Dual narrative: Peter P and Saint R Who: Spiderman + Saint R What: Photo-shoot. When: Recently Where: Marvel New York
Peter never thought he’d be grateful for the consistent predictability of criminals, but then again he never really thought he’d end up in some mixing pot of alternate universes either. Giant lizards? Best friends turning into goblins? Sure. Electric men? Other animal-themed supervillains? (He was noticing a definite trend. Maybe he’d started something.) Yeah, whatever. But the whole different worlds thing was… new. MJ wasn’t his MJ, Harry wasn’t his Harry but was just as doomed, and there were a bunch of people who knew a him that wasn’t really him. Not exactly what he wanted to be dealing with at the start of the school year but, hey, when life hands you lemonades, whip them back as hard as you can. Or make lemonade. Whatever. Spider-Man still had a job to do; at least that seemed to be a constant. Criminals were criminals no matter what world he was dumped in.
Sure, the Avengers handled the big stuff, but Spider-Man was more your friendly neighborhood superhero. Robbers, murderers, thugs; every so often some supervillain would pop up but so far, so good. His only problem was Harry and he was hoping to prevent another goblin rampage. 2pm, Tuesday afternoon, and he was web-slinging through the streets, keeping an eye and an ear out for any potential trouble. In his world, Jameson did his best to smear the Spider’s name but he got on pretty well with the NYPD, and he was hoping to keep that rapport here. Staying the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man would be great.
“Good afternoon, New York, it’s a sunny seventy-two degrees and traffic is a little backed up on West 43rd, but hey, just settle in and turn up the tunes.” He chattered to, well, himself as he swung, intentionally thinking about nothing in particular, and then his Spidey senses started tingling. Bingo. He pushed off the side of a building, catapulted into the air, flipped around, and set off in the other direction. A couple of minutes later and the police scanners lit up with reports of an armed robbery at a bank, suspects fleeing, pursue with caution. Caution? Hah. Spider-Man laughed in the face of caution. He swung lower, lower, and landed on one of the sirens-wailing police cars.
“Hiya, boys! Hope you don’t mind if I drop in. Looks like you could use a little help.” He waved, saluted, and swung off towards the vehicle in question, a big black SUV, deftly avoiding bullets. Bad guys were so typical.
Saint did not have many things left. The hotel had given him his wallet and it had given him his cameras. The enlarger had been acquired with much persuasion and an hour long conversation about the difficulties of developing black and white film in color solutions, from a closing-down photo place. The apartment was small and it was cheap and it was in the kind of neighborhood where the street was never empty and never quiet at night. Frequently, he ran into the kind of women whose stories he had once told with photographs in cool, white clean galleries that middle class America had paid a lot of money to look at and feel informed about social problems.
Now the apartment was missing a door and he was missing the enlarger. This had become a problem, although not an insurmountable one. He had a clear and expressed preference for film, seeing the smoky appearance coagulate under solution into a print crisp and clear enough to sell and to sell well. Of the cameras (both of which had been on him during his wander through New York’s diseased streets) he had a digital that worked just as well as the manual SLR but there was something calming about the tactile need to wind on film, to listen to the minute sounds of the camera in operation.
But there was no reputation to fall back on, no long-ago-but-vaguely-present royalties to trickle in. He had to take pictures that sold, and he had to take them quickly enough that he could afford to evacuate Stark Tower and the last trickle of people who had been displaced by the pandemic and go to somewhere that preferably had a door. (Saint was not especially picky otherwise).
He had the digital camera in his hands now, easy shots of New York’s skyline that sold for pennies online but were stock, the kind of stock that moved quickly. And then Spiderman swung into the view-finder and Saint blinked, and his fingers moved before his mind had caught up and shot after shot snapped off as the camera ticked with digital patience for the entire scene, start to finish. And by the time the criminals had been rounded off into police cars, lights splaying blue against the buildings, Saint was squinting down and reeling through shots to select the best ones. There was a paper here, a newspaper who had a thing for Spiderman. And with a cheerful sense of purpose, Saint moved in the direction of that particular area of the city.