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This high up, the city didn’t look much different from Peter’s New York. There was the Oscorp building, visible even from here, and it was overall a bit less…lit-up than his home city, but it was not strange enough to make him feel uneasy. He sensed his counterpart coming, naturally, but didn’t feel the need to look back: the other Peter would say hi when he landed.
Or, well, that’s what he thought: actually the other Peter hurled something tiny at his head that Peter only caught thanks to his tingle. He held it up to the light to look at the tiny copper disc.
“For your thoughts,” Repeat said, and Peter heard the thud of an obscene number of pizza boxes being dropped on the roof. “They seem so deep and profound.”
“Nah,” Peter said, and squinted at the coin. “Hey, your pennies are weird.”
“Shut up. Really?” He leaned over Peter’s shoulder to also squint. “How are yours different?”
“...uh, stupidly, now that you’re asking I don’t know how to describe a penny to you,” Peter said, laughing a little at himself. “But I know for sure it doesn’t say ‘ONE CENT’ like this does.”
“Yet another reason to not use cash cross-universe,” he said sagely, and Peter nodded rapidly in agreement. He still hadn’t really emotionally recovered from Peter-Two trying to buy something in his universe with a golden twenty-five dollar coin, which was one of the weirdest things to exist in the oldest Spidey’s universe. (And that was a universe that had Doc Ock.) Peter-Three reclaimed the penny and nudged Peter’s back with his knees. “Come on, they’re already getting cold with me swinging them here. Where’s Old Pete?”
“Got caught up,” Peter said vaguely, investigating the pizza boxes–eight of them, all told. “Who do we have to thank for today’s dinner?”
Peter-Three whipped a credit card out of his uniform—he hid the pockets so much better than Peter had figured out how to so far–and read ceremoniously: “From a mister…Johann Deer.” He scoffed, then snapped the card and scattered the pieces on the rooftop. “Nice alias, asshole.”
“What did he do?” Peter asked, trying to be casual about it. Peter-Three had some…wiggle-room, in his morals, in places the other two Peters didn’t. Among other things, he’d decided several years ago that certain criminals owed him lunch—robbing the rich (the crooks) to feed the poor (himself), as it were. Peter kinda thought his Aunt May wouldn’t approve, but he also thought the older Spidey was grown up enough that Peter had no right judging where he drew his lines.
“Wannabe mob boss,” the older Peter said, his relaxed tone much more convincing than Peter’s probably had been. “Met him while he was booting a poor little stray cat out of his lair. With a crowbar.”
“Is the cat okay?” Peter asked anxiously, only to slump when the other Peter shook his head. “Oh.” He busied himself pulling the top pizza off the stack and flipping open the lid. He was pretty sure Repeat was as sad about the cat as he was, or more, since he’d had to see it, so Peter offered, “Old Pete’s late ‘cause we helped a kid find his escaped gerbil and he was walking him home.”
Repeat laughed, just a huff, but he took a pizza himself too. “Naturally. Unfortunately, you snooze you loose, and I ain’t holding off eating for him to get back.”
“Ok,” Peter said comfortably, knowing that exactly one third of the slices were going to stay waiting even if Old Pete was an hour late. “Thanks for getting me olives on some, Repeat.”
“Hey!” He punctuated his statement with a flick to Peter’s head hard enough he felt it, which meant it would have probably dented a non-enhanced human. “Whose universe is this? I think you’ll find it’s mine! As long as we’re here it’s my God- and Old Pete-given right to be the Peter Prime.”
“Sorry, Peter,” he said dutifully, then inhaled his first slice of pizza. They both made business-like work of the first pies, but before they could open new ones Peter-Three’s head snapped up and he craned his neck.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said brightly as Old Pete landed on the rooftop.
“The gerbil, technically,” Old Pete said mildly, and gave them a dorky little wave. Peter, trying to wave back AND give him a pizza box AND eat his 12th slice, dropped the half-eaten piece on the ground.
“Oops,” Peter said, mentally counting seconds in his head, as Peter-Two accepted the offered box. It was a little past five seconds before he could snatch up the fallen slice, but that wasn’t too bad.
Peter-Three apparently didn’t agree. “Excuse me? Ew?” he said, recoiling in exaggerated disgust. “Do you know what pigeons DO on this roof?”
“Who among us hasn’t eaten pizza out of a dumpster a time or two?” Old Pete said philosophically, and Peter nodded in reply as he ate his rescued slice without guilt.
“... I haven’t? What the hell?”
“Really?” Peter and Old Pete chorused. Old Pete shrugged and continued, “I mean, when you’re broke and hungry, and you’ve got a super-healing power that also gives a super-immune-system….”
“I am having a crisis right now,” Repeat squawked, pointing accusingly at them both. “How are you both acting like that’s no big deal!”
“Aww,” Old Pete said with one of his little catlike smiles. “Good for you. Here–” he mimed taking something off his head and placing it atop Repeat’s fluffy mop. “The crown of Most With-It Peter is yours for now, with that.”
Repeat sniffled, straightening the imaginary crown and placing his hand over his heart. “I’d like to think the Academy, for setting the bar so low that even–”
“Hey!” Peter cut in indignantly, pointing at Old Pete. “How come you had the crown! We didn’t vote on that!”
Old Pete gave a little shrug that said ‘sorry’ but a little smirk that said ‘you know why’, and there wasn’t really any point in arguing with that. Peter sighed, defeated, and ate another slice. “Old Pete is being a bad example,” Peter-Three said, but he said it through a mouthful of pizza so that kinda shot his credibility in the foot as far as Peter was concerned.
“Sorry, Mads,” said Old Pete, and Peter-Three did a kind of full-body outraged flail that ended in a one-handed handstand (‘cause the other hand was full of pizza)
“Does no one! Remember! The home turf advantage!” He pointed in turn: “Old Pete. Half-Pint. Peter! Not Mad Scientist Peter, or Repeat, or…or….”
“Peter-Three?” Peter said innocently. Peter-Three righted himself and scowled.
“Exactly!”
“I kinda get the short end of the stick, huh,” Peter-Two said a little ruefully. Peter swallowed the crust from his 21st slice and felt a twinge of conscience.
“...it doesn’t really hurt your feelings, does it? When we call you Old Pete?”
His older counterparts, with gooey looks, reached out to pat his head simultaneously. (they did some kind of awkward little ‘no you first’ exchange over his head then took turns ruffling his hair) “It doesn’t bother me…much,” Peter-Two said, but with a face that Peter interpreted as reassuring. “It could be worse. I’ve handled way worse than a bit of little-brother-ly teasing.”
“We’re not…we’re not, I mean, teasing you–”
“We for sure are,” Peter-Three said, “but in the karmic balance of tease we’re totally even. We earn like five ‘old Pete’s for every ‘You guys can’t do that?’” He turned to Peter pleadingly. “Lil Pete. He called our web-shooters ‘prosthetic spinnerets’. ”
“Hah!” Old Pete said, seeming pleased with himself.
Instead of having to take a side, Peter opened mouth and inserted pizza.
“Coward,” Peter-Three sniffed.
They had almost polished off the pizzas when Peter-Two froze with his hand outstretched over a box. “What’s wrong?” Peter said, standing up to look around–he recognized a tingle when he saw one.
“Did Timmy fall down the well?” Repeat said. He still looked relaxed, which made Peter feel a bit better–Old Pete might have by far the most broadly-powerful danger sense of them all, but Peter-Three was absolutely king of sensing enemies in the vicinity. It wasn’t something like a villain sneaking up on them, then. “What is it, old boy?”
Peter-Two didn’t reply, but instead of standing up he hopped up to crouch on Repeat’s shoulder like the world’s heaviest pirate-parrot. Peter giggled in spite of himself, and hurried to finish off his last slice.
“...dunno,” Old Pete said after a full minute, ”But it’s that way.” After that, without any other explanation he did a back handspring off of Repeat and swung off ‘that way’ with his characteristic power and efficiency.
“Shoot,” Repeat sighed, looking mournfully at his remaining food, and leapt off the building after him.
“This is, like, littering !” Peter shouted after them, but if they weren’t gonna stay to clean up he certainly wasn’t. He followed without a backward glance.
They couldn’t just swing normally: it would be hard to miss three spider-dudes swinging at once. They hugged close to buildings and over rooftops–Old Pete sometimes just straight up leapt from one roof to the next, which was cool. They traveled several blocks that way before Peter felt his tingle start to go off to whatever their eldest had caught ages ago. From the way Peter-Three froze at the top of an arc he must have felt it too. A moment later they saw the smoke.
“Hell’s Kitchen?” He called when his swing brought him close to Repeat, who scoffed.
“Excuse you?”
Okay, so apparently this area of New York wasn’t called Hell’s Kitchen here. Of course Daredevil wasn’t here either, but Peter still felt like looking over his shoulders for a figure in red leather to give him an ass-whooping for intruding on his turf. The sound of sirens grew along with the smoke and he landed right behind the tallest Spidey. “Old Pete?”
“He’s inside,” Repeat said tersely. The building wasn’t exactly engulfed in flames, but it was heading in that direction. There was a fire truck setting up on the street below, but from the looks of the neighborhood there might not be more for a while. The building didn’t look in good shape either, even the parts that weren’t on fire. Mentally calculating, Peter went to dive off the edge and swing for the burning building–before being snapped back by a web.
“Hey!”
“You’re gonna blow my cover, half-pint,” he said. Peter might have argued but he could tell the other Peter was also frustrated to be out here instead of in there helping. “There’s already a Spidey on the scene. C’mon.” He tugged off his mask and swung off his backpack, hastily pulling out his rolled-up button-down shirt. “People will be pointing cameras and stuff, let’s not be so conspicuous”
His method of non-conspicuous was to sit on a fire escape facing the building, legs dangling and phone out as though he were filming the fire himself. “This makes us look kinda callous,” Peter pointed out quietly.
“We’re in good company,” Peter-Three said evenly, and returned to staring at the building like he could see through it. Wait, could he?”
“Do you have, like, spider-x-ray-vision?” Peter blurted. Then felt stupid, then enjoyed the baffled look on the older Peter’s face.
“...no?”
Before Peter could defend his comment which was, admittedly, absurd on the surface, a shout from below took their attention. A person was flying through the air from one of the windows–and landing, precisely, on a person-size web that had preceded them into the building across the way. Peter whooped. “Nice shot!” Old Pete could probably hear him, even in that ruckus: among his other unfair physiological advantages, his control over his senses was so much better than Peter’s that he could dial them up waaaaaay higher without knocking himself out.
“I have got to fine-tune the mechanism,” Repeat muttered glaring at the sleeve that hid his web-shooter, “I’ve always tinkered with the formula , but structurally, there’s gotta be more…that was a single blast, all threads the perfect tensile strength, precisely calibrated so all the structural strands connected to the desired surfaces and left a center at the right tension to receive the desired target with no rebound…”
“There was a little rebound,” Peter pointed out, to be fair. “It looks like it’s just got some really sticky ones in there. If they don’t know how to dissolve that they’re probably gonna have to cut her hair out to detach her, and stuff.”
“RIP,” Peter-Three said. At the building, a webbed head was sticking out a window to check the street below, then busting the whole thing out. Spidey stretched out his arm and shot one long line to the ground, another a little over a foot parallel, and then a rapid zig-zag down the length to make a slightly slant-y but perfectly functional ladder. “Hm.” Repeat leaned back, looked at the building from another angle. “He must have figured the fire-spread pattern will get there last.”
“Oh, right,” Peter said, as a dark-skinned woman cautiously edged out of the broken window and started descending the ladder, a young man soon after. “If they can help themselves he can get to others in more immediate danger. There must be a lot of people in there.”
Peter-Three winced. “Yeah.”
He probably shouldn’t ask, but Peter couldn’t help but say “If we were just very careful to not be seen–”
“If it’s blowing out cover or letting someone die of course we’re gonna blow it,” the older Peter said, and gently squeezed his shoulder. “I promise. But OP’s got it now.”
“Does that stand for Old Pete or Over-Powered?”
“Yeah.”
The fire spread, faster and faster: more emergency services arrived, but they weren’t making much of a dent in the blaze. Peter felt a twinge at the realization that a bunch of people were gonna lose their homes today. Hopefully not their lives, though: there were firefighters going in and out on the lower floors, helping people away: Spidey’s web-ladder was joined by a couple others: and a half-dozen more people went soaring out windows to land on personalized web landing zones. At some point a news van had arrived, and Peter nudged Repeat and nodded at it. “Are they your guys?”
“Huh? Oh!” He squinted at them. “Nah, I work for the Bugle, remember?”
“Yechhh,” Peter muttered.
“I know. But I do know those guys, from the New York Moon? I think that’s Sandy, actually. She’s cool.”
“Huh.” Peter cocked his head. “Do you want to, like, be seen? To, you know–” he gestured vaguely at the burning building. “To, you know, be in two places at once?”
“Oh!” He perked up, and swung up on the railing. “Oh, hey, good idea, kid. I’ll make like I’m taking pictures for the Bugle-–shit, I’ve only got my phone. Well, it’ll have to make do.”
“Old Pete will do something for you.” He had, back in Peter’s universe, contrived to have his mask ‘accidentally’ compromised where witness could see: not only did no one on Earth-One remember Peter Parker, it was widely reported that Spider-Man was a forty-ish man with blue eyes and dark hair, which was a little piece of extra security that Peter hugely appreciated. “Go on, be seen. I’ll just watch from here.”
Repeat waved at him when he reached the street level, and Peter waved back and watched him approach the reporters for just a second before turning his attention back to the building. It wasn’t gonna be salvageable. As he watched, Spidey hung half-out of a busted window and bellowed to the fire crew, “Top five floors clear! I got one more in here, then its just your guys on the ground!” The crew chief waved and Spidey ducked back in.
Peter’s tingle had been going at a low-level buzz this whole time, but it suddenly flared. He looked around, making sure he wasn’t about to be mugged (on a fire escape? Come on, brain) before standing up and looking over the burning building. There—the back right corner. Something was up with it structurally that wasn’t wrong with the rest of the building. He wanted to think Peter-Two felt it too but he might not: Peter didn’t like to brag, but his sense of the inanimate objects in his environment was better than either of the other Spideys. Peter-Three theorized it was to do with him using the high tech suit from Mr Stark, but whatever the reason he was way more precise than the other Spideys in his web placement AND he could sense things like buildings about to fall. He bounced on his toes, torn, and paced in a quick circle as he fought the urge to go fix the problem himself. Instead he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Spidey! The back right building corner is about to go out!”
He saw Repeat startle down on the ground and mentally apologized for making him look like a spaz in front of the cool reporter. From the building, Spidey lept free, backwards–using his body to protect the old man in his grip from the window glass. He swung a long arc that deposited the person on a gurney then quick-reversed towards the building. He bounced off a wall and towards–oops.
“The other right, Spidey!”
Old Pete reversed course and slingshotted himself around to the correct corner. He sprayed a wide net of web all across the building corner, then cocked his head. He started running rapid reinforcing strands top to bottom, then from the building to its neighbors. The fire was starting to die out a little, both from the efforts of the fire crew and because it had already burned a lot of what was flammable. Spidey waited til the last person was out, then crawled his way, leisurely, down the firetruck ladder. He stood on the top of the firetruck, waved at the rubberneckers, then gave finger-guns to Repeat and paused to pose for a photo. The cool reporter shouted a question, but Old Pete was already off.
Peter decided this was a good time to make tracks, and scurried up the side of the building to the roof. He met up with Old Pete a few roofs away, and found the older man leaning over with his hands on his knees coughing his guts out. “You ok?” Peter said, patting his back. “Nice job in there.”
“All part of a day’s work,” Peter-Two gasped, then coughed a bit more, then finished: “--as your friendly neighborhood Spider-man.”
“Dude, you’re the best!” Repeat landed behind them and dug through his backpack for a water-bottle that he then passed on to Old Pete. “Sandy said something about, of course he posed for his personal photographer. I have never seemed less like Spider-Man in my life. You’re an artist.”
“I try,” Peter-Two said humbly. He capped the water bottle and started to hand it back before hesitating. “Oh. Sorry, I got my germs on it.”
“Su germs es mi germs,” Peter-Three said philosophically, and tucked the bottle back in his bag. “Junior, why didn’t you just say it was the south-west corner.”
“I don’t know directions,” Peter protested. “This suit doesn’t have a compass in it.”
“It is handy to be able to tell the cardinal directions, bud,” Old Pete said.
“Even I can do that,” Repeat added smugly.
“I’m a superhero! Not a boy scout!”
Old Pete shrugged and quirked a smile at him. “Why not both?”
“I hate you guys,” Peter grouched, and sat on the wall with his arms crossed. “You suck.”
“I know,” said Repeat. He got headslapped by Old Pete for his troubles, which of course meant he let it happen ‘cause his tingle would for sure have alerted him. Peter-Three was weird.
“You do not suck,” Peter-Two said firmly. He stretched with a groan and gestured vaguely. “We should go back and deal with the pizza.”
“Eww,” said Peter, at the same time as Repeat said,
“It’s gonna be Ant-a-palooza by now!”
“All the more reason to put them in a dumpster instead of just leaving them out.”
Peter squinted at the skyline. “Where was it again?”
“Um, due west of here,” Repeat said in the most annoying way possible. He dodged Peter’s headslap, which was also annoying. “Come on, Mr Superhero, time to interrupt some ants’ party.”
“I know a guy who can talk to ants!”
“Shut up. No you don’t. What’s his name?”
“...Ant-man.”
“Ok, now we know you’re just messing with us—”