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I’ll never forget the first time the spider bit me. A lanky fifteen-year-old with more acne than confidence, I thought that field trip was gonna be another snooze-fest. Then bam. A radioactive spider decided I was its last meal. Or maybe its magnum opus. The next morning, I woke up sticking to my ceiling. Freaked me out so bad I fell flat on my face. Not my most heroic moment.

But the powers? Wall-crawling. Super strength. That tingle in the back of my skull—my Spidey-sense—that warns me when trouble’s coming. At first, I used it for selfish stuff. Wrestling cash. Ego. Then my uncle died because I didn’t lift a finger when I could have. After that? I learned the hard way: with great power… you know the rest.

Around that time, I met her.

Mary Jane Watson. Red hair like sunset caught fire. Eyes greener than the Hudson on a clean day (which was never, but still). And a laugh that made my spider-sense do backflips for all the right reasons. Aunt May set us up. “Just a friend from next door,” she said. Right.

Our first date was a disaster. I wore my only suit—a hand-me-down that smelled like mothballs and regret. She showed up in a leather jacket and a smile that could disarm Doctor Doom. We went to a shawarma place. I spent the whole time trying not to web-sling my soda across the room by accident.

But then, under a streetlamp buzzing like an anxious thought, she kissed me. Not a shy kiss. A Mary Jane kiss. Confident. Real. When we pulled apart, she smirked. “You know, Tiger,” she said, “for a guy who sticks to walls, you kiss pretty good for a nerd.”

I blinked. “You… you know?”

“That you’re Spider-Man? Please. I’ve known since you were fifteen. Saw you crawling past my window one night. You waved.”

I stood there, dumbstruck. “And you’re not… freaked out?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding? It’s the coolest thing about you. Besides, someone’s gotta make sure you don’t bleed out in some alley.”

We fell in love fast after that. She never asked me to stop. Not when I came home bruised, not when our dates got interrupted by the Rhino rampaging through Queens. She’d just patch me up, order Chinese, and listen to me rant about J. Jonah Jameson’s latest hit piece.

I supported her dreams, too. Acting. And man, was she good. I’d watch her on stage, lit up under the lights, and think, That’s my wife. Because yeah—we got married. Small ceremony. Aunt May cried. Flash Thompson showed up and tried to do the worm. It was perfect.

Then came Benjy. And Mayday.

Holding my son for the first time, tiny fingers wrapping around mine… I thought my heart would burst. Mayday was born two years later, red hair already defiant and wild like her mom’s. We were happy. Really, truly happy. For a while.

Then the world ended. At least, mine did.

It wasn’t some cosmic threat. No alien invasion. Just a bullet meant for me. We were coming home from May’s ballet recital. A mugging gone wrong—or right, depending how you look at cowardice. I webbed the guy up before he could even blink. But not before the gun went off.

Mary Jane fell against me, her red hair spread across my chest like a flag of surrender. I held her there on the cold pavement, my suit soaked in something warm and too dark. “Hey, Tiger,” she whispered, her voice fading like a radio signal. “Don’t… don’t you dare blame yourself.”

She died in my arms. And a part of me died with her.

The funeral was… crowded.

I stood there in a black suit that didn’t fit, gripping Mayday’s hand while Benjy clung to my leg. The whole hero community showed up. Batman, stern and silent near the back. Superman, his eyes heavy with a grief he understood too well. The Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Titans—even Deadpool, for some reason, wearing a surprisingly tasteful black suit (though he still whispered, “Nice eulogy, web-head. Real tearjerker.”).

Scarlet Spider—Ben Reilly, my sometimes-clone, sometimes-brother—stood beside me. “I’m here, Pete,” he said, voice low. Kaine, the Violet Spider, just nodded once, his scarred face unreadable but present. They understood loss. We all did.

I found the guy who pulled the trigger. Not for revenge. For justice. He was shaking in a crappy apartment in Jersey. I webbed him to the ceiling, called the cops, and left without a word. No quip. No punch. Just silence. It didn’t bring her back.

Weeks bled into months. I tried to be there for the kids. Tried to be Spider-Man. But the suit felt heavier. The jokes… they just didn’t come.

Then, Tony Stark called. “Parker. We found something. Or rather, someone.”

At a forgotten S.T.A.R. Labs facility, we uncovered an android. Sleek, crimson, hovering in a stasis field. They called it Red Inferno. Based on designs from the old Firebird project, similar to the JLA’s Red Tornado. Powerful. Flames flickered at its fingertips even in sleep.

But its face… its face was Mary Jane’s.

Turns out, a rogue scientist who'd admired MJ’s spirit—and my resilience—had been working on a way to cheat death. He’d copied her consciousness, her memories, everything that made her her, and uploaded it into this synthetic body. Without asking. Without telling anyone.

The moment the transfer completed, Red Inferno’s eyes snapped open. They glowed with a fierce, familiar fire. Before anyone could speak, she shot through the ceiling and into the sky, a streak of red and gold against the clouds. Gone.

We didn’t have time to look for her. Because that’s when Killer Frost decided to freeze the Eastern Seaboard.

She’d amassed an army of ice constructs, crystalline soldiers spreading glacial silence across Manhattan. The Justice League called me in. Of course they did.

We fought atop the Brooklyn Bridge, the air so cold my webbing was brittle. Superman’s heat vision flickered; Wonder Woman’s lasso was stiff with frost. Even Thor’s lightning seemed muted.

“There’s too many of them, Spider-Man!” shouted Batman, grappling away from an ice spike.

I was tired. So tired. My limbs ached with cold and something deeper—a hollow emptiness MJ’s absence had carved into me. I dodged a freeze ray, my body moving on instinct. “Yeah? Tell me something I don’t know, Bats.”

Then the sky turned red.

A blaze of fire descended like a meteor, landing between me and a battalion of ice soldiers. Red Inferno. Flames wreathed her form, heat rolling off her in waves. Without a word, she unleashed a torrent of fire, melting an entire platoon into steam.

She moved like dancing. All grace and power. Killer Frost shrieked, hurling spears of ice, but Red Inferno evaporated them with a glance. Together—me webbing up strays, her incinerating the ranks—we turned the tide.

Superman finally got close enough to encase Killer Frost in a diamond-hard embrace. “Thank you,” he said, his voice genuine as he nodded to Red Inferno. “We appreciate the assist.”

She hovered there, flames dimming to a soft glow. Her eyes—those impossible, perfect green eyes—locked on me.

Spider-Man tilted his head. “Do I… know you?”

She drifted closer. The heat wasn’t scorching; it was warm, like breath. Like life. She reached out, her synthetic fingers—sleek, metal, but shaped so familiarly—brushing against my masked cheek.

And I felt it. Not just the heat. Not just the mechanics. But her. The way she always used to touch me when I was hurt. When I was sad.

My breath caught. “...MJ?”

She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Instead, she leaned in, her lips meeting mine through the mask. They were warm. Not human-warm. Something else. But the kiss—the way she kissed me—was all Mary Jane. Assured. Loving. A little mischievous.

When we broke apart, my head was spinning harder than the time Mysterio dropped me in a funhouse.

“Hey, Tiger,” she said, her voice a smooth electric hum layered over the woman I loved. “Miss me?”

------

All eyes were on the woman made of metal and fire hovering just above the frozen battlefield. The silence was heavier than Thor’s hammer. Even Killer Frost, now encased in a Superman-delivered ice block (poetic, I know), seemed to be listening.

Batman was the first to speak, because of course he was. Voice like gravel wrapped in a warning. “Identify yourself.”Red Inferno—MJ—landed softly, her feet not quite touching the cracked asphalt. Flames licked harmlessly at her chassis, casting a warm, flickering glow over all of us. She looked at her own hands, turning them over as if seeing them for the first time.

“I… I don’t know,” she said, her voice a melodic synthesis of machinery and the faint, familiar echo of the woman I loved. It sent a shiver down my spine that had nothing to do with the sub-zero temperatures. “The last thing I remember is… is a light. A warm light. And then… falling. I woke up like this. I could feel the fire. I could hear a fight. I just… came.”

She looked around at the assembled heroes, her luminous green eyes scanning their faces—Superman’s compassionate frown, Wonder Woman’s guarded respect, the Flash’s vibrating curiosity. She saw Ben and Kaine, my… well, my brothers of a sort, and her gaze lingered on them for a moment with a flicker of confused recognition.

Then her eyes found me.

I’d pulled my mask off. My face was bare to the cold air, probably pale and smudged with soot. I didn’t care. I needed her to see me.

“Peter?” she whispered. The name wasn’t a question of who I was, but a statement of stunned realization.

And in that moment, it all seemed to rush back into her. Her optical sensors—her eyes—widened. The flames around her flared brightly, then subsided.

“The… the recital,” she said, her voice gaining strength, gaining her. “Mayday was so proud of her little pirouette… We were walking home… and there was a sound… a pop…” She brought a hand to her chest, the metal plating smooth and unmarred where a bullet had once torn through flesh. “You held me. You were crying. I told you… I told you not to blame yourself.”

Tears I thought I’d cried out months ago welled in my eyes. “Yeah,” I croaked, my voice thick. “You did.”

A low, calm, synthetic voice hummed from the back of the group. Red Tornado drifted forward, his own android form a contrast to her fiery vibrancy. He was all cool silvers and deep blues.

“The body you inhabit,” he intoned, “was not built for you. It was the vessel of my older sister. Firebrand.”

That got everyone’s attention. Even Vision, who had been observing quietly, tilted his head, a look of profound understanding passing over his synthetic features. I am not the only one, he likely thought, a quiet kinship forming in his mind.

“Our creator, Professor Morrow, built her as he built me,” Red Tornado continued. “She was designed for a purpose she ultimately rejected. She chose to aid humanity, to be a hero. Her final act was one of supreme sacrifice. She shut down, her core programming corrupted beyond even my father’s ability to repair. Her body was placed in stasis, preserved… but empty. Until now.”

MJ—Red Inferno—looked down at her hands again, but now with a new perspective. “So I’m… wearing your sister’s suit, huh?” she said, and a hint of her old humor, dry and resilient, tinted her words.

“It would appear so,” Red Tornado replied. “The transference of a human consciousness is… unprecedented. A marvel.”

“A miracle,” I corrected, not taking my eyes off her.

I stepped forward, through the slush and debris, and reached out. My bare, human hand, still trembling slightly, took her metallic one. It was warm. Alive with energy. But the way her fingers curled around mine, the gentle pressure—it was her.

“I don’t care,” I said, my voice firm now. “Metal, flesh, toaster oven—you’re Mary Jane Watson. You’re my wife.” I leaned in and kissed her again. It was different this time. Not a shock of discovery, but a promise. A homecoming.

“I missed you,” she whispered against my lips, the synth-modulation softening into something heartbreakingly tender.

“The kids…” I said, pulling back just enough to see her face. “Benjy and Mayday… they miss you like crazy.”

The mention of our children made her flame-flicker glow even warmer. “I need to see them. I need to… to pat their heads. To hold them.” She looked at her powerful, potentially-incendiary hands. “If I can.”

From behind us, Scarlet Spider—Ben—cleared his throat. “So let me get this straight. My sort-of brother’s dead wife is now an android who is also the long-lost sister of the Justice League’s wind guy.” He shrugged. “Y’know, for us, that’s actually a pretty tame Tuesday.”

Red Tornado processed this. His internal fans whirred softly. “The familial designation is technically inaccurate, as we are constructs. However, if Mary Jane Watson-Parker now inhabits the form of my sibling unit, then by associative logic…” He turned his gaze to me. “…I appear to have acquired a brother-in-law.”

I couldn’t help it. A laugh—a real, genuine, Peter Parker laugh—bubbled out of me. It felt foreign and wonderful. “Welcome to the family, Reddy. We have dinner at Aunt May’s every Sunday. She’ll try to feed you wheatcakes.”

Wonder Woman smiled. Batman’s stern expression softened by a micron. The tension finally broke.

“The form you now occupy is highly adaptive,” Red Tornado stated, returning to practicality. “Firebrand’s morphing matrix was one of her primary functions. You are not limited to this appearance. With focus, you can reform your exterior to mimic a human form. Or you may choose to appear as Firebrand did. The choice is yours.”

MJ looked at me, then at her own metallic body, then back at the league of heroes around her. A slow, brilliant smile spread across her faceplate—a smile I’d seen a thousand times before a thousand big decisions.

“Well,” she said, the fire around her wrists coalescing and shifting. “The hero stuff is new. I think I’ll need a look that says ‘don’t mess with me or my family.’ So for that… I’ll take Firebrand’s look. The cape is a nice touch.”

The flames enveloped her briefly, and when they parted, she stood differently. Sleeker armor, a flowing crimson cape made of living fire, a helmet that suggested a fierce avian grace. She looked every inch the powerhouse.

“But,” she said, and the fiery helmet retracted, flowing back into her shoulders to reveal the face I fell in love with—soft, human, freckled, with that brilliant red hair, all crafted from seamless nanites and hard light. “For being Mom… for being Peter’s wife… I’ll always be MJ.”

She reached out and took my hand again, her grip now feeling exactly like it always had. Warm. Real.

“Now,” she said, her eyes sparkling with tears of joy and energy. “Take me home, Tiger. I’ve got some serious hugging to catch up on.”

To Be Continued