My Roommate, The Barbarian (Patreon)

Even swinging through the city at a good thirty miles per hour, Peter was in danger of his mind wandering. He and Mary Jane had been friends for a while, on an even keel, which always felt so right that Peter wanted it to feel righter. And MJ had been hinting that she wanted more as well.

Felicia was a problem, though. She’d been pulling jobs in New York again—Peter, or rather, Spider-Man’s ‘flirtation’ with her was as hot and heavy as ever. And he was due for one of his bad guys to break out of prison; then he’d really have a full plate.

Thankfully, a pained howl pulled Peter out of his own head before he could faceplant into the side of the Chrysler Building. Shooting out a webline to the nearest edifice, he translated his momentum horizontal, hurtling himself out of the airspace above a busy Manhattan street and into the narrow canyon between two buildings. Far below, under a tangle of fire escapes and electrical lines, was something that didn’t look much like your average hold-up at all.

The stick-up man, all shabby clothes and desiccated addict physique, was missing an arm. It lay in a spreading pool of blood on the cracked pavement, while he cradled the stump as it bled.

Inwardly, Peter made a sound of disgust. He could see a gun clutched in the hand of the arm on the ground, but God, even Wolverine refrained from going Benihana on a dumb smackhead, no matter how out of line he was.

The man who’d be pleading self-defense was huge, nearly seven feet tall, but you wouldn’t mistake him for a basketball player. His biceps and thighs were thickly rendered with muscles, his neck bullish, his chest and shoulders broader than a good many Avengers Peter could name. A mane of brutish black hair hung down to his spine. His eyes were blue, chilly and intelligent despite his otherwise dark, brooding features. His jaw was square and jutting, brow prominent, nose thick and flat with healed breaks.

He wore armor that wouldn’t look out of place on Thor. A leather cuirass studded with metal, tanned hide breeches finished with fur trim, his boots the same, and a helm with two tusks jutting from the forefront. There was a blood-stained broadsword in his hand and he looked ready to use it again, as Peter closed in on him, already able to tell that there was a lot more going on here than some whackjob who had seen Xena too many times.

Then the really weird thing happened.

Peter recognized the guy.

“Conan?” he called, landing on and sticking to a section of brick wall above a backdoor that had seen more than a few smoke breaks, judging from the pile of discarded cigarette butts off to the side.

Conan looked up at him, seeming as stoic as ever. “Spider-Man,” he rumbled in cool greeting, his rough voice as unhurried as if they’d seen each other in line at the supermarket.

The newly one-armed man was dismissed as a threat and Peter was considered as one, though Conan didn’t make any hostile moves or put himself on guard like a paranoiac. He just shifted his sword in its stance, as casually as he’d turn his head to address someone.

They’d met before. Peter knew Conan came from some time period in prehistory, pre-civilization, or at least this civilization. Some tangle of barbarism and medieval times and proto-empires that would all be lost, then rediscovered in a way, eventually cycling through to Peter having to pay sales tax. It was all almost as distant and as alien as, well, aliens.

Magic and sci-fi stuff had thrown Conan into New York before, and he’d met other capes who had talked about him, so Peter knew he wasn’t the psychopath he looked like. By the standards of his time, he was even something of a hero—adhering to a code of honor and protecting the defenseless. But when some poor schlub was tagging the side of a building with spurting blood, it was hard for Peter to keep cultural relativism in mind. Maybe that’s why he was doing so poorly as a college student.

“What the hell are you doing?” Peter demanded.

Conan didn’t quite shrug, but he put the same economy of movement into flicking the excess blood from his blade. “He demanded my valuables. I gave him a display of my warrior skill. Learning that trade was valuable indeed.”

Peter flipped forward, landing beside the unlucky mugger. He closed up the wound with a spray of webbing. Then snagged up the severed arm with a webline, thrust it against the mugger, and webbed it to him. Maybe the doctors at Lenox Hill could sew it back on. Maybe.

Still, ee-yuck. So much for getting into a romantic mood with MJ or Felicia anytime soon.

“Wait here, I have to get him to a hospital,” Peter told Conan.

“Why?” Conan returned, either about why he had to wait or why anyone should bother bringing a one-armed drug addict to the emergency room. Peter didn’t feel he had time to explain. The mugger was finally going into shock.

“Just do it!” Peter told him, and webbed Conan’s boots to the ground.

He got the mugger to the ER in two minutes, was back in one. When he returned, he found that Conan had abandoned the boots. Wincing at what a New York street would do to the man’s feet—first you wince over a guy being disarmed, then you’re worried about bare toesies. Going sissy on me, Parker—he took to the skyline.

Thankfully, even in New York, a six foot seven guy in medieval armor was hard to miss.

Peter came down next to him on the sidewalk, sticking to a parked Pacific Courier truck on the adjoining street. Thankfully, too, one spider-superhero and a Cimmerian didn’t stop anyone from minding their own business.

Again, New York.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Peter demanded.

“He accosted me. I defended myself,” Conan reasoned. “Isn’t that why you wear the mask? To defend others? If I hadn’t used my blade on him, you would’ve beaten him yourself on my behalf.”

Damn, Peter thought. Just because Conan was built like the Hulk and carried a sword instead of a Colt .45 did not mean he was lacking in intelligence.

It was annoying as hell: “I wouldn’t rip the guy’s arm off!”

That got Spider-Man some looks, which struck him as profoundly unfair, considering that the guy with the sword had been the one to actually do the amputating today.

“Too civilized,” Conan muttered and pressed on.

Spider-Man somersaulted off the truck, coming down in a crouched landing in front of Conan, who didn’t take being blockaded well.

Conan gritted his teeth. “You’ve experienced secondhand what befalls those who get in my way. Don’t taste my wrath yourself!”

“Easy there, gladiator movie, I don’t want to taste anything of yours,” Peter assured him. “Would you just hold on a minute? You don’t even have any shoes on.”

“Aye, I noted last time how the people of this era seem determined to choke soil and grass with stone. I know not why civilized men find the look of a barren field so appealing, but it will take more than that to slow my progress.”

“Yeah, well, wait until you see one of the subway rats—then you’ll want those shitkickers back. Heck, I could go for a pair of them myself.” Peter pulled Conan out of the flow of pedestrians before someone bumping into him started WW3, instead situating them in the doorway of a closed boutique. “Let’s start at the beginning: what are you doing here? Is there some wizard chanting prog-rock lyrics? Hole in the space-time continuum? Big Conan-sized block of ice with a hole in it?”

Conan grunted. “I was in Argos, my coin-purse flush with the trade I’d gotten from lending my sword-arm to a Brythunian merchant…” he began.

Peter held up his hands. “Hold it, hold it, hold it. This is starting to sound a lot like the beginning of one of my Star Wars fanfics, so I’m gonna need you to spare me the novella, cool it with the proper nouns, and give me the version you’d put on a tattoo.”

“Zingaran assassins chased me into a cave. I saw a light inside and when I approached it, my curiosity found me in this time and place, where I soon found that dogs walk on two legs as readily in your epoch as in mine.”

“Yeah, yeah, and Cats was sold out. Damn tourists,” Peter muttered bitterly. “Look, before you eviscerate anyone—or, worse, ride the subway—how about we try getting you back to your own time? You want that, right? No one hassling you about cutting off limbs or not cutting off limbs…”

“Aye. From what I remember, these people of yours harry you worse for protecting them than ever an Argos magistrate looked ill upon my deeds in personal enterprise. As much glories as your city displays, its slide into depravity and degeneration is well underway.”

“Tell it to Alex Jones,” Peter retorted. “Now, since I’m assuming I can’t just carry you someplace…”

Conan rested a hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword. “If you wish to take liberties with the person of a Cimmerian, you must pay for the right in blood!”

“Yeah, uh-huh, gotcha,” Peter said quickly. “Let’s go another way.” He stepped out into the street, hand held up, hoping the red and blue suit would come in handy. “Yo, TAXI!”

So as it turned out, what Peter needed to do all his life to get a taxi was to dress in skintight spandex and be accompanied by a huge, armored barbarian.

***

“This is… peculiar,” Reed Richards announced. Peter thought that was a bit rich, when it was Reed’s high-tech lab they were in, his experimental sensors poised around Conan, and him stretching all over the place to daub with the settings as the scan went on.

“Normal people peculiar or us peculiar?” Peter asked, he felt with remarkable restraint.

Reed shut the sensors off, their lights going dark, as he returned to his normal shape and size, his limbs and torso shrinking back into place like a garden hose after the water had been turned off. “He’s absolutely inundated with chronotonic radiation. More than I’ve ever seen in a living being!”

“Makes sense,” Peter equivocated. “He just scooted through time a million years or so.”

“It’s not that, Spider-Man. I allowed for a normal variance of time energy. It’s not just that he’s here instead of in Hyboria. It’s that his being here is vitally important to the flow of time. At least, for most branching timelines my instrumentation can register.”

Peter tried to think of how he would explain this to Conan and realized he only half-understood it himself. And he liked to limit his half-understanding to women and J.J. Abrams movies. “What are you saying? That he’s here because he’s destined to save the President from an assassin or something?”

“Oh no, it’d be have to be something important, not that,” Reed said off-handedly. “And it’d be a mistake to think of it in terms of causality. Imagine instead… a pressurized container. Here, at the properly calibrated atmosphere, it’s harmless. Move it to the top of a mountain or the deep sea and you’d have an explosion. Only in this case, substitute an equalization of gases for a burst of temporal energy that could have dire consequences throughout the timeline.”

“So he goes back to his own time and he explodes? That doesn’t sound right…”

“I’ll do more calculations. But for now, I think it best he remain here. Or perhaps…” Reed noticed that Conan had wandered off from the center point of the instruments, now examining the various odds and ends of the lab—and looking much like a shoplifter. “Could you explain to him not to touch anything?”

“Reed, no offense, but one good blow-up between Torch and the Thing, with Conan in the middle, and God knows what’s going to happen. Thanks for everything, but I think I’ll get a second opinion. Wouldn’t want to spoil you spoiling a Skrull invasion with Dolph Lundgren here.”

“At least let me fabricate some boots for him,” Reed said. “If I can make some for Ben, I can come up with two for him—and Sue would be quite happy to see someone else wearing her designs.”

“Yeah, sure,” Peter said, adjusting his mask instead of running a hand through his hair. “But as soon as that’s done, he’s prehistory again.”

***

“He’s going nowhere,” Doctor Strange told Peter, unequivocally.