Chapter Text
“What do you want me to do, in exchange for doing this for me?”
“Get rid of Mephisto. I don’t care how, I don’t care about the consequences, but I want him as far away from Earth as possible. You took me away from my real life, so this is the least you can do to make this one bearable.”
“If I do this for you, you realize that you won’t remember that part of our conversation at all? You will still wonder all the time.”
“I bloody well know that, you little shit. But wondering about some of the Bravo Sierra he put certain people through is still a better thing to have to do than living through it. That arc put me off Marvel entirely until those games came along. So if you want me to not just sell everything I own and retire to the flyover states, then you will do this for me.”
“Why are you willing to do this for them?”
“Because I managed to do what Stan Lee and the others wanted us to do. I identified with them. I liked them. I admired the tenacity he had that I never did. And then when he was happy, some bugfuck editor decided to take that away because he felt that the character had to suffer. Fuck that shit.”
“So you want him happy?”
“I want both of them to have a chance at happiness. I know better than to assume anything, I know how this version of the universe works and that it’s not entirely up to them, but I want them to have that chance.”
“Are you sure? You do not want to know for sure if certain things will happen or not?”
“What’s the point? It’s a comic book universe. Get rid of one threat and five other, more powerful ones come along. Besides, I don’t want to make what knowledge I have entirely useless.”
“Which is a valid point from your perspective.”
“It’s what spawned fucking Thanos. Trust me when I say that had you not said that he would not become an issue, I would have refused to do this. That chucklefuck is a worse story plot warper than the Death Star and an order of magnitude harder to kill.”
“My people agree. Do you wish to know how we dealt with him?”
“Naa, as long as I get to remember that I won’t have to deal with the possibility of a snap. Plenty of threats closer to home, and plenty of damage JJJ did to repair.”
“As you wish.”
“But before we do this, I have a question? I get why JJJ is…. well this, but why not use do this four years ago from his perspective? It’d make things as lot easier.”
“Because replacing a living person with another is considered a form of murder among my people, and until he had that car accident, there was no other opportunity.”
“This is still morally questionable.”
“Not by our standards. Welcome to Earth-1049.”
A bright kaleidoscope of lights.
Then nothing.
True to its word, the Little Shit had wiped Jonah’s memory of that part of the conversation. All that he remembered of the second half of that odd experience was that he’d been told that he would be watched. But he was a version of J. Jonah Jameson, and he wasn’t here to entertain some alien bastards, he was here to do what was right and try and head off some of the worst events of the wider Marvel multiverse as far as they affected this Earth.
It had been almost a week since then, and right now, he was sitting in the first class compartment of a Pan American 747, on final approach to JFK in New York. Jonah knew that the time of the Quad jets would be coming to an end eventually, so he decided to enjoy them while he could.
He was enough of an experienced flier in this world that he immediately noticed that something was wrong when the four high-bypass turbofan engines began to roar and thanks to a tail-fin mounted camera, he could see that the flaps changed position and the nose pulled up. The weather was fine, nothing was on fire that Jonah could see, so why was the crew going around?
The explanation for that came flying by the camera seconds later. The form of the Vulture was very recognizable to anyone who had spent any time in New York during the last few years, as was the person tethered to him. The red and blue suit was obvious, and Jonah hid a grimace. He knew that tomorrow, the Bugle would have to lead with a suitably anti-Spider-Man headline.
As much as he didn’t want to, but there was no choice. If he flipped the script out of the blue, then awkward questions would be asked. Both because it was very out of character in a universe where several known and unknown methods of mind control existed and because the very people this was all about wouldn’t trust his sincerity.
No, this had to be done slowly and carefully. And, much to his own disgust, Jonah knew that he would have to wait for something suitably gruesome to happen, or this would never work. His long-term plans to avoid some of the stupid of mainline and MCU verses required that Spider-Man and his friends trusted him. And after four years of.. well, old JJJ, that was hard to accomplish.
As the plane came in for another landing, Jonah had decided on his first steps.
With everything going on, it took him another two hours to get back to his penthouse. He had already phoned in the Bugle headline for tomorrow along with an outline for the article itself. It was as toned down as he dared, but he already knew that it would give him another round of hate mail from Spidey’s fans.
The penthouse was in every way appropriate for J. Jonah Jameson. It’s location, what he paid for it and in how it was appointed. The last part surprised him, because it was surprisingly down-to-earth, excepting the wall-sized TV in one room, of course. A guest room was permanently appointed for his son, and generally, he approved of the style his host had carried in private. No need to change that.
With the exception that as it was 2014, avowed baseball fan J. Jonah Jameson would absolutely be watching the World Cup in Brazil live. That was one change he’d never bother to hide.
He plopped himself down on the almost ridiculously comfortable couch and began to plot.
“No.”
“But… it’s a full-page ad, and we are willing to pay in advance for this and for the TV spots we are currently shooting as well.”
Jonah pinched the bridge of his nose. Racism was one stain on the collective face of humanity that he could well do without, and these chuckleheads had the potential to be a lot more dangerous than some good old boys south of the Mason-Dixon line getting drunk and setting fire to an African-American church or dancing around in white hoods. They were equally despicable, possibly even more so, and a lot more subtle. It was a function of the way this universe worked, and it was one thing that he felt he could start to work against without looking particularly odd. He knew that on a personal level, pre-merger Jonah had despised these people almost as much as he did now, but not been above taking their money.
In the here and now though…
“Haven’t you been listening? No. To reinforce, not only no, but…”
He paused for effect and took a deep breath. “Hell. No. Not in the Daily Bugle or anything we publish.”
“It’s a full page ad, consecutively until our rally on the fifteenth of next month, and a number of prime-time TV spots!”
Wishing he’d stayed home another day instead of coming in, Jonah leaned back in his chair and slammed his hands down on the armrests. He failed to fight the urge to yell.
“Let me put this in words even you are able to understand, Mister Turner. That ad has the same chance of making it into my paper as Captain America does of putting on an SS uniform and screaming 'Heil Hitler' in Times Square! Now get out of my building before I call security!”
Turner was smart enough to understand when he was done and left. Jonah knew he had made an enemy today, but even without his knowledge, taking a stand against this sort of idiocy was the right thing to do.
“Elizabeth,” he said quietly, “as of right now, Friends of Humanity and associated groups are permanently blacklisted from all our publications and media outlets. Let it be known to our ads department that any requests from other groups like that… hell, hate groups in general are to be forwarded to me, and I’ll deal with them myself.”
Having worked with her for a good decade now, Jonah knew that Elizabeth knew he was extra-serious when he was at his most soft-spoken. So instead of asking him why he’d decided this way, she merely nodded.
“Anything else, boss?”
“Not until after you’ve taken care of this.”
She left and Jonah sighed. Love or hate what had happened in the MCU, he had a chance to nip this sort of shit in the bud right now before it infested this version of Earth as well, and… yes, it was worth having the lessened ad revenue or being called a hypocrite later on because he couldn’t change ‘his’ views on the likes of Spider Man at the drop of a hat. Much as he wanted to. With that in mind, he picked up his desk phone.
“Robbie! Get me the best writers we have at pissing people off! I want people comparing the Friends of Humanity to SATAN by the time we're done with those Ku Klux Klan wannabes!”
Slamming the phone down before there could be any response, he grinned as he went to do the drudgework of the day that came with running a publishing Empire from his office for the day, only interrupted a few times, of which one was a meeting with the writers he intended to sicc on turning at the very least New York City against the FOH.
The last interruption was one that reminded him of why he was here. It started with someone reluctantly knocking on the frame of his door.
“Mister Jameson?”
Jonah looked up and saw none other than Peter Parker waiting to come in and reluctant to do so because Jonah had been extra angry today.
“What can I do for you, Parker?” Jonah asked in that ‘I like you but it would be against my public persona to say so’ way that Jonah used with his most trusted employees and motioned for the photographer to come in.
“I know you assigned me to the groundbreaking for Fisk Tower, but… something came up that I can’t move to another time and I’d need the day off, if possible.”
Jonah had to suppress a grin, because he was pretty sure that the ‘something’ involved a red and blue spandex suit with spider symbology, but he couldn’t, not yet. So instead he frowned like he’d have before the merger and considered it from that angle.
Parker was one of his best photographers, not just for spidey-stuff but in general. For something like this he’d have been wasted even if Jonah hadn’t known what he was doing in his off-time, so he was more than willing to assign someone else to this. Besides, if something ended up happening that required the intervention of the friendly neighbourhood superhero from Queens, then there might be an opportunity to make one first, tiny tack towards the new course he wanted for himself and for his company. So…
“Tell Anton to cover for you.” he said and looked down at his desk, making it clear that he considered the matter closed.
Parker thanked him and left, and Jonah didn’t look after him, but he was aware that this young kid was critical to everything that he had planned. He hated himself for some of the things that might happen to the kid and that there was next to nothing he could do about any of them. One thing Jonah was looking forward to though was his face when one day he revealed that he knew that he was Spider Man.
He was on the top of the list of people he needed to look into starting tomorrow. Having decided that, he put his laptop aside and pulled a pen and paper notebook from his desk drawer.
With a sigh, Jonah began to write down names that would go into his personal vault as soon as he reached home. People that needed to be looked at and for, if they were still alive, when and how they had died if they weren’t and if they still existed, needed to be put on the list for that very reason.
Villains, possible villains, heroes both present and possibly future, everything and everyone that he could remember.
And yet he hesitated after the last two on the list.
George Stacy
Gwen Stacy
He knew that George Stacy was dead, so he crossed him out right away, but he wished that pre-merger Jonah had bothered looking into the man’s family. When the Captain’s death had stopped being part of the news cycle, Gwen had still been alive, but that was where his knowledge from either side of the merger ended.
Putting the pad down, he scratched the back of his head. Finding out what had happened would be pretty straight-forward, and he’d decide what to do then when he knew. All a matter of searching the Bugle database.
Five minutes later he had done so.
“Oh for fucks sake!” he exclaimed. Thankfully most of the office workers had already started to leave, so no one heard.
“Missing, presumed dead?”
If there was one certainty in a comic-book based universe it was that this meant absolutely nothing. Other than that she would appear when it caused the most drama at the worst possible moment. Funny in a comic book, but when it was real? Not so much.
So no crossing out her name…
“I need a drink.”
He knew that for the first time he had encountered the crazy mechanics of this new universe.
tbc