Ultimate Spider-Man: Best Destiny (Patreon)

It’s 8 AM when Peter finally trudges through the front door of his own apartment, feeling like shit, hoping he doesn’t look enough like shit to worry the kids. They’re young. Not old enough to realize parents aren’t invincible.

But Mary Jane, she’s a lost cause. Probably a nervous wreck; she took losing Aunt May as hard as he did. All he can do is comfort her as soon as possible and hope there’s such a thing as apologizing enough.

She and the kids are just wrapping up breakfast when he comes in, adjusting the glasses he doesn’t need.

“Daddy! Where were you? You missed my loose tooth,” May mewls plaintively—the only May he has left now.

He gives her a tired smile. “I had a doctor’s appointment. Real early, I didn’t want to wake you guys. Sorry I forgot to tell you.”

May’s young enough for it to be a mystery, but Richard, he has his mother’s suspicion in his eyes. God, it’s a virus—one he’s exposed them to. “We tried calling you.”

“My phone died. I thought I managed to get a text off before it went totally dark; guess not.”

Mary Jane tousles Richard’s hair. It aches Peter to see how it looks like… he doesn’t know how it looks. Like MJ is telling Richard she’ll handle it, that he’s something to be handled. Parents were supposed to keep their kids from worrying about things: not be what they’re worried about.

“Richard,” Mary Jane says, her eyes slashing to Peter so he can see she’s acting, pretending everything’s fine with all the tools in her talent. “Can you walk May to the bus?”

“Yeah, sure.” Right now, Peter would kill for Richard to have his usual adolescent whine about any additional responsibility, but Richard’s a sharp kid. He knows this is serious.

God, what is he doing to his family—making them act like they’re in crisis mode on a normal goddamn Wednesday?

“Thanks, Richard,” Peter puts in, and Richard ignores him to take May’s hand and lead her out of the kitchen.

The next thing he knows, Mary Jane is in his face. Her voice isn’t screaming, but only in volume. “I won’t call out your bullshit explanations in front of the kids, but if you think that has me fooled—”

Peter puts his hands up. “I’m not going to lie to you.”

“I’m not yelling for at least ten minutes, because I want our children out of earshot.”

“I said I wasn’t going to lie.”

“If you don’t love me anymore—” Mary Jane falters and he can see her heart is skipping a beat like he had an X-ray right over her chest. “That’s one thing… but don’t think I’m an idiot just because I don’t have your Ph.D—”

“I don’t think you’re an idiot and I’m not going to lie.”

“Okay, don’t lie. Dontliedontliedontliedontlie—are you gay?”

The sudden non sequitur—at least from his perspective—catches Peter so off-guard that, in a moment he can only blame on being punchy and sleep-deprived too—he laughs.

“If you think I’m gay, you remember our twenties a lot differently than I do. Haven’t I had to run enough lines with you that you know I’m not that good an actor?”

“What is it then? Are you really, really bisexual? Some kinky thing? Or is it just another woman?”

“It’s not a sex thing at all, I promise… which is not something I ever thought I’d say about a full-body spandex suit…”

Mary Jane’s face twists. “Do not make me hate you using humor as a defense mechanism. I used to love that about you. You’re making me hate it. Tell me what’s going on.”

Peter takes her hands. Thumbs the ring on her finger. Pauses. “It’s actually pretty hard to explain now that I think about it.”

Mary Jane rips her hands away. “You’re the smartest person I know. Try.”

“I can only figure out things that make sense. And this… let me show you. It’s probably on the news by now.”

He goes to the TV. Turns it on. He doesn’t even need the remote. A few presses on the Next Channel button on the TV base and he’s at the morning news and they’re showing the oil refinery, the ‘supercriminal Rhino,’ and the ‘posthuman vigilante Spider-Man.’

“Spider-Man. I’m glad they figured the logo out. I was worried it looked more like an octopus.”

He turns to look at Mary Jane. It was childish, maybe, but he’d expected her to be awed. Oh my God, YOU’RE the Spider-Man? That sort of thing. The boyish urge to impress a girl.

And at least the anger is gone, but replacing it is the sympathy he remembers from after his aunt died. Medicinal, but an ipecac too.

“Peter… are you having a breakdown?”

“Believe me, I’ve asked myself that. But—” He reaches over. Lays his hand flat on the chest of drawers. Then he picks it up. With one hand flattened on the top of its two hundred pounds.

He doesn’t break a sweat. Him. The guy who goes to a gym once a month when the credit card payment guilts him.

Mary Jane is awed. Among other things. “Peter, you’re bleeding.”

Pulled his stitches. Or whatever. He sets the chest down, jostling a candlestick on top of it. He’s quick too. He catches that and straightens it before it tips over.

Peter takes off his jacket and sees the blood seeping through his Oxford shirt. “Rhino. That horn isn’t just for show.” He moves to the bathroom. Unbuttoning his shirt before the dry cleaning bill gets any higher. “I webbed it up, but I’ve only gotten the formula to last twenty minutes—”

“You webbed it up,” Mary Jane repeats, following him, seeing the nasty gash on his side and the sodden material turned red by what’s soaking through it. “Oh my God, you let me yell at you when you’ve got a—look at you!”

Peter shrugs. “You’d do worse to me if you thought I was having an affair.”

“Peter, we have two kids. You should know that if someone has an open wound, you lead with that!”

Peter picked up a towel. “I thought it would scab by now. I heal faster too.”

“Not the decorative towel!” Mary Jane snatched it away from him. “You need stitches anyway. Sit. And explain. Are you a mutant?”

“No.”

“An Inhuman?”

“MJ, I haven’t been hiding anything from you—this is new.”

“You haven’t been hiding anything?” Mary Jane lets out a laugh so shrill it’s like she’s inhaled helium. “You have a costume! You’re on the news! You web things!”

“MJ, you know how in all your movies, the guy says ‘wait, let me explain’ and you’re hoping she lets him explain, because it actually all makes sense once you hear it?”

Mary Jane gets out the needle and thread from the first aid kid behind the mirror. He’s not sure he wants her armed even that much at the moment. “Oh, no, this is the part of the movie where the girl reads the guy the riot act because he’s acted like a total—” She stops herself. Counts to ten in her head, which he can see because each numeral is practically pushing through the bulging vein in her forehead. “I swore I’d never be the wife that calls her husband names. Please don’t make me have to yell at my wonderful, loving husband. Explain.”

So he tells her, as she stitches him up. About how they always thought something was iffy about the Stark terror attack. About the box that showed up in the middle of the night while he was on his laptop, trying to cure his insomnia with Bejeweled. About the orb inside and the hologram and the world and how wrong it is. How wrong he is. And how this is him right.

Mary Jane looks like she’s going to be sick. “And when was this?”

“About a week ago.”

“You’ve been… Spider-Man… for a week? And you didn’t tell me? You’ve been--” She gestures to where the TV is still showing what footage the news crews could get. “Throwing criminals through walls and this is the first I’m hearing of it?”

“He was a very tough criminal.”

“Peter!”

“I’m just saying, I try not to use excessive force, but this guy—he’s literally called the Rhino.”

“Yeah, we didn’t spank Richard when he crashed the car that one time, of course you don’t use excessive force. Not the issue!”

“Well, I’m a little defensive. Somedays it’s like the news can’t decide whether I’m a threat or menace.”

Mary Jane finishes with the stitching. Then she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, with any of her. Peter can feel her desire to be close to him. But she doesn’t let herself be. She sits on the counter while he stays on the closed toilet.

“I should’ve told you,” he admits. “I was going to. I am. The last thing I wanted was to make you worry like this. I wanted to say it all the right way, all in the right order, but the Rhino was… what can I say? I couldn’t leave in the middle of a fight because my wife expected to wake up next to me. People could’ve been hurt.”

“I was worried sick,” Mary Jane says.

“I know.”

“Your kids didn’t know where you were.”

“I know.”

“What if they needed you, what if I—”

“I know, I know—”

“Do you? Because you could’ve been killed. Has that registered with you?”

“A lot.” Peter gestures to the wound in his side. “It was like a bubble. Or a dream. I didn’t want to pop it. And if I told someone about it, it’d be real… something else… maybe not what it first was. But as long as it was just mine… I just wanted to try it out for starters. Practice with it, you know—I actually took a karate class just so I could know how to throw a punch. Then I started… you know the stuff you look past? The dude running down the street with a woman’s purse, the drug buy in the alley, the cop hassling a guy you know hasn’t done anything wrong. You ignore it because you can’t do anything about it. When you realize you can—it used to be all I could do was take pictures and hope there’d be justice after the fact. I can make it so there’s nothing to take pictures of. And I’m the guy the pictures are supposed to move. Maybe I always was.”

“You’re insane.” Mary Jane blinks. “An actual goddamn hero. In my bathroom.”

“I’m not a hero,” Peter insists. “That’s the one good thing about them calling me a vigilante—”

“No, I wasn’t… it wasn’t an insult. God, you were right about the world not making sense. A world where hero is a dirty word. And it’s you. My husband. You always hope that if some crazy man with a gun starts shooting, he’ll step between you and the bullets. Jesus Christ! You go running up to the gunman. Throw him through a wall…”

“One guy,” Peter says defensively. “It was a thin wall too. Plaster.”

She gets down from the counter. Kneels before him. Her hands taking his. Her fingers rubbing the ring he wears.

“King goddamn Arthur…” She lays her head on his knee. “Oh my God. I was ready for you being gay.”

“The suit isn’t that stylish,” Peter promises her. “Not even one sequin.”

“At least it’ll be hard to figure out your identity. Everyone knows your wife dresses you. And I wouldn’t let you be caught dead in that thing. Fuck, I need ice cream. I think that conversation used up my monthly allotment of endorphins.”

The ice cream isn’t enough for Mary Jane. And watching it disappear isn’t enough for Peter. He downs some coffee to calm his nerves, which actually works. By the time it’s gone, MJ is scraping the bottom of the pint.

Peter steps in front of the freezer before she can get another one. He can tell her mind is going in circles like when one of her babies was sick. She’d make herself throw up before she figures it out.

“Can you talk to me?” he asks.

“Top of the refrigerator,” she says. “Feel around.”

Peter reaches up, to where Mary Jane can’t reach without a stool, and soon touches the frayed paper packaging of an old pack of cigarette. It’s half-full, cigs rattling around inside when he hands it to MJ. She’s already gotten the box of kitchen matches from above the stove.

She goes out to the fire escape to smoke. Peter follows her, but doesn’t go further than the windowsill that lets them out into the open air.

He doesn’t like his wife smoking, but he doesn’t have much right to call her out when he’s spent the night getting batted around by a two-legged rhinoceros. And he has to admit, she looks damned good, breathing that smoke in and letting it out through the plushest lips he can imagine.

“Do you trust Tony Stark?” MJ asks him.

“No. I want to, though.”

“Because he told you you’re special,” she says bitterly.

“That’s not it…”

“Because you’ve always been special to me.”

“This isn’t about you, this isn’t you doing something wrong—”

“You’re goddamn right it’s not,” Mary Jane declares, and puffs so fiercely on her cigarette that she singes her fingers, she burnt it so fast.

She closes her eyes for a long moment as the sting fades.

“I’m angry at him, not you,” she says after that moment, gray exhaust fleeing her lips with each word. “He can’t just do this to people. To you. To me. Drop a bomb on our world because… I don’t even know why. We’re supposed to be happier? I never thought I could be this happy, coming up the way I did. Because it’s what he says? Why are we supposed to care about him more than our kids—”

“It’s not about him either, you know,” Peter interrupts. “It’s about me. My choice.”

“Your choice.” Mary Jane holds up her hand, the wedding ring on her finger. “Like this was all me?”

It’s the hand holding the exhausted cigarette and she flicks the butt away, to dissolve into stray ash when it rebounds off the fire escape’s railing.

“I’m not ignoring you,” Peter promises her.

“Peter… sixteen years of marriage. I’ve been there, half asleep on the couch when you think I’m all the way gone and you turn on Star Trek with the volume low and the closed captions on? And I don’t mind because I just want to cuddle? I know how this works. This is the bad future, right? The way it goes when everything goes wrong? Because you were supposed to be a hero and I was… and our kids were…”

“No. No way.” Peter takes her in his arms whether or not she likes it—he would hold onto her then if she slips a knife between his ribs. “You, us, our family, none of that ever felt wrong. Just me, my life… never you. If it was a choice between you and this… never think I wouldn’t choose you.”

“You say that, while you’re choosing it.”

“No, I’m choosing what you bring to my life! I’m choosing a better world because you show me it’s possible.”

He kisses the top of her head, not passionately or lovingly, but because he’s on fire and he wants to spread it to her. Show her the warmth he feels, because of her and because of this. There’s so little difference between the two, once you find the right angle… the angle he sees through the mask…

“Every day, we watch the news and see some horrible thing and you say ‘how awful.’ I don’t. I wish I could’ve done something. And that thing with the Rhino, that could’ve been a natural disaster. One of those times they fly the flag at half-mast. And look.” He looks back through the window. Back at the TV. “Those news anchor, they’re not somber. They’re telling jokes. They’re showing videos of cats now. You know, I’ve always said that you and the kids are the only things that make sense to me? This makes sense. And all that random chaos… I’m making sense of it. They’re not just bad things that happen anymore. They’re things I stop. I don’t know about destiny or fate… all I know is, if there’s one person that has what I have with you, and they get to go back to it at the end of the day because of me? If I value us at all, then I have to value that too.”

“You really mean it, don’t you?”

“I think…” Peter fumbles for words, his tongue suddenly dry. “I think the way things were supposed to go, or at least that they used to go—being Spider-Man brought me to you. But this time, you brought me to it.”

Mary Jane’s red lips flick into a smile like a lighter catching. “No one else could be as good a superhero’s wife as me, that is true.”

“Damn right it is.”

“But you’ve got to promise me something.” Mary Jane takes his hands and squeezes them tight. “You have to promise.”

“Anything.”

“Next time you go out, pick up some more ice cream. I need to process this some more and if I keep going for the cigarettes, this is going to turn into an episode of Mad Men.”

“It hasn’t already… Joan?”