Chapter Text
Peter Parker hadn't slept properly since Devil's Breath and he was beginning to suspect the city was doing it on purpose.
He wasn't complaining.
He never complained.
Well, he did. But that's a totally different thing.
New York was like a roommate you'd lived with long enough to know by sound. He knew the pigeons on the water tower above Ninth Avenue got restless around two. He knew the delivery trucks came in a wave at three and a smaller wave at four and that in between there were maybe sixteen minutes when Manhattan went almost quiet, the closest it ever came to holding its breath. He knew which bodegas kept their lights on all night and which of them would try to sell you a sandwich that had been sitting in its wrapper since the last administration.
He was eating one of those sandwiches now, cross-legged on the rim of the water tower, regretting it. But not enough to give up on it.
He was in his work clothes: the big white spider stretched across his chest like it had somewhere to be, the weave that took a punch better than he did and a mask whose lenses had a bad habit of narrowing and widening with his mood whether he wanted them to or not. The mask itself was rolled up over his nose, because eating through a mask was a skill he'd rather not develop.
"I can hear you chewing," said MJ in his ear.
"I'm a growing boy."
"You're an adult eating a turkey club from a gas station."
"Bodega. I have standards."
"Do you?"
Peter looked at the sandwich. The sandwich looked back. He sighed.
"No," he admitted. "Not really."
Her laugh was warm just like he remembered and was accompanied by the sound of typing.
Wherever she was tonight—her apartment, a corner table in some cafe with a laptop and a coffee she'd forgotten about an hour ago—she had settled into the posture he could hear in her voice, leaning forward a bit with her brain running ahead of her mouth.
"Okay, listen up," she said. "Three storage facilities in nine days."
"Robberies?"
"Not exactly." A pause, the click of a trackpad.
"Robberies get reported. Somebody files a claim, somebody calls the cops, somebody screams at an insurance agent. But there are no reports about these three. The manifests say sporting goods, industrial adhesive, restaurant equipment. Pretty boring, right? Except the buildings are getting emptied out early in the morning by guys who don’t exactly look like movers."
"So… whoever owns the stuff doesn't want to admit they own it."
"Or doesn't want anyone asking what it is." He could hear her smile. "The facilities were leased through different shell companies, all with the same agent in Delaware. And the lease on tonight's warehouse transferred eleven days ago."
Peter stopped chewing. "So you know where they're hitting next?"
"Yes. It's called journalism, Parker. Try it sometime."
"Tried it, didn't work. Also wouldn't wanna steal your thunder."
"Riiiiiight," she laughed. "Cold storage on the far West Side. I'm sending you the blueprints. There's a mezzanine office over the floor and skylights along the north wall. Peter—" The teasing dropped out of her voice. "Nine guys last time, according to a guy at the leasing office who owes me a favour. Nobody's been hurt yet."
"Yet," said Peter.
"Yet."
He crumpled the wrapper and shoved it into a pocket, where it would remain until he found a trash can or died, whichever came first.
Below him the avenue rolled on, yellow cabs and steam and a couple arguing about directions under a streetlight.
Just three months ago the city had been broken, piece by piece, by an old man's vendetta and then gotten put back together. In the process, the city had gotten a little louder, more alert, like a person who'd learned what it felt like to nearly fall.
Peter had gotten a little louder too.
On the inside.
He'd tried the usual fixes. Warm milk, which he hated. A white-noise app, which turned out to be a poor match for a man who could pick out a dropped fork two blocks away. Lying on the ceiling, which was fun for about ten minutes and seemed to only confirm that he was, in fact, awake on a ceiling.
Sleep had turned into something that happened to other people. And he had enough of those things already.
There'd been a time when he'd have tried to file the current conversation into something more than it was supposed to be. But one hundred and ninety-two non-broken bones and losing May put things into perspective.
He'd made his peace with the version of them that existed now. It worked better than the other version ever had, which was either a good sign or a sad one. He had also trained himself not to ask which anymore.
"Also," MJ said, as if she'd been waiting for the exact moment his mind wandered, "try to leave the building standing. The guy I talked to called it 'a fragile asset.'"
"I'm very gentle."
"You are not."
"I'm situationally gentle." He tugged the mask back on. "On my way," he said and stepped off the edge.
Swinging was the one thing in the world that made his brain go completely quiet.
People thought it was all instinct and nerve and it was, mostly. But it was also physics and faith: pick the anchor, let the arc take you, check the math and trust that gravity would remember you at the bottom. There was a moment at the top of every swing, where everything dropped away and nobody needed anything from him.
He could happily spend his life chasing that high.
Maybe that’s what he was doing right now.
Then he killed the momentum and took the rest of the blocks by rooftop. He wall-ran up a brick chimney, vaulted a parapet, flipped over an exhaust vent with one hand on its rim and slid under a strung-up clothesline without disturbing a single sock. He moved between air-conditioning units as the sounds below sank to a murmur: the hiss of tires, a bass line thumping out of a passing car, the mechanical breathing of a thousand compressors.
Suddenly, he got the feeling of being watched. A faint pressure at the back of his neck. It wasn't the spider-sense, which stayed silent. He probably had just been awake too long.
He still looked back. An antenna array, a slice of skyline. Nothing.
"Everything okay?" MJ asked. The wind noise on the line had stopped; Peter was standing still, which could be a cause for concern anytime.
"Fine. Just… nothing."
"You're always fine."
"I'm always tired and fine. Betcha didn't know that." MJ snorted in response.
The warehouse squatted at the end of an industrial street: a long, windowless block of corrugated steel, loading docks down one side, a chain-link fence with a hole in it that someone had made once and someone else had never fixed.
Beyond it, the river was a dark and creeping presence. The air out here smelled of river mud and diesel and a barge horn sounded, as if the city was clearing its throat.
He swung over to the roof and found the skylights, a row of dirty rectangles running the length of the north wall. He crawled over to one and looked inside.
The floor laid itself out like a diagram. The dock doors ran down the east wall in a row: the first standing open to the street, the truck parked nose-out in the second, the last one at the south end sunk in shadow. Between the truck and the back wall stretched a corridor of stacked pallets and above the middle of the floor, the mezzanine office hung from rusted brackets, its glass front looking down over everything like a bored manager.
Nine men, as advertised. Maybe ten.
They wore matching white shirts and black ties, a few of them also had suspenders. The ensemble seemed expensive enough to look like a uniform.
Additional brownie points for sticking to the theme, I guess.
The truck idled with its rear doors gaping, a rental logo on its side half peeled away like a sunburn, while a battered yellow forklift ferried pallets across the floor towards it.
The place still held the cold of what it had been built to be. Even with the refrigeration long dead, the air that seeped up through the skylight gaps smelled of frost. At the back, a walk-in freezer stood with its heavy door propped open, breathing a faint white mist across the concrete. Two of the crew were standing near it, stamping their feet and complaining loudly enough that Peter caught every word through the glass.
"—can't feel my feet," one of them was saying.
"It's a freezer, Vinnie. It's supposed to be cold."
"The building's been dead for a month, smartass. Why's it still cold?"
"Because it's built to be cold. That's the whole—never mind."
"I'm just saying. Nobody told me a freezer job meant an actual freezer."
"Nobody tells you anything."
"And this tie." Vinnie tugged at it. "This tie is giving me a cold.”
"You want to tell the boss the tie's a problem?"
A pause.
"…Nice tie."
Peter grinned behind his mask.
"Do you see anything?" MJ asked quietly.
"Pallets. Crates stacked on pallets. Grey, sealed, about the size of a footlocker." He tilted his head. The lens in his mask caught the stenciling on the nearest crate and rendered it in sharp white: a shield-shaped emblem and beneath, some random numbers. "There's a marking. No words, just numbers."
A tiny shutter-flick in the corner of his vision and the image left for wherever MJ's laptop lived.
"So sporting goods," Peter said.
"Sporting goods," she agreed dryly.
"Bowling balls," Peter offered. "Very dangerous bowling balls."
"Nobody is smuggling bowling balls, Peter."
"You don't know that. There could be a serious shortage somewhere."
Below, the foreman—a wide man with a shaved head and a phone he kept checking—was arguing with one man over a crate that had shifted on its pallet.
"Careful with that one," the foreman snapped. "You drop it, you're carrying it."
"It's just a box, Sal—"
"It's not. Move."
In his experience crooks treated their cargo with the tender care of people who wanted to get paid, but this was something else. This was fear. These men were handling those crates like they'd been told exactly what would happen if one cracked open.
Something moved on the mezzanine.
Peter's head came around. A glass-fronted office was bolted to the steel framework above the floor and behind the glass, folded down behind a desk, a security guard was talking on the phone.
Gray hair, maybe sixty, a moustache that had been carefully kept for a long time. A laminated photo of a grinning kid was taped to the edge of his desk, the kind of detail Peter always noticed and always wished he hadn't.
Nine men, one truck, one civilian(?), one mezzanine that looked like it had been welded together by a committee. He could take the crew in under a minute if nobody got creative.
The guard was the variable.
Peter had learned early that the job was never really about the fight. It was about the person in the corner who had never asked to be in one.
Far off, a siren could be heard. The foreman's head snapped towards the sound. So did everyone else's.
"Well," Peter murmured. "That's one way to move up the schedule."
"Peter," said MJ.
"I see a guard."
"With them?"
"Not sure. Working on it." He was already easing the skylight's latch loose. "Do me a favour and don't say anything. You always jinx it."
"You've got this."
"What did I just say?"
He dropped through and landed on the forklift.
That was not the plan, to be honest.
The plan had been a dramatic arrival in the middle of the room, but the forklift was where the floor happened to be and the driver's expression as Spider-Man materialized on top of him was the highlight of his day so far.
God, he loved this job.
"Evening," Peter said. "Child Welfare. We got a call about some kids out past their bedtime, playing dress-up in their dads' clothes.”
A pause as he took in the scowling faces.
“Oh. No. You're all grown men. That's so much worse!"
The driver screamed and threw himself off the far side. The forklift, rudderless, ground on towards the truck at a walking pace. Peter stepped off it, tagged the driver's ankles with a web so he wouldn't wander into anything and turned to find eight men staring at him.
"It's the Spider!" One voice rang out.
"Nothing gets past you guys," Peter replied.
They came at him all at once, which was the correct decision and also the wrong one.
He went low under a swung baton, caught the hand holding it, redirected it into the man behind, spun and webbed a second guy's hands to his own belt buckle.
"Please remain still, sir. This is now a no-wake zone."
A fist grazed his jaw right then. His spider-sense had already shouted about it, a bright ripple across the back of his skull, but the sense could warn him and could not make him faster and a couple of these guys were built like actual refrigerators.
The first over-committer was yanked off his feet and into two of his friends, the closest thing to bowling Peter had done all year. The next swung a crowbar; Peter caught the arc with a web line and turned the man's own swing around until the crowbar buried itself in a stack of shrink-wrapped pallets. He kicked off a steel support column, flipped over a rushing shoulder and landed behind the man with a web bomb already flying, pinning his arms to his sides.
Something crackled behind him and he ducked another baton without looking, snapped an electric web across the wielder's chest and watched the man's whole body go rigid and then very, very sorry.
Two more went down with their boots stuck to the concrete and an uppercut that ended their futile struggle.
It was almost restful. There was a rhythm to it, a language he'd been using long enough that he could think about other things while his hands got creative.
He swung a hanging chain hoist into one man's shoulder, snapped a pistol out of another's grip and rode a rolling pallet jack across the floor for a delighted three seconds before it rammed a stack of empty crates.
"Please tell me that didn't sound as stupid as it felt," he muttered.
"It sounded like a man falling down some stairs in a very happy way," said MJ.
"That is what I was going for."
The men weren’t running.
The truck's engine was still on, the sirens were getting closer and the smart play for anyone here was to bail. Instead, a knot of them had peeled off to stand between him and the pallets.
One man even threw himself half over a crate with his arms spread.
"Seriously?" Peter ducked a baton. "Guys. Nobody should be this loyal to crates."
"Pete," MJ said in his ear, sharper now. "That marking. It's not on any manifest, any customs database, any registry I can get into. Whatever it is—"
"Later!" He drove both feet into an unguarded chest, landed and found the foreman coming at him.
Sal had been the last to move. He'd been backing towards the truck cab with his phone still in his hand and then he'd stopped, looked at Peter, looked at the crates and made a decision Peter would think about later. He didn't run. He came in swinging with a baton and he was faster than a man his size had any business being.
"Is there a baton store? Is it a franchise? Do you fellas get a loyalty card?" Peter said, dodging.
Blue arcs snapped along the length of the weapon. It hummed past Peter's ear close enough to lift the hair on his neck through the mask. "You know, I'm guessing you guys don't get paid enough for this."
"Shut up!" Sal exclaimed as he tried desperately to land a hit.
"That's fair. I'm also gonna guess, you don't get dental."
Sal swung again. Peter caught the baton's shaft between two web-lines and pulled and for a moment the two of them stood in a strange, straining tug-of-war until Peter let go of one line at exactly the wrong moment for Sal's balance. The big man went stumbling backwards into a pallet.
The crate on top slid an inch and Peter, who'd had a bad feeling about the crates all night, put out a hand and steadied it on instinct.
It was heavy. Not just heavy—wrong-heavy, dense in a way that made even his arm complain. And under his palm, there was a fine vibration.
"Get your hands off that!" Sal roared and hit him with the baton.
It wasn't a clean hit. The sense had warned him a hair too late and he'd twisted, so the arcs skated across his shoulder instead of his spine, but it was enough to light up his whole left side like a struck bell. Peter went down on one knee, swearing and came up with another web bomb already in his hand. He threw it at Sal's feet and the man vanished under a fat white blooming mass. Peter's shoulder was going to have a lot to say about that tomorrow. Tonight, it could take a number and wait.
"How many?" MJ asked, sounding almost impressed.
"I don't know," said Peter. "I wasn’t counting."
The last few had regrouped near the back wall and when he turned, two of them, the pair who'd been complaining about the cold, tried to hit him from the side like line-backers. He jumped over them and in the tangle of elbows and profanity that followed, all three of them wound up sprawling straight through the door of the freezer.
Peter got a boot into someone's stomach. Behind them the door swung shut with a heavy thunk.
Darkness. Cold. On the far side, a bolt slid home.
"Vinnie, buddy, you were right. Nobody told you it was a freezer job."
"Peter?" MJ's voice crackled, breaking up. "Your signal's going—are you in a freezer?"
"Define 'in'!"
He hooked an arm around one of the men and used him as a very unwilling shield against the other's flailing. "For the record, I love the tie. Very Untouchables. Clip-on, though? Bold." He then shoved them both into a corner and webbed them to the shelving. Frost cracked off the wall under his hand.
Outside, the sirens swelled.
Forty seconds, he thought. Maybe less.
He put his shoulder to the door and it didn't move. Fine. He pulled a fist-sized impact web from his belt, pressed it against the steel just above the latch and stepped back. It went off with a dull whump and the door blew open in a cloud of white vapor and splintering steel.
Peter stepped out through the mist like a man with a vendetta.
It did look really cool.
That put him a long way from the mezzanine, with a lot of concrete and some gangsters with a questionable sense of fashion between him and everything he cared about.
Then his spider-sense went white.
The rifle was at the far end of the floor, in the hands of a lean man who had been standing in the dock doorway.
The muzzle came up. Peter fired a web without aiming, on pure reflex. It hit the barrel and the man, more surprised than skilled, pulled the trigger as the rifle was yanked sideways.
The burst went up.
That was the awful part. It wasn’t aimed at anything, just noise and bad luck, a stitched line of holes across the framework overhead.
For half a second nothing happened at all.
Then a support bracket sheared with a crack and the mezzanine lurched. Peter felt it through the soles of his boots before he understood what he'd heard.
Peter was already moving, but he was on the wrong side of the floor and knee-deep in the fight. The office slid off its mount at one end, glass bowing outward, the whole structure canting towards the concrete twenty-odd feet below. Behind the glass, the security guard's face swung up into the light, mouth open and then the glass went and he fell with it.
"No—"
Peter shot a web. The line stretched for the falling man and it fell short. It fell short by a yard. He could see exactly how far it was.
Every part of him that counted and calculated was screaming at the arithmetic: too far, too late, wrong angle, not enough time.
Then the man stopped falling.
He hung a foot above the floor with his arms flung out for balance, like something caught in the moment before a sneeze. Then, gently, he was lowered. The shards of the office glass hung with him, dozens of pieces frozen in a glittering cloud and they drifted apart in the air and settled down without a sound.
The guard sat down where he'd been set, like he wasn't even sure the floor was real. His lip was trembling. His eyes went past Peter, past the men, to the door.
The air had a feel to it.
An electric pressure, like the second before lightning strikes your neighbour's house. His spider-sense didn't flag it as danger. It just hummed there at the back of his skull.
He knew that hum.
Peter turned his head slowly. In the frame of the first dock door, backlit by the sodium glow of the street, a woman stood with one hand lifted and palm forward.
The breeze outside caught her hair and pushed it back from her face: red, dark red like embers burning. She didn't look at the men. She didn't look at the crates, or the truck, or the mezzanine tilted like a broken wing over her head.
She looked at him. She smiled.
The last time he'd seen her, they had been standing in his kitchen, saying goodbye. He could remember her expression, the one she always wore when she wanted to act like something didn’t tear her apart.
He'd spent long enough not thinking about that memory that the not-thinking had become its own kind of muscle.
His mask hid whatever his face and mouth were doing but his lenses didn't get the memo. He could only mutter:
"Jean?"