CHAPTER ONE: Before Sunset
He decided to run the mask through two more rinse cycles than he ran with the rest of the costume. Washing the head-piece was usually the most important part of laundry day. He spent so much time breathing in his own breath through the thing that he really didn't need a three-day-old body-funk included. He knew this from experience. Peter Parker had been cleaning his own Spider-Man costumes since he was fifteen.
It had been absolutely necessary back when he was just a kid living with his aunt in Forest Hills. There was no way May Parker was going to miss a pair of red and blue spandex tights mixed in with all those yellow sweater vests. When he was living with the gorgeous Mary Jane Watson years later, the reasons for washing his own suits were something else entirely. MJ was a "dry clean only" kind of girl. The image of her bent over a clothesbasket with a Spider-Man costume in hand was the height of whimsical fantasy.
There were only two other people who'd ever cleaned his spider-duds. He generally tried not to think about one of them because the reason she had to do so was absolutely mortifying. Of course, the fact that it had led to some fantastic, life-affirming sex shortly thereafter made his night with Batgirl the kind of thing Peter actually ended up thinking about a lot... even all these years later.
His most recent launderer, however, had been the Avengers' butler, Edwin Jarvis. Peter, Mary Jane and Aunt May had briefly lived in Avengers Tower after Peter had joined the Earth's Mightiest Heroes. They hadn't stayed there long, but in the brief time before the insanity of the superhero "Civil War" forced them to flee, Jarvis had absolutely
insisted
on taking Peter's costumes while he handled the rest of the Avengers' laundry. And Jarvis brought them back so fresh, clean, and downright fluffy that Peter saw little reason to argue. Of course, it was eventually revealed that this particular Jarvis was, in fact, an alien imposter who'd probably used the genetic material scraped from their unclean clothes to help his warrior race of shape-shifting Skrull to duplicate the Avengers' various powers, so Peter had once more embraced his D.I.Y. philosophy of spider-washing.
This is why, Peter found himself locked in the basement laundry room of Avengers Mansion, naked, hating his life. It wasn't cleaning his own clothes that put him in such a funk. Hell, this was a nice, quiet bubble of sanity in a life that got crazier and less certain with each passing day. And while the wall-crawler had long been prone to a substantial amount of self-loathing, this particular Peter Parker pity party happened to occur at a definite low-point in his long career as Spider-Man.
Something like ten years had passed since Peter had been bitten by that radioactive spider, but he swore sometimes it felt closer to fifty. Just an endless blur of goblins and symbiotes and lizards... oh my!
Ever since he'd joined the Avengers, his life had become one mega crap storm after another. That civil war over the Superhuman Registration Act -- which demanded that every masked vigilante step forward to reveal their true identity or face federal prosecution -- had torn his life apart in a way that made the Skrull's secret invasion of Earth almost pleasant by comparison. The decisions he made during that impossible imbroglio had almost cost Aunt May her life... and they seemed to cost Peter the love of his own, as Mary Jane had left him and New York City behind when it was over...
Battling the Skrull months later had been dangerous and more than a little confusing, but that was pretty much business-as-usual for the web-slinger by now. It was the
aftermath
of the Skrull attack that really blew his mind, as his greatest enemy, Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin, was appointed the new director of S.H.I.E.L.D. -- the world's premiere intelligence and covert ops agency. Stormin' Norman rebranded the operation as H.A.M.M.E.R., proclaimed himself the new leader of the Avengers, and spent half a year zipping around the world in a repainted suit of Tony Stark's Iron Man armor, calling himself the Iron Patriot while backed by a handpicked team of unrepentant supervillains. And all Osborn had to do to get away with this was dress them up in old Avengers costumes! Daredevil's old sparring partner Bullseye was the new Hawkeye. Moonstone was the new Ms. Marvel, and Mac Gargan, the former Scorpion and current Venom was the new Spider-Man... the new Spider-Man who was inexplicably more popular than the original. Osborn's public relations team was something else, alright.
Oh. And somehow during all of this, J. Jonah Jameson, the man who'd spent the last decade declaring the web-head a public enemy in 40-point font in the
Daily Bugle
, was elected mayor of New York City. Mercifully, up until the election, the usual gang of threats and menaces that plagued Peter's life as Spider-Man had been absent. Then, in a flash, they were back and worse than ever. Doctor Octopus took technological control of the city. Electro destroyed the
Bugle
building. Two different Rhinos fought to the death in the middle of Manhattan in a gruesome street brawl and Spidey hadn't been able to stop it... just like he failed to stop Curt Conners from murdering his own son as the Lizard.
This relentless gauntlet pushed Peter to his breaking point, and that's when Kraven the Hunter -- the man who had once left Spider-Man buried alive before killing himself -- came back from the dead to bring Peter's life to a new level of hell. The wall-crawler had barely wrapped up that nightmare before the Blackest Night descended upon him.
Peter didn't learn most of the details until later, but apparently some dread, cosmic death god named Nekron brought back the dead as Black Lantern zombies bent on the end of all life. Spider-Man still wasn't certain whether or not Kraven's return had been a part of Nekron's design, but there was no question that it was one of the worst nights of his life. He endured the return of damn near everybody who'd ever died under his watch, fighting their cosmic-powered corpses in the streets of New York.
There was Sally Avril from high school... NYPD Captain Jean DeWolff, one of the few cops who would work with him before she was murdered by the Sin-Eater... Even Ben Reilly, the genetic double that had filled-in for Peter as Spider-Man when both of them thought Ben was the original and Peter himself was merely a clone of the one, true web-head.
Despite the abject horror of that dark night, Spider-Man fought his way through them all. Because as soon as he realized the Black Lanterns' strategy -- gorging themselves on the emotions conjured up by the living in face of the dead -- he realized he had to get to Aunt May, because it was only a matter of time before they'd both come face to face with his greatest regret: Black Lantern Ben Parker. He found them at the house in Forest Hills, his poor aunt terrified as she confronted the gentle face of his beloved Uncle Ben, twisted in rage while spouting all of his widow's worst fears while trying to tear out her heart and eat it. Spider-Man did what he had to stop him...
If it had just ended there.
Saving May from his undead uncle was a breeze compared to confronting a space zombie Gwen Stacy. Peter should have expected it, but he tended to remember Ben as the good man who raised him and Gwen as the first girl who loved him wholeheartedly. And honestly, after all these years, he'd been able to put so much of the guilt he'd felt for Uncle Ben's death behind him. Because Ben had died because Peter failed to act -- he'd let the burglar who shot his uncle run right past him. But as Black Lantern Gwen was all too quick to point out as their battle raged across two boroughs, she had died
because
Peter acted.
"Trust me, Peter, this is a terrible place to die," she said, as the chase brought them atop the George Washington Bridge. Spider-Man
hated
that goddamn bridge but somehow he seemed to end up there every couple of months, forced to relive some ridiculous rehash of the worst night of his life...
