Work Text:
It’s a common theme by this point that most New Yorkers, especially in Hell’s Kitchen and Queens, will look the other way and leave a suspected mutant to themselves. Sure, cops have been known to go harder at mutants for no reason, but most regular people will simply ignore them until they go away.
This works in Peter’s favor, even when he doesn’t realize it. The amount of times he vaults the school gates without doing a thorough look around is staggering, but what’s even more is the times he’s used his strength to move something he really shouldn’t have been able to move, including the lockers in the school gym changing room when his pencil rolled under it once.
The general consensus surrounding Peter Parker is that he’s a mutant, but he’s too unsuspecting to actually do anything with his mutant “powers.” Flash seems to take this as a sign that he can push and trip Peter more than he can the normal kids he bullies.
As long as it helps him get out of odd situations, Peter puts up with the increased physical aspect of Flash’s bullying and tries to keep using his powers in public to a minimum.
He’s visiting Matt today, since Tony and May are busy with their respective work. He takes the subway to Hell's Kitchen and ducks into one of the less used alleyways when he thinks no one is looking. He left his valuables in his locker before he left school, ‘cause he knows what happens in places like this, so he only has his jacket and a light backpack on when he makes one final look over his shoulder for any bystanders.
He eyes the height of the buildings he’s in between and backs up to the wall of the taller one. He thinks it’s a hotel, but it could be an apartment building. He can hear people moving around inside.
Tightening his backpack straps against his shoulders, Peter bends his knees and launches off the pavement, reaching out with both arms towards the rapidly approaching roof’s ledge. He cheats a little by sticking to the bricks as he grabs them, and he pulls himself up without any issue. He looks down at the alleyway and smiles when he sees the floor intact. Matt and Jess have been trying to help him control his strength, and he thinks it’s been helping! He didn’t crack the concrete when he used his spider strength to jump this time. Last time he wasn’t so precise…
Eyeing his surroundings, he thinks he’s close to the boxing gym Matt likes to train at. He’s better at moving across rooftops after a few years as Spider-Man (hyphen included), so he makes sure his backpack is still close and takes off towards the familiar destination.
Fogwell’s, the gym, is open at this time of day, so Peter jumps from the nearest rooftop while nobody’s looking and throws himself into a roll on top of the gym. Matt is set up behind the place in the back area the owner lets him use, Peter can hear his heartbeat and breathing from a building away. Judging by the rhythm of the vigilante’s heart, he’s working with the punching bag.
Training is as entertaining as always, with Matt running Peter through their normal exercises before having him test himself against a few boxers who want to try their skill against a mutant. (Matt only lets him fight people who swear they won’t say anything about either of their skills, by threat of injury.)
Jessica and Trish drop by near sunset, and Peter gets to try his hand against Jessica’s brand of super strength while Trish and Matt gossip in the background. Matt, despite his catholic attitude, loves nothing more than to gossip with Trish, Foggy, and Karen (the woman, not the AI).
When it’s time for Peter to head back to Queens, he pulls his Spider-Man suit on, the new one that Tony and he worked on, and swings his way out of Hell’s Kitchen. He stops muggings and helps old ladies as he goes, normal friendly neighborhood Spider-Man stuff. He makes sure to avoid the places where Peter Parker is usually seen, but that’s alright since that’s usually where Daredevil patrols.
If he focuses, he thinks he can hear Jessica getting into a bar fight not too far away. He smiles and blocks out the sound of shattering glass. She can handle herself. He swings away from the Hudson towards the Empire State Building and past it, waving at Stark Tower as he goes, knowing Friday will see him and tell Tony he’s out patrolling.
He hears a commotion and stops a bank robber from getting any further into the small bank with a few webs. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, just a down on his luck criminal who’s been pushed too far. He has a gun but Peter takes care of that as soon as he gets there.
Peter likes swinging through the city at night. His webs are made to dissolve after a few hours, these webs anyway, so he can swing up to the highest buildings without having to worry about being taken up on property damage. It’s a comforting rhythm, aim, thwip, swing, detach, aim, thwip, swing, detach. His enhanced senses combined with the tech in his suit means he can see in the dark like it’s day, and he uses that to scan the streets below him for any signs of trouble.
He pauses at the top of the Skyline Tower, resting on his hands and the balls of his feet in his signature crouch, the one that’s become the most comfortable position since the spider bite. The metal is cold through his suit. He keeps his touch light so as to not bend the portion of the wall he’s crouched on.
He knows that to anyone else this pose would look uncomfortable. He’s on his hands and feet on the side of a building, facing down at the busy street below him. Gravity should have ripped him from the wall and thrown him down by now, but his skin is intact and he doesn’t feel the slightest discomfort, almost like he’s simply crouching on the floor. He sighs and stands from his crouch, putting himself parallel to the ground below. Still, gravity says nothing to him, and he tries not to consider the implications of physics ceasing to apply.
Its as simple as breathing for him to let go of the wall with his feet and plummet like a meteor towards the street. He breathes in the air rushing around him and adjusts his arm so it’s ready to shoot out a web. He gets closer and closer to the ground, and to anyone else his velocity might have already knocked them out.
There, only a few yards away from the ground. He aims upward and thwips , shooting a line of web towards the nearest building. Idly, as he swings away from the clapping New Yorkers, he wonders if he could have survived the fall without swinging away. The force of being yanked upwards by his web would have torn off his arm if he weren’t Spider-Man, but since he is he feels no pain, just tension in his arm where the web is holding him up.
Tony and Bruce think he could survive a lot more than most enhanced can, especially after finding out about the building that fell on top of him. They theorize that he has the proportional strength of a spider, which would account for Peter’s build, since male spiders are generally smaller and more agile than female ones, but that still leaves the question of what kind of spider did Peter become?
It’s not that important, he thinks as he swings further into Queens, dropping by Midtown Tech to check that everything’s locked up safe for the night. As long as he can keep doing what he’s doing, he doesn’t care what his limits are or what kind of spider bit him.
Someone screams in a nearby alley, and Peter’s off like a shot before he can process it fully. He leaps from rooftop to rooftop, gritting his teeth at the lack of taller buildings for him to swing from. He can hear someone, maybe a woman judging by the heartbeat and smell of perfume, fighting against a larger attacker, and Peter’s speed increases until he’s a blur in the air.
Using just a portion of his strength, he grabs the back of the attacker’s jacket and throws them sideways into the alley wall. He listens closely but nothing cracks, which is good. He doesn’t like hurting people, even if they’re horrible people.
He webs up the attacker with probably too many webs, shooting them all in quick succession until the person is covered and stuck to the wall. Karen puts a call into the nearest police station to come pick them up. He covers the person’s mouth when they start shouting slurred insults at the woman behind Peter and Peter himself.
“Are you okay?” Peter asks softly, turning to the woman while keeping the attacker in his senses. She looks fine, and the hug she launches at him lets him confirm she has no broken bones.
He walks the woman home and confirms with Karen that the attacker is in police custody. Peter’s not the biggest fan of cops, sure, even if the memory of Ben makes him want to be, but he trusts the ones that Karen reaches out to to take care of the criminals he catches.
Jumping back up into the sky and vaulting forward with a well placed web, Spider-Man’s patrol continues. He decides to stop when the night gets too long, before the sun can rise. He has school tomorrow, and he needs to be up before May or Tony can reprimand him for staying up too late.
As he swings home, back to his and May’s apartment, he stops by the abandoned apartment he’s been keeping an eye on lately. There’s no one there, as usual, and it looks like no one’s been there except for him in a long time judging by the layer of dust on the floor.
He’s been scoping the place out for a while now. He loves May’s place, and he knows Tony will always have space for him in his lab and in the Tower, but something in his instincts, the same place that his Spidey Senses originate from, tells him that he needs a place of his own. It may not be the best, but it doesn’t have to be. It has a working ceiling, four walls, and a window for him to crawl through to enter. It’s out of the way enough that no one wants to rent it out, and Peter’s pretty sure that anyone who knew about it has forgotten about it.
He’ll give it another few days before he gives in to the instincts itching at the back of his neck, instincts telling him to spin web after web and collect all his belongings to hide in cocoons of silky webs. He only has so much room in his closet for tech scraps after all, and that space is rapidly running out.
He makes it back home before May gets off work. He’s in bed by sunrise, his alarm set for seven thirty.
It takes two days for him to be sure that the little one-room apartment he found is truly abandoned. He spends most of that time with Tony and the others, letting the Defenders have time to themselves. Foggy has been getting on Matt about the hours he puts in at work.
Sunday morning, Peter eats breakfast and goes out for the day, having Karen text Ned to arrange a hangout in Tony’s lab for tomorrow. The suit feels like a second skin, sort of like an exoskeleton, though that’s a weird thought for the lord’s day. He snickers to himself as he crawls up a nearby skyscraper to get some height. The lord’s day. There’s nothing holy about what Peter does, he thinks, not when he could kill a man with a medium-strength punch.
Again, the apartment that Peter has set aside for his new nest is untouched. He sticks his hands to the window glass, dragging it upwards, and shimmies his way through. Latching onto the wall above the window so no one sees him, he pulls himself onto the ceiling.
Peter curls himself into the top corner of the room after making sure that the door to the outside hall is locked and rusted shut. His legs press up against his shoulders as he presses his face into the ceiling. He doubts that he could pull this off without the ballet that Natasha has been teaching him to help loosen his muscles and give in to the spidery need to contort in horrible positions. It feels good to be up this high, and it feels even better to blend into the shadows not being lit by the open window.
The single light and ceiling fan are broken beyond repair, though Peter could probably fix them if he wanted to. For now, he decides he likes the space to crawl around without getting hit by light or fan blades.
He’s already mentally planning out the entire nest, where the webs will go and where the bits of tech will be stored near the ground, all hidden if someone happens to glance through the thirteenth floor window that he climbs through every time he visits. His wrists itch with the need to string up web after web until the walls and ceiling are covered beyond recognition.
This is gonna be fun.
The result of his nest (now being paid for with the money he’s squirreled away from his internship with Tony because Peter feels bad about using it for free and the possibility of someone renting it out and finding his nest is unimaginable) is a perfect room for a spider hybrid like Peter. Sure, he doesn’t know how spidery he truly is biologically, but he feels like the term still fits.
The ceiling and walls are lined with webs of his own design, ones that won’t dissolve after a few hours like his patrol webs do, and tucked away near the corner furthest from the window is a cocoon-like canopy for Peter to curl up in and indulge in his instincts without any risk.
Over the course of a few weeks, Peter fills the web pockets closer to the floor with tech he’s slipped into his pockets and even his backpack from his section of Tony’s personal lab. There are circuits and power sources, little metal bits and copper wiring, and he tucks them away into the lower portion of his nest where only he can find them. Realistically, Peter doesn’t need to do this. No one will get into this apartment without his permission except the building super (though he’s shady enough that he won’t bother), so the layers of spider web that wrap his belongings are unnecessary, but it makes him feel better, more secure.
Aunt May eyes him curiously when she sees him emptying out his closet into one of his bigger backpacks, but she doesn’t comment. She probably thinks he’s moving it to his room in the Tower. He feels a little bad about deceiving her that way.
Yesterday he spent most of the day after school training with Matt and Castle. The two men fight all the time but they’re bearable when Peter’s around to stop them from shooting each other. He promised to play in the lab with Tony after patrol this morning, seeing as it’s a Saturday, so after breakfast he swings by his nest to check everything’s alright then starts his normal route.
He and the other vigilantes of New York have defined their territories pretty well by now. He knows where Daredevil’s ends and Jessica’s starts or where Castle and Luke frequent when they’re looking for trouble. Peter tries not to limit himself to one specific route, instead going to wherever he knows he’s needed.
This is how he finds himself not too far from Stark Tower, in the middle of Manhattan. He’s on the seventh floor of what seems to be a crowded ten-story apartment building, and his Spidey Sense is screaming at him to leap into action. He was called here by the itch at the back of his neck and an odd smell, but now that he’s standing here in a random hallway, he has no idea what the danger is, just that it’s there.
“Karen, get the building evacuated,” he says, already moving to knock on doors and warn people of the coming danger.
A pop up in his vision tells him that Karen has informed the police. The fire alarm comes blaring to life, but Karen blocks the increase in noise right as it happens. He hears people start to panic from the combined alarm and the noise Peter’s making racing down the hallways and pounding on people’s doors.
The hair on the back of his neck stands on end, screaming at him until he stops in his tracks. People flow by him, heading towards the emergency stairwell, and all he can do is hope that they make it in time.
“Underoos,” Tony’s voice comes over the comms, startling Peter out of the scan he and Karen are taking of the nearby stories. “What’s going on over there? Friday says the police are issuing an amber alert to get everyone out of the building you’re in.”
“Dunno yet, Mr. Stark,” Peter says, falling back on familiar formality. Unease creeps up on him as his scan turns up empty for the third time. “I can’t find anything that would do much damage, but my Spidey Sense is telling me something big’s about to go down. You and Friday have any idea what it could be?”
“Sorry, ‘roo. All I have are building blueprints and whatever cameras are in there.”
Peter grits his teeth against a rising wave of instinct telling him to get out of there! The other side of his instincts directs him towards the center of the seventh floor, away from the flow of panicked tenets running for the exit.
As he gets closer to the very center of the floor, his lungs stutter and freeze in instinctual terror.
“Mr. Stark,” he says quietly. “There’s a bomb. Scans didn’t pick it up for some reason, and I don’t know when it’ll go off.”
Tony curses on his end of the comms. There’s a rustling and the clang of something falling from his lab table before Tony’s back on the line speaking quickly in a tense voice.
“Get out of there, Pete,” he says. “Help the evacuation efforts. Fri says there are only a few police units in the area and they’ve only gotten up to the fifth floor in clearing everyone out. Listen to me, kid, do not go near the bomb. Do you hear me? Pete?”
Peter swallows his fear and steps up to the bomb. It’s hidden behind a vending machine, tucked away and disguised as a maintenance cart. It’s unlikely anyone else would have found it.
“I can’t do that, Mr. Stark,” Peter says apologetically, deft hands already removing the cover over the bomb. “Judging by the intensity of my Sense, it’s gonna go off in the next minute. I have to try disarming it if I want anyone to have a chance of surviving this. Can you let Jessica and Bruce know where I am, just in case?”
It’s protocol by now to bring in the strongest enhanced heroes when dealing with a bomb threatening the structural integrity of a multistory building.
He tunes out Tony’s spluttering denials and pleas to focus on the machine in front of him. This close to it he can smell the source of what brought him here, something coppery and putrid like sulfur. His stomach drops.
After his first encounter with a bomb on patrol, Tony and Bruce made an all-encompassing training course for him and anyone who needed it. Part of that included an analysis bit, the part of the plan where you conclude if you can disarm the bomb or not. If so, do it. If not, either evacuate the area or get the bomb to an evacuated area for it to safely blow up, taking into account that motion won’t trigger it early.
Peter already knows he has no chance at disarming this bomb. It doesn’t look like anything he’s encountered before, from the lack of wiring to the odd material and smell that surrounds it.
“Update please, Karen,” Peter says as he runs through plans in his head.
“Only forty-seven heat spots remain in the building,” Karen’s cool voice runs over him. “Recordings of the bomb have been sent to leading experts, but there are no solutions to the problem at this moment.”
Tony audibly takes a breath over comms, knowing what will happen before anybody has to say it.
“I might be able to get it to the roof,” Peter mutters to himself. “I doubt it’s heavier than an ambulance. How many people are left on the tenth and ninth floors?”
“Twenty-three.”
Fuck.
“Okay, okay,” Peter says. “Odds of this going off if I move it?”
“Sixty five percent of being triggered by movement,” Karen says grimly. Tony curses where he’s no doubt trying very hard to find a solution while getting into the Iron Man suit and alerting the others. “Dr. Banner and Pym advise against it.”
“Just get the others out first, ‘roo,” Tony pleads. “Make a web or something, just make sure they get down before the bomb goes off.”
Peter knows what his mentor is doing, trying to get him out of the bomb’s range by distracting him with possible casualties. It works. Peter hesitates, reading the updates from the police Karen is putting in the top right of his vision. Up to the sixth floor is cleared of all people, and ambulances are arriving on the scene in preparation for whatever’s about to go down.
Peter covers the bomb with webbing, layer after layer until it’s unrecognizable as anything more than a white blob of artificial webbing. He prays that’s enough to blunt the blast enough to save whoever can’t make it out in time.
“Ten more have made their ways to the fire exit,” Karen says. “Thirty-seven remain. There are six on the seventh floor, thirteen on the eighth, eight on the ninth, and ten on the tenth.”
“Why aren’t they leaving, Karen?” Peter asks, already moving towards the ones on the seventh floor, abandoning the bomb to help the cops clear the rest of the floor. “Are they trapped?”
The fire alarm is still going, and Karen’s display tells him that amber alerts have been sent out telling people to get out of the area. New Yorkers are used to having to pack and run, especially near Manhattan, so it’s surprising there are still so many people in the building after the standard warnings have been sent out.
He finds a drunk man struggling to get a bag packed, a mother and her child that can’t get the nearest fire exit open, and a few more stragglers that have to be coaxed from their rooms and practically thrown down the emergency stairs.
Only one person remains on the seventh floor by the time the police race up to the eighth floor. Peter webs up a little net near the ground and drops the straggler down from the nearest window, letting the firefighters down there get them out.
“Eleven heat signatures left above you, Peter,” Karen says, and red spots highlight themselves in his vision, courtesy of his AI. “Iron Man and Jessica Jones are quickly approaching, but they are preoccupied by armed forces targeting the Museum of Modern Art.”
Peter curses. They must be the backup, he thinks, the distraction to split the focus between the destruction of the bomb and whatever else the enemies of the day have planned.
All of a sudden, Peter’s senses blare.
“Jump!” he screams as loud as he can, making direct eye contact with the firefighters and police officers near the window they’ve been using to get people down quickly. They’re on the sixth floor, and if they move quickly they can jump into the net before the bomb goes off. “Do it, now!”
A blur of motion, a shriek of metal and noise, a flash of light.
Peter acts on instinct born from countless battles and simulations. He throws himself towards the nearest person and braces himself, eyes squeezed shut and hands braced above him.
In the back of his mind, he’s already mourning the two firefighters still on the eighth floor and the old man in the wheelchair they were helping get to the sixth floor. The moment before the blast hits him, he counts five heartbeats around him on the sixth floor, two falling from the window, and one still on the ninth floor. He prays for any of them to jump, but he knows as blinding heat envelopes him that they don’t have a shot at getting out in time.
Darkness falls as concrete crumbles and metal shrieks out protests. Something hurts, something burns, but Peter can’t see anything yet. His eyes are closed, and when he opens them all he can see is rubble.
His ears ring. He can taste blood, can smell it in the air. Is he alive? He can feel his heartbeat everywhere in his body.
Sound eludes him, but now that his eyes are open he can see the person he dove into laying next to him in the little pocket of air they’re in. Oh, thank god. She’s breathing. Peter exhales heavily, only to wince when something creaks above him.
Oh.
He’s here again, it seems, trapped beneath a building. Is this some kind of cosmic justice? Has he done something wrong? What are the odds of this happening twice in his short superhero career?
His arms ache, and he finally narrows down the source of the burning sensation. Shifting slightly to confirm his guess, Peter takes note of the position he’s contorted himself into above the woman he threw to the ground on instinct.
In any other situation he would laugh, but he’s in enough pain as it is.
One knee rests on the ground, the fabric of his now suit torn beyond recognition on his left knee. His other leg is bent so his thigh is parallel with the ground, his foot pressed firmly below him and his knee at a right angle. Blearily, as something drips into his eye, he registers that his head is ducked, his neck bracing something hard to keep it from falling.
His arms, just as Atlas held up Ouranos from Gaia, are bent to press his hands flat against the surface above him, bearing all the heavy weight on the line of his shoulders, curved back, and palms.
He grunts, shifting to better hold the weight of whatever’s above him. His shoulders burn, his arms twinge with the sheer pressure being exerted on him as the only thing supporting it. He breathes deeply and focuses on not throwing up.
The ringing in his ears recedes a bit, just enough for him to hear someone calling out to him. He almost drops everything when he hears Karen’s voice, but he manages to tense his muscles just in time to keep it all up.
He stutters the start of a word, enough for Karen to hear he’s awake and aware.
“Peter,” she says slowly, like she knows how hard it is for him to focus on her voice while keeping his body from collapsing under the weight on his shoulders. “You are injured. You have several broken bones and internal bleeding.”
Yeah, no shit. He can feel all that, though he’s surprised he’s able to keep up this pose while being that hurt.
“Your healing factor is trying to keep up, but there is too much to repair while you are exerting the amount of force you are to keep the building from caving in further.” She pauses, letting him take that information in, before she continues, “I have halted external communication for the moment while you recover, but Tony is insistent to speak to you.”
He blinks dust out of his eyes and breathes slowly, grunting a bit to show Karen he hears her.
“I have let Friday relay the situation to him,” Karen says.
“Pete,” a familiar voice comes through the comms.
Tony’s cracked voice fills Peter with such relief that the wave of pain threatening to overwhelm him fades to the background for a moment, allowing him to readjust his stance and push upwards more than his previous one allowed, lessening the weight on the back of his neck and redistributing it more towards his hands.
“You’re gonna be okay, buddy, okay? Everything’s gonna be alright.” Some rustling from Tony’s side of the comms. It sounds like someone’s barking orders, like people are arguing. “We’re going to get you out of there, alright? Just keep doing what you're doing, and don’t let go.”
Peter grunts, managing to lick the blood from his lips before going back to gritting his teeth at the pain.
Friday must have warned Tony to be calm, because Peter doesn’t think he’s ever heard Tony talk like this in a crisis before. He doesn’t shout at all, which is a real help to Peter’s concentration.
“Good kid, good job. We’ve got our best working on getting you out, ‘roo, but it’ll take some time, alright? According to Friday and Karen, the only reason you and the others on that floor are alive is because of you holding up that roof. Keep holding it, Peter, please keep holding it.”
The floor beneath him creaks. He pushes more of his strength towards his hands, distributing the weight pressing down on him onto the length of the leg he’s kneeling on instead of the one that’s bent upwards.
“Structural integrity of the floors beneath you are at sixty-four percent,” Karen says at the noise.
Could be worse, Peter thinks. Then Tony’s words catch up to him, and he sucks in a rasping breath. His lungs feel full of something they’re not supposed to hold, but he manages to speak briefly.
“Survivors,” he croaks. He spits blood to the floor beneath him, grimacing as he realizes his mask is torn just above his nose, hiding his eyes still.
“There are five heat signatures on the sixth floor that appear to still be living, though one is fading as time goes on,” Karen updates him. She adds a very dim red light to his vision to highlight the positions of the survivors. “According to the data before the explosion, four people did not make it. Two jumped from the building and landed in the web in time to sustain minimal injuries. Five remain on the sixth floor with you, one of which is directly next to you.”
Good, that’s good to know. He hates that he wasn’t fast enough to get everyone out in time, but a voice that sounds suspiciously like Rhodey reminds him he can’t save everyone. He despises that voice.
Something above him shifts, rubble falling from the mess of material that is the top four floors, and his heart stutters in his chest at the sudden jolt. He can feel some of it fall to the ground around the building, but it’s not enough to noticeably lessen his load. He hopes no one gets hit by the falling rubble.
His knee throbs where it’s grinding into the hard floor below him. The smell of blood gets thicker in the air.
“Just a little bit longer, kid,” Tony says gently to not startle him. “We can’t risk the Hulk helping and adding to your load, so Falcon is flying Jones up to chip away at the rubble she can get rid of. Wanda’s on her way, but she’s at least an hour away by quinjet, maybe less if Clint uses all the fuel to speed it up a little.”
Peter licks his lips and tries to clear his throat of blood before grunting, “Suits?”
“I’m sorry, Underoos,” Tony sighs. “They’re busy taking care of what we’re pretty sure are Hydra forces. An apparent army has been swarming major landmarks, and most of the gang is dealing with all that. I’ll call some of my Iron Man suits over when that clears up.”
Peter hums his understanding, even as fear begins to build up in his chest.
Now that time has passed since the blast, his hearing is almost back to normal. He can hear the heartbeat of the woman beside him. It’s surprisingly clear. If he focuses, there are four other heartbeats, though one is lagging a bit behind the others, clearly getting slower the longer they stay under the rubble.
He thinks he can sense two of the others near the fading heartbeat moving around. He hopes they’re helping the fallen person, because otherwise they might not make it.
Without prompting, Karen displays a map of the building crafted from the blueprints and the recordings from his suit’s camera. He’s on the south side of the sixth floor, near the far wall. It’s lucky he’s not in the center of the building, since he gets the feeling the bomb would have blasted him into pieces in an instant. Since he’s near the wall the firefighters were using to get the stragglers safely down to the ground, he’s entirely holding up one section of the building, four floors worth.
As if knowing what he’s thinking, Karen says, “If you were positioned anywhere else on the sixth floor, the other survivors would be dead by now. You are the only reason the top four floors have not collapsed and destroyed the fifth and sixth floors, and if you let the roof fall, it will collapse on the other survivors as well.”
Fuck. Okay, he needs a game plan. So far he only has one step: keep holding up the building. It’ll have to do for now.
“As your bones are not mending at the normal rate despite the amount you have consumed today,” Karen continues, “Friday and I conclude that your healing is mainly being devoted towards healing the tearing in your muscles that comes from holding up so many tons of weight. It can be assumed that as long as you don’t exert yourself or break anything else, your enhanced healing will keep your muscles intact enough to hold up the building.”
Okay, that sounds good. His whole body hurts, sure, but as long as nothing gets worse he’s pretty sure he can continue holding it. He just has to keep his focus and remember why he’s suffering, remember that he’s keeping five other people alive.
Breathe, in and out. That’s all he has to do. Focus on keeping his arms up and his leg out to keep him upright.
He almost loses his grip as the woman next to him stirs. He bites his lip and exhales shakily as the roof presses closer. He can’t drop it, if he does he kills five people. He carefully steadies the material above him and angles his head to peer down at the injured woman.
Blood trickles from a cut on her forehead, and her left arm is at a weird angle, but other than that and a few bruises she doesn’t look too hurt. Thank Thor for small mercies.
“Sp-spidey?” Her voice sounds painful, probably from all the dust and particles in the air drying out her throat. “What’s goin’ on?”
Peter breathes in slowly and exhales just as slow. He presses against the crushing force to ground himself enough to speak.
“Bomb,” he says in a rasping voice. His lungs might be filling with blood, he thinks. “Went off. Holdin’ it up.”
The woman’s eyes go wide, and Peter can see her becoming paler than the blood loss made her. She can see him, so Peter assumes the eyes of his suit are giving off some kind of light, which is good. He can see because of his enhancements and Karen’s night vision feature, but it’s nice to know that the woman isn’t completely defenseless in this pocket of air beneath probably hundreds of tons of rubble.
“Wha’s your name?” he slurs, spitting another mouthful of blood to the ground. He’s alert, but the internal bleeding is making it a little hard to concentrate on anything other than holding up the building above him.
“Sandra,” she says quietly. She looks around, probably looking for a way out of their little bubble. He doesn’t waste energy telling her there isn’t one. She looks better now that she has her wits about her. “You okay, Spidey? That’s a lot of blood.”
He smiles as well as he can, knowing she can see it because of his ripped mask.
“‘M fine,” he says. “Jus’ gotta concentrate.”
Sandra nods and eyes him warily. He must not look that great, but he can’t stop to think about his injuries. Karen can keep an eye on that through her sensors, but it’s Peter’s job to keep everyone alive.
The comm clicks in his ear, or the general area of his ear as Karen takes care of things like that, and the icon for Iron Man appears in the corner of his vision. Tony’s connected back with him again.
“Just a little longer kiddo,” Tony says, though his voice is strained. “Two of the suits are helping Jones clear the rubble, and we’re trying to contact Strange to see if he can either portal Wanda here or help himself, but he might be too busy with the army gathering near the Empire State Building.”
Peter huffs, trying to keep it from being loud enough for Sandra to hear but enough to be picked up over the comms.
“I know, buddy,” Tony soothes. “You need to hold out for a little longer, an hour at most. I know that seems like a long time, but you can do this, Pete, I know you can. The firefighters are working with your buddy Daredevil to see if they can come up through the fifth floor and pull you out that way.”
That sounds plausible, but that doesn’t account for the four survivors trapped closer to the window. Karen, as always, is on the same wavelength as him, and she chimes in when Peter can’t verbally respond.
“Doing so would risk the lives of the other survivors,” she adds. “As soon as Peter falters in holding up the roof, the others will have a maximum of ten seconds before they are crushed.”
Peter grits his teeth. Thanks for the reminder, Karen. They need more heavy hitters if they want to get to Peter before his muscles give out, though his healing might be putting that off for as long as possible.
“Get Cage,” Peter grunts as quietly as he can, cutting off whatever Tony was gonna say. “Or Rand.”
They’re the two that are both local and powerful enough to survive taking a direct hit from concrete while also being able to destroy it in one hit.
“On it, ‘roo,” Tony says. “Hold tight, okay? We’ll get you out of there.”
If all else fails, Peter thinks through the burn in his arms and the blood seeping from his knee, he could get Tony to clear the surrounding area and simply push as hard as he can until the roof tips into the street below. But no, that might actually kill him, exerting that amount of energy in one go after holding it for so long.
How long has he been under here?
“You’ve got this, Spider-Man,” Sandra says, and there’s something in her voice that reassures him more than anything else. She seems fully confident in his ability, like the wariness she felt when she regained consciousness is completely gone, replaced by conviction of Peter’s strength.
Peter exhales slowly, more smoothly than before. The rasping in his chest is still there, but it hasn’t gotten any worse. His healing is still working well enough to simply pause his bodily functions instead of heal them.
“I’ve got this,” he mutters.
“You’ve got this,” Sandra says with a smile, ignoring the blood still dripping from the cut on her forehead. She’s got her broken arm cradled to her chest, but she still believes that Peter can keep her safe.
He breathes, in and out, in and out, in and out .
His heartbeat falls into a rhythm alongside his breathing, repetitive enough for Peter to calm significantly. He breathes in, exerting pressure through his back upwards to keep the roof well-distributed across his grip, and then he breathes out, lifting his hands to balance the weight while his back gets a reprieve from the intense pressure.
He thinks time passes, but he can’t be sure. Sandra is breathing in time with him, reminding him to focus on the weight above them, and he finds himself listening to the other survivors’ heartbeats to make sure they’re still alive. The fading heartbeat sounds a bit better, so he assumes they’ve gotten some amount of medical attention from the others, which is very good.
Every so often, Peter feels the weight on top of him shift slightly. Maybe it’s the spider DNA or maybe it’s intuition, but he’s pretty sure the minute shifting is actually Jessica and the Iron Man suits walking around up there. They don’t weigh as much as the Hulk, so he didn’t notice them at first.
“You doing okay, kid?” Tony asks. “Karen says you’ve been silent for a bit now.”
“Hm,” Peter hums, half of his attention still on keeping his heart in its rhythm. “Focusin’.”
“Good job, ‘roo. We’re making progress, I promise. Wanda’s thirty minutes out. Strange is busy with his own Hydra enemies, but we’ve got Luke Cage helping Jones with the clearing on the roof. Falcon and I are flying them back and forth, but I had to send the sentries back to the field. Looks like they had backup forces on standby.”
Peter grunts. If he focuses past the pulsing of his own heart that he’s so attuned to, in fear of dropping the building and killing five people, he can hear Tony’s thrusters as he makes trips up and down the building.
The fading heartbeat of one of the survivors falters and skips, and Peter has to take a deep breath to keep himself from reacting bodily to the sudden change. The other heartbeats speed up, panicked.
“‘Have a plan,” Peter says, only half paying attention. “Bad plan, but a plan. Can hold it until Wanda gets here, but one of ‘em not gonna make it ‘til then.”
“What kind of plan, Underoos?” Tony sounds concerned, but Peter can’t care about that right now. He hears voices on the other side of Tony’s comms giving orders. After a few more seconds, Peter feels the rubble above him shift again, like the people on top have just left.
“Gonna push,” he says. “Tell Karen what direction, and I can throw it off, but you gotta get ev’ryone out, yeah?”
“Peter,” Tony says lowly, “that’s a bad idea. You and I both know that your body’s too taxed right not to heal anything more than muscle strain.”
“Don’t care,” Peter grits his teeth with a grimace. “They’re gonna die if I don’t do it.”
“Jesus, kid,” Tony says, and he can imagine him running a hand through his hair. He must be out of the suit, which means he’s safe on the ground. That’s good.
“Please, Mr. Stark.”
“Fine! Fine. I’ll give the order, but you better survive this, Underoos, or else I’ll send May to get you from the afterlife and lecture you until you die a second time, okay? I’m not kidding, kid, I know sorcerers and gods, I could do it.”
Peter smiles weakly despite himself. He can hear the tension in Tony’s voice.
Tony gives the order to retreat. The sound of ambulances and other cars moves away from the building, and Peter diverts a portion of his senses to search his surroundings one last time. There are no more heartbeats than expected, thank Thor.
Now for the hard part.
“Sandra,” he says loudly, calling her attention from where she’s zoned out on the floor. “I’m gonna try to move the roof. If it works, we’ll be safe, but if not I’m gonna need you to run and get somewhere safer, ‘kay? It’s important.”
He might have lost more blood than he thought, he considers. His words aren’t just mangled from the blood in his mouth anymore.
“Okay,” Sandra says shakily.
“‘M proud of you,” he says through gritted teeth. “Get ready.”
He takes a deep breath, trying his best not to cough from the fluid in his lungs. He spits out one final mouthful of blood. Just a few yards away, the fading heartbeat skips and sputters, the surrounding heartbeats speeding even further in a panic.
Here we go.
He braces his palms against the beam above him, adjusting his posture until all his weight rests on his left knee and his right foot. He thanks Thor that he instinctively fell into a kneeling position when the explosion went off.
Karen brings up a map of the building and sets it in the bottom right corner of his vision. The cardinal directions highlight themselves in relation to Peter’s position at the South wall of the building. An arrow points in the opposite direction, towards the street. One last check for heat signatures shows that the street is empty enough to take the rubble from above him.
He’s done this before, pushed a building off of him, so he knows he can do it again. He’s gotten stronger since the Vulture. The building above him is heavy, heavier than anything Peter’s held up before, and he doubts the Spider-Man of a few years ago could do anything like this.
His suit is torn, almost gone against his palms where he’s been holding up four stories of an apartment building, torn across his spine where he’s been balancing the rest of the rubble, completely gone where his left knee and shin lies against the floor, an entire building pushing down on him. He takes a deep breath, almost gagging at the thick smell of blood in the air, and finds himself feeling really grateful that his healing makes him vaguely numb to his injuries after so long in pain.
His whole body shakes as he pushes upwards with all his strength, which is a significant amount. He can lift ambulances and planes with only a bit of unease, which means this is probably hundreds of tons.
The skin on his shoulders splits as he shoves himself upwards from his kneeling position, and he screams as the weight gets impossibly heavier. He staggers to his feet, his left leg feeling weaker than it should be. Something might be broken there.
The building groans above him. It shifts so suddenly from his movement that he feels some of the weight lessen as rubble falls into the alleyways and street around the building. It’s good but not enough to stop Peter from feeling like he’s holding up the sky on his shoulders. He adjusts his arms so his elbows are sticking out, his palms directly above his head.
With a great heave, Peter throws all of his strength behind his hands. He throws the beam above him towards the street side. The building creaks and shrieks as metal grinds, and suddenly there’s a lot less weight on his hands.
Sucking in a deep breath for the first time in a long time, Peter notes gravity taking effect on him for the first time in a while.
Hands grab him and pull him from the pool of blood he’s been kneeling in for the last however long. There are voices in his ear, both from the mask and around him, and he lets himself be moved without fighting back. A familiar mechanical whir comforts him enough for his eyes to fall shut.
The last thing he feels before the black of unconsciousness takes over is the hard press of metal carrying him into the air.
There’s a smell that tells him he’s somewhere safe. His eyelids hurt with a familiar light, and the mattress under him cradles him gently. He’s in the med bay, he realizes. This is not the first time, nor the last, that he’s woken up in the Tower’s med bay.
“Hey, Underoos,” Tony rouses him from the haze of sensation. “You feeling any better?”
Peter gets the feeling he’s woken up a few times before this, but he doesn’t remember any of them.
“Yeah,” he croaks.
Tony gets him some water, and he sips it down gratefully. He didn’t realize how much his throat had been hurting.
“Did…” Peter starts before trailing off. He lets his head fall back to the pillow and sighs. “Did I hold up a building for almost an hour? Or did I hallucinate that and I’m in here for another reason?”
“This first one, kiddo. Gave us a real scare.”
“Sorry,” he says sheepishly.
His body reminds him of its normal functions, and he groans before sitting up. He lets Tony pull off the sensors that connect him to the machines around the bed so he can head to the bathroom.
The lights are blazing above him, and when he gets up to go to the bathroom he stumbles a bit at the headrush he gets. Tony rushes to hold him up, but he brushes him off. A man’s gotta have autonomy, right? (Still a kid, not a man yet, Tony says, amused.) His ears ring with the sound of electricity.
Luckily, the bathroom is right next to his hospital bed. The doorknob crumples in his hand. He stops and stares. It feels a lot like after the spider bite, learning how to use a normal amount of strength in daily activities.
“Kiddo?”
“Um, Tony?” Peter looks up from the crumpled lump of metal and meets his mentor’s eyes. “I think something’s wrong.”
Either his control is gone and he has to learn how to hold himself back all over again, or something has changed. Is it possible he’s gotten stronger? He feels lighter, sure, but stronger?
“Did you just…” Tony trails off, looking at the destroyed doorknob.
“Either I got stronger or my control is gone,” Peter summarizes. “And I still have to go to the bathroom.”
After they sort out that whole situation, Peter climbs back into bed with careful movements. Bruce and Dr. Cho help him get the sensors back on his chest and temples. They measure his brain waves, his heartbeat, and other biological processes, just in case his stint holding up a building has permanently harmed him.
“Are your senses more intense than normal?” Bruce asks, typing away on his Stark Pad. He takes care of the physiological and enhanced side of things while Dr. Cho checks Peter’s vitals.
“Definitely,” he says, blinking up at the lights until Friday dims them further. “But I dunno if that’s because I just woke up or not.”
“There’s more activity in your parietal lobe,” Dr. Cho adds. “More than usual after you come into my care like this. Not to mention the increased density of your bones, though they’re still well below the normal human ratio. That and the fused fibers in your muscles point towards a marked increase in your abilities. I would bet that this is a natural progression of your maturation, seeing as your first boost, the spider bite, happened during the start of puberty. You have proven that you can handle an increase in responsibility, as well as an increase in adrenaline and other hormones, so your mutation is adapting.”
“Ugh,” Peter groans. That means there's a possibility of this happening again some day. “I had enough trouble the first time around, now I have to deal with it again?”
“Sounds that way, Pete,” Bruce says apologetically, smiling down at him. “But this time around you have the Avengers and our training gyms to help you get a handle on it.”
That is definitely a plus, Peter thinks, but he has school on Monday!
“How long was I out?” he asks.
Tony answers this one, “About seven hours. We’ve let May know you’re staying for the weekend, so she’ll probably show up after her shift to check on you. Odds are she’s already seen the videos by now and is worried out of her mind.”
“Videos?” Peter blinks in shock. He should have expected this, but he wasn’t too focused on anyone filming him when he threw four stories worth of rubble to the side.
“Yeah, you’re famous, Underoos,” Tony says with a smirk. “Twitter’s going wild speculating on how much you can lift.”
He groans again, covering his face with his hands.
Peter spends the rest of Saturday and the beginning of Sunday in the med bay. When Dr. Cho finally lets him go with a doctor’s note to excuse him from Monday’s class, Peter disappears into the training gym that Steve and the other enhanced members use.
He’s broken four more door knobs and seven door frames from when he misjudged the distance, all by Sunday afternoon, and he’s so ready to leave Dr. Cho’s domain that he actually blurs when he gets the all clear, he’s moving so quickly. He idly notices Bruce make a note of his speed in the Stark Pad he’s been carrying around since the incident.
The strength equipment that Tony invented to help the others get a handle on their abilities is a real help in retraining Peter’s instinctual levels of force. By Sunday night, with the aid of an excited, puppy-like Thor and an always gentle Steve, Peter can open a door without destroying it or ripping it off its hinges.
It’s odd, he thinks. He doesn’t feel that different. His senses seem like they’re amped up to ten and it’s oddly easy to do anything physical now, but he’s still Spider-Man, he’s still Peter, ya’ know?
(There’s a part inside him that is terrified at how much harder it’s gotten to not break somebody’s hand simply when shaking it, at how much control he will have to have on patrol to not shatter bones just by tapping someone on their shoulder. He shoves those thoughts aside for now and focuses on training. He’ll talk to Sam about it later, he thinks.)
Twitter is indeed going crazy with speculation and thirst tweets (ew) about Spider-Man. Friday lets him scroll through some of the more popular tweets on one of her interactive holograms, since he doesn’t dare go near his phone like this.
He has texts from Ned, MJ, and Aunt May that he answers through Karen with the repaired spider suit pulled over his head so he can do it all without having to touch anything.
When he can dress himself without tearing the fabric even with gentle, gentle hands, he pulls the rest of the spider suit on and disappears out one of the Tower’s windows. He leaves a note, a sticky note with reassurances written in shaky handwriting from a hand still getting used to the proper amount of strength to drag a pen across the thin and fragile paper. He makes sure to tell Friday that he’s okay before he leaves, so Tony and the others don’t come looking for him before he’s ready for them.
His nest is untouched, thankfully. He doesn’t know what he would do if someone had gotten into his place and left bad smells behind.
Catching that last thought, Peter freezes. Smells?
Up until now, Peter mainly relied on senses like sight, touch, and sound. Those were the ones that got stronger after the spider bite. But now, it feels like things are different, things he didn’t notice in the med bay or the Tower.
The webs that weave throughout the room that holds his nest sing of stillness, like they’re telling him a story of what’s plucked them since he made them. He follows one of the threads to find a fly tangled between two intertwined webs.
Huh.
“Karen, text Tony, please,” he says. “Tell him that it’s not just my strength and senses that increased. I might be a little more spidery than I was before.”
“Sent.”
“Thanks, Karen.”
The fly is dead, so he gently removes it from his web and drops it out the window, feeling sorry all the while. Luckily, he has no mysterious urge to eat it. He thinks he would actually drop himself off of a building if that instinct popped up all of a sudden.
Crawling up into the cocoon of soft webbing far from the window, he takes in the scent of the room, the vibrations that he feels through the apartment walls.
He thought he would feel claustrophobic being inside a building like this again after the bomb, but he doesn’t. Instead, curled into a ball near the ceiling of a giant webbed room, he feels at peace like he didn’t in the med bay or the training gyms. Is he really that much of a spider?
He knows better than most the difference between a mutant and a mutate, and he’s definitely a mutate. He was made into the way he is now, he wasn’t born with the X gene or whatever it is. Peter’s like the Hulk that way, radiation and a bunch of other stuff collided inside him to fundamentally change his DNA.
Because he’s a mutate, he wasn’t always like this. He used to be entirely human. Now, he’s not so sure that’s the case.
“You have an incoming text, Peter,” Karen says, jolting him out of his mind. “Irondad says, ‘If I find you wolfing down crickets at three in the morning or liquidizing your burgers, we’re gonna have a problem.’”
Peter snickers, burying his face into the crook of his elbow. He’s fully pressed against the wall now, and it’s doing wonders to calm him down from the existential crisis his mind was just running through.
“There’s one more. It says, ‘Just kidding, ‘roo. You know I’ll keep you no matter how weird you are.’ According to Friday, Tony is making contingency plans in case of further mutations. He is currently drafting what he has decided to call the Smoothie Mixer , an industrial grade smoothie maker that will take anything and blend it into a drinkable liquid.”
“Oh god,” Peter groans. “Tell him that’s probably not happening any time soon, but I appreciate the thought.”
He spends the rest of the night in his nest.
Monday morning, Peter wakes up with an itch under the skin of his wrists. Unease creeps over him when he fully registers the feeling, and he thinks he knows what’s going on before he looks.
This has always been a theoretical that Peter thought about, a situation that he bounced off of Ned and Tony on their more theoretical discussions.
There are small bumps in the insides of his wrists.
“Karen,” he whispers. “Can you see them too?”
“Yes,” she whispers back, seeing his need for a sense of privacy, false as it is. “Would you like me to contact the Science Bros?”
He considers that. They would help, no doubt, but he doesn’t think he’s ready for Tony’s resigned expression, the one he gets when Peter does another impossible thing. For now, it might be better to keep this to himself.
“No,” he says. “I’ll show them later.”
He ignores the bumps for now, and he has a feeling he’ll continue to ignore them until he’s forced to confront them. Laying his head back on his arm, he sighs. That’s a problem for another day.
“Hey, Kar’,” he starts, a grin building on his face.
“Yes, Peter?”
“Can you ask Tony if he’ll still have me if I have eight legs?”
School on Tuesday is every bit as stressful as he thought it would be. He has Ned and MJ to drive off Flash when the boy gets too close, but it’s still hard. The bell shoots through his head and gives him a migraine until he puts on his hard-to-see noise canceling earphones. The smells and movement in the hallways makes him nauseated, and he keeps pulling his sweater up over his nose when he thinks no one’s watching.
When the final bell rings, Peter is out of there like a shot. He shouts a goodbye to Ned and darts for the nearest shadowed alleyway.
He retreats into the far end of the alley and regards the nearby buildings. The rooftop to the left is lower, so Peter looks over his shoulder to make sure no one’s there before launching himself upwards from his bent knees. He hears something crack as he flies upwards, the concrete, but he doesn’t have time to wallow too much because he has vastly overestimated the strength needed to get to the ledge.
Flailing his arms, he falls a few feet to hit the roof and pushes himself into a roll to keep it from breaking beneath him. He’s lighter than average because of the spider bite, but he jumped with enough force that he doesn’t know what would happen to the roof if he hit it straight on.
He lays there on his back for a moment, breathing carefully. That could have gone better.
Peter hauls himself back up to his feet and carefully moves to the edge of the roof he’s on, facing towards Manhattan. Tony gave him permission to skip lab day today, so he’s headed to see Matt and whoever else shows up to see him after the Incident.
Carefully, with his strength dialed back to sixteen percent, Peter jumps from rooftop to rooftop, adjusting his strength for further distances and higher heights. He sticks to rooftops that aren’t near major streets, just in case anyone looks upwards. By the time he gets to the bridge separating Queens from Manhattan, he’s not breaking things when he jumps. He even throws in some flips when he thinks he can get away with it. He walks the length of the bridge before hopping back up to the roofs.
It’s more difficult to jump rooftops in the daytime, especially just after school lets out, so he sticks to the backroads while he moves. Luckily, New York has an unspoken code when it comes to mutants. If Peter moves quickly enough people will just assume he’s into parkour and let him be.
He can tell he’s entered Hell’s Kitchen by the low level of fog in the air. It reminds him of how people think of Gotham in the DC comics that Ned and he read, dark and a little deteriorated.
Matt’s at Fogwell’s Gym, as usual, and he doesn’t react when Peter drops down into the back area.
“Peter,” he says affectionately. “Glad to see you’re okay.”
“Thanks, Matt,” Peter says. He holds himself back from hugging the man, afraid of snapping him in two. “It’s good to see you too. Sorry I missed training on Sunday.”
“It’s perfectly understandable.” Matt sets his cane aside and moves towards the table set out for them, no longer playing for an audience. “Barnes reached out and told us the bare bones of your situation, so I thought I’d bring something special for this just in case you’re still adapting.”
Matt cocks his head to the side and pauses as he reaches out towards the bag on the table.
“And judging by the way you’re holding yourself, you are still adapting to the boost you got,” he adds. With a sigh, Matt grabs the bag and positions himself across the little courtyard from Peter. “So this is what we’re going to do. I will throw something at you, and you will catch it without breaking it. After that, we can start your control exercises over again.”
Peter huffs. He doesn’t like the control exercises. They focus on breathing and meditation, which really, when he thinks about it, might have been what helped him hold up that building on Saturday.
“Fine,” he concedes. “But next time you’ll show me the takedown you used on Danny, right?”
Matt grins, and if Peter squints he could imagine blood covering the man’s teeth. There’s a reason they call him the Devil; that grin sends shivers down the spines of the strongest criminals.
Matt, and eventually Foggy when he gets done visiting a client, throws ping pong balls at Peter until he’s confident he can catch something unexpected without crushing it. They even test out his new and improved Spidey Sense, seeing if he’ll overreact at a sudden threat and destroy it.
Out of all the heroes, vigilantes, and overall enhanced people that Peter knows, Matt is the one with senses the most similar to him. That’s why the man’s control exercises help so much with Peter’s issues, he thinks. Peter and Matt can’t help but sense everything around them, and they’ve found ways to help themselves and each other through meditation.
By the time the sun sets, Peter can catch something coming at him with the right amount of force. It’s easier than the first time around, probably because this isn’t the first time he’s gone through it, and the breathing exercises Matt walks him through are familiar.
Karen chimes from his phone in his backpack, reminding him to head home, and Peter says goodbye to Matt and Foggy.
“See you on Thursday,” Matt reminds. “Bring the suit, we’ll practice patrolling.”
Despite the excitement that statement brings out in him, Peter jumps as carefully as he can up to the rooftops. He doesn’t leave any damage on the concrete below. Score.
He drops by Jessica’s office before he heads back to Queens. He feels bad about making her go out of her way just to move rubble from the top of a building to the bottom, all to free Peter from something he wasn’t quick enough to get out of.
“Shut up, kid,” Jess tells him. She smells like alcohol, but that’s pretty normal. The door to Alias Investigations is falling apart. “Just tell Stark not to let it happen again, you hear me? He’s responsible for you when you’re out of the Kitchen.”
Peter smiles and thanks her, barely flinching when she slams the door in his face. The glass cracks a little more, the wood splintering further.
AcaDec practice takes up most of his time the next day after class. Peter enjoys the club. It lets him have control over his human life, more control than high school gives him anyway. He gets to show his skills and hit Flash where it hurts, his ego.
Flash is absent, a doctor’s appointment according to Mr. Harrington, and Peter finds himself relaxing into practice more and more as time goes on.
MJ runs the group with an iron fist. She asks the questions quickly, expecting her teammates to get to the answer before she has to remind them of it. She respects them all, but she’s also a taskmaster when it comes to the short time they have to practice. Mr. Harrington sits at a distance from them all, watching over them in between reading pages of whatever book he’s reading this time.
Near the end of practice, as always, they pack up the boxes of flashcards and settle back into their seats to talk nonsense. Peter settles in between MJ and Ned.
“Yeah,” Betty says to Abe and Cindy, already deep into their own conversation, “Mom and I were next door when it happened. The amber alert had us running for safety a bit after Spidey got there, but we watched it all happen from the ambulances. Mom got grazed by some debris when it finally went off, so we had front row seats.”
Peter looks up sharply, honing in on their conversation.
“I saw it from my place,” Cindy adds. “We weren’t that close, but I swear the entire block went silent when the bomb went off.”
“You get used to stuff like that in Manhattan,” Abe agrees, “but it’s a different thing to actually see it. Grandma and I were out getting groceries for Dad to cook dinner, so we were on the street when the explosion happened. The police directed us to the nearest bunker, which, wow, I can’t believe that’s an actual normal sentence to say these days.”
“Mama said she couldn’t remember a time that this happened before the last few decades,” Cindy says. “She’s convinced it all started with the Battle of New York, says the entire state is cursed.”
Betty and Abe laugh along with Cindy at the statement.
“Anyway, I only really saw it on YouTube after it happened,” Abe continues. “If I hadn’t felt the explosion, I don’t know if I would have believed Spider-Man could have done what he did. Well, that and the D.C. Incident.”
Betty nods. “Yeah, we’ve seen firsthand how strong he is, but a building? I hadn’t expected that. Ambulances and long haul trucks, sure, but four stories worth of rubble?”
“Has anyone actually done the math on how much weight he was holding up?” Charles butts in from where he’s sitting near MJ. “I heard Brian Cox tweeted about the proportional strength of spiders versus whatever Spider-Man has going on, but I haven’t seen any actual estimate on how much he stopped from falling.”
They glance around to see if anyone has an answer, but it seems like no one does.
“It’s hard to calculate the weight of stuff like that,” Sally says. “From the materials used to the possible furniture and even how high up it is, buildings vary vastly in weight. It’s estimated that a two story house with everything inside is around 180 tons, but Spider-Man lifted between three and four stories when accounting for what the explosion expelled from the top of the building, so take what you want from that.”
“Woah,” Cindy says. There’s an awe-tinged silence from the rest of the team.
Sally blushes and shrugs, “I did some research after the videos went viral. My brother wants to be in construction, so we bet on who could find the best answer.”
“Who won?”
“Me, obviously,” Sally says with a smug smile.
Conversation peters off naturally after that, and MJ calls the meeting not long after. Mr. Harrington escorts them all to the front of the school and down the steps. He stays until all the students are safely off campus, as usual. Peter appreciates that about him. Not many of the teachers at Midtown would do that.
Peter hangs back as well, waiting for Ned’s Mom to arrive so they can go out for an early dinner with his Mother before her shift at the firehouse. He makes conversation with Abe and Betty as they wait for their own rides. Most of the others walk or take the subway, Peter included.
They sit together on the steps of the school’s front doors. Mr. Harrington scrolls through his phone.
“Did you guys see the explosion?” Betty asks, ever the investigator.
Ned and Peter share a look.
“No,” Ned says first. “I was babysitting and didn’t even know something happened until Mom called to make sure we were okay. We don’t live anywhere near where it went off.”
Abe and Betty nod, and in tandem they look to Peter for his answer. Peter, who is a minute away from panicking and sprinting away so he doesn’t have to answer. He shoots a wide-eyed look at his friend.
“Uh,” Peter says eloquently.
A revving engine cuts him off, thankfully, before he can stutter his way to a vague lie that keeps his friends from suspecting he’s Spider-Man. The four of them look to the street in surprise.
“Shit,” Peter mutters under his breath. He sighs and shrugs his backpack onto his shoulder, getting to his feet before anyone else can move. He calls out, “Hey, Jess!”
Jessica Jones raises a lax hand, waving back at him. She lounges on her motorcycle, leather jacket blanketing her in a way that tells Peter it’s probably covering a bullet wound or something else bloody. Sunglasses rest low on her nose, and she looks up at him with a raised eyebrow. She is the epitome of cool, as usual.
“Is that…” Betty trails off, her mouth agape. “Is that Jessica Jones? The P.I. that killed Kilgrave?”
“Unfortunately, yeah,” Peter says. He and Ned do their handshake, and he steps away from his classmates towards Jess and her motorcycle. He waves goodbye to the stragglers, “Well, see you tomorrow, I guess. Get home safe.”
Clambering onto the back of the motorcycle, using his stickiness to keep from falling off, Peter shakes his head. Jess smirks and hands him a helmet. He pulls it on, flicking the visor down to protect his face.
“You’re so extra,” he mumbles before she starts the engine up again.
“Shut up, kid,” she says with a smile, he can tell from her voice. “Hold on.”
She takes off with such speed that a normal person would have gone flying off, but Peter’s spidey enhancements keep him on. Gravity and physics are more of a recommendation when it comes to him, as Jess knows from the Great Super Olympics of Team Red. She knows he’s safe behind her.
Tony probably won’t be happy that one of the Defenders is kidnapping his intern, but that’s future-Peter’s problem.