CH12: Storming the Building.

"Okay, what the fuck?" Gwen complained. "First you tell me you're getting seduction classes from Black-fucking-Widow, and now this?"

"You like it?"

"I love it, but I hate you."

I laughed, resting my hands in the pockets of my new leather jacket. Widow had given me a list of clothes I needed to try out as 'homework', and the jacket had gotten her approval.

"I think it looks good on you, man," Peter said, to which I replied with a fist bump.

Thank you, Peter. Your loyalty is a most valued trait.

We entered Midtown, and met up with Flash, who raised an eyebrow but made no comment on my jacket.

Until I started annoying him about my jacket and he said I looked like the Fonz.

"You're a bigger dork than I thought for knowing who the Fonz is," I laughed, and he rolled his eyes.

I rolled one of my batons on my hand distractedly as I sat atop a streetlight. I liked peaceful moments like this, where nothing was happening and nothing needed my attention.

"'EY, YO SPIDER-MAN!"

Never mind.

I sighed and looked over my shoulder. There were four kids standing around on a basketball court. One of them, a small black girl with messy dreadlocks, had her hands cupped around her mouth. The one next to her, a brown-haired girl that was slightly taller, looked horrified. She was whispering about how she couldn't holler at random super heroes.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Come play with us!"

"What are you doing?!" the brunette hissed. "He's a hero! He's probably too busy saving the universe or something, you can't-"

"Actually, saving the universe is more of an Avengers thing," I corrected. They both shrieked and turned around to find me standing there. I love that trick. "I'm more of a friendly neighborhood superhero. Except that my neighborhood is the whole city."

They were all gaping at me, including the two that hadn't gotten involved.

"So," I pretended to cough into my fist. "How's this gonna go? All of you against me? I join one team?"

"Join ours!" The one that called me and the brunette said.

"Okay," I shrugged.

"No," Another girl, this one blonde and shorter than all the others, said. "Guys, come on, he's a superhero, he should be on his own team."

"You're just saying that 'cause you know we would dunk your face off," I joked. They all looked at me. "Are we not doing trash talk?"

The blonde laughed and tossed me the ball. "Alright, Spidey, let's see what you got."

The next hour was spent with me having more fun than I expected. Eventually, I heard police sirens, so I had to leave, but I promised to try to show up some other time.

I was doing push-ups with Black Widow sitting on my back. It would have been better if not for the gun pointed at my neck in case I ever stopped.

"What page are you at?" I asked.

I heard the sound of a page being turned. "Page 187."

"Ok," When I started doing push-ups, she had started at the first page. I was starting to worry that she was going to read the entire book before I could stop.

Spoiler alert: that's exactly what happened.

The guy sitting in front of me had tried to rob a man in an alley. Obviously, I'd stopped him. But then the would-be victim started kicking him while he was down. I told him to cut it out, and he asked me what I cared about some random…

Well, let's just say he used a very mean word, and that I replied with my lack of fear of knocking two bitches on their asses.

I sat down next to the guy. I felt bad for him, honestly, and I was feeling generous.

"Before I call the cops, because I doubt that other guy will," I started, "I'd like to know why you're doing this. You got a family or something?"

"… Yeah," he admitted. "Little nephew, barely seven years old."

"You're supporting him?"

"Nah, he's got his parents for that," the man snorted and spit to the side. "I offer to help out from time to time, but my brother doesn't want any dirty money near his kid. Can't say I blame him."

"Hm," I pulled out my baton as I started twirling it. I thought I had a good idea of who this guy was. "Your nephew, he knows that money is dirty?"

"Hell no, man! The guy treats me like I'm one of you," he said, probably meaning Capes. "My brother and his wife don't like me much, but they're not gonna tell him that his uncle goes around robbing motherfuckers."

"Hm," I pulled a cigarette from his pocket and offered it to him. Seeing how his arms were webbed to his sides, he took it without complaint and kept it close while I lit it. "So you just do it to keep yourself fed?"

"Pretty much," he admitted. I respected how he didn't dance around it.

"What's your name?"

"Aaron."

"Tell me, Aaron," I turned to look at him. "Are you a well-connected man?"

"… I make do," he nodded.

"Well, it just so happens that I keep a sort of… network of informants, if you will," I grabbed the webs on him and started tearing them apart. "I'm looking to expand, and I could use someone that other robbers wouldn't keep their guard up against."

"Are you for real?"

"I bet it would be real nice to have a reason your family would accept for robbing guys, hm?" I pulled the last web off and helped him up. "Maybe show your nephew a selfie of yourself with Spidey, your work friend?"

Aaron blinked at me slowly, before he started laughing. At one point, he was laughing so hard he bent over and had to hold on to me to keep from falling.

When he stopped, he accepted eagerly and took a picture to show his nephew Miles.

Yeah, I about fucking figured.

I was chilling on a rooftop when suddenly everything got hotter, in more than one way.

"Hey! I heard about you! You're Spider-Man, right?"

I looked up from my phone, and flying there in all his burning glory was Johnny Storm, the Human Torch.

"That's me, yeah," I rolled back to stand on my hands, and then did a double flip onto a standing position.

Completely unnecessary? Sure.

Cool? Probably not.

"Nice to meet another teen Cape," he laughed, turning off his powers and dropping to stand in front of me. He stretched a hand forward. "I'm Johnny, Johnny Storm."

"Nice to meet you, Johnny-Johnny Storm," I shook his hand. "What brings you to this rooftop?"

"Eh, just escaping my house for a while," he pointed back with his thumb and I followed to the Baxter Building. "Reed's making some kind of portal thing and it's really noisy."

"Huh," Peter would probably be outraged that someone would decide not to look at a portal because it's too noisy. "Well, feel free to chill on this rooftop with me if you like, I was taking advantage of things being quiet to catch up on… social networks."

I was definitely not going to talk about reading fanfiction from TotallyAwesome with Johnny-friggin'-Storm, especially since I was just reading one about him and The Thing in a coffee shop AU. It was pretty cute, honestly, they were both pretty in-character. The grammar had a few problems but- oh shit he's talking.

"Thanks, man," he said, pulling out his own phone from his criminally tight supersuit and starting to type something. I turned back to my own phone, this time leaning against a wall. It was quiet, for a while, and kinda awkward.

I caught a purple glow from the corner of my eye, and I looked up at the Baxter Building.

"Hey, Storm?"

"You can call me Johnny, dude."

"Right," I nodded, "Hey, Johnny?"

"Yeah?"

"Was Richards' portal purple?"

"Yeah, how'd you guess?"

"Because the three top floors of the Baxter Building are glowing purple."

He turned around and saw that, indeed, they were glowing.

"What the hell?" he flamed on and started flying, but I stuck a web to him and pulled him back. "Let me go!"

"Wait!" I shouted, not tearing my eyes from the increasingly bright windows. "I think that if you go right now, you'll get caught."

"Caught? What do you mean ca-?"

The light suddenly stopped. Before Johnny could relax, our phones started screeching. He turned off his flames and looked at his phone, which was displaying some kind of armored green blob.

"Inferior creatures of Earth!" it screeched, "I am the great and powerful Ooze Master!"

The image panned to show three of the Fantastic Four, all of them with little balls of goo attached to their temples. "As you can see, we have imprisoned your strongest and smartest, and will now proceed to conquer the Earth!"

As the little ball of goo continued to monologue, I looked down over the edge of the roof. The same broadcast was being played on the phones of everyone below, and I could hear it from the Big Apple's general direction.

I nudged Johnny, "Okay, now we can go."

"Huh?"

"No one expects an attack while they monologue," I said, before jumping off and shooting a web. I heard him shout his catch-phrase, and soon I was joined by the Human Torch.

I strained my senses, and saw that there was a goo creature on the second floor from the top.

"Follow my lead!" I shouted, before using two webs to slingshot me through the window. I landed on the creature with a kick, which splattered it everywhere. Johnny followed through the hole.

Like you'd expect, the kick didn't do much, and it started quickly reforming. "Foolish inferior! The proud goo-"

"Just reformed into a trap," I finished, pointing a finger gun at it as the web bomb I'd put where it was reforming triggered.

The creature went from being blue to a sickly grey as it bloated and hardened.

I stuck it to the roof and turned to look at Johnny, who seemed impressed, which was nice.

"Okay, listen," I popped a squat and gestured for him to get closer. He copied me, still on fire, and I whispered in case they were listening. "Here's what I got so far: I can't hit them, but webs will work, so there's only so many I can take out. Luckily, they're probably not fireproof."

He gave a fierce smile at that, and I returned it under my mask.

"I'm glad you get it. Now, I don't feel or hear any of them approaching, so that either means they're not hive-minding this…" I raised my voice a little, "Or they're spying on us, which is unlikely because they are the biggest morons on the galaxy!"

I heard goo rushing over, plus some footsteps.

"Okay, definitely a hive-mind, I can hear them coming," we stood up and got ready, me with my webshooters and him with his fire. "I'm going to need you to keep up the offense while I search, these conqueror types always have a super-laser or something loading up, and I'd bet good money on it being on the top floor."

"How do you know all this?!" the defeated goo on the roof demanded.

I turned around and flipped it off.

"Because I'm Spider-Man, bitch!"

About an hour later, there were burns all over the second floor, more than a few goo bitches had been fried, and we were staring down Ooze Master and the three brainwashed members of the Fantastic Four. Behind them, there was a purple portal that opened to a barren world. The portal was on top of an iron platform that had some kind of yellow sci-fi battery stuck to it.

During the fighting, we'd discovered that the goo invaders were building a weapon on the roof. It had finished about a minute before the confrontation, and had thirty minutes until it was done warming up.

Ooze Master had been making another fucking monologue for the last two minutes, and I was just about done with his shit. Johnny was frozen in place, hesitant to fight his family.

I decided that enough was enough, and I raised my hand.

"Excuse me, Goo King?"

"That's Ooze Master, inferior!" it shouted, before quietly adding, "Although your idea is good too, I might take it as a title."

"Whatever, I have a question about that portal." He looked at it. "If I close it, would it be one of those everything-goes-back-to-it's-dimension situations?"

Ooze Master stared at me. Johnny stared at me. The Brainwashed Three stared at me.

"… No," Ooze Master said.

"I'll take my chances," I replied, shooting a web at the battery thing-y and pulling.

In a second, the portal turned into a knock-off black hole that only sucked in all the goo, including the bits stuck to Sue, Reed and Ben.

Shortly after, they were back to normal and I was eating a late brunch with them.

"So this kinda thing is just another Wednesday for you guys, huh?" I asked through a mouth full of toast. "That's gotta get annoying."

Ben nodded, and Sue shrugged.

"You get used to it," she said.

"I'm more interested in you, young man," Reed Richards said, giving me a smile. "How did you figure out the portal so fast?"

I could see, out of the corner of my eye, Johnny rolling his eyes as a small sigh escaped him.

I felt for the guy. Growing up with the Parkers was great, but Peter had a tendency of leaving me feeling pretty dumb. Being normal around geniuses would leave most people with issues. Being a reincarnated teenager that should be smarter than a four-year-old was just humiliating. It was part of the reason I decided that the age that mattered was the one of my body.

He probably expected me to be yet another super-smart Cape that could think circles around Hawking.

Boy did he get the pleasant surprise of my stupidity.

"I just figured I might as well try," I shrugged.

Richards' face fell (a bit too literally, as it looked like it actually elongated), Sue blinked with surprise, and Ben coughed.

Johnny looked happy, though.

"Seriously?" asked Ben.

"Well, from what I've heard, that's how these things go," I gestured vaguely. "You fight the brainwashed members while some sort of secret weapon loads up, then the weakened but free Smart Guy tells you that the portal just needs to be shut off, and then you try to shut off the portal in time. It seemed easier to skip to the last step."

Johnny started laughing while Ben and Richards gaped at me.

"What if that hadn't worked?" Sue asked. "We would have been stuck with the Goo Invaders."

"No, they would have been stuck with us." I corrected.

This got a grin from Ben.

"In any case," said Richards, failing to hide his disappointment. "We are in your debt."

"Great, because I have two favors to ask and I'd rather just owe one."

"Huh?"

"The first one and this is the one I'm cashing in my favor on, is that you give a friend of mine a chance for an internship here," I finished what was left of my toast and washed it down with orange juice. "I'm not asking for you to hand it on a silver platter, just look at some of his work."

"That sounds more than fair," Sue nodded. "And the other favor?"

"I need a full medical exam," I explained. "I got my powers from a radioactive spider, and I don't want to find out I have radioactive blood or something the wrong way."

"A radioactive spider?" Johnny asked.

"I don't know, man, the universe is weird." I said, exasperated.

"True that," Ben admitted.

"You'd rather use your favor on an internship for your friend than your medical exam?" Sue asked.

"Meh," I shrugged. "I've been fine for the last couple months; I can manage to go without a doctor if you say no."

"Of course we won't," Sue sighed. She got up and gestured for me to follow, "Come on, I'll take you to my lab."

"O-oh, you mean- I mean, of course, I heard that you're a geneticist but I didn't think- Not that you're not-! I mean!"

She laughed a little and gestured for me again.

"Right," face burning under the mask (which I hurriedly pulled down over my mouth) I followed.

"Hey, Spidey!" Johnny called.

I looked back and saw him make a 'watching you' gesture before laughing.

I shot a web over his face. Not enough that he couldn't breathe, but enough to annoy him.

Muffled swearing and the laughter of a man made of rock followed me out the door.

"Interesting," Sue whispered, looking down a microscope at a sample of my blood.

'Hm, yeah,' I thought. 'That's what I like the Invisible Woman to call me. Interesting. Like a bacteria farm.'

It could have been worse. I was alone in a room with Sue Storm and my shirt was off. That was pretty good.

"So, what's up, doc?"

"Nothing as bad as radioactive blood, you'll be glad to hear," she said.

"Good, so now my only worry is radioactive sperm and saliva," I joked. She turned to look at me like I was crazy. "Bad joke, sorry."

"It's fine," she said, shaking her head. "I'm just surprised; there aren't many Capes your age. I didn't think I'd meet any besides Johnny."

Truth be told, the 'boom' in Cape activity didn't start until the Avengers originally formed, which was about two decades before I was born. I was, as I was starting to figure out, part of the second generation of Capes in this universe.

Most active and retired Capes were around or over thirty. The implications were… alarming.

The way it was looking, I could end up being a trend-setter.

Ha, isn't that a laugh? Here I was, Jake Fletcher: Spider-Man-and-Trailblazer Extraordinaire.

Sue took a swab of saliva and asked me to, um, fill a cup to make sure my jokes didn't have a serious side to them.

Sometime later, the tests came back negative for poison.

"I'm sure this'll be a relief for your girlfriend," Sue said.

I faked a laugh.

"Not too popular, huh?"

"I have a reputation for insanity and fighting bullies."

"Could be worse," Sue shrugged.

"Would you have dated me?" I asked, mostly rhetorically.

"Depends on what you look like without the mask on," she teased.

Suddenly, it was very hard not to notice the lack of a ring on her finger.

'NO! Bad Spider!'

I cleared my throat. "Right, thanks, I appreciate that."

"No problem," She winked before turning back and retrieving the blood sample. "No, what I wanted to talk about is your powers. I think they're not done developing."

Wait, what the fuck?

She sat on a chair and held the sample in a force field, "From what I've seen, the mutation caused by the spider is tied to your growth hormones."

"So, I don't get full powers until I finish puberty?"

"Basically," she shrugged. "Extreme amounts of adrenaline might rush it a little, but I don't know for sure. You should be prepared for some extreme growth spurs."

I nodded, tapping my chin thoughtfully.

This was probably tied to The Great Web of Fate in some way. Maybe because I got in Peter's place, I was being put on a trial run of some kind?

"Thanks for this, doc," I said, getting off the examining table and putting on the parts of my suit I'd taken off. "Would you mind destroying those samples? I've got this thing with clones, I don't want loose ends."

Sue raised an eyebrow, but nodded anyways. "No problem, at all. It was the least I could do."

We shook hands and I headed off to say goodbye to the rest of the team. Ben and Reed were relaxing on the couch, Reed writing something on his computer while Ben watched the T.V. and drank beer. The former didn't even notice I said something, but the Thing nodded at me and thanked me again for my help.

I found Johnny still on the kitchen, with the smell of burnt chemicals indicating what happened to my prank.

Before I could leave, Johnny told me to stand still as he wrapped an arm around my shoulders and raised his camera. "Selfie!"

I had just enough time to make a little peace sign.

"Nice, this is going on Twitter," he said, already typing away. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. "Here."

"What's this?"

"That's Reed's personal email address and my number. The first one is so your friend can send something for the internship. The second is in case you wanna hang out sometime."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I mean," he seemed oddly nervous. "I don't know any other Cape my age, you know. It'd be cool to hang out with someone that gets it."

Johnny Storm was a social butterfly. He thrived at parties, could get a date by brushing his hair with his hand, and might have caused a heart attack at one point with a wink of his eye. He was nothing like me.

But, I got what he meant when he said that. Not even Peter really understood some things I talked about. He'd try to, but he didn't get it.

"Sounds good," I nodded, pocketing the piece of paper.

I thought about it, and decided to throw caution away. I took off my mask, "I'm not comfortable with everyone knowing, but my name's Jake Fletcher, if you were wondering."

His smile was a million watts, and I pondered how I could possibly be this bad at keeping a secret identity.

"Alright, thanks Blondie," I said. "Yeah, no, I'll be fine. Yeah, thanks. We'll talk later. Bye."

I hung up. Illyana had just confirmed my theory; I was 'incompletely' bound to The Great Web of Fate.

If I had to guess, I just had to prove myself a capable Spider-Man.

How was that going to happen? A fight against the Green Goblin? Keeping the mask after the death of a loved one?

… Whatever it was?

I may not have been ready, but I was willing to face it.