SSSS Chapter 20 (Patreon)

It was quiet.

Too quiet.

Peter prided himself on his originality, but he was more of an improv comedian than a wordsmith. Otherwise, maybe he’d be able to put a more subtle phrasing on why the Xavier Institute was freaking him out that morning.

He wasn’t a substitute teacher or anything, but he’d visited the mansion enough times that his mental image of the place was one of constant motion, life, youth, passion. Even without the superhero weirdness that he was well used to himself, there was always mutant-powered training, games, sports, quarrels, horseplay, not to mention trysts and affairs that made him look like a Mormon.

Yet right now, the place was still. Lifeless. He wouldn’t say his spider-sense was tingling, but… it definitely seemed to be taking a deep breath.

“Here is where I will be returned to my own body?” Sonja asked.

“Let’s hope,” Peter replied.

“Good. Let us find this warlock forthwith. I tire of being in this flesh.”

Peter raised an eyebrow. He couldn’t say he related to Sonja being fed up with being inside of Mary Jane.

“The little toe feels weird,” Sonja continued.

“Yeah, MJ stubbed it a week ago and it’s still being wonky. Maybe we can get it looked at while we’re here.”

The gate was open and Peter had driven right in. Now that he’d reached the front of the mansion—still with no sign of life—he drove the car around the big fountain that the driveway circled and put it in park facing away from the mansion. He climbed out, then poked his head back into the car while Wanda and Sonja were unbuckling their seatbelts.

“Wait here,” he told them.

“I’ve had enough of being ordered about!” Sonja retorted. She was having much less success with her seatbelt than Wanda. “If there’s danger in the offing, I will face it!”

“Not in my wife’s body, you won’t,” Peter told her firmly. “Wanda, watch her. Don’t let her do any swashbuckling.”

Sonja glared at Wanda, who gulped—suddenly uncertain of how well she’d be able to babysit a she-wolf who didn’t want to be babysat. But the redhead did give up on getting out of her seatbelt, for the time being.

Peter left the keys in the ignition. Wanda crawled through into the front seat and buckled her seatbelt, just in case. She’d made enough fast getaways with the Avengers to know that it definitely beat getting caught.

Sonja stayed in the backseat and scowled at her. “You prepare yourself to run from jeopardy,” she accused.

“If I have to, yes,” Wanda said shamelessly.

“And you let that man order you about.”

That made Wanda’s cheeks flush. “He has a lot invested in this,” she said defensively. “It’s his wife that’s in danger. The least I can do is not add to the hardship he’s going through.”

“Yes,” Sonja said, her voice rich with sarcasm. “I’m sure you’d be heartbroken if he were suddenly on his own…”

Wanda ignored Sonja. What did she know? She’d been dead a thousand years before indoor plumbing was invented.

***

Peter tensed up as he came up the stoop to the mansion’s front door. There’d been no one manning the intercom when he’d tried using that, but maybe someone would come when he knocked. The way the mansion went through more renovations than an HGTV show, he wouldn’t be surprised if something had knocked out this wiring or that.

But also, he was already so tense over the straits Mary Jane was in that worrying about Magneto practically came as a welcome relief. He slipped his webshooters out of his pockets, slapped them on his wrists, then reached for the old-fashioned knocker on the mansion’s big double doors.

His spider-sense flared; he threw himself backwards just before something hit the door like a charging bull. The impact was so powerful that everything within the doorframe exploded outwards, splinters of wood—some as long as his forearm—spraying out over him. Peter turned his head, shielding his face with his arm, before he came down in a skidding roll on the path leading up to the stoop. Coming up in a crouch, he finally got a good look at whatever it was that had come at him.

It was… some kind of robot on the top step of the staircase, but built more organic than he’d ever seen one before. A loping, canine, chrome quadruped, smooth and sinewy, its featureless body tapering into a sort of beak at the front. And there were more right behind it.

Peter immediately shot out two weblines, wrapping the beak shut. That took care of the business end, but still left the thing’s sharp claws. And two more were smashing through the remains of the door, coming to the stairs and lunging rather than even bothering to descend. Peter thwipped out another two shots, straight into their roaring mouths, before leaping to the side.

The things cared little that he’d stuffed their beaks full of glue. They landed in such a frenzy of slashing claws that they couldn’t even gain purchase on the ground, but shot along it like Tasmanian Devils. One finally got its bearings, claws sunken into the earth, while the other bulldozed into the driveway’s fountain. It knocked a chunk of masonry down to hit the hood of the car, exploding its headlight, and Peter was filled with such concern for Mary Jane and Wanda that it took the blare of his spider-sense a second to penetrate.

The first one, beak webbed up as it was, had recovered and made its own charge for Peter. He juked aside, but still caught a slashing claw across the shoulder. A glancing blow, he gauged—otherwise it might have taken his arm off. Forcing down the pain, he swiveled with his other arm, firing out a webline, catching a good snag on the thing’s back.

Then—like he had a dog on a leash and no concept of animal cruelty laws—he gave the thing a hard pull, flinging it through the air. He let go of his end of the ‘leash,’ giving it a little finesse so it spun to catch on a nearby oak tree. With luck, the newly attached webline would serve to anchor the dog-robot until he could come up with a more permanent solution for it—like a Howitzer, maybe.

Of the other two, the one that had headbutted the fountain seemed to have been knocked for a loop, while the other one was hacking—trying to clear its whatever of his webbing—but seemed largely in the fight. In a split-second, Peter had a plan.

He charged the hacking robot, launching himself toward it like a missile, arms pressed to his sides and feet together to streamline his body. The thing tried to react, but he was coming on too fast. Even as it raised its claws to swipe at him, he was hurdling over it, striking down a fist in passing to shove its face into the gravel. That’d buy him at least a second.

And in that second, he hit the third, dazed robot. Slamming his uninjured shoulder into it like a fullback, ramming it through the rest of the fountain so it was taking damage both coming and going. His spider-sense was blaring from all directions, but it deadened at the thing he’d hit. Peter got the feeling that whatever it had inside passing for a motherboard—its mothering days were over.

On his feet, twisting, he thwipped the robot he’d planted in the dirt. His hurt shoulder screamed in protest as he used the webshooters of both hands, but his webbing locked it down, Another webline streamed out, grabbed its rear ankle, and he pulled to sprawl it on its belly and add more webbing to cocoon it in place. Now, with no leverage, he doubted it’d be doing anything anytime soon.

He ran to the car and almost collapsed against it, a burst of exhaustion—if exhaustion could be said to burst—hitting him. Some kinda toxin on the talons of the one that had hit him? This woozy feeling definitely reminded him of when Kraven had dosed him in the past.

His speeding brain accessed the situation. The one he’d knocked through the fountain was still down. The one he’d webbed in place was scrambling to get loose. And the one he’d chained to the tree was gnawing free of the webline. His spider-sense crackled, telling him that more were inside the mansion, moving fast to explode through the windows or even the walls and confront him. At the speed they traveled, Peter knew the car had no chance of outrunning them.

He met Wanda’s panicked, yet controlled eyes. God, she was so young, so scared—like him. He wondered if that was how he looked under the mask. Well, he wasn’t wearing the mask now; maybe he could ask Wanda the next time he saw her.

“Get Mary Jane out of here! Someplace safe! Sit on her until I call you!”

Wanda reached past him, shooting out a hex bolt to the one trying to free itself from the tree’s webline. Abruptly changing tact, it attempted pulling free of the webline—managing to dislodge the tree so it toppled over, crushing the robot underneath its branches.

“I want to fight!”

Peter half-expected the vehement voice to be Wanda—it was a shock to realize it was coming from Mary Jane, Sonja, pulling herself free of the seatbelt. The only thing that’d kept her out of the battle this long was that she hadn’t quite mastered how to make it release her.

“You wanna get near those things? Do it with your own body,” Peter told her firmly. “Wanda, go. I’ll hold them off.”

“Peter,” Wanda breathed, struck by his concern for Mary Jane, his almost thoughtless self-sacrifice on her behalf. He loved her, Wanda realized. It hit her, just then, how much. He wasn’t just in love with her, he loved her. And, equally abruptly, Wanda realized how much she wished that concern, that commitment, that sheer bottomless devotion for herself.

Before she could say anything else, Sonja got her seatbelt figured out. She undid the toggle, then ripped her way out of the shoulder harness in time for Peter to web her in place. Sonja yelled out a frustrated war-cry as she realized how completely thwarted her efforts were.

“Go!” Peter insisted again, stepping aside to get clear while Wanda stepped on the gas, threw the car into a loop, and sped back the way they had come—leaving Peter to deal with the wolves alone as they burst through the façade of the mansion, smashing down onto the front yard like a meteor shower.

Wanda didn’t look back. If she did, she would never leave, and Peter had trusted her to leave. He didn’t love her, she knew, but he had trusted her… the best way she could love him now was by returning that trust.

But she swore to herself, she would make this right. Whatever those things did to Peter, wherever they took him, she would save him. And then, maybe, he would realize just how much she felt for him—and how he really felt for her.