Chapter 5

Funeral Suit

Peter was thinking of a joke. The joke was that there's a comedian on stage, performing a fresh bit about this middle aged has-been never-was, and it went like this:

This guy, he just finds out he has three kids he's never known. Three kids he's managed to let down years before ever even meeting them, before any of them were even born. One after another – one he's scarred for life, the other he's ruined, and the last he's corrupted. The same could be said for all of them, but it's a pretty spectacular way to fuck up so quickly nonetheless.

Peter himself is in the crowd as the comedian yaps on, less listening than he is badgering the bartenders that run the place. They're two ladies; one's a red head with hips for days, breasts like dreams, and an ass like an assisted suicide machine that would get his mouth arrested for assault and battery if she was dumb enough to let his tongue anywhere near it. The other's a woman… probably. She has the shape to catch his eye, but she's made out of tar, with large, jagged teardrop white eyes and a large white spider on her chest, between her breasts. She has a tongue for days, but everything else takes a backseat to the fact that she's washing the cups with it and her drool.

He's badgering them for a full refund for his ticket because this comedian stinks. The black one hisses and the redhead, she makes him look at the stage while the comedian talks about the kids, two girls and a boy.

Sounds familiar. He asks Red if she knows them and she drops three names while dropping three olives into a drink: April, May, and Ben. Peter cannot for the life of him wonder why the kid couldn't have been named 'Augustus'.

On stage, the comedian drops three of his own while slamming his foot into the stage. His round specs crack, his brown hair messed up, and he looks like he just got punched in the face a few times: Mayday, Ashley, and Junior, because apparently, this guy, he isn't so good with names.

What can you expect from a bozo calling himself Spider-Man? The comedian asks the crowd. They boo, but the bartender, Black, she snickers.

How a two-bit jokester calling himself 'Captain Universe: Comedian Extraordinaire' can ever throw shade at a name is beyond Peter. This yutz couldn't take the name 'Captain' if he was the last man on Gilligan's Island.

He tells Red as much and she giggles. Peter tells her he likes how she laughs, that he's willing to take a hit on the tickets if he can just get half his money back – or her number, so he can hear her laugh some more. She doesn't, but smiles sadly, and tells him he has bigger problems as she scratches her ring finger.

The jokes keep coming. How is a forty-six-year-old ever going to rake in enough dough to provide for three teenaged mouths on a florist's income? The comedian asks, but no one in the crowd knows, so he helps out, but makes things worse as usual.

This guy, at least he doesn't have a wife to provide for. He could take up prostitution instead – could certainly stand to get laid for once. And, he could feed all three the way he fed the only one of them that was his actual, technical daughter and technically someone he probably never should have met.

With all of them on their knees before the only good thing about him, his big, swinging dick spitting sticky white stuff into each of their hungry mouths. Because, this guy, he was apparently good at that, and Junior looks just like him at that age. He had figuratively fucked himself his entire life, so why wouldn't he be good at literally doing it?

The crowd boos even louder. There's an old married couple there, up front, and a police captain in the back. There's an army vet with missing legs, a scrawny redheaded guy fresh out of rehab with his father, both with bad haircuts, and a few others. A college professor here, a guy with tentacle arms and a bowl haircut there. They throw anything they can get their hands on at the comedian and he takes every hit, looking none the worse for wear save for the black eye, broken glasses, and bloody nose.

Red frowns, shaking her head. She goes back to making drinks and for once, even Black doesn't find something funny. But Peter isn't willing to bet on either color to pull the comedian's ass out of the fire. Something tells him the guy wouldn't accept help anyway.

Peter leaves, and can just barely hear the last joke over the booing crowd. Outside, people are packing the streets just to see or even hear the comedian bomb, and he bombs hard, his voice barely there over the din of the crowd. "Who fights harder, the one legged husband and father of three, or the shut-in geriatric chasing down his heyday? Hey folks, it's a hard day to lose to a dead man, but if anyone can do it, this guy can!"

He points at Peter, and on one end of the street Peter sees a guy with a cane and a missing leg. On the other, a hungry giant looking for an English-speaking man. Looking at either of them gives him a headache, and so he looks up at the sign in lights on the building. There's a knockout wet dream of a frightened looking redhead laying on a tiger-skin rug, dressed in a little black classic with blood flowing from her mouth that forms the club name: Tiger, Red's Scared.

Peter's name is on the marquee: Come see the Amazing Spider-Man in the grudge match of the century! And somewhere far off, he hears a crowd laughing.

That, is funny.

The street outside the old brownstone on the tail end of West 81st street burst into chaos with a shower of glass, wood, and bodies.

The crowd outside wasn't ready for it, they never were, but Peter was expecting it. After everything he'd been through, he always was. Not just for a fight, but for something to go wrong. Some malformed plan to come apart at the cheap seams he'd sewn, because he was a piss-poor tailor when it came to anything that wasn't cloth.

His body tensed with old muscle that, for once, didn't feel like an annoying echo of the young man he used to be, a reflection that didn't stack up to memory. It just was, and the silly string being flung like a party favor was, as usual, because of him.

When all hell broke loose the only thing he ever seemed to be able to do was put on his mask and spray his sticky white stuff and wait until everything worked out. He'd gotten very good at waiting, but that was an answer to a non-problem.

The problem wasn't that he was working on a florist's income, or that and four bodies erupted out of his building's front door, causing an optimistic estimate of a few hundred dollars in damages. The problem wasn't that three bodies had broken in on silly string dressed in bad Halloween costumes, two of them looking too similar to Peter's nightshift uniform, and the last just looking like she'd chosen to dress up as him. The problem wasn't even that Ashley, Junior, and Mayday had butt into his workday like unneeded interns.

The problem was that Peter Parker had three kids with some kind of issue, daddy or otherwise, that could be traced back to him in at least one way, shape, or form, and he'd told them to beat pavement… and actually expected them to listen. Had actually expected their spider-senses to not go nuclear for just long enough for them to leave. He should have known better, because at that age, or any, he wouldn't have listened either.

And in response, Peter took the haymaker shoved into his face by the guy who killed him. He ate it like ice cream, and it came with all the sweet tooth comfort of a root canal as it careened him out of the building. He was still standing afterward – barely – and he was the only one.

It played out like this:

The three of them, three kids that never should have gotten mixed up with him, came busting in like the tag-team he never asked for. The alarm was blaring with a near deafening ring that was somehow still quieter than the concert Peter's spider-sense gave him in his head, and Mayday was leading the charge like her father was screaming her name. It had to have been someone else on a different world with his name and face that she'd just supposed it was him, because Peter hadn't said a thing.

He had turned on his heel just in time to see them before one of the two doors turned into shrapnel. The three of them dove in like acrobats above the crowd; of the three of them, Mayday knew what she was doing the best. Mad desperation tended to put things into focus like that. It had been around twenty years since Peter had seen her particular brand of it.

There'd been no time to marvel at that, their speed, or how utterly pissed Peter was that they were still around. Before, the world had been slow, but as it sped up Peter was still keeping pace. Old steps to an older dance he'd learned years ago; the door came off its hinges with the bash from the heel of Mayday's sneakered foot, the impact turning shrapnel and chaos into a noise that made Peter's eardrums pop. The door would have torn through the air like a wrecking ball, but Peter was ready.

With one, bare hand Peter stopped the object with cold ease. Mayday surfed over his head, an ugly hook in her right hand and her knee ready and waiting to prescribe pain medication to the man who'd not only murdered her father, but was trying to do it again. Peter was moving with the speed and experience of his years rather than any speed he might have had when he was young as he turned, firing a webline after her. It hit pay-dirt at her heel and he yanked, executing her momentum like a headsman.

He snatched her out of the air and whipped her through the door in less than a second. A flurry of dollar store dress clothes and a red mask sending her careening toward the Daily Grind coffee shop across the street as though Peter was a better man that had just sent her to her room.

Junior was after her, without whatever paltry experience Mayday had and only the blind bravado and stupidity that defined Peter at his age, along with whatever joke he could come up from the back of his throat. He never got the chance. Peter's spider-sense blared, and the older of them knew the younger would be too slow to react, and so Peter became the outfielder making the winning catch – he took the door and used it like a fly swatter to beat his younger self down to the ground just before as a glowing hand erupted behind him, right where Junior's throat would have been. Peter webbed him down before he had a chance to even move.

Ashley was last the Spider-Kid's Caboose, skidding on the air just above Peter's head as well as Daemos' outstretched tree trunk of an arm. She masked her approach with a sputtering gout of webbing from her granddaddy's webshooter that hit its mark on Daemos' face, yet barely stunning him as he burned away the webbing and wiped it down with his bare hand. But she was ready for that, or she thought she was. Peter knew better.

Ashley's heels were poised to bash him in the teeth up high and Peter swung the door down low like a back straight Daemos' knee, so close to the back of it but missing by a hair. The door splintered and broke. It was barely enough to make the giant buckle, but had been just enough to turn his vicious, almost contemptible slap to the side of Ashley's head into just a batting away of an annoying gnat. She went flying into a hole in the receptionist's cubicle that hadn't been there a second before.

Peter whirled on him in the same second, bringing up his fist in what would have been a KO punch to his toughest gentleman callers back in the old days and a kiss with his fist that'd give his ex something to fantasize about. It was a quick, vicious uppercut spearheaded by the cold, grip-deformed iron doorknob in his hand. But this wasn't the old days. His fist and the metal gripped in it slammed into and went past Daemos' missing-link jawline in a streak with a crunching thud for proof and a few flung teeth afterward, yet in the scant second afterward, all Peter was treated to was a hungry, ugly, distended smile as they grew back.

Peter hit him again, and again, and again, and Daemos continued to smile even as Peter beat him back. To the stairs and away from the kids with however much speed and power he still had left in his old age as the webhead. Daemos' head banged and rocked from sweet chin music, leaving welts and yellow bruises and teeth that vanished into burning smoke almost instantly, or grew back respectively.

One punch made him bite off his tongue. A snake's tongue grew back in a second, and in the next Peter's rib-shattering punch was stopped cold, his fist snatched out of the air and wrenched to the side. His other followed suit and as Daemos gripped both fists he leaned in close and leered hungrily, his eyes momentarily giving way to a lizard-like, slit yellow.

Peter responded with something far simpler than an uppercut, far less cutting than a hook, and so much less flashy than the moves the kids tried to pull, but just as effective. He head-butted him. And it hurt.

Only for a second, but that was enough. Daemos stumbled back and beneath the spray of blood Peter reeled away, freeing his hands and then swinging back in. He'd beaten the guy away from the door and back to the stairs in just a handful of seconds – not bad for an old man – but the other guy was taller, had physics on his side, and now leverage, not to mention the most annoying healing factor Peter'd run into in years.

Meanwhile, Peter was asking the death metal concert of his blaring spider-sense to tone it down, trying to get the little bookworm he used to be to stop crunching numbers, worrying about three stubborn kids, and fighting in the middle of a ring against someone who'd killed a version of him that had been than Peter himself better in every conceivable way. Simplicity at its finest.

It was a numbers game and Peter could see them count down. He swerved beneath a hook Daemos sent his way and gave one of his own in return that landed between the taller man's ribs. Peter twisted his knuckle and drove harder still, making the ribs crack and break and heal; by that time, he was already sending more up to Daemos' kidneys, solar plexus, other ribs, and chin in another handful of seconds.

The air was gone from Daemos' throat in a whoosh, but he was still laughing. He rocked back, then stepped forward, and the old nerdy bookworm in Peter knew what he was doing – there were brains behind all of his big-eats brawn. The numbers came down and Peter's spider-sense blared with a death metal solo as Daemos knocked into him with Newton's Third Law. The threat wasn't from being caught off balance, but from the hook coming behind that which kissed the webhead mask-first and sent him flying.

It didn't hurt, but Peter knew from experience that it would later. And when it did, if he wasn't dead, it would be up there with the top three worst hits to the face he'd ever gotten: his ex, the Hulk, and his own Aunt. But as it made contact, he remembered a bit from the book he'd bought, How to Get Your Sorry Ass Out of Bed, that had said, "Bad and good are like air anywhere, and you always need to breathe. So breathe."

And so Peter ate the punch and breathed. His spider-sense was still playing on, now telling him the reason why he'd bothered to get in the ring was behind him – that there was an 'almost-eighteen' year old Daddy's girl trying to catch a forty-five-year-old man as if he were a fly ball. Not bothering to course-correct - he knocked her out of the air like a flyswatter before she could get any further involved, and what happened afterward was only due to his extensive experience from being punched that hard.

As Mayday tried to bleed out their momentum with weblines – smart girl – Peter used that and snatched up her backup dancers in two precise weblines. As their Daddy slash not-daughter duet went back, he yanked. Hard.

Mayday was only caught off guard, but it was Peter that was conscious, at fault, and the only responsible adult, not just for three dumb kids sharing the same name, but for the crowd outside. He was on the job, now, using whatever nimbleness and agility left in him to swerve around her, slam his feet into the ground, and jump just as the combined weight of all three teenagers slammed into his back.

They went flying into the street. Peter figured they would have gone good alongside some Benny Hill music as what was left of the second door of the building sailed out with him, face first. Glass broke against and shredded his mask and someone in the crowd screamed, but Peter ignored all of it – his spider-sense was incessant, now warning him of the wall across the street that was eager to meet his face.

He turned just in time, but the wall still hurt – a lot less than a haymaker from the chucklehead that killed him, but it still hurt. The stone was hard, but experience said Peter was harder, if not more hard-headed, and that brick, limestone, and cement would all break before his body would. One of his eyepieces weren't so lucky. It cracked down the middle before anything else as he took the brunt of the weight from four people surging into the wall on spider-strength and a prayer. His shoulder and arm and leg bashed the stone, but so did his already throbbing skull, and the wall cracked from the impact.

Peter landed on his knees and feet, but barely that. His three helpers were back up before he was, either from the benefits of youth, or not getting punched hard enough. His back hurt, his fists and his face and his head, hurt, and he knew it was going to be one of those days…

Mayday's voice filtered in to him but it may as well have been underwater. He heard her speak to him and he didn't respond, couldn't. She shouted at the other two with some muddled order that he couldn't hear, but Peter didn't have to. The way Junior skipped over the gaggle of his neighbors and Ashley bounding off a car to do the same didn't leave much to the imagination. Instead of leaving, like he'd told them to, they jumped back in to keep the yutz in a nicely tailored suit away from him, like Mayday had told them to. Kids.

Wasn't about to stand for that – and that was right, because as Peter attempted to stand, he stumbled. Mayday was there when he didn't want her to be, didn't want any of them to be; she held him with her small hands and clutched him with her slender arms, trying drag him to the nearest exit out of Dodge. Peter's marbles were spilled, but he collected as many as he could and wrenched away from her.

She gave him such a look that he wondered if she'd punch him. It'd be better than sucking on his tongue like she had, but no, she looked too angry to cry, too worried to scream, and too good a girl to do anything but beg him with her eyes to come with her. There wasn't a single thing he could say to make her feel better, but he could make her feel worse.

Peter ignored that look – he couldn't let her have her way all the time, and the two other kids were as much his responsibilities as she was now. Couldn't let them get hurt. He tore away from her and in the same second she tried yanking him back to her with a webline at his back and another at his foot. He'd invented that move; old experience had him dodging the first and sidestepping the latter entirely.

He was gone before she could so much as touch him. Hearing her shout his name after him in frustration, he wondered when, exactly, his name had become, 'Dad'.

Luckily, he and Daemos were of the same kind. He wanted one thing and one thing only, and wouldn't take a Junior meal or a Granddaughter slam instead. Peter felt flattered. He was across the street in a second, just by the time Ashley and Junior were double teaming the big guy – one going high and the other low. Daemos beat them away; an uppercut sent Junior into the ceiling where a fist ground his stomach against his spine. Junior fell to the floor and twitched, vomiting beneath his mask, but still alive. Good.

Ashley shouted, tackling Daemos with the spirit and verve of a linebacker but none of the mass, and Peter had the perfect inappropriate view to see every which way her pretty, jiggling young body just wasn't fit for the job. She barely managed to make Daemos even move. He brought an elbow down into back of her head just before Peter could close the distance to feed his hungry self with a running start, the power of an old man, the poorly invested responsibility of a young one, and a great left hook.

Bone crunched but the impact was like a steel mallet against meat, and Peter didn't know which was which. It was just barely enough to push him back to where Peter had him before. Luck and on-his-feet thinking had Daemos stumbling at a step, the next above it, then tripping and falling to the stairs. Peter bounded off his knee to bring his elbow brutally down against the other man's nose, but Parker luck had Daemos snapping his glowing hand up as Peter fell, ready to snatch him by the throat.

Mayday burst in like lightning, all of her mother's flair for making Peter's heart stop and her father's inability to protect property, public or private. Her weblines yanked him back just in time, bringing him back to her. The look on her face said exactly what his spider-sense had screamed. Seeing it, Peter yanked something out of his pocket. She looked down at it and it took only a second for Peter's very first, "Bring your daughter to work" day, to turn into a "keep your daughter out of your work" day, because she knew him well enough to guess he was about to do something stupid – and she was right.

In the half a second before they started running, Mayday firing every webline that she could to hinder his progress and Peter diving through them all, he wondered if he'd been asking himself the wrong question all this time – the one about a one legged husband and the shut-in geriatric. That, maybe he should have been asking himself how the older generation stacked up against the younger one.

Daemos was off guard, for what that was worth, and Peter scarcely knew what he could do to stop this right then and there, but he just barely had a plan, and hoped that was enough. Peter was thinking about what would happen if he didn't stop the latest Saturday morning cartoon villain to mosey onto his block, if he didn't end the fight before three kids, unfortunately sharing the last name Parker, got hurt. If he let them down.

Mayday had different ideas. As much she was thinking about what would happen if she didn't manage to keep him alive, she was thinking about what would happen if she did much, much more, and that made it a race with a photo finish: a Daddy-daughter duet of an old has-been athlete versus the hot, tight, new talent with Daddy issues and poor taste in men.

To Peter, the winner should have been obvious. She was someone with more sense than him, if not just a bit less stubbornness, and that made her at least half her mother, and that made her at least half better than him. Just as hungry for her win as he was for his, even if her reasoning – wanting her father's poorly cast body double to not die – wasn't so good. What did he want in comparison to that?

Peter wanted a lot of things. And apparently that was enough, because he won.

All his life, people had told Peter Parker that he was smart, clever. He might have been at some point, but at no point had he been good at thinking of the consequences to his actions, and that was a trend that had hit the ground running by the time he got bit by a spider.

He'd never truly learned how to get good at not messing up either, but over the years he'd learned how to expect it. Not through precognition or anything fancy like that, but through good ol' fashioned Parker Luck. All it took was trial and lots of error instead of smarts. Good news for him, since he didn't have the smarts. He was never a Tesla, or an Einstein, or a Richards, Stark, McCoy, and he damn sure wasn't a Rogers.

In his own eyes Peter was just a dimestore budget-bin MacGyver, a tinkering thinker, and so when Union Jack gave him a little spider-shaped bracelet to use in case of a rainy day, Peter got to tinkering and thinking about how things could go south.

Foodie Victorian Vampires had somehow managed to cleave through Spider-Man after Spider-Man – that didn't say much for his odds. There had to be someone better than him out there, if not the entire bunch and bushel. What he needed was a plan – he didn't have one. What he needed was an edge – but he was too stubborn and too senseless to ask for help, to make his problems someone else's.

What he wanted was some kind of backup in case the old standby of 'punch and kick until the guy stops moving' didn't work. What he came up with, in addition to a parlor trick spin on his webshooters, was a wormhole.

He hadn't made one, not on a florist's income, but luckily the doodad Jack had given him had come with one prepacked. The doodad – it was an escape route to back where Jack was holding the worst costume convention Peter had ever heard of, and unfortunately for the event waiting for their latest member, Peter was too stubborn to use it. He tinkered some more, and when Mayday had come along without one of her own, Parker Luck said she either had too much baggage to carry back, spider-strength or no, or wouldn't be leaving for one reason or another.

Peter wasn't about to let that one reason become another. He tinkered even more, only with an actual plan in mind for once: keeping her safe.

He wasn't very creative about it. Rotating the thing clockwise and smashing the spider down would open a timed gate to wherever Jack and his godawful army of Peter Parkers were. After a few seconds, it would close before releasing a disrupting blast on the other side to prevent any other device of the same make from coming back around. Rotating it counter clockwise would open a portal to someplace bad, a place that Peter was only prepared to go to if he had no other choice… Jersey.

Peter had turned the spider clockwise, smashed it, and threw it at Mayday's feet. The portal took less than a second to open in an explosion of pinkish-purple light – back in his day, portals had been blue.

Mayday ran into it with all of her speed and good-girl sincerity before she could even stop herself and Peter fired like he was the fastest hand on West 81st street, slinging and yanking Ashley and Junior's barely sensate bodies to him as if they were paperweights. Mayday was back, then, too smart and too fast to not fire a webline at him to bring him along with them. Peter dodged them again, easily – mad desperation tended to put things into focus – and threw the two of them at her, sending all three of them tumbling into the portal with a second to spare.

It shut a second later, just long enough for Peter to see her horrified face and hear her voice get cut short. "No-!"

The portal shut like an old television turns off, flatting and thinning with a single pop of light. And like that, Peter watched the prettiest face on the network come and go. Now he was stuck with the ugliest one since Alfred E. Newman.

The fire alarm finally died, the crowd outside long since scattered, leaving the two of them in the ring. A grudge match of the century with no one around to see, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

Daemos stood up to his great height, clapping softly. "Bravo, Mr. Parker. Positively amazing."

Peter grunted, cracking his sore knuckles. "'Amazing'? Buddy, you got the wrong guy..."

The hubbub at the brownstone lasted less than ten minutes and would be on the news by nightfall. What happened afterward would be in the news for a month: Peter Parker, the owner of May Flowers, that little flower shop around the corner from West 81st street, had gotten into a knockdown, drag out brawl of a fight that lasted barely more than an hour, yet managed to cleave a path through the city that brought mayhem to April.

It would be a slow news day. Manhattan hadn't seen a good brawl in years – the end of the year spectacle between an old man and the mayor notwithstanding – and had almost forgot how to handle one. It remembered how well enough: with lots of bystanders and property damage.

Peter did his best to keep it out of populated areas, but was glad he hadn't left a will. No apology for the damage he was causing, property and otherwise, would ever make up for that, or anything else. He'd not only lobbed his tag team out of the ring, but had banned them from the stadium. There'd be no backup coming for him, and relatively no one else to worry about. Just him and his problems like always. And he was fine with that.

The fight took him to the last place he wanted to be, but probably the most appropriate. His body tore through the front doors, front counter, front room to the back, into the sitting room and through the grandfather clock and out of the back door of the place and into the front tree behind the place, breaking it. The people inside the funeral home looked from him and his old mask, dusted with wood, glass, and leaves, to the near seven-foot monster walking in after him, and got the message pretty quick. Dodge wasn't so good a place to be this time of year, Peter figured.

Daemos stepped aside from the ruins of the door and gestured to it, the picture of the giant that had eaten a gentleman. "After you," he said, bowing, but as the people ran, a girl wasn't running away, but running toward him. She snarled as he snatched her up by the hair. "Except you, brave girl," he said, and sniffed her. "Ah, a mutant – so delightfully spicy. But, something… more. Go on, girl, show me what you have."

The girl kicked at the air and screamed and screeched but Daemos' grip was like iron. She started to change, her features turning feral. She grew a tail, and Daemos leered. "Ah, a canine totem – excellent appetizer, if a little Oriental. Darwin, you clever man, you…"

He lifted her up with one hand and opened his mouth, his jaw distending as his other hand began to glow. The girl's screams turned into wordless, voiceless, pained shrieks as he palmed her face and began to squeeze. "Bon appeti- hmmn."

He looked at Peter while he swallowed a load that would have made the most experienced professional choke. A fat wad of webbing from across the room sunk into his corner pocket, punching past his teeth, leaving stringy white streaks before sliding down smoothly into his stomach.

Daemos dropped the girl with a sigh, and Peter unceremoniously zipped her to him. By the time she landed by his feet he was already gone with barely a look her way.

"Didn't your folks ever teach you to dance with the one who brought you, big guy?" Peter said, just before his tight, raw fist yanked Daemos' face one way, tearing away skin ripping teeth that grew back seconds later. Seconds slower than they had before, but still leaving Peter's knuckles gashed and bloody. That was progress.

Daemos bent with the blow, swerving with Peter as if they were two boxers, willing to play along with his game, and Peter was just flattered as his stomach was when Daemos took his jab and traded him another, and crashed their skulls together for good measure. He met him head on yet again, grinding the crown of his forehead against the near flat, Cro-Magnon surface of Daemos'. It wasn't a fight he won, and he stumbled back, his balance gone in the face of an explosive headache going off in his skull.

"My mother taught me how to dance. With my sisters," Daemos said conversationally. He frowned, as if they were talking about unpleasant experiences over lunch. Peter supposed they were as he shook his head to get the stars out of his eyes – he'd eaten so many knuckle sandwiches in his life, how could he not enjoy the taste?

Daemos gave him more time and conversation than he expected. If only all his potential murderers had been so polite. "They, my mother and father, taught us differently," Daemos began, stretching his jaw with many jointed, inhuman cracks. "Father, that the best way to appreciate a meal is to whet one's appetite. Mother, that it is best to go in hungry. "

"She sounds pretty wise," Peter said.

"The dead usually do."

"Your father sounds like a real piece of work, though. Mine told me that I had a really good head on my shoulders."

"It is surprisingly hard, yes," Daemos said, gingerly touching a gnarly looking lump on his forehead with a small noise of discomfort. It soon healed. Some guys had all the luck. "But… yes. My father – he always gets the lion's share of the food. Our patriarch, you understand. For instance, he'd hog you and leave the rest of us with the scraps, if that."

Peter took a second to appreciate the fact that he was food – food worth hogging, no less. It was nice to be so popular. "Well," he said, "you don't look like you've been missing too many meals."

Daemos smiled. "That's because I know how to stay… hungry."

A slight shift of movement let Peter know the girl was still around. She took a tentative step forward and froze like a deer in the headlights when he looked at her. She had red fur on her, a canine's snout and sharp claws instead of fingers. So she was a mutant… or she just didn't shave this morning.

Not one for judging, he stepped in front of her. "Gonna have to wait if you want next dance," he said, pushing a crick out of his back. His spine popped. "But if you still feel up to it, stay right here, watch the dance. Call the DJ and ask him to put on some of that newfangled stuff kids your age like, alright?"

She blinked at him, at his mask, like he had a second head – or like his penis was out – and for the first time Peter took notice of the colors of her clothes, yellow and dark blue, and the X on her belt.

He pointed at the ruins of the door, tired of teenagers stepping into his grudge match today. "Actually, get out, kid. There's an age limit on this club. Seniors only." She obeyed, and Daemos stepped aside and let her go. Peter sighed. "Kids these days. What are you going to do?"

"When they get old enough, eat them," Daemos said without an ounce of sarcasm. He sniffed the air and grinned like he smelled something for the first time. "Apparently, you like them young. Truly, there is no accounting for taste."

Peter worked his jaw and tasted blood. He added it to the pile of wood and glass on the ornate carpeting. "You got that right."

He wasn't expecting judgement from the guy who went around eating old man meat for fun, and he didn't get it. Only hits. Fist here, a bash to the back there with a cracked rib for flavor. Gashes on the brow ridge that Peter wasn't a fast enough healer to get rid of before the blood seeped into his eye. Nothing below the belt, though. Old fashioned – Ben would have liked that.

Peter bat Daemos away like he was trying out for the Mets, but the joke was him ever thinking he could make the team. Talking about family was a nice change of pace and, for a guy who'd murdered him, he could see the two of them going out for a drink. He didn't drink, and it would probably end up like Weekend at Burnie's, but the thought was nice.

The world swam more than it didn't, and when he crashed to the ceiling of the place back first into the chandelier, and then back down with the chandelier dropping on him, he almost couldn't get up. Almost, but even a blind ref would have called the fight then and there, and Peter would have thrown him out of the ring for it.

Daemos watched him stand on rickety legs, a reptile watching its prey, and that made Peter feel nostalgic, but he had never cared for nostalgia. He'd also gotten some good licks in – the other guy's fancy suit would need a long visit to a dry cleaner and tailor after this was all over, something that would cost far more than replacing dollar store dress clothes, so who was really winning?

Not him. An old quote came to him, over the raggedy sounds of his own breathing and the blood rushing in his ears. "Fighters shouldn't fuck before the big match. They need to go in the ring with everything they have. Can't come and play, and then go fight," it went.

Everything Peter had was now a universes and worlds away, sitting in his daughter's full belly as her breakfast. He was flagging now and he knew it, and Daemos knew it. His punches were slower and everything hurt more. Good licks, but Daemos liked those as much as Peter's own daughter did, eating them for breakfast and lunch to work up an appetite for dinner. And as he walked toward Peter, dusting his hands, Peter knew who was on the menu. 'No accounting for taste' was right.

Peter let him come to play, and gave him a good one across the face when he did, a two that managed to crush bone before it healed, and a three that caked his face like bad makeup. Peter would make it look good on him… Great power, great responsibility, and a great left hook.

Just not great enough – Daemos stopped smiling and he soon caught one fist, and then the other. He snatched Peter up by the face with his large hand to slam him into the ground. Then he did it again, and again, and again. Peter was too slow to dodge, his spider-sense a constant wailing that, for some reason, sounded like a redheaded girl. He had leaned back to avoid the hit and got a ripped mask for his trouble. Blood flew from his mouth stained Daemos' cufflinks while his body gave the floorboards an old man sized hole.

He was back up with fists flying, always, and then he was down again. Daemos hefted him back up to careen him back down, breaking the floor beneath them like corn chips to crush Peter's body against the reinforced flooring beneath the wood, and that cracked too. The whole building shook, the windows rattling as his fist slammed into this man's chest and stomach and ribs, beating thunder out of him and the sounds of gurgled, blood soaked choking.

But this was no longer a boxing match between two fighters in a ring, nor was it a beat down. This was impersonal, now as it had always been, and always would be – a matter of course. The way things were and the tenderizing of grade-A meat. And it would have been so much easier if the poor, lonely, aged stag on the table stopped trying to get back up as the hunter prepared to end its suffering.

But Daemos didn't mind that. Food was always better when it not only lasted long, but when there was fight to it. This one had the most fight so far, and had lasted far longer than most.

When he was done, and it took a while because Mr. Parker kept bringing his fists back around, swinging with misses so bad that those interesting things on his wrists – called webshooters in so many worlds, so clever – clashed against each other pitifully. Daemos' body had broken, and there was pain, but also satisfaction. To work for a meal was to earn it. And as Mr. Parker went down, breaking what he could, only to have it heal over, Daemos came right back to repeat the process and earn his meal.

But when he was done, he lifted the man up in the air by his tattered, bloody shirt with one hand, his other hand glowing, and his face solemn. Mr. Parker raised his hand and waved at him, and he smiled. This had been fun. "Thank you very much for the meal, Mr. Parker," Daemos said, and opened his mouth wide.

And then he heard hissing.

Outside, Rahne Sinclair could barely hold her phone in her hands as she ran. Of all the times to leave her emergency comm at the mansion… The adrenaline coursing through her made her misdial twice and accidentally end the call three times. She hoped that would be enough for someone at the mansion to know something was wrong as she tried again.

She could barely believe it. Inside- that had been him- he was that guy- the Spider-Man- the Spider-Man she'd heard so many stories about before and after she moved to America. She had asked the instructors at the mansion if the stories about him were true, menace this and murderer that. They said no. He'd helped them out many times – he was an old friend of theirs and always would be, they said.

A friend that had helped her, saved her, but looked like he was the one that needed saving. Rahne Sinclair wasn't the type to ever let a friend down. She'd just connected to someone, anyone, at the mansion when a large, black mass moved out from the corner of her eye and consumed her.

…A second later she rose from the ground and ended the call. She felt different. Still weak, but stronger than before. This new host was a mutant. She'd never worn mutant before…

It wasn't as strong as it used to be, and this host was nowhere near as strong as her first host, but she would have to do. She smelled like a wet dog, but was fiercely loyal, and that was good. If only some of its previous hosts were like that. She was also a redhead, with green eyes.

Parker would like that, the symbiote thought.

Peter had spun his last trick. His latest gentleman caller could take a load fairly well, but Peter's were fairly big. Taking gutshots from someone who could probably put Rhino to sleep with a bear hug wasn't fun, but it was the only thing he could think of to get Daemos to lower his guard.

Back in the day, a Russian guy who enjoyed sucking off rifles for fun had told him that, "Prey is deadliest when they're caught, and predators are at their weakest when they're ready to eat," and that had given Peter a plan. A bad one, but one nonetheless. Daemos was a hungry, hungry hippo of a man, and Peter had a surefire way of making a hungry man very, very full…

He raked his webshooters against each other in between punches and they spun like revolvers – it was in the name and he was Old Man Parker, the fastest, stickiest hand in the West end of 81st street, and his penchant for low-tech tinkering made something happen. Something voluminous.

His webshooters themselves weren't anything to write home about, not to him. They weren't a marvel of engineering, and they didn't have the sentimental weight of a girl's only connection to her dead grandfather, but Peter thought the new spin he put on them was neat. Slap them together and they'd spin and lock for you, and then rotate backward in a countdown for you, one cartridge after another releasing a pneumatic hiss as a single soft point in them was punctured.

Usually when the webfluid met air, it polymerized and expanded; now, trapped in the hard casing of the cartridges until the containers couldn't hold it anymore, they'd explode. The bad news was that trying to use them after the countdown would make them rupture from the pressure, but the good news was that it took about as many seconds as he had cartridges left. And Peter had made sure he had all of them, so it would take some waiting, but he'd had gotten very good at waiting.

It'd be his last act on stage before the hook – feeding Happy-Peter's killer one last sticky knuckle sandwich down the throat. That was fine. Afterward, maybe MJ wouldn't be too disgusted with him when he shuffled past her way off to wherever. And, maybe, 'Day wouldn't be too broken up about him. Maybe the next guy she met would be someone bitten by a clown spider, someone who could actually tell some good jokes for once.

If Peter was lucky, it wouldn't be a version of him. For once he was glad he wasn't lucky at all.

Peter had just started to feel a seeping, burning tickle within him when he heard hissing. Then, something crashed into him and sent him into the wall.

This new host was weak. Weak and slow. The symbiote used the sight of Parker's beaten body, the cracked eyes of his mask and the sheer state of him as fuel to cover the distance. He was ready to die. Die? He was an idiot, useless without it, just like it always knew, and stubborn, just like always, and the symbiote punted him across the room before sinking its claws and teeth into this… new one. The latest in a long line of annoyances that bothered and tried to hurt First Host- that tried to hurt Parker.

The fight was vicious, but short. The symbiote lashed at Daemos' flesh and the scars healed, but slow enough to leave behind scales and patches of raw, animal hide. Tendrils like barbed wire burrowed deep into his body but were bunched up and burned away by his hands, then withered and pried away like weeds. He bashed the girl across the face and she reeled and jumped back in, the characteristics of both host and symbiote rendering her savagely protective, but savage regardless.

Daemos caught her by the hair and sneered, flailing her into the ground, the wall, and the ceiling before bashing her against the floor again, and again, and again. The black on her sluiced off, weakly surging toward him, and his glowing hand burned whatever facsimile of flesh the creature had away.

The symbiote screeched, and Daemos sneered. "Symbiote," he spat. "Like raw sewage-"

Peter was behind him without thinking. No time to think. The pneumatic hiss of his webshooters counting down made all the pain in his old, beaten body go away. Six cartridges left on the countdown and he'd been up, pretending like old and bruised bone was new again. Five, and he was kicking the backs of Daemos' knees in hard enough for them to heal the wrong way. Four. The symbiote was pinned, and Peter rectified that by ramming his elbow right between Daemos' shoulder blades with just enough hootzpah to get him to let go of the webhead's extra-terrestrial ex-girlfriend.

Wrangling him backward by the neck, Peter tore off his webshooters, held them in one hand as they slowly ticked down. Three. His voice gurgled out of his mouth with blood and phlegm. His cheek felt minced. He kept talking anyway. "Hey, big guy…" he said, "what did I tell you about dancing with the one that brought you?"

Daemos steadied himself, looking more annoyed than surprised. Peter's hold around his neck weak at best, but as stubborn as the rest of him. "One moment, Mr. Parker. It appears rotted, raw fish is on the menu…"

"If you're hungry, I got something for you," Peter said, locking eyes with the beaten form of his ex and the girl she wore. Two. "Open wide, big guy, 'cause it's gonna be a big one…"

His spider-sense blared, and from the way the symbiote's eyes widened, he knew its facsimile of his spider-sense did as well as the final cartridge locked into place. The casing of the cartridges began to crack, the frame of the webshooter unable to break as the polymerized fluid kept the material together, yet tried to escape its containers to expand in open air at the same time. It never got the chance.

Peter tore open Daemos' jaw to its inhuman, reptilian-like length without a second thought. Not about Happy-Peter and MJ, or 'Day, Ashley, and Junior, or any of the others that Daemos and his family had hurt. No, Peter just wanted to see him smile, and smile wide, that was all. Didn't care how tough you were on the outside, everybody hurt on the inside, and he was going to make sure of it.

The webbing was already crawling and growing on his hand and up his arms like spiders as Peter shoved his full hand into Daemos' gullet, his hardness punching through soft, yielding tissue, right down to his elbow. The sound was even more horrific as he wrenched his hand out than when he slammed it home, like someone trying to deepthroat a parking meter.

But as he did, hand empty and bloody, Peter knew that whatever damage he'd done had already healed. That was too bad - some guys just had no luck.

Daemos stumbled, and coughed. "Mr. Parker," he began, sounding annoyed, "what did you just-" He burped, loudly, before looking at his slowly expanding stomach like someone realizing they'd just bitten off a bit more than they could chew. "Oh," he said, blinking.

Peter sneered, giving him a brutal, hooked knuckle sandwich to go with his full belly. For Happy-Peter and everyone else's sake. "Yeah," he said. "Oh."

The hit rocked Daemos to the side and there was a small noise similar to a pot coming to a boil, and then a rumble and his, a windy keen just before an industrial strength air pump was turned on inside a none-too-elastic container. The container broke, and Daemos looked at him, mouth open, and from the ground the symbiote weakly kicked his mouth shut just in time to have him chomp down on the webbing crawling from the back of his throat. He fell, and Peter barely managed to roll out of the way as the webfluid did its ugly work.

Orifices began to swell and leak red and white as though all of the old man meat he'd eaten was coming back to bite him. His body expanded and the foamed up webbing covered his face like a cocoon, wrapping him in a spider's web from the inside out. His body, however much of it human or comparable, began to twitch and seize during that, lungs expanding but not taking on air, panicking, and muscles contracting and convulsing. His face turned a spectacular shade of blue as it began to change from mammal to reptile and everything in between, and then… pop.

It took a minute or so for Peter to realize his spider-sense had finally stopped ringing. The concert in his head had finished, the final ding in a boxing match had sounded. The shut-in geriatric had won… Funny how winning felt a lot like getting your ass kicked. Some things never changed.

He tried to stand up but couldn't manage it. He tried to sit down, and fell on his ass. He was done, tenderized and seasoned, just with no fork to stick himself with, and so he stayed put, watching the last bit of the show as if he were a voyeur at a snuff party.

Daemos' body soon foamed over completely with webbing, and an itsy, bitsy spider trailed down from some dark corner on the ceiling to land on him. It crawled inside a funnel web and made itself at home. Peter snorted. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

"Hope you've enjoyed your stay at Casa de Parker, big guy," he grunted. "Make sure to leave us a good review."

He wasn't sure when, but eventually a white spider blocked his front row seat to the show. The symbiote crawled over to him on its last legs, because the girl it was wearing only had two, and Peter looked at his ex blearily for the first time in months. Its approximation of the girl's wolf-like appearance made it obvious that Spider-Man's tag team partner was a wolf-spider. Absolutely hilarious.

Then the symbiote began to change; it turned into a little black classic, black mask, white eyes, and chest in all – a personal message to Peter that he ignored. From where he was sitting, it only looked like something he couldn't pull off in his old age, especially with the difficulty he had getting pulling it off in the first place. She looked a lot better in his suit than he did, but then the women he found himself attracted to always had.

He grunted and gripped his ribs and blew blood soaked spittle from between his busted lips. He felt around for his teeth. Silver lining, he still had all of them – they'd left gashes in his mouth. "Hey, sweetheart, long time no see," he said, groaning. Existing hurt. "Did you miss me?"

The symbiote yanked away his hands quickly and roughly – but not too roughly. His ex had apparently gotten soft in her old age. She started to cover his ribs in a cast-like net of webbing that soon hardened on them, or it tried to, at least. The symbiote's webbing sputtered out and ran dry; after a day of hard work, it was tired along with him. Maybe it figured they could curl up in bed together. He could wear her like a suit before he wore her like a condom, just like old times.

He shoved her hands away as she stubbornly struggled to get water from a drying well. The webbing wasn't coming, and Peter wasn't thirsty enough to have her keep trying.

"You're… a nurse now," he said, brushing off her attempts. "Good for you. Too bad you didn't have this kind of bedside manner on our last one-night stand, huh." She hissed at him, sounding weak, and he waved her down. "Yeah, yeah…"

Moving onto his arm wasn't something he could stop her from doing, mostly because he couldn't move that arm without feeling a numb, cold pain. She put it into a sling of hard-won webbing that itself had the spectacular tensile strength of wet tissue paper – and promptly ripped. What a shame.

"You… missed me, didn't you," he said, gabbing on. "'Course you did… Because I… I still know how to stick 'em, don't I?" He heard a crowd laughing somewhere far off. The comedian on stage bowed before the lights shut off. "Thank you, thank you… I'll be here all-" and he paused to spit out a wad of bloody saliva. "Well, who knows."

The world started to list and shift – it took a second for him to realize that was his head drooping. The symbiote propped him back up, gently putting him against the wall and roughly shaking him when he drifted too far away, hot and cold until the end. It creaked to him in a low, dual toned groan that sounded vaguely Scottish, of all things, "Parker."

"Yeah, I'm awake…" he muttered, waving. And then he wasn't. She woke him back up. "Five more minutes, sweetheart. I'm old, tired… Need more rest than I used to. Put on some Columbo for me, and get the tapioca, will you?"

She hissed again and suddenly gripped him by the chin – he didn't respond. Slowly, she began to move from the girl she was wearing, Black slinking off her latest host to go back to her first. No accounting for taste.

He couldn't push her away, and so he nudged her. Even that much hurt, but it was enough to stop her. She bristled and shook in response, but that was enough for Peter. The poor girl she was wearing needed his ex a lot more than he did, and the symbiote needed her right now a lot more than it needed him, even if it seemed too stubborn to care. He wondered for the life of him just who the hell she had gotten that particular trait from...

He listed to one side, and then he was falling, falling long and hard into something cold and quiet. He kept talking, because old habits only died against something hard, and the floor against his hard head fit the bill well enough.

Before he could, the symbiote caught him. Peter could see her tongue, long as ever, and grunted. Cleaning glasses with it just seemed like something she'd do. "Don't kiss me with that mouth," he said. "Don't know where you been…"

The world started to spin around him; it was like there was a plane crashing and Peter was the pilot, going down, down, down… He heard himself calling into his walkie-talkie, just this once and one last time, "'Mayday, Mayday…" And then he laughed. "Sorry, kiddo."

The symbiote shook him, but he didn't even notice. He was tired, and the last thing he saw on Earth was darkness. Which was good, because he really needed a good, long nap.

Outside, a portal opened. The cavalry arrived in the form of a flood of trick or treaters, spearheaded by two badly dressed girls.

A/N: Happy New Year.