Chapter Text
Peter rang the doorbell, just like he always did, and wiped his finger off on his jeans, just like he always did. In all the visits he'd paid to Frank, he had never managed to find a place to sit or even lean that wasn’t coated in a dark mystery grime. He'd learned to keep his hands jammed in his pockets to keep himself from absent-mindedly touching anything in the big guy’s frighteningly disheveled home.
The floorboards inside the door creaked heavily. The hair on the back of Peter's neck prickled, and he straightened up and smiled as Frank stared him down through the peephole. There was a gravelly sigh before the door was yanked open a scant two inches, held there by a taut chain.
“What now?” Frank growled through the crack in the door.
“Hey, Frank!” Peter waved, which he regretted immediately. He felt like a middle-schooler. “I was wondering if I could borrow your truck, maybe?” He flashed another smile.
Frank blinked. “My truck?”
“Yeah, so, I'm actually moving this weekend, and I realized I—”
“Can't afford an Uber?”
Peter’s smile became strained. “I don't think Ubers move guys into college.”
“U-haul?”
“Yeah, but… but you have a truck,” Peter emphasized. “And it's… free? Maybe?”
Frank slammed the door shut.
Peter sighed, composed himself, then pounded a fist on the door. “C’mon, Frank, let me in,” he called. “I can be louder! Let me in, Frank Castle! A.K.A., The Pun—”
Just like always, Peter was grabbed by the shoulders and pulled roughly through the door into Frank’s lair. The place had a smell that was equal parts nauseating and comforting—primarily booze and bodily fluids, with an undercurrent of mildew. Peter was thankful that it was dimly-lit only by artificial light, since the sun probably would have cooked it all into an unholy soup.
“God, it’s like you want to get shot!” Frank scolded. His hand gripped the back of Peter’s neck and steered him through the space. “And the hell are you wearing?! How many times do I have to tell you? Dark colors, Pete! What is this firetruck shit?”
“Dude, back off!” Peter squirmed out of Frank’s albeit gentle grip and turned to face him. He looked down at his sweatshirt. “I thought I looked good in red.”
“I don’t care if the sweater’s your friggin’ mother’s—don’t wear it around here!” Frank snapped. Then, for good measure, “Christ!”
Peter ducked out of the way as Frank stalked into his main living space, if it could be called that. It was practically wallpapered in news articles and photos, the purpose for which Peter could only guess at. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say Frank was solving crimes, not causing them.
Frank threw himself into a sagging office chair, pinched the spot between his eyebrows, and just breathed for a minute. The air conditioning fluttered to a stop, and the resulting stillness of the air made the smell all the more apparent. Peter nearly pulled a fist out of the pocket of his jeans just to hold against his nose as protection, but ultimately decided that breaking the hermetic seal wasn’t worth it.
“Did you say college?” Frank finally asked.
Peter cleared his throat. “Uh… yeah.”
“You got in?”
“Yeah. I guess my essay was pretty good,” Peter said. Then he furrowed his brows. “You told me you were gonna be my reference. Didn’t they call you?”
Frank sigh-growled as he spun to pick through his array of burner phones. He held up a flip phone (Peter was sort of impressed he still had one of those) with a sticky note on it: ‘ESU - Pete’s internship. Nice things ONLY!!’.
Peter grimaced. “Awesome…”
“Don’t worry. I always follow my own advice,” Frank muttered as he tossed the phone back into its shoebox home. “Besides. If you wanted a good reference, you coulda asked… gee, I dunno, anyone else?”
Peter shrugged. “I’ve told you: you’re basically the only guy I know.”
“Y’know, you never really gave me a satisfactory answer on that one,” Frank said. His voice was sneaking into that range that made Peter twitchy. “You’re my only repeat customer who’s this, uh… wholesome.”
“I am not—”
“How exactly did you fuck up your life this bad?”
It was a fair question. A fair answer would be… long. And convoluted. And difficult to believe. A fair answer would include a lot of things that Peter didn’t like to think about anymore, and a lot of people he had long since put to rest in his memory. A fair answer would make him a liability in Frank’s eyes, and that would mean the end of the only thing approximating a friendship that Peter had found in the wake of his mistakes.
So Peter said, “Drugs?”
Frank gave him a weary look. “Right. You sure look the type.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, limp bangs hanging in his face. “You said you wanted my truck?”
“Just for, like, an afternoon.”
“What’s in for me?”
Peter rolled his eyes. “How about I don’t turn you in to the cops?”
Frank smirked and shook his head. “Sorry. I’m calling your bluff on that one,” he said.
“I’m not bluffing.”
“You’re gonna turn the only guy you know into the cops?”
Peter shrugged. “Eventually.”
“Sure. I’ll believe it when I see it.” A shadow of a smile crossed Frank’s face. “You still work at that bodega?”
Peter arched a brow. “So what if I do?”
Frank leaned back, and the office chair groaned like it was about to collapse. “Well, I’m a hungry fella, Pete. Guy like me doesn’t get to have a nice, fresh sub very often.”
“No kidding.”
“I like Italian. The works. No tomato,” Frank said, beaming. “You can bring it by on Fridays. Wearing appropriate clothing.”
“What would that be, again? Juicy couture?”
“Okay, smartass. Italian with the works every Friday and a tank of gas.”
“Y’know, it’s not technically ‘the works’ without tomato.”
“Pete?”
“Yeah?”
“I have a gun.”
---
Empire State University was not an exceptionally large or well-regarded school, which was probably why Peter was able to get an acceptance letter in the first place. It was composed of a handful of buildings which hadn’t been updated since the late eighties strewn across a patch of poorly-maintained grass. Easily the best-looking part of the university was its front gate which simply proclaimed ‘EXCELSIOR’. Peter dimly remembered the half-hearted story in the pamphlet about the motto’s origin and ESU’s dedication to scientific progress.
Peter turned the truck off and stared up at the gate. As the engine whirred to a stop, he read that word over and over again. Excelsior! Onward.
He was trying. Nearly everything Peter owned had fit into the bed of Frank’s pickup. The rest of it was in his backpack, strapped into the passenger seat. And it had taken nearly three years for him to accumulate that much.
Peter’s neck prickled, and there came a soft knock on the truck’s window. He turned to see a girl in a burgundy polo, one hand pressed against the car’s door, her face round yet serious. She said something, but it was so muffled through the glass that Peter couldn’t hear.
The girl tapped on the window again and mimed rolling it down. Peter obliged.
“Hiya, newbie!” She said with a sincere smile. “You’re an ESU student, right?”
“Um… yeah?”
“Well, are you or aren’t you?” She giggled a bit and something… flicked?
Did she have a tail?
Peter did a double take, and the tail flicked again—a huge, puffy, twitchy thing nearly as tall as the girl was. “Uh…” Peter blinked. “Yeah, I’m… I’m Peter P—er, Reilly. Peter Reilly.”
“Ooh, you’re on my floor!” The girl stuck her hand out to be shook, an awkward feat from inside the car. “I’m Doreen, your RA. And you can’t park here.”
“Cool,” Peter said, contorting himself to shake the girl’s hand. “Where do I—”
“Around back! I’ll help ya.”
The girl—Doreen—had a sort of sparkle to her. Not just her voice, but the way she swayed slightly forward and backward on the sidewalk. The way she seemed to hit each pose as if it were choreographed. And, of course, the way her tail seemed to move each time she giggled. It was hard not to stare at it, wrong as Peter knew it was.
And, wow, was she strong. Peter watched as she seemed to effortlessly hoist armfuls of boxes out of the truck bed and run them up the stairs. She rivaled his own strength, which Peter clumsily downplayed as best as he could.
“You’re studying physics, right?” Doreen asked as she bounded up the stairs two at a time. “I feel like you’re a physics guy.”
Peter chuckled. “Is it that obvious?”
Doreen shrugged. “I have a sense for these things,” she said. “And I bet you’re from… the Bronx, right?”
“Eh…” As much as it hurt, it was part of his cover story. “Yep. Born and raised. You?”
Doreen dropped a few boxes on the floor. She looked conspiratorily to one side, then the other, before leaning in close. “I’m from Jersey,” she whispered. Then, with a theatrical nudge to Peter’s ribs, she added, “Our secret, ‘kay?”
Peter mustered a weak chuckle in response.
The silence hung just long enough to feel awkward. Then Doreen clapped her hands together, a sound that echoed in the undressed dorm, and said, “Welp! I’ll leave you to it, then. Your roomie won’t be here ‘til tomorrow.”
“Roomie?”
Doreen snorted. “What’dya think the second bed was for? Guests?”
There was, indeed, a second bed. How had Peter missed that?
“Right,” Peter said. “Duh.”
“I’m just a few doors down that way if you need anything,” Doreen said as she backed out the door, thumbing over her shoulder as she did. “Don’t hesitate to gimme a holler!”
Peter flashed her a quick thumbs-up, and Doreen was gone, her tail following close behind.
Weird.
Peter shook his head. “Not cool, Pete,” he muttered to himself as he pushed the dorm room door closed. “You’re weird, too.”
If Peter was thankful for one thing, it was that Doreen’s squirrel-sense hadn’t picked up on any of his own weirdness. Then again, he wasn’t technically a mutant. Well, for all he knew, Doreen wasn’t a mutant either… but she had to be. Right?
The mutant thing was new and challenging exactly when Peter had needed everything to be easy and stay the same. Even thinking it felt selfish—as if the fight for mutant rights only amounted to a personal inconvenience—but it really was just another thing that kept Peter dancing on the outskirts of his own life. Mu-tated, but not a mu-tant. Forgotten, but not gone.
Peter flicked open his pocket knife and sliced into the first box: a pathetic assortment of clearanced school supplies. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to do too much paper note-taking, but his laptop had given him a few good scares in the past couple months. It wasn’t out of the question that it would up and die on him in the middle of class. He hefted the spiral-bound notebooks out of the box and dropped them on the surface of his cramped particle-board desk.
He had a few boxes of clothes, all of which he slid under the bed without much thought. He wasn’t above living out of cardboard. One box of very carefully packed paperwork was tucked as far under the bed as possible. He had also packed some of the barest necessities to get him started: laundry detergent, canned meats and veggies, bland crackers, cold medicine, cough drops, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant. He had managed to get his hands on some cheap sheets for the borrowed twin-size mattress and a moderately fluffy pillow. That left one box.
Peter sat cross-legged on the floor next to the final box. For a minute, he just rested his hands on it and picked at a corner of the packing tape. It’s not like he really needed to open it—he knew its contents better than he cared to admit: a paperback copy of the I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an MIT ballcap, a bag of Peter Pan Cafe coffee beans that would never become coffee, a lego minifigure, an expired MetroCard, and a simple message scrawled on sticky note—‘text me when you get home!’.
He leaned down, pressed his nose against the box, and inhaled. It still smelled like coffee. He hoped it always would. He ran his fingers along the edge of the box once more before shoving it under the bed with everything else.
This was all Peter allowed himself. Everyone who was still alive was blocked on social media and placed at the greatest physical distance Peter could manage. Ironically, it had been watching Frank’s process for making his own life a miserable hellhole that led Peter to take those steps in the first place. Jury was still out on whether he was more or less lonely, but he figured that wasn’t really the point. The point was to glide through the world like a duck through water, never creating more than the barest ripple. Until he died.
Peter closed his pocket knife and rocked onto his knees to tuck it back into his pocket. Then he just stayed there, kneeling in the middle of his dorm, wondering how he was going to drive a wedge between himself and his future roommate without being an asshole.
“Who are you kidding?” Peter mumbled. “You are an asshole now.”
It was a comforting thought.
---
Peter dropped Frank’s truck off that evening and posted the keys through the mail slot. He had conveniently forgotten to top off the tank, but he doubted Frank would notice with the way he lived. He had to admit he didn’t love walking through Frank’s neighborhood in the dark. Not that he saw anything in particular, but when a guy like Frank Castle starts getting worked up about safety…
The subway wasn’t much better, but it was at least familiar. It was a new feeling for Peter to be genuinely nervous moving about New York—he’d grown up here, he’d fought unimaginable evils here, but now he was effectively stripped of the things that used to protect him. He could see things coming, but he couldn’t fight back. Instead, he dug his nails into the softened knees of his jeans and waited for the ride to be over.
It was on the 28th street station that Peter saw him. He wasn’t exactly eye-catching—just a young man slouching under a weak fluorescent light, his hands resting limply in the pocket of a pullover sweatshirt. He looked tired. His face was round, with a bit of patchy stubble poking out of his cheeks. Peter’s neck tingled as he looked at the guy, but his face was downturned. He couldn’t make out any sense of malice or harm or… or anything, really.
The subway doors ground shut and the train started to move again. Only then did the man look up, right into Peter’s eyes.
It was him.
A bolt of cold fear shot down Peter’s spine. It wasn’t like looking in a mirror; this Peter was different. But it was Peter.
For a single, brief moment, the two Peters locked eyes. Something passed between them. A feeling? A question? Who are you?!
Then the train passed into the darkness, and Peter was only looking at his own reflection.