The next day I arrived at school to find the whole class clustered around Flash's phone again. This time the footage was from a courtroom — live coverage. I leaned in over Flash's shoulder and felt a brief flicker of recognition.
The man on trial was Aleksei Sytsevich — the operator of the Rhino. The judge sentenced him to five years for theft and public endangerment, with the lesser charge attributed to the fact that no one had died. If they had, it would have been twenty. I didn't have strong feelings about it either way. One way or another, he was going to be a problem again before this was done.
The rest of the week settled into its routine: school, the Baxter Building, street patrols as Spider-Man, the occasional mugger or emergency dash to the hospital with someone who couldn't wait for an ambulance. The streets were quiet for the most part. It gave me time to think.
What I was mostly thinking about was Homecoming.
I genuinely did not understand how a high school dance could affect me the way it did, but Felicia had apparently noticed my nerves because she spent the better part of the week needling me about it — going on about how the night needed to be perfect, or else, while offering absolutely no clarification on what the 'else' entailed.
So I actually put effort in.
Uncle Ben had a blue suit that still fit well. I left his formal shirt in the wardrobe — too dated — and wore my own black shirt underneath instead. The combination worked: clean, a little unconventional, and not trying too hard.
I also got a reservation at a restaurant in the nicer part of town. I knew I'd be spending half my monthly allowance on dinner, but if you're going to do something properly, you do it properly.
Harry and Flash spent the entire week trying to convince me to double-date with them. I declined politely, twice, and then told them to back off.
On Friday evening, an hour before we were supposed to meet, I called Felicia while I was getting ready.
"Hey, Kitten."
"Hey, Tiger," she said.
"All set for tonight?"
"Absolutely. We're meeting at Julio's, yeah?"
"Yup. See you soon."
"See you soon, Tiger," she said, and hung up.
I finished getting dressed and went downstairs. "There he is!" Ben grinned when he saw me. "Don't you look sharp!"
"Thanks, Uncle Ben. Can you help me with the tie? I can't get it right."
"Course, come here." He sorted it out in about thirty seconds with the confidence of someone who'd done it a thousand times.
"Oh, I wish you and your lovely date were meeting here!" May sighed. "Felicity, wasn't it?"
"Felicia, Aunt May," I said patiently.
"Well, whatever her name is, she ought to be photographed. Peter, you pick such peculiar girls. You should have stuck with Mary Jane."
"She's going with Harry, Aunt May. And I don't think MJ and I would have worked — she's at a very different point in her life."
"That sounds like a trumped-up excuse to me," May huffed, just as the front door opened and she stopped mid-sentence. "Mary Jane! Oh, don't you look wonderful!"
I turned.
MJ stood in the doorway. Black dress, mid-thigh, fitted, with a sheer overlay across the shoulders and arms. Her makeup was done with quiet precision, and I had no doubt — not for the first time — that this was a woman who was going to be on magazine covers inside of three years.
I smiled. "Damn, MJ. I think this might be the first time I've ever been genuinely envious of Harry."
MJ smiled back. "Thanks, Tiger. You don't look too bad yourself."
"High praise," I grinned.
"Come on, you two — photo! Right now!" May said, already reaching for her camera.
"May, she's not my date," I said.
"Oh, what does that matter? Come on, up close!" She waved us together.
I looked at MJ, who shrugged. We stood together. My arm went around her waist. Her hand went to my shoulder. It felt completely natural — no awkwardness, no calculation. May took entirely too many photos. Ben stood beside her and watched with a small, knowing smile.
"So what are you doing here?" I asked MJ as May finally lowered the camera. "I figured you'd be meeting Harry and the others."
"They're not coming for another half hour. I wanted to see how you were getting on." She paused. "Julio's?"
"Julio's."
She whistled. "Pulling out all the stops, then."
"Might as well." I grabbed my coat. "I should get going — don't want to keep her waiting."
"You're meeting her at the restaurant?" MJ asked, surprised.
"Yeah. She didn't want me picking her up — I think she's embarrassed about home," I shrugged.
"Oh. Well... good luck." She smiled. "I hope you have a brilliant time."
I pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. MJ went very still. I winked and walked out.
I hailed a cab, texted Felicia that I was on my way, and settled in as the city crawled by in Friday evening traffic. I had a white corsage in my jacket pocket — I hadn't known the species of the flower, just that it was white and suited her colouring. I also quietly checked the inside pockets of my jacket. Web-shooters and a folded mask, just in case. I'd learned not to assume any evening would go smoothly.
I arrived ten minutes early and found our table on the top floor of the hotel, right by the window with the city spread below us. A few other students from school were there with their own dates. They waved. I waved back.
And then I waited.
Three glasses of water later, two trips to the bathroom, and twenty minutes past the time she was supposed to arrive — I called her.
"Peter." Her voice was tight. Breathless. "I'm so sorry, something's come up."
"What kind of something?" I asked. My voice came out flatter than I intended.
"I'm really, truly sorry, but I can't—"
BOOM.
The sound hit simultaneously through the phone and through the window. I spun and looked out.
A thunderbolt tore through the sky a few blocks away, electric tendrils forking outward in every direction.
"Felicia?! Felicia, are you alright?!" I was on my feet.
A pause. Then her voice came back, strained and tight. "I'm fine — something's here, it's attacking people, I don't know what—"
"Stay where you are. Stay out of sight. I'm getting help." I left a twenty on the table and ran.
I tried Johnny first. No answer. The electricity — it had to be jamming radio signals. Of course it was.
I hit the roof and stripped off the suit jacket, shirt, and trousers, revealing the black muscle shirt and leggings underneath. I webbed the clothes into a bundle and pinned it to the side of the building. Mask on. Shooters on. I cleared the rooftop in two steps and launched myself off the edge, swinging hard toward the source.
I knew what it was before I saw it. It could only be one of two things — and it wasn't Thor.
I swung into view above the street.
Floating in the middle of the road, radiating crackling arcs of blue-white electricity, was a figure that had ceased to be entirely human. He was laughing. Each bolt he hurled seemed almost casual — a car here, a section of road there, chunks of concrete thrown skyward by the impact. People scattered in all directions, screaming.
"Someone help us!" a woman cried out.
"Shut up!" Electro screamed. "Nobody cares about you!"
"Please!" she shrieked even louder.
"I said shut the hell up!" He raised a hand toward her. I fired a web line and yanked her clear as the bolt scorched the pavement where she'd been standing.
"What?!" Electro wheeled around and found me on a rooftop. "Spider-Man?!"
"I'll give you one chance," I said. My eyes swept the wreckage for Felicia. "Leave. Don't come back."
"You think you can order me around?! No one orders me around — not any more!" He hurled a barrage of bolts at me.
I threw myself sideways as the rooftop behind me erupted in rubble and flame.
"Come on, Sparky! Is that really all you've got?!" I called out, already swinging to the next building.
"Hold still!" he roared, tracking me as I kept moving, swinging from line to line, never landing in the same spot twice. Every time he got a clear shot I was already somewhere else. I kept it up — goading him, drawing his attention, keeping it locked on me. The angrier he got, the less damage he was doing to everyone else.
I scanned the street below. There — Felicia. Her clothes were torn and her hair was wild, but she was pulling someone out of a wrecked vehicle and guiding them away from the blast radius. Even through the carnage she looked extraordinary.
"I'm going to crush you, Spider! And when I do, everyone will see who the real hero is!" He launched another bolt at my web line, severing it. I dropped, hit the ground, and rolled — but the landing was wrong. Pain flared up my leg. I pushed it down and kept moving.
I looked up. He was descending toward me, slowly, smirking.
"Better than you. Always better than you. You're nothing."
"Quick question before you do anything dramatic," I said. "Do you like water?"
He blinked.
I shot a web line at the nearest fire hydrant and ripped it from the ground. The water exploded outward in a high-pressure jet — and a stray arc of electricity still rolling off Electro's body bridged the connection. The feedback was instantaneous: a surge that ran back into him hard enough to lock every muscle in his body.
"What—?!" he cried.
"Basic physics," I said, and fired two web lines at him, hauling him forward.
I launched myself off a lamp post and drove my fist into his jaw with everything I had. The impact cracked a tooth. He went flying back and crashed into the wall of a building.
I hit the ground and started circling, firing web after web, building layer after layer over him — covering his arms, his torso, everything I could reach. He was dazed from the combined impact of the electrical feedback and the punch, and by the time his mind started catching up with what was happening, the webbing was already too thick to break quickly.
I changed cartridges without stopping. Kept going. Then I broke four more hydrants out of the road, flooding the street ankle-deep in water, and put fresh cartridges in.
"This pathetic webbing won't hold me!" Electro snarled, smoke rising from the burning layers as he started working through them. "I'll tear through all of it!"
"Maybe," I said. I wrapped my right fist in a thick double layer of webbing. "But I can still hurt you first."
I scaled the side of the building next to him, slow and deliberate — my leg throbbing with every grip. He was twenty feet off the ground, arms still pulling at the webbing.
He tore through the last of it just as I jumped.
My fist hit his face at full speed and I felt a tooth give way beneath the impact. He lost altitude instantly, spun out of control, and crashed down hard into the flooded street below.
I landed on the opposite wall and watched.
Water conducts electricity. The flooded street was now conducting Electro's own power directly back into him at a rate his body couldn't regulate. He convulsed, thrashed, and then went limp.
If I left him like that, he'd die. I wasn't going to do that.
Reluctantly, I fired a web line, caught him, and dragged him up to a lamp post, stringing him there upside down with heavy insulating wraps of webbing. He'd be out for a long time.
Then I stood there for a moment, looking at him.
He was a living superconductor of electricity. His body had been pushed beyond any recognisable human threshold — flash-frozen, then electrocuted at a scale that should have killed him. But it hadn't, because somehow every mitochondrion in his cells had adapted to the energy rather than surrendering to it. He should have died three times over.
He was genuinely fascinating, from a scientific standpoint.
I found a broken headlight on the asphalt nearby, unscrewed the housing, and used it as a makeshift vial. There was plenty of blood around his shattered jaw and split gums. I collected what I needed, sealed the vial with webbing, and tucked it away carefully. The curiosity could wait — right now I had somewhere else to be.
I swung back to the site of the initial attack, changed back into my clothes, and hit the ground running as Peter Parker.
"Felicia!"
She looked up, and for a moment her composure cracked. "Peter!"
I crossed the distance between us and pulled her into a hug, one hand going through her hair. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," she said into my shoulder. "I'm so sorry about dinner."
"Forget dinner," I said — and kissed her.
She made a small sound of surprise and then her arms went around my neck and she pulled me closer, and around us people who had just survived something terrible were laughing and cheering for absolutely no reason except that they were alive and so were we.
We broke the kiss and both looked around at the crowd, somewhat bewildered.
We helped where we could after that. Felicia walked away with a clean bill of health from the paramedics, and I heard that only one person had been seriously hurt — one man struck directly by a bolt, now in the ER, but expected to survive.
Three black SHIELD vehicles rolled past on their way to where I'd left Electro strung up. The SHIELD insignia was clearly visible on the side. I watched them go and said nothing.
I helped Felicia into a cab and we rode to the school.
But when we got there, she stopped at the door and didn't move.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
She lifted my jacket from her shoulders to show me her dress. It was midnight black with silver trim along the sides, and it had taken some damage — a tear here, another there. But she was still wearing it, and whatever state it was in, the dress fit her the way dresses are supposed to fit, and I genuinely could not look away.
"I think you look perfect," I said quietly, and pressed my lips lightly to hers.
"Peter, I'm not going in there," she said.
"Seriously?" I asked.
"Seriously."
"That's a shame. I really wanted everyone to see how incredible you look."
"So I'm something to show off, am I?" she asked, her tone catching just slightly.
"Not something. Someone," I said. I stepped closer until our foreheads were touching, her arms going to my shoulders, mine settling at her hips. "Someone who pulled strangers out of burning cars tonight. I wanted people to see who you really are."
"Peter," she said softly, "that isn't who I really am."
She didn't sound entirely convinced of that.
"Keep telling yourself that, Kitten," I smiled. "I at least wanted one dance with you tonight."
"I'm not going in," she said.
"No — you don't have to." I took out my phone and found a song I'd been thinking about since this morning. I pressed play, keeping the volume low enough that it belonged only to the two of us.
The melody started. Felicia and I began to move — slowly, without any particular technique, just the two of us finding a rhythm together outside a high school gym while the city that had just tried to kill us hummed quietly in the background.
I could smell her perfume — something unusual, something I knew I'd never quite be able to name or forget.
I felt her breathing slow and deepen.
"You know," she said at last, "for someone who's supposed to be terrible at human interaction, you have a remarkable instinct for romance."
"I think I was just waiting for the right person," I replied.
She was quiet for a moment, thinking something through. Then she looked up at me, decision made.
"Peter... do you want to take me out sometime?"
"Like on a date?" I asked.
"Yeah. A real one. An actual date." Her eyes met mine and held.
"I would love that," I said — and then, because I was already smiling and it seemed like the most honest thing I could say: "I didn't actually think you were the type who wanted something like this."
"I wasn't," she admitted. "But you're different, Peter Parker. You're a puzzle I can't solve, and the longer I try, the more I find myself thinking about you."
"Does that mean you'll lose interest once you figure me out?"
"No," she said. "I don't think so."
"Well," I said, laughing quietly, "that's good to know."
We danced in our small, private corner of the world, and neither of us said another word, afraid that speaking would break something neither of us quite had a name for yet.