-Parker Corporation, 100th Floor — Peter's Office-
(December – 11:00 AM)
They had arrived that morning.
Two of them. Yashida's people, as promised — hand-picked by the Yashida Ichiro himself for their particular skills and their proximity in age to Peter's public profile. The logic was clean: a seventeen-year-old billionaire with adult security was a story. A seventeen-year-old with two people who looked like peers was background noise.
Shingen 'Shin' Harada was eighteen. Peter screened his background with a fleeting glance. He had his grandfather's bearing — the particular stillness of someone raised to understand that composure was not the absence of capability but its most refined expression. The young man was lean and dark-haired, precise in his movements in the way of someone who had spent most of their life being corrected until precision became the only mode they operated in. He wore civilian clothes well — a dark fitted jacket, clean lines — and nothing about him read as anything other than a composed young man waiting outside an office.
Peter had a different understanding. The suit was something else entirely.
Cypher had scanned it before Peter finished crossing the room. Nano-lattice construction, adamantium-composite alloy, compressed to an almost undetectable layer beneath the civilian clothing — the kind of engineering that should not exist at this scale, certainly not on an eighteen-year-old standing in a corporate lobby. The Yashida files had listed it only as a prototype under active development. What they had not listed was that the power source had been swapped out: a miniaturised Flux-core, one of Peter's own, tucked into the suit's chassis alongside what Cypher identified as selectively integrated Chitauri tech running the deployment mechanism. Peter had sent those specifications to Yashida's engineers.
Silver Samurai MK-V.
Shingen himself had no powers. Cypher had confirmed this within the first thirty seconds — no mutation, no enhancement, no latent ability flagged. What he had instead been something that registered on a different kind of scale entirely: twelve years of continuous martial training beginning at age six, across disciplines that most practitioners spent a lifetime specialising in one of. The Yashida files used the word supernatural in the margin of his assessment and then crossed it out and wrote exceptional and then left both visible. Whatever the right word was, it was the kind of thing that made the suit a force multiplier rather than a crutch. Right now he was standing at parade rest outside Peter's office door like he was waiting for something he had already decided the outcome of.
The one next to him was… different.
Betsy Braddock. Nineteen. British. Her accent — crisp Home Counties, the kind that was trained rather than acquired. She was tall, violet-haired in a way that looked entirely deliberate, with the easy physical confidence of someone who had been exceptional at something since before they could name what it was. She had shaken Peter's hand and looked at him for slightly longer than social convention required, which Peter had noted and Cypher had flagged as a probable low-level telepathic scan. A precautionary read—Peter's mental walls were up just in case. A habitual reaction to telepaths. The Fool's Mask had given her nothing she wasn't supposed to have. She had smiled — satisfied, or at least neutral — and taken her position to the left of the door without comment.
Similar to her counterpart, she had an air of discipline about her.
"Yashida-san sends his regards," Shingen had said. His English was precise and entirely unaccented, the English of someone who had learned it as seriously as everything else. "We are at your disposal, Parker-san."
"Appreciated. Don't call me Parker-san."
Shingen had considered this. "Peter-san."
"That's worse."
Betsy had made a sound that was technically not a laugh.
They had been at their posts since nine. The floor was quiet in the way expensive floors were quiet — not silent, but managed, the distant hum of ventilation and the muffled city below carrying just enough sound to remind you it existed without requiring you to engage with it. From his position outside the office door, Shingen had spent most of the morning doing what he always did in unfamiliar environments: mapping it. Sight lines. Entry points. The weight distribution of the two men from the renovation crew who had passed twice in the last hour, neither of them looking at him, both of them clocking him. He had noted the building's security infrastructure with the methodical patience of someone who found the work genuinely interesting, which was the only way to find it at all.
Betsy had spent the morning leaning against the wall beside him with her arms crossed and her eyes at middle distance, which was her version of the same exercise conducted through an entirely different mechanism.
"He's interesting," she'd said at one point, unprompted, somewhere around ten.
"Oji-chan said as much," Shingen had replied. "My father on the other hand..."
"Your father said he was an existence worth serving." She'd glanced at the office door. "I'm saying he's interesting. It's not the same thing."
Shingen glanced at her curiously. "What did you find?"
"Well, my 'skills' don't work when I touch him and, oddly enough, he thinks in binary code."
"Binary? Like ones and zeros."
"Yep." Betsy tilted her head slightly. "I think he felt me poking around too."
"Then I suggest you do less poking and more guarding."
Betsy rolled her eyes. "Look at you finally taking an assignment seriously. Never thought I'd see the day."
"I have to make an impression." Shin asserted as he adjusted seams of his jacket. "Oji-chan… If you saw him, you would know. This isn't like the other assignments. It's different. It feels different."
At eleven forty-seven, the elevator opened.
Betsy straightened almost imperceptibly. She paid that particular quality of attention she deployed when something registered as worth reading more carefully. Shingen clocked the arrival without turning his head: young woman, early twenties, red hair, recorder in one hand, notebook under her arm, moving with the focused energy of someone who had somewhere to be and had decided the most efficient path was a straight line.
Without giving much away, Betsy raised a single hand and signed at Shin. "Drama. 12 o'clock."
She noticed them immediately. Shingen gave her credit for that. Most civilians took a beat to register anything outside their immediate purpose. She clocked them both in a single pass, took a few seconds to decide what they were and what they weren't, and then — notably — chose not to ask.
Betsy watched her walk through the office door and said quietly, "This one's going to be more interesting than the renovation crew."
"So… ex-girlfriend?" Shingen asked in a conspiratory tone.
"Doesn't feel like it."
"Ex-lover?"
"Really, Shin?"
"Well, you did say drama, and nothing is more dramatic than the matters of the heart."
"You really should cut down on the romance novellas."
"Never."
- ++0000++-
Low, slanted winter sun cuts sharply through the glass, casting long, crisp shadows across the room. The midday rays glow with a striking, cool clarity, stripping away harsh contrasts in favor of an expansive, bright calmness that contrasts with the chilly world outside.
The floor-to-ceiling glass on the eastern wall filtered it into something flat and silver, the snow-diffused sky turning the room into a study in grey and white that made the dark wood of the desk and the warm amber of the city below look like they belonged in a different painting. It was, Peter had found, the kind of room that changed character depending on what was happening inside it — it had a quality of attention about it, something to do with the height and the glass and the way sound moved in the space, that made conversations feel more deliberate than they might elsewhere. He probably had a few snippets of knowledge about neuroesthetics and environmental psychology in his head somewhere.
Something about how the elements of a room, from the lights, sounds and scents to the scale, furniture and even the color and ambience can act as a sensory input that triggers subconscious psychological and physiological responses in the brain.
One can learn a lot of weird stuff when their brain is perpetually connected to the internet.
He was at the window when she came in. Hands in his pockets.
He turned leisurely.
Mary Jane Watson looked like herself, which was still the most disorienting thing about her. She hadn't changed the way most people changed — in stages, incrementally, becoming a different person by degrees. She just looked like more of whatever she had always been. The red hair was longer. The green eyes did the same thing they always did, which was take inventory of everything in a room before the rest of her had finished arriving in it. Dark coat, fitted blouse, recorder in hand, notebook under her arm.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
A beat passed that had more history in it than either of them was going to acknowledge immediately.
The more things change, the more things stay the same… Peter noted internally, in the clinical and slightly detached way he noted most things. She looks exactly the same and nothing feels the same.
"Parker," she said.
Not Peter…
"Watson." He moved away from the window. "You're late."
"Three minutes."
"I know. I wasn't criticising."
She looked around the office the way she'd looked at him — taking it in, measuring it, the brain behind the green eyes turning everything into something she might need later. Her gaze moved across the desk, the glass, the hundred-floor drop, the silver city below.
"Nice office," she said, in the tone of someone who had decided to acknowledge something without committing to being impressed by it.
"It came with the building."
"Right." A short pause. "Because you own the building."
"That's what the big glowing sign says." Peter lips quirked up into a dismissive smirk.
"Oh? Sorry, must have missed it on the way in." She set the recorder on the desk, notebook beside it, sat without waiting to be invited. Her expression and tone switching into something professional. "I did a piece last month on the Yashida deal. The Parker Corp financials are publicly filed, which I assume you know." She opened the notebook. "Two and a half billion. First tranche wired inside forty-eight hours of the announcement." She looked up. "Most partnerships of that scale take six to eight months to close. How did yours take eleven days?"
A beat passed as Peter met her expectant gaze. She really was keen on playing her part in this interview to the end.
"Mr. Yashida is decisive when he sees value," Peter answered smoothly, settling into the chair across from her. "I'm told it's a family trait."
"Decisive," she commented. "That's a word for it." She clicked the recorder on. "MJ Watson, Daily Bugle. Interview with Peter Parker, CEO, Parker Corporation. December 18th. 11:57AM." A beat, the kind she put there on purpose. "The last time I saw you, you had a split lip and a cracked rib and you were sitting on a hospital cafeteria floor." She said it the way she might read a date off a calendar. "Now you're here."
"Nothing stays the same forever. Things change…" Peter let a moment pass. "People change."
"True. But I think a lot of people would agree that your type of 'change' is phenomenal."
"Phenomenal? No, I prefer lucky."
"From a nerdy teen from Queens to a corporate CEO in-what? Practically overnight. I'd call that phenomenal. Wouldn't you?"
"I guess, when you put it like that."
Watson paused to write something down. Peter could read it. Analyzing the curvature of the pen was childs play for cypher.
"Considers situation lucky? Reason- Aunt May? Discovered by Arno Collins? Scouted by Yashida Industries?"
Fools Mask held back an eyebrow twitch. Quite the detective aren't you Watson….
Watson then turned to Peter, have him a sweet smile and spoke.
"Walk me through it."
- ++0000++-
Outside the office, Betsy tilted her head slightly.
Not enough for anyone to notice. Just a fraction — the kind of micro-adjustment that happened when something at the edge of her awareness sharpened.
"What?" Shingen said, without looking at her.
"Nothing." A pause. "The room changed."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning whatever's happening in there got more complicated about thirty seconds ago." She settled back against the wall. "He's still perfectly composed. She knows he's perfectly composed and she's deciding on the story." A beat. "They know each other. She knows him, like really knows him, or at least she used to. She's not so sure anymore."
Shingen processed this. "Is that a problem?"
"No," Betsy said. "It's just free reality TV I didn't pay for."
- ++0000++-
"Two patents," she said, once he'd given her the broad shape of it. An amalgamation of events saturated with lies and fabrications designed to paint a specific picture for her. "Filed at seventeen."
"Sixteen." Peter corrected. "The filings went through at seventeen."
"The Flux-core I understand. Clean energy, commercial applications, the pitch writes itself." She tapped the pen once on the notebook. "The AI is harder. Everything I've read describes it differently — near-AI, advanced language model, autonomous system. Which is it?"
"All three descriptions are accurate depending on what you're measuring it against, it's nothing that will pass the Turing Test but given time to develop and grow we might eventually get it there but I digress." Peter answered.
"Turing Test?"
"Proposed by mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, It's a benchmark for artificial intelligence. It evaluates a machine's ability to exhibit conversational behavior indistinguishable from a human which is also why the classification question is genuinely unsettled. The existing framework for what constitutes an AI wasn't built to account for what it does."
"And what does it do?"
"With enough time, it will do whatever the user wants it to do."
"That's a very clean way of not answering." She said it pleasantly, the way you said something pleasant when you meant it as a point.
"It's the most accurate answer available."
"Right." She made a note. "So when Yashida Corp bought the licence, what exactly did they buy?"
"Access to the application layer. The system itself isn't transferable."
"Why not?"
"Because it isn't external," Peter said. "It's not a product that runs on a server somewhere. The architecture doesn't work that way."
She looked at him for a moment. "So Yashida paid two and a half billion dollars for something they can use but never own."
"Most people pay for things they can't own," Peter said. "Electricity. Weather forecasting. Sunlight." A beat. "It's a workable arrangement."
Watson looked at him with the expression of someone who had just watched a card disappear and knew there was a trick but hadn't found the mechanism yet. She wrote something down. Peter didn't bother reading, he could fish out of cyphers data stream later.
"The pharmaceutical project," she began, trying to work from another angle. "Regenerative compound, trial phase. It's in the Yashida filings but not in any of your press materials."
"We don't announce things until they're ready to be announced."
"When will it be ready?"
"When it is."
"What does it do?"
"Accelerated cellular regeneration and rejuvenation The initial application is trauma medicine."
"And the non-initial applications?"
"Still in the works." He said it with the easy patience of someone who had given this answer a dozen times and found it entirely sufficient each time.
"That's very convenient," she said. Still pleasant. "First patent at sixteen, Yashida deal at seventeen, Parker Corp incorporated and fully operational within four months." She looked up from the notebook. "Who helped you?"
Wouldn't you like to know… Peter raised an eyebrow. "I have a staff of fourteen hundred and more that's coming in day by day."
"Before the staff. Before the building. When it was just you and a bedroom in Forest Hills." She held his gaze. There was a hint of something there. Curiosity? Resentment? Respect? Or something in between all of that. Peter wasn't sure.
"Someone helped. Mentored you. Funded early development. Something. Nobody does this alone at sixteen."
He looked at her steadily. She looked back with the focused patience of someone who had learned that the silence after a good question was where the real answer usually lived.
"I had access to good resources," Peter said. "And a lot of time."
"Don't give me that. That's the press release version." She pushed. "You went through something terrible. No one should have gone through something like that and then you do all… this. You expect anyone to believe that you built all of this without any form of guidance in your bedroom, alone—
"Yes" Peter's voice was calm. He was sure of it. Fools Mask ensured it. But something about it, he wasn't sure what caused Watson to still.
"I was… alone." He paused a beat. "I was depressed and going through something no one should experience. In that four-by-four bedroom with nothing but time and my own thoughts to keep me company I learned something."
"I learned that in the end, nothing matters." He held her gaze. "Not my friends. Not school. Not society, or rules. none of it matters. No. In the end, everyone eventually ends up alone. They die alone and I…" I don't want to be alone anymore, not if I don't have to be. I won't. Only my family matter to me now. Only they… "I did not want to live in that four-by-four room anymore, sleeping in trash and smelling like shit. So, I did something about it and I did it alone."
Something flickered in her expression. She chose not to respond or rather she couldn't. She looked back down at the notebook and sharply cleared her throat as an excuse to swallow the invisible lump in the back of her throat.
"Let's, let's talk about Midtown High," she said.
- ++0000++-
Eventually they settled back into their usual back and forth silently brushing whatever had occurred under the rug.
"Parker Corp's first major philanthropic commitment and it's your old high school." She let that sit for a half-second. "There are cynics at the Bugle who called it brand management before the ink dried on the announcement. Rags-to-riches, giving back, human interest angle." She looked up. "What's the version that isn't that?"
"The same version," Peter said. "I know what Midtown needs because I went there. I know which labs are under-equipped, which programmes got cut, which teachers are carrying departments on salaries that don't reflect the work. The information was specific and the means were available. Whether that's philanthropic or practical depends on which frame you prefer."
"New headmaster. Robert Callaghan. Robotics professor, no secondary school leadership background." She tapped the pen. "Callaghan's Laws of Robotics are foundational, yes. But headmaster of a high school is a specific job. Why him specifically?"
"I don't think we've made that public yet?" Peter raised a brow curiously.
"You have your computers; I have my sources. The question Parker."
"Because he's spent twenty years building things for other people's benefit and producing students who changed their fields. That's not a credential. It's an orientation. I want Midtown to have that orientation."
"That's a nicer version of the press release." She said it without heat, the observation of someone keeping score. "The Mary Janes played the winter assembly there three years ago. Acoustics in the main hall were terrible."
Peter looked at her. She looked back with an expression of perfect professional neutrality that had a very thin wire of something else running underneath it.
"New paneling," he said. "Whole auditorium. In fact, why not a new auditorium."
Something crossed her face. Gone before it finished arriving. She wrote it down, which meant she'd decided it was worth keeping, which was its own kind of answer.
"Good," she said.
- ++0000++-
Outside the office, Betsy shifted her weight almost imperceptibly.
Shingen glanced at her.
"Sooo?" he asked.
"I might need some popcorn." She was eyes were glazed over with that particular quality that implied she wasn't looking at anything in particular despite staring. "She's looking for a crack. She's been looking for a crack since she walked in." A pause. "She's not going to find one."
"Because he won't give her one."
"Because he's not performing." Betsy paused. "That's the thing. It's not that he's good at hiding. It's that there's nothing to find in the way she's looking." She tilted her head slightly. "She knows that. It's making her push harder."
Shingen was quiet for a moment. "Should I?"
"No." She straightened. "She's not a threat. She just cares about him in a very complicated way, which is more complicated."
"So, it is a matter of the heart. Huh! Called it."
"That's not…"
- ++0000++-
"Your aunt," the redhead began.
Careful… "Yes."
She had set the pen down with the deliberateness of someone marking a boundary.
"Still in a coma. Almost two years."
"Yes."
" I've read the articles, the media and their framed context. The orphaned genius angle." She held his gaze. "Fourteen versions of that story in the last month. I'm not asking for it."
"What are you asking for?"
"What it was actually like." Her voice was even, no performance in it. "You were sixteen. No family. Two-bedroom in Forest Hills to this. The part in between — what was that?"
He took a moment. An actual one. This question was easy. Despite everything, never let it be said that Marry Jane Watson was bad at her job.
"Hard," he said. "The work was something I could do when there wasn't anything else I could do. I can't explain that more cleanly."
"You built a near-AI while your aunt was in the ICU."
"I built something to focus on. I found a distraction I could lose myself in. What it turned out to be came later."
"That's not really an answer."
"No," he said. "It's not. Not to you. But it is to me."
She looked at him for a moment, the green eyes doing the thing where they were deciding something.
"She's still there," MJ said. "Your aunt. Is she —"
"Stable. The prognosis has been improving. I'm optimistic."
She repeated the word. "Optimistic." Quietly, the way you repeated something when you were deciding whether to push on it.
She wrote it down.
He watched her write it. She had heard the distance between that word and a real one. She had heard it and chosen, for now, not to press. That was either restraint or strategy or both, and either way he noted it.
She had always been sharper than people gave her credit for, he remembered. Even before all of this. He had known that, back when knowing things like that still felt like something.
- ++0000++-
She clicked the recorder off.
The room settled into a different quality of quiet. The snow outside, the city below, the flat silver light through the glass. The history between them stopped being covered by the professional register and just sat there in the open, patient and slightly inconvenient. She let out a long sigh and ran her fingers through her hair like she was preparing herself for what was to come.
"Off the record," she finally said. "You look like yourself. Mostly."
"Mostly," he agreed.
"I've been covering you for a month you know. Press conferences, the Yashida announcement, footage from the Midtown ceremony." She set the pen down entirely. "You never get caught off guard. Not once. Not even close."
"I've had practice."
"That's not what I mean." She looked at him with the directness she'd always had, the kind that didn't flinch from its own conclusions. "At the hospital. I was furious at you. I was furious at you for a long time after."
"I know."
"And I found out later that," she said, "that you'd just lost your uncle. That your aunt was in surgery. That you'd been sitting alone in a waiting room running on nothing, and you said something terrible to someone who didn't deserve it, in front of all the wrong people, because you had nothing left." A pause. "I've had enough bad days to know what that looks like."
He said nothing.
"I slapped you."
"I earned it."
"You did." The faintest suggestion of something that wasn't quite a smile. "I'm not apologising for it."
"I'm not asking you to."
The silence between them held. Neither of them hurried it.
"I went back," MJ said. "A few weeks after. Went to your door. Thought you'd moved out cause no one saw you around for weeks. There are people out there who still care about you. You know that right?" She was looking at the recorder, not at him. "I'm telling you because it seems like the kind of thing you should know. Not because it changes anything."
Peter looked at her. It doesn't. I won't. You're a little too late MJ…
She had gone back. He had been gone. He turned that over — mapped the edges of it the way an architect would alter the schematics of a model and found the places where it changed the shape of things he thought he'd already accounted for. There were a few.
"I didn't know that," he said.
"I figured."
A beat.
"What happened to you, Peter?" She said it quietly. Not as a journalist. Just as a person who had grown up on the same street and was sitting across from someone she used to know, finding the geography familiar and the terrain entirely different.
The Fool's Mask held the surface the way it always did. Open, present, the portrait of someone being candid. Below it, something noted the specific quality of being asked that question by this particular person — the gap between who she was asking about and who was currently sitting in this chair made briefly and plainly legible by someone who had no idea how wide it actually was.
What happened to him? I died MJ. I met death. I fought gods and monsters and fought gods with monsters. I've killed and raised the dead. I've met mutants, evil scientists, wizards and heroes. I've built things and done things and will do things you wouldn't believe. The Peter you know is dead. Why can't you see that? Why can't anyone see that? If I showed you what I am, what you do?
He found he didn't entirely mind being seen that much. He could tell her. What would that change. He could just… Peter shook the though off.
"A lot," he answered. "A lot happened."
"Yeah." MJ looked at him for a moment. "I can see that."
Maybe she noticed it somehow, she always did have that almost unnatural intuition about things. She reached forward and clicked the recorder back on.
"Back on record. Last question." The professional register settled back into place, clean and complete. "Parker Corporation's stated mission is building the infrastructure for a better future. What does that mean, practically?"
Peter slipped back into his role as she did hers.
"It means the systems we have were designed for a world that no longer exists," he said. "Energy, medicine, education — all of it built before alien invasions, before enhanced individuals, before the kinds of problems that come with those things. What we're building accounts for what the world actually is now rather than what it used to be." He paused. "Practically speaking."
She wrote the whole thing. Every word.
When she looked up, for a moment the interview was over and they were just two people from the same street in Queens sitting a hundred floors above the city.
"Good answer," she said.
"True one."
She clicked off the recorder and stood, tucking the notebook under her arm. She stood up and held out her hand.
"Parker."
Peter shook it softly. Her hand was soft and rather fragile in his.
"Watson."
"I'll send a copy before it goes to print."
"Appreciated."
She was at the door when she stopped. Didn't turn around.
"She'd be proud of you," MJ said. "Your aunt. Whatever else is going on — she'd be proud of this part."
She walked out.
- ++0000++-
Outside, Betsy stepped aside to let her pass without being asked. Shingen's eyes tracked the elevator.
"Well?" he said.
Betsy was quiet for a moment, watching the elevator doors close.
"She's going to come back," Betsy said. "Not for the article."
Shingen considered this. "What do you think will happen?"
"Ask me again in a few months."
She turned back to her post. Shingen turned back to his.
Inside the office, Peter stood at the window for a long time.
The snow came down. The city did what the city did. The flat silver light held the room in its particular, patient indifference.
He wasn't sure whether the version of himself that Aunt May would be proud of and the version currently standing in this office were the same person or two different ones who happened to share a face.
He found he didn't want to model that particular projection.
Some things, he was learning, were better left unresolved.
-Chapter End-