider-Man." Fury's voice was level, controlled. "Come with us. We'll get you patched up, get your side on the record, and sort this out properly."

"Arrest him!" the suit screamed.

"Sir, step back before I have you removed."

The crowd of survivors pressed closer. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents adjusted their stances, hands drifting toward sidearms, eyes cutting between the civilians and their commanding officers. The air tasted like ozone and blood and something about to break.

"No."

Peter said it quietly. The same quiet from before, scraped down to bedrock.

Every head turned.

"No," he said again. He looked at Fury, then at Hill, then at Steve, who stood three paces behind them with his hands at his sides and his shield on his back, and the expression on Cap's face was something Peter had never wanted to see there and never wanted to see again.

"I'm done."

"Spider-Man…" Steve started.

"I'm done, Steve." Peter's voice didn't rise. It flattened. "I have given everything. Everything. For twenty years I have bled for this city and I have bled for this team and I have bled for people who will never know my name, and today I nearly died, alone, for five hours, while every single one of you was somewhere else. And the reward..." He gestured at the suit, at Hill's tablet, at the cordon and the cameras and the agents with their hands on their guns. "The reward is this. It's always this."

He reached up and unclipped something from inside the collar of his suit. His Avengers priority card, the one Stark had handed him at the Tower last Christmas with a handshake and a joke about finally making it official. He'd kept it close since then. Tucked it in the suit every morning like a talisman, like proof he belonged somewhere.

He held it out to Steve.

"Give it to someone who still has the fire to fight on." His fingers were steady. His voice was steady. His ribs clicked when he breathed and he did not flinch. "Because mine just went out."

Steve didn't take it. Peter pressed it against the star on his chest and let go, and the card stayed there for a half-second before gravity caught it and it fell between them, bouncing once on the broken asphalt with a small, plastic sound that shouldn't have carried as far as it did.

Peter fired a web.

The line caught the corner of the glass tower three blocks north and went taut with a sharp, singing thwip, and he was off the ground before anyone moved, rising fast, the arc carrying him up and away from the wreckage and the cameras and the faces.

"Spider-Man!" Steve's voice.

Thor stepped forward, Mjolnir already in hand, arm cocking back for a throw that would loop the hammer's trajectory into an intercept.

Hulk's hand closed around his wrist.

The green fist swallowed Thor's forearm to the elbow, and Banner held him there with an expression that dared the God of Thunder to test the grip. Thor's head snapped toward him, eyes flashing, and Hulk stared back and said one word.

"Don't."

She-Hulk stepped into Stark's path as his faceplate cycled shut. She put her palm flat against the chestplate of the armor, fingers spread over the reactor housing, and the repulsors whined and died under the pressure.

"Jen, move."

"He's right and you know it." Her voice was low and shaking, and the look she gave Tony Stark could have bent adamantium. "You were in a board meeting, Tony."

Stark's faceplate retracted. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Cyclops turned toward the Blackbird, already keying his comm. "Storm, prep for aerial…"

"No."

Emma Frost stood up from beside the man with the pinned leg. Her white cape was filthy, her heels cracked, her knees dirty from kneeling on broken asphalt to hold a stranger's hand. She crossed the distance to Cyclops in four strides and planted herself between him and the jet.

"You will not pursue him, Scott. You will not track him. You will not send a single soul after that man."

"Emma, we need to…"

"We need to what?" Her telepathic voice hit every mind in the intersection simultaneously, a cold, crystalline pulse that made agents flinch and heroes stiffen. We need to manage the optics? Contain the narrative? He bled for our people today. Ours. While we held a council meeting on Krakoa about trade agreements with Arakko, a human man was breaking his body to save a mutant child. And you want to chase him down so you can explain why we were late?

Cyclops's visor flared. His jaw locked so tight the muscle jumped.

Wolverine walked out of the wreckage carrying one last survivor, a human woman cradling a broken arm, and set her down gently with the paramedics. He straightened, cracked his neck, and looked at Cap, at Fury, at Cyclops, at all of them.

"Kid's been carrying all of you for years." He lit a cigar, the match flaring orange against the grey dust. "Every damn one of you. And not a single one of you noticed till he put it down."

He took a long drag. Exhaled smoke into the settling dust.

"Let him go."

Peter swung north over the rooftops, the wind cold against the exposed lower half of his face, and he did not look back.

The ice cracked in the glass. Fury watched the amber shift, settle, and go still, and he did not drink.

Six screens. Six feeds. Every one of them burning.

The main monitor, centre wall, was tuned to CNN. The chyron crawled across the bottom in block white capitals: SPIDER-MAN LEAVES AVENGERS — "MY FIRE JUST WENT OUT". Above it, Anderson Cooper sat across from a retired NYPD captain and a Columbia professor of ethics, and the professor was mid-sentence, glasses in his hand, jabbing them at the camera like a pointer.

"…and what we're witnessing is the inevitable consequence of a system that treats individual heroism as an inexhaustible resource. Spider-Man didn't quit. He was abandoned, and there's a profound moral distinction…"

"With respect, Doctor, he made a choice to…"

"He made the only choice left! The man fought six supervillains and three sentinels for five hours with compound fractures and no one picked up the phone!"

Fury lifted the remote and unmuted the screen to his left. Fox News. The anchor's face was set in that particular configuration of concern that meant ratings were through the roof.

"…and the question tonight is whether the Avengers initiative, which has enjoyed broad bipartisan support since its founding, can survive this kind of public fracture. We're hearing from multiple sources on Capitol Hill that emergency hearings are already being scheduled…"

He muted it. Unmuted the one to the right. BBC World Service. A measured British voice over aerial footage of Lexington Avenue, the devastation still smoking under floodlights while cleanup crews moved through it like ants.

"…international reaction has been swift. The footage, which has now been viewed over four hundred million times across platforms, shows Spider-Man sitting alone and visibly injured amid the wreckage before being struck by a projectile thrown by a bystander. The subsequent confrontation with Avengers leadership and X-Men field commander Cyclops has been described by one former UN diplomat as, quote, the most damaging thirty minutes in superhero public relations since the Sokovia incident…"

Fury killed that one and brought up MSNBC. A panel. Five faces, all talking over each other. He caught fragments.

"…abandoned the city, that's the word I'd use, he abandoned…"

"He didn't abandon anything, Karen, he was the only one there…"

"But if every hero quits when the job gets hard…"

"Gets hard? His nose was broken. His ribs were broken. He held a ceiling on his back for four minutes. What did you do today, Karen? What did any of us do?"

The studio audience erupted. The moderator lost control for six full seconds. Fury watched it burn and still did not touch his drink.

His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen. Hill.

He ignored it.

The fifth monitor was cycling through social media aggregation, a custom S.H.I.E.L.D. intelligence feed that scraped trending topics and sentiment analysis in real time. The numbers were staggering. #SpiderManWasRight had been the top global trend for four hours and showed no signs of slowing. #AvengersAccountability was second. #WhereWereYou was third, and that one had spawned a brutal subcategory: civilians and first responders posting their own footage from the fight, timestamped, showing the empty sky where backup should have been.

The sixth screen was the one that hurt.

C-SPAN. The United States Senate floor, and it was chaos.

Fury had watched a lot of Senate sessions. He'd watched filibusters that ran eighteen hours. He'd watched confirmation hearings that turned into knife fights conducted with parliamentary procedure. He had never, in thirty years of intelligence work, watched a sitting United States Senator punch another sitting United States Senator in the mouth on live television.

But there was Senator Florez from New York, jacket off, tie loosened, standing over Senator Whitfield from Alabama, who was on his back across a colleague's desk with blood running from a split lip. Three pages were trying to pull Florez back. Two more senators were shoving each other near the Republican aisle. The sergeant-at-arms was sprinting down the centre with a look on his face that said he had not been trained for this.

Whitfield had called Spider-Man a "costumed vigilante who got what was coming to him" approximately ninety seconds before Florez's fist ended the sentence for him.

The C-SPAN camera held steady, because C-SPAN cameras always held steady, and Fury watched Florez shake off the pages and point down at Whitfield with a finger that trembled.

"That man saved my constituents!" Morales shouted, loud enough for the gallery mics to catch every syllable. "A hundred and seventeen of my people are dead because your committee cut the sentinel early-warning budget last March, and you sit there and call him a vigilante? Get up, Bill. Get up and say it again."

Whitfield did not get up.

The gallery was roaring. The presiding officer's gavel was hammering, the sound thin and useless against the noise, and two more New York delegates were on their feet, jackets off, moving toward the Republican side with purpose.

Fury changed the channel.

The White House press briefing room. The podium. Karine Jean-Pierre stood behind it with the seal at her back and a carefully composed expression that did not quite hide the exhaustion underneath. The room was packed. Every seat, every aisle, cameras three deep along the back wall.

"…and I can confirm that the President has been briefed on the situation in full. The administration considers Spider-Man a valued ally and a symbol of the best of what this country's enhanced community represents. We are currently in active discussions, through multiple channels, to reach out to Spider-Man directly and explore every avenue toward reconciliation with the Avengers initiative. The President has asked me to emphasize that the service Spider-Man has provided to this nation, to New York City in particular, is extraordinary, and that no one engagement, however difficult, should define the end of that relationship."

A reporter's hand shot up. "Karine, is the President considering executive action to compel Avengers response protocols? Because the five-hour gap…"

"I'm not going to get ahead of any policy discussions, but I can tell you the President shares the public's concern about response times and accountability, and those conversations are happening at the highest levels."

Fury muted it. The ice in his glass had melted. He still hadn't taken a sip.

He reached for the remote one more time and brought the main screen to Al Jazeera English. International coverage. A correspondent in Geneva, standing outside the United Nations European headquarters, and behind her, a motorcade with Symkarian diplomatic flags.

"…and in what many are calling an unprecedented move, Silver Sable, head of state and commander of the Symkarian Wild Pack, has issued a formal public statement inviting Spider-Man to accept Symkarian citizenship, complete with diplomatic immunity and a standing offer of, quote, a home in a nation that values those who bleed for strangers." The correspondent paused, glanced at her notes. "The statement goes on to express, and I'm quoting directly, profound disappointment in the institutional failure of multiple hero organizations to support an ally in crisis, and calls on the United Nations to convene a special session on enhanced-individual labour protections. We're also hearing…"

The correspondent's earpiece crackled. Her eyes widened.

"We're getting reports now that Doctor Victor Von Doom, the sovereign ruler of Latveria, has also issued a public statement. This is… this is remarkable. Doom has offered Spider-Man full Latverian citizenship, a personal laboratory, and what his embassy describes as the respect a warrior of his caliber deserves. The statement reportedly includes a direct criticism of the Avengers, calling them, quote, a coalition of dilettantes who abandoned a superior operative to die while they attended to lesser affairs."

Fury's jaw clenched. Doom. Doom was on television praising Spider-Man and shaming the Avengers, and the worst part, the part that sat in Fury's gut like a swallowed coal, was that nothing in the statement was wrong.

He changed the channel one final time.

The Daily Bugle network. And there, filling the screen, red-faced and incandescent, was the flat-topped, mustached, apoplectic visage of J. Jonah Jameson.

Fury almost smiled. Almost.

Jameson's tie was unknotted. His sleeves were rolled. He was standing, because the chair behind his desk had apparently been shoved back so hard it had hit the studio wall, and he was looking directly into the camera with an expression that could have etched glass.

"I have spent twenty years calling that man a menace." Jameson's voice was hoarse. He'd been going for hours, clearly, the studio desk littered with coffee cups and crumpled notes. "Twenty. Years. I have run every headline, every editorial, every unflattering photograph I could get my hands on. And I will tell you something tonight that I have never said on this program." He leaned into the camera. "I was wrong."

The studio went still. Even the production crew, visible at the edges of the frame, had stopped moving.

"Spider-Man is the only hero in this city who gives a damn about the little guy. The only one. You know what the Avengers do? They fight aliens. They fight gods. They fight interdimensional threats to the fabric of reality, very impressive, and while they're up there saving the universe, who's down here? Who's stopping the mugger on 43rd? Who's pulling the kid out of the burning building in Queens? Who's holding the ceiling up in a bank while ordinary people crawl out underneath him?"

He slammed his palm on the desk.

"Spider-Man! Every single time! And where were the rest of them today? Thor was off-world. Stark was in a meeting. Captain America was in Washington probably getting his shield polished. And that man, that man fought for five hours alone and then the first thing he got was a rock thrown at his chest!" Jameson's voice cracked. He hauled it back. "And then they had the nerve, the absolute gall, to show up after it was over and ask him for a debrief. A debrief!"

He pointed at the camera.

"You want to know why he left? Because we didn't deserve him. None of us did. And I say that as a man who spent two decades proving the point."

Fury set the remote down.

The screens played on. Debates, fistfights, diplomats, dictators, and J. Jonah Jameson defending the man he'd spent a career crucifying. And running under all of it, on every feed, on every chyron, in every crawl and every hashtag, the same question asked a hundred different ways.

Where were you?

He picked up the glass. The bourbon was warm and diluted, ruined. He drank it anyway, all of it, in one pull, and set the empty glass on the console and stared at the screens until the ice water pooling at the bottom caught the light from six different angles and held it there, fractured and cold.

Maria Hill closed the door behind her with the careful, deliberate click of someone who knew the next five minutes were going to be ugly. She had her tablet under one arm and a fresh earpiece in, the old one dangling from her collar where she'd yanked it free sometime in the last hour. Her jaw was set. Her eyes were tired.

Fury heard the click and did not turn from the screens.

"Tell me something good, Hill."

"I can't do that, sir."

He closed his eye. Let a breath out through his nose, long and controlled. "Did we locate him?"

"No." She pulled a chair from the briefing table and sat without being invited, which told him everything about where they stood. "His apartment in Queens is empty. And I don't mean he's out. I mean empty. Agents confirmed twenty minutes ago. Furniture's still there, but the personal effects are gone. Clothes, photos, equipment, all of it. What he didn't take, he gave away. The landlord said a kid from the building came by with a hand truck and took the television and the bookshelf. A neighbour got the kitchen table. He left the deposit."

Fury turned from the screens. "How long."

"Based on what the landlord described, he'd been clearing it out for days. Maybe a week. This wasn't a snap decision, sir. He was already packing before today."

That sat between them like a stone dropped into still water. Fury reached for the bourbon bottle, then stopped himself and pushed it aside.

"What about personal contacts. Watson?"

Hill's expression shifted. Something tightened around her mouth.

"That's where it gets worse."

"Of course it does."

"Do you remember the dimension incident? Eighteen months ago, the rift event over the East River."

Fury remembered. Spider-Man had torn through three Avengers response teams to reach a dimensional breach that was pulling a civilian through. He'd webbed Hawkeye to a rooftop, dropped a shipping container on Vision's phase path, and put his fist through the faceplate of one of Stark's unmanned suits before anyone understood what was happening. The civilian had been Mary Jane Watson. His girlfriend. The woman he'd loved since he was a teenager, the one constant in a life that shredded everything else. She'd been pulled into the breach by a sorcerer targeting Spider-Man's known associates, and Peter had fought his own team to get her back.

He'd gotten her back. Brought her through the rift unconscious and bleeding, handed her to the medics, and then sat on the tarmac with his mask off and his hands shaking while Steve Rogers tried to explain that there would be consequences for assaulting fellow Avengers during a Code Seven containment.

"I remember," Fury said.

"After that, they broke up. We don't have full details on the timeline, but Watson moved out of the shared apartment within a month. She's currently living with a man named Paul Rabin." Hill glanced at her tablet. "Civilian. No record, no flags. Engineer apparently. They've been together roughly a year."

Fury said nothing.

"Watson tried to reach Parker after today's footage went viral. Called multiple times." Hill paused. "His number has her blocked. She tried through the Bugle switchboard. He'd already cancelled his freelance contract there. She tried Aunt May's line. May didn't pick up."

"And May Parker herself?"

Hill's composure cracked. A fraction, just a flicker, but Fury caught it.

"May Parker called this office directly. Forty minutes ago."

"Called you?"

"Called me. By name. I don't know how she got the direct line, and frankly, sir, I didn't have time to ask because she spent nine uninterrupted minutes telling me exactly what she thought of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Avengers, the United States government, and me personally." Hill set her tablet on the table with a careful, flat motion. "She called me a disgrace to the uniform. She said her nephew gave everything he had and we gave him nothing. She said if Ben were alive he'd..." She stopped. "She hung up on me. Slammed the phone. I called back. She didn't answer."

Fury leaned back in his chair. The leather creaked.

Peter Parker had no apartment. No girlfriend. No job. An aunt who was furious with the institutions he'd served and who might or might not know where he'd gone. No team. No card. No lifeline.

Fury had known Richard and Mary Parker. Known them well. They'd been two of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s finest agents, brilliant and brave and dead too young, and Richard had sat across from Fury in this very office, a younger version of it, different walls and different screens but the same chair, and he'd asked one thing.

"If something happens to us, look out for Peter. That's all I'm asking."

Fury had promised. Shaken the man's hand and promised.

And he had watched Peter Parker bleed for twenty years and done nothing. Sent him on missions, used his skills, filed his intel, and never once asked the kid if he was eating, sleeping, or falling apart. The promise had been easy to make and easier to forget, because Peter never asked for help. Peter just showed up and bled and cracked jokes and went home alone.

If Richard Parker were alive, he would not have asked questions. He would have walked into this office and put his hands around Nick Fury's throat and squeezed until the answers came or the breathing stopped.

"What else," Fury said. His voice was flat.

Hill picked the tablet back up. Scrolled. Her lips pressed together.

"The mutant situation is deteriorating. Fast."

"Define deteriorating."

"Their public relations are in free fall. Someone compiled a thread, it's been shared four million times in the last two hours, of every documented instance of Spider-Man supporting the X-Men and mutant rights. Every one. Genosha, he was there. The Morlock massacre aftermath, he helped dig survivors out for thirty-six hours straight. The anti-mutant riots in Brooklyn, he stood on the police line with his arms spread. The sentinel attack on the school in Westchester, he swung in alone and carried out eleven students." She turned the tablet so he could see the screen. A cascade of images, video clips, and timestamped news photos, all showing Spider-Man standing beside X-Men, standing between mutants and harm, standing where he wasn't asked to stand. "And the caption on every single one of them is the same."

Fury read it. Three words, repeated under every image in bold white text.

Where were they?

"Hellfire Gala invitations are being returned," Hill continued. "Dozens of them. Human dignitaries, ambassadors, celebrity guests. They're citing today's footage and the compiled support thread. The optics of attending a lavish mutant celebration while Spider-Man fought sentinels alone to protect mutant civilians... nobody wants to be seen at that party right now."

"Internal response?"

"Split. The Quiet Council is in emergency session on Krakoa. Magneto is apparently furious, though we're not clear at whom. Cyclops is locked in with Emma and Storm, and from what our sources on the island are saying, it is not a pleasant conversation." Hill scrolled further. "But the younger generation is pushing a different direction entirely. Hope Summers went public on the Krakoan network an hour ago calling for Spider-Man to be granted honorary citizenship. Full diplomatic protections, gate access, the works. Cable backed her within minutes. Several of the younger X-Men have posted similar statements. They're framing it as a debt of honour."

"The Council won't go for it."

"Maybe, maybe not. The pressure from below is significant. These aren't fringe voices. Hope Summers carries enormous weight with the younger mutants, and Cable's military credibility gives it teeth. The argument they're making is straightforward. Spider-Man bled for mutantkind repeatedly, at personal cost, with no obligation, and Krakoa's failure to reciprocate is a stain on everything the nation claims to stand for."

Fury rubbed his temple with two fingers. "And the human side of the debate?"

Hill set the tablet down and folded her hands. This part, clearly, was the one she'd been saving.

"The anti-mutant groups are having a field day. None of them are praising Spider-Man directly, he's helped mutants too many times and too publicly for any of them to claim him. But they don't need to praise him. All they need to do is point at what happened and say look what helping mutants got him."

"They're using him as a cautionary tale."

"Senator Creed was on Fox forty minutes ago. His exact words were, Spider-Man is proof that the mutant problem poisons everything it touches. A good man nearly died today because he made the mistake of treating mutants like they were his people, and they left him to rot. That should tell every American everything they need to know about the mutant agenda." Hill's jaw tightened. "It's effective messaging, sir. It doesn't matter that it's cynical. The footage supports the emotional core of the argument. Peter helped them. They didn't help Peter. Every bigot with a platform is running that sequence on a loop."

Fury dragged his palm down his face, fingers catching on the stubble he hadn't shaved in two days. "When I find whoever deployed those sentinels on American soil, Hill, I am going to feed them through a meat grinder. Feet first. Slowly."

"Noted, sir. But that's tomorrow's problem." Hill swiped her tablet and pulled up a new display. "Right now, New York is on fire. Figuratively and, in three cases since last night, literally."

Fury's eye tracked to her. "Define on fire."

"Crime is up forty-one percent in the five boroughs since Spider-Man's departure four days ago. Muggings, armed robbery, carjackings, gang activity, all spiking. NYPD is overwhelmed. They're pulling double shifts across every precinct and they're still losing ground." She set the tablet on the console between them, the screen facing him. "But the street-level surge is manageable compared to the costumed problem."

"What costumed problem?"

Hill's jaw shifted. She tapped the tablet twice and a grid of incident reports filled the screen, each one flagged red.

"Every mid-tier villain Spider-Man kept in check has figured out he's gone. Simultaneously. Shocker hit a Stark Industries research satellite facility in Brooklyn yesterday morning. Ironman responded."

Fury waited. Hill's pause had a shape to it, the kind that preceded information nobody wanted to deliver.

"And?"

"Shocker put him through two walls."

Fury stared at her. "Shocker. Herman Schultz. The man in the quilted suit."

"The man in the vibro-shock gauntlets that can level a city block, yes." Hill's voice was flat and precise. "Stark went in expecting a smash-and-grab. Schultz had rigged the building's structural supports with resonance charges tuned to the suit's repulsor frequency. The moment Stark fired, the whole grid fed the energy back into the gauntlets and Schultz hit him with a pulse that overloaded the Mark Ninety-Three's dampening systems. Tony spent six hours in the medbay. The suit's still being repaired."

Fury's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"How?"

"How what, sir?"

"How did Shocker outthink Tony Stark?"

Hill set the tablet down and folded her arms. When she spoke, her voice carried something Fury hadn't heard from her in a long time. Something close to exasperation.

"Because Shocker isn't stupid, sir. He never was. Peter knew that. Peter treated Herman Schultz like a legitimate threat every single time they fought, because Schultz is a legitimate threat. The gauntlets are military-grade tech that Schultz built himself in a machine shop. The man has an engineering mind. He just happened to spend the last decade getting beaten by someone with superhuman reflexes, precognitive danger sense, and the raw intelligence to counter every adaptation Schultz ever tried." She paused. "Take that someone out of the picture, and suddenly Schultz is fighting people who've never seen his playbook, who underestimate him because Spider-Man always made it look easy, and who walk in expecting a B-lister."

Fury leaned forward. "Who else?"

"Vulture managed to escape custody and ambushed a S.H.I.E.L.D. convoy transporting confiscated Chitauri tech through the Lincoln Tunnel. Took out four agents and got away clean. Mysterio ran an illusion grid over six blocks of SoHo that had Doctor Strange chasing phantoms for three hours while Mysterio's crew emptied a vault two streets over."

"Strange got played by Mysterio?"

"Beck's illusions are technology-based, sir, holographic projectors and chemical hallucinogens layered together. Strange's magical detection kept pinging the projections as non-magical, which they were, so he dismissed them as low-priority sensory disruptions and focused on finding the real mystical threat. There wasn't one. Beck counted on exactly that response." Hill pulled up the incident file. "Spider-Man never made that mistake. He'd fought Mysterio enough times to know the tech was the threat. He bypassed the illusions by tracking air displacement and sound distortion patterns. Strange tried to detect sorcery. There wasn't any sorcery to detect."

Fury pushed back from the console. His chair rolled six inches and stopped against the wall. He sat there, eye closed, and let the full scope of it settle into his chest like concrete setting.

"We got arrogant," he said.

Hill said nothing. She didn't need to.

"We got arrogant. All of us. The Avengers fight Thanos, they fight Kang, they fight cosmic-level extinction events, and somewhere along the way everybody decided that a man in a quilted suit with shock gauntlets was a minor inconvenience." He opened his eye. "Parker never decided that."

"Peter treated every enemy like they could escalate. Every one. Shocker, Vulture, Mysterio, Sandman, all of them. He studied their gear, tracked their upgrades, adjusted his tactics fight to fight. He never coasted on the assumption that beating someone once meant beating them forever." Hill picked the tablet back up. "The Avengers haven't fought a street-level villain with genuine preparation in years. They show up with overwhelming force and expect compliance. It works on most threats. It didn't work this week, because these people have spent a decade learning from Spider-Man, adapting to Spider-Man, building counters for Spider-Man, and now they're deploying all of that hard-won combat experience against opponents who've never seen it."

Fury stood. The chair hit the wall again behind him.

"Get me Luke Cage. Danny Rand. Jessica Jones. Matt Murdock. Every street-level asset we have relationships with. The Defenders, Heroes for Hire, anyone with boots-on-the-ground experience in this city."

Hill was already typing. "Cage is in Harlem, he'll answer. Rand's been semi-retired but I can reach him through Colleen Wing. Jones won't like it."

"Jones doesn't like anything. She'll still show up." Fury paced three steps toward the screens and stopped. "Get the Avengers off the bench. All of them. I don't care if Thor has a diplomatic dinner on Asgard, I don't care if Stark's suit is scratched, I don't care if Cap has a meeting with the Joint Chiefs. They are hitting the streets tonight. Foot patrols. Visible presence. Every borough, every block Spider-Man used to cover."

"That's going to be a lot of blocks, sir."

"I know how many blocks it is." His voice dropped a register. "I know because one man covered all of them, every night, by himself, and we never once stopped to ask how."

Hill held his gaze for two seconds, then looked back at her screen and kept typing.

"Once the city's stable," Fury said, and his voice changed again, the operational bark bleeding out of it, leaving something rawer underneath, something he'd have denied if anyone had named it, "once we've got the streets under control and the bleeding stopped, I want every resource we have turned to one objective. Finding Peter Parker."

"And when we find him?"

Fury looked at the six dead screens, each one dark now, each one still faintly warm from hours of broadcasting a question he couldn't answer.

"Then I owe a dead man an apology for breaking a promise. And I owe his son a hell of a lot more than that."

The cabin cost him nine hundred dollars a month, all in, which was less than his old utility bill in Queens. A two-room box of knotted pine and fieldstone tucked into sixty acres of state forest in the Catskills, an hour's drive from a town of twelve hundred people who minded their own business with the religious devotion of folks who'd been doing it for generations. The nearest neighbour was a retired postal worker named Glenn who lived two ridges over and communicated exclusively through a hand-wave from his porch if he happened to be outside when Peter's truck passed on the gravel road. Glenn had never once asked his name. Peter loved Glenn.

He'd found the listing on a corkboard in a gas station off Route 28, handwritten on an index card, tacked between a notice for free firewood and a lost-dog flyer. The owner was a woman in her seventies who lived in Albany and had inherited the property from her father. She wanted someone in the place through winter so the pipes wouldn't freeze. Peter paid cash, three months up front, and she handed him the key without running a credit check or asking for ID.

The burner phone sat in the top drawer of the nightstand, powered off unless he turned it on Wednesday mornings at six. Aunt May had the number, and the number changed every week, pushed to her laptop through a rotating encryption script he'd written in an afternoon. She never called unless something was wrong. She texted once a week, always the same format.

May: I'm fine. Eat something green. I love you.

He texted back the same way.

Peter: Eating plenty. Love you too.

That was the whole of his digital life.

Two months. Two full months of nothing but the sound of his own breathing and the creek running past the south side of the cabin and the particular quality of silence that existed only in places where nobody was trying to kill you. He woke at dawn because his body had always woken at dawn, but now, instead of pulling the suit on and swinging out the window into the cold dark of a city that needed him, he made coffee. Real coffee, not instant, brewed slow in a dented percolator on the propane stove, and he drank it on the porch with his feet up on the rail and watched the trees do absolutely nothing.

He read. Three books a week, sometimes four, pulled from the little free library outside the general store in town and from the boxes he'd brought up in the truck. Physics journals. Biochemistry texts. Paperback novels he'd been meaning to get to for fifteen years. He read Feynman's lectures cover to cover and then read them again with a pencil, scribbling notes in the margins like a grad student, and for the first time in two decades the science felt like joy instead of ammunition.

The workbench in the second room was covered in half-finished projects. A better water filtration system for the cabin. A small-scale solar array cobbled from salvaged panels and homemade charge controllers. A new compound he was developing, a bio-adhesive polymer that had nothing to do with webs and everything to do with wound closure, something that could seal a laceration in seconds and dissolve cleanly as the tissue healed underneath. He worked on it in the afternoons with his sleeves rolled up and his hands steady, and the work was clean and quiet and belonged to nobody but him.

Mornings were exercise. Push-ups, pull-ups on the branch of an oak that overhung the creek, bodyweight circuits on the flat rock behind the cabin. He kept himself sharp out of habit, the same way a retired boxer still hit the bag, but the edge had softened. His ribs had healed in the first week. His nose was straight again. The scars on his knuckles had faded to thin white lines that caught the light only if you knew where to look.

Evenings were the bath. A cast-iron clawfoot tub the previous owner had hauled in sometime in the eighties, fed by a gravity tank he'd rigged to heat off the woodstove. He filled it to the brim, sank in until the water hit his collarbones, and stayed there until the heat worked through every muscle and the last of the day's tension let go. Some nights he fell asleep in it and woke pruned and lukewarm at midnight, the cabin dark around him, the silence so complete he could hear his own heartbeat.

He hadn't worn the suit once. It was in a bag in the back of the closet, folded tight, the webshooters wrapped in cloth beside it. He hadn't opened the bag. He hadn't wanted to.

Town was a Wednesday errand. Groceries, propane refills, the occasional hardware run. The general store was called Harker's, and it was run by a woman named Denise who had opinions about the government and shared them with everyone who stood still long enough. The girl at the register was Denise's niece. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Black hair cut blunt at the jaw, dark lipstick, a silver ring through her septum, and a collection of band t-shirts she'd cropped short enough to show a stripe of pale stomach above her belt. She had the kind of figure that made the shirts fight for their lives, heavy through the chest in a way the cropped cotton did nothing to disguise, and she leaned forward on the counter every time Peter came through with a grin that was two degrees past professional.

"Hey, mountain man." She scanned his eggs without looking at them. "You ever gonna tell me your name, or do I just keep calling you that?"

"Mountain man works."

"It does, doesn't it?" She winked. Slow, deliberate, her dark eyes holding his a beat longer than the transaction required. "Same time next week?"

"Same time next week."

He drove home with the windows down and the radio off and something in his chest that might have been contentment, or at least its quiet, cautious cousin.

Two months. The longest stretch of uninterrupted peace he'd had since he was fifteen years old.

It ended on a Thursday.

The knock came at half past four in the afternoon. Peter was at the workbench, pipette in hand, a droplet of the bio-adhesive compound suspended at its tip, and his spider-sense pulsed once. Low, warm, familiar. The particular frequency that meant known contact, no threat, a signature he hadn't felt in months but recognized the way you recognized a song from the first three notes.

He set the pipette down. Wiped his hands on his jeans. Crossed the cabin's single room to the front door, twelve steps on creaking pine, and opened it.

Felicia Hardy stood on his porch.

She leaned against the doorframe with one hand braced above her head, her platinum hair loose and heavy over one shoulder, the late-afternoon light catching the faint cool purple at the tips. Jeans so tight they might as well have been painted on, sitting low on her hips and clinging to every curve from her thighs to the full, round swell of her ass. A black tank top that scooped low enough to put the deep line of her cleavage on full display, her breasts heavy and straining against the thin cotton, the fabric riding up just enough to show a sliver of flat, toned stomach above her waistband. No bra. That much was obvious.

She looked like she'd stepped off a magazine cover and driven three hours into the woods to ruin his life. Which, knowing Felicia, was more or less exactly what had happened.

Those green eyes swept him head to toe. The bare feet. The worn jeans. The flannel shirt, unbuttoned, hanging open over a white t-shirt that had seen better days. The stubble he hadn't shaved in a week. The tan he'd picked up from two months of outdoor living. She catalogued all of it with the slow, appreciative thoroughness of a cat sizing up a sunbeam, and the corner of her mouth curled.

"Hey, lover." Her voice purred through the word like honey through a sieve. "Miss me?"

The cake sat between them on the kitchen table, a rough two-layer thing with lopsided frosting and a crack down the middle where it had cooled too fast, and Felicia stared at it like he'd pulled a live rabbit from his sleeve.

"You baked this."

"Don't sound so shocked." Peter cut her a slice and slid it across on a chipped plate that had come with the cabin. "It's just butter, sugar, flour, and eggs. Basic chemistry."

"Spider, the last time I saw the inside of your fridge, it had half a bottle of ketchup and something growing in a Tupperware that I'm fairly sure had developed language." She picked up the fork he'd set beside the plate and took a bite. Her eyebrows climbed. She took another. "This is actually good."

"You don't have to sound surprised about that, either."

"I really do, though." She pointed the fork at him. "This is lemon. With actual zest. When did you learn to cook?"

"Two months of nothing but time and a propane stove." He poured tea from a ceramic pot he'd picked up at Harker's, a dark oolong that smelled like smoke and dried fruit, and set the cup in front of her. "Turns out I'm decent at it when nobody's trying to kill me."

Felicia wrapped both hands around the cup, breathed the steam in, and watched him over the rim. The late light through the kitchen window caught the faint purple at the tips of her hair and made her eyes very green and very patient. She sipped. She waited.

Peter leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. "How'd you find me, Felicia?"

The smile she gave him was slow and warm and carried the particular smugness of a woman who had earned it.

"You forgot I'm a cat, Spider." She set the cup down and ticked the points off on her fingers. "You drove north from the city. You paid cash for everything, which was smart, but you used the same gas station three times on the way up, which was sloppy. The security cameras at that Mobil off Route 28 are a joke. One phone call to the right fence, who owed me a favour, and I had the footage. From there it was your truck, your route, and a very patient afternoon of driving back roads until I found the turnoff."

"You tracked my truck."

"I tracked your habits. You stopped for coffee at the same diner twice. You bought your propane from the same depot. You're a creature of routine, lover, you always have been. Brilliant at disappearing from people who look for Spider-Man." She shrugged one shoulder and picked up her fork again. "Less brilliant at disappearing from someone who knows Peter Parker."

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. The gesture was tired and old and belonged to a man who'd been running from things for longer than two months.

"Felicia."

"Mm?"

"I'm not going back."

She didn't flinch. She didn't argue. She took another bite of cake, chewed it slowly, swallowed, and nodded.

"I know."

"I mean it. I'm done. The suit's in a bag in the closet and I haven't touched it and I don't want to. I'm done with the Avengers, I'm done with S.H.I.E.L.D., I'm done with the rooftops. All of it."

"I heard you the first time."

He'd braced for the argument. The tease, the flirtation-as-leverage, the slow campaign of charm she ran when she wanted something. He'd prepared for it the way he prepared for a fight, mapping the angles, rehearsing the counters, and the fact that she'd simply agreed knocked every one of them loose.

"You're not going to try to talk me out of it?"

"Why would I?" She set the fork down and looked at him straight, no angle, no performance. "You gave them twenty years, Peter. You bled for every single one of them and they let you bleed alone. If you're done, you're done. I'm the last person on earth who's going to lecture you about walking away from a life that's eating you alive."

He exhaled. Something in his shoulders unlocked, a tension he hadn't known he was still carrying, and he pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.

"Miles could take over. He's good. He's better than I was at his age, honestly. Smarter about the emotional stuff, less stubborn." He paused. Rubbed the back of his neck. "It might be a headache waiting for him, though. The rogues, the politics, the Bugle, Jameson… all of it lands on his shoulders the second I stay gone."

"He's got people around him. His family's solid. He's got friends his own age in the life." Felicia tilted her head. "He'll figure it out. Or he won't, and that'll be his call to make. You can't carry his weight too."

Peter looked at the table. At the cake he'd baked and the tea he'd brewed and the quiet kitchen of a cabin in the woods where nobody threw rocks at him.

"Nobody knows you're here?"

"Nobody knows I'm here. Nobody knows where you are. I didn't tell a soul, I didn't leave a trail that anyone who isn't me could follow, and the only record of my route is in my head." She tapped her temple. "Cat burglar, remember? I know how to move without being seen. It's sort of the whole thing."

"So why come at all?"

The question hung in the air between them, honest and undecorated, and Felicia's expression shifted. The teasing edge softened. Something real moved behind her eyes, the thing she usually hid behind the wink and the innuendo, the thing he'd only ever seen in glimpses across two decades of tangled history.

"Because you shouldn't be alone out here." She said it simply, the way you'd say the sky is blue. "You left. Fine. Good, even. But you left everything, Peter. Your apartment, your work, your people. And you came to the middle of nowhere and you're sitting by yourself baking cakes and reading physics papers and pretending that's enough." She held his gaze. "I decided it wasn't going to stay that way."

"You decided."

"I decided." The smirk crept back, just at the edges. "You can argue with me if you want, but you already know how that goes."

He almost smiled. Almost.

"Felicia, this isn't the city. There's no nightlife, no galleries, no penthouses, no scores. The nearest bar is forty minutes away and it serves three kinds of beer, all of them bad. You're going to be bored inside a week."

"Mmm." She looked around the kitchen with an expression of theatrical consideration, her gaze sweeping the dented percolator, the salvaged solar panel components on the windowsill, the handwritten grocery list tacked to the fridge with a magnet shaped like the state of New York. "You might have a point. I suppose the question is whether I can afford to be bored."

"Can you?"

She leaned back in the chair. Her legs crossed under the table, one ankle hooking over the other, and the motion drew the tank top tighter across her chest in a way that was almost certainly deliberate.

"I have fifty million dollars in a foreign bank, Spider."

Peter's cup stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Fifty."

"Fifty." She held up five fingers and wiggled them. "Million. Spread across three accounts in two countries, none of them extraditable, all of them earning interest while I sit here eating your surprisingly excellent cake." She picked up her tea and took a long, satisfied sip. "So unless you're planning to buy a mansion, I think we'll be fine."

Peter set his cup down. He looked at her, the platinum hair and the green eyes and the knowing smile and the fifty million dollars in stolen money and the fact that she'd driven three hours into the Catskills on a Thursday afternoon because she'd decided he shouldn't be alone.

"You're impossible."

"I'm a delight." She took another bite of cake. "Now. Is there a second bedroom, or are we negotiating sleeping arrangements? Because I should warn you, I sprawl."

The first full day she spent in the cabin, Felicia Hardy discovered three things about the Catskills.

First, there were an unreasonable number of birds. They started at five in the morning and they did not stop, a rotating symphony of territorial shrieks and mating calls that filtered through the cabin walls with the persistence of a car alarm in Midtown. She lay in bed with a pillow over her face and listened to what Peter later identified as a pileated woodpecker hammering at a dead oak fifty yards from the porch, and she seriously considered adding it to her enemies list.

Second, the woods smelled incredible. She hadn't expected that. The city smelled like exhaust and hot garbage and, on good days, whatever the halal cart on 53rd was grilling. The forest smelled like cold water and pine resin and something green and alive underneath, the soil itself breathing, and when Peter took her up the ridge trail behind the cabin that first morning she caught herself stopping every hundred yards just to pull it in.

Third, Peter Parker was genuinely, infuriatingly happy.

She watched him on the trail ahead of her, moving through the trees with that unconscious, loose-limbed grace she'd always found quietly maddening, pointing out a red-tailed hawk circling the thermal above the ridge, crouching beside a stream to show her where a beaver had been working the bank, talking about the specific species of lichen growing on the north face of a granite outcrop with the same enthusiasm he'd once reserved for swinging between skyscrapers.

"That one's Umbilicaria mammulata," he said, running his thumb over the grey-green crust. "Rock tripe. You can eat it in an emergency. Tastes like dirt, but it'll keep you alive."

"Thrilling."

"And this." He stood and pointed to a cluster of shelf fungi on a fallen birch. "Turkey tail. Trametes versicolor. Medicinal. There's promising research on its polysaccharide compounds for immune support."

"You're giving me a mushroom lecture."

"I'm sharing knowledge, Felicia. Knowledge is a gift."

"Knowledge is a gift," she repeated, flat as glass. "You used to say that right before you webbed someone to a lamppost."

He grinned. A real grin, wide and unguarded, the kind she hadn't seen on his face in years. "Different context."

They hiked four miles that day. He showed her a family of white-tailed deer bedded down in a hemlock grove, a doe and two fawns, and they crouched behind a fallen log and watched them for twenty minutes without speaking. He found a garter snake sunning itself on a warm rock and picked it up with the casual confidence of a man whose reflexes could catch a bullet, letting it coil around his wrist while Felicia stood three feet back with her arms crossed and her lip curled.

"It's harmless."

"It's a snake."

"It's a beautiful example of Thamnophis sirtalis."

"It's a snake, Peter, and if you bring it within two feet of me I will hurt you in ways that leave marks."

He set the snake down gently and they kept walking, and when they got back to the cabin he made dinner. Actual dinner. Pan-seared trout he'd caught the day before, wild garlic from the creek bank, roasted potatoes from the general store. He cooked with the same focused intensity he'd once given to recalibrating webshooter cartridges, and the food was good, genuinely good, seasoned and timed and plated on the chipped cabin dishes like it mattered.

After dinner he washed up while she dried, and they talked. Easy talk. Nothing heavy. She told him about a job she'd pulled in Monaco six months ago, the vault of a Russian oligarch, and the look on the man's face when he'd opened the safe to find nothing but a handwritten note that read Better luck next time, darling. Peter laughed so hard he nearly dropped a plate.

She told him about her father. A little. More than she usually told anyone. Walter Hardy's last letter from prison, the one she kept in a lockbox in Zurich, the one that ended with You were always better than me, kitten. Don't let anyone tell you different. Peter listened without interrupting, his hands still in the dishwater, and when she finished he said, quietly, "He was right."

That was the first night.

She expected him to make a move. She'd worn the tank top. She'd leaned. She'd deployed every weapon in the arsenal short of climbing into his lap, and when the dishes were done and the fire was banked and the cabin was warm and amber with lamplight, Peter Parker picked up a dog-eared copy of Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, stretched out on the sofa with a blanket over his legs, and said, "Night, Felicia."

She stood in the doorway of the bedroom and stared at him.

"You're sleeping on the sofa."

"Yep."

"The sofa that's four inches too short for you."

"I've slept on worse." He cracked the book open. "There's extra blankets in the chest if you get cold."

She went to bed alone and lay in the dark listening to the woodpecker, which had apparently decided that moonlit drumming was also acceptable, and thought, What the hell is happening?

The second day was more of the same. He woke her with breakfast. Scrambled eggs with chives he'd grown in a window box, toast from bread he'd baked himself, coffee from the percolator. He set the plate on the nightstand and said, "Morning," and left before she'd finished rubbing her eyes.

They hiked a different trail. He found a barred owl roosting in a white pine and they watched it for ten minutes, its huge dark eyes blinking slowly down at them. He identified six species of wildflower along the creek bank, pronouncing the Latin names with the same careful precision he'd once used for chemical formulas, and Felicia found herself actually remembering them. Trillium grandiflorum. White, three-petaled, growing in the shadow of a mossy stump. She picked one and tucked it behind her ear and caught him looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite read.

That night she sat closer to him on the sofa. Close enough that her thigh pressed against his, close enough that the heat of her body bled through the thin cotton of her shorts and his worn jeans. She leaned her head against his shoulder while he read. Her hair spilled across his chest. She smelled like the cedar soap from the cabin's shower and underneath it, warm skin.

He turned a page.

She waited.

He turned another page.

"Good book?" she asked.

"Feynman's treatment of photon path integrals is elegant. He makes quantum electrodynamics accessible without dumbing it down."

"Riveting."

"It really is." He turned another page, his free hand resting on the arm of the sofa six inches from her hip, perfectly still. "You should read it. You'd like the probability stuff. It's basically the math behind your bad luck powers."

She lifted her head and looked at him. Green eyes, half-lidded, searching his face for the crack, the tell, the moment where the performance of restraint would slip and the man underneath would surface. She found nothing. His expression was warm and open and completely, maddeningly sincere.

"Goodnight, Felicia."

She went to bed alone. Again.

The afternoon of the third day, Peter stood at the kitchen counter filling the kettle. Late light angled through the window above the sink and caught the stubble on his jaw, the lean muscle of his forearms below his rolled sleeves, the easy set of his shoulders. He set the kettle on the burner and turned the propane dial, and the blue flame popped to life with a soft hiss.

The bedroom door opened behind him.

He heard her feet on the pine floor. Bare. No shoes. The particular, silent placement of each step, heel rolling to toe, that she couldn't switch off even when she wasn't working. He heard the faint drip of water on wood. He turned.

Felicia stood in the doorway between the bedroom and the kitchen wrapped in a towel. One towel. White, threadbare, hitched under her arms and barely reaching mid-thigh. Her platinum hair hung in heavy wet ropes over her shoulders, darker at the roots where the water clung, the faint purple at the tips vivid against the white cotton. Water beaded on her collarbones, tracked down the swell of her cleavage where the towel strained across her breasts, and pooled in the hollow of her throat. Her skin was flushed pink from the heat of the bath, still damp, still steaming faintly in the cooler air of the kitchen.

She leaned one shoulder against the doorframe and crossed her arms beneath her chest, which pushed her breasts higher against the towel's edge. One eyebrow climbed.

"When exactly did you become a monk?"

Peter blinked. He glanced at the kettle. Back at her. "I'm making tea."

"I can see that. I'm asking why you've spent three days treating me like your sister."

"I haven't…"

"Peter." She pushed off the doorframe and took a step toward him. The towel shifted. A bead of water ran from her collarbone down between her breasts and disappeared into the cotton. "I hiked with you. I ate your cooking, which, for the record, is annoyingly good. I sat on your sofa with my tits against your arm and you read me a chapter about photons."

"Photon path integrals."

"I don't care what they were." Another step. The kitchen was small. Two more and she'd be within arm's reach. "I wore shorts that could pass for underwear. I leaned on you. I all but spelled it out in semaphore, and your hands haven't strayed once. You haven't looked at my chest, you haven't looked at my ass, you haven't so much as…"

"Felicia." His voice was quiet. Steady. He met her eyes and held them. "Just because you came here to stay with me doesn't mean you have to sleep with me."

She stopped.

Something moved across her face. Quick, complex, layered the way her expressions always were when the real thing pushed through the performance. Surprise, first. Then something softer that she killed before it could settle. Then heat.

"You absolute idiot." She closed the distance in two strides, both hands fisting the front of his flannel shirt, and drove him backward into the sofa.

He hit the cushions with a grunt. She followed him down, one knee planted on either side of his hips, straddling his lap, and her mouth found his before he could draw breath. The kiss was hard, open, hungry, tasting like cedar soap and the mint toothpaste from the cabin's bathroom. Her fingers dragged up through his hair and gripped, pulling his head back, and she bit his lower lip hard enough to sting.

The towel fell.

It slipped from her body in one clean drop, pooling around her hips and his thighs, and she was bare above him. All of her. The full, heavy swell of her breasts freed from the cotton, her nipples stiff and flushed dark pink from the bath's heat, the smooth toned plane of her stomach still damp, the deep curve of her waist flaring into the lush width of her hips. Water droplets still clung to her skin, catching the late light like scattered glass.

She pulled back just far enough to look at him. Her green eyes were bright, direct, stripped of every layer of tease and performance. Her lips were swollen from the kiss. Her chest heaved with each breath.

"I am done waiting, Spider." Her voice was low, rough, scraping the bottom of that purr she kept for moments she meant. Her hips rolled against him once, slow and deliberate, grinding down onto his lap. "I want that cock inside me. I want it making me purr." Another roll, harder, her breath catching. "And I want it making me scream."

Twenty minutes of hands and mouths and the slow migration from sofa to bedroom, and they were on the bed, Felicia straddling his hips again, her bare chest pressed against the worn cotton of his t-shirt while she kissed him deep and slow and filthy, tongue sliding against his, teeth catching his lower lip and pulling. Her fingers found the hem of the shirt and dragged it up his torso, nails raking over the ridged muscle of his stomach, and she broke the kiss just long enough to haul it over his head and fling it somewhere behind her.

"God, look at you." She spread both palms flat against his chest, fingers tracing the cut lines of his pectorals, the hard shelf of his shoulders, the dense, wiry muscle packed tight under skin that was tanned and warm from two months of mountain sun. "You've been hiding this under flannel. Criminal."

"I wasn't hiding anything."

"Liar." She dragged her nails down his abs and felt them clench under the touch. "You've been walking around this cabin in loose shirts like some kind of lumberjack monk, and the whole time you had this underneath."

His hands answered her. Both of them, sliding up her ribs, and he palmed her tits with a grip that was firm and sure and unhurried, fingers sinking into the heavy, soft weight of them, thumbs dragging across her stiff nipples. She arched into it, a sharp breath hissing between her teeth, and he squeezed, kneading both breasts in his hands while his thumbs circled and pressed.

"Fuck, your hands." She rolled her hips against him. "Don't you dare stop doing that."

He didn't stop. One hand stayed on her tit, squeezing, rolling the nipple between his thumb and forefinger until she gasped, and the other slid down the curve of her waist to her ass, gripping the full, round swell of it through the tight denim, fingers digging into the flesh hard enough to dimple. He pulled her hips down against him and she felt it, the thick ridge of him straining against his jeans, pressing up between her thighs.

"Oh, someone woke up." She ground down onto it, slow and deliberate, dragging herself along the length of him through two layers of fabric. "And here I thought the mountain air had made you docile."

"Felicia."

"Mm?"

"Take my pants off."

She grinned, wide and bright and dangerous. "Yes, sir."

She slid down his body, kissing a trail from his chest to the hard flat of his stomach, her tongue tracing the line of muscle above his waistband. Her fingers found the button of his jeans and popped it, tugged the zipper down, and she hooked her thumbs into the denim and pulled. He lifted his hips and she dragged the jeans down his thighs and off, tossing them over the side of the bed.

His boxers were tented so hard the fabric was pulled taut, the outline of his cock straining against the cotton, a dark wet spot spreading where the head pressed against the material. She sat back on her heels between his legs and stared.

"Jesus Christ, Peter." She licked her lips, a slow, involuntary sweep of her tongue. "Did it grow?"

"It didn't grow."

"It grew." She pressed her palm flat against the bulge, fingers curling around the shape of it through the cotton, and felt it throb. Thick. Heavy. Radiating heat through the fabric. "I remember this cock, Spider. I've had dreams about this cock. And I'm telling you, it's bigger than I remember."

"You're being dramatic."

"I am never dramatic." She hooked her fingers into the waistband and pulled the boxers down, slow, watching his cock catch on the elastic and then spring free, swinging up heavy and hard against his stomach with a wet slap. Thick, veined, the broad head flushed dark and leaking a clear, viscous bead of pre-cum that stretched and dripped in a thin line down the shaft. His balls hung swollen and full beneath it, drawn tight with arousal.

"Oh, fuck me." She wrapped her hand around the base and squeezed, feeling the girth of it stretch her fingers, the pulse of blood hot against her palm. "Mary Jane really was the dumbest woman alive, wasn't she?"

Peter's jaw tightened. Something flickered across his face and she caught it, the flinch he tried to bury, and she leaned up and kissed him before it could settle. Soft, this time. Her hand still wrapped around his cock, thumb stroking slow along the underside of the shaft.

"Her loss." She said it against his mouth, quiet and sure. "Her loss, Peter. Every inch of this." She squeezed again, stroking him root to tip, feeling the pre-cum slick her palm. "Every. Inch."

She kissed him once more, then slid back down between his thighs, both hands on him now, one wrapped around the shaft and the other cupping his heavy balls, rolling them gently in her palm. She looked up at him through her lashes, green eyes bright, platinum hair pooling across his thighs, and opened her mouth.

The first lick was slow. She dragged her tongue flat from the base of his shaft all the way to the tip, tracing the thick vein that ran the underside, tasting salt and skin and the bitter-sweet slick of pre-cum. She swirled her tongue around the swollen head, lapping up the bead that had gathered at the slit, and his hips jerked.

"Mmm." She hummed against the head, lips barely parted around it. "You taste like you've been saving up for me."

"Felicia..."

She took him in.

Her lips stretched wide around the fat cockhead and she sank down, inch by inch, her tongue working the underside as she went, cheeks hollowing with suction. Three inches. Four. The head hit the back of her throat and she swallowed around it, throat muscles rippling against the tip, and kept going, her nose pressing into the coarse hair at the base of his shaft until she'd taken every last inch.

"Fuck." His hand fisted in her hair, fingers tangling in the wet platinum strands, and his head dropped back against the pillow.

She pulled back, slow, lips dragging tight around the shaft, a thick rope of spit and pre-cum stringing from her lower lip to the glistening head. She gasped, licked her lips, and dove back down.

Sloppy. Hard. The way she knew he needed it.

She worked his cock with her mouth and both hands, one fist pumping the base of the shaft in rhythm with her bobbing head, the other rolling and squeezing his balls, tugging them gently. Spit ran down the length of him, pooling in her fist, coating his balls, making every stroke slick and loud. The wet, obscene sounds of her mouth filled the bedroom, sucking and slurping and the guttural little moans she made each time the head nudged the back of her throat.

"You always had the best cock in New York." She pulled off to breathe, jerking him fast with both hands, spit dripping from her chin onto his shaft. "And I've done my research, Spider. Extensive research."

"Are you seriously giving me a peer review right now?"

"Shut up and let me suck your dick." She swallowed him again, all the way down, and the sound he made, a low, broken groan that seemed to start somewhere in his chest and tear its way out, told her everything she needed to know.

She settled into a rhythm. Deep, throat-stretching strokes alternating with fast, shallow bobs focused on the sensitive head, her tongue lashing the frenulum on each upstroke, her fist twisting at the base. She pulled off every few strokes to drag her tongue down the shaft and mouth at his balls, sucking one into her mouth and then the other, feeling them heavy and tight against her lips before licking her way back up and swallowing him whole again.

"Felicia." His voice had gone rough, stripped raw. His hand tightened in her hair. "Felicia, if you keep doing that I'm going to..."

She looked up at him with his cock buried in her throat, green eyes bright and wicked, and hummed.

He groaned, the sound dragged out of him low and shaking, and she pulled off his cock with a wet pop and dropped lower, her tongue tracing the crease where shaft met sac before she opened her mouth and sucked one of his balls past her lips.

"God, Peter." She rolled him on her tongue, feeling the heavy, swollen weight of him, the tight skin stretched taut over what felt like a week's worth of cum packed behind it. She released him with a slow, deliberate pull and licked across to the other, sucking it in, her hand still stroking his spit-slick shaft in lazy, twisting strokes. "These need draining. Daily. I'm talking a strict regimen."

"A regimen," he managed.

"Felicia-assisted draining." She tugged gently with her lips, tongue working the underside of his sac, and felt his thighs clench under her palms. "Doctor's orders. These balls are criminally full, Spider. It's irresponsible. Somebody has to take care of this."

"And that somebody is you."

"Obviously." She released him and dragged her tongue in a long, flat stripe from the base of his sac all the way up the underside of his shaft, tasting salt and spit and the steady leak of pre-cum that hadn't stopped since she'd started. "Who else is qualified?"

She swallowed him again before he could answer, all the way down, her throat stretching around the fat head, lips sealed tight at the root, and she held there, throat working, swallowing around him in rhythmic pulses while her hand cupped and rolled his balls. The sound he made was barely human. His hips bucked, cock throbbing against her tongue, and she felt the telltale swell at the base, the pulse building toward something that would have flooded her stomach white and thick if she let it happen.

She pulled off. Gasping. Spit stringing from her swollen lips to the glistening head.

Peter's chest heaved. His abs were locked tight, every muscle in his body clenched with the effort of holding back, and his cock stood straight up between them, angry red and twitching, so hard it looked like it hurt.

"You were close," she breathed, wiping her chin with the back of her hand.

"You noticed."

"I felt it, lover. Right there on my tongue. All that cum trying to get out." She licked her lips. "I almost let you."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I want it somewhere else."

His hands moved.

She'd forgotten how fast he was. The spider-sense, the reflexes, twenty years of catching bullets and dodging tentacles compressed into the casual, terrifying speed of a man reaching for what he wanted. His hands closed around her waist and she was off her knees and in the air before her brain registered the motion, lifted like she weighed nothing, because to him she did, and her breath caught as he held her against his chest with her back pressed to his sternum and her legs dangling.

"Oh, hello." She looked down at herself, suspended. "This is new."

He shifted his grip. One arm hooked under her left knee, the other under her right, and he spread her legs apart in the air, her thighs parting wide, the cool cabin air hitting the slick heat between them. She was soaked. She could feel it, the wetness glossing her inner thighs, her cunt swollen and flushed and aching from twenty minutes of having his cock in her mouth.

"Peter." She craned her neck to look at him over her shoulder. "What are you…"

He lowered her.

She felt the broad, blunt head of his cock notch against her opening, hot and slick and impossibly thick, and her eyes went wide.

"Oh fuck. Oh, fuck, that's…"

He thrust up and pulled her down at the same time.

Ten inches. All of it. One stroke.

Her scream bounced off the cabin walls and rattled the window glass. Her back arched, head thrown back against his shoulder, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut. He filled her so deep she felt him in her stomach, the fat head pressing against the deepest part of her, her cunt stretched obscenely wide around the base of his shaft, and he didn't stop. He didn't pause. He didn't give her a single second to adjust.

He fucked her.

Hard. Fast. Brutal. Holding her legs apart in midair like she was a toy, his hips driving up into her with a force that clapped her ass against his pelvis on every stroke, the wet, filthy sound of his cock splitting her open filling the bedroom in a steady, merciless rhythm. Her tits bounced with every thrust, heavy and swinging, and her cunt clenched and gripped and fluttered around him like it was trying to pull him deeper even though there was nowhere deeper to go.

"Peter! Oh god, oh god, oh f…fuck, you're so deep, you're so…"

"Hold on to me." His voice was low and rough against her ear, his breath hot on her neck.

"I can't…I don't…there's nothing to…oh god."

She reached back, fingers clawing at his shoulders, nails digging into the dense muscle, and he shifted his angle and drove up into her harder and she felt the head of his cock drag across the spot inside her that made her vision white out. Her thighs shook in his grip. Her feet curled in the air. Every thrust punched a sound out of her, breathless, broken, animal, and she could hear herself and she didn't care.

"You feel that?" He thrust up, deep, grinding the head against her cervix, and held there. "You feel how deep I am?"

"Yes…yes, I feel it, I feel all of it, oh god, Peter, please…"

"Please what?"

"Don't stop. Don't you dare stop."

He didn't stop.

He fucked her suspended in his arms like gravity was a suggestion, his superhuman strength holding her weight without effort, his hips pistoning with a speed and force that would have broken a normal woman's pelvis. Felicia's bad luck aura crackled around them both, the lamp on the nightstand flickering, the window latch popping open on its own, a hairline crack racing across the ceiling plaster, probability warping under the sheer force of her pleasure the way it always did when she lost control.

The orgasm built from somewhere behind her navel, a tightening spiral that wound tighter with every stroke, every grind of his cock against the swollen front wall of her cunt. She felt her muscles lock. Felt the pressure crest. Felt the moment her body decided the decision was made.

"I'm going to…Peter, I'm going to…oh fuck, oh fuck, I'm…"

She came so hard she squirted.

It hit his thighs, her thighs, the bed beneath them, a gush of slick fluid forced out of her by the sheer pressure of his cock buried to the hilt while her cunt spasmed and clenched in waves that tore through her from her core to her curling toes. She screamed. Actual screaming, ragged and raw, her nails leaving red furrows down his shoulders. Her whole body convulsed in his grip and he held her through it, still buried inside her, still hard, still thick, letting her ride it out while her legs trembled in his hands and her cunt pulsed and gripped and leaked around his shaft.

He lowered her onto the bed. Slow. Careful. She collapsed onto the soaked sheets on her back, chest heaving, platinum hair fanned out in a tangled wet halo, her thighs still shaking, her cunt flushed and swollen and glistening. She stared at the cracked ceiling and tried to remember how lungs worked.

"Where…" She swallowed. Drew a breath that shuddered on the way in. "Where the fuck has that been?"

He braced himself over her on both arms, his cock still hard against her inner thigh, slick with her cum. "What do you mean?"

"I mean…" She pushed her damp hair out of her face with a trembling hand. "All those years in the city. All those rooftop quickies and stolen hours in your shitty apartment. You were holding back, weren't you? You were holding back."

The corner of his mouth twitched.

"You were." She jabbed his chest with one finger. "You absolute bastard. You've been fucking me at half speed this entire time."

"I didn't want to break anything."

"Break me, Peter. I'm giving you permission. Break me in half."

He kissed her.

Slow, this time. His hand cupped the back of her skull, fingers threading into the damp platinum tangle, and he held her there while his mouth found hers. The kiss started soft and deepened by degrees, his tongue sliding against hers, tasting her, and Felicia made a sound into his mouth that vibrated through his teeth. Her nails scraped his chest. Her hips canted up off the mattress, searching for friction, and he gave her none, just the kiss, long and thorough and unhurried, until her breathing went ragged and her fingers stopped clawing and started clutching.

He broke it. Pressed his forehead to hers. Her eyes were glassy, blown wide, the green barely a ring around the black.

"Turn over."

"Make me."

He made her.

One hand on her hip, the other braced against the mattress, and he flipped her with the casual, terrifying ease of a man who could bench-press a city bus. Felicia gasped, her stomach hitting the sheets, and before she could push up he had both hands on her waist and was pulling her hips back and up, positioning her on her hands and knees with her ass raised and her back arched deep. Her platinum hair spilled forward over one shoulder and pooled on the pillow beneath her.

"Oh, we're doing this." She looked back at him over her shoulder, lips swollen, eyes bright. "We're really doing this."

Peter's palm slid up the curve of her spine, slow, feeling the bumps of each vertebra under the flushed, damp skin. Down again, over the flare of her hip, and then lower, both hands spreading her cheeks apart, his thumbs framing the tight, pink furl of her ass and the slick, swollen mess of her cunt beneath it. She was still dripping from the first orgasm, cum glossing her inner thighs, and he dragged two fingers through the slick and brought them up to her tighter hole, circling the rim with a pressure that made her hips jerk.

"Peter, I swear to god, if you tease me right now I will…"

He pushed inside.

Two fingers, slick and steady, sinking past the tight ring of muscle, and Felicia's protest dissolved into a choked moan that she buried in the pillow. He worked her open with patient, deliberate strokes, scissoring gently, feeling her clench and then gradually soften around the intrusion, her back arching deeper with each pass.

"Fuck…fuck, that's…more. Give me more."

He withdrew his fingers and pressed the fat, blunt head of his cock against the loosened ring. She felt the size of it and sucked a breath through her teeth, her fingers twisting in the sheets.

"Breathe, Felicia."

"I know how to breathe, I've been doing it my whole…oh fuck."

He pushed in.

Slow. Relentless. The broad head stretching her open inch by agonizing inch, the tight heat of her ass gripping him so hard his vision flickered at the edges. Felicia's mouth dropped open. Her arms shook. A sound came out of her that started as a word and finished as something primal, a low, trembling moan that climbed in pitch as he sank deeper, deeper, the thick shaft splitting her open until his hips pressed flush against the full, round swell of her ass and every last inch of him was buried.

"Oh my god." Her voice was thin, cracked at the seams. "Oh my god, Peter, you're so…I can feel you in my chest."

He held there. Let her feel it. Let the stretch register in every nerve ending before he drew back three inches and drove forward.

Her scream hit the cabin walls.

He fucked her.

Deep, measured strokes that built momentum with each pass, his hips snapping forward, the impact clapping through the meat of her ass and sending it rippling with each thrust. He gripped her hip with one hand, fingers digging into the soft flesh hard enough to leave bruises that would bloom purple by morning, and with his free hand he brought his palm down across her right cheek.

Crack.

The sound was obscene, sharp and flat, and the flesh bounced under the blow, her ass jiggling in a way that made him hit harder.

Crack.

"Yes!" Felicia's fingers tore at the sheets. "Harder, you bastard, harder!"

Crack. Crack. Crack.

He spanked her in rhythm with his thrusts, alternating cheeks, each strike punctuated by the wet slap of his hips driving forward and his balls swinging up to smack against her soaked cunt. Her ass bloomed red under his palm, hot to the touch, the handprints overlapping into a single burning flush that spread across both cheeks. Every impact sent her ass bouncing, the full, heavy curves of it rippling and shaking, and the sight of it, Felicia Hardy on her hands and knees with her ass in the air turning red under his hand while he fucked it, pulled something loose in his chest that he'd been holding down for a very long time.

"You like that?" He drove in deep and held, grinding, his hand coming down hard across her left cheek. "You like getting your ass fucked and spanked like this?"

"I…oh god…I love it, I love it, don't stop, don't you dare…"

"You came all the way up here." Another thrust, another slap. "Three hours through the mountains." Thrust. Slap. "Just to get this cock in your ass."

"I came…" She tried to form the sentence and a thrust broke it apart. "I came because I…oh fuck, fuck, right there, right there…"

The orgasm tore through her like something with teeth.

Her whole body seized, back arching so deep her stomach nearly touched the mattress, her cunt clenching on nothing while her ass locked down on his cock in rhythmic, crushing waves. She screamed into the pillow, raw and broken, her thighs shaking violently, her fingers white-knuckled in the sheets, and the scream went on and on, each spasm pulling another ragged note out of her until her voice cracked and she collapsed forward onto her elbows, trembling.

Peter didn't let her fall.

His hands hooked under her arms. He pulled her up off the mattress, her back peeling away from the sheets, and in one smooth motion he threaded his arms under her knees and locked his hands behind her neck. Full nelson. Her legs spread wide in the air, her weight suspended entirely by his arms, her body pinned open against his chest with his cock still buried to the root in her ass.

"Peter…oh god, Peter, I can't…I just came, I can't…"

"Yes you can." His mouth pressed against her ear, his breath hot on her neck. "One more. Give me one more."

He thrust up.

The angle was devastating. Her own body weight drove her down onto his cock with every stroke, gravity doing half the work, and his hips snapped up to meet her with a force that jolted her whole frame. Her tits bounced wildly with each impact, heavy and swinging, and her head fell back against his shoulder as a sound left her that was barely human.

"oh…oh god…oh god oh god oh god…"

"That's it." He fucked up into her, hard, relentless, his arms flexing as he bounced her on his cock. "That's it, Felicia. Let go."

"I can't…it's too much…it's too…"

"You can."

His hips pistoned. The wet, obscene slap of flesh on flesh filled the cabin, loud enough to scatter the birds in the nearest tree, and Felicia's voice climbed, syllable by broken syllable, past words and into pure sound. Her bad luck aura surged. The lamp on the nightstand exploded, glass tinkling across the floor. The window latch flew open and slammed against the frame. A crack raced up the bedroom wall from floor to ceiling, plaster dust sifting down like snow.

"Peter…peter…i'm going to…i can't stop it…i…"

She squirted.

The gush hit the sheets three feet away, a hard, pulsing spray forced out of her by the pressure of his cock hammering her from behind while her cunt spasmed in freefall. Her legs kicked in his grip, heels drumming against nothing, and the sound she made was a shattered, keening wail that broke apart at the peak and dissolved into hitching, breathless sobs. Her whole body convulsed, once, twice, three times, each spasm wringing another wet pulse from her cunt that dripped down his shaft and pooled on the ruined sheets below.

He held her through it. Stayed deep. Stayed still. Let the aftershocks roll through her while her breathing stuttered and her muscles twitched and her eyes stared at the cracked ceiling without seeing it.

"I…you…that was…"

Her voice was a whisper, slurred and distant, her lips barely moving.

"…ruined me…you actually…ruined…"

"If you ever hold back on me again," Felicia murmured against his mouth, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw, "I will burn this cabin to the ground. With you in it."

"Noted." He kissed her, slow, tasting salt and cedar and the faint copper tang where she'd bitten his lip earlier. Her legs wound around his waist, heels hooking at the small of his back, and she pulled him down against her so every inch of their bodies pressed flush. Her tits crushed soft and full against his chest. Her cunt was slick and swollen against his cock, still hard, still resting heavy between her thighs.

"I'm serious, Spider." She bit his lower lip and tugged. "Twenty years of rooftop quickies where you were apparently managing me. Do you know how insulting that is?"

"I was being considerate."

"You were being an idiot." She rolled her hips up, dragging her soaked slit along the underside of his shaft, and the wet heat of it made his breath stutter. "I can take everything you've got. I've always been able to take it."

"Felicia..."

"Make me scream again." Her green eyes locked onto his, glassy and fierce and stripped bare. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. "I want to feel you for a week."

He kissed her once more, then rose up on his knees and gripped the backs of her thighs. She let him fold her, legs pressing up and back, knees beside her ears, the full weight of his body pinning her into the mattress. The sheets were soaked beneath her. Her platinum hair fanned across the pillow in tangled, damp ropes, and her tits rolled heavy toward her chin as her spine curved, nipples flushed dark and stiff.

He lined up. Pressed the fat head against her cunt. Felt her flinch and then open for him, the slick heat parting around the tip.

"Oh god, oh god, right there, just..."

He drove in.

One stroke. All of it. His hips slammed flush against her ass and his cock bottomed out so deep she choked on the sound she tried to make, a strangled, wrecked noise that started in her chest and died somewhere behind her teeth. Her hands clawed at his forearms. Her eyes rolled back.

"There it is," she gasped. "There, there, don't you dare stop..."

He gave her nothing gentle. The mating press drove his full weight behind every thrust, his hips snapping down with a force that shook the bed frame and punched a sharp, wet clap through the room each time his pelvis crashed into hers. Her cunt gripped him so tight on every outstroke that he felt the drag in his spine, the squeeze and the pull, and on every instroke the head of his cock ground against that deep, swollen place inside her that turned her voice into something animal.

"fuck...fuck, Peter, you're so deep, I can feel you in my..."

"I know." He thrust harder. Watched her mouth fall open. "I can feel you clenching."

"I can't...I can't help it, you're too...oh fuck..."

Her bad luck aura crackled. The remaining lamp on the dresser popped, the bulb bursting with a soft tink of glass, and the bedroom plunged into grey evening light from the open window. The headboard cracked against the wall with every thrust, a rhythmic, splintering bang that sent plaster dust sifting from the ceiling.

"Harder." Her voice was shredded, barely a whisper. "Harder, you bastard, ruin me..."

He braced both hands flat on the mattress beside her head and let the spider-strength loose. The pace doubled. The bed shrieked across the pine floor, two inches, four, the iron frame scoring white lines into the wood. Felicia screamed. The sound ripped out of her raw and ragged and climbed until it cracked, her whole body seizing beneath him, her cunt locking down on his cock in crushing, rhythmic waves that milked the shaft from root to tip.

"Cumming...I'm cumming, I'm cumming, oh god oh god oh god..."

Her back arched off the mattress, lifting them both, her heels drumming against his shoulders. Slick gushed around his shaft with every spasm, soaking his balls, pooling in the ruined sheets beneath her ass. He felt the orgasm ripple through her muscles like a current, her stomach clenching, her thighs shaking, her fingers leaving red crescents in his forearms that would fade in minutes.

He didn't stop.

He drove into the clenching heat of her, through the aftershocks, through the oversensitivity that made her whimper and twist, through the second wave that hit before the first had finished and tore another broken scream from her throat. Her cunt fluttered and gripped and leaked around him, soaking, obscene, and the pressure at the base of his cock wound tighter with every thrust until it sat white-hot behind his balls.

"Felicia." His voice scraped low. "I'm close."

"Inside." She grabbed his face with both hands, fingernails biting his jaw, her green eyes blown to black and wet at the lashes. "Inside me. Every drop. Fill me up till it's running down my thighs, Peter, give it to me..."

He buried himself to the root and came.

The first pulse hit her deep and she felt it, her mouth dropping open on a silent gasp, her cunt clenching hard around the sudden flood of heat. Thick, heavy ropes of cum pumped into her in waves, each one filling her deeper, each one forcing a wet, obscene sound from where their bodies joined as the sheer volume exceeded what her cunt could hold. It leaked around his shaft in white rivulets, dripping down over her ass, pooling on the ruined sheets. His hips jerked with each spasm, grinding deeper, and Felicia's legs tightened around him, holding him there, her fingers buried in his hair.

"Oh...oh, that's...I can feel it, I can feel all of it, you're so full, god..."

He pulsed inside her for what felt like a full minute, the orgasm drawn out and wrung dry, his cock twitching against her clenching walls. When the last wave finally ebbed, he let his forehead drop against her collarbone, breathing hard, his chest heaving against her breasts.

She stroked the back of his head. Her fingers were shaking.

"Okay." Her voice was a wrecked, drowsy murmur. "Okay. That's...that's acceptable."

He laughed against her throat, and the vibration made her squirm. His softening cock shifted inside her, and a fresh trickle of cum leaked out around the shaft and ran warm down her inner thigh.

He turned them without pulling out, rolling onto his back and bringing her with him, and she settled against his chest with a boneless, satisfied sigh. Her cheek found the hollow below his collarbone. Her legs tangled with his. His cock slipped free, and she felt the slow, thick pour of cum leaking from her cunt onto his thigh, warm and copious, and she didn't move to stop it.

"First thing tomorrow morning," she said, tracing a circle on his chest with one fingertip, "I'm waking you up with my mouth."

"You don't have to..."

"I'm going to wrap my lips around that cock before you're even conscious. I'm going to suck you slow and sloppy until you wake up with your hand in my hair and your balls on my chin." She pressed a lazy, open-mouthed kiss to his collarbone. "Consider it a standing appointment."

"Felicia."

"Mm?"

"Thank you. For finding me."

She went still against him. Her finger stopped its circle. For three heartbeats the only sound was the creek outside and a barn owl calling from the ridge.

"Someone had to." She kissed his chest once more, soft, her lips lingering on the warm skin. "Go to sleep, Spider."

He pulled her tighter against him. Her hair spilled across his shoulder, platinum and purple in the fading grey light. Her breathing slowed, evening out into the deep, steady rhythm of someone who felt safe enough to drop every guard she carried. Her body softened against his, heavy and warm, her breasts pressed full against his ribs, one leg hooked over his hip.

Peter stared at the cracked ceiling. The plaster dust had settled. The broken lamp glass glittered faintly on the dresser. Through the open window, the last birds of the evening were finishing their calls, and the creek ran cold and steady past the south wall.

Perhaps there's a life after Spider-Man.

The thought arrived quietly, without fanfare, and settled into his chest beside the warmth of her. He turned his face into her hair. It smelled like cedar soap and pine smoke and something that belonged only to her.

He closed his eyes, and for the first time in twenty years, Peter Parker fell asleep without dreaming of the city.