Two hours after Fury briefed me, I was ready to go. I told Ben and May I would be at the Baxter Building for a few days — an experiment Reed was running that required my extended involvement. To the FF, I just told the truth: SHIELD had another mission for Spider-Man.
David picked me up in a private SHIELD jet, which he landed on a skyscraper rooftop in Queens. I got in and sat in the back as the plane climbed into the sky and banked toward international waters.
I sat there in full armour, running through the situation in my mind. I couldn't make any major changes to the costume on short notice, so I had stuck with the current configuration. I picked up my helmet and turned it over in my hands.
"David," I said.
"What?" the agent replied.
"Does everyone know my identity?"
"No. Only a few select individuals have access to that information — Agent Romanoff, Director Fury, and myself."
"What about the other Avengers?"
"Your identity has not been included in any of their briefing materials. As far as they're concerned, you're an exceptionally capable asset."
"Good." I settled the helmet over my head and locked it into place. I activated the voice modulator — it dropped my voice several octaves lower, enough to throw off anyone trying to take a guess. "Because the last thing I need is a lecture about my age in the middle of a crisis."
"Voice modulator?" David asked.
"Can't have people making educated guesses," I said.
"Smart," he replied, which was about as close to a compliment as David got.
I got up and moved to the cockpit. Through the forward window I could see the helicarrier out across the water, still some distance away. Even from here it was extraordinary — a floating fortress the length of a city block. "David — do you think I'm ready for this?"
"No," David said.
I looked at him.
"But I don't think anyone's ready for something like this," he said.
I nodded. "Then let's get Fury's battery back."
We landed on the carrier deck and I stepped out into organised controlled chaos. It looked exactly like I'd always imagined from the films — hundreds of personnel moving with purpose, every terminal manned, the air carrying that particular tension of a facility that never slept.
I spotted one man immediately who looked completely out of place. Grey suit, purple undershirt. Standing near the railing and watching the activity around him with the careful expression of a man who had learned to observe from a safe distance.
"Dr. Banner," I said, walking toward him.
He looked up. "I'm sorry — do I know you?"
"Spider-Man," I said, offering my hand. "And yes, actually — in a manner of speaking."
Bruce looked at the offered hand and then shook it carefully, as though he was always a little conscious of his own grip. "A fan?"
"Very much so," I said. "I've been following your work on the Super Soldier formula — the gamma radiation approach. The methodology was brilliant."
"And why would that particular strand interest you?"
"My own powers work on similar principles," I said. "Radioactive spider bite. Altered my biology, gave me enhanced strength and agility, proportional to a spider. Lets me cling to surfaces. The biological mechanism isn't so different from what the gamma radiation did to you — it rewrote the physical parameters of a human body."
"That's...actually quite interesting," Bruce said.
"Also — we've met before," I added. "Not you, exactly. The other you. In Harlem."
Bruce's expression shifted. "I — I'm sorry about that—"
"For what? You were trying to stop the Abomination. Honestly, it's partly because of that fight that I decided to do what I do. I figured if I wasn't going to help, more people would get hurt. Things went from there."
"You got into heroism because of the Hulk?" Bruce asked, looking genuinely surprised.
"You were the first person I saw who couldn't stop themselves from trying to do the right thing, even when the right thing was enormously dangerous and complicated," I said. "It made an impression."
"Is this the Spider-Man?" a voice asked nearby.
"Yes, he is," another voice replied — and I turned to find Natasha and Steve Rogers walking over together.
"Nat!" I stepped forward and hugged her. She suppressed an extremely dignified sigh. "I missed you."
"Spider," she said, extracting herself. "You're still...active, I see."
"Very much so! And what on earth were you thinking, leaving me alone with Agent David?! He's absolutely awful!"
"I'm sorry?" Steve said, looking politely confused.
"I was his handler," Natasha explained. "I had to reassign."
"You didn't reassign me to a suitable replacement," I said. "You assigned me to a brick wall in a bad mood."
"Spider-Man," Steve said, giving me a firm handshake. Even through the armour I could feel the man was built like a granite pillar. He spotted Bruce. "Dr. Banner."
Bruce shook his hand. "They told me you'd be here. I wasn't sure I believed them."
Steve smiled. "They told me you could find the Tesseract."
"Is that all you've heard about me?"
"It's the only part I needed to know."
"Look at you two," I said warmly. "Already getting along famously. This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
"Gentlemen," Natasha said, "you may want to step inside. This next part gets a little uncomfortable." She was looking at the deck, where crew members were beginning to move with unusual urgency, strapping equipment down, issuing rebreathers.
"Is this a submarine?" Steve asked, looking around.
"In a pressurised metal container?" Bruce said, the faintest edge of tension in his voice. "Really?"
"Wrong direction," I said, nodding toward the horizon as the helicarrier's enormous turbines began to spin up. The whole deck shuddered. Then the carrier began to lift.
"Oh," Bruce said, watching the ocean fall away beneath us. "No — this is considerably worse."
We moved inside. Natasha guided us through to the main operations room. I looked around at the dozens of people working at terminals, the screens tracking a dozen simultaneous threads of intelligence. Fury stood at the command station, watching the room.
"We're ready, sir," a woman called up from the pit of terminals.
"Good. Vanish," Fury said.
On the main screen I watched the carrier's camouflage engage — a skin of projected sky that turned the whole ship invisible from below.
Steve walked up to Fury and handed him a ten-dollar bill. Fury pocketed it with a satisfied expression.
He crossed to Bruce. "Dr. Banner. Thank you for coming."
"Thank you for asking nicely," Bruce said. "So — how long am I expected to stay?"
"Until we have the Tesseract."
"And where are you with that?"
Fury nodded toward Coulson, who was overseeing the intelligence operation from his terminal. "We're piggybacking every wirelessly accessible camera on the planet. If it's connected to a satellite, it's working for us now."
"You won't find him in time," Natasha said, eyes on a screen showing Clint Barton's face. Her expression was controlled, but I knew what she was feeling.
"Then narrow the field," Bruce said. "How many spectrometers do you have access to?"
He and Fury stepped away into the details of the operational problem.
I had watched the Avengers film probably a hundred times over. I knew every line, every plot beat, every turning point. And I knew that too much interference would break the outcome we needed — the world needed the Avengers, which meant the Chitauri had to come, which meant Loki had to succeed up to a point, which meant I couldn't change too much.
I genuinely hated that.
Nat walked out with Bruce to show him the lab they had prepared. That left Steve and me with Fury.
Fury looked at me. "Ready?"
"As I'll ever be," I said. "What can you tell me about Loki — beyond what was in the file? You met him briefly. What kind of man is he?"
Fury considered this for a moment. "Arrogant as hell."
I nodded. "Aren't they always."
SHIELD tracked Loki to Stuttgart, Germany, and quickly enough. A sonic jet, Cap, Natasha, and me.
I looked at Steve across the aircraft. He was wearing his suit — the one from the first film. Flat blue, star on the chest, looked like it had been designed by committee in 1944.
"Cap — I don't want to be critical, but are you really going out in that?"
Steve looked down. "Coulson insisted. I said it was old-fashioned."
"It's not old-fashioned, it's a paint sample," I said. "Nat — you seriously let them put him in that?"
"I think he looks fine," Nat said, with a precisely measured smirk.
"You don't like it?" Steve asked, genuinely surprised.
"It's just — plain. Have you thought about electromagnets for the shield? Attaching to your gauntlet so it returns after a throw? That's low-hanging fruit from an engineering standpoint."
Steve blinked at me.
"Right — sorry, you're not really tech-oriented. My apologies. Also — at some point, when there's a spare hour, you should watch a film called Star Wars. I think you'd enjoy it."
Steve looked equally amused and baffled. Nat just smiled. Some things transcended the passage of time.
We drew up over a grand museum in Stuttgart and looked down. Loki was standing in the middle of a crowd of well-dressed people he had forced to their knees, talking about himself. Apparently the God of Mischief had not changed his approach since the Bronze Age.
"Let's go!" Steve called out, and jumped from the open cargo door.
I jumped after him.
Steve landed in front of one of Loki's energy blasts and deflected it back with his shield. It staggered the god. I landed on a lamp post and watched, phone already out and recording. This was going to be historically significant and I was not missing the chance to document it.
"You know," Steve said, standing up, "the last time I was in Germany and a man stood above a crowd like this — we didn't get along."
"The man out of time," Loki replied, with the particular smile of someone who considers other people's suffering to be witty.
"Not as out of time as you might think," Steve said, and nodded over his shoulder.
Natasha brought the jet around and levelled the nose cannon at Loki. "Loki — drop the weapon and stand down."
Loki fired at the jet. Natasha dodged. Cap threw his shield. Loki caught it with his sceptre and sent Steve flying backward.
I planted the phone to the lamp post, pointed at the action — it was still recording — and leaped.
"Yee-haw!" I went feet-first into Loki's chest, using my momentum to drive him back, bounced off and landed clear. I spun a web line and hit his arms, pulling him down and pinning them to the ground.
He strained against it, looking up at me with genuine fury. "What are you?!"
"Haven't you heard?" I said. "Spider-Man." And then my spider-sense detonated — I threw myself sideways just as Loki's sceptre materialised in his hand and drove into the space where my chest had been.
He had freed himself. I had no idea how.
I closed in again, dodging the sceptre, and landed a clean punch across his jaw. He went back two steps, rubbing his face.
"I'll admit," he said, pressing the back of one hand to his lip, "you are among the most agile fighters I have encountered."
Steve came up beside me. "Hear that, Spider? He likes you."
"Aw, shucks. Sorry, Loki — I'm more into women."
I fired two web grenades at him. He blasted them apart.
"Enough of this!" He hit us both with a wave of force. We jumped clear and Steve charged in immediately, hammering Loki's sceptre aside with the shield before kicking him solidly in the stomach.
Loki snarled, thrust forward with the sceptre. Steve blocked. I went over Steve's shoulder, both palms levelled at Loki's face.
"Bite me!" I fired.
Twin repulsor beams hit him directly and sent him skidding backward across the square, sceptre spinning away. He hit the ground and lay still for a moment.
Steve and I walked toward him.
Loki got back to his feet slowly. He looked at me specifically. "Spider-Man."
"That's me," I said, and then my spider-sense lit up again — "Cap, down!" I hit Steve in a shoulder tackle just as two daggers came singing through the air at our heads.
Loki grabbed his sceptre. He aimed it.
Steve raised his shield between us.
The blast hit it and sent us both sprawling. Loki turned to run. We scrambled up and started after him — and then the opening riff of AC/DC's Shoot to Thrill came rolling across Stuttgart's rooftops.
I smiled inside my helmet.
Iron Man came out of the sky trailing red-gold fire, hit Loki with two repulsor blasts, and landed between him and us with every single weapon system he had live and aimed.
"Your move, Reindeer Games."
Loki looked at Tony. He looked at us. He put his hands up.
"Mr. Stark," Steve said.
Tony looked over his shoulder. "Captain."
I fired web restraints around Loki's wrists and bent down to pick up the sceptre. "Damn, this thing is something. It's like a magic wand. Loki, you're basically a wizard."
Tony and Steve looked at each other.
"And this is the person who took down Magneto?" Tony said, with precisely calibrated sarcasm.
Steve shrugged. "That's what the file says."
"I'm standing right here," I said. "And you're both mean."
We loaded Loki onto the jet and were airborne within minutes. Natasha radioed ahead that we were on our way in. Fury, apparently, was suitably impressed that we'd brought him in cleanly — but even more cautious for it.
Tony removed his helmet as the jet levelled out and turned to study me. He looked at me the way people look at something that doesn't quite compute.
"Is that my tech?" he said.
"A version of it," I said.
"SHIELD is stealing my technology now?" He turned to Natasha.
"Nobody stole anything," she said pleasantly. "He built it."
Tony turned back to me. "I'm sorry?"
"It took me a couple of months," I said. "The repulsors were about half that."
Stark's expression went through three distinct phases in rapid succession. "Two months," he said. "People have spent years trying to crack my designs. Teams of engineers. And you did it in two months."
"I had a working model to pull apart," I said, sitting down. "When you can study the thing directly rather than guess at it from first principles, it's considerably faster. I used components from the Hammer drones I took apart during the Stark Expo incident."
"You built this off Hammer tech? How has it not exploded?"
"I made several improvements," I said. "It won't explode. And your palladium decay rate — I've extended it significantly. You won't need a replacement for quite a while."
"How did you—" Tony stopped.
Thunder rumbled outside the jet. We all felt it.
Loki, sitting in restraints, went very slightly still.
Steve looked at him. "What's the matter? Afraid of a little lightning?"
"Not the lightning," Loki said carefully. "What tends to come with it."
Something hit the roof of the jet.
"Stark," I said, "helmet."
Tony was already opening the jet door.
"What are you doing?!" Steve said.
A large blond man in silver-grey armour stepped through the door, red cloak sweeping behind him, hammer in hand.
"Hey — nice cape," I said, and fired both repulsors directly at his chest.
Thor went flying back out of the jet.
I turned to Tony and Steve. "That was surprisingly easy."
"ARGH!" Thor came back in.
My spider-sense went absolutely insane — but there was nowhere to move in time. His fist hit me in the gut like a wrecking ball. I went backward through the cockpit windshield and came to rest against the instrument panel.
I was fairly certain one, possibly two ribs had cracked.
"Spider!" Natasha moved immediately, pulling me carefully away from the controls.
Through narrowed eyes I watched Thor take Loki and fly back out.
"Are you all right, son?" Steve was beside me, helping me off the panel.
"Fine," I said, tasting blood. "Scratch."
"That absolute—" Tony was already suiting up and moving.
"Stark! Wait!" Steve started after him, then turned to Natasha. "Can you handle him?"
Nat nodded. She looked at me. "You don't want to fight these two, Cap. They come from mythology. They're essentially gods."
"There's only one God, ma'am," Steve said, securing his parachute. "And I'm fairly certain he doesn't dress like that." He went out.
I pulled myself upright. The pain was significant but manageable. I started calculating the damage — and then the world began to tilt.
"Nat," I said. "I think Thor hit me harder than I thought."
"Spider—"
Everything went sideways, and her voice was the last thing I heard before the darkness.
Some time later:
I woke up in a medical bay. My helmet was removed. My suit had been opened at the chest and bandaging wrapped around my ribs.
I groaned and sat up. How long had I been out?
"Carefully," Natasha said.
She was sitting between my bed and another bed, in which Clint Barton was unconscious.
I looked at her. "What did I miss?"
Nat sighed. And explained.
The plot had run its course largely the same way. Tony had been furious that Thor knocked me out — more furious than the film had accounted for, apparently. Thor had apologised. Tony hadn't accepted it. Then Loki had escaped, SHIELD had lost propulsion, and the Avengers had been split apart.
I sat with that for a moment.
I had wanted to change things. I had hoped to. But maybe this was simply how it had to go. Maybe the Avengers needed to be broken before they could be built. Maybe some things couldn't — shouldn't — be prevented.
I pulled the wires and monitoring pads off myself and stood up. My ribs protested.
"You need to rest," Natasha said.
"Loki is out there assembling an army," I said, pulling the suit back on. My spider-web filaments came alive across the fabric, reasserting the pattern. "I'm not going to sit here and wait."
"You were hit by a god, Peter. You can—"
"Don't finish that sentence," I said quietly. "I'm not a child to be wrapped up and set aside. I may not be a trained assassin like you, but I am not a coward." I settled the mask into place. "Where are Stark and Rogers?"
She looked at me.
"Right now, those two are the most important people on this carrier," I said. "I'm going to make sure they stop feeling sorry for themselves and start getting angry about the right things. Make sure Barton's alright."
I walked.