crack-headed crossover comicfic

[holli]

Peter woke up the first time in an alley, his head pillowed on a foul-smelling paper bag of elderly fast food. He remembered the fight, with one of the weirder hugely destructive costumed crazies he'd met of late, and he remembered how the fight had spilled out of Doc Connor's lab, and into the one across the hall, where they'd been working on something extremely complicated-looking. And glowy. And then a bright flash, and then, alley, and the smell of fries long past their sell-by date. "Ugh. Freakin' supervillains."

And then he heard the sound of a woman, screaming.

Well, that he knew how to deal with. Peter scaled the wall, and got a good look at the skyline. A skyline. Not the New York skyline, which was significantly less threatening-looking. Also less gargoyle-intensive. "Oh crap, not again. If I'm in another freaking foreign country, I'm making MJ send me tickets home. No more stowing away for ol' Spidey." He was talking to himself. "Am I talking to myself? Well, I'd might as well talk to myself, because nobody here's gonna understand a word anyway--" The woman, he could hear, was begging for her life. In English. "Oh, thank goodness." He crossed the rooftop, then swung down into the street on the other side.

"Don't worry, ma'm, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is at the... rescue." Or would have been, if a boy in green tights hadn't swung past him, taking the thug out with a few ruthlessly efficient moves. "Well, phooey."

The kid-- well, that wasn't entirely fair; he looked Peter's age, if not older-- nodded to the woman, and handed over her purse. She took it, hesitantly, and ran.

"Not even a thank-you, huh?" said Peter. "It's always the same. I'm just glad she didn't throw a bottle at my head. No respect for the profession."

Green Tights just looked at him. "Have we... met?" he asked, the look on his face way too unreadable for someone his age. Peter didn’t think he could be that unreadable, and he had a lot less face to show in his costume.

"Well, no, but I'm sure you've seen me in the Bugle. Do you get the Bugle here? I don't actually know where this is, exactly; I was in New York when I lost consciousness and I'm pretty sure this isn't New York, but at least it's not Brazil oh man did you hear about how I ended up in Brazil unhh."

While Peter talked, the boy had removed a small canister from his belt. Peter hadn't paid much attention to it, until the boy held it to his face, pressed a button, and sprayed him with something that put him to sleep even more efficiently that the super-villain had.

Peter woke up the second time with an even more splitting headache, and no mask.