Cross of Steel 2 (Patreon)

Mary Jane awoke to a night bright in its darkness—something only a certified night owl could understand. The stars threw the darkness of the sky into sharp relief. Even the glass of the little window by her bed didn’t show any of the little white in a glare; it let the blackness in like a hole in the boat would let in water.

She shook her head groggily and came to her feet. Peter wasn’t in the bedroom. He hadn’t been there when she’d gone to take a nap and he hadn’t crept into bed when he was back from being Spider-Man. Which didn’t mean he would never come back—it just made Mary Jane a little grateful that she saw light spilling in under the closed door, coming from the living room.

She walked slowly to the door, opening it carefully so she didn’t make a sound that would disturb him. It wouldn’t be unlike him for Peter to have fallen asleep on the couch so he didn’t wake her, especially if he was injured. If she tried to cuddle with him in the night and he had a bruise, she could wake him up in pain and then his pain would wake her up… it had happened. That was Peter’s argument.

Her argument was that it was a very nice bed that they’d spent a good amount of money on and so Peter should get as much use of it as he could before it wore out or got trashed by a supervillain.

She would say the same thing about her nightie, but Peter wouldn’t think that was very funny.

She found Peter on the couch, in the pants of his Spider-Man costume. He’d taken off the shirt and mask to patch himself up, doing a good enough job that Mary Jane almost couldn’t be cross with him for not waking her up and letting her do his stitches.

He looked beautiful, lying there in his sleep, innocent and careless. Mary Jane felt tears well up in her eyes: he deserved a normal job, where all he had to worry about was netting a promotion and remembering to buy milk on the way home. Not… all of this. He was too good a man to have to suffer through what it took to be a hero.

But that was how it had to work. It couldn’t be some jerk, some slob who got the power. They’d never use it like he did. It was all so… Biblical. He suffered like a martyr because he had the soul of a saint. And the man felt like a sinner for even thinking about not doing the right thing.

She looked at the TV, playing on mute, its light and only its light filtering out into the room. The closed captions and scrolling headlines of the news channel it was tuned to put a fine point on what the news helicopters showed. Fisk Tower was a wreck, an entire floor blown out from ‘SPIDER-MAN’S BATTLE WITH WILSON FISK… INDUSTRIALIST REVEALED AS CRIMINAL KINGPIN… MULTIPLE ASSOCIATES ALSO APPREHENDED BY VIGILANTE… FBI SEIZING ASSETS, SAY MORE ARRESTS TO COME’

“I swear, the guy furnishes his office exclusively with stuff he can use for blunt force trauma. He must weigh his statues before he buys them.”

Mary Jane cracked a smile. Peter was up, though his eyes weren’t open. She guessed he was in too much pain to really sleep, exhausted as he was.

“You need some pain pills?”

“No, I’m not in any pain so long as I don’t move. But I may scream when I need to go use the bathroom.”

Mary Jane sat down next to him, careful to avoid pressing against Peter too roughly, and took his hand. He mumbled when she brushed her thumb over his bruised knuckles, but it didn’t hurt too bad. She could tell. He was feeling too good from the victory to be in real pain.

“You think they’ve really got him this time?”

“Who knows? He’s got an army of lawyers, but there’s no honor among thieves. All those crooks he had working for him must be lining up to turn on him.”

“Especially since he’s locked up in the Raft,” Mary Jane said, knowing she was stroking his ego, “and not bribing any officials.”

“Yeah. I didn’t let him use me to dust his office just for the hell of it. Now that he’s got the handcuffs on, they can see he isn’t untouchable. I’m guessing even the Kingpin can’t build a tower that can’t crumble when everyone’s swinging his own hammer.”

There was a familiarity to the view from the news cameras: the gray cityscape, the police and FBI agents in tones of dark blue. But now that we replaced by the sharp red, blue, and yellow of a BREAKING NEWS bulletin. Peter opened his slitted eyes wider to see what could possibly have bumped the Kingpin of Crime from the headlines.

“MJ, could you turn it up?”

Mary Jane grabbed for the remote, having to feel for it because her eyes were locked to the screen and she didn’t want to look away to see exactly where the controller was.

The news footage was now darkly hued, a view of California in the made night of a heavy storm. There was a hurricane battering the shoreline and the skies silvered with lightning—the camera flashed with driving rain, catching the light.

But the view wasn’t just of the oppressive weather. It was of a man-sized blur, moving with incredible speed and purpose. Even with miles in which to capture it through the viewfinder, the camera struggled to keep pace with the flying figure.

But aside from the bright red and blue colors that blurred with constant motion, it was legible by the impact it was having. Where it flew, the storm was being undone. The gravely rotating column of the hurricane was breaking up… sectioned away by the frenetic motion of the blur and then dissipating.

And with the storm being taken apart, the sun was breaking through. Thick shafts of sunlight coming in as the dark cloud cover vanished. It was like watching a jigsaw puzzle being taken apart, the scene it depicted erased piece by piece, until all that was left was the clear glass of the tabletop it’d been assembled on.

And now, with the storm gone, the blur ceased its efforts. It stood there, no, hovered… the way it flew was so casual that it might as well have been a man standing in place. And it was a man. Strongly muscled, tall and upright, in a blue bodysuit with a red cape unfurled behind him. And a yellow-red symbol on his broad chest—one Peter only believed he could make out because it was so simple. An S. That had to be it. A giant S.

The S-Man remained in place, surveying a disaster zone with no disaster. Then, apparently satisfied with his work, he flew off. Blurring to wherever he had to go with the same speed that he’d used to attend to the hurricane.

“Peter, what are you thinking?”

Peter turned to her, seeing that Mary Jane was as agog as he was at this display of raw power. Even Iron Man would struggle to put away an entire storm system like he was folding laundry.

Peter shook his head. “I’m wondering how much the cameraman got paid for getting all that on tape. I can’t imagine what I could charge Jolly Jonah for pictures like that.”