Peter stared at the girl in the center of the room, his brain misfiring.
It wasn't just that the second spider-bite victim was standing right in front of him. It was the sudden, jarring realization that his comic book meta-knowledge was completely useless. In standard continuity, Cindy Moon was locked in a concrete bunker for a decade to hide from a multiversal vampire. She definitely didn't get recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D.
Furthermore, according to the comics, Spider-Man and Silk were supposed to experience an uncontrollable pheromone surge the second they met. Peter waited a beat. He checked his pulse. Nothing. Just a girl in a white and black tactical suit.
He dropped his shoulders. Honestly? That was a massive relief.
"Kids these days," Nick Fury said. He stepped forward, swirling the amber liquid in his glass without drinking it. "You get superpowers, and instead of registering with the government or getting professionally trained, you put on circus tights and pick fights in the street. Completely ignoring the fact that bullets still kill you."
"I actually do have training," Peter retorted. "And I wasn't losing that fight just now. No offense, Cindy."
Cindy had already retreated to the corner of the room. She sat on a stool and pulled a book from her pocket, completely unbothered.
Fury wasn't letting him off the hook. "You think you're hot stuff," the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director said. "You took down a safe-cracker, an international assassin, and a pile of bugs in two weeks. Congratulations."
Peter hadn't actually tallied it up like that. Two weeks. It sounded exhausting when Fury said it out loud.
"You think you handled the problem this morning?" Fury continued. "Did you know there was a surviving spider trying to crawl out of the rubble? Because you didn't see it. S.H.I.E.L.D. did."
Ah. So that was the pitch.
"Let me guess," Peter said. "You're about to offer me a S.H.I.E.L.D. gym membership. Sorry, my schedule is pretty full."
"S.H.I.E.L.D. can make you better," Fury countered smoothly. "We can do things the Avengers can't. We can give you the intel, the backup, and the network to turn you into the ultimate Spider-Man."
It was a good offer. Logically, S.H.I.E.L.D. had the infrastructure Peter desperately needed. But Peter knew the MCU timeline. Unless he could guarantee S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't currently rotting from the inside out with HYDRA agents, he wasn't stepping foot on a Helicarrier.
"I prefer working solo," Peter said. "Even the Avengers just asked me to house-sit. Besides, I had a dream I joined S.H.I.E.L.D. once, and the whole place got taken over by a giant sn—"
He cut himself off. He saw the microscopic shift in Fury's expression. A fractional shake of the head.
Peter's heart skipped a beat. He knows. The movies were wrong. Fury knew about HYDRA. He was deliberately keeping them around? Why? To siphon their funding?
"—giant shark," Peter finished lamely.
Fury took a slow sip of his scotch. "The shark ate it." He set the glass down on the counter. "The offer stands. You can cash it in whenever. Oh, and regarding your multiverse problem—you'll be selected for the Baxter Building internship. You'll meet Spider-Woman there."
Fury turned to leave.
"Can I ask you a question?" Peter blurted out.
Fury stopped. He adjusted his coat. He gave a single nod.
"Your eye," Peter said. "What happened to it?"
Fury stood completely still. "I was blinded by someone," he said quietly. "It was a simple hostage rescue. The simplest kind. We had the package. We were moving out. Then, a man appeared. He killed every single agent under my command. He killed the target. And he took my eye."
Fury looked at Peter. The single, unblinking eye was cold.
"I still don't know his name or what he looked like. I only know he had a metal arm. The Soviets called him the Winter Soldier."
Peter frowned. That directly contradicted the Captain Marvel movie. No alien cat. No Skrull scratch. Just a massacre.
Fury stepped out the glass doors onto the exterior helipad. The chopper's rotors were already spinning up.
"Watch out for people with metal arms, Peter Parker," Fury yelled over the engine roar. "Your parents were killed by the Winter Soldier. Not a plane crash."
"Wait, what?!" Peter stepped forward, his pulse spiking. "What did you say?!"
Fury didn't answer. He climbed into the helicopter. The doors slid shut, and the aircraft lifted off the pad, banking sharply over the Manhattan skyline.
Peter stood in the empty common room. The silence rushed back in. He stared at the empty helipad, his brain trying to process the tectonic shift in his own reality.
Then he turned around.
Cindy Moon was still sitting in the corner, turning a page in her book.
"He didn't take you with him," Peter said.
Cindy didn't look up. "Fury said we're going to be working together. Figured we should get acquainted."
Peter walked back to the center of the room. "How did you end up with S.H.I.E.L.D.?"
Cindy flipped another page. "My parents saw my powers. They panicked and called the cops. S.H.I.E.L.D. showed up six hours later."
So much for a normal high school life. Peter sat down on the sofa across from her. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "Julia Carpenter told me about you. She said you could sense me. Is that true?"
Cindy finally looked up from her book. "You really can't sense me?"
"No."
"That explains why you missed the surviving spider," Cindy said flatly. "I can sense you perfectly. Your distance, your exact location, your physical state. Those thirty seconds where you were taking maximum voltage from the electrical cables were very obvious."
Peter rubbed the back of his neck. "Uh. Sorry about that. Has it been messing with your life?"
Cindy let out a short, quiet laugh. She closed the book. "It's fine. It's like... knowing where my phone is all the time. The giant breeding spider-monster was the only thing that actually bothered me."
She leaned forward, mirroring his posture. "My turn. I've watched your combat footage. Based on your behavioral algorithms, when I attacked you earlier, you should have fired a web to blind me or pin my arms. Why did you throw a chair?"
"My web-shooters got crushed in the fight this morning," Peter said. "I can't shoot webs right now."
Cindy stared at him. The confusion on her face was entirely genuine.
"Wait," Cindy said slowly. "You can't sense me. And you can't even make your own silk?"
She raised her right hand. She pressed her index and middle fingertips together. With a casual flick of her wrist, a pristine, white strand of structural spider-silk spun naturally from her skin.