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The funeral is on a Friday.
It's small.
Quiet.
Roses and tulips and pebbles, lined up nice and pretty along the tombstone.
He doesn't cry.
He just feels empty.
—
There's something wrong with him
Not numbness, or apathy, that's normal, that's grief.
He knows that.
It isn't his first rodeo, his first funeral, his first loss.
The thing that's wrong, that's out of place, is the anger.
He's not sure where it's crawled up from, from the trench in his stomach or the pit in his chest, but it's there, livid and roaring and angry.
There was nothing he could've done.
It was a robbery gone wrong.
He couldn't have known.
No one could've.
The monster screams wrong wrong wrong.
—
He gets reckless.
Walks across the tops of buildings, darts through traffic, runs through the dark alleys that taste like blood and death.
He skirts the line, jumps back at the last second, stands close enough that the wind rips through his hair.
It scares him, how it's the only thing that keeps him sane.
The adrenaline in his veins, the danger on his tongue, the threat pushing down his shoulders.
He dances with death and feels alive.
—
He sneaks out at night.
He's not sure if his aunt notices and he's not sure he cares.
The monster is pulling at his skin and he wants to break something.
He wants to bleed his knuckles raw.
He wants to feel something, anything.
Someone tries to mug him, and he's not scared.
He's angry.
He's livid.
He's smiling with all his teeth and finally feels right.
He's never fought before, never thrown a punch that wasn't soft and joking, but there are fangs grinning in his mouth and claws curling at his fingertips and he's never breathed easier than he has punching someone with all his strength.
Muggers don't expect their victims to fight back.
He does.
He fights back.
He knocks the knife out of his mugger's hand, not before it can cut him, but he still pushes it away, still hits as hard as he can until the other guy doesn't get up again, and breathes easy in time with the rattle from the ground.
Blood drips down from his cheek.
He can't stop smiling.
—
He gets worse.
He goes out longer, goes out farther, and comes back with more cuts and bruises than he can name, with breaks and fractures and cracks, and he can't stop.
He's thought about it, but he can't stop.
He's tired and aching and everything hurts but the monster in his chest, the wrong feeling in his heart, is gone and dead and quiet and he can finally breathe.
He gets worse and it somehow feels better.
Through the broken bones and bloody noses, it feels better.
It feels good.
It feels like healing.
—
It's the next step.
Freedom settles around his wrists, cloth wraps around his jaw, and wind pulls at his hair.
He steps up to the edge.
It's not too high.
He made sure.
If he falls, it'll hurt, but he won't die.
He doesn't want to.
He wants to be and to feel and to exist.
Anything is better than the nothingness.
But living tastes like risk, tastes like danger.
One foot over the edge–
And he falls.
It feels like clarity.
He throws out his wrists.
And he pulls up from his arc, skimming the riverside.
He laughs from the thrill of it.
A leap of faith.
—
He stops getting in fights.
Instead, he soars.
Through buildings and across rooftops, twisting through the air and falling with the wind.
It's real freedom, real danger, and if he isn't careful, he'll die.
He loves it more than anything in the world.
He doesn't know how he ever lived without it.
—
Avengers Tower is the tallest building in New York.
He climbs it.
He wants to know what it feels like to fall from the very top.
Up and up and up, until he's standing between the blinking red lights.
It's a sheer drop, and he jumps with a yell.
It feels like an eternity of bliss as the concrete rushes to meet him.
He throws out another line, and his feet almost touch the sidewalk as he arcs back into the air with his swing.
Adrenaline fills his mind like a haze.
He wants to do it again.
He wants to do it forever.
—
Sometimes he thinks he knows what’s wrong with him.
He’s missing something.
Something that he’s supposed to have.
Something that’s supposed to make everything feel more right.
It feels like he’s standing at the edge of something great, something terrible, something that was Supposed To Be But Is Not.
It feels like he was supposed to hit the iceberg but passed in it the night.
He wishes he knew what it was.
What was missing.
What was making everything feel wrong.
—
The thing about swinging is that the recoil should kill him.
It doesn't.
Because he stole from the chem lab for more than just the web fluid.
Making new compounds is easy, in a way.
He's always been too smart for his own good.
A support exoskeleton really isn't the hardest thing he's done.
He figured out the secret of spider silk in a summer.
It feels kind of like his magnum opus.
His arc reactor built in a cave with scraps.
And he can't tell a soul.
———
He gets arrested in Hell’s Kitchen.
It wasn’t on purpose.
He’d been doing better, burning out all the energy in the freefall.
But the monster had started itching again, had started crawling under his skin, and he’d started prowling the city again.
He’d started walking too close to alleys with a mask ready to pull over the bottom half of his face, started sneaking into the school gym to hit punching bags, started pushing himself to the limits.
It was almost fun.
He’d gotten angry though.
Gotten mad.
Hadn’t stopped to see if anyone was paying attention, hadn’t stopped to cover his face, hadn’t stopped to check his exits.
Hell’s Kitchen was a dangerous part of the city.
There was a reason they had their own personal devil just for one neighborhood.
It was goddamn rough.
And almost everybody knew somebody that was in some shit.
So he should’ve been more careful lunging at some tall guy backing a gal into a corner.
He’s not strong, but he doesn’t need to be.
He has the webs.
He has mobility.
And spider–silk is a thousand times tougher than some chump that doesn’t understand when to back the fuck off.
But even chumps have friends.
He’s arrested, the tall guy's arrested, and the gal is brought in for questioning.
He’s not sorry.
—
The detective sitting across from him looks pained.
“Do you have a lawyer?”
He says nothing.
“Please tell me you have a lawyer.”
His jaw clenches around the words he won’t say.
“Jesus Christ, you don’t have a lawyer.”
This is a trick. Cops don’t care. Cops haven’t ever cared. Not since Ben.
The detective drags a hand down his face, and then he leans forward, hands coming up to rest behind his neck.
Arms blocking his face.
No view from the other side of the glass.
He starts to tense.
And then the detective says, from behind his barrier, “I’m gonna call you a lawyer, and he’s gonna get you outta this shit. Vigilantism is his specialty.”
He leans back.
“Hang tight. We’re gonna sort this out.”
The detective leaves.
He closes his eyes.
He’s tired.
—
The detective actually called him a lawyer.
A blonde man with long hair and gauges in his ears.
It doesn't really match the nice dark suit or the very professional look on his face.
Then he gives the detective a winning smile when he grumbles something, and it fits his face a whole lot better.
The lawyer sits down across from him, and holds out a hand.
"My name is Franklin Nelson," he says when he finally reaches out. "But you can call me Foggy."
"Foggy?"
The lawyer smiles again.
"With a name like Franklin, wouldn't you?"
He picked his name, but.
Yeah, probably.
—
One of the fancy lawyer ways to classify fist fighting in public is disorderly conduct.
It's a misdemeanor.
Vigilantism, however, is yet to be completely illegal, and Foggy the lawyer wants to have his actions qualified within the rights of self defense – seeing as how he was defending someone else – and citizens arrest.
The fact that he's a minor makes everything both a thousand times easier and harder.
The ways the laws apply to him are weird but there's somehow not a single person in the station besides the guy he punched that wants to see him get punished for his actions.
He's just a kid.
He was trying to do something right.
Hell's Kitchen is weird.
He thinks he might like it.
—
Foggy the lawyer stands with him under the awning of the police station as they wait for his aunt, and he watches him, something strange on his face, as he wraps new tape around his knuckles.
"Where'd you learn to do that?" Foggy the lawyer asks.
He pulls the tape over and through the last of his knuckles and starts wrapping it around to secure it.
"Internet."
Foggy the lawyer looks away.
It's not raining, but it feels kind of like the kind of day it should be.
Clouds and wind and dampness on the air.
Spring broke early this year, but only the temperatures.
It's not cold but it still feels like winter.
"My partner's dad used to be a boxer." Foggy the lawyer says abruptly. "The gym that he used to fight at won't charge you if you say Foggy sent you, alright? Fogwell's knows me a little bit."
He side eyes him.
He doesn't look like a boxer.
"How little is a little bit?"
"I'm my partner's conscience." Foggy the lawyer explains dully. "So the guys there think I'm basically the son of God."
He finds himself laughing.
"W–what?"
"I’m saying that my partner is a handful, the guys at his gym like me because I put up with him, and if you tell them I sent you, Fogwell won’t charge you.”
He swallows.
“I appreciate it, but I don’t want charity.”
Foggy the lawyer makes a face.
“It’s not charity. If you have something to hit, maybe you’ll focus up and not get arrested the next time you do something dumb.” He says, voice edging into a tone that sounds focused.
Rehearsed.
Familiar.
A taxi pulls up on the curb.
Aunt May steps out still in her scrubs, and he looks away from Foggy the lawyer.
“I’ll think about it.”
—
Midtown hears about his stint in the 15th.
It had gone viral, apparently, when he hadn’t stopped to make sure no one was watching and someone had caught it on their phone.
The five foot five kid that had walked right up to the five foot ten asshole backing a gal into a corner and kicked off a dumpster before breaking his nose.
It was also kind of hard to hide the big bright bruise across his cheek.
Midtown hears about it.
Reactions are the same mixed bag they've always been.
The freshman that see his bruises and scrapes and shrink back, the seniors that sneer at the blood on his collar, the juniors that don't have time to care, the other sophomores that remember him from middle school and think what happened to you?
What happened to the happy, shy kid that only needed his aunt and uncle to be content?
What happened to the bright, smiling kid that had top marks and never missed a day?
What happened to the soft, sweet kid that beamed over Legos and had never seen detention in his life?
What happened to him?
What happened to Peter Parker?
———
He makes a not great decision.
Not even that.
It’s a bad choice.
Baaaad choice.
Very, very bad choice.
He doesn’t get invited to parties.
Never has, never will be.
Ned gets invited though.
And Ned wants him to go with him.
It’s been a long time since they’ve done something that wasn’t coated in the overhang of Ben is dead, you’re acting strange, there’s blood on your clothes and you won’t tell me why.
It's been a really long time.
So he goes.
That isn’t the bad choice.
It’s a not great decision.
But it’s not a bad choice.
He goes to the party.
It feels so painfully normal it’s like he’s drowning, but Ned looks… happy.
He doesn’t want to ruin this for him.
But he can feel the stares.
He can hear the whispers.
Flash catches his eye from across the room.
He slips out as soon as he can, when Ned’s back is turned.
And that’s when he sees it and when he makes the bad choice.
The plume of blue fire in the distance.
And the roaring beast that says go.
He’s never had the best impulse control, if that wasn’t obvious from the fighting in alleys and leaping off buildings.
He makes a bad choice.
He listens to the beast.
He goes.
—
He has a good memory, and he’s pretty smart.
He memorizes the plate numbers for the man that was trying to buy, but the ones trying to sell don’t have any.
And the weapons they have are straight out of a science fiction novel.
Straight out of the past.
Straight out of a nightmare.
He can’t stop them.
So he watches.
And he feels a thousand times more wrong than he ever has.
—
Sometimes, when he goes to that gym in Hell’s Kitchen after school, there’s other people there.
Not very many, but sometimes he’ll catch the old boxers that used to fight there, that used to bleed and break in the ring.
They stare at him strangely at first, at the scabs on his knuckles from fighting back, the bruises on his jaw from where he wasn’t fast enough, the tears in his clothes from where he’d fallen and gotten back up because he had to.
When you fall down you get back up.
They get used to him though, and sometimes they’ll show him what he’s doing wrong, and how to make it right.
It feels kind of like spending time with Ben again.
There’s one guy, though, that he’s never spoken to.
Who always comes in when it’s late, hands already wrapped and a cane swinging from his bag.
He knows what white canes mean.
Whoever that guy is though, it doesn’t seem to be stopping him.
He’s never seen him miss the bag.
—
Almost every borough in the New York area has a vigilante.
Luke Cage is in Harlem.
Iron Fist is in Chinatown.
Jessica Jones is in Greenwich.
Hawkeye, who’s really more of a superhero, is in Bed Stuy across the bridge.
And so on and so forth.
Some are better known than others, like Luke Cage.
Some are shadowy rumors, like Iron Fist.
But everybody knows the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
He was the first.
He was the one that stood the tallest.
He was the one that looked at New York and said enough.
Everyone knew Daredevil.
Even kids from Queens.
He couldn’t stop the people selling weapons.
He wasn’t special.
He wasn’t powerful.
He wasn’t a giant among skyscrapers.
He was a teenager with a sketchy reputation and an abundance of health problems.
He was a nobody.
He couldn’t stop these people.
But someone like Daredevil could.
And more than anything, everyone knew that the Devil came when he was called.
—
The thing about grainy newspaper photos is that they’re never as good or impactful as the real thing.
They’re never as terrifying.
And looking at grainy newspaper photos, you think that they edit them just a bit to make up for the fact that they aren’t always the best quality.
He hadn’t thought Hell’s Kitchen really had red lights at night.
But it does.
And it paints Daredevil in blood.
He’s a lot scarier in person than you’d really think.
They call him the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, but it had never felt so real.
He swallows hard and tries to pretend it doesn’t look like blood is dripping from the Devil’s hands.
And he says,
“I need your help.”
—
Daredevil is a giant until he isn’t.
A mountain until he’s not.
Atlas standing tall under the world until he’s a mortal in the sands.
Over a burner phone, he sounds a lot more human.
He leans back in his and Ned’s hotel room.
It’s a miracle AcaDec hasn’t made him quit.
He’s not sure if they can actually do that.
But maybe the team would’ve gotten together to have him resign.
They never had.
Maybe they were too afraid to.
“You have the license plate for the buyer?”
He hums into the receiver and waits for his laptop to finish booting up.
“Yeah. Belongs to a guy named Aaron Davis.”
The Devil makes a clicking sound over the line.
“You got an address?”
“He sounded like Brooklyn, but I can get you an address.”
Daredevil makes that clicking sound again.
“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ll have Jessica Jones look into it. Anything else?”
He takes a deep breath.
“No, but I… I had a question.”
Daredevil pauses, and then says, “Make it quick.”
He closes his eyes.
“Why did you listen to me? Why are you doing this?” He asks, and it comes out a whisper.
Daredevil doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
“You remind me of somebody I used to know. He didn’t have anyone to turn to.”
He covers his face with his hand.
He’s not stupid.
He can read between the lines.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. Ever.”
He takes another deep breath.
And he whispers, so very softly,
“You’re not as bad as everyone thinks you are.”
—
Michelle answers the winning question.
In the hype of it, nobody seems to remember to be scared of him.
He’s swept up into the hug, into the yelling and laughing and crying.
It’s the most normal he’s felt in months.
His knuckles are smooth.
His clothes are pressed.
His glasses are clean.
And for a moment, he feels human.
—
Daredevil asks to meet him on a rooftop in Hell’s Kitchen when he gets back from DC.
Jessica Jones is there.
He recognizes her from the papers.
She was the woman who killed the man in the purple suit.
There’s also a man in red and black wearing katanas on his back.
Chatting Daredevil’s ear off.
But as soon as he reaches the lit part of the rooftop the man cuts off abruptly and inhales like he’s dying.
“No.”
He grabs onto Daredevil like a lifeline, and he tries to shake him off.
“Jesus, Deadpool, what the hell–”
Deadpool interrupts him with a near hiss of, “That’s– what the fuck, what the fuck, he’s not– Red he’s not supposed to be here.”
He takes a step back.
Daredevil snarls.
“Calm the fuck down, Wilson, you’re scaring the kid. He’s the whole reason we’re here you know that–”
“NO.” Deadpool almost shouts. “No, you don’t understand, he’s– he’s supposed to be one of us and he’s not. He– I saw webs in Queens, and the pictures online, and I assumed– but he’s– he’s not him. He’s not like us.”
Something like horror starts to fill his chest, but it’s not–
He’s not scared.
“You can feel it too,” crawls out of his mouth in a croak. “The wrongness.”
Deadpool reels back even more.
“You can tell? You can– Jesus Christ I’m so fucking sorry–”
“What the hell is going on here?” Jessica Jones shouts.
He takes two steps forward, and then three, and then five, and he grabs onto Deadpool’s arms with wide eyes.
He feels like he’s dying.
His heart hurts so much he can feel it in the shaking of his hands.
His throat is tight.
He can barely breath.
“What’s wrong with me?” He breathes. “What’s missing?”
Deadpool stares at him in a quiet horror, the eyes of his mask wide, and grabs onto his hands.
“Your freshmen field trip, what happened?” He asks desperately. “What happened kid, what happened?”
Acid splashes at his teeth.
“I got sick.” He answers in a whisper.
“I never went to Oscorp.”
—
Deadpool – “Wade, call me Wade,” – takes a long time to calm down, to become a functional person and fulfill the planning purpose of the meeting.
Jessica Jones only stays long enough to tell them she talked to Aaron Davis, and that there was going to be a weapons deal on the Staten Island Ferry tomorrow, before jumping down and off the building.
She doesn’t need a safety net.
She doesn't need an exosuit.
She doesn’t need webs.
It’s kind of annoying.
It kind of stings.
It kind of hurts.
Because Dea– Wade says he’s supposed to be like them.
He’s not supposed to be missing.
He’s not supposed to be on the edge.
He’s supposed to already be gone.
But he’s not.
He’s still there.
He’d wanted an answer.
He’d wanted to know why.
And he does.
He got it.
He got his answer.
But it still curls sour in his chest, still wraps tight around his lungs, still digs its venom into his brain and his blood and his heart.
It’s his answer.
He doesn’t know what he was expecting.
He doesn’t want the one he’s got.
But life isn’t fair.
It’s not kind.
He knows what he’s missing.
And there’s nothing he can do about it.
—
The thing about the Parkers is that they have a curse to their name.
His grandparents didn’t live to fifty.
His parents didn’t live to thirty.
His uncle didn’t live to forty.
The Parkers have a time limit for walking on this Earth.
They don’t die peacefully.
He doesn’t think that he’s going to be the exception.
Not chasing after Devils.
Not running after mercenaries.
Not swinging towards blue fire and bloody alleys.
And somewhere in the plummet he forgot to care.
—
Wade goes to the weapons deal.
Scouts it out.
Waits until the last second to expose himself and start tossing people into the river.
Daredevil had called someone to alert the CIA, who had alerted the FBI, so when Wade starts fighting, the agents do too.
People had taken videos when they’d heard the shouting.
It was New York.
People just weren’t scared anymore.
The leader had been there though.
And Wade had hit him hard enough to knock his mask off.
He’d gotten a picture, with it on and with it off.
And he’d given it to Peter.
The head of the weapons dealers is a man named Adrian Toomes.
The head of the weapons dealers is Liz’s dad.
The FBI calls him the Vulture.
—
Daredevil laughs so hard he almost starts crying when he tells him that he goes to school with the Vulture’s daughter.
Wade does laugh so hard he starts crying, and doesn’t stop even when he shoves him almost off the roof.
He’s informed that this is a classic move of life and the universe, where someone you care about is related to the person that a) is trying to kill you, b) you are working against, or c) ?????.
Wade explains that the ????? is the optional Horrible and Hyper Specific to You situation.
He doesn’t like it.
But the way that Wade says This always happens to people like us, and the way Daredevil laughs again, bright and loud and so at odds with how he always is, feels kind of like home.
—
The Vulture drops Liz off at Homecoming.
Nobody knows who he is.
Nobody knows what he’s done.
But he does.
He knows the Vulture.
And the beast in his skin is screaming that something about tonight is wrong wrong wrong.
So he walks right up to him.
And says, “Hey, is Liz doing alright?”
The Vulture looks at him weird.
“What?”
“She’s been really stressed lately. I’m Peter Parker by the way,” he adds, “I’m on her AcaDec team.”
The Vulture narrows his eyes.
“The really smart one that doesn’t try enough and is always getting into fights?”
He swallows down the heat in his face and keeps his pulse cool.
He just needs one moment.
One slip up.
“I’ve never gotten in a fight at school, sir.”
“That’s not a no.”
“Still never gotten in a fight at school.” He leans forward a little more, places one hand on the door. He’s wasting time. “But seriously, is Liz okay?”
The Vulture looks away, just a little bit.
“She just puts her heart into everything, is all. Winning that competition seems to have smoothed her out.”
He does his best to level an unimpressed look.
“She has five coaching and team building books each. I saw her muttering about Homecoming yesterday, and I don’t think she realized I was there. She’s been freaking out, sir.”
It’s not a total lie.
He’s playing it up a bit, but it’s not a total lie.
He just needs a second.
One moment.
“I’m just worried about her. She’s team captain and everyone puts a bunch of pressure on her, you know? She might’ve bit off more than she can chew. Maybe she needs a break.”
And the Vulture looks away completely.
He drops his phone into the crack between his seat and door, and watches as it falls against the curve to rest face down under his seat.
“I’ll talk to her mother about it,” the Vulture says. “Thank you for bringing this up, what was it, Pedro?”
He smiles past the bile in his throat.
“Peter.”
—
Daredevil calls him an idiot and Wade calls him a genius.
Slipping into the computer lab to track his phone is easy.
He was breaking into the school for months before Foggy the lawyer told him about Fogwell’s.
There’s no one to miss him and he makes sure to pick a corner where the light shouldn’t be visible from the door.
“Phone signal is tracking from Upper East.”
Wade makes a delighted noise over the comm unit that he’s painfully grateful for now, and there’s the sound of him clapping his hands.
“I’m bringing A Team!”
Daredevil groans.
“Please God, no.”
“No, you can bring your team too! It’ll be great.”
“I’m– no. Not calling them. I don’t– what did you call it kid?” Daredevil asks. “When you’re too tired?”
“Not enough spoons.” He answers.
“That. Don’t got enough spoons for Danny at the least . Not at this hour.”
He hums.
“Signal stopped up on the edge of Harlem.”
Wade claps again.
“Yes! I’m so close to there! Red, you needa lift?”
“I’m fine. Just need to go around and across.”
“Aight, but you better meet me there. Address, baby boy?”
He zooms in on the map.
“Some warehouse along the river side.” He answers. “Past the synagogue and right on the district split between Upper East and Harlem. Be careful. Feels very trap-y.”
He can hear the smile in Wade’s voice.
“Relax, kiddo! I’m always careful.”
Daredevil laughs like that was the funniest thing he’s heard in weeks.
—
In a rare show of luck(not) he gets caught.
Not by a teacher no, but by Ned and, weirdly enough, Michelle Jones.
Who take in the comm in his ear and the maps on the computer with, in Ned’s case, wide eyes, and Michelle Jones’ case, something like growing interest.
“Kid? Sitrep? You’re bein’ awful quiet.”
“I’m fine.” He answers tensely. “Just some unexpected company.”
“I’m almost there. How about you, horn-head?”
He snorts.
Daredevil makes a sound that he feels accompanies a scowl.
“Don’t call me that. I’m just past Central Park.”
There’s a pause.
And then Wade says, “Hi, Just Past Central Park, I’m–”
“Gonna die if you don’t stop there.” Daredevil growls, and he snorts again.
Ned takes a step forward and he takes one back.
“I needa go.”
Wade makes a clicking noise.
“Yeah?” He asks, his voice edging into something dark.
In the past three days he’s known Wade, he’s learned a couple things.
One: he’s not as fine as he says he is.
Two: he’s fiercely protective.
Three: he’s very protective of him especially.
And four: he’s protective because he’s scared of something happening to him.
Because he isn’t powered.
Not enhanced.
And that makes what he does a lot more dangerous than it should be.
He’s not the right Peter Parker for what he’s doing.
He’s too fragile.
Too soft.
But he’s going to do it anyway.
“I’m fine, Wade. Just some friends.”
There’s a thumping sound, and then Daredevil asks, “Are you sure?”
“It’s fine, Red. You take care of everything, okay? I’m–” He takes a deep breath and swallows, watching Ned and Michelle Jones carefully. "I’m trusting you to take care of this.”
Daredevil breathes heavy for a moment.
And then he says, “Good luck.”
Wade hums.
“Ditto. Let us know if you need help.”
“I will.”
The lines go dead.
Ned and Michelle Jones stare at him.
“You wanna explain that?” Michelle Jones asks flatly.
He tilts his head.
“No, not really.”
Ned opens his mouth to say something, and then snaps his jaw shut at the sound of heels clicking down the hallway.
There’s no time to run.
He shuts the computer down as quickly as possible and moves to the windows, pushing them open and hoping over the rim and onto the brick facade.
Ned almost screams, hands slapping over his mouth, and Michelle Jones “huh” s.
“Are you coming or not?” He asks brusquely.
Michelle Jones watches him for another second and the heels get louder.
Then she weaves through the computers to where he’s holding open the window and, after a moment's pause, jumps over the rim.
Ned digs his hands into his hair, glances at the door, and then rushes over to them, with a hiss of “Are you guys crazy?”
Michelle Jones raises an eyebrow. “Do you wanna get caught, Leeds?”
Ned talks a deep breath and flinches at the sound of a key turning in the lock of the room.
He jumps over the rim, and desperately grabs onto the facade.
He lets the window fall shut and jumps down to the overhang.
Michelle Jones jumps almost immediately, and Ned follows a second after.
The windows light up above them, and he presses up against the wall, the others following suit.
They turn off after the tensest two minutes of his life, and that’s when he starts laughing.
Ned looks at him like he’s crazy.
“Huh.” Michelle Jones says. “Parker’s lost it. The fall did him in.”
He smiles with all his teeth, and laughs some more because this is the silliest situtation he’s been in for months.
“Oh, don’t worry.” He breathes. “I’ve jumped from higher.”
For some reason, they don’t seem very reassured by that.
—
It’s all over the news the next day.
Adrian Toomes was found tied up on Coney Island and in the wreckage of a Stark Industries plane, surrounded by the broken remains of an exosuit, hybrid Chitauri technology, and with a note pinned to his chest.
From: Deadpool, Daredevil, and Spider-man, your friendly neighborhood Team Red!
Ned and Michelle look at him with knowing eyes.
Because he called someone on his call Wade, someone Red, said I’m trusting you, said I’ve jumped from higher.
Because he’d led them across the tops of the school with ease, with practice.
Because he can’t help but look at Liz in guilt.
They know.
But they don’t say a word.
The gratitude in his chest feels like oil slick.
It also feels kind of like the start of something better, even as it suffocates the old.
—
There’s a man standing at the gates to Midtown at the end of the day, and he has a white cane in his grip.
Dark glasses and stubble along his jaw.
The man from Fogwell’s.
He flags him down.
And holds out a cracked phone.
The man raises an eyebrow.
“I think you forgot something?”
He looks up from the phone to the man's face, and then back down again.
There’s dust in the cracks, and the surface lights up with a picture of Manhattan from Avengers Tower.
He inhales sharp enough to cut.
Daredevil grins, and he can see the crows feet crinkling through his red lenses.
“Hey kid.”
—
There is no title to his shadow.
There is no legacy to his name.
He’s not… he’s not the person Wade says he was supposed to be.
He’s not the right Spider-man.
And he just has to be okay with that.
Because even if he’s not the right Spider–man, the right Peter Parker, he’s the one they have.
He doesn’t have powers.
He’s not enhanced.
But he’s not gonna stop trying.
He’s not gonna stop running through alleys and swinging through skyscrapers.
He’s not the Peter Parker the world was supposed to have, but he’s the one they got.
There’s still a monster in his skin, still a void in his soul, still a wrongness to his heart.
But he’s not gonna let it stop him.
He’s not the right Peter Parker.
But even if that’s the truth, they still have him.
They still have his heart and his soul and his love.
They still have Spider-man.
Powers or no.
He's still Spider-man.
