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The alley smells thickly of blood. Infinitesimal chips of bone hover in the air like buzzards over a carcass. It’s almost smoky, the pain lingering here. A collapsed form, dark as a mountain range shielding the sun, lies beneath the fire escape, and Peter is smoldering.
“Matt,” he calls into the silence, feeling far away. The stitch in his side from sprinting recklessly across the rooftops is distant. It’s like being dropped by the Vulture—those first few moments spent plummeting, the next searching for a parachute that isn’t there, and in what feel like the final seconds of his life, Peter hits the ground running.
Matt, he resists the urge to scream. He pulls the form out from under the fire escape, all the while recalling viscerally a long-gone Peter Parker trapped under the rubble of a warehouse. The form is a man, and the man, Peter knows without prying off the mask, is Matt.
He checks for a pulse, and finds a weak one.
Sirens wail. Fisk’s goons are gone, and only Peter and Matt remain. Peter hefts Matt up and into his arms, hearing the flicker of flames that aren’t there, feeling May’s blood on his hands. It’s so wicked, the way New York seems to part for him when someone he loves is dying.
He remembers going with Matt to confession once. Recalls the long rows of the pews; the mesh hiding the priest; the penance. Peter remembers waiting in the church with the stained glass and the long crucifixes nailed to the walls and the soft, waxed pages of the Bibles, moth-eaten as if left open for hours at a time, and wondering: how could anyone have managed to build such a beautiful place out of such an ancient, gruesome torture? How is all this the result of an execution?
Now, in a New York alleyway in the very same Hell’s Kitchen wherein that church rests upon crumbled mosques and temples, he finds himself thinking: this was inevitable. How could I ever have allowed myself to believe anything different?
(Because it was easy, the priest would say. Because he made it easy. Because, for a moment, it was beautiful.)
So. Is this how it ends? A downed crimson vulture on a well-lit, somber night. It’s familiar. Except this time, the remains are not blazing. And Peter cannot save everyone.
Peter considers a hospital. But—he can imagine the cops, the gang members, and most of all the associates of Fisk clamoring to get at Matt, to finish him off. He can’t bear being the cause of that beyond not being fast enough to help Matt the first time.
So instead he brings the incapacitated vigilante in his arms to Foggy Nelson.
He’s never really met Foggy—he’s been to Matt’s office only once, and even then just for a few minutes. But he knows Foggy’s address like the back of his hand because Matt’s always talking about him.
Matt makes him sound perfect. Peter sees it in Foggy’s eyes when he drowsily opens his apartment door: the friendship they have, the lack of understanding between them and the immense care that makes up for it. And yet when he takes Matt from Peter—having given Spider-Man only a once-over and a invitational nod to the interior of his apartment—Foggy has to call someone else to save his best friend.
Claire Temple arrives fashionably scruffy in her nightclothes and with a massive first-aid kit tucked under one elbow. She, too, disregards Peter. When she sees Matt she murmurs something low and exhausted which sounds like dumbass and expertly flips the kit open and gets to work.
It’s bad.
“Can you save him?” Peter remembers asking later.
“Of course I can,” Miss Temple replies, and Peter can distinctly recall her frown as she says it.
When Matt wakes, Peter has been waiting in Foggy’s apartment for hours. Dawn is like a cobweb brushed away by the closed blinds, and Spider-Man, ordinarily stubbornly nocturnal, sits in one corner trying not to spit out the coffee Foggy gives him.
There is no quiet stirring. Matt regains consciousness with a clumsily-thrown punch and a kick that sends him off the edge of Foggy’s couch. Matt collapses into a heap when his ribs hit the floor, and then rolls onto his fists and tries to push himself up.
Peter steps toward him, and Matt’s head snaps up. He blinks as if into a too-bright sun, the whites of his eyes stark as strips of a bleached sidewalk. Peter can tell he’s straining his ears.
His mask lays on the coffee table, abandoned like the holsters and other armor. The bloodstains remain.
“Peter?” he mutters.
Peter bristles and opens his mouth, but Foggy gets there first.
“Peter?” he echoes. “The kid you’ve been talking about for, like, weeks—is Spider-Man?”
Matt winces, but Peter doesn’t care. He’s felt helpless for way too long by now. “You almost died,” he snarls. He’s never taken this tone with Matt before, hardly even dared with Mister Stark. It’s as freeing as it is bloodcurdling.
“Fisk—” Matt starts.
“The second time we met,” Peter interrupts, almost growling, “you told me not to rush into fights. You called me reckless, you told me to be better—”
It’s like shouting at Mister Stark. These are words he wished he said on the spaceship, on Titan, in the moments before Mister Stark died. These are words he might’ve drafted into a speech to tell during the funeral, if he had been brave enough.
(There was something about that lakehouse that set Peter on edge. Perhaps it was the lies in the peace there. Because although the leaves blew pleasantly and the spring brought rabbits and birds and fish, there was a dead-ness in the air, a helplessness as if in the face of a far more powerful cruelty, and it made every single moment Peter spent there feel like cowering under the immense force of the universe. Like losing to Thanos.)
Matt makes an attempt to pull himself back onto the couch. Peter keeps ranting as he takes Matt’s hand and pulls him up and onto the cushions, not as gentle as he could be. Matt only grunts.
(Peter thinks: maybe Miss Temple hadn’t said dumbass. Maybe she’d murmured martyr, and meant the exact same thing.)
“Peter—” Matt tries, and coughs a little. Peter practically flops next to him, sitting heavily on the part of the couch unbloodied by Miss Temple’s field work. “Peter,” Matt finally chokes out. “I’m sorry.”
His mind isn’t making much sense, it’s so furious. He finds himself saying: “We live like mayflies.” In clarification, waving his hands like Mister Stark during a convention: “We have one of the longest lifespans of all mammals that have ever existed. We as in human beings—are you a human being?” he snaps derisively. “’Cause you act like you think you’re a god sometimes—but we could be like tortoises, like ancient reptiles, like trees. Instead, people like you live like fucking mayflies.”
“People like us,” Matt says, almost fond. And then, with a grimace, “It’s what I have to do.”
Martyr, Peter’s mind chants, and May.
“God-damn it,” he hisses, and ignores the bewilderment he sees from his periphery in Foggy’s gaze, probably because people consistently find it hard to reconcile Peter Parker with Spider-Man. “Because—because,” he snaps, feeling out of breath, “because fuck all the people who woulda had to bury you, right? They can go to hell.”
He doesn’t know how to communicate how small he felt in that alley, how useless. Like he’s not a cog nor a screw in the whole machine of the world—just an onlooker, a phantom, powerful enough to lift the dying man but not enough to save him. It’s like the spell all over again. It’s like being wiped out, being erased, being nothing.
“No,” Matt denies, and Peter leaps to his feet to pace in rage. Foggy takes his place on the couch, holding Matt’s hand, and for a moment Peter feels guilty.
But—that’s his whole thing. That’s the purpose of his life. It’s so that nobody else dies. It’s such a simple anthem, so easy, and yet it’s as complex as world peace: nobody else must die.
And he knows the responses people give to that. Honey, they say, if they’re fake; boy, they say, if they think it’s an honest, gruesome, manly truth they’re telling: people will always die.
Because—no. They can’t. They shouldn’t. Peter won’t allow it.
Peter’s been to different worlds. He’s been on spaceships. He’s seen aliens. And in reality they’re not quite so alien, so strange. Intelligent life follows a simple formula: cruelty over kindness. Does that mean he must expect cruelty?
No. Because Titan looked like, had they arrived a thousand years earlier, it might’ve been beautiful. And from every Asgard, so to speak, there’s a Thor to accompany a Loki. A Peter for every Beck, an Osborn for every Norman, a Stark for every Stane—etcetera, etcetera. So. It would be easy to face such a truth. But he’d be deluding himself with that one, too.
“If I didn’t find you,” Peter begins, stops, starts again. “If I had been a minute late—”
“I would have lived,” Matt assures him, his tone confident despite the raspiness of his voice. “I’ve survived worse.”
Peter abruptly stills in his pacing. He sees Foggy’s head dart up from where it had been resting mutely in his hands, eyeing Peter unsurely. Matt tilts his head. (I can smell norepinephrine, he had told Peter once; I can sense anger like you sense sewage.) “Do you think dying would absolve you?” Peter asks, hushed.
Matt just blinks in his general direction.
“Is it your fucking penance to die doing this? Is that what the priest says? Because, Matt, I will burn down that fucking church, I swear to G—”
Matt rears up a little, and his teeth flash white in the early-morning light. “I was raised in that church,” he snaps. “And I do this because I need to. Hell’s Kitchen needs me.”
“As a lawyer.”
“As whatever is necessary,” Matt says, taking up the reasonable tone he uses in courtrooms. “As whatever is allowed. As—as whatever I’m capable of being.”
“As a dead man?”
“I said whatever’s necessary, Peter.”
Peter slumps a little and drops down next to Matt on the couch. Because the thing is: he agrees. When the cops are corrupt, when deadly weapons are too easy to come by, when nobody seems to give a fuck whether you live or die—when the shadows prowl and snap and bite and the sun rises too late, it is New York’s vigilantes who assure: you are not driftwood. You are not debris.
But. Why does it always have to be someone he loves?
“I don’t want you to die,” Peter states plainly, at last.
Matt looks at him from across the couch. He’s relatively upright, and though he’s still curled around his ribs there’s something indestructible in the way he holds himself.
Hubris, Peter thinks, and Mister Stark.
“I don’t want to die, either,” Matt agrees, and though his words are soft it’s clear his will is unbending.
Peter nods sharply and stands. Matt’s eyes attempt to follow him, but soon flicker again into the vague distance. It’s with a bitter smile that Peter approaches the door. “But you’re willing to.”
Matt straightens, tilts his head, searching for Peter’s presence in the apartment. “Yes.”
Peter doesn’t bother to sigh. He flips the lock on the front door and doesn’t watch as Matt’s attention visibly flits toward him; he pulls the door open, doesn’t look back, but finds himself unable to leave.
“Thanks for the coffee,” he calls back to Foggy, feeling the bitter taste of it lingering in his mouth. And, mustering all his courage: “I won’t be able to speak at your funeral, Matt.”
He remembers clutching a script in his hands at that dead, lonely lakehouse, rereading it over and over, and eventually ripping it in half and putting it back in his pocket. Because, unlike the vigilante Spider-Man, Peter Parker has always been a coward.
When nobody answers him, Peter walks out the door and shuts it gently behind him. His teeth grind with grief.