For the next month or so, this was my life.
School remained the one reliably normal part of it — which also made it the most tedious. I managed to make it tolerable by spending as much time as possible with Felicia. We came dangerously close to getting caught more than once, which somehow made everything considerably more entertaining.
Natasha tightened the training regimen every week. The first order of business had been the manual — I memorised it inside of a week, which I'm fairly sure surprised her, though she didn't say so. The more interesting challenge was learning which sections to selectively discard. Most of the operational doctrine was sound. A few passages were written for situations where the agent was supposed to be anonymous and replaceable. I wasn't.
The hand-to-hand training was humbling. Natasha put me on the mat every single day. Slowly, painfully, I began to identify patterns in her attacks — the openings she allowed, the ones she created on purpose to exploit my counters. She was an exceptionally patient teacher and a completely merciless opponent, and I was starting to understand why.
Between sessions she drilled me on everything else: international current events, high fashion and couture labels, art criticism, reality television, social customs across a dozen cultures. The reasoning was simple. If you can't hold a conversation at a gala, a boardroom, or a gang safehouse, you're a liability in the field.
Felicia and I texted constantly during the hours I wasn't training. At one point Natasha confiscated my phone mid-session and snapped it in half because I'd been checking messages during a briefing. I bought a replacement and promised, with genuine sincerity, not to make that mistake twice.
We grew closer regardless. There were moments — quiet ones, at the end of phone calls, or in the brief space before I said goodnight — when I could tell she was considering telling me something. She never quite got there. I understood. It had only been a month. I could wait.
MJ talked to me when she could, though she was spending most of her time with Harry, who was apparently learning that a girlfriend requires more than attendance. That was his problem now.
At the Baxter Building I finally had time to start my own research in earnest. I brought in the arc reactors and drone components I'd recovered from the Stark Expo cleanup, kept them well out of sight of the FF's labs, and got to work.
The arc reactors came first. What I'd partially understood in the early hours of that Sunday morning began to resolve into something comprehensive — a full working model of the energy cascade, the magnetic containment geometry, the radioactive decay chain that kept the whole system self-sustaining. I tested scenarios, ran calculations, cross-referenced them against what I'd learned from the repulsor assembly.
Then I turned my attention to Electro's blood.
The vial still sparked faintly when I retrieved it. I ran it through the FF's advanced analytical equipment — spectroscopic analysis, mitochondrial mapping, electrical conductivity testing — and began building a picture of what had actually happened to Max Dillon's body.
My working theory: he had been flash-frozen to extremely low temperatures and then subjected to a massive electrical charge, one large enough to have killed him several times over. It should have killed him. Instead, every mitochondrion in his body had adapted. They'd become supercharged, restructured at the cellular level to absorb, store, and transmit electrical energy rather than convert glucose.
How the cellular adaptation had actually occurred — that was the fascinating part. I suspected some prior exposure to a radically altered biological substrate was involved. A radioactive eel, perhaps, and yes, I was aware of how that sounded, but the evidence pointed somewhere in that direction.
I asked Reed to assist with several of the more complex formulae. He had the time and the inclination, and between the two of us we mapped the mitochondrial structure thoroughly enough to reproduce it.
By the end of November, I had done exactly that.
The result was a synthetic superconductive fluid. It could store electrical charge and absorb it dynamically without resistance, without heat generation, without any of the degradation problems that plagued conventional conductors. The material was black, slightly viscous, and faintly luminescent under certain spectra.
I named it Parker Blood.
Sue took one look at it and immediately began calculating its commercial applications. She filed a patent in my name within forty-eight hours.
The implications for power transfer systems alone were significant. Conventional wire transfers electricity at a rate limited by the material's inherent resistance. Parker Blood, threaded through a fibre cable, transferred it at five times that speed with no thermal loss whatsoever. The applications in computing alone were extraordinary.
"Peter," Sue said the day I demonstrated it, pulling me into a hug, "this is going to make us genuinely wealthy."
"Sis, sometimes I wonder if you care about anything else," Johnny said.
"Someone has to! Do you want to keep eating takeaway pizza for the rest of our lives?!" She turned back to me. "I want to contact Google about this. If I can get them on the phone, there will be a bidding war."
"Can we patent it first?" I asked.
"Already done. Two patents to your name now — at fifteen. Not bad, is it?" She smiled at Reed. "Remember when that was us?"
"I'm still that impressive," Reed said.
"Sure you are," Sue said.
She handed me an envelope later that afternoon. I opened it and stared.
"That's... that's ten thousand dollars," I said.
"Your monthly allowance," Sue confirmed. "Did you genuinely forget we were paying you?"
"...A little, yes."
Johnny burst out laughing.
"The Amazon deal also went through," Sue continued. "They've agreed to take the SA as a premium competitor to their existing readers — we had to make a few modifications to the original design, but nothing significant. The Baxter Foundation received two million for the manufacturing rights, and you will receive five percent royalties on every unit sold."
"How much are they selling them for?" I asked.
"Around a thousand dollars each."
I did the arithmetic. "Fifty dollars in royalties for every unit."
"Exactly. So use the money wisely. And don't let it go to your head." She winked and went to call her patent lawyer.
That night I walked home with a genuine spring in my step. I cashed the cheque, went home, and dropped the whole amount on the kitchen table in front of May and Ben.
Ben thought I'd robbed someone. I let him think that for about fifteen seconds before explaining, and after a call to Sue to confirm the story, they hugged me and told me they were proud.
Getting them to accept the money was a separate battle. They're proud people, both of them, and they pushed back hard — "use it for university," "keep it for yourself," "we don't need it." In the end I told them about the royalty cheques that would be coming in and pointed out, as gently as I could, that the bills on the kitchen counter weren't going away by themselves.
Ben told me later, quietly, when May was in the other room, that things had been tighter than they'd let on. The money would genuinely change things at home.
That settled it for me.
---
With the financial situation at home stabilised, I turned to the project I'd been quietly planning for weeks: a proper suit.
The jacket had been the right call at the time — practical, low-profile, adaptable. But it was still just a jacket. I needed something built for what I was actually doing.
I started with a SHIELD tactical bodysuit from the safe house armoury, with Natasha's permission. It was constructed from a polymer composite — ten laminated layers of treated material offering state-of-the-art ballistic protection, flexible enough for full range of motion, and black by default.
I then built a miniaturised arc reactor from scratch.
The design differed from Stark's in several key ways. I used a hexagonal housing instead of circular, and replaced the internal wiring entirely with Parker Blood conduit lines. The result was a reactor about three inches in overall height, producing comparable output to Stark's original but with no radioactive decay issues — the PB lines transferred energy cleanly and indefinitely. The reactor itself glowed black under load, the Parker Blood absorbing the visible spectrum.
I ran conduit lines from the reactor across the surface of the suit — up the torso, across the shoulders, down the arms, along the sides and outer legs. Since exposed conduit lines would snap under impact, I layered a semi-transparent red polymer fabric over the entire suit, the same material as the base but lighter. The red was translucent enough that the conduit lines beneath were visible when the reactor was active.
The effect, when the suit was powered, was a black-and-red web pattern radiating outward from the chest. A circulatory system made of light.
It looked exactly like the classic Spider-Man suit. Except black and red instead of red and blue.
The web-shooters needed a complete rebuild.
The originals were functional, but I'd outgrown them. I needed greater range, more variation in web-fluid viscosity, additional payload capacity, and — eventually — a housing for the repulsor technology. The wrist-band format couldn't accommodate all of that.
So I redesigned them as gauntlets.
The design was informed by the drone forearm assemblies I'd recovered. Each gauntlet ran along my forearm and contained an automatic web-cartridge rotation system — when one cartridge ran dry, the next loaded itself without me having to stop. Think of it as a self-loading magazine system for web fluid.
I left significant internal volume in each gauntlet. For now, the additional space housed a compact computer system — phone, GPS, map access, browser — with a small SA unit serving as the display and a miniature keypad below it. Basic. But it gave me a wrist-mounted command interface.
The gloves were the same polymer blend as the suit itself, reinforced at the knuckles with a hard polymer brace — not a significant force multiplier on its own, but useful in sustained close-quarters work. I also installed a compact repulsor emitter in the palm of each glove. It wasn't up to Stark's power output — sorry, Tony — but it was more than sufficient as a directed-force weapon.
The gauntlets themselves were silver, breaking the black-and-red colour scheme — deliberately. They needed to pass scrutiny outside the suit. So I made them collapsible: each gauntlet folded in on itself to roughly the footprint of a large smartphone and could be tucked into any bag. Unfolding them took about four seconds.
I considered adding repulsor units to the soles of my boots. The physics worked, theoretically, and the idea of Spider-Man in actual flight was undeniably appealing. But the weight and profile of the units would destroy my balance, and Spider-Man lives and dies by agility and footwork. Flight could wait.
The mask was the final component — and the most personal redesign.
A cloth mask is fine for most purposes. It's light, compact, and iconic. It is also, when you're swinging between skyscrapers at near-terminal velocity on a thin web line, not particularly protective in the event of an error in judgement.
So I made a helmet.
Johnny helped with this part. Cars are his territory, and collapsible high-performance materials were something he understood intuitively. Together we designed a helmet that compresses to roughly face-mask dimensions when not deployed and expands to full coverage in under two seconds without losing structural integrity. The surface was lined with alternating hue panels — neutral and inconspicuous in standby mode, shifting to red with black web-line detailing when activated. I incorporated the night-vision goggles I'd recovered from Rhino's crew into the lens housing, which felt like a fitting repurposing.
I finished the suit in the middle of December.
I stood back and looked at it, hung on the display frame in my lab.
There was a lot more I could do. Better sensors, better communication systems, better everything. But I didn't have the components yet, and patience was, apparently, a skill I was still developing.
The door opened. Sue walked in, stopped, and whistled quietly. "So this is what you and Johnny have been working on."
"Yup."
"He wasn't exaggerating." She walked around it slowly, examining the construction. "You're certain Stark won't object to the arc reactor?"
"The Parker Blood integration makes it a functionally different machine," I said. "The geometry is similar, but the operating principle is distinct. I don't think he has grounds."
"If you say so." She paused, then turned to me. "Speaking of things I need to talk to you about — the Parker Blood patent. We're getting interest. I've managed to keep your name out of the spotlight so far, but if we go fully public with this, there's going to be attention. People will want to know who invented it."
"That's fine. I can handle it."
She handed me a stack of documents. "Sign these." She went back to examining the suit while I worked through the paperwork. "You know you're welcome to let me review the technical specs. This is remarkable engineering."
"Knock yourself out. Password's the same as always."
She pulled up my research terminal and got to work.
I sometimes forgot she was just as much a scientist as Reed and I. She spent so much of her time handling the business and administrative side of the FF — contracts, funding, public relations — that it was easy to overlook how sharp her scientific mind was. That wasn't fair to her.
But that's life, I suppose. You don't always get to spend your time the way you'd choose.
My phone buzzed. Unknown number. I opened the message and read it.
Peter,
This is Norman Osborn — Harry's father. I would like to extend an invitation to you and the Baxter Foundation to attend Oscorp's annual Christmas party. I assure you it will be worth your while — a number of my senior scientists will be attending, and the evening will provide an excellent opportunity to observe the direction Oscorp intends to take in the coming year.
Each guest may bring a plus-one. This is not strictly a social occasion: I will also be using the event to announce Oscorp's research and development goals for the next twelve months.
Please respond within the week. The party will be held on the 23rd of December.
With regards,
Norman Osborn
Chief Executive Officer, Oscorp Industries
I read it twice.
The man mentioned his company or his personal involvement no fewer than five times in six sentences. The narcissism was almost architectural.
I didn't want to go. Obviously I didn't. A room full of Osborn's people, with Norman himself playing host — everything about it felt like walking into something carefully arranged.
But if Osborn was planning something, the best way to learn about it was to be in the room when he announced it.
I told Sue about the invitation. She put it down immediately — the FF couldn't be seen associating with Norman Osborn. Too much history, too many complications.
I understood completely. But since I wasn't technically a member of the Fantastic Four, I wasn't bound by the same constraints.
I accepted.
I had a few days before the party. I'd use them to prepare.
Something about this didn't sit right. An announcement of research goals. Scientists in attendance. Norman Osborn personally ensuring that I would be there.
Spider-Man was going to need to be nearby that evening.
I wondered if Felicia would want to come.