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saw it in jesus, saw it in superman

Summary:

“Queens boy, born and raised,” Peter said.
“Well, I have a sensitive question for you, then,” Matt said, leaning in a little, dropping his voice to a mock whisper. Peter tensed again. Shit. Maybe he did know.
“You a Mets fan?”
Peter’s head dipped back in relief. Jesus, this guy really was gonna kill him.

It has been nearly six months since college admissions season, and Peter Parker has royally failed to launch. Matthew Murdock gains a stalker.

Notes:

title is from breakin' point by peter bjorn and john! lyrically somewhat relevant
i wrote most of this in 2022 in a post-NWH fugue state... ddba lit the fire under me again, so figured i'd chop it up into something more or less presentable and share. it's not really up to my current standards, but it was fun to write so hopefully it's at least a little fun to read :) it's mostly done. will probably end up around 40-50k depending on whether or not i decide i hate the existing plot and completely overhaul it

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter was being self-indulgent.

It was not anything new.

He was headed to the shop just to look at MJ, not hover, or try to talk, or be weird. Just to get a look at her face.

It was teetering ominously close to August, the cruel tail-end of July. He had only a few weeks left to look at her before her disappearance was something like permanent, so he may as well be self-indulgent while he still could.

He went during the early morning (or about as early morning as he’d been up since he was out of high school) specifically to keep it un-weird—he got the sense she was beginning to catch on to why he’d usually come closer to close and linger until the mops came out, and he didn’t want to freak her out too much. Look, he’s a normal customer of a coffee shop whose main motive is to buy coffee and leech WIFI, not be weird or a creep. He promises!

The mid-morning rush was no joke, though.

He opened the door, and with his second step across the threshold, he was already in line. He just settled in. Not like he had… literally anything else to do today.

He tapped a foot on a nonsense beat.

What do normal, not-weird people do when waiting in line, again?

Scroll various apps, it seemed. These kids and their damn phones. Too bad Peter’s was running off a cheapo prepaid SIM these days. Can’t waste data.

Peter let his eyes drift over to MJ instead, mind a mile-high on fond thoughts of her loose curls and bitter smiles and blackberry perfume. Though when he actually got around to looking her way, there was this guy totally in the way. Peter plummeted back down to Earth.

Some schmuck in a suit was all up in her personal space. His face—was he wearing sunglasses inside?—was bent way too close to hers. What? That was a grown ass man, and she was at work, like, busy. She didn’t need any of that. What the hell was he doing? Back up, asshole. So weird. So weird, in fact, his legs were already moving without much critical thought or consideration for the angry mutters of “hey, no cutting” from the line.

“Hey,” Peter barked.

MJ looked up. “Um… hey?”

“Hey,” he said, “is this guy bothering you?”

MJ didn’t respond, aside from staring pointedly. His heart skipped a beat.

Peter tried the creep instead. “Hey, give her a little breathing room, alright?”

MJ opened her mouth to say something, before thinking better of it, just wore a light grimace. What was this?

Peter reevaluated the scene, looked at the dude who hadn’t yet cared to turn his head to his. He did so slowly, a bit hesitantly. As he turned to face Peter, he noticed the long walking cane he’d had tucked against his chest. Shit. Their heads were probably close because it was nearly impossible to hear anything in the packed café; everyone else’d just pointed items off the menu. Shit.

“Um,” Peter said.

“Don’t go anywhere, I’ll get your order up for you right here, Matt,” was all MJ said, tapping the counter with both hands, though her eyes never left Peter’s. His were set on her face, desperate for some glimmer of sympathy, the image of a man meditating on his own tombstone. All he got was the subtle curl of her lips. “And, ah, Peter Parker, you’ll have to go to the back of the line to be served, please.”

“Course. Sorry,” he managed, and immediately heel-turned away from the counter. He walked as fast as he could before it was called running, practically body-slammed through the door, its bells jerked into an offended jingle.

It was taking literally all of his willpower not to web to the top of some building in his civvies right then and there. So embarrassing so embarrassing so embarrassing he was unfit to be a part of human civilization he needed to get blown up or move to a cave immediately. Where was a supervillain when he needed one? They always want to blow his brains out when he didn’t want his brains blown out, never when he did. What was that about?

“Excuse me!” a man’s voice called. “Excuse me.”

What had MJ called him? Matt. Matt had a completely different vibe from the nefarious character Peter’d written for him inside his head.

His dark hair, glinting copper in the sun, was a tiny bit messy from his hustle out of the shop. It was a handsome face, firm-jawed, thick-browed… maybe, actually, a bit on the boyish side of handsome, a charming roundness to the features that weren’t all sharp and solid. He was the image of the nonthreatening husband from a detergent or meal-prep service commercial.

He was already holding a coffee (MJ did have excellent service) in one hand and his walking cane and leather shoulder bag in the other, a real white-collar type. His slate-colored suit was plain—landed more pencil-pusher than Tony Stark on Peter’s surprisingly comprehensive mental spectrum of suits—but it was neatly pressed and well-fitting.
Speaking of fit… Peter got the sense he was a very big fan of physical fitness from the semi-distinguishable swell of muscle under his button-down.

Peter stared, waiting to be scolded. And then he wanted to die again. Matt couldn’t exactly sense him, could he? He had to announce himself.

“Hi there,” he offered.

“Ah, hello. Thank God,” the man said, settling his head more accurately towards Peter’s voice and putting on a diplomatic smile. He tucked his cane under his other arm, pulled his bag over his shoulder, and offered Peter his hand. “Sorry about all that, um…?”

Peter winced but took the hand in a shake. “Um, it’s Peter, sir. I should… I should be the one to apologize! I was making some pretty bad assumptions. Accusations. I'm sorry.”

“No, not at all,” the man said. “You were just looking out for a friend, weren’t you?”

“Not exactly. I mean yes, exactly, looking out, but we’re not… the two of us aren’t friends.” He stumbled over his words again. “Not like dating not-friends! Just normal not-friends. Acquaintances.”

The man titled his head. At the new angle, the white sun trickled through his stylish red lenses. The illusion they provided was just barely broken—his dark eyes weren’t set anywhere near Peter’s.

“Oh, I got the sense that… well, you know what, that’s even better of you, isn’t it? Looking out for all of your neighbors, no matter their relation.” His features settled into another polite smile, lips tight over his teeth. “Anyway, I’d hate it if you went on kicking yourself for the rest of the day. It was just a misunderstanding, and I took no issue. I thought it was sweet, really.”

“I appreciate that, for sure, but I definitely… it definitely was my, um, actual bad," Peter emphasized. “But you’re really cool for calling out after me though. You totally didn’t have to do that.”

“Of course,” the man said. “Just looking out for my neighbors, too.”

He paused. Something too subtle to be called an expression ran over his face. Though the man wove his words in precise patterns, nonverbally, he may as well have been communicating with lines drawn in sand.

Which Peter figured made perfect sense. He supposed he should just be grateful the man couldn’t see the bright red embarrassment painted boldly on his own face. Was it in his voice? He hoped it wasn’t in his voice.

“Peter,” Matt said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” he replied quickly. Anything to feel like he was doing the man some kind of service, some kind of returned favor.

“What are you?”

Peter was desperate for context, senses suddenly razor sharp, but he found none. The man’s voice was completely level, face completely illegible.

What… was he?

Peter’s blood flushed cold through his veins; his eyes stung.

Peter Parker was a 17-so-so-close-to-18-year-old. He was more or less a human being. He was no longer a son, a nephew, a friend, a boyfriend, an intern, or a college hopeful. He was a penniless loser, Spider-Man, and not really a whole lot else after the spell, but who’s asking?

It was as if the genre had suddenly shifted. He’d gone from an average day on a sunlit street to something out of a Noir, a thriller, the climax of a slasher. The birds were still chirping, and the cars were still honking their horns, but the scene may as well have been scored by the screams of violins.

The stone-faced man in front of him grew menacing. This must be an all-powerful villain, right? Possessing some invisible ability to wrench Peter’s identity from him, even after all of the blood and tears he’d poured down the drain to keep it close.

Should he run? Make a scene? Or was that what he wanted?

Peter almost wanted to cry out, hah, Mysterio, or Loki, or… someone else with evil illusionistic powers! This is your doing, isn’t it! The horrifying things I’m feeling! That’s why this stranger has such a hold over me, from three measly words! But he was incapable of moving his mouth at all. His heartbeat became the only sound he could hear.

And then the man tilted his head again in a particularly puppyish gesture and at once broke the enchantment.

“Peter, are you still there?” The man’s brow had knit—his face had such plain concern on it that the dark thoughts Peter had been caught up in immediately embarrassed him all over again. They faded quietly behind his eyes like a bad dream. This was just… some harmless dude, really. Who he’d worked himself up over for no reason. Twice. In like a two-minute period. What the hell.

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” He loosened his throat with a humorless laugh. “What am I? Like, um, I’m currently in between education and employment, if that’s what you’re asking, heh… um.”

“Oh,” the man replied. There came and went another micro-expression. “Yes. Sorry if I phrased it oddly.”

Peter’s eyebrow ticked up. Hm. Alright. Sure. Anyways.

“Did you actually want coffee, by the way?” Matt added. “A snack, maybe?”

“No—well, I mean, yes, but I was mostly just in there for my, um, not-friend.”

Matt smiled widely enough to show his teeth and paint little lines over his cheekbones before Peter could stutter the last of the sentence out. It was very heart-fluttery and sunshiny and all that, but it also confirmed Peter’s vague suspicions that his previous smiles were all a little fake.

“Well, as sweet as that is, you should’ve lied. I would’ve treated you. Still will, in fact.”

“Nah. No, thank you, I mean. It’s very nice of you to offer, and thank you for that offer, but it's alright,” Peter managed.

“You know, I once got hit in the head with a collection plate,” Matt said, somehow straight-faced. “Took it as a very, very hard sign to exercise generosity whenever the opportunity presents itself. Allow me to, yeah?”

What the hell?

“I’m good, seriously,” Peter said. “You should, uh, pay it forward. No need to be generous with me.”

“None at all?”

“Really.”

“Alright, then, if you’re certain,” he said. “But it’d be no trouble.”

Peter blinked. God, this guy was persistent. Made Peter a bit suspicious. But the 4 bucks he’d set aside for a small iced coffee were the last of his eating-out budget for the week, and it was only Tuesday… well, if asking again after being turned away thrice was good enough for the rabbis, perhaps it should be good enough for Peter.

“When we say no trouble,” Peter tried, “are we talking, like, none at all, or some non-zero value?”

“None at all,” Matt said, amused. “You know, if you’re worried about being indebted to a stranger, I could, uh, trouble you for a walk to the subway afterwards. I’m far from home, and a little turned around, if I’m being honest.”

“Of course,” Peter said. “I mean, I’d do that without compensation, even. It’s kind of my thing, actually, if you can believe it. Walking people around.” Well, Spider-Man’s thing, but that distinction was hardly relevant to the conversation.

“That’s a, uh, nice hobby,” Matt hummed, offering Peter his elbow. Okay, maybe it did sound a little insane outside of the context of Spider-Manning.

“Hey, no way in hell am I going back in there, by the way,” Peter said, taking it. “Not sure I can ever go in there again. But you can treat me to the next nicest, if that’s alright.”

“Fair enough,” Matt said. “Lead the way.”

Despite his blessing, Matt became patently unamused when Peter led him to the bodega across the street and the cashier requested $5.99 for a combo self-serve coffee and toasted bagel. The two settled out front at a filthy little table. God, it was so hot already, Peter noticed, taking a long sip. Heat rose from the sunbaked asphalt in shimmery little waves between the hurried legs of pedestrians. Maybe he should’ve done something canned and cold.

“Should I take this personally?” Matt said from behind his coffee. “What made you think my sense of charity is this skim?”

Peter choked a little at the apparent faux pas before the drink was set down to reveal a wry smile. Ah. Jokes.

“Hey, don’t diss a nice, honest cup of crap coffee, man,” Peter said. “This city was built on crap coffee.”

“Well,” Matt said, “I guess I can appreciate the, uh, cultural significance of crap coffee. But I’ll do it from a distance whenever possible.”

“Missing out,” Peter said, mouth full of burnt bitterness, and Matt just gave him an airy laugh in response.

Right. Small talk. Conversations. Peter definitely remembered how to do those.

“You said far from home. Are you in from out of town?” he asked.

“I suppose that depends on what you count as the town,” Matt said. “I’m just in over from the Island for work.”

“Oh, fancy,” Peter hummed.

“Well, I’d hardly say that. Hell’s Kitchen,” Matt said. “This home for you?”

“Yep.” Peter gave his answer before realizing it was a little bit of a lie nowadays. May as well qualify it with a bit of hard truth: “Queens boy, born and raised.”

“Well, I have a sensitive question for you, then,” Matt said, leaning in a little, dropping his voice to a mock whisper. Peter tensed again. Shit. Maybe he did know.

“You a Mets fan?”

Peter’s head dipped back in relief. Jesus, this guy really was gonna kill him.

“Course,” Peter said. “I think it’s like, illegal to root for anyone else down here.”

This really cracked Matt up for some reason, got a second real smile out of him.

“Hey, me too,” Matt said. “They’re not looking half bad this year, are they? Pitching rotation’s about as strong as it’s ever been.”

“No, they are not,” Peter huffed. “I got serious trust issues, though. Just waiting for some Tommy John news to drop.”

“Can’t say I don’t get it,” Matt said. “Hard team to trust, our Miracle Mets. But it’s fun to have a little faith, right?”

“Maybe them miraculously choking every damn year is the part I believe in,” Peter said.

“Why stick around, then?” Matt said. “There’s excellence waiting for you just up the river.”

“I dunno,” Peter said. “Just what I was born into. The Yanks are for the lucky ones, right? I’m sure your reasons are about the same.”

“This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try,” Matt intoned, much in the way one recites a bit of scripture.

“Where’s that from?”

“Old-time baseball writer,” Matt offered. “Said there was more Met than Yankee inside all of us, and that was the appeal, how their, uh, remarkable capacity for failure reflects our own. I always liked the sentiment. We need to put a little faith in our Mets, because we have to have a little faith in humanity.”

The bitter thing that’d curled in the back of Peter’s head writhed at the implication. Of course he knew there was good in humanity. It’s just that none of it was really… for him anymore, was it?

“It’s less about faith,” Peter said, “and more about a measured response to a frequent outcome. Sides, you got no expectations, you never get disappointed.”

Matt took a long sip of coffee.

“That’s perfectly sensible,” Matt said, his free hand tapping an aimless rhythm on the table. “Though in my experience, avoiding disappointment is only a short-term solution. You need something at least half-decent to believe in if you’re in it for the long haul.”

“Hey, man, are we still talking baseball here?” Peter said, laughed dryly.

“Not sure,” Matt said. “That what you want to talk?”

And there it was again, that fear bubbling up from nowhere—something in the slight tilt of his head, or the cold glint off his glasses, that made Peter feel like he’d been flayed down to his core.

All at once, Peter was angry.

He’d gone from neutral to furious in a moment, no pit-stop at pissed off. Who in the hell did this guy think he was? Were the hidden terms and conditions on the coffee and bagel some kind of therapy session? But most importantly—how was he reading Peter like a goddamned book?

Peter swallowed any accusations or insults under the last bite of his bagel, made a show of checking the time on his phone that probably went unobserved.

“Hey, is it all good if I walk you to the station now, man? I got a thing. In a bit,” Peter lied.

“Of course,” Matt said with a polite smile, already rising to stand. If he’d picked up on any change in Peter’s manner, he was doing a damn good job of hiding it.

The three-block walk to the station was mercifully quiet; the only words spoken were warnings of curbs and stairs and other obstacles and the various expressions of appreciation that followed them.

Once they’d reached the turnstile, all that anger vanished as soon as it’d come on, replaced with regret and a little shame. Peter was about to let another opportunity slip through his fingers, wasn’t he? If he thought up some plausible excuse, the childish part of him wondered, would Matt go sit back down with him?

Hey, maybe they could watch—or listen—to a game together sometime. That’s a normal enough thing for a teenager and some thirty-something to do together, right? They could go to some sports bar that pretended it was a restaurant. The suggestion had made it all the way to the tip of Peter’s tongue before his nose filled with phantom scents of long-cleared smoke and long-dried blood.

No expectations, no disappointments.

“Gate’s right here,” Peter said instead.

“Appreciate the guide, Peter,” Matt smiled, feeling through his wallet for a MetroCard. “Hope I didn’t keep a busy young man.”

“Course not,” Peter said. “Thank you so much for the coffee. Seriously! Made my day. Month, even.”

“No problem at all. Hey, if I see you around again, I’ll buy you another,” Matt said.

Peter paused.

“It’s a joke,” Matt said to Peter’s silence. “You can laugh.”

“Ha?”

“You have yourself a good one, Peter,” Matt said, disappearing onto the platform with a little wave.

“You too!” Peter yelled.

Was the ‘busy young man’ part a dig?

If it was a dig, he totally deserved it.

Notes:

did you guys know both characters are canonically mets fans:D cause i did and it's always delighted me. very appropriate for the patron saints of lost causes

the line matt quotes is from roger angell's article, "the 'go!' shouters," which he wrote for the new yorker in 1962. it's not ... technically available online anywhere without a paywall... but it's easy enough to find in certain places, and it's a lovely bit of reading even if you don't know anything about baseball.

full passage:

Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try—antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

Chapter 2

Summary:

re: schedule -- i'll be posting once a week every tuesday until the pacing and ending have a shape i like so i have a bit of a buffer(currently 13 chapters) to neaten everything up. i may break my own rules and double-upload if i feel a chapter is too short/too much of a nothingburger on its own... actually yeah next week will probs be a double
also thank you for the comments!! you guys are too kind. no literally pls let me know if there's anything i should be improving upon

Notes:

this chapter is best read while imagining matt trying very very hard not to laugh the entire time

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter had been caught up in a pretty dull routine for the past couple months.

Wake up past noon in an empty, undecorated apartment, eat a poorly-cooked (but gradually improving!) meal if he had an appetite, study, waste time online, do some sketchy ass gig work until his inbox was empty, study some more, waste more time online, occasionally leave the apartment for food or toilet paper, light afternoon nap (read: 7 pm to 11 pm) so he could be refreshed for Spider-Manning, and then Spidey it from around midnight to an unspecified pass-out time (either from exhaustion or getting his head knocked in), repeat.

Listen.

He was in a really weird place, alright?

Even though he lived like it, he wasn’t actually completely broke. The life insurance deposits had come in about a month and a half after the complete Situation-Normal-All-Fucked-Up that was college app season. It had completely blindsided him, to put it lightly.

He’d dropped by the mailroom one day and picked up a stack of letters from his bank and opened them without much thought, expecting monthly statements he also got digitally or an advert for a credit card he wouldn’t actually qualify for or a few cents left over from one of his student worker payrolls or something else worth less than the prepaid postage.

Instead, they were worth nearly six figures.

It seemed that even though everyone in the universe had forgotten Peter Parker’s existence, that didn’t have anything to do with the account and routing numbers May had put in as the beneficiary of her life insurance plan.

And it was 4 different sets of payouts and inheritances. It included his parents’, which had gone into a trust under Ben and May, Ben’s, which had gone to May, and May apparently hadn’t touched a dime of any of it. She’d occasionally mention she had his money put aside for him, and to set his hopes as high as he’d like with college, but he didn’t know she meant… quite this much.

The realization made him a bit miserable. The only reason he was able to self-justify the burden he was on her most nights was by figuring it wasn’t her money she was spending on his extracurriculars or health problems or stupid hobbies, but his. But no, she’d raised him out of her pocket, like the saint she was.

And then it was her policy on top of all of that, which was no paltry sum—she was a fed worker, after all.

It wasn’t a fortune, especially in New York, but in some kind of gesture of mourning he’d put it all in a color-coded spreadsheet one day, just like May would’ve told him to. Depending on how stringently he budgeted it, it could last him a good couple years without a dime of income (though he'd kept working, as he was May's child; he knew better than to stay in the red a moment longer than he had to).

Now, this scenario meant no shot at a four-year college degree, but he was starting to see that as an inevitability, anyway. Just too much damn paperwork he no longer had. No transcripts, no letters of recommendation, no nothing.

So, with the danger of starvation pushed back by half a decade and 99.9% of his dream careers permanently out of his reach forever, Peter was beginning to realize something about himself: he was a pretty simple guy, with pretty simple motivations.

When he had nothing to fight for, he could motivate himself by having something to look forward to. If he had nothing to look forward to, he could motivate himself by having something to fight for.

He had nothing to fight for, since he was housed and fed and had no one left to protect. The general public of New York, maybe, but that was more abstract than simple-guy Peter needed. And saying that he had nothing to look forward to was basically the understatement of the century at this point.

Besides, looking forward to things was the enemy.

Peter would never admit to anyone that payouts were the nails on the coffin, not even himself. They were quite literally the fiscal manifestation of the blood of his loved ones, and it would take an astounding amount of callousness to treat them like baggage. But they kind of were.

In the time before the checks, he was essentially a five-foot-seven knot of negative feelings, but he was also sharp as a knife. He’d impressed himself with the depth of his instincts and will to survive—he secured himself housing for when the shoe would drop with May’s lease and fed himself and burrowed his way into the city's dubious cash-only job market with what was essentially concentrated chutzpah and not a whole lot else.

It was like he had this untapped geyser of willpower that finally burst to flow through some crack in his heart. And then the money came, and he didn’t need to be sharp anymore. He was still a knot of negative feelings, just a dull one. His willpower couldn’t drown a gnat.

And it wasn’t like he could just give it all away, though sometimes he dreamed about it disappearing. Terribly guilty dreams, with how lighthearted they left him in the morning.

The worst part of it all was that his mad dash for survival had been the perfect panacea for grief—it filled up the hours that would’ve otherwise been used to wallow in misery. Once he was done running for his life, though, he had plenty of free time. He sobbed himself to sleep more entire months later than he had in the first freshest few days.

At this point, he was mostly just proud of himself for managing not to completely lose his mind yet. He didn’t know it was even physically possible to be lonely enough that it hurt.

He thought about getting a goldfish or something that would look him in the eyes but felt a little too embarrassed to go through with it. And if he managed to kill it? He was so close to the edge that even flushing some three-dollar betta might be enough to tip him right on over.

He didn’t talk to anyone except cashiers and clerks as Peter or criminals and victims through the mask. The brief and somewhat excruciating exchange from the morning was the longest and most personal conversation he’d had in months—by a pretty wide margin, too. So, needless to say, the way he’d run to his laptop after the strange encounter was most excitement he’d felt in weeks.

Peter’s finger hovered over the enter key. Like, was it impolite? Immoral, even? To boil someone down to their disability?

Was it disrespectful? Peter’d done disrespect well enough already on their first meeting.

The obvious aside, Peter wasn't exactly why he was so caught up on the guy. Maybe it was the series of freak-outs he’d given him, the fallout of which was still yanking on his heart now and then. Maybe it was just because he was a bit of a mensch. Probably the latter, Peter thought. He played through the exchange over and over in his head as he made his way back to his apartment and concluded that he was just being overly paranoid the entire time.

The dude probably just wanted to know if he was in college or high school or something, be sure he was on the straight and narrow, talk a bit of baseball… normal-people things, right?

Peter pressed enter.

‘Matt blind Hell’s Kitchen’ had more results than he’d expected.

“BLIND JUSTICE: FORMER KID HERO SHOWS OFF HEROICS FOR KID IN COURT,” the headline bragged. It was some filler from a few years back about how attorney Matt Murdock had gotten a massive settlement for a couple whose child was paralyzed due to a company’s negligent use of dangerous chemicals.

It was only newsworthy because the reporter had dug up how Murdock himself had been blinded by a similar chemical mishap and knit together a real tearjerker out of that.

A picture of Peter’s Matt standing firm behind the tearful couple and their son in less stylish glasses and a goofier haircut confirmed his identity. The next result down was a poorly digitized bit of microfilm from an open-access newspaper archive that confirmed the details of Murdock’s own childhood accident. It happened while the boy was trying to help people.

He was saving lives at nine. Mensch from the cradle?

A cursory search of the archive brought up another fragment of an article, dated a miserably short time later—his father, an up-and-coming boxer and the boy’s only known relative, was shot and killed. It was one instance in a hot string of mob-related violence, and the article was mostly just harping on how little the cops were doing to stop it.

His surviving son was placed in the custody of his local church, the reporter offhandedly noted at the end.

So, Matthew Murdock was a lawyer, and a pretty good one, too. A search of his full name brought up a bio of a Hell’s Kitchen native with a neat stack of distinguished degrees, laudatory tales of and thank-yous for his pro-bono work, and long-time connections to a short-lived but shockingly successful District Attorney candidate.

At present, he practiced at Nelson and Murdock, a two-person firm with a barely functional website. They were technically criminal defense attorneys, but they seemed to also dabble in housing disputes, tenant law, worker’s compensation, all sorts of fancy words that meant looking out for the little guy.

Mensch was beginning to feel underpowered. Saint? Bodhisattva?

Explained his godly patience and charity, Peter supposed.

He wasn't fixated on this Matt guy, Peter told himself. It was interest. Very innocent interest. He just had a lot of time to contemplate morality these days, that’s all, and he thought it might be a good excuse to do a little character study.

It wasn't like it was stalking, alright?

The distance was merely a safety precaution. Best to minimize chances of exposure to that seemingly contagious Parker Luck.

And, more importantly, it was just a totally inane excuse to see a little new scenery. Like taking a dog to a new park, just a little enrichment; but he was the dog, and also the owner, and the park was all the way across the damn East River…

So, before he gathered the wherewithal to feel shame, Peter wove across subway lines with the suit in his backpack.

Murdock was pretty easy to track down. The lights were still on at his office when the lazy summer sun got its act together and set, so Spider-Man posted himself up on the roof across the way, calibrating his audio accordingly.

Murdock and another—Nelson, must be—were talking plenty about very little that had any meaning to Peter. Semi-English legal jargon, mostly. He wondered guiltily if his eavesdropping was some especially unique breach in confidentiality.

But it wasn’t like he had any motive to take advantage of a couple of displaced tenants, a trespass, and a DUI, right?

Okay, the DUI was an eyebrow-raiser. Peter had typically zero tolerance there. But it seemed they planned to argue that their client was unjustly targeted during a traffic stop with no other apparent cause—the cop hadn’t even cared enough to do a breathalyzer before arresting him, just said ‘his manner seemed altered.’

Peter never thought of it that way. And then it made him revisit the times he’d dragged drunk drivers out of their cars or webbed away their keys, before remembering, oh, right, I got fancy senses and that’s how I spotted them in the first place, and they were all definitely 100% sloshed.

Eventually, Nelson and Murdock locked up for the night, and the two came down the stairs shortly after. They had their suit jackets folded over their arms, shirts rolled to the elbow, all shiny and flushed from the summer heat. Murdock was wearing a wide grin as he linked arms with Nelson.

“We’re going to destroy them,” Nelson said, punching through the air, presumably a demonstration of the scale of destruction to come.

“Obliterate, even,” Matt concurred.

“In the mood for a little premature celebration, Mr. Murdock?” Nelson asked.

“Always, Mr. Nelson.”

“Really?” Nelson said, giving Matt’s shoulders a little rock. “No midnight dalliances to be done?”

“Nah, not tonight, Foggy.” Matt said. Geez, the guy really knew how to smile around Nelson, huh? Peter was now doubting the authenticity of the ones from the morning he’d thought were real.

Then, as if it was the funniest joke ever told, Matt added, “Besides, I think someone’s covering my shift.”

A lawyer has to work two jobs? NYC cost of living is fuuucked, Peter thought.

“Do I even want to know whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean?”

Matt just gave Nelson a cryptic grin, teasing eyebrows making an appearance above his glasses.

“God, you’re insufferable,” Nelson said. “Let’s go, I’ll liquor it out of you.”

The two disappeared into a local dive bar, emphasis on the dive. No way in hell was Peter going to be able to eavesdrop on a place like that. He tuned into the police scanner instead—may as well get some crimefighting in while he waited for his mark (uh, no, that sounded nefarious… his subject… of… interest?) to knock a few back.

He kept a lady in possession of her purse, chastened some assholes who were getting rowdy with their Uber driver, and fixed someone’s stuck window. That one he didn’t get from the radio; he just happened to be hanging out on the wall next to the gal who’d been breaking a sweat to get it open.

“The hell is Spider-Man doing in Hell’s Kitchen?” she’d asked after, leaning out to get a good look at him. “Don’t you do Avengers shit? Should I be seeking shelter?” She’d lit up a cigarette, offered Peter one in thanks. He’d refused, though not without a little morbid curiosity—his souped-up lungs could probably take it, right?

“Oh, shit, is that where I am?” he’d replied mildly. “Man, I got zero sense of direction.”

And then he realized it’d been nearly an hour, and he had no practical idea how long adults were supposed to spend in bars, so he swung his way back. Just in time, too—a few minutes after Peter returned to his post, Nelson and Murdock staggered out the door.

They parted ways with a long, rocking hug (aw, these guys were so cute), and then Murdock turned to tap his way home. He still had a big old grin plastered his face as he walked—swayed—alone; how many had he had? Good thing Peter was here to supervise.

Of course, absolutely nothing happened. Murdock settled comfortably into his apartment. A penthouse suite! Maybe that’s why he needed two jobs.

Peter was doing his stretches for the long swing back home when Murdock’s phone rang, announcing his partner’s name.

“Hey,” Murdock said. Peter couldn’t quite make out the other line.

“Yeah, I’m home safe. You?”

“Nah, I told you I wasn’t going out,” Murdock laughed. “Not feeling like a liar tonight. Besides, I got my stalker.”

Peter let out a quiet gasp. What? A stalker? Who was stalking Matt Murdock?

“Hey, listen, let me… gonna have to hang up on you,” Murdock said, all levity suddenly evaporated from his voice.

“Yeah. No, it’s fine, it’s not any sort of problem, just… I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

“Sure, sure. Goodnight, Foggy.”

Peter uncurled from his shocked stiffness. Well, thank god he was here, then—he quickly resolved to keep vigil at Murdock’s apartment all night if he had to.

Though the bedroom door slid shut as soon as he made said resolution. Peter picked up the opening of dresser drawers, running water, whispered prayers, shifting sheets.

Sounded like bedtime. Huh.

Well, he could always… keep his vigil around the general domain of Murdock’s apartment, Peter decided, switching back on the radio.

It was a fairly quiet night, all things considered. Dispatch was really only chiming in now and then to move units around, swap out patrol shifts.

Peter got himself high up—high as Hell’s Kitchen offered, anyway, which felt like a mile below the behemoth that was the thundering heart of Manhattan—and took a moment to admire the sights.

This was meant to be enrichment, after all.

Peter had been across Europe, he’d been through the void of outer space, seen alien sunsets, but he knew nothing, and he meant nothing, could compare to a clear summer night in the City.

From this height, it was easy to spot the scars of Hell’s Kitchen, broad swaths of destruction left behind from the Battle of New York. Though parts of that day seemed fresh, the wounds had all since been scabbed over with shiny new steel-and-glass construction, anachronistic among the brick-and-stone buildings that made up the bulk of the ancient neighborhood.

Peter’s memory of the Battle was all colored with the general haze of helplessness he now associated with the Before. The bite had strengthened the fidelity of his memory, of all things, so when he recalled his childhood, it came back all sun-faded and pale, like overexposed film.

It was funny, he had so many more befores under his belt these days: before the bite, before Ben, before Stark, before May, before the spell, before the checks… was this what growing up was like for everyone? Collecting befores?

Everything looked clean from up here. Even the piles of black bags in damp alleyways had a soft gaussian gleam under gentle streetlights. The Hudson shimmered between massive cranes, sinewy ribs of the ports, its unworried waters a flattering mirror of Jersey.

Some views were meant to be shared, but Peter always thought New York looked her best for the lonely. Look, the countless lights reminded you. Look upon the grand whole you were born into. Did you really think you could ever be anything more than one among our solitary millions?

Enrichment time came to an unpoetic end once Dispatch called in a carjacking near 11th and 46th and Peter flung himself back into the warm, whistling air.

It was not hard to find them—the thieves had decided the best way to test out their new candy-colored wheels was to rip screeching donuts in that very intersection. It’d taken quite a few layers of web on the tires to get the Charger’s howling supercharged engine to finally give it a rest, but Peter was satisfied with his work. He strapped the drivers in safely with another few fwips.

“Hey, either of you fellas got the time?” he asked.

“You’re fucking with the wrong people,” was the only answer he got. Oh, wow, never heard that one before.

Peter bent to peek inside in the cabin and check the dash clock, ignoring the gnashing of teeth below him—tipping towards 2 am already. Way past his bedtime, especially accounting for the commute home. He’d check on Murdock one more time and then call it, he decided, dragging the car out of the street by its bumper.

There was no movement or sound from Murdock’s apartment, but plenty of light, good lord. Peter squinted past the glare of the LED billboard he perched atop, scouring Murdock’s broad windows for signs of movement.

“You’re a little far from home,” came a voice from nowhere.

Peter leapt skyward on instinct, dropping in a battle-ready crouch atop a nearby air conditioner unit.

No one there.

Peter’s eyes were still dazzled from the billboard, seeing stars; he flinched at fragments of false positives, flickers of imagined movement. Someone… or something… was here, he could tell. He just couldn’t make anything out, only the vague black boundaries of the unlit rooftop against the starless sky.

No pings on the spider-sense, either, which was only vaguely reassuring.

“I moved, actually,” Peter offered towards the darkness, deploying his last resort: that chipper disposition of his. “Way closer to Manhattan now.”

The darkness laughed. Then it solidified into something like a silhouette, swallowing up nearby shadows. Peter froze, locked onto it with scrying eyes. It almost seemed to… grow in size?

What was the old mantra of storm chasers?

If a tornado’s not moving, but it looks like it’s getting bigger, then it’s headed straight towards your sorry ass.

“Hello, neighbor,” the Devil said.

Oh god this was not an encounter Peter had especially wanted. He knew the possibility came with the territory, of course, but wasn’t Daredevil supposed to be, like, semi-retired these days? He was in an unarmored black outfit, the upper half of his face obscured. What remained exposed to the night air was stony, jaw set firmly—not quite hostile, but certainly nowhere in the ballpark of welcoming. They were on the same side, weren’t they?

“Hey,” Spider-Man managed.

“What’s the situation?” Daredevil asked.

“Just… hanging around,” Peter said, mildly pleased this hadn’t already turned into a fight. “Is that going to be a problem? I know your type can get testy about their turf.”

Daredevil flexed his fists, which he kept mercifully low at his sides. He stood just outside of the reach of the scattered halo of light from the billboard behind them, lit only by the last remains of dying echos. Peter wished the man was a little closer so he could make out literally any kind of detail, any distinguishing feature, but he certainly wasn’t going to be the first to make an approach.

“This isn’t a territorial display,” he said. “I was told you were big time, Spider-Man. You’re telling me you’re not chasing a big time threat tonight?”

Ah. That. Again! Why does everyone still assume that? He’d been completely ground-level for months! Months! You go tête-à-tête with Captain America once and it permanently ruins your street cred forever.

“Nah, I, uh, actually recently… reassessed my career trajectory,” Peter offered in his best interview-speak, “and I work in a modified capacity these days.”

“You took a demotion,” Daredevil summarized.

Peter narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t give me an answer. Are we going have an issue?”

“I don’t think so,” Daredevil said through a dismissive sneer.

It took Peter a moment to pick up on the insult; Spider-Man was the non-issue in question here, wasn’t he… god, Peter would be so annoyed with this dude if he wasn’t already capped out on freaked.

“This roof,” he said. “You’ve been here more than once tonight. What are you watching for?” Peter couldn’t see the man’s gaze through the black of his mask, but he could swear he could feel it worming its way under his skin, breaking him down to bits and pieces.

“Hey, and, uh, don’t take this the wrong way,” Peter said, “merely professional interest. How the hell do you know that?”

“Nothing happens in Hell’s Kitchen without my knowledge,” Daredevil replied lightly, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. What, like, by magic? Had he always been that kind of character? Peter supposed he was pulling off the whole sinister-vaguely-demonic-spirit thing well enough.

“Well, alright, then,” Peter said, “ignoring the whole, uh, Epicurean paradox that brings up, did you know the guy in the penthouse suite over there has a stalker?”

Daredevil worked his jaw. He opened and closed his mouth twice, visibly weaving his way through discarded strings of words.

“Yes,” was all he settled on.

“Say I believe you. Were you gonna do anything about it, or was your plan just to interrogate me while he got murdered or something?”

“There’s nothing to be done,” he said. “Matthew Murdock isn’t in any danger.”

Ah, so he did have some degree of omniscience, then. His voice was level, but a little wrought, Peter noticed. Daredevil was keeping some emotion or other clamped down, and hard. Fear? Anger?

“He’s a criminal defense attorney,” Peter snapped. “Pretty sure they’re never not in any danger.”

“And what’s he to you, hm?” Daredevil craned his jaw, a predatory gesture, flaring out the muscles in his neck. “When did he get himself a yappy little guard dog?”

Man, this guy did not care much for Murdock, did he? Peter wondered if there was any history there.

“He’s absolutely nobody to me,” Peter said, and it wasn’t really even a lie. Murdock’s praise from the morning ran through his head: “But that’s the job, isn’t it? Looking out for your neighbors, no matter who they are. We—and I can say we, right? If you’re in trouble, we’re here to help.”

Daredevil didn’t react at all, a brick wall in black.

Peter had encountered brick walls with more emotion, actually.

“I’ll keep an eye on him for you,” he eventually offered.

“Both of them,” Peter raised, pointing threateningly.

“Fine,” Daredevil said, another slant to his head, this one lighter—jaunty, teasing. “Matthew Murdock gets one hundred percent of my visual attention. Cross my heart.”

Bizarre way to put it, and Peter was definitely being made fun of, but whatever, he could live with that.

“Good talk,” Peter said, then promptly fled over the side of the building.

Notes:

i don't know how probate works. this is probably obvious to anyone who does. also FEAST is federal now. i don't remember why i decided to do that..... i don't remember why i decided on a lot of the first part actually(probably thought abject poverty was too much of a motivator, as awful as that sounds..?) but i'll stick with it.......
also anyone else driven a little crazy by how we're told that mcu pete has enhanced senses and then receive zero elaboration or examples thereupon? well anyway in this fic he can listen in from a rooftop with a little help from some tech

Chapter 3

Notes:

this chapter is an entirely self-indulgent exercise in forum-flavored epistolary and only marginally advances the plot? but i'm fond of it so it gets spared the chop:) i probably shouldn't admit that should i

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Did you know Daredevil’s wiki page was, like, empty?

Spider-Man’s had one hundred and forty-nine citations.

Most of them had to do with his Avengers stint, of course. People were obsessed with the Avengers, and all of the old SHIELD documents and a lot of the newer U.N. ones were public record, so the nerds had a ton of data on him to nerd over and pick through; a ten-word sentence discussing Iron Man and him had a battalion of six or seven little reference numbers at the end.

It was all so embarrassing.

May as well have his legal name up.

Oh, wait, ha ha ha.

But Daredevil, there was almost nothing. Just a general modus operandi, notable events, documented costume iterations, and a few external links.

The opening sentence of the article still had the word “alleged” in it, for god’s sake.

Spider-Man wasn’t alleged.

Peter’d never really thought about his fellow vigilantes—and he was a true-blue vigilante now, no matter what window lady or Daredevil accused him of—all that closely, and last night had him self-reflecting over it.

Probably had something to do with that whole, being-plucked-up and tucked-away in the over-engineered birdcage of Stark Industry HQ barely-after-starting-high-school thing. A better source of info on Daredevil and his ilk was this one forum whose users spent their entire day debating details on obscure heroes called c-listers.net. Peter spent a really long time lurking on it.

The c-listersers were working on (read: fighting each other over) putting together a list of Daredevil’s abilities, but it was slow-going, to put it lightly—the current ‘Devil of Hell’s Kitchen Master-Thread IV’ had almost fifteen hundred replies, and its past three iterations had been locked and remade at 5k. The first thread was nearly half as old as Peter.

The singular fact everyone agreed on was that he was probably a world-class professional martial artist or fighter, and if he wasn’t, it was a serious waste of talent. Which discipline(s) he studied was a point of serious contention, however.

[02:34] He definitely specializes in Muay Thai. You don’t get that good at it without fully devoting your life to the Art. It’s unlike any other fighting style.
[02:34] You sound pretentious omg look out here comes Dr Muay Thai #teamjiujitsu 
[02:35] shut up hes literally just boxing 95% of the time
[02:37] There’s overlap. You’re fucking stupid if you don’t think there’s overlap. 
[02:37] ur fuckig stupid if you don’t think hes a boxer 
[02:38] boxers do cool ass flips now?????? Shitttt I didn’t know guess I should start tuning in to the wbo lolol
[02:44] @may thai guy Didn’t you just say it’s unlike any other martial art lol
[02:52] Can we all calm down? This is a stupid argument. We all know he specializes in an ancient and obscure School of Jiu Jitsu btw. That’s what this dude on YouTube proved. Recommend this channel, check him out. Really valuable work for followers of DD.

Ad nauseum. For dozens of pages. Daredevil in particular seemed to attract c-listersers who were also fans of those dodgy underground enhanced fighting leagues, and they were all… certainly passionate.

The last poster had linked to a 46 minute long video that consisted of frame-by-frame fight style analysis by this nasal-voiced dude with an unkempt beard and a beanie, which Peter watched while folding his laundry later that afternoon. His actual application of ‘analysis’ was generously loose, but it bummed Peter out; why didn’t anyone love Spider-Man enough to do his frame-by-frame fight style analysis?

Another heated debate on the forum was centered around whether or not Daredevil was enhanced.

The general consensus leaned vaguely towards a yes, mostly just by virtue of his vigilante career being a series of incredible feats. Theoretically, an ordinary person could do everything Daredevil did, the c-listersers agreed, which was part of the reason why they found him so compelling. They liked when losers, everymen, or mid-tiers did amazing things; they had zero interest, and maybe even a little contempt, for the elite being elite.

It’s just that said ordinary person would just have to be, like, in the 0.01% percentile of all people, ever, talent-wise, or luck-wise, to do what he’d done, to survive what he’d had done to him. Some kind of enhancement would smooth the probability out.

The users had a hard time pinning down what, if any, enhancement he did have, though.

Some on the no-enhancement side used that as evidence for a lack thereof—if he had one, wouldn’t he make it obvious to freak out his opponents, like the rest of the supers who built their identities around them? (Peter took this personally.)

Most of the pro-enhancement users were split between the pro-invulnerability/super-regeneration camp and the pro-super-senses one. The invulnerability/regeneration advocates mostly cited how he was able to survive multiple fights with Wilson Fisk, who was alleged to have repeatedly crushed the skulls of men with his bare hands like tangerines, or whatever.

(The Fisk stories varied wildly between tellers, Peter noticed. The Kingpin still had a pretty staunch group of defenders and apologists.)

Or how vague rumors said Daredevil’d been shot in the head one night and was seen walking the next.

The he-just-has-a-really-good-suit camp typically pounced on that argument, though.

Sensory truthers thought some kind of supervision might explain his ability to effortlessly navigate darkness and track opponents across the city. It would help explain his success with urban parkour, too. The real fringe guys thought he was psychic or made of shadows or something more nefarious. Maybe that omniscient demon theory wasn't too absurd.

[10:03] I actually had a run in with dd late last year. Im serious im a kitchen res don’t ask me to dox myself though. Anyway he definitely had a dark ~presence~. Like something was up. Something spooky supernatural he kinda moved inhumanly. I think hes an actual irl demon like from the Bible. Very cutthroat and did a really fucking demonic laugh while breaking this dudes nose but he did try to mug me and my gf so do I give a fuck? Not at all thank you dd
[10:03] thank you dd
[10:04] Thank you DD
[10:04] thank you dd
[10:05] Doxx yourself or it’s fake

This one user was infamous for going on conspiracy-riddled tirades about how he was actually the Antichrist or Lucifer’s blood-son and consumed sinner’s souls for power and was connected to the Illuminati. He’d been IP-banned like six times, but he kept VPN’ing to preach his truth.

[00:00] ( USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST. )
[14:52] MODS!!!!!! he’s out again
[14:53] Δ Δ Δ mods sleep post ddminati Δ Δ Δ

There was also a frequently referenced micro-wiki maintained by a user who was really doing their best to ferret out Daredevil’s identity via a complicated breakdown of every public or private figure he’d ever interacted with in any documented capacity.

They maintained a directory of subpages for each; the bulk of them were just, like, ‘Unidentified Caucasian Female Mugging Victim #3,’ so Peter scrolled to the big ones, like Wilson Fisk and Frank Castle—wait, huh? Matt Murdock was on this list.

Maybe they really did have some beef.

Peter clicked through, expecting maybe some civil suit filed on a victim’s behalf. Farthest thing from it:

Matthew Murdock
Associated with [CONFIRMED CONTACTS] Karen Page, Frank Castle, Det. Brett Mahoney, [UNCONFIRMED/LIKELY CONTACT] Franklin Nelson
[UNVERIFIED EVENT] Bulletin massacre
During the period when murdock was a person of interest in a fisk-era FBI investigation, a custody exchange was to take place at the bulletin office prior to the infamous Copycat massacre. It’s unclear if murdock was ever actually on site, as the handover was interrupted by a bunch of bloody fucking murder, but the copycat was fought off by the masked assailant broadly accepted by the community as the real DD, suggesting at the very least that it was POSSIBLE for them to cross paths.
See also: Karen Page

FBI what?

But more importantly—Copycat?

Peter clicked through, increasingly unnerved by every word he read about the murderous imposter who’d donned the horns. It almost made him appreciate the light-handed nature of Quentin Beck’s frame job.

Almost.

Anonymous said: I hate how toxic everyone in this community is about the so called Copycat. We can accept our fave has flaws guys. God forbid a guy cut loose a little
[Moderator] DDWIKI said: Listen brother i know you really like the murderdevil theory but you gotta stop proposing edits to the page without citations
MrsDD said: FUCK OFF EVERYONE KNOWS IT WASNT HIM STFUUU

Needless to say, Peter had spent a really long time lurking on the forum. The point was, he’d grown a little… obsessed. With Daredevil, but more broadly with the thought of learning something about his city other than the bubble Stark had kept him in.

Maybe it was even something to look forward to.

And, hey, with what he'd read about the guy, it seemed pretty unlikely that Peter could get him killed.

Notes:

surely that final line won't haunt anyone!
also lol at the fisk tangerine bit being written three entire years before #that ddba scene
peter's not cognizant of this so it's not like i can write it out directly but i do feel like it's a pretty key bit of characterization that he sees that his current obsession was an fbi poi and just immediately moves on~~~~

Chapter 4

Notes:

matt pov finally :DDD
the first version of this had proper alternating povs all the way through, but the beginning was kinda just retellings of the same scenes over and over, and i know hardly enjoy that as a reader
and unfortunately peter's the more active party at the start (and more importantly i adore describing matt from an outsider's perspective) so matt's early chapters were the ones that got snipped. it'll mostly be back to alternating from here?
just know he was thinking really cool and clever things this whole time. you don't need me to tell you that, though, right...

Chapter Text

“Good evening!” Spider-Man said.

Matt breathed in deeply. He was settled in a squat atop some cornice, a flesh-and-Kevlar gargoyle, letting his arms hang between his legs as he tasted the air.

It was a cloudless night. It had cooled in a grand exhale once the sun set, all the easy-going mid-summer energy of the day gone with its heat, replaced with the oppressive hum of a high-pressure system building in strength a few hundred miles to the south. Tomorrow’s air would be heavy with heat and moisture, but tonight’s remained bone-dry.

It felt like sandpaper as it brushed through Matt’s windpipe.

Breezes on the cusp of being called wind skipped north over the Hudson, carrying kaleidoscope impressions of the piers, the Bay, and the fathomless Atlantic beyond them. Those sorts of scents always put the dirty little snow-globe city Matt was so possessive over in perspective. So inconsequential on the grand, universal scale, but made all the more precious by its replaceability.

“I don’t think I properly introduced myself last night, but I’m Spider-Man, by the way,” said Peter Parker.

It was moonless, too—the long, whispering song of the tide told him as much—though Matt didn’t mind the darkness.

What he did mind was how the sheathe of black lent confidence to the more cowardly of his city’s criminals.

If there was one thing he’d learned, it was that there was nothing more dangerous than a coward given confidence. Nights like these made small men feel big, and the big ones feel small. It almost was like the unveiled sky and snuffed-out moon gave Him total clearance to breathe straight down Matt’s neck.

“Hey,” Spider-Man repeated, the tiniest bit of fire audible in his voice. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to ignore people? I’m talking to the gentleman in the horns.”

“I hear you,” Daredevil replied.

“Alright, great. Hi! How are you doing this evening?”

Matt refused to respond on principle.

Peter himself seemed to be doing poorly. This was their third encounter, and he’d been in rough shape for each.

(That first time, Matt had been picking up some paperwork from a clerk in Queens, and figured a little coffee on the way back couldn't hurt.

They were out of light roast, he'd mourned; he'd been hit with the smell of the cup-and-change left getting thoroughly scorched by its hot plate as soon as he’d come in. Then, the door had swung open, rattling its bells and letting in a gasp of the city air and the body heat and moisture of the new entrant, and Matt was no longer occupied by the future roast of his coffee.

A too-fast heartbeat, skin a bit too cold, dying, unhealthy, avoid, his lizard brain had tried to explain. It was unsettling in an instinctual way, a supersensory uncanny valley. Something distinctly entomological was woven within otherwise human flesh and blood. No one else in the shop had been gripped with the same fear Matt was, so he'd quickly assumed the thing at least looked human.

Matt had been so distracted that the barista assumed that he was half-deaf as well as blind. And, well, that'd certainly had consequences.)

That heartrate, even with its uncanny baseline, was elevated again tonight. Daredevil made him nervous, but he was pretty good at setting that aside, making it undetectable in his voice, his manner. Matt somehow doubted he would ever be villain of the month in the kid’s rogues’ gallery.

Dinner had been soy sauce ramen and a lot of diet coke. Matt wondered if the kid even noticed what all that sodium was doing to his blood pressure, or if he just lived in a perpetual state of primary hypertension.

Matt was surprised to meet him again. He really thought he’d blown the whole thing when they’d first met sans masks; why exactly Peter Parker was still caught up on Matt Murdock, and now, apparently, Daredevil, remained unclear. Had he caught on to some connection?

Spider-Man shifted uncomfortably in the stretched-out silence. Matt heard him shuffle, work out a calf, and adjust the sole of his suit.

“Hello?” he repeated. The full span of Spider-Man’s patience was apparently 42 seconds.

“You’re not too good at reading between the lines, are you?” Daredevil muttered, finally raising to stand. He kept his back to Peter, offering him a sliver of his profile and not much else. “I hear you, so I don’t hear the people I need to protect.”

This was a lie, Matt could hear both just fine, but he wanted to sound like an unyielding hard-ass.

Peter ran a pinched hand over his mouth—zipping his lips, Matt parsed. Cute.

“What do you want?” Daredevil said.

“Oh, I was going to be quiet for a while—I mean, I was, uh, I ended up in your neighborhood again.” A lie. “And I was wondering if you wanted to maybe do a little teaming up, a little teamwork?”

“Did I give you the wrong impression last night?” Daredevil lifted his chin. “The kind of work I do, I don’t do with anyone. Let alone kids.”

Spider-Man scoffed. Did a pretty good job of hiding the hitch in his breath, but not good enough for Matt. Did he really think his age was a secret?

“I mean, I can’t say I don’t respect the whole grimdark, Rated-Restricted-18 thing you have going on… it’s a great schtick, very intimidating, really… but I’m legally an adult. Almost, anyway.” Goodness, kid, Matt wanted to say. At least try to switch up your speech patterns while masked.

“Almost legal means very little,” Matt said. “Almost legal tends to mean illegal, actually.” Oops, broke character. Hypocrite.

“But there’s plenty of stuff you can do on your own at seventeen, you know?” he hummed.

Of course Matt knew.

“Including drive a car, and work past 10 pm, and sign on for six figures worth of predatory student loans. Have you been to space? I’ve been to space. I’m basically your senior if we count spacetime towards seniority, which, I think everyone would agree, we definitely should,” Spider-Man prattled, equal parts self-assured and insincere, like even he didn’t know which side he was on.

“Seventeen,” Daredevil tasted the word, finally cutting off the kid. He’d expected somewhere around there, but was having trouble with the whole can’t-even-vote-yet part. “You want to tell me your date of birth, too?”

“Oh, shit, oops, um… you’re,” Spider-Man began, and then paused. “Was that a joke? Are you joking?”

Matt let one corner of his mouth twitch up to keep from earnestly grinning.

“Wow, I’m totally, like, leaking this to the press! Breaking news, Daredevil has a sense of humor, everybody!”

“So, anyway,” Spider-Man said, “was that a firm no? ‘Cause, other places to be, other faces to punch in, you know.” He mimed punching the other faces in question for rhetorical effect.

“Such a busy young man,” Daredevil said, tilting his head.

Matt Murdock’s parting words from that ill-omened first meeting. It was shameless bait; Matt narrowed his focus on Peter to a needlepoint. Peter’s hummingbird heart fluttered vaguely in response, but it was nothing beyond plausible deniability.

Matt would have to keep playing him out, then.

Luckily, tonight’s goal was more than big enough to share.

“Just keep up and out of trouble,” he relented.

Matt quickly regretted the ‘keep up’ bit of his admission to the kid. Usually, Daredevil’s rooftop escapades impressed, but apparently Spider-Man had a ridiculously efficient mode of city-block travel that Matt had read about but had a hard time imagining.

Well, in person it was pretty damn clear—it was this thwip swing rhythm like Tarzan vines that got him between buildings in seconds, meaning the kid would wait an immodest amount of time at vantage points while his more gravity-bound comrade and his apparently dogshit grappling hook led the way. He hardly even needed the webs in a neighborhood like Hell’s Kitchen—could simply leap from roof to roof like it was the three-inch gap before the subway car.

Matt was actually breaking a bit of a sweat. It was humiliating. He felt oddly… old, like some unfashionable uncle. He just hoped the mask did a good enough job of hiding it.

Thankfully, they weren’t traveling for very long.

The tableau the duo had set off towards was spread out below them within a quarter of an hour. It was a terribly sophisticated little set up. Auto thefts had been up in Hell’s Kitchen the past few months, and this chop shop seemed to be the epicenter of it.

Members of the group Matt didn’t have a name for yet would steal vehicles from all across the city and surreptitiously bring them to this standard-issue abandoned industrial property. Prior to being abandoned, it was a vehicular service and detailing center, its tools and stations left behind to perform nefarious deeds. Matt was not entirely unimpressed at the factory-line efficiency with which the group worked; he’d listened along as they’d completely processed three cars in the time it took to hardball Spider-Man and make their way over.

Their hot goods were ice-cold within hours of being stolen. They were nothing if not economical.

It was unsurprising that nobody had made any progress—not him, not other gangs, and certainly not the cops. Matt hadn’t dealt with them because he rarely dealt in cars—not exactly his wheelhouse—or property theft in general, really. Human life was more important.

He’d once stopped a carjacking of theirs in media res when he’d happened to be nearby, but that was about as involved as he’d cared to get. The only reason they were currently on his radar was because Matt had heard vague rumors that they’d recently started taking the drivers along with their cars if they were young and pretty.

The men he would confront tonight were almost certainly not the whole of the operation. No, tonight was more about sending a message than stamping them out. Letting them know they’d crossed a line, and that there’d be worse consequences in store if they continued to toe it.

Daredevil crouched down behind the barrier of the roof which overlooked the operation, arms crossed behind his knees. The kid, charmingly enough, did a little back and forth before perfectly mirroring his gesture.

“Keep your voice and head low and listen to the letter,” Daredevil began. This seemed to startle Spider-Man into seriousness, who stiffened and only answered with a terse nod.

“Six out front,” he continued. “All are armed with handguns, two have semi-automatic rifles." His head twitched. “The four with only handguns aren’t carrying additional ammo. Probably just warm bodies. Not trained enforcement.”

“More inside. A dozen or so? Most are just working, but two are armed, on patrol.” He listened closely in the brief gap between the beats of their hearts and the screeches of power tools. “Semis on them, too.”

“I’m beginning to suspect you’re showing off,” Spider-Man said.

“Are you following me?”

“Yessir. Six out, dozen in, two high-priority targets in each group.”

Daredevil twitched his chin in a single nod. “There are also four civilians, which are our main priority. Young women, I believe. They’re in the basement, which has an interior access point near the western wall. I don’t think they’re attended, but I could be wrong.”

Spider-Man didn’t falter in any perceivable way, but he didn’t have a snappy retort ready, either. Right, he was used to the purse-snatcher type, wasn’t he? To borrow the kid’s own metaphor, he was PG-13. This was a bit past that.

“Kid? I need to know if you’re following me. People will get hurt if we go in unprepared,” Daredevil warned.

“Comprendo, jefe,” the kid simply replied. “Eight opps, four vics. How are we doing this?”

Maybe Matt was the one overthinking it.

Matt ran a hand over his mouth, teeth tugging at his glove. “Depends on how confident you are in your stealth. I figure one of us makes a fuss out front, gets as many people out of building as they can, deals with them. The other handles the ones left inside quietly and gets the victims somewhere safe.”

Matt could practically hear the gears in the kid’s head turning.

“I can play decoy. They won’t expect me, right? New kid in town. My suit is way flashier, too.”

Was it? Damn, maybe they shouldn’t have been plotting near the edge of the building, then.

“Alright. If you get in over your head, just call out. I can find you.”

“How heroic,” Spider-Man mused.

“Or I can leave you to die.”

“There’s that sense of humor again!” He paused, reconsidering. “I hope.”

Matt laid a hand loosely on the Peter’s shoulder. The kid flinched, but didn’t make an effort to move.

Matt was flooded with information about Peter’s altered vascular system with its rabbit pace and alien pressure. His iron-woven muscles and his nerves flashed with millions of tiny impulses, almost faster than lightning, under the skin of his suit. What was that thing made of, anyway? Some kind of… uncomfortably tactile fiber, generating flickers of its own heat…

Matt had wanted to say something meaningful or reassuring or adult along with a grounding touch, but he’d gotten thrown off by the stimuli and felt the moment had gone on for too long and was teetering on awkward.

“Give me a minute or two before you start,” was all Daredevil managed, lifting his hand with what he hoped was a brotherly pat, “and keep your head on a swivel when you do.”

Then, he set off to duck over the back edge of the roof.

Chapter 5

Notes:

chekov's bright red srt

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Daredevil was so fucking cool.

Peter thought his hours of forum-scrolling would have properly prepped him for his level of coolness, but he was somehow even cooler in person. Cloaked in black, as seamless in the night as the darkness itself. It was like he had some kind of invisible dominion that spread well beyond the boundaries of his body.

He was whip-smart, too. Peter hadn’t expected that. The C-Listersers had painted a vivid picture of this bloodthirsty warrior who would walk right into a building and Wolverine everything in his path, but Peter’s impression was of a man with this uncanny sort of intelligence, or maybe actual omniscience, radiating off of him.

Granted, he hadn’t actually seen him fight yet.

He had seen him navigate the deadly obstacle course that was the New York City roofline like he was walking on a fuzzy carpet, though, and that was impressive enough. Peter twisted a crack out of his neck. He was going to give the vigilante about 40 more seconds to get where he needed, and then he’d introduce himself to the car thieves.

Feet, calves, thighs, back, shoulders, wrists… alright, nice and loose.

He simply walked directly off of the building. Yes, the superhero pose wrecked your ankles, but the effect was so worth it.

“What the hell is that?” gasped one of them.

“Good evening, gents,” Spider-Man said. 

“What are you playing at? You’ll turn right back around if you know what’s good for you,” one yelled over the music. Turn around? That didn’t even make sense, he’d jumped off of a building.

The two semi guys drew their weapons. Peter didn’t know too much about firearms, but he’d been around enough soldiers to know their grips were all kinds of off. Noticing this gave him a kick of confidence—he took in a deep, anticipatory breath and rolled his shoulders back, hands twitching like a quick-draw cowboy.

“Back off! I mean it!”

“Someone turn that music off!”

Why weren’t they shooting? Maybe the new kid in town thing worked.

“Is that fucking Spider-Man?” one of the handgun guys muttered to another. “What’s fucking Spider-Man doing here?”

Hell yeah.

Well, Peter wasn’t going to let them take the first blow, even though he’d been polite enough to give them plenty of time for it.

He aimed a webshooter at the angrier of the two semi guys and yoinked his gun away from him; he sort of hot-potatoed it, tossed it about 2 stories up, and then webbed it flush to the façade in what he hoped was one suave-looking motion.

The Spidey-sense surged, and so did he.

This was enough to get the other guy’s head in the game, it seemed, as a volley of shots decorated the ground where Peter had been standing like string lights.

Peter webbed the top of building behind his attackers. With his running start, he swung himself heavenward, getting an eyeful of the gray sky, and latched himself high up the wall of the chop shop.

From there, he glued down no-semi guy’s feet, and then he dropped directly atop yes-semi guy’s shoulders.

The dude crumpled easy, to mutual dismay.

Peter liked it better when they stayed standing and he could play chicken.

The two of them watched the gun clatter and skitter away, Peter’s man-shaped seat squirming beneath him. Peter gave his head a good knock against the concrete, and then another, until he groaned and slumped flat. A quick thwip secured his loose weapon to the floor.

Peter rose to a crouch and gave his surroundings a look. Hey, why did he recognize that cherry-red Charger?

The first no-semi guy (they were both no-semi guys, now) was tugging at his webbed feet, completely distracted. The handgun guys had kind of been watching in—well, not silence, they’d been swearing and yelling—but impotent shock.

Peter really thought this would have higher stakes.

Peter webbed chicken man’s hand to the floor, then stood to full height.

This got the handgun guys moving; the one closest to him drew his weapon, eyes behind it dripping with fear in the glow of the floodlights, and fired. The bullet shot past his cheek, close enough for Peter to feel the heat of the displaced air.

Peter didn’t give him the chance to fix his aim—he launched himself towards him in a head-first leap and eased his landing by palming the man’s chest and forcing it to the ground in a long skid. The man let out an extended grunt of pain and made no attempt to get himself back up.

Spidey-sense had him up and running again, this time sliding his back along the Charger as bullets ran their whistling paths by his ears. He spotted bits of his webbing in the tires—hey, he really did know this car! That’s weird. Shouldn’t it have gone to the cops?

“Don’t hit the fucking merchandise!” one man called to another.

“Are we really still worried about that?” someone replied, voice hitched up three octaves.

“Where the fuck are the other guys?

“Fucking put the Spider down already!”

Peter used their hilarious reluctance for messing up the paintjob of his cover to take a moment and reevaluate the situation. No one had actually taken the time to turn off the music—the skirmish had been set entirely to some kind of way too up-tempo EDM. Peter had gotten down three guys, which meant he had three to go. He was making good time!

Theatrically lit, another watchman stepped out of the massive sectional door of the building and immediately began to let a magazine loose.

Never mind!

Didn’t these guys know not to shoot at things with gasoline in them? With each tink-tink-tink, Peter clenched his teeth at the idea of a bullet catching the tank. A window shattered behind his ears, sprinkling sparkly dandruff all over his bent shoulders.

He needed to move.

He found he didn’t have a choice in the matter as his hands and feet sprung forward in a crawl on a familiar and desperate instinct. Peter was left with no time to wonder at the reason—within a half a second, the already-bright night swelled with a livid orange glow. Then the sound came. All sound went right after.

The pressure, a massive invisible hand, smashed him flat against the ground. Peter’s senses were about as useful as a chocolate teapot. He rose and kept crawling, one hand after the other. All he could see was the shadow of his own head and shoulders, pitch-black and crystal-clear from the brightness of the flames behind him, the asphalt and air white with light and billowing heat.

They really did catch the fucking tank. Amateurs!

As his senses slowly settled back into his body, Peter pulled himself up.

No obvious injuries, no gashes or burns, just a terrible soreness tugging at his knees and forearms and what felt like a liquified brain. He turned back towards the scene, reading it through smoke-stung eyes.

The speakers had finally been quieted, which meant Peter could better appreciate the subtleties of the new banshee-scream ringing in his ears. One of the floodlights had been blown clean in half, and the other had been knocked on its side, casting the wreckage in Halloween-yard raking light.

Peter been the closest to the blast, but he also happened to be a superhero. The remaining men were about as scattered and functional as the severed bits of Charger that had embedded themselves throughout the area.

He didn’t really know what to do. An explosion was sure to get the cops moving if the shootout hadn’t already, but he was in a team, or something, so he couldn’t just up and do what every cell in his body was telling him to do—run like hell.

Daredevil emerged from the darkness of the interior, lit in blacks and whites.

For a moment, he was statue-still in the midst of shivering flame. Reminded Peter of how May would just stand in the doorframe until he would notice that she had noticed that he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to.

“DD, did I do decoy okay?” Peter called. His voice sounded distant to himself, like he was speaking underwater. Ears weren’t fully sorted yet.

Daredevil’s head turned towards Peter, and he immediately rushed over. Huh. For some reason, Peter had assumed his stillness was in anger, not confusion. But there was no reason for the blast not to throw him off, too, come to think of it.

Something inside Peter’s ears popped, and the world was back to prickly-sharp detail, all noisy snaps of fire, alarms, and groans of pain.

“Hey,” Daredevil muttered, “you good?”

“Smoking,” Peter replied, flicking an ember off of his suit.

He was absolutely unwilling to speak with any inkling of seriousness, because he knew from experience that it would come out along with tears. Forgive him if he was extra touchy—you know, more than the standard human amount of touchiness, which was still pretty high—over explosions these days.

Daredevil was visibly deciding between multiple sets of words and actions.

“The Hell you call me?” was the one that won, it seemed.

“It's what everyone online's calling you,” Peter said, “but maybe we’re not on nickname basis yet, I get it. Apologies for taking the Devil’s name in vain.”

He smiled. Scariest shit Peter had seen all night. A night of flames and hellfire and raining bullets, and the Devil was smiling. Wasn’t even an evil smile—that wouldn’t have been scary, it would’ve been appropriate—just a nice, earnest, familiar smile.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, and just as quickly settled back into the emptiness of the mask.

“What about the girls?” Peter prompted, the tone of a child who’d been lied to by his mother about leaving a social function a few times already. “Can we get the hell out of flaming Dodge yet?”

“They’re gone.”

“Oh, nice.” Peter chewed on the information for a moment. “What have you been, uh, busy with, then?”

Notes:

another double update ahead... not for any good reason i just know i'd be annoyed to stop between these two chapters ... but that kind of applies to like most of them ......... man guess im just lighting a fire under my own ass to get that ending done

Chapter 6

Notes:

jsyk the first part runs contemporaneously to the last chap then it's back to present time for the second. hopefully that's uh. obvious

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The chop shop was massive.

It was a simple steel and cinderblock structure, cheap, not quite built to best standards and practices. An open nave hundreds of feet long and two or three stories tall made up the bulk of the space, curtailed on its sides by catwalks connecting the little office spaces on the upper floor. Its hollow body was clustered with industrial car lifts and other indistinguishable behemoths of hydraulic machinery.

While out front seemed overly bright, Matt got the sense that the inside was more conservative. The modest whine of bar fluorescents hung over the work areas, but not really anywhere else.

The workmen had opted for their own personal headphones, their disparate soundtracks all tinny in Matt’s ears. It was a little taboo to wear in-ears while doing something illegal, Matt had noticed over the years. He rarely come across a single career criminal (or even a pettier lone miscreant) with them in at a scene of a crime unless they were muted and part of a disguise.

It was probably like wearing them while driving or taking a test, maybe. Impolite, against unwritten rules, or part of some modernized thief’s code. It could cause unforeseen consequences.

Such as, Matt figured, not having an inkling as to the presence of the Devil.

The back service door was generously propped open, lending the structure a bit of extra ventilation and vulnerability. Matt had slipped in silently, close against the cool metal doorframe. He waited for any sign of alarm—a spiked heartbeat, a startled gasp, but none came.

He moved to a crouch behind the propped door, which gave decent enough cover from most eyelines; the darkness and their overconfidence should do the rest. He’d wait for them to notice the kid first and then he’d start his work, he figured.

That said, Matt was ready, if not a little giddy, to take on the entire group of men at once, fists practically itching. The mask had become more of a bi-weekly thing as of late. It wasn’t really the result of some moral reform; it just happened that Matthew Murdock’s day job and sundry commitments were picking up steam at about the same rate that Daredevil’s city seemed to be cooling off.

Though Nelson and Murdock had more or less negotiated the ethics of the situation into something palatable, Foggy didn’t even care to try and hide his elation at his partner’s gradual lifestyle shift. He’d slapped him on the back at the end of a clean-knuckle week and said, “See? You barely need the blood and guts to feel alive anymore! DeGrom is pitching tonight, that’ll be invigorating enough.”

As nice as the idea was, the Devil inside was still very much demanding its due.

Matt had been anticipating tonight from around the moment he’d last taken off the mask until he’d put it on earlier this evening. If anything, his newfound restraint made the delights of his fits of flagellation, self or otherwise, all the more undeniable.

It seemed as though tonight’s men were stubbornly refusing to give him an excuse to indulge, however. Jolted heartrates caught his attention from outside. It seemed the kid had made his appearance, and an inelegant arrangement of gunfire came soon after.

As he heard the gunman across the room stiffen to attention by the entrance, Matt had his target set—he’d go for his partner, on his side of the building, and pull him off to the basement while his buddy was distracted.

The man was posted up by the walkway that overlooked the lowered work area, arm resting on his weapon.

Matt heard nails over too-long stubble; his target scratched at the side of his face, looking halfheartedly towards the fuss from outside.

“Hey,” he called over to the workers.

The only response was the continued yammer of power tools.

“Hey fellas!”

Still silence. He groaned and moved to give them a knock on the head or something.

Matt wasn’t going to give him the chance.

He sprung from his crouch, and just as quickly realized he was one bound too far for a full stealth approach.

“Oh fuck,” the gunman choked as soon as Matt reached his periphery, arm half-tangled and impotent in his gun strap.

Matt used his momentum to land a sweeping hook across the man’s jaw. It wasn’t enough to knock him off his feet, but it was enough to leave him dazed. Unwilling to give him time to recover, Matt uncoiled his torso in a whip-fast kick that connected behind the man’s knees.

That got him down, folding like a lawn chair.

Matt grabbed a fist of his hair and pulled him up.

His hands tugged weakly at Matt’s wrists, too uncoordinated to get a grip, but irritating. Matt threw him back down and pulled the man up by his top, instead. Wasn’t that nice of him?

“Shut up,” he growled, and only after realized the man hadn’t said much other than grunts.

The man didn’t point out his mistake, politely enough, just held on to Matt’s wrist with shivering fingers to keep from choking on his own crewneck.

It was at this point that those gasps of horror he was listening for finally began to sound, one by one. The men were startled, smacking their comrades alert, and… silently gathering their things… and leaving out another door? He heard a phone camera shutter click.

Matt headed towards the basement doors, dragging the man with him.

“Are these locked?”

The man shivered and twitched, mouth clamped shut. Matt lifted him up by his shirt and threw him down over the doors.

“Answer me,” he spat. His mouth flung open from the impact, and Matt learned why he’d been so adamant on keeping it closed. The blood in the air was rich enough to taste. Matt had apparently busted some tooth or bit of flesh with a particularly enthusiastic blood supply, and his mouth’s accumulated contents spilled out over his chin, making it all the way to his pants.

Useless.

The man rolled his way over and began to eek his way across the wall, but his efforts didn’t sustain him for long. Matt waited until the man fell to a slumped seat before standing over him again.

“Come on, man,” he garbled, his words wet with red.

Matt crouched over him and landed a sharp jab on his sternum. It was another moment of kindness; he could’ve gone for the face again. The blow buckled him over with a grunt, drizzling microdroplets of blood over Matt’s face in the process.

From his bent-over position, Matt pulled the rifle over his head, took the magazine out, and slid both across opposite sides of the hall.

Not that he was even entirely sure if the man knew how to fire it at this point.

Then he tried the doors himself. They opened easily. Matt was familiar with the smell of captivity. It was usually fear, sweat, the foul sweetness of concentrated human off-gas, and, depending on the level of cruelty, shit. Matt smelled none of those things as he stood at the threshold.

The bouquet of this particular room was no worse, if not significantly better, than an average office breakroom.

He retrieved his hostage, this time by the back of his shirt, which upset him even more than the front, and threw him down the half-flight of stairs.

A chorus of mutters and a bright scream accompanied the man’s tumble-and-splat. He had landed in a fetal curl, a steady stream of warm blood already pooling below his mouth. A quiet part of Matt’s mind wondered if the man had dental.

The room’s occupants fell dead silent the moment they caught their eyes on Matt’s figure. His distant impression was… partially correct. It was 4 young women, but they were well-groomed and neatly kept, sitting among random pieces of tech and computers and bags of salty snacks, not sobbing in the dark.

“Get out of here,” he said, sticking to the script anyway.

They didn’t question his advice—the girls rose from their seats and filed past him, silent except for startled gasps and sniffs and the jingling of their jewelry, making a beeline to the exit.

“It’s alright,” one said at the door, comforting another who’d been immediately burst into tears at the sudden show of violence, “I’ll call an Uber.”

Huh?

Matt was given no time to process this information—just as soon as the words left her lips, his World on Fire went supernova white.

—-—

“Hey, man, are you okay?” Spider-Man asked.

Matt wasn’t 100%, but he didn’t care to show it. While he’d recovered from the bulk of the blast, his ears were still flooded with false static. The ground was made of quicksilver, its shape shifting with each of his bang-drum heartbeats.

But he could still smell and feel and interpret geomagnetic fields (something ordinary people did too, but not well enough to have a word for), so he was more or less functional.

“Cops are en-route,” he just replied. That he was sure of, the sirens.

“Okay,” Spider-Man sounded out, “any, um, plan? Do you want me to get us to the rooftops?”

“Hm? Yeah, that’ll be… that’ll be fastest,” Matt managed, battling back a wave of nausea.

“Alrighty,” said Spider-Man, turning his back to him, making some pose and gesture.

Matt waited for an impression of it that wasn’t Cubist.

“Piggy-back ride,” he clarified, sensing Matt’s confusion, “unless you’re too dark and twisty for that.”

“I’m not dark and twisty.”

“Understood. Guess I got the wrong impression from that little bit of face you got on your blood.”

Was it that bad? He didn’t think it was that bad, but Matt didn’t care to argue.

He just awkwardly slung himself over the kid’s shoulders.

What followed was, in the moment at least, one of the most terrifying experiences of the Man Without Fear’s life.

During spring break of their junior year of undergrad, Matt and Foggy had schemed up a plan. They were still living on campus, but in cloistered upperclassman housing; they were in their own little world in an accessible-priority suite double.

Matt obviously had nowhere to be, and Foggy’s folks were out of the state celebrating some anniversary or other, so the pair decided to try to get an authentic, old-fashioned college Spring Break trip in rather than piss each other off inside the dorm all week.

They wanted to make it to Florida, but last-minute airfare was out of the question, so the plan was to take a complicated series of Greyhounds all the way down the coast.

They’d done well enough until all of Baltimore—their bus’s delay and their transfer’s early arrival cost them an entire day of travel. Looking back on it, Matt was mildly impressed that two knuckleheaded city-children even made out of the State of New York. Foggy had travelled, but he’d always done so while playing a Gameboy in the back of his parents’ car; Matt hadn’t so much as been in all five boroughs yet.

Over horrid Italian take-out in a cheap motel room, the pair managed to admit to each other that Foggy was becoming a praying man, and Matt, an infidel, at the mere thought of 30 more hours of breathing in strangers’ exhalations all the way down the I-95.

So instead, they had to figure out something fun to do in Godforsaken Maryland for a week.

It could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Jersey.

Matt had suggested crabbing, but they were a week or two shy of the season. Foggy suggested the Walters or the National Aquarium before feeling a little silly.

“I dunno… can you hear fish?” Foggy had asked, and that moment was the closest he’d ever come to admitting everything prior to their fateful morning. God, he had wanted to go so bad. Yes, he could hear fish, and he’d really like to, especially Baltimore’s sharks and dolphins and rare birds of paradise.

The end result was a snoozer of a pre-season exhibition game at Camden Yards that had Matt thinking Foggy could do color commentary if law didn’t pan out, too much seafood, a bar crawl during which they both failed to keep down said seafood, and, finally, tickets for a MARC Train into Washington, D.C. after they’d exhausted their options in all of a day.

Foggy had read the pamphlet before they boarded the next morning (that made Matt feel old, people still read pamphlets back then) and noted excitedly that Six Flags America was not too far out of the way. Matt had no idea what a rollercoaster would be like on him—he’d only been on a little wooden thing on a pier pre-accident—but by then, the spontaneity of the trip had fully penetrated the pair’s skulls. They were doing things just to do them.

They’d finished a bottom-shelf six pack behind the train station, realizing only after they’d disembarked with it that yeah, of course the park had a no outside booze policy, duh. Matt’s World on Fire was swirling with psychedelic sparks by the time they’d made it in.

The two realized that three bottles of beer for breakfast pre-rollercoasters was almost certainly a horrible idea a little too late, so they tried funnel cake to fix it, which settled in about as well as one might guess.

The clustered heads of the crowd and the rich fat of concessions and the rattling metal structures that sounded a mile high became glittering tesserae in fractalized Byzantine patterns.

Though the park was disorienting enough on its own, the experience of the ride itself was nigh indescribable. Old Testament-style horror.

As a child, Matt had read about how the event horizon of a black hole had such an extreme gradation in gravity that the tips of your feet would be sucked in long before your head. A grown man would be stretched into an atom-wide strand of spaghetti, the book had said, and the image stuck with him for some reason. That day, Matt felt as though he’d gotten about as close as a living man could to Spaghettification.

“Hey, man, are you okay?” Foggy had asked when they disembarked, likely in reference to Matt’s full-body shakes.

“Let’s go again,” Matt had managed. They didn’t make it to D.C. that night. They stumbled out of the park a few hours later, more drunk on endorphins and sun exposure than the morning’s alcohol.

The two managed to check into an overpriced hotel across the highway, where they both promptly fell asleep on the one queen bed.

Anyway, fond memories aside—being on Spider-Man’s back as he flung himself between buildings was Six Flags all over again. By the time he peeled himself off of the kid’s back and planted his feet onto firm concrete, his eyes were prickly with windshear tears, even from under the mask.

“Are your guys always so schlubby?” Spider-Man asked as he and his passenger settled atop a 7-story. “Doesn’t bode well for your professionalism.” There was just enough levity in his voice to skate over offense.

Matt leaned his back on the ledge, crossing his arms.

“No,” Daredevil replied. “I’ve dealt with vending-machine bashers less, um, ‘schlubby.’” He hadn’t actually heard the word before—wasn’t even sure if it was a real one—but he felt its meaning was clear enough by its sound alone. “There’s something off about the whole set up. If they put up a proper fight, I’d be more at ease. But if the men on the ground are that useless, there’s probably something bigger keeping them safe.”

“Or maybe they’re just schlubs. Felt like half of them didn’t even know they were anything illegal,” Spider-Man said. “You think they were just responding to Craigslist ads?”

“Don’t know about illegal, but they definitely didn’t think they were doing anything dangerous.”

“You and your legality,” Spider-Man said. Matt froze, but the kid just continued speaking like the words meant nothing. “So, uh, what’s the plan, then?”

Matt tugged absentmindedly at his gloves. He honestly couldn’t think of a reason to continue dancing around the subject.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked, using a quiet voice, Matt Murdock’s voice.

The response was an unexpected emission of rage, magnitudes stronger than that one from the coffee shop. Spider-Man balled his fists, gritted his teeth, but just simmered instead of speaking. Matt wondered if it might be best to flee preemptively.

“No, I get it,” Spider-Man eventually began, his voice crystal-clear in the cool night, no familiar filter of humor. “I know exactly who you are. You’re the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. You like to wade through misery and the blood of your enemies. You’re a lone wolf. You don’t work with kids.

“And you think you’re too good for me, but you’re not, and I think other than having a car blown up in my face… hell, even with the car blown up in my face, maybe even especially when the car got blown up in my face… I proved I’m plenty capable, and I’d really appreciate it if you stopped talking to me like I’m a fucking kindergartener when I could tear you in half without breaking a sweat.

“Not that I ever would, of course. That would be gross, and also murder, which I personally try to avoid. But I can throw F-150s like whiffle balls, and I think that makes a lot of society’s stupid little rules kind of redundant, because they’re just not written with people who can throw F-150s like whiffle balls in mind, and I feel like you of all people should be sympathetic to how frustrating that can get!

“So no, you’re not going to kick me out of something we started together, because I try to… because I always see things through to the end, and I’m tired of being treated like something less than I am. What you’re going to do is get over yourself and tell me what the plan is, if there even is one, so I can you help out!”

“Respectfully,” he threw in there at the end. Wasn’t even a lie.

All of Matt’s coiled-up snakes of lawyerly words and rhetoric resembled overcooked noodles.

There was another prolonged pause.

“I’m sorry for saying I’d tear you in half,” Peter offered. Regret was quickly bubbling in the kid’s chest—it was his turn to feel uncomfortable in the quiet. “Don’t really know where that came from. Never actually torn someone in half before. Don't intend to.”

Spider-Man, almost quietly and smoothly enough that Matt missed it, sat cross-legged at his feet.

“Hey, say something.”

Matt let out an awkward laugh instead. Peter parroted it, his facsimile more bitter than awkward.

“The hell’s funny?”

“That’s, ah, not what I meant by my question,” Matt started, laying a hand over his chest. “But please know that I’m taking your feelings to heart and your needs seriously.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re kinda difficult to work with?” Peter asked, tenting his hands.

“Yeah,” Matt said. “And you?”

“Oh, totally,” he replied. “Occupational hazard, right?”

“I asked if you knew who I was just because I’d thought you’d,” Matt said gesturing vaguely to his mask, “figured out my identity, not to be an asshole.”

“Huh, what? Since when? Have I? We just met, haven’t we?” he said, standing to attention. “I’m sorry, then, I guess. But I’m not psychic. Or that good at figuring things out, really. I have no idea who you are behind the horns.” The only lie in his tangle of questions and admissions was that he didn’t think he was good at figuring things out. Apparently, Peter was a fully-fledged boy detective in his self-opinion, but he really didn’t know Daredevil’s identity.

Matt struggled to believe that the whole thing was some kind of impossible coincidence. That made even less sense than Providence.

He felt some manic impulse building.

“Wait, what did I say that made you think that?” Spider-Man said, a glitter of excitement sparkling in his voice and blood. “Now I wanna figure it out. Are you someone famous?”

And then just as suddenly, he was dull. “No, I don’t, actually. That’s none of my business. I’m not going to think about this for another minute, it’s…”

“Hey,” Matt said, “it’s alright, it’s all good.”

Peter settled back to sit, this time up on top of the same ledge Matt leaned on, swinging his feet.

“If I ask you another question, are you going to give me another lecture?” Matt asked.

Peter laid a loose punch on Matt’s arm that somehow still stung.

“I was sharing my feelings, don’t be rude,” he said, in the drawn-out, sarcastic but earnest way only teenagers seemed to do correctly. “But no, I won’t. Probably.”

Matt brought himself up to stand, took a few steps from Peter. The same kind of ecstatic exhilaration he got before a particularly wide jump settled over his limbs. He wished he was in the black get-up. That would make this easier, one quick motion, like ripping off a bandage. Since there were two with the helmet and cowl, he kept over-thinking it.

But every time he asked himself if he really trusted the kid, his heart’s answer was a quick yes. His mind was a little less enthusiastic, sure, but not resolutely opposed, either.

Ah, fuck it.

He turned back to Spider-Man while wearing Matthew Murdock’s face.

“If you didn’t know who I was, then why’d you come after me, Peter?”

The air was at once sweet with fear. It was a miserable taste.

“No,” was all Peter said, “oh, hell no.”

Matt opened his mouth—to say what, he didn’t know, that wasn’t exactly one of the reactions he’d imagined—but before he could do anything with it, Spider-Man leapt to a crouch and slung himself over the side of the building.

Matt’s heart stung. He absentmindedly spun the helmet in his hands before pulling it back over his head, smoothing over his emotions with the gesture. He set his hands on his hips and wondered irritably if the rooftop stairwell here was unlocked, or at least behind a breakable door.

His ride up had completely ditched him, after all.

Notes:

the degrom namedrop really dates this work. cannot believe his old ass is still in the league
i don't love too much about these chapters but i also don't care quite enough to completely rewrite them and we gotta get through this one way or another........... but as always, would love to know what you think:)

Chapter 7

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter sticky-pulled his one screenless window up.

The glass’s half-assed silicon seal was shot, and the frame was completely misaligned, so it always made a little too much rattle-banging noise for comfort with how late he usually got in. He made a mental note to pick up WD-40, but it would probably end up in the mental wastebin like the last dozen.

Slipping into the apartment was never, ever elegant, no matter how many times he did it. He always ended up rolling in ass over heels. But he was in, and he was safe, so it was fine.

He got himself up, dusted himself off, and pulled off the mask, savoring that first sweet breath of fresh air, especially delicious after that hike through Manhattan and over the river.

Since he’d left the bathroom door open, Peter could see his entire little domain from where he'd settled beneath the window.

It was a New York studio, so a Midwestern pantry, only barely triple digits in square footage. He had a bit of space to fit a bed and then there was the bathroom (standing shower, made for messy first aid) and the ‘kitchenette,’ which was a cute word a decidedly uncute all-in-one from the 80’s with sink smaller than some of May’s pots, twin electric burners that balanced said pots about as well as angels on the head of a pin, and the skinniest oven Peter had ever seen in his life.

Would be a tight fit for a Cornish hen.

Well, not like he baked.

The whole five-story walk-up, no central air thing knocked the price down from ludicrous to crazy, which was nice. Spidey-strength meant he could lug up furniture and groceries without breaking a sweat, so it was really no big deal, except when he’d run into neighbors on the way up and struggle to remember how much normal people can lift (“Hey, don’t worry, man, it’s seriously, like, way lighter than it looks. Aluminum alloy frame. Very modern. But I appreciate the offer!”).

Most of May’s stuff was still in boxes.

They’d become furniture in their own right, the bulky cardboard things. He still had them right by the door, as if she was going to swing by and pick them up tomorrow. They were functionally a console now, naturally accumulating his keys and mail and miscellanea.

Peter had dropped her clothing, bags, and shoes at the shelter pretty early on, because, duh, that’s what she would’ve wanted, so it was all just personal effects and tchotchkes and books and photo albums he didn’t have a shelf to put on yet.

He’d brought the old apartment’s mezuzah with him. Peter vaguely remembered that it was bad luck to take one down, but how much shittier could his get? It was just too pretty to leave behind, anyway, all polychrome gems and greenish brass, all the years of it catching his eye and letting him know he was finally home after a long day, safe and sound.

Leaving it to the fate of a landlord special had to be the less frum option.

He couldn’t fully remember the rules or prayers for it and felt too embarrassed to look them up, so he’d just hung it on a slant with a command strip. Better than nothing, right?

The co-signer on the apartment was Happy, not that the man actually did any signing.

He’d basically given Peter permission when he’d found a scan of the man’s driver’s license among May’s files—and really, you’d think someone in his line of work would be more conscientious with that kind of thing, so if anything, Peter was doing him a favor, a little white-hatting.

The place was at the crux of a cluster of satellite campuses near the East River, way closer to Manhattan than he’d ever lived before. The Queensborough Bridge was pretty easy to fling himself across, so he’d extended his range over through the Upper East Side, which was fun; even crime was chic there.

Peter had heard that the landlords in the area didn’t care about anything except rent because they thought college kids were stupid, and he’d even done a bit of digging via the mask to figure out which asshole thought kids were the stupidest.

Moral and legal neglect were not what most prospective tenants looked for, but for Peter, they were necessary boxes to check.

He’d knocked his birth year down by one on his documents and the application, and neither those forgeries nor the rotary stamp and signature he’d shopped on the co-signer form would hold up to anyone who looked twice at it. His landlord clearly only looked once; he got the approval email within the week.

Life was good in the world of his lease: he was eighteen, probably a student, and had a reliable, well-paid guardian over there.

He was way jealous of that Peter.

The real Peter flung the mask in the general direction of his bed and headed to the bathroom.

He shook himself out of the suit, toes curling at the cool bite of the tile, and went to wash up. The same dull old mug was looking back at him in the mirror. The spidery stuff had killed his acne dead years ago, but even that miracle couldn’t fix the garden-variety irritation and neglect that buzzed in dry patches of red on his cheeks and forehead. He was paler than he was used to, especially this late in the summer, which made the bouquet of pink and violet under his eyes extra obvious.

He didn’t really go outside much when the sun was still up. Not like he used to spend his summers, anyway, no more long days at the parks or shores with Ned and MJ, no trips down to the beaches in May’s car.

His hair was getting too long, he observed, pulling a comb through it. Long enough to dry in curls if he bothered to take care of it. The offhand thought was enough to bring back a phantom scent of May’s hair oil, almonds and honey.

The comb clattered angrily into the sink, taking an innocent bar of soap down with it. Peter didn’t bother to retrieve them.

He tugged lotion over a clean face and wandered over to his armoire, which was actually just a suitcase and one of those uber-cheap cube organizer things he’d ordered online whose fabric bins were already falling apart. He’d been meaning to lurk thrift shops for something a little sturdier for a while now, but, hey, piss-poor perception of time.

It was always, oh, tomorrow’s fine, and then it was still left undone two or three weeks from when he’d first set his mind to it, rinse and repeat until weeks turned to months.

Applied to both furniture shopping and reconnecting with your best friends like you’d promised, it seemed.

Peter gave Lego Palpatine, posed atop the dresser, a sidelong glance. He bent down to squint at him. The little printed-on face glared back with its usual diabolical sneer. The expression pissed him off today. 

The tiny Emperor was totally mocking him. Were you in on it, fucker?

Peter readied up a flick of his fingers before realizing it'd probably turn the figure in a neat little pile of ABS powder; he satisfied the urge by knocking him over with a tap instead.

He stared at the toppled toy a moment too long and became embarrassed.

Dressed in comfy, clean clothes, Peter more or less threw himself onto the bed, whose cheap frame creaked in admonition.

Matthew Murdock.

Peter kicked at his covers like a child. He wasn’t sure which feeling was strongest—humiliation, fear, betrayal, anger, dread, a little plain curiosity—but they were all wreaking havoc in his chest, bubbling and boiling themselves into a froth. He pulled a pillow over his head and pushed it tight, as if that would cut the noise coming from inside his own head.

How did he know? What gave him away?

He batted the pillow off of his face and crawled under the covers.

Greyish light danced across Peter's ceiling. Light never really died in the city; no matter it started, it could count on catching itself on fifty reflective surfaces, each fragment scattered across fifty more. He could be looking at the final resting place of the gleam of headlights from all the way across the river, for all he knew.

This nonsense train of thought had such a hold on him that he only realized a fair bit later that said light was also an indication that he'd left his window open and curtains drawn.

It's a cool enough night for it, he decided. Fresh air is good for you.

Some cataclysmic but perfectly generic noise rang out from the streets below, just in case he hadn't managed to notice yet, and he stiffened. Construction? He sure hoped it was construction. Should he go check?

All that followed was a long exhale of relative city silence. No, not worth checking. Though that meant he had nothing else to attend to other than the day's events.

Did Murdock know who he was from the second they’d met in the coffee shop? Was he playing with him entire time?

Peter heard Matt Murdock’s voice say, “busy young man.” No, it was Daredevil’s. No, it was Murdock’s. The echoes rang inside his skull like bells in a cathedral.

Like a fucking fiddle.

What was Murdock going to do now that he knew? Or had always known? The answers his head gave for this question were more comforting than the others, honestly. He just couldn’t see the man betraying him for no reason.

Shit. Was abandoning him on the rooftop enough of a reason? Would he take steps to protect his identity now that he'd revealed himself? Violent ones?

Did he only know the name Peter Parker, or did he know Peter Parker? There was a pretty big difference between the two scenarios. Life and death.

Ah, death. Death and Peter Parker. The two of them inside a heart, carved into a tree, the perfect, inseparable pair.

Dread curled in his stomach, the shameful scarlet-red kind that always seemed to accompany meeting your idols. It put their first exchange in clarifying context. All that anxiety—it must’ve some subconscious alert he didn’t know how to read, the Spidey-sense in civilian mode.

He sat up straight. Suddenly, his fixation made a lot more sense.

Well, serves you right, Murdock, Peter thought, sliding back into bed, turning his back towards the bright window. You're not the only one who gets to be psychic or whatever the hell you are.

Notes:

this one's kinda short and lame but if i gave you a double update here i may as well give you a triple so uhhh... see you next week

Chapter 8

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

It was a relatively slow day at the office.

Not that 'fast-paced' has ever really been in the job description for Nelson and Murdock.

Two of Matt’s cases were file-a-form and done, which he’d gotten through before 10 am, and the other was on a long, infuriating hold because the opposition was dawdling with their documents. Dawdling well within their legal right to dawdle, too, which made the whole thing all the more excruciating.

He continued to pick through material he’d already picked through, running the documents through the screen reader, then braille, then the screen reader again, as if some nuance would make itself clear through one medium but not the other. The phone rang thrice: twice telemarketers offering services Nelson and Murdock neither needed nor could afford, once a former client. Mrs. Engel was a very sweet older woman who was in clear need of socialization, and often called to talk about nothing important, but plenty otherwise.

Matt was happy to chat with her as long as she needed, especially on days like these. He knew so much about her granddaughters now; he would probably recognize them off the street by secondhand impression alone.

Foggy wasn’t there to bug or be bugged by—his docket for the remainder of the week was all consulting uptown, and it was up to Matt to hold down the fort.

In addition to being an unimpeachable part of Nelson and Murdock, Foggy had resumed part-time consulting for their old firm, spending two weeks or so out of a month looking down from their glass tower. It was a slow decision, and Foggy had meticulously and diplomatically laid out the reasoning behind it, but it still managed to spin Matt into a week of bloody midnights.

For all his play-acting as a sharkish teddy bear, Foggy Nelson was a shark to the bone. He had always been ambitious, but treated it like a private matter. While in polite company, he curtained it with his humility and pragmatism and self-effacing humor as though the traits were somehow mutually exclusive; Matt knew he’d actually made it past the whole everyone’s-best-friend bit and into something like actual intimacy when Foggy began laying his lofty dreams all bare.

But when Foggy had touched at such vivid heights of success during the District Attorney race, it made all that ambition much harder to deny. He wanted it so bad he was willing to bare his shark teeth to everybody. The scale of casework he would need to work towards said ambitions were simply not what Nelson and Murdock could provide, so he’d given Marci a call.

Now, Nelson and Murdock was still his top priority, a detail that Foggy felt the need to verbally remind Matt of every time he’d leave their little brick office for a few days. Matt wasn’t owed the affirmations, and he knew it. It was a Hell of a lot more than he’d ever done when splintering into solo work.

Karen, of course, was now a meteoric star of a journalist who really had no business checking in on their little office as often as she did, but she was kind enough to pretend it wasn’t completely beneath her.

All of Matt’s people had big kid jobs. He’d have to come to terms with it someday.

The morning’s weatherman augured a high-moisture heatwave stretching its arms up the seaboard from the Gulf—its brunt wouldn’t hit until the end of the week, but its omen already hung humid in the air, just as Matt had predicted. The air conditioning units throughout the building were on high, their anti-resonant vibrations drawing shimmering spirographs over the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Matt had long since given up on theirs when he was the only one in the office. It put out plenty of world-bending noise and very little cool air. Carefully positioned box fans did the trick. Sort of.

Matt was pondering dropping by the precinct to trawl through recent bookings when he recognized that strange presence, now quite familiar. The kid had shown up around the second half of noon, an omen in his own right, his alien heartbeat hovering on a nearby street corner.

What a perfect day for a long lunch, Matt immediately decided, packing up his bag.

He tapped his way past any regular haunts. He knew it would be best to confront Spider-Man somewhere Matt Murdock wasn’t too conspicuous. God forbid someone happen to mention Matt’s new stray to Foggy, as he’d explained him only in the vaguest of terms. Said it was more to do with Matt Murdock than Daredevil, which he supposed was true in its own twisted way.

Not that, of course, he was being duplicitous.

Transparency was key at Nelson and Murdock these days. No, really, it was the singular thing keeping them on speaking terms. But this time around, it wasn’t about Matt keeping secrets, it was about Peter. He was simply prioritizing the kid’s privacy, wasn’t he? Nothing to do with his own.

The kid kept up, convincingly maintaining about half a block of distance. He wasn’t angry anymore, but scared seemed to have stuck; it clung to him like a cheap perfume. Peter was pretty good at retaining his spacing even during visual gaps, Matt noted. Was it good hearing, or good instincts? He’d have to inquire.

After Matt made it two full blocks without recognizing anyone, he ducked into a wide alley that led to an unattended parking lot.

In the gap between tall buildings, the afternoon air was spared from the bulk of the sun’s heat, and condensed humidity dripped off every inch of metal, an unpracticed orchestra of tuneless bells. Emboldened by the drape of shadows, the kid checked his six, then sticky-crawled (the sound gave Matt full-body goosebumps) his way up the wall behind Matt, noiselessly slipping onto a fire escape overhead, where he kept a timid vigil.

“If you’d like, I could work with you on hiding your presence,” Matt eventually called, his back to Peter.

“Fuck off,” Peter chirped from his perch.

“What? I’m offering a favor,” Matt said.

“No, you’re not. You’re making fun of me.”

“Never multitasked before?” Matt said, turning his way.

He got an irritated groan in response. Peter dropped himself from the fire escape in one elegant swoop, landing nearly toe to toe with Matt. He hardly displaced the dust below him, Matt marveled. He was so light on his feet already; he’d just need to learn to mask his vital signs, and he’d be all but incorporeal.

“I don’t like being made fun of,” Peter spat. He meant it as a thinly-veiled threat, but it came out closer to petulant—didn’t help that he said it while kicking away a loose bit of asphalt.

“And I don’t like being stalked at my place of work,” Matt said cheerily, leaning into the kid’s air, Daredevil’s grin sharp on his cheeks. “But see how I handled that with grace?”

Peter took an unconscious half-step back. Bad idea to get into a thinly-veiled threat contest with Matt Murdock.

“I mean, I just figured it was… marginally less rude than going where you live,” Peter said, hands up in a vaguely defensive gesture. So many openings in his posture, Matt noted. Completely untrained. Not that he was certain he could do too much with them anyhow, knowing the speed of kid’s reflexes.

“I’m treating you to lunch,” Matt said instead, already headed back towards the street.

“Huh?” Peter barked. He followed in step regardless.

“Said if I saw you again I would,” Matt said. “I’m a man of my word. Besides, would you rather have this conversation in a hot alley, or an air-conditioned restaurant?”

“You don’t have to spend any more money on me, man,” Peter whined.

“You’re starving, Peter.”

“Am not.”

“I know a lie when I hear one,” Matt smiled, “and a completely shriveled-up stomach. Last thing you ate was half a bag of stale chips, salt and vinegar, probably a few hours ago. Breakfast of champions?”

“Hey—hey, what? God, that’s humiliating,” Peter said, shielding his gut behind wrapped arms. “Don't listen to my stomach!”

“How did you manage that, anyway?” Matt asked. “Finding out where Matt Murdock worked. Don’t think I ever actually told you my name.”

“Stop me when I get offensive,” Peter said, “but MJ, uh, the barista, said your name was Matt. And there aren’t really that many Google-worthy blind Matts from Hell’s Kitchen.”

Matt laughed. All that from a coffee order? Easiest he’d ever been made.

“You knew I was Spider-Man whole time, didn’t you?” Peter asked. “That first meeting at the coffee shop, you had me dead to rights.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, “though it’d probably be more accurate to say I could never really know you as anyone else. So much of how I recognize others comes from their biological makeup. I, uh, doubt you need me to tell you this, but you’re several standard deviations away from the average human. And young, hungry. Scared. Felt obligated to help.”

Matt tilted his head. He heard Peter’s pace faltering behind him. He seemed unsure, anxious; Matt wondered if he might be tempted to flee. He certainly seemed to like doing that.

“I was only trying to be nice at the bodega,” Matt offered, turning back towards him. “Spider-Man or not, you seemed in need of a little kindness. You just didn’t want mine, and that’s fair. I felt like I knew you pretty well already, but to you, I was still a stranger. Must’ve been… disconcerting, to say the least. I've been told as much before.”

“You read emotions?”

“More or less.”

“You knew when I was scared, angry, flustered,” Peter said.

“Yes,” Matt said. Like right now: a nice, even blend of all three.

“Shit,” Peter said. “I was so pissed at you for trying to be nice, and you knew the whole time. Everything about this is so embarrassing.”

Ah, that was the only issue? Matt turned Peter’s way, put out a hand.

“Matt Murdock, Attorney at Law,” he introduced himself, “among other things.”

“Peter Parker, perpetual part-timer,” Peter replied, shaking his hand, “plus, yeah, the other things. Hey, am I still supposed to, like, offer to guide you, by the way?”

“If you’d like,” Matt said, raising an eyebrow. “It does make things a little easier. Though I’m sure you’ve gathered it’s mostly optics by now.”

“Har-har,” Peter enunciated, looping his arm through Matt’s as they turned back onto the avenue. “You’re still leading, though. This is so not my neighborhood.”

The longer he spent in the kid’s presence, the less his odd physiology lit up Matt’s sympathetic nervous system. Exposure therapy, he thought sagely. But God, with him so close, it was impossible to ignore how young he was.

He distracted himself by finding them lunch. No, that kitchen was one great big health code violation, no, a former client was dining there, certainly not, obvious mob front, and not even one with good food…

Ah. Cool air, fresh ingredients, disinfected tables, the sound of hands being washed with soap. Antibacterial soap, even. An oasis.

“How’s Vietnamese sound?”

“I’ll go ahead and be honest here, Mr. Murdock,” Peter said, “I’ll eat anything you’re paying for.”

“That’s the correct answer,” Matt said. “Matt’s fine, by the way.”

“Yeah, don’t hold your breath on that,” Peter retorted. “I was raised too damn well.”

Really? Matt had guessed some variant upon orphan or runaway.

Peter was clearly feeding himself based on the quality and frequency—or lack thereof—of his meals. Able to play truant during the day, wander anywhere he cared to at all hours of night, collect bruises and scars freely: not exactly the typical markers of a carefully minded child.

Maybe ‘raised’ was in past tense for a reason other than grammatical. The subject seemed a little too delicate to press upon directly, though.

“Well, I certainly wasn't,” Matt said. "Matt. I insist."

“We'll see about that,” Peter hummed, chewing on his lip.

Alright, then, Matt thought through raised eyebrows. Funny thing about teenagers that Matt knew firsthand—they're pretty good at making even politeness seem rude.

“Tell me a little about yourself, Peter,” Matt said instead.

“Not much to say,” Peter hummed, a faint waver in his voice and heart. “High school dropout, techie. Hard on the hardware, not so much the software. Software’s always been more of… an old friend’s thing. I manage plenty on my own, though. It’s more or less what I do for work these days. Weird little tech freelance gigs.”

“The suit,” Matt said. “Your craftsmanship?”

“Mine? I mean, mostly, yes,” Peter said. “I put this one together, but it’s based pretty heavy off of someone else’s blueprints.”

“You worked for Stark Industries.”

“Dunno if ‘for’ is the word I’d use,” Peter said. “And it was Mr. Stark, never really Stark Industries.”

“Would you say there was a clear point where the interests of the two entities diverged?”

“I mean, sure, SI was his baby, but he could hardly have his fingers in every billion-dollar pie, could he? Hey, are you, like, witness-questioning me here?”

“Well, look at you cross examine me back,” Matt grinned. “What would you say in lieu of ‘for’?”

“With,” Peter said, “and, I mean, yeah, maybe under, sometimes. But never for. Spider-Man doesn’t work for anyone. Except, you know, a very broad, non-exclusionary, universal sense of capital-G Good.” Lie, but he’d sure like if it was true.

“What is that thing made of? Your suit, I mean. Unsettled me the first time I touched it.” It was currently unsettling him—he had it in his backpack, and the distinct smell stood out even among the typically diverse perfumes of the city street, heady and acerbic.

Peter brightened, blossomed, even, at Matt’s side.

“A personal blend of modified spidroin proteins and other amino acids," he said. "Spider silk on steroids, essentially. Not quite Kevlar, but it has some nifty self-healing properties and can be synthesized in a tiny kitchen without any billion-dollar equipment and knit together into fabric with a hobbyist loom, so…” Ah, that’s why. This was his wheelhouse. Matt wondered how long it’d been since he’d gotten to talk to someone like this.

“You said techie, not chemist.”

“There’s overlap,” Peter admitted. “All-round nerd, let’s say that. Engineer.”

“It generates its own heat,” Matt recalled. “Irregularly. Tiny peaks, in different places, at different times. That have to do with your proprietary blend?”

“Ah, you picked up on that? I’ve got a whole onboard computer hidden in there, actually,” he prattled, nearly incandescent. “Figuring out heat distribution was a bitch, but the solution’s pretty clever! Used little copper threads, suit’s essentially one big air-cooled heat sink, and man can I overclock while swinging. Just a simple Linux distro that keeps me productive. And warm. Which is nice, because I’m about as coldblooded as a human can get before they just straight-up die. But you probably knew that already, huh? God, that's creepy…”

All-round nerd.

Yeah, Matt could believe that.

“That must be our overlap,” Matt smiled. “To our left, Peter.”

“Smells good,” Peter said as they pushed through the door. It did—star anise, heavy enough upon the air to taste, ginger, sesame, cinnamon, cilantro, and a dozen other spices, all simmering alongside bloody-fresh beef and broth. The shop was comfortably occupied; not busy enough to overwhelm, but not empty enough that they’d stick out.

Matt and Peter were sat immediately, and both asked unaffectedly for the house special.

“No one’s really listening in, by the way,” Matt said after a moment. Their food had come out in minutes, steaming hot. “We can talk freely.”

Peter nodded through a thick slurp of rice noodles. Once he’d choked it down, he cleared his throat.

“So, uh,” he said, pointing at nothing in particular with chopsticks, “how’s it all work? Specifically. Enhanced hearing, I figured.”

Matt must’ve put on a face of some magnitude.

“What?” Peter demanded.

“You know,” Matt said, “I think you’re the first person I’ve had this conversation with who didn’t open by alleging that I fake my blindness.”

“Huh.” Peter tilted his head, stirred his soup. “Wouldn’t be my first guess. Just… seems like a really specific and super inconvenient cover story.”

Matt worked his jaw through a frown. “You’re right, aren’t you? Maybe I should be angrier at that.”

“I dunno, I’ve heard scandalous rumors about your angry, man,” Peter floated. “Hazardous to public safety.”

“No Light Response is the medical term for it,” Matt said, ignoring him. “Everything else, hearing, scent, touch, got turned to a million when my vision went to zero. I’ve learned to maneuver around it.”

“I think you do a little more than maneuver, Mr. M… Matt,” Peter said. “And, the, uh, flips? Olympic gymnast? Circus runaway?”

Mr. Matt. Was he a preschool teacher now?

“I was trained by a master of an ancient martial sect as a boy,” Matt recited. “He was blind, too. Taught me how to turn myself and all that extra noise I hear into a weapon against my enemies. Well, his enemies, anyway, an opposing cult. But I've never been very good at doing what I'm told. Found battles of my own to fight.”

“No shit?” Peter said. “Didn’t know we actually had those in real life. Are they still around?”

“As far as I know, I'm the last of my kind,” Matt said. “But in my experience, that sort of bullshit has a hard time staying extinct. If you start seeing ninjas around town, you walk the other way and let me know, yeah?”

“That’s sick. I mean, not the, uh, blind bit, but, uh…”

“No, sick’s an understatement,” Matt said, cutting him off with a light little laugh. “It’s a fragile blessing, and I've been reminded of that quite acutely. I try my best not to take it for granted.”

“I, uh, had glasses. Before. And asthma,” Peter said, rambling, “and I also try not to lose sight of that among all the super-strength and stuff, and… I don’t really know why I’m trying to center myself here, this feels rude…”

“It’s usually called empathy,” Matt offered. “Before what, exactly?”

“The bite,” Peter said, as though it was a perfectly reasonable explanation. “From a genetically modified spider.”

“And where exactly was a minor exposed to a genetically modified spider?”

“Uh, doesn’t matter. Closed down now, so quit drafting that lawsuit, lawyer. It was totally my fault either way,” Peter said. “Had a head-start internship out of middle school, got placed at a tech startup. They were researching the refinement of animal compounds, like spider silk, for industrial applications. I decided it would be a good idea to get a bit of investigative journalism in, too, snuck where I shouldn’t have. I was a total knucklehead of a thirteen-year-old.”

Matt swallowed down a large bite of his meal, which he realized he could hardly taste; his mouth had gone dry.

“You’re a genius,” he intoned. He supposed the fact was evident enough from the kid’s earlier monologue, but putting a number alongside it still shocked him.

“Well, I dunno if I’d use that exact terminology,” Peter shrugged. “But my teachers said I always tested pretty advanced, sure. Hey, aren’t you the summa cum laude, first-time pass at the bar guy?”

“Stop looking me up,” Matt snapped. “Do you know what I was doing at thirteen? I mean, you don’t, but it certainly wasn’t a head-start internship.”

“I actually so wanna know.”

“Pleading the fifth. Involved whiskey,” Matt said. “You’re… you’ve actually been Spider-Man since thirteen?”

“Nah, took me a few months to cope with the changes and stop feeling sorry for myself,” Peter said. “Didn’t actually start going out until high school. Very responsible, right?”

“Not the word I’d use,” Matt said.

Notes:

every time i proofread this chapter i have to go out and get pho for dinner. hope it also makes you want to have pho for dinner
also yes i'm sorry i am a nelson murdock and page hater. they're family of course. but karen is just soooooooo much more compelling when she has an actual life and career and goals and shit somewhere far away from matt.
i am not a nelson and murdock hater so i don't really remember why i decided on the foggy bit. 2022 me was like fuck matt in particular i guess? which i guess is a pretty average matt murdock fan impulse. waiter! cover him in his own blood & make him sadder please
oh wait actually it was probably to strengthen peter/matt parallels of letting loved ones slip away.... that's pretty smart actually. alright point to 2022 me

Chapter 9

Notes:

two chapters for one conversation lmfaooooo sorry

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“Hey, I uh, didn’t just come to properly introduce myself, by the way,” Peter said, a blunt redirection that Matt immediately furrowed his brow at. “Remember what I said about your car thieves?”

“That they were, quote, schlubby.”

“Nah, that they might’ve gotten hired off of Craigslist. Well, I did some sleuthing online,” Peter said, rummaging through his backpack. Some quick, clumsy taps, then he shone the screen Matt’s way, “and look what I found.”

“We just went over this,” Matt said.

“Oh, right,” Peter stuttered. “Um, it’s a job listing, posted last night on the local deep-web anon board. Twenty-seven dollar base pay. No background check, proof of work eligibility, or references required. Entry-level applicants encouraged to apply. Urgently hiring. Call us tonight, get cash in hand tomorrow.”

“Why are you on the deep web?”

“Wow, nothing gets past this guy.”

Matt just raised an eyebrow.

“What, you think they post cash-only openings on Indeed?” Peter said. “I’m not technically, uh, eligible to work at the moment. Work papers are hard to get, you know. Actually, you especially. I’ll go back to the legit stuff as soon as I can, but this is all I got right now.”

“Not concerned about getting your hands dirty? Helping the wrong cause?”

“I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting the tax evaders from the actual bloody-murder criminals. Besides, if I’m not sure, my good buddy Spider-Man can always poke around for me.”

It was plain enough on his face that Matt didn't particularly like those answers, but he didn’t care to press further, either. “This listing. You think it’s our chop shop?”

“Think I know. Responsibilities: help facilitate fast-paced auto repairs,” Peter read. “Meets on-site in Hell’s Kitchen. Overnight shifts. And, I quote, ‘no cops or narcs need apply.’ Sounds real legitimate, right?”

“Organized crime doesn't often outsource,” Matt said. “Unless they’re…”

“Super low-level disposables. See, that’s what I thought, too,” Peter said. “Except I found more listings. ‘Private security,’ ‘warehouse management.’ All under the same contact information. The whole joint is outsourced, top-to-bottom.”

“Someone must be doing the outsourcing. A new player, or some innovative market expansion?”

“I guess that’s our mystery,” Peter said. “Also, uh, my first night in Hell’s Kitchen—hey, wait a fucking minute…”

Peter recalled several things at once: a phone call, a mention of a stalker, an insincere promise from a shadowed vigilante.

“Whatever happened with your stalker, Mr. Murdock?” he asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.

Matt opened his mouth, closed it, swallowed a spreading smile down under a mouthful of noodles.

For some reason, it was this inane moment—not last night on the rooftop, when he'd turned to him in the suit, face bare, not earlier, when he'd somehow spotted him from a fire escape two stories up—that Matt Murdock and the Devil of Hell's Kitchen finally overlapped in Peter's head.

He'd known it, sure, but now he was aware of it, almost uncomfortably so, and it was unbearably embarrassing.

“Oh shit. It’s me,” Peter intoned. “I’m the stalker. You knew I was there the whole damn time.”

“Every moment,” Matt said. “Knew before you really made it into the neighborhood, actually. Like I said, you’re a very distinctive presence.”

“So you were just… going about your night… noticing me… notice you?” Peter threw back his head with a frustrated groan. “I must’ve seemed like such an asshole.”

“Well, a very earnest little asshole,” Matt offered. “I thought I was being generous with my timing, too. Foggy wanted to go another round, but I had to go, oh, sorry, bye. This teenager’s here to pick me up, and I have to go show him where I live so I can corner him and interrogate him in a mask.”

“Oh my fucking god,” Peter muttered, hiding his face.

“I’ll admit it, though,” Matt grinned. “I did not know you could hear a phone call from across the street. Thought I blew my cover then and there. I was lucky you’re so…”

“Oblivious?” Peter supplied, indignant.

“I was lucky you have such a strong instinct to protect,” Matt tried. Peter narrowed his eyes at that, suspecting flattery.

“And they say crime never pays,” Peter said, forcing himself to come to terms. “I got a free lunch out of the dude I stalked.”

Matt choked through a chuckle.

“Hey, hold the fuck on,” Peter said. “‘Keep an eye on Matthew Murdock?’”

“Heh. Yeah. Bad joke,” Matt said, a loose smile on his face.

“Alright, um, anyway,” Peter said, regathering himself. “My first night in Hell’s Kitchen, I helped recover a stolen car.”

“I know. It was clean work.”

“Quit showing off and let me finish. It was this super bright candy-red Charger. Stopped the wheels, webbed in the drivers, dragged it to a parking spot, right under a streetlight. And then guess what I found out front of the chop shop?”

“A bright-red Charger?”

“Yup,” Peter said, “bits of web still all tangled up in the rims, even.”

“So, our thieves recovered it,” Matt said, not quite following.

“Yeah, but here’s the thing. I got the location off the police scanner. The cops knew everything I did. And it took me a while to get over there, it’s not like I’d sniped it. I get Hell’s Kitchen has a lot going on some nights, but…”

“You think the police had plenty of time to get there.”

“Yeah. Just… rubs me the wrong way, you know? Something’s definitely wrong here, but I don’t have enough context to know what. Anyway, I was thinking I’d apply for one of the jobs, go undercover,” Peter said. “Learn a little more.”

Matt frowned. He was really good at those, Peter had noticed. Textbook frowns.

“I’d like to say that you shouldn’t be putting yourself in harm’s way,” he said. “But honestly, I don’t know enough about the group to say anything at all. At this point, I’m not even sure if they’re still a threat worth pursuing via nocturnal means.”

“Hey, if I see sketchy ass job listings preying on our most vulnerable, I’m gonna have to stick my nose into it,” Peter said. “Which is exactly why I should go undercover. I’m smack dab in the middle of their target demographic.”

This put another expertly-crafted frown on Matt’s face.

“Peter,” he began.

“Mr. Murdock,” Peter interrupted. “It’s—it’s not like I need your permission. This is happening with or without you. I’m just trying to be a team player here, yeah?”

“Of course,” Matt said, his voice softening. “I wouldn’t ask for more than that. I just want to make sure you know that, uh, whatever has you feeling vulnerable… if there are legal solutions, you have a passing acquaintance with a pretty good lawyer.”

“Oh,” Peter said, flushing. “Right. That. Sure.”

Matt was apparently feeling merciful; he gave him a mild smile and left it at that for now.

“If you’re in, I’m in,” he said instead. “We’re, uh, finishing what we started, right? You should run point.”

“Alright,” Peter said. “I’m a great runner of points.”

“Hey, are you free any nights this week?”

“Most of them. Why?”

“You and me, we’re sparring,” Matt grinned, this one a fresh shade of unhinged.

“Huh? I dunno, man,” Peter said. “I was clear about the super-strength, wasn’t I? Could really hurt you.”

“Yeah, if you can land a hit,” Matt teased. “We’re still strangers, Peter. If we’re going to work together… well, in my experience, it’s the fastest way to get to know someone.”

“You wanna beat on a teenager? Sicko.”

Matt leaned in, raised innocent eyebrows, a splayed hand over imaginary pearls. “You intend to let a blind man beat on you?”

Peter groaned.

Notes:

funny how i went into this thinking it would be a very straightforward exchange and then these boys still insisted on fitting in a misunderstanding there at the end!! ridiculous

Chapter 10

Notes:

wow!!! ty for over 100 kudos!!!! that's a big number. i think. i don't really have a frame of reference. but i'm going to decide it's big!! thank you all for reading along!
anyway have some legal drama no one asked for as thanks

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The phone rang shortly after Matt returned to the office. How novel.

“Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law. Murdock speaking,” he said.

“Hey, it’s Brett,” Mahoney said.

“Always nice to hear from you, Detective,” Matt smiled.

“Why? ’Cause a call from me means a case for you?”

“There’s that. There’s also the pleasant sound of your voice.”

“Yeah, you can go ahead and knock that shit off, Matt. I got a perp in here who’s spouting all kinds of… well, you know, the standard-issue Nelson and Murdock type bullshit. Says he was framed for a GTA. Figured I may as well pass along the tip, if you got the time.”

“Much obliged,” Matt said. “I can be over shortly.”

“Sure,” Mahoney said. “Just you, or your better half joining?”

“Just me today, Brett,” Matt admitted.

“Ah. Well, I’ll go ahead and send the reports over to the office for you to print up special, then,” Mahoney said.

“I’d appreciate it.”

“So you’re gonna ask for a, uh, Ross Molina,” Mahoney said. “Charges we’re looking at are the GTA, Resisting Arrest, maybe a Disorderly, but nothing firm’s been sent to the prosecutor yet. I probably won’t be in by the time you swing by, but I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

“Thanks, Detective. Be there soon,” Matt said, tucking the phone back in its receiver.

The humidity had not yet broken when Matt headed out; if anything, it’d compounded as the sun slid down from its apex, and the air on the street was thick enough to gather on every smooth surface, lending a prosaic finish to the World on Fire. Matt shrugged off his suit jacket, yanked his tie loose. Appearances were hardly worth maintaining on a day like this.

Matt spent the damp walk reviewing Molina’s file inside his head.

Ross Molina, native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn some forty-two years ago. He’d spent six of those in a federal prison for the sale or receipt of stolen vehicles across state lines and another two on parole, out exceptionally early from a ten-year sentence on good behavior; Matt had never read such adoration in a parole officer’s final report before. These days, Molina was a well-paid and completely legitimate senior mechanic in a reputable body shop in Hell’s Kitchen he now co-owned.

By all accounts, he’d become a model citizen following his release. He was a paragon of rehabilitation, the kind overemphasized in the end-of-year reports of advocates and institutions alike.

Up until last night, at least, when an officer pulled him out of the driver’s seat of a two-hundred thousand dollar Mercedes he didn’t own.

Molina claimed he had the owner’s permission, the cops claimed he’d nicked the keys, had clear and probable intent to nick the car. Funny thing, though: the owner’s statement was never actually taken. It was unclear if the police had identified an owner at all.

Like Brett said. Standard-issue Nelson and Murdock type bullshit.

The precinct had great air conditioning—sure ought to, with how bloated the NYPD budget was these days—and Matt developed a chill the moment he walked through the door.

Bit like being steam-roasted then chucked in the freezer, he thought. No good for dead meat, hardly pleasant for the living.

The building had about the same perfume as ever, though contributed to by fresh occupants, mostly cortisol and sweaty palms and printer ink. Nearly every heartrate in the building was elevated, except for the odd officer on desk duty; a few of those were half-asleep, one was fully.

Matt tapped his way towards the front desk, and the rabble parted awkwardly around him. It was funny: Matt recognized everyone by their sound, but this was perhaps the one place where everyone instinctively recognized him by his.

“Hi there, Mr. Murdock,” the receptionist called. “Mahoney sent you?” She liked him, probably for the usual reasons. Was just about the only person in the building pleased by his presence.

“Yes, ma’am,” Matt said. “Here to provide counsel for a Mr. Molina.”

“I’ll let them know you’re here,” she smiled. “Actually, Officer Victorino here can show you back to Molina. Can’t you, Vic?”

“Show, my ass,” Victorino (around 6’2, early twenties, tweaked ankle he really shouldn’t be putting weight on, just came in from finishing the day’s fourth cigarette) muttered under his breath. Matt warded off a scowl with a diplomatic smile. Those jokes were only funny when someone he liked made them.

“Right this way, counselor,” Victorino said, a loose hand on Matt’s elbow.

“No Nelson?”

“No Nelson,” Matt confirmed. “I don’t believe we’ve met, Officer.”

“Yeah, fresh outta the Academy, me,” he huffed. “But you’re one of the stories they tell to scare probies here.”

“How flattering,” Matt said. He wondered he was the leading man in more than one of them.

“Yeah, well, don’t let it get to your head,” Victorino laughed. “I dunno what kind of miracles you’re hoping to pull off with this piece of work. We got him dead to rights, in my humble opinion.”

“How lucky, then,” Matt smiled, “that our legal system takes a few other opinions into account, too.”

Victorino scoffed and let Matt’s arm go. Matt heard keys, the scrape of a heavy door.

“Here we are,” Victorino said. “Right ahead, Mr. Murdock.” It would be polite to lead him to the chair, but Officer Victorino had more or less blown polite before they’d shared any words, so Matt was unsurprised when he was left to figure it out on his own.

“Hello. Mr. Molina, I hope?” Matt said, feeling his way along the table and towards a backrest.

“Sure am,” Molina said, watching Matt settle in with some trepidation. “Who the hell are you supposed to be, though? You don’t look like a cop, and I don’t remember calling a lawyer.”

“My name is Matt Murdock,” Matt said, pulling out his laptop, spreading out files. “I’m one half of Nelson and Murdock, criminal defense attorneys.”

Matt offered Molina a hand. Molina did not reach for it.

“Someone smarter than myself once told me something about free lunches,” Molina said. “You ever heard the saying?”

“Well, it’d hardly be free, though our rates are competitive,” Matt said, setting his hand back on the table, giving it a light rap with his knuckles instead.

“Ambulance chasers, then.”

“You could say that. Or you could say we have a, uh, vested interest in helping the underserved members of our community,” Matt said. “When I say competitive, I mean it; Nelson and Murdock prides itself on its accessibility. Plus, if there’s a payout involved, we’d take our modest cut.”

“Payout? Who said anything about payouts? I thought I was looking at jailtime,” Molina said.

“The way I see it, Mr. Molina,” Matt said, “if last night happened exactly as you say it did in your statement, we’re looking at a pretty straightforward case of entrapment. This means a sturdy defense against criminal liability, of course, and, if we’re persistent enough, the possibility for a wrongful arrest settlement.”

The ‘if’ was pulling a lot of weight here. Molina’s story seemed somewhat fanciful.

“That’s… encouraging,” Molina said, though he hardly seemed encouraged.

“Speaking of,” Matt said, “I’m eager to hear your side of the story myself. It alright if I record?”

“Sure. And it ain’t gonna be any different than what you read, by the way. Because, you know. I’m telling the truth.”

Molina’s heartbeat was steady and even. He was clearly familiar with law enforcement, with prosecution, with sitting in a holding pen for eight hours and an icebox of a questioning room for another four. He’d only been given water during all that time, and his blood sugar levels were a crime of their own, but that heartbeat was still steady.

Not upset about what he seemed to consider false charges, either. No, his emotional state was much more level than that. Resigned, almost?

What a shame, Matt thought. Better fix that.

“Ready when you are,” Matt said mildly.

“So, I’m at Club 78. You know. Clubbing,” Molina began.

“Would you say you’re a frequent club-goer, Mr. Molina?”

“Nah, a guy my age?” Molina said. “I was just, uh, meeting a buddy for a drink.”

“Has this ‘buddy’ made a statement?” Matt asked.

“Not yet,” Molina said. “Name’s Leon. Hopefully he’s on his way to pick me up. Asshole. This is all his fault.”

Oh. Interesting. There was a little real heat on that last bit.

“What do you mean by that? What’s his fault?”

“It’s just a figure of speech, Mr. Murdock,” Molina lied, trying to shrug it off. “Wouldn’t have gone out that night without him dragging me, you know.”

Matt raised an eyebrow. Molina quieted. He could tell Matt had bit onto some fragment of insight, but seemed unsure how to shake him off. Pretty good insight there himself.

“Mr. Molina, are you aware of the specifics of attorney-client privilege?” Matt said.

“Sure,” Molina said.

“If you agree to take Nelson and Murdock on retainer, nothing you tell me has to make it to the prosecution,” Matt said, “before it first passes through my discretion. Including whatever it is you’re blaming your friend for.”

“I haven’t said nothing to nobody. I don’t think the cops’re usually that smart, even if I did,” Molina laughed, humorless.

“Cops? No. The D.A.? Different story. Now, this is not technically legal advice,” Matt said, “but if I was giving any, I’d tell you your chances are going to look a Hell of a lot better with me than a public defender.”

“Jesus,” Molina muttered, wiping sweaty palms on his pants. “Yeah, let’s say you’re hired, why not. Really do not need this bullshit right now.”

“Glad to hear,” Matt smiled. “Please continue.”

“Right,” Molina said, “so, Club 78 is a good place to spot. ‘Swhy Leon took me out there. Him and me, we were spotting.”

“Spotting what?”

“Supercars,” Molina admitted. “Every CEO and CTO and trust-fund asshole shows up there, revs their Competition M-Series or McLaren or Aventador or fucking Veyron or what have you on their way in. Their valet’s got a pristine rep—main gal's ex-pro, pretty sure—and a super-secure lot, so everyone knows that people bring out their nicest when they’re going to 78. And I didn’t tell the cops that part for… obvious reasons. We really were just looking, though.”

“Of course,” Matt said. “So, our Mercedes, then…”

“The Mercedes AMG,” Molina corrected. “Big difference there, Mr. Murdock.”

“Right,” Matt said.

One mustn’t take pride in ignorance, but Matt was fine knowing nothing about cars. Because he was blind, sure, but also because he was a New Yorker; it was his Goddamned birthright never to touch a steering wheel.

“So, our Mercedes AMG was one of these supercars?”

“Well, the lady’s really more a luxury sportscar, heh,” Molina said.

Matt raised an eyebrow.

“Anyway,” Molina refocused, “pretty thing was parked right across the street, perfectly tuned bi-turbo V8 humming away, lights on, no one in it. Me and Leon had gone out front to smoke, you know, real casual, law-abiding like. So I say to the valet, hey, that one of yours? She says no. I ask the folks around us, everyone says no, not ours, god, we wish, you know? Then this guy in a suit—tall, blondish, I dunno, it was dark—peeks out the club.

“He goes, oh, that car’s mine. It’s push-to-start, all that modern tech, I can never remember to turn it all the way off. Mind you, guy can’t be any older than 25. Doubt he’s ever put a real key in a real ignition, so who knows what he was on about? But he goes, hey, how about you turn it off for me? And tosses me the keys before I can answer. He goes, ‘just lock up and leave those with the valet, alright?’ And heads back in.”

Not a stutter of a lie all the way through. Matt was fascinated, despite himself.

“’Oh, that car’s mine,’” Matt recited. “Think that’s close to a direct quote?”

“I’d even say it might be a direct quote,” Molina said. “Because I remember how I was doing the asking pretty clear. ‘This car yours?’ ‘Yes, that car’s mine.’”

“Mr. Molina,” Matt said, “would you say all actions that you took that night were performed under the impression that the owner of the car had given you explicit permission to go inside of it?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Molina said. “It sounds insane, though, right? Especially with my history. Even at the time, I was like, Jesus, does this dude know who he just gave his keys to? And that’s why I was on my best damn behavior! Even thought to give them to someone else, but like hell was I going to miss the chance to sit in one of those, sweet baby Jesus forgive me.”

“And by history, I assume you mean your past charges,” Matt said.

“You all… up to date on that, counselor?” Molina huffed.

“I reviewed the documentation, but I’d always prefer to hear it in your own words. I find rap sheets rarely tell the whole story.”

“Not too much to tell, honest. I was young, stupid. I was selling shit I shouldn’t have to people who, turns out, weren’t so good at buying. I got caught, did my time. Cleaned up.”

Hm. Oblique half-truths, flirting with lies. Well, he could address that later.

“Back to last night,” Matt said. “In your words, what happened next?”

“I mean, it all happened so fast,” Molina said. “You probably hear that a lot, don’t you? But it really did."

“I hop across the street, I put my hand on the handle, open the door, slide in. I’m smitten with the cream leather interior, I gotta admit, the big old screen on the dashboard, all the settings and modes. So I spend a moment or two admiring it, sue me. I see he’s barely got two thousand miles on it, and I… and before I can even go to turn the damn thing off like he told me to, I’m being pulled out by the neck, thrown on the ground, screamed at, cuffed, shoved in the back of a much less gorgeous car.”

“You never shut the door behind you?”

“No,” Molina huffed. “And I wasn’t ever going to. I was on my best behavior, remember?”

“Do you think anyone would corroborate this telling of events? Your friend Leon? A bystander? The valet?”

“Well, I’d damn sure hope,” Molina said. He’d worked himself up in reminiscence—Matt could hear his throat closing up. “Because it’s true, goddammit. Really do not need this bullshit.”

“I believe you, Mr. Molina,” Matt said, tried to offer a comforting smile.

“That’s nice, Mr. Murdock,” Molina sighed. “But I’m more worried about what the jury thinks.”

“Please, don’t insult me,” Matt said. “The jury's my job now.”

Molina signed the intake forms quietly while Matt inquired upon the terms of his release. The clerk let it slip that they weren’t considering it a violent offense anymore—not going ahead with the Resisting charge, then, which Matt assured Molina was an excellent sign, as they slapped that shit on a loud sneeze if it was done in cop’s vicinity. He could probably get him out of custody as soon as the judge was free to chat.

Matt took his last breath of sweet air conditioning and prepared to brave the heat. He stepped out the door and immediately wilted.

Then, he dialed Jessica Jones.

“Hey, Matthew,” she drawled in that faux-Angeleno accent. “Inviting me to another one of your funerals?”

“Are you ever going to let me live that down?”

“’Live’? Oh, you think you got jokes, Murdock.”

“I object, Ms. Jones,” Matt said. “I know I got jokes.”

“What do you want?”

“You, uh, working currently?”

“Know anyone in this godforsaken town who can afford not to?” she said.

“You know I work disability heari—never mind. I have a case,” Matt said, “with unusual circumstances. Could use a functional set of eyes on it. Gather some admissible evidence.”

“Alrighty, well,” Jessica said. “I never know if Mr. Pro-bono over here is ever actually bono for it, so… gotta ask up front, this a paying gig, or volunteer? ‘Cause I think I did this quarter’s charity work already just taking this call.”

“Yeah. I mean, probably,” Matt said, then had to cut off her protests. “Hey. Lawyer. Most of my paychecks are probables. But I have very good reason to believe there’s going to be a big, nasty entrapment payout on the other end of this one.”

“Ew, can hear your hard-on for justice through the phone.”

“Oh, darling, I’m sorry,” Matt muttered, “you know I can’t help myself.”

“Numbers, freak,” Jessica demanded.

“The case itself, we’ll do the standard Nelson and Murdock non-food-item hourly rates. You’ll get 5 of whatever that is, let’s say 500 minimum. And if we settle later, it’ll be 12 percent of damages between me and Foggy, and you’ll get, uh, how does 10 of my cut sound?”

“Miser,” she said. “You’re going to Hell.”

“I know,” Matt said brightly. “Are we in business, Ms. Jones?”

“Sure, send over deets,” she said, and the line went dead.

Notes:

whys jessica the bus driver all of a sudden? but come on i couldn't miss a plausible reason for her to show up and insult matt... btw what's the etiquette on here for tagging characters making smaller cameos? she'll be here in the flesh for realsies in a future chap but i think it'll just be the one.. does that warrant a Jessica Jones tag

 

i've been in the process of moving (hitting post on this and then packing away my laptop:P) this past week so i'm even slower than usual at responding to comments but each and every one really does make my day! would love to chat with you once i'm properly settled in:)

Chapter 11

Notes:

suggested listening for this chapter is getting into knives - the mountain goats. mostly just because whenever i proofread to the 'get into knives' line it gets stuck in my head so you'll get the authentic authorial experience

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“I’m really more of a mid-to-long-range sort of guy,” Peter said, studying Matt Murdock’s hands.

They had already been wrapped in orderly layers of white athletic tape; he was reproducing the pattern on Peter’s in neat, clever loops. Peter maintained his focus with chagrined purpose. Kept him from thinking too hard about how this was the first non-violent physical contact he’d had with another human in near half a year.

“Typically, the excuses come after you lose,” Matt smiled. He wore sweatpants and a tank top tonight, hair unparted and allowed to fall loose over his forehead, and he hardly resembled the stiff-backed professional Peter had first met him as. Felt a little like running into your teacher at a grocery store, Peter thought.

No glasses, either, so Peter got his first good look at his eyes. A kind shape, a nice warm brown color, parallel little creases running under them and all across his cheeks when he smiled.

“Not an excuse,” Peter said. “And I’m not losing, but… just saying, you ask a fish to climb a tree, he might be slow at it. I do hit and runs, and that’s about it.”

“Am I a monkey in this metaphor? My point is that it’s bad practice,” Matt said. “Aware or not, you’ll always seek out the safety of distance, even if up close is the best way to do it.”

“I don’t think it’s a problem to play to your strengths.”

“Never said it was. It’s more about building a foundation for your strengths to work off of,” Matt offered. “You can be the best sniper in the world, but that’ll hardly matter when someone gets up in on you. The way I was taught—you had to be capable of taking down an opponent with an empty hand before you were allowed blunt weapons. After blunt weapons, you could get into knives. After knives, you might be allowed to even think about picking up something ranged…”

“Hey, hey, hey, I thought we were just getting to know each other,” Peter said. “Why do I feel like I’m getting roped into some kind of Mr. Miyagi situation? I did not sign up for any sort of lifechanging mentorship wherein we both find the son-slash-father we never had.”

“God, you don’t think I’m that old, do you?” Matt said, weaving his way across Peter’s other hand.

“Fine. Uncle, nephew, whatever,” Peter said. “Still, no mentoring allowed.”

“Didn’t care for that movie,” Matt mused. “One of the few I actually saw, too. Could’ve been watching Coppola or Scorsese. What a waste.”

“Weren’t you like ten when you lost your sight?”

“Nine,” Matt said through a slack-jawed grin, “but somehow I doubt seeing The Godfather a little too young would’ve counted among the more traumatic events of my childhood.”

Matt tapped lightly at Peter’s wrapped knuckles—something like tiny pings of radar, Peter realized—checking the minute details of his work. It was satisfactory, it seemed.

“Show me a fist,” Matt said, and Peter obliged.

Matt felt his way through an inspection, repositioning Peter’s thumb, straightening his wrist. He gave Peter’s corrected form a fist-bump he was too oblivious to return and slid himself up into the ring without turning his back to him, a goading smile on his face.

“You’re having too much fun,” Peter frowned.

“Hardly a sin,” Matt said.

“Maybe it should be,” Peter said, wriggling his way under the ropes, “the way you’re doing it, anyway.”

“Forgive me, I’ve—it’s just been a while,” Matt said. “Since I had a challenge. A friendly one.”

“Oh, so I am a challenge,” Peter muttered under his breath, though a distant part of him suspected that Matt wasn't just talking about their sparring match. It was nice to be seen in your entirety; Peter knew that well.

The whole room reeked of decomposing vinyl, but it was strong enough to taste inside the ring. Peter wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. He was reminded faintly of the unique breed of awkward he felt during school dances; what’s the most socially acceptable thing to do with your hands, again? Did they stay at your sides, or should you wave them up by your shoulders?

Matt knew exactly what he was doing. He settled into a foreboding stance as naturally as breathing. Peter figured he may as well try to mirror him. But which foot goes out front?

Peter had hardly gotten his hands up, and Matt was in his space already, a wild glint in his eyes.

Peter sprung up to hop backwards, flee. This was a mistake; Matt did not let it go unpunished. He dropped low, a sweeping leg catching the foot Peter meant to land on. He fell flat on his back, exhale forced out crudely alongside a little ‘oof’.

Peter palmed the ground behind his head, tried to kip-up to his feet, evade. Apparently another mistake: Matt slipped beneath the arc of Peter’s airborne body and slammed his shoulder into his back, flinging Peter to the other side of the ring.

He flipped himself flat to stare at the bare ceiling for a moment, trying to sequence whatever the hell just happened.

“Ow,” Peter intoned.

“Like I said,” Matt said from somewhere above him. “All you want to do is run. Control the impulse, or it’ll control you.”

“No mentoring,” Peter snapped.

Matt was right, of course; every hair-trigger cell in his body was rioting to launch already, but he slid to rise in a low crouch instead. I’m leagues stronger than him, Peter thought. May as well try and trust that. He lunged forward, fist-first; Matt rendered his arm impotent by weaving it to the side and landing a blow across Peter’s jaw in one clever motion.

“Huh,” Matt said, leaping back, tilting his head. “Your bones. Funny sound.”

“Rude,” Peter said. He dove in with another series of volleys.

“Nah, compliment,” Matt said, swiping each aside, “sturdy, but light, like… aviation ceramic.”

“Can you at least pretend to pay attention to me?” Peter said, pulling back.

“Yet to see anything that requires my attention,” Matt said blithely. “Come on, give me something to work with.”

It was Matt’s turn to charge in, this time with two whistling hooks that Peter wove himself between, but he was unable to react in time when they came together in a quick and crude two-handed shove. It connected, had Peter stumbling backwards.

He regained his footing to take a wild backhanded swipe, but Matt bent his wrist aside, twisted his arm skyward, then capitalized on the lack of coverage to land a few left-handed blows to his ribs.

“Ow,” Peter said again, this time with a little heat, wrenching himself away with a spin and getting his guard back up.

“I can tell when it actually hurts, you know,” Matt said. “You’re not getting pity out of me.”

“There’s something seriously wrong with you,” Peter said.

“Well,” Matt smiled, all teeth, “no points for the obvious.”

He was in on him again, upping the tempo, no, doubling it—four strikes in fluid motion where there’d once been one or two, more and more landing as Peter's guard was eroded away. Peter's halfhearted ripostes were swiped away like bugs on a windshield. It was enough to spike up dull flickers of the Spider-sense, even.

By the end of it, all Peter could do was cross his arms over his face, bend his knees to protect his balance.

This half-measure was short-lived; Matt slipped behind his guard, caught the back of his head with a hand and the front of his knee with a foot, then pushed both in opposite directions, pinwheeling Peter face-down into the mat.

“I think you’re in the wrong business,” Matt hummed, wetting his lips. “You’re not going to protect anyone like this.”

There was a strange glimmer in his voice. Peter wouldn't have guessed St. Matthew was capable of haughty.

It didn't suit him at all.

“Shut up,” Peter snapped, slipping back to his feet, swinging a leg around in a high kick that Matt parried with his own.

“Oh? Think I hear a little shame in there. Who did you fail, Peter?”

Before Peter could protest, Matt spun himself skyward in a heavily-choreographed kick. Peter ducked out of the way of that, but it was Matt's other leg, transitioning from counterweight to offense in a liquid-smooth shift, that connected, nearly knocking Peter's head from his shoulders.

“Shut the hell up,” Peter said, peeling himself off of the mat, tasting vinyl and a little blood. That one had actually stung, rung his bell. If Matt was being honest about knowing when it hurt, it meant he hardly cared, hell, he liked it; there was a slight serpentine curl to his parted lips that suggested a grin.

“You’ll have to make me,” Matt hummed.

Peter’s chest flared with anger. He’d do his goddamned best.

Peter sprung up from the ground, and Matt ducked low, swung out a leg, primed to take advantage of his lack of balance again.

Just as Peter had hoped he would.

He twisted himself midair, hands where feet had been, and caught Matt’s shin in a firm grip. The moment he touched down, he used the newfound leverage to haul Matt’s entire weight portside.

It worked, somehow, though the motherfucker still managed to land in a neat little somersault. Alright, new lesson learned—don’t let go.

“Good,” Matt said, nearly growled, through a wildcat smile.

Peter was way past snappy retorts. He just pushed back in, and Matt met his pace, two freight trains on a collision course.

Matt caught his shoulders with both hands, bracing in to plant a knee in the soft part of Peter’s abdomen, knocking loose a grunt and a bead of pinkish spit. He wouldn’t let him retreat, so Peter leaned farther in, instead: he curled in to tuck himself under Matt’s waist, nabbed the back of his thighs, and hoisted him up over his shoulder.

Oh, I’ve always wanted to try this, a childish part of him chittered. Peter piledrove him straight into the ground.

The hit knocked the wind out of him, had his head lolling. Peter spun about and settled atop him.

He landed a sharp jab to his jaw and was rewarded with a picturesque splatter glittering across the mat. Then he landed another, then another. His opponent smiled widely in a breath between blows, teeth painted bright red.

There was a streak of color and light along Peter’s periphery. He flinched at it, froze—some new enemy to his right?

Ah, no, he realized, eyes coming into focus upon his own hand. Just the red on the white of his neatly wrapped knuckles.

Neatly wrapped by…

“Oh, shit, sorry,” Peter gasped, shame hitting him hot. He leapt up. “I am so, so sorry, Matt.”

“The Hell for?” Matt grinned, rising up to a crouch, a ruby strand swinging from his lips. “Only half-decent hits you’ve landed so far.”

“I think I’m done,” Peter said, pacing backwards, a tremor building in his fingertips. “Yeah, yeah, think I’m done.”

“S’alright,” Matt said, his bright tone a poor match for the blood pooling down his front. He sat, crossed his legs, leaned back on his hands. “We can call it a draw.”

Peter frowned, set shaking hands on his hips, then bundled them securely away in crossed arms.

“The hell we can,” he spat. “I almost… I could’ve killed you.”

“What, you think that makes you special?”

“I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I,” Matt said, letting his chin drop towards his heaving chest. “If you really wanted me dead, I’d probably be dead, what with… all that strength of yours. But, uh, rest assured—if you’re ever tempted to try, I’d damn well make it harder than that.”

Wanting… wanting him dead… wanted him dead… god, he’d wanted him dead…

“Hey, Pete, look at me,” Matt said. He’d stood and approached without Peter noticing, pressing a warm hand to the side of his neck. “You looking?”

He was, though he’d really rather not be. He’d split Matt’s lip wide and bloodied his nose, and angry burgundy bruises were already blooming along the ridge of his jaw.

Funny. All that red brought out the tiny bit of hazel he hadn’t noticed in Matt’s eyes.

“You have to let me know. Not like I can tell.”

“I’m looking,” Peter said.

“Good. Not sure where you went,” he said, “but you’re back here with me now, yeah?”

“Sure,” Peter breathed. “Sure, yeah.”

Matt opened his mouth as though he’d like to elaborate, but must’ve thought better of it, as he headed out of the ring and opened up a locker instead.

“Got a first aid kit over here,” he called. “I keep this one fresh.”

What, like Peter was the one that needed it?

He frowned, ready to object, but the stretch of his lip stung unexpectedly. Evidently, his lip had been split, too. A cursory wipe of his face with the back of his hand came back reddish—not all of that tackiness had been sweat, then.

All of Peter's adrenaline had etherized by now, replaced with the quiet warmup of a headache and a chorus of odd little aches and pains all across his body.

Alright, sustained.

“So, uh,” Peter said, wandering over to Matt. “Did I prove myself with an empty hand? Does this mean I get to learn knives or whatever yet?”

“Sure, if you want,” Matt said. He'd found a clean towel, wiped himself down, tossed one Peter's way without turning towards him. “You'll just have to find a different teacher. Never actually made it that far myself.”

“You are so full of shit, man,” Peter huffed, burying his face and the insult in the towel.

Matt laughed, a short, singular bark—must’ve been painfully reminded about the state of his lip, too.

Apparently, Matt had noticed something off about the mechanics of Peter’s punch while he’d been spaced out, whaling on him (which was more heartening than it had any right to be—a guy actually getting beat to death would hardly notice such things, right?), and instructed him to do a bit of bag work as a cooldown exercise.

“You want to break a wrist? That’s an excellent way to break a wrist,” he’d said, to which Peter made some retort about his fancy aviation ceramic bones. Matt reminded him that even tempered glass shatters if you hit it in the right place.

Peter rolled his eyes at that, but it made a little sense. If you ignored literally all of the material qualities of tempered glass, anyway. Well, Matt was a Bachelor of Arts, not of Science; Peter would let it slide this time.

And, to be fair, the new form Matt had taught him was noticeably more comfortable to beat on the bag with.

Who knew punches weren’t actually supposed to hurt both parties?

“I assume your thorough research means you know who my dad is,” Matt said eventually, breaking their vigil. He'd been icing his jaw at a nearby bench, quietly coaching Peter through combos.

“Yeah,” Peter said.

Matt didn't respond right away. He set the ice pack down and let his eyes drift skyward.

Peter stepped away from the bag, steadied it, studied a faded picture framed above the lockers. Jack Murdock glared back at him defiantly with a remarkably familiar expression.

“Be kinda hard to miss him in here, even if I didn’t,” Peter noted.

“Battlin’ Jack,” Matt said, voice soft enough to scald. “Pride of Hell's Kitchen. I get it from him, you know.”

“What, your good looks?” It was a half-truth; whoever his mother was must've smoothed him out, strengthened his brow, given him those disarmingly dark eyes. Peter wondered if he would ever learn who she was, if Matt even knew.

“Well, that too,” Matt said.

“What else?”

“The, uh… the rage,” he said.

Peter stilled, suddenly nervous for reasons he couldn't quite discern yet.

“There’s this part of me,” Matt said, “and it’s always begging the rest to land just one more hit, spill a drop more blood, snap one more bone… and sometimes it’s louder than the reasonable parts, the kind parts, the penitent ones. And I got it from him. The old man had always had it inside, his Devil. Grew into mine like a house on fire.”

His lip had started bleeding again, a cherry gem bright atop the blackening scab.

“I don’t do this just to help people, Peter,” he continued. “I do it because I need to.”

His thousand-yard stare looked leagues longer than usual. He worked his teeth over the wound, tongue wiping away the blood.

“You, though,” Matt said. He strung his words together slowly, carefully, each at their own time, like rosary beads. “I get the sense that… for you, it’s not exactly hereditary, not exactly natural, is it? You wear it well, but I think it's something you put on, not let out. Where’s all that rage of yours from, Peter?”

Peter ran his fingers along the soft leather of the punching bag, let the question linger in the dusty air.

“That a lawyer trick? Telling a dirty secret of yours to pry out one of me?”

Matt smiled, this time about as sad as Peter had ever seen him.

“Yeah, oldest in the book,” he said. “It work?”

Peter didn’t bite. His nails left half-moons in the bag.

“Nah, no tricks,” Matt clarified. “I wanted you to know. Whether or not you’d share in kind, I thought you should know exactly who you're running with.”

Peter walked over to him. He pulled a wad of gauze from the first aid kit, caught Matt’s jaw in one hand, and staunched the fresh flow from his lip with the other.

“I know exactly who I'm running with,” Peter said. “You and me, I don't think we're quite as different as you seem to wanna think.”

Matt’s eyes widened slightly to search around for nothing in particular. Peter let his head go and sat on the bench at his side.

“Are you saying you're more like me, or am I more like you?” he asked.

Peter shrugged, studying Matt, grave and still save for the aimless flutter of his eyes, the subtle, near constant motion of his fingers, like seagrass under a gentle current. He hadn't really thought it through that far out, though he found himself inordinately certain of it anyway. Maybe both?

“You asked what I'm mad at,” Peter said instead. “And it's me, mostly.”

“You know, I was, uh, raised to believe that no one was beyond saving, beyond help,” Peter said, staring down at the bloodied gauze in his hand. The red nearly glowed in the low grayish light. “Probably the first lesson I was ever taught.”

“And I was given an opportunity to put the theory into practice,” he continued. “And by opportunity, I mean this… ridiculous fucking shit show, which was, of course, all my fault anyway, me trying to have my cake and eat it too. And in the process, I ended up… getting my aunt, the one who did all the raising, killed. Ironic, right? She taught me how to kill her.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Matt said, and the pithy condolences didn’t piss Peter off like he thought they would. Maybe the lawyer tricks were working on him. Maybe it was because something in the way Matt said it made Peter think he was used to hearing it.

“Yeah, me too,” Peter said, half-manic. “And the rage… I'm still so angry at every single… everyone responsible. But they're all beyond my reach now, so I got nowhere to put it. Well, aside from myself, of course.”

“Would she want you to blame yourself?”

“Course not. That's literally the only fucking reason I haven't…” Peter trailed off, unwilling to dignify those dark impulses by speaking them out loud. “She was it, you know. My center. After she went, everything else, just fell… I just let it all fall apart. No reason left to pick up the pieces.”

“One will come,” Matt offered. “It always does. Did for me. And if it doesn’t, you’ll just have to make one.”

“It’s been months,” Peter huffed.

“Yeah, that was about my timeline, too.” Matt said.

He slung a loose arm around Peter’s shoulders. He was warm. Almost feverishly so. Did Matt run hot, or was Peter's preternaturally low internal temperature just skewing his perception?

“Hey, it’ll work out,” Matt said. “What little I know about you… somehow, I doubt you’re the type to let it do much else.”

“Whatever,” Peter muttered, though it came out far more stilted than he would've liked.

Funny thing about dust, once it's allowed to gather in thick enough layers—it dampens sound about as well as anything. A slovenly ruin like Fogwell's may as well have been a subterranean crypt; the near-liturgical quiet was only occasionally broken by the gentle hiss of tires from the distant streets.

“You know,” Matt said after a moment. “It sounds like you still believe in it, after everything. In the possibility of salvation.”

“Have to, right?” Peter said. “Sunk-cost fallacy. It’d all be worth jack shit if I quit now, wouldn’t it?”

“That's not quite honest, is it?” Matt said. “And I think you know it, too. I think it’s bravery. Think it’s faith.”

Peter swallowed around the swelling in his throat, though Matt almost certainly picked up it on anyway.

The empty room suddenly seemed loud with ghosts.

“Well, who gives a damn what you think?” Peter said, soon as he could speak without bursting into tears. “You’re apparently some kind of bloodthirsty maniac. I don’t think I should be listening to you at all.”

“Ha. Good call.” Matt smiled widely, splitting his lip open a third time.

Notes:

matt: something's off with this kid. gotta push him to his limits and get inside his head and figure out what. make sure he's not the dangerous kind of off
peter: auntie exploded :(
matt: im going to hell

i am not a powerscaler! if you are please let me know how wrong this fight is in the comments below:P

Chapter 12

Notes:

sorry for being so slow with replies these past two weeks have been kinda nuts .. got my work hours doubled while moving insane one two punch ( ´ཀ` )

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

“Hiya,” she said. “Heard you’re looking to join our team. I’m Antonia.”

Antonia was a pretty young woman—nah, looked more like a young lady—probably college-age, dark hair that fell in neat, gelled ringlets. As if the name on its own wasn’t a strong enough clue, Antonia’s accent was highly suggestive of her origins: a thoroughbred New Jersey girl. She held a glittery clipboard under one arm and wore a long lanyard with plenty of keys and pepper spray and a small stuffed animal of some kind around her neck.

If Peter didn’t know where he was, he’d suspect he was about to be asked to donate to some sorority’s charity drive. He was tempted to ask why she was part of an auto theft ring instead of studying communications at Rutgers, but it seemed unlikely that the answer would be anything happy.

Hell, maybe she was doing both. Some people are just too productive for their own good.

“Benjamin.”

“Nice to meet you, Benjamin,” Antonia said, flashing a pearly-white grin.

“You too. You, uh, showing me the ropes?”

“Hell no,” Antonia laughed. “I don’t work in the shop. Ever. I’m actually part of the social engineering team, but I’m, like, basically HR these days. I speak with all the new hires, make sure we’re all on the same page with things like discretion and whatever.”

Social engineering? What, like, cyber security social engineering?

“Almost sounds a real business,” Peter said. “How long you been here?”

“Hm,” Antonia said, taking a sideways glance at Peter through her heavily-lashed eyes. “Couple months. Longer than most, anyway. You might’ve heard, but we had a, uh, close vigilante encounter the other day. They didn’t really do much, just knocked some people around and blew shit up, but it, like, totally tanked our retention rates.”

“How’d you get on a vigilante’s radar?”

“Vigilantes, plural, two of them. I saw Daredevil up close. Christ, is he certifiable. And I don't know... random act of violence, felt like,” Antonia hummed. “I mean, sure, we aren’t exactly running a daycare for puppies here, but I hardly think we qualify for a check-in from a fucking Avenger.”

“I don’t think Spider-Man’s an Avenger anymore,” Peter said.

“Oh,” Antonia said, an eyebrow raised, “so you did hear about it.”

Shit.

“I’m kind of a, uh, groupie,” Peter tried. “Of his. Spider-Man’s. Not that, uh, that would stop me from shooting at him! To defend this place. And its honor. Or whatever.”

“Jeez, chill,” Antonia laughed, her keys jingling. “We wouldn’t ask you to. Shop boys only gotta carry if they want to. The shooting part’s security’s job.”

“You guys sure got compartmentalization down pat,” Peter said.

“It's policy. Each of us get precisely what we need to know, like they did in the Manhattan Project,” Antonia said. “Hey, speaking of…”

Antonia poked her head through a propped door. A breakroom, by the looks of it; a slovenly little kitchenette (still bigger than Peter's) and a folding table and chairs. The room's one window—high, unreachable—had been shattered. Fairly long ago, too, if the tattered state of the waterlogged butcher paper that stood in for the glass was any clue. Very cozy.

“Heyyy, Jeremy,” she said. “We got a Spider-Man fan here.”

Peter poked his head in, too. Oh. Jesus. It was chicken man. From that one night, the one with the explosions. Eating a little microwave meal with a plastic fork.

“Fuck that guy,” Jeremy spat.

Peter frowned.

“Not you,” Jeremy backtracked. “I don’t know you. You can like him, I don’t care, just… fuck him.”

“Jeers got his ass whooped by your fave,” Antonia stage-whispered.

“That’s, a uh,” Peter said. “Perfectly reasonable response to that. Yeah, fuck him. For whooping your ass.”

“This is the break room,” Antonia said, continuing on with her little tour. “We don’t really micromanage, but we ask that you try to limit your breaks to thirtyish on a four-hour shift and sixty for an eight. Microwave, fridge, coffeemaker.”

“Sure, great,” Peter nodded. He and Jeremy hadn’t broken eye contact yet.

Jeremy narrowed his eyes. “Hey, you ever met him, fanboy?”

“No,” Peter said. Not in the hyperspecific sense of the word, anyway.

“You’re about his height.”

“That’s crazy,” Peter intoned. “Hey, show me the shop, Antonia?”

“Sure thing,” Antonia said, leading him back down the hall. “Oh, um, shit, before I forget. You bring a cellphone with you today?”

“Nope,” Peter said. Only guy he’d need to call in a situation like this was probably eavesdropping anyway. “Was I supposed to?”

“Ah. No, that’s preferable, actually,” Antonia smiled. “If you must bring in your personal, we just ask that you disable Bluetooth and avoid unsecured networks. No mentioning the address outright in calls and texts, don’t take photos without wiping metadata after, yada yada yada.”

Ah, so it was cyber security-type social engineering.

“I did bring a laptop, though,” Peter said. “That a problem?”

“A laptop? Why?”

“I, uh, thought I put in my app. I do computer stuff.” He’d even paid all of 0.0000435 Bitcoins to some asshole from Poland for a very sketchy but highly rated car-thieving executable.

“Did you?” Antonia flipped through her clipboard. “Shit. Sorry. You so totally did. Boss keeps putting everyone without mechanic experience under entry-level shop boy. I’ve been trying to tell him to knock that shit off. Well, isn’t that exciting?”

Oh? Boss? So, there was a ringleader.

“Boss must be a mechanic himself, then, right? Not a fan of clean hands?”

Antonia pursed her lips. “The boss is the boss,” was all she offered. “Alright, I got a fun little test for you then, Benjamin.”

“Hey, um,” Peter tried. “So, social engineering. That, like, uh, phishing-type stuff?”

“You sure like asking questions,” Antonia hummed. “You a cop?”

“Do I… do I look like a fucking cop?” Peter’s voice broke mid-sentence, which really strengthened his alibi.

“Fair enough. And yes, pretty much. These days, only some of our, uh, procurement is done the old-fashioned way,” she said. “There’s far prettier ways to get things done in the modern age.”

Antonia brought Peter over to a handsome matte-gray sedan with its doors removed.

“Alright, here’s the entrance exam,” she smiled. “I mean, I’m sure we’ll still keep you around if you fuck it up. You’ll just be vacuuming carpets.”

How humiliating.

“Called in nerd backup, Toni?” A nearby mechanic had noticed the two of them, wandering over to investigate.

“Backup implies I was ever really on this job,” Antonia scoffed. “This is so not my problem. Care to clue Benjamin here in? Benjamin, Joe, Joe, Benjamin.”

“Hi,” Peter said.

“Hey,” Joe replied. Joe was tall. Tall enough Peter hardly parsed any other details about him.

“So, uh, this is a current model, and that means it comes with a remote kill switch. Was a pretty rough snatch, owner triggered it. You turn it on, the alarm goes. You don’t disable the alarm in sixty seconds, and it tries to tell the cops where it is.”

Hey, aren’t the stakes a little high here?

Joe must’ve noticed Peter’s eyes widen, because he added, “We, uh, don’t think they ever paid for the satnav package, so it doesn’t actually know where it is. But we still need a hard wipe before we can resell. Right now, piece of shit’s just taking up valuable garage space.”

“And the alarm’s fucking obnoxious,” Antonia added. “You probably should aim for less than sixty seconds anyway if you don’t want to piss off literally everyone in the building.”

Peter wiped damp palms on his pants.

“Sure, sure,” he said, pulling the laptop from his bag. “Can I, uh, set up?”

“Yeah, knock yourself out, Neo,” Joe chuckled. Antonia had to hop up a little to bap the back of his head with her clipboard.

Peter obliged, settling into the driver’s seat, opening up the laptop, flipping through the driver’s manual, unfurling wires, identifying the I/O ports.

Just for the Neo comment, he executed his jailbreaking program through the command line, though double-clicking would’ve worked just as well.

Check out this white monospaced text on a black background, Joe, Peter thought. I’m logged the fuck in.

Peter searched up the software for the matching make and model, moved it to the portable drive clone—command line again, of course—and plugged the laptop into the USB port.

“He’s doing it again, by the way,” Antonia said to Joe. “Ignoring literally every skill that isn't mechanics or, uh, gun.”

“Well, shit, that’s kind of his thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s still annoying. I know he knows his other teams are pulling their weight. What I don’t know is where he gets off on pretending otherwise.”

“This about your boss?” Peter inquired.

“You a cop?” Joe asked.

“He’s like twelve,” Antonia said.

“Hey, could be a baby C.I.,” Joe said. “They might’ve swooped down on him right outta some juvie stint. Hey, buddy, what’d the cops promise you? Because you’re not gonna get it. They’re gonna find a way to throw you back in, and you’ll make your momma cry.”

“Don’t got one of those,” Peter huffed. “And I think I’m ready.”

“Here. Short the ignition, work your cyber magic,” Joe said. He handed him a wrench off his belt, then stepped back a little, as if a bomb was about to be defused. Antonia followed, ducking slightly behind him, hands braced over her ears.

Peter picked up the two wires, took a cautious glance back at them.

Antonia nodded reassuringly.

He completed the current. All hell broke loose.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

Oh jesus this was loud.

HONK! Fuck. Why wasn’t the on-board seeing the drive?

HONK! Shit, he’d forgotten to reformat the partition back to read-only.

HONK! He typed furiously, fucking up the command the first time, because of course he did.

HONK! Reformatting 34% complete…

HONK! 35% … shit, maybe it was time for a new SSD…

HONK! 69%. Nice.

HONK! 70… 72… 79…

HONK! 89… 90…

HONK! > successfully formatted the volume.

HONK! Just a double-click, then…

HONK!

HONK!

The on-board computer blacked out, rebooted, showed a blissful startup animation. Silence. Sweet silence. Though his ears were still imagining phantom honks.

“Holy fuck,” Peter said.

“Holy fuck,” Joe parroted. “Hey, look at Neo go.”

“Hey, bang-up job, Benjamin,” Antonia said, though her tone said something more along the lines of ‘I have a fresh migraine.’

“Um, quick question,” Peter said. “Why didn’t you guys just cut the power to the horn? Was that part of the test?”

Antonia and Joe glanced at each other.

“Course it was,” Antonia smiled.

“Yeah, course,” Joe said. “Gotta have stakes. We only want people who are excellent under pressure.”

“Yeah, of course,” Peter grimaced.

Antonia finished up the tour before consulting with a few other mechanics.

“Hey, so, this is awkward,” she said, headed back his way, “but we are actually going to have you vacuuming carpets.”

“What the hell?”

“You’re still our number-one guy on computer issues,” she hummed. “We just don’t apparently have any computer issues right now! You fixed the only one. But don’t worry, you’ll be vacuuming carpets on that higher pay scale we discussed earlier.”

Well, that was nice, at least.

Peter and a hand vacuum spent a few undisturbed hours together, during which Peter learned he actually really sort of enjoyed vacuuming. He did have to try very hard not to think about the circumstances these cars were collected in, though, particularly when he was forced to soak out a suspicious iron-colored stain.

Eventually, his quality time was interrupted by an ominous pack of security goons.

“Hey, Ben,” one of the goons said. “Come with me.”

“I’m—I’m working here, pal,” Peter said. He’d just finished on the mats; he was a little too excited to actually get to the car itself.

“It’s still gonna be there when you get back, kid. Come on. Nonnegotiable.”

Oh, great, Peter thought. I'm so dead.

The main goon walked him up through a weave of rusted metal stairs and catwalk until he could see the tops of the heads of the workers below. They reached a little office built into the raised scaffolding, door on one side, broad windows on all the others.

The guy gave the door a knock.

“It’s open,” came a voice.

The goon pulled the door open for Peter, guiding him in with a nod of his head. The voice belonged to a man who reclined comfortably in an office chair, a cluttered desk in front of him and a wallpapering of printouts tacked up behind him. Peter skimmed for information, but nothing held any immediate significance: names, numbers, most of them referring to car parts.

A sleek laptop sat before him, its screen casting harsh blue light on his face. If this was the guy in charge, he was younger than Peter had expected; military-style hair in dark blond, a Bond-villainesque scar at the corner of one eye, a rough-hewn face—an archetypal gym teacher or rock climber. 

No, rock climber didn’t quite grasp at his grittiness. Motorcycles, maybe? Sports biker.

He had a little bag of snacks in one hand, a pretzel caught between two fingers in the other. He wore a brownish Henley with a heavy-looking sidearm at the ready in a shoulder holster. Once Peter noticed how worn down the leather of the release strap was, he had a hard time focusing on anything else.

“Hey there, new kid,” he said, dropping the pretzel on his lip. Thick New York accent, a native. “Remind me your name?”

“Benjamin Beck,” Peter offered. It’d become his go-to pseudonym these days; he often wondered what a psychologist might say about him swiping the surname of a felled enemy, but the first name just had to be Benjamin, and Beck sounded so perfect afterwards.

“Hello, Benjamin. The people told me you wanted the boss,” the man grinned. He raised his arms, palms to the sky. With the movement, the gun caught the light, gleaming like a missile. “Well, you got him! I’m Wes. This here’s all my baby.”

“Ah,” Peter managed. He hadn’t really planned quite this far ahead. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

“Heard you’re a curious cat, Benji. Lots of questions. Why all the questions?”

“I just, uh, like knowing who I’m working for,” Peter said. Wes raised a thin eyebrow—not enough. Give him something else. “Last time I did something like this, it turned out to be a sting.”

“Well, rest easy, then!” Wes said. “We’re rotten to the core ‘round here.”

Peter swallowed through a nod, worked the skin of his palm.

“You wanna know who you’re working for, sure, I get it. I like knowing who’s working for me, too, hm?” he said. “But that’s what’s funny here. The way my people talk about you, I’m not really sure who the hell you’re supposed to be. Because they say you’re clever. And clever boys like you don’t usually work hard jobs like ours, do they?”

An involuntary little laugh slipped through Peter’s lips as he shook his head, but he was successful in swallowing down a ‘no shit.’ He was supposed to be in college, goddammit.

“Do they, Benji?”

He bit down through another pretzel—this time, the sound made Peter flinch.

“No, sir.”

“So, tell me. How’d a nice kid like you end up dodging stings?”

Oh, he was so fucking busted.

“Identity issues, sir,” he offered. Best lies had truth at their core—what’s a nice normie reason to work under the table? “My, uh, shithead parents… fucked up my credit score beyond recognition before I could talk, made me quit high school. Hard jobs are the only ones I’ve ever had. And a real shitty run of hard jobs led to a warrant in my home state, so I’m on my own out here.”

He supposed those last two points were true if you really squinted at them.

Wes barked out a laugh. “I like it,” he said. “You got fucked over, but I guess you’re not the type to let it stop you from doing what you gotta do, huh?”

“No, sir,” Peter said, and this was true too. “Can’t let anything stop me.”

“You see those men and women down there, Ben?” Wes said, rising to stand. He stood in front of the tall windows of the overseer’s office, fingertips leaving marks on the glass. The fluorescents from below caught his eyelashes, casting feathered shadows up across his eyelids. Peter crept forward, stilling just behind Wes’s shoulder.

“Yes, sir.”

“Each and every one of them, they all got a sob story like yours. Most of them worse,” Wes said, giving the window a light rap before turning back towards Peter. He tried not to flinch under fresh interest from his caustic gaze.

“But without me,” he continued, “they’d never be doing anything bigger than jumping from shit gig to shit gig, peddling cheap knockoffs on Canal Street, peeling the copper from wires. Men like me? We get fucked over by the system, by our enemies, we find a way to fuck ‘em right back. We build something bigger. On our terms, our rules, not society’s. So, tell me, you like your shit gigs? Or do you think you’re gonna grow up and be a man like me, Benji?”

“I, uh, can only hope,” Peter said.

“You’re gonna have to give me a little more than hope,” Wes chuckled. “Show me you want it, and maybe soon enough you’ll be looking down on them, too.”

Oh. Never mind? He was so fucking in.

“I… I really appreciate that, Mr. Wes,” Peter said.

“Bad luck to thank someone for shit that hasn’t happened yet. I just want to know—think you can show me? Wanna hear you say it.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, brave enough for a grin. “Think I can show you.”

“Great,” Wes smiled, giving Peter’s shoulder a rough smack. “Now get your ass back to work. And stop asking all those damn questions. You’re too smart to be asking questions. Wise the hell up, yeah? Be a shame to have to waste lead on you.”

Oh, shit. Why was Wes’s criminal-with-a-code schtick kind of working on him? Involuntary visions of a bright future in running cars were flashing behind his eyes.

On his way out, Peter caught Antonia, who had a dark look on her face.

“Hey, Ben,” she said. “He in a good mood?”

“Think so,” Peter offered.

“Good, good,” she hummed.

“Why? Bad news?”

“I thought we were briefing you on the whole question thing,” Antonia said, frowning.

“Right, right, sorry,” he said, fleeing down the stairs.

As soon as he was out of sight, he settled down in a crouch, pretending to paw through his backpack. He narrowed his focus on the office above him, holding his breath for clarity.

“Toni, baby!” Peter heard Wes say. “There’s my favorite girl.”

“Hi, boss,” she said. “Um, slight possible problem that I was just informed of.”

“You always come to me with problems, never anything fun. Why’s that, Toni?”

“Molina lawyered up,” she said.

“Remind me—I give a damn, why?”

“It’s, um,” she said. “It’s a fairly well-known lawyer. Like, good at this kind of thing. So even if the hand-off was airtight…”

“Hey, if Molina walks, more power to him. He already did his part perfectly. Won’t ruin my day,” Wes said. “Can they connect him to us?”

“Don’t think so,” Antonia hummed. “I mean, it’s all very circumstantial. But…”

“But Molina knows my face,” Wes frowned. “Shit, maybe you were right about that. Who’s the lawyer, anyway?”

“Local guy. Matt Murdock.”

Notes:

fun fact: i name all ocs by opening up baseball-reference.com and hovering over the major league players of the day

if wes seems familiar it's because he's more or less a knockoff of han from tokyo drift but without any of the sauce and it's not plot relevant and will never come up but please note that this means wes is a drift king too. he can absolutely tear corners up in a souped up rx7 jsyk

Chapter 13

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Pissing off Peter beyond recognition had been the plan. Their first meeting had taught Matt that Peter wore guilt like a true Catholic: get him feeling guilty, and he’d do nearly anything for absolution. It was risky, a delicate little maneuver to gain trust, a bit of insight. Matt had certainly shed blood for less.

He had really hoped he could keep him away from his face, though. But he should've known that particular descent would hardly be controlled.

A black eye or two was nothing when he had a partner to laugh it off with. But he was the face of Nelson and Murdock this week, Goddammit. Today had been fine, all phone calls and faxes, but tomorrow was wall-to-wall meetings, including a few first impressions. Can't have bruises on the face of the firm.

As such, Matt was deep in meditation, preoccupied with willing thrombocyte-rich blood to flow through pulverized capillaries, through bent cartilage, to knit back up subcutaneous tissues.

He was comfortable like this, completely coiled up inside the small ivory apse of his skull, aware of little more than the gentle echoes of his twenty beat-per-minute pulse.

It was a sweeter peace than sleep.

Too comfortable, he would later scold himself. Comfort is gonna get you killed, Matty.

His subconscious had picked up on the exterior door swinging open, the heavy footsteps up the stairs, and the mutter of, ‘hey, which apartment was Murdock’s, again?,’ but only felt the need to tap on the shoulder of consciousness when he heard his address read out.

Matt’s eyes snapped open. They—three of them, all armed—were five doors down and coming in hot.

Matt tasted the iron of a crowbar that would almost certainly splinter the heavily abused wood of his door within a few moments. Slipping out via roof access was ideal, but not quite an option here, Matt realized with a wince—the door would still be swinging shut by the time they’d made it in, and he could hardly disappear from up there as Matt Murdock.

He could probably make it to the bedroom, slide under the bed, but if they discovered him there, he’d be hopelessly cornered.

The closet was the best option, and damn, was it shitty.

Matt rose to his feet noiselessly, slid the doors shut, settled in a crouch, and waited. He could try that old Chaste trick, negate his presence, but it only worked properly when one wasn't actively being sought out; no need for all the mental and physical strain that along came with it.

Matt's estimations had apparently been generous. The man with the crowbar didn’t quite know how to use it, took a few tries to get it under the door frame.

Damn. He definitely could’ve made the roof.

“Murdock!” one of them—santal cologne—roared, pressing in through the door. He heard the lights go on, the men split up—Santal checked the bedroom, another the bathroom, while one scoured the living room.

“Hey, Murdock!” 5-in-1 Shampoo hollered. “You deaf as well as blind?”

“Maybe he’s out,” Cigarettes said. 

“Dunno,” Santal said, crouching to lay a hand on the mat he’d left out. “Mat here’s still warm. Looks to me like our man was just doing a bit of late-night yoga.”

“We know you’re in here! This is going to hurt a whole lot less if you come out!”

Less implies there’s still non-zero hurting, Matt thought. Not a terribly tempting offer. They were now searching in earnest, and it must be a matter of time. Matt heard them dip to look under tables, beds, the bedroom closet—ah, there it was, a hand on the living room closet’s door.

“There you are,” Santal cooed, dragging him out.

Matt tried his best not to fight back beyond reasonable belief, just threw loose blows in the air. He was thrown to his knees, and Cigarettes ducked behind him to zip-tie together his wrists. 

“Hey, you a yogi, Murdock?” Santal asked.

“It’s important to stay in shape,” Matt said. “You never know when thugs are going to bust into your apartment in the middle of the night.”

He earned a quick hook to the face for that, laying him flat. Ah, he’d just fixed that part…

“Doesn’t look like it’s doing you much good from here,” Santal sneered, pulling him back up to kneeling by a fistful of hair.

“This is, uh, feeling a little personal for a robbery," Matt winced. "If this is a shakedown, can we just get to your demands?”

“Hey, how about I ask the questions, hm?” Santal said. “For example, counselor. You know what this is?”

He pulled the handgun from his holster, pressed the cold barrel to the thin flesh of Matt’s skull.

“Sorry,” Matt frowned. “I’m not quite sure… .38? .45?”

This got him a white-hot pistol whip across his temple, the reverberation of which provided an exceptionally clear image of the chamber. 9mm, then. An unexpected choice. It slit a wide gash open just behind his hairline, and blood laced down his forehead like water. The room was spinning, the impressions of the men around him rippling like troubled tides.

“You’re gonna do two little things for me, Murdock, and then you won’t have to learn the caliber by demonstration, alright?”

“Alright,” Matt said, blinking through the odd drop in his eyes.

“First is you’re gonna quit being a smartass,” Santal said. “Second is you’re gonna drop Ross Molina as a client. And you’re not gonna refer him anywhere, clear? Just leave him to disappear into the loving arms of the system. Easy, right?”

“Or what?”

“Or—for crying out loud,” Santal snapped. “The hell you think, genius? Or your fucking brains are gonna be real hard to get out of your carpet.”

“Can’t help you,” Matt said.

“Come on. You really wanna die for a shitbag car thief, Murdock? Nobody’s gonna thank you for it. Let him go back to jail where he belongs, and you can get back to your stretches. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“Rather know why you'd kill for our shitbag car thief,” Matt said. Come on, Santal. Tell the dead man your tales, Matt willed.

The only response was a brutal kick in the side of his ribs that launched him half across the room. Great, hairline fractures on three of them, tiny little breaks on another two.

“You want the Molina case to fall through the cracks,” Matt breathed. His argument would probably come off a little stronger if his cheek wasn’t flush to the floor, gumming up his words. “You don’t want it handled by someone half-competent. And that means you didn’t think this through. The Hell you think’s gonna happen when they find his lawyer shot dead? Might even… might get the Feds interested.”

“What did we say about being a smartass?” Santal said.

Matt braced for another blow, but all he got was a relatively light knock on the inside of his shoulder, flipping him flat on his back. His arms were still pinned behind him, and the tug of his serratus over damaged ribs was, to put it lightly, excruciating. He would not give this man the pleasure of writhing, however.

“Well, maybe it’s not his lawyer who dies, hm?” Santal said, pressing his shoe on Matt’s sternum. Smelled like engine oil, like asphalt, like kitty litter. “Maybe it’s a friend. Maybe it’s that partner of yours. Maybe we just go ahead and get Molina shanked in jail. Yeah, actually, I think that’d work for us. That work for you? Or would you rather to solve our little problem without any unnecessary bloodshed?”

Shit. Maybe the argument had been too strong.

“I can’t just let this go,” Matt tried. “There’s going to be questions. I’ll have to tell them something.”

“Well, you’re a clever cat, aren’t you? Sure you’ll figure something out.”

“You’re going to have to kill me,” Matt said.

“Hate to hear it,” Santal sighed, “but it can be arranged. Boys, get him up.”

5-in-1 and Cigarettes hoisted him up, one shoulder each, just high enough that he couldn’t quite support himself on his knees or his feet. Matt gritted his teeth, biting down a series of groans—the position was far from kind on his ravaged core.

“Listen, Murdock,” Santal began. “I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. A fair one. Would you say I’m a reasonable man, boys?”

“Sure,” “yeah,” they chorused.

“And, well, let’s be honest, yeah? I’m not too sure it’s reasonable to shoot a blind man. Also, come on, where’s the fun in it? Ain’t no fear in those eyes, and that’s always my favorite part.”

“Get to the point,” Matt hissed.

“The point is," Santal sighed, a little melodramatic, “I’m a reasonable man, but I’m also a man with interests, with values, that he’d do very unreasonable things to protect. And I feel—stop me if I’m off the mark?"

Santal bent down a little, laid a friendly hand on the base of Matt's neck. The gun in the other found the soft part beneath his chin.

"I get the sense that, well, you and me, Murdock, we must be very similar men. So I’m gonna ask from a place of empathy, knowing exactly how hard it’d be for me to agree, if I were in your shoes—won’t you do the easy thing here, for once in your goddamned life? For both our sakes?”

“Go to Hell,” Matt spat.

Santal sighed, straightened himself, pressed the barrel to Matt's temple, and ticked off the safety.

“Shame,” he said. “After you, counselor.”

A number of things happened in breathless succession, some of which even Matt hadn’t anticipated.

Matt hopped up to his feet and swung himself skyward between the two men’s arms, landing a kick to Santal’s hand and knocking the gun loose along his arc; the impact got to his trigger finger, compressed it just enough, but the bullet embedded itself harmlessly in the ceiling, dusting all parties in bits of plaster.

He’d shed his captors' grips at the apex of the flip and landed uneasily on his feet with a grunt—rough work without arms to balance, but he'd done more with less.

Santal was shocked still; he took a moment to consider Matt with an odd sort of warmth, then dove to retrieve his weapon.

Matt did not get the chance to stop him.

It was Peter—when had he arrived?—who dropped in near noiselessly, landing just behind Santal.

He landed a punch to the back of his skull, grabbed him at the waist as he buckled forward, and heaved him wide through Matt’s bedroom door with all the effort and care of a toddler to its least favorite toy.

Matt and Peter regarded each other for half a breath—Matt, with a deep inhale and an ear set towards his rabbit heart, Peter, with a glance, a hair-trigger flinch, probably at all that blood—then each refocused on a fresh danger.

While Peter had been dealing with Santal, 5-in-1 had recovered and drawn his own weapon.

Matt heard the hammer go down, the gunpowder sizzle to life, and reacted, moving to get himself just beyond a fatal trajectory and out in front of Peter. Unfortunately, Matt’s offhand assessment of Peter’s reflexes wasn’t quite accurate.

He was preternaturally faster.

Well beyond Matt's protection already.

Peter wore the bullet like a champion, to his credit; the fresh tear through his side did nothing to stall his freight-train advance towards 5-in-1, which terminated in a brutal blow to his skull that had him out cold before he could hit the ground.

He’d settled upon Cigarettes with similar speed and efficiency—all it took was an outstretched hand that eased through his guard like it'd never been there in the first place and percussive slam of the back of his head into Matt’s countertop. He slid to the floor like a fish down a deck.

Matt found himself inordinately proud, even through the thick haze of shock and pain. Peter was an excellent student; he’d used that corrected fist Matt’d taught him for the entire little sequence.

“Hey,” Peter panted. “Just dropping by to let you know that your new client’s involved in some nasty shit with our chop shop.”

He’d been a liquid stream of uninterrupted motion since he’d first appeared; now, standing still, chest heaving, he was an entirely different person.

Ah, there was that troubled kid who’d walked him to the subway last week.

“I gathered,” Matt said. “You’ve been shot.”

“Yeah, gathered,” Peter huffed.

Peter's shivering fingers hovered over the wound, but he only gave himself another few moments to stand still: paralyzed by pain or indecision?

Peter rolled the mask up and pushed his way into Matt’s kitchen, retrieving a knife and a fat wad of paper towels—they got stuffed ingloriously into the bloody hole in his suit, and the knife sawed its way through Matt’s zip-tie handcuffs, freeing his arms.

“What do you think? Leave them in some alley, far, far away from here? Call the cops?” Peter said, tossing the first of the unconscious men over by the roof access stairs.

“Peter, you were shot,” Matt said, rubbing at his wrists. “You shouldn’t be…”

“I'm pretty fucking aware!” Peter snapped. Then, softer, “It’s not that big a deal. Just a tap.”

Matt made some incredulous noise and grabbed at Peter’s arm.

“You’re in pain,” he said. “You really should sit down, take a breath.”

“Yeah, like you’re one to talk,” Peter said, voice and blood pressure gone molten hot. “How many fucking bones did you let them break?”

He wrenched himself free from Matt's grip. The rough motion drew involuntary hisses out of both of them. 

“Let them?” Matt frowned. “They quite literally had my hands tied.”

“Oh, no, what an impediment,” Peter drawled.

See, this was the problem with the clever ones.

“This was about the safety of my client,” Matt tried. “I needed as much information as they were willing to give me, and yes, that meant taking a few hits. But I’m pretty damn good at that, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah? You good at taking bullets to the head, too?”

Matt knew it wasn’t going to help his case in any way, but still couldn’t quite stop himself from saying, “On occasion.”

Peter scoffed, this one long and drawn-out—by the end, it was coming out closer to a growl.

“I don’t give a shit about your sketchy-ass client’s safety,” he said, livid fists grasping at the air under Matt's nose. “It's yours I…”

“Peter,” Matt began.

“No, no. You do not get to Peter me right now, asshole. Sit down, let me handle this.”

“I can’t just…”

“You will, or I’ll web your ass to the couch. Sit.”

“You’re scared, Peter. I’m sorry I scared you. But your fear is making you unreasonable,” Matt said, hands held up in a calming gesture. “Let’s both just…”

Peter laughed, dark and dry.

“Unreasonable. Caught that part of Wes’s spiel, you know,” Peter said, dragging the man in question into the living room by an ankle. “Reasonable men capable of unreasonable things. He really had you bang-on, dude. God, maybe I should’ve just let you two assholes kill each other. You’re soulmates! When I heard them say your name and then go and arm themselves, I… oh my god, this is my second time knocking Jeremy out. Poor Jeremy.”

“What?”

“Not important,” Peter sniped. His pulse had grown so quick that there was hardly a discernible gap between beats anymore. “All I’m saying, is… what I meant is… you really, really, really can’t get yourself offed right now, okay, man? Under any circumstances. I mean, I couldn’t even… a goldfish…”

A what?

Matt wondered idly if he’d been concussed and was mishearing him, or if the bullet had merely knocked some screw of Peter’s loose.

“Listen, I’m going to sit, okay?” Matt said, withdrawing to ease himself down on the couch, though the generic action had the severity of a hostage negotiation. “You should, uh, come sit down with me. These shitheads are going to give us a few moments to catch our breath. You… certainly saw to that.”

Peter sighed, a little half-sobbed stutter at the end. Matt heard his diaphragm stretch his lungs through long, soothing breaths. Good sign.

But the moment he touched the cushion, Matt found himself restrained by webbing. God, it smelled awful, and the fumes went straight to his head. As if he needed to be any dizzier.

“Be right back,” Peter said. He tugged the mask back down, inelegantly loaded all three bodies atop his skinny shoulders. “Reflect on your actions, ‘kay?”

Matt was too aghast to be angry.

Notes:

the true catholic bit is funny. jewish ppl got like four thousand more years of professional-grade guilt on the catholics soz matt

Chapter 14

Notes:

heads up for a) vaguely graphic medical descriptions and b) other vaguely graphic descriptions. oh and a little underaged drinking? lol
this is a long one soz

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

When Peter returned to the apartment, saw Matt’s head—much of it crowned with long drips of dried blood, like the wedding cake of a vampire enthusiast or some Final Destination character whose cruel and unusual death involved a can opener—slack and pale against the cushion of the couch, he made the only reasonable assumption: oh my god, I fucking killed him.

“Matt!” he said, gripping his head with both hands. “Matt, wake up!”

“Was just meditating,” Matt said through slow blinks. “Hell happened to Mr. Murdock?”

“You lost Mister privileges when you lost all my respect as an authority figure,” Peter said, the second half an undisguised lie, circling the couch to drop himself down with a long hiss. He tugged off the mask, wiped uselessly at the sweat already dried down to salt.

“Thank God,” Matt muttered, closing his eyes again.

Peter stared at Matt's unfinished ceiling. Carrying the body weight of three fairly large men half a mile was not terribly conductive to healing, and now that he’d panted out all of his adrenaline, his frayed nerves were ardently reminding him of the fact.

In the corner of Peter's eye, Matt put on an exaggerated frown, this one almost a pout.

“You going to get me out of this?”

“Used the ten-minute stuff. Should be dissolved by now,” Peter said, tugging at his paper towel bandage. Ow, ow, ow. Ah, shit, it’d scabbed all up in the wound…

Matt tentatively raised an arm, and, go figure, the webbing sheared away like candy floss. He plucked away a strand, rolled it between his fingers.

“Tastes like benzene,” Matt huffed, rising to stand with a grunt and a great deal of effort. He dusted himself off as best he could. “Really hope you’re preparing this shit under a fume hood, or you’re going to give yourself cancer.”

Peter frowned. He'd actually... never heard that one before. Usually people privy to the topic were too busy praising his chemical brilliance to bring up lab safety. Does an oven vent count as a fume hood?

“It’s okay,” Peter said. “I got fancy cellular regeneration like a bug. Think I’m immune.”

“Insects don’t get cancer because their lifespans expire before it has the chance to develop,” Matt accused, disappearing into the bathroom. “That sound like your strategy, mayfly?”

Ouch.

Peter heard the water run, a cabinet swing open.

“Okay, maybe a, uh, lobster is a better comparison?” Peter called.

“What did you do with our friends?” Matt asked.

“Webbed them up in alley a few blocks from here,” Peter said, a sidelong glance at the bloody stains Matt had left behind on the couch. “Called it in as Spider-Man, said I pulled them out of an apartment during a robbery. Should get them at least the night in lock-up.”

“A call-in from an Avenger. Bet the boys at the Fifteenth got a kick out of that.”

“Ex,” Peter said, rolling his eyes.

A cleaner-faced Matt returned with a comically oversized first aid kit, dumped it on the coffee table, and then limped off towards the kitchen. This time, his prize was an ice pack and a comically heavy pour of whiskey, which he took a long swig of. The ice pack got shoved under his shirt.

“Hey, I get any?” Peter tried.

“It’s a crime to allow a minor to consume alcohol,” Matt said sternly, though his hand—apparently a rogue agent—held out the glass Peter’s way.

Peter gingerly accepted, eyeing the glass suspiciously. This was probably at least a little more hardcore than the odd sip of May’s beer, wasn’t it? Like, capital-L Liquor. Peter was feeling pretty hardcore tonight, though.

He took a big mouthful and immediately regretted it. Why was it so damn hard to swallow? It burned all the way down and had Peter sputtering out dry little coughs as he passed it back. There went his nonchalant image.

“Not much of a drinker, then,” Matt noted through a light smile. “That’s reassuring. Let me see the wound.”

Peter shimmied down the suit, pulled up his undershirt. He wrinkled his nose. Smelled like an abattoir. The black-red grin just below his ribs was mocking him, the flesh around it gone pale and pinkish.

Matt knelt by his side to set a light hand by the injury. The gentle pressure was enough to draw tiny pricks of tears.

It really had just been a nick, was more or less already scabbed over, paper towel-shaped gap notwithstanding; Peter wasn’t sure why Matt was being so dramatic about the whole thing. Sure, it hurt, but…

“I know you’ll probably take this as an endorsement,” Matt said, interrupting his chain of thought, “so let me begin by saying, uh, never do that again. Never take a bullet for anyone again, clear? Certainly not me.”

“Clear,” Peter hummed noncommittally.

Matt raised a disbelieving eyebrow but didn’t press further. He must have known exactly how futile his case was—he’d almost certainly disregarded some variant of it himself, Peter felt safe in assuming.

“That said,” Matt continued, “you’ve done half a week’s worth of healing in half an hour. It’s remarkable.”

Well, duh, that’s why I’d happily take a bullet again, Peter thought.

And as if Matt had somehow overheard that from the inside of his skull, he snapped, “Never again, hear me? And never restrain me like again, or I’ll…” He trailed off.

“Or you’ll what?”

Matt paused again to ponder something, probably the legal or moral implications of threatening someone’s child with an unspecified form of harm.

“Well, let’s both hope we never have to find out,” Matt said.

“Not the most convincing of your arguments,” Peter hummed.

“Ready for stitches?”

“No,” Peter said, “but doubt I’ll ever be, so may as well get it over with.”

“Good mindset,” Matt said. He pressed the tumbler back in Peter’s hands.

Peter watched the lavender light from the windows dance atop the honey-colored liquid. Pretty, he thought. Smelled sweet from here, though he knew looks and scents could be deceiving.

He was suddenly struck by the realization that it had been a very, very long day. A long week, even. One of his longest in a while. So much talking, so much moving, so much… plenty of emotion. Peter was bone tired. More tired than he’d been in months, and he hadn’t really felt anything in the ballpark of awake since the obvious.

“For courage?” Peter asked.

“God forbid we get you any more of that,” Matt said, a faint smile on his lips. “Over-the-counter sedative.”

Peter took a sip—this time, a small one that he sent straight back to a swallow, he’d learned his lesson—and tried to focus on the warmth that bloomed in his chest instead of whatever Matt was doing.

He failed in that regard. Matt had painstakingly sterilized his hands and tugged open a pack of strong-smelling gauze, which he pressed firmly into the wound. Stung like salt.

God, the dude had half an OR in there. Though Peter supposed that came with the territory. Maybe he should ask him where he got it.

“Think you healed too fast, Pete,” Matt muttered, grabbing a disposable scalpel from somewhere behind him. “Little debris trapped in there. Think I should cut it out. That okay?”

No, fuck no, Peter wanted to say, but then he recalled a history of nastier things—abscesses, wounds months old and still itching, oozing—and nodded instead, setting the drink down.

“On three,” Matt said. He glanced somewhere upwards, put on what might’ve been meant as a reassuring face, then immediately pressed the scalpel through rendered flesh.

“Fuck—fuck you, man,” Peter barked.

“Worked, didn’t it?” Matt said, settling the scalpel aside to put pressure on a fresh flush of blood. “Stitches are going to feel like nothing after that.”

Peter nabbed the tumbler with shaky hands, pulled back another desperate sip.

After another round of disinfectant came a little pre-strung needle, which, to Matt’s credit and quick, clever hands, was hardly a nibble compared to the bite of the scalpel. Still had teeth, though.

Peter watched the light from the billboard go from pink to yellow to white to a bright, bloody red, which Peter thought was a bit on the nose. The pain level of the little procedure was infuriatingly inconsistent. Went wildly between a wince and a stiffened grip five to exerting-every-ounce-of-willpower-to-not-run-and-scream eleven. Peter would almost prefer settling on eleven: less anticipation involved.

That aside, Matt was clearly pretty good at this. Then again, he hadn’t really encountered something Matt was bad at yet, aside from the obvious.

No, no, not that obvious! Geez. Self-preservation.

Pierce, loop, tug, tie, snip and repeat—five times, five neat little black knots in his side.

“All done,” he said another few advertisements later, sealing off the site with a broad bandage. “You’re an excellent patient.”

“Well, duh,” Peter said. “Always want a good grade at the doctor’s.”

Matt’s brow knit in confusion, but he gave him a laugh anyway, probably just a little too old for that breed of humor.

“Did you need any, by the way?” Peter asked. “Doctoring.”

Matt felt near the wound under his hair.

“Don’t think so,” he concluded. “Head wounds can knit themselves up quick. Just need to keep it clean. Ribs are… not much you can do with ribs but ice and time.”

Didn't he know it. Peter hummed an acknowledgement, tested see if he could sit up yet. Ah, not quite, the tenderness across his side said, let’s rest for another few moments.

He reached for the whiskey glass, but Matt was faster.

“Hey,” Peter frowned.

“No. Cut off. You’re legally intoxicated,” Matt said, then frowned. “From just a shot and a half. Please tell me that’s some side effect of an altered metabolism and this wasn’t your first time drinking.”

“Listen, man,” Peter said, “I was, like, way too busy in high school to go to parties.”

Matt crossed himself, then threw back the generous remainder in a few effortless swallows.

“Jesus, I’m going to Hell,” he muttered, wandering back into the kitchen with the empty glass. If he was worried about being a bad influence, maybe he should first try to stop making alcoholism look so sophisticated.

He returned with a tall glass of water, then fished out a bottle of pills from the kit, shaking out several to press in Peter’s hand.

“Oh, we’re going from alcohol to drugs?”

“One point five the daily limit of ibuprofen,” Matt huffed, knocking back a few himself. “Fresh out of the fun stuff, sorry.”

Peter took his medicine, closed his eyes. The world spun in little half-circles. That was fun.

“We got a gameplan?”

“For tonight?” Matt asked. “You’re grounded for at least a few hours. Gameplan is sleep. Need to be sure Molina’s safe right after that, but I doubt they can do much with him still in custody.”

Peter pursed his lips. “Isn’t he on their side?”

“No, not unless they have a very unique way of showing it,” Matt said. “They wanted him dead or in jail. Why?”

“The way they spoke about him,” Peter hummed. “Sounded like he did them some kind of favor.”

“That’s… disconcerting,” Matt said.

“A, uh, handoff, he called it,” Peter mumbled. “I think it’s…”

Ah. Couldn’t quite remember what he thought it was. Could hardly keep his eyes open.

“Come on, kid,” Matt said, scooping him up under his shoulder. “Let’s get you to bed.”

Yeah, that sounded nice.

It was dark. Pitch-black. A kind, protecting darkness—the sort you know your enemies can’t see you in, either. Peter kept his eyes closed.

“Peter,” someone says, feather-light.

He’s safe here.

“Peter, we’re home,” May calls. He feels the gentle rock of the car settling into park, hears the engine go quiet.

He’s in the back seat of the ancient Volvo, he realizes, the dry, powdery scent of its sunbaked leather and decades-old upholstering heavy under his nose.

It’s a summer night. They just made that last turn home—the practiced tick-tick-tick of the turn signal and the squeak of the breaks must’ve been what roused him. He hears crickets, the soft ambient hum of traffic, laughter and upbeat music from somewhere farther off. There’s a bit of itchy sand caught under Peter’s clothes, in his shoes. He must’ve dozed off after a long day at the beach.

The latch clicks, the door swings open.

“Peter-bear, I know you’re up,” May says, almost sings, unbuckling his car seat, cradling the side of his face. Her almond-honey hair falls heavy over her shoulders, and Peter is bathed in the sweet scent.

He holds down a smile under her warm hand, scrunches his eyes shut.

“Oh? Is he still sleeping? Well, there’s only one way to tell for sure,” May says. “I’ll lift up his arm. If he’s really, really asleep, it’ll stay up, won’t it?”

She picks up his wrist, holds it straight, and when she lets it go, Peter dutifully keeps it suspended in the air.

“Gotcha! The gig is up, you little sneak!” May says, tucking into his torso with a barrage of tickles. Peter collapses in a shriek of giggles.

He finally lets his eyes open—ah, there she is, that heart-shaped face, the wellspring of kindness in her eyes. She must’ve left the hazards on; she’s lit from behind, bathed in gold, every few moments. She gives his hair a fond ruffle.

“Carry me, Auntie?” he asks, reaching his short arms up to wrap around her neck, bury his nose in her hair, eager to close his heavy eyes again.

“You’re getting too big to carry, kiddo,” May says, pulling him close, stroking his back.

“Please, Aunt May?” he asks. “Just to the door?”

“Too big,” she says, her soft voice close to his ear. “Much too big. I won’t make it. I’ll need to catch my breath.”

“Please?”

“Gosh, you should know better, honey,” she chides. “You’re the one carrying me these days, aren’t you?”

And something in her tone, something cold, far away, scares him, so he pulls himself out of their embrace.

But in the time he'd spent nestled inside her arms, the world had twisted, inverted.

He’s ten years older, and she’s the one sitting, no, bent, brought down low by rubble underneath him, livid gold light catching the dust in the air. Flames, it’d always been the flames.

“Catch my breath,” she stutters, eyes half-lidded and fading fast, “Just need to catch my breath.”

“Please,” he sobs, hands cradling the sides of her face like the pressure can keep her soul from slipping out. He shoves his eyes shut, willing the moment to reverse, to open his eyes and be in the station wagon again…

But she’s still there when he gathers the courage to look again, a dead, unseeing thing between his hands, her color gone all wrong.

“Please,” he begs someone, anyone, “please.”

And then he’s five years old again, small, clumsy hands cradling cooling flesh, and the thing where his Auntie used to be frightens him, so he shoves it away from him with a cry.

But he’s still as strong as the seventeen-year-old.

The head tumbles away, makes an unmentionable noise it hits the concrete, wet and somehow hollow.

He hears two sets of screams: one childish, one grown.

“Peter,” he heard again.

Peter flinched, wondering anxiously if the loop was about to restart. Some part of him was coherent enough to realize he'd had this sort of dream before, and he always got stuck inside them. They would play over and over and over again: childhood, rubble, childhood, rubble.

But it was only ever shocking that first time around. The rest were just sad.

Peter dared to let his eyes slide open. Unfamiliar masonry, someone else’s scent, a bed he didn't recognize; Peter nearly panicked, but Matt was sitting on the other side of the bed, face flat with concern.

Oh, he was awake. That was nice.

Matt's warm hand—a familiar temperature by now—was laid lightly on his shoulder. Peter had unconsciously caught his wrist in a firm grip with his own, probably too firm, but if Matt was hurting, he wasn’t showing it.

Of course, by now, Peter knew that was hardly a good indicator with him.

“Sorry,” Peter said, unfurling his hand, the angry ghosts of the dream still heavy atop his chest, raw in his voice. “I wake you up?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Matt said. “Ribs were the main culprit. You hardly made a difference. You, uh, feeling alright?”

“Feeling like I got shot,” Peter winced, shimmying up to sit. “Or are we talking emotional feelings? The, uh, the whole screaming-bloody-murder nightmare thing?”

“Whichever you’d prefer,” Matt said. “I’m not going to… I’d understand if you don’t want to talk about it.”

“You seem to do that a lot,” Peter said.

“Hm?”

“Understand,” Peter said.

“That a bad thing?”

“Maybe I, uh… maybe I don’t need understanding,” Peter said. “Maybe I need someone to yell at me, set me straight.”

Matt raised his eyebrows.

“Thought you said no mentoring,” he said.

“Doesn’t need to be a mentor,” Peter tried. “Maybe it could just be a friend.”

“Well, then, as a friend, Peter,” Matt said, “talk to me, please.”

“Oh, shit,” Peter said, “I forgot. I don’t actually want to. Never mind.”

Matt laughed, a gentle, cautious thing.

“It’s a, uh, bitter truth, but talking to someone really can help,” Matt said.

Peter pressed his hands over his eyes, willing his palms to breach through bone, to cleanse the images stuck along the walls of the cavern of his skull like tar. He had a wicked headache, he suddenly realized, sitting still enough that the raw gap in his side wasn’t hogging all of his attention.

“Hey, can I ask you a totally unrelated question first?”

“Course,” Matt replied. He swung his legs up on the bed to cross them, resting his back on the headboard. Probably suspected this was going to be a long one.

The light from the LEDs slipped along the slopes of Matt's profile, painting his eyelashes snow-white. The bedroom was certainly darker than the rest of his apartment, but god, that was hardly praise. The whiskey from earlier had done Peter quite the favor, he realized dully, running the odds on whether or not he would be able to fall back asleep.

“You never really tried to stop me,” Peter said. “Spider-Man, anyway. You knew he was this random-ass, untrained kid, but you never tried to stop me. Why?”

“Well, no one's been able to stop me,” Matt said, “and I don't even have super-strength.”

Then, as if disgusted by his own levity, he briefly furrowed his brow, screwed up his nose.

“I know what the call sounds like, Pete,” he amended. “That call inside to go out and help. To do something, anything. Loudest damn thing on Earth for me. Always heard it, but it got a Hell of a lot louder once I became strong enough to actually… be of help. Doubt it can be any different for you.”

Peter hummed an assent. He studied the mottled patterns in Matt's bruises in the light, gone greenish, trying to spot the difference between the ones he'd made and the fresher ones Wes had put there.

“I could never tell you to ignore it,” Matt said. “I would never want you to. This Godforsaken world has plenty of bystanders already. Full to bursting with them. I know it's selfish, but I don't think I'd ever forgive myself if I somehow made a bystander out of you.”

May would like him, Peter immediately decided. This odd part of him he somehow considered selfish, anyway.

“Can I ask a follow-up?” Matt asked.

“Sure.” 

“The no-mentoring thing,” Matt said. “You say it like a joke, but it's hardly a joke to you, is it? Why?”

“I dunno,” Peter said. “It’s just… about as long as Spider-Man has been a thing, he’s always been under someone else’s wing. I figured, if I’m gonna get anything good out of this shit-show, I may as well use the time alone to go and become my own person, mask or otherwise. Learn who I am.”

Matt stilled. He had that look on his face, a subtle tilt to his head, a slight tension at the corner of his eyes, that Peter now knew accompanied a cellular-level inspection. He was probably deciphering some message hidden inside Peter's systolic pressure, some telltale sign in a flush of neurotransmitters.

It was a very birdlike gesture, Peter thought, something canny and clever. A crow, far too clever for its own good.

“And how’s that working out for you so far, hm?” Matt asked.

Mean.

That was… genuinely mean.

Cruel, even. It was meaner than Peter had ever heard from Matt (aside from what the fiend wearing his skin in the ring said, that is, though Peter had half-consciously begun to think of the two as separate entities). The recognition rolled under Peter’s skin like a flood of ice water; he was too plain startled to be hurt.

But it was precisely what he’d asked for, wasn’t it? Someone to set him straight.

“I’ll figure it out,” Peter growled.

“Of course you will. But you’re allowed to ask for help while you do it. Doesn't make you less of your own man.”

“I know that.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do,” Matt sounded out. “I just know that, uh, that’s the sort of thing I need to be verbally told to actually internalize, though.”

Peter fumbled around for an argument, but came up short. Matt was right. Peter really should know that by now.

A glance at the bedside table revealed that Matt had brought him a fresh cup of water—nice of him, nicer than he had any business being to the kid who stole his bed and bled a little on his fancy-ass sheets—and a few blissfully cool swallows were a great excuse to delay the inevitable.

“Dream was about the same thing it always is,” Peter said eventually. “Her… Aunt May… dying in my arms.”

“Don’t think you told me that part,” Matt said.

“No, probably not, because it… because it was the worst thing to ever happen to me. Don’t like saying it out loud. Not sure if ever I have, honestly.”

“I know the feeling,” Matt hummed, letting his head drop to one shoulder.

“Your dad,” Peter said. “Did the, uh… when does it stop feeling so… fresh?”

“If you want advice on how to move on,” Matt said, “I’m sorry, but I am not the right person to ask. I think a part of me—not a small one—has been that little boy in the alley for more than two decades. Will always be him.”

And Peter supposed he must be the same way. Those Befores he'd been collecting—just fragments of younger Peters, each frozen in their own little worlds, kinder worlds.

“Okay, no moving on,” Peter said. “But you live with it. How do you live with it?”

“Living with it… the grief comes and goes,” Matt said. “It’s always going to be there, but it’ll come and go. It’ll get smaller, more manageable, even if it’s so large right now you can’t imagine there’s enough of your time left for it to ever erode away.”

Matt set his head somewhere skyward, jaw working through unspoken thoughts.

“But the, uh… the love’s always going to be there, too, you know,” he said. “Sometimes it’s harder to find, sometimes you have to… pull together the faith to look for it, but it’ll be there. Never one without the other. The two are never far apart, grief and love.”

Smoke and blood, almonds and honey, Peter thought numbly.

“Are you scared of losing me, Peter?” Matt said after a moment of quiet, as though it was some shocking revelation.

“You say that like it’s not a totally normal thing to be, man,” Peter frowned. Why would he think otherwise? He'd said about as much in pretty explicit terms, hadn't he?

“Just wasn’t aware I’d made that much of an impression,” Matt muttered.

Peter's first instinct was to take that personally, get his feelings hurt—had this all been more one-sided than he thought?

But then he recalled what little he knew about the man, his history, his mannerisms.

Matt was the type to never allow himself assumptions of good will, Peter realized. He was always looking for people's boundaries in order to set up camp on the noncombative side of them. Even jab of his from earlier had been one Peter explicitly asked for.

“I know it's a pretty cowardly way of thinking,” Peter said, “but that's, uh, probably why I haven't… you know… really gone outside since, the, uh…”

He swallowed.

“Like, you know, why bother connecting with people if you’re probably just gonna have to lose them?”

Matt nodded.

“It’s a trap of logic,” he said. “Fallen into it myself. It’s dangerous because it seems so perfectly sensible at first.”

“How’d you get out of it?”

Matt worked his lip, set his eyes near the ceiling.

“Well, 'out' is a strong word,” he smiled. “I'm aware of it, doesn't mean I can avoid it. I’m not exactly a creationist, but sometimes I’d like to think humans were designed with some kind of intention. Why give us all these emotions when logic would work just as well? I figure we’re not really meant to experience the world through rationality alone. We’re meant to do things that… get us hurt, cause us pain…”

“Nah, see, I don't get that,” Peter said. “Why hardcode in the hurt?”

“Because that’s where the best of life is. Between the hurt. If it’s too easy, if it never pisses you off, makes you cry, it’s probably not worth it,” Matt said. “It’s why you can’t live your life avoiding pain. I made that mistake for too damn long myself. It only ever makes things hurt worse in the end.”

He allowed himself a pause, though the little flares in his neck suggested swallowed elaboration.

Matt looked more fragile than Peter thought he was capable of. It was difficult to reconcile him with the man he'd been just a few hours ago, jaw set firm and fearless even while kneeling before the barrel of a gun. Peter opened his mouth—to say what, he wasn't quite sure yet, probably some expression of comfort…

“Anyway, don’t worry too much about me, Pete,” Matt said, cutting him off before he could begin. “These days, I’m half-convinced God won’t give me permission to die.”

It was a brutally clumsy redirection, and Matt knew it just as well as Peter did. Peter let out a soft sigh, scooched his way back down to recline. Matt better be thanking that god of his that Peter was tactful enough not to press. And very, very eager to go back to bed.

“Yeah, uh, only people who are gonna die violently in their immediate futures ever say shit like that, Matt,” Peter said, closing his eyes.

Matt gave him a quiet laugh, reaching over to give his hair a ruffle on his way out.

Notes:

this chapter started out like a third its size but they just KEPT TALKING
do we like the case shift on the dream or is that tacky?

Chapter 15

Notes:

augh asking a lot from your suspension of disbelief with this one but foggy's here so you can't get that mad at me. right

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

It was a dream. Something vague and peaceful, familiar faces without names, painted in Matt’s long-dead colors. He was rising from it naturally before a pillow thrown over his face crudely finished the job.

“Matthew, why is there a child in your apartment?”

Matt batted the pillow off of him and jolted up to sit, the abused parts of his body complaining at the exertion. He’d been draped over the couch, blanketless in his boxers, a summertime special.

“Foggy,” he observed, voice caked with sleep.

“Well sleuthed, Sherlock. The one who you told to come over at 7 am to go over the Molina case,” Foggy muttered. He was peering right down at Matt, arms crossed in a remarkably parental gesture. “The one who was greeted by the aforementioned child because you were knocked the fuck out and he was less scared of letting in a stranger than waking you up. Do I even want to know what happened to your door, by the way? Jesus, look at the state of you, Matt. Did you pick a fight with a semitruck?”

Way too many questions for 7 am, Matt thought groggily. And it was just three of them. And one was rhetorical. He reached out an unfocused arm to grab at Foggy's, get himself up, but Foggy easily swiped it aside.

“I wasn’t scared,” Peter lied. He was tucked on the kitchen stool closest to the wall where he’d squirreled away in a defensive position with a half-eaten bowl of cereal. “You just looked like you needed the sleep, man.”

“Matthew Murdock, who’s underfed child is this?” Foggy said. “Is it yours?”

“What?” Matt muttered. “We’re not that old yet,”

Foggy held his ground, and Matt got the keen sense he was being stared down.

“We’re not.” Matt said. “Are we?”

“We’re no longer the glittery-eyed, Natty-for-breakfast, testosterone-fueled undergrads we once were, buddy,” Foggy said, shaking his head. “I saw a Green Day tee in the vintage section the other day. All of my targeted ads are for minoxidil.”

He said the last bit while pulling a purposeful hand through his still-luxurious head of hair. Matt had met his mother’s father; he’d likely keep every strand until it was the mortician’s turn to style it.

“He’s seventeen,” Matt said.

“Alright, well, maybe not that old. I mean, I know you had an eventful teenagehood, so… but we’re getting up there, that’s my point.”

“He’s not mine,” Matt insisted.

“You’re a bit of a late bloomer, aren’t you?” Foggy said, suddenly bored of harassing Matt.

“No, I’ve bloomed. I’m just kind of on the small side,” Peter replied, “and have what I’ve been told is, uh, a terminal case of baby-face. I’ve come to terms with the diagnosis.”

“See, now I know you can’t be Matt’s,” Foggy mused. “He wore his little rosy putti features like a scarlet letter until he was 22 and could grow a full beard. Which he did, by the way, for a few awful months. Looked like some indie frontman out of Montreal. Yeah, you’re far too confident to be his.”

This got a little laugh out of Peter, and Matt listened as his tension eased. Something like comfort even began to bud in his chest.

Yeah, Foggy tended to have that effect on people. Matt reached out again—he'd been appropriately chastened, apparently, as this time, Foggy took both hands and pulled him up gently.

“You gonna make it today, buddy?” he asked, voice light and sweet in his ear. “I can run point on Molina, I can totally make the time.”

It was a plain-faced lie, and surely Foggy knew Matt could hear as much, but it was a nice gesture.

“No, no. I've had worse,” Matt said, half-focused on recalibrating his balance. “Really, most of it was just… I just slept rough.”

Foggy did not care for this answer, but seemed to understand just how little contesting it would do, as he let Matt go with a light pat on his shoulder and left for the kitchen. Matt heard glass against plastic and tap water slosh into a pot. Coffee. A clear get-a-move-on message.

“If your landlord doesn't have a locksmith on call for the door, I know a guy,” Foggy said. “Or… bet I could do it. Give me an afternoon, a six pack, and a bit of wood putty.”

Matt gave him a vague hum of acknowledgement. Feeling safe enough to leave the kid unattended for a moment, he wandered over to the bedroom, pulled a top over his head, and ducked into the bathroom to clean up.

He didn’t miss how his sheets—Peter’s, last night—were stripped and carefully folded down to the pillowcases, even though no one would blame him for leaving them a mess after the night they had. It made Matt’s heart sting in the way only immigration reform and the scent of orchids did.

He headed over to take a seat by Peter at the bar. It was nice to be around a pair he didn’t feel the need to grab his glasses for.

“Peter, Franklin Nelson, Franklin Nelson, Peter,” Matt said.

“It’s nice to properly meet you, Mr. Nelson,” Peter said. “Been, uh, following your work.” He unraveled himself from his defensive position by the wall to exchange a handshake over the counter.

“Hell’s that supposed to mean?” Foggy asked.

Peter, Matt thought idly, please don’t allude to the fact that you’re a stalker in front of a guy smart enough to pick up on it.

“Foggy’s my partner,” Matt redirected. “We went to school together, so he knew me as an unstable mess fresh out of an orphanage and still decided to keep me around… and then he knew me as a masked vigilante, and that didn’t scare him away either, so really, there’s nothing I can do to shake him off.”

“Til death do us part. His, violent and stupid, most likely,” Foggy said. “Alright, so what are you, then, if not a bastard son? Surprise nephew? Future client? Fellow child soldier?”

“Yeah, he’s, uh,” Matt said, gauging tiny changes in Peter’s comfort level with each syllable, “someone like me.”

“What? Irish Catholic?”

“Ashkenazi Jew,” Peter corrected.

“L’chaim.” Foggy had already pulled a mug from the cabinet and gave Peter a cursory toast with it. The coffee was percolating away.

“Well, I don’t know, Matty, that’s about your entire personality, so what else could he be?”

“I have a few other charms too,” Matt said, somewhere in the ballpark of offended.

“I’m Spider-Man,” Peter said.

The mug slipped from Foggy’s hand, clattered on the counter at an odd angle, and bounced overhead. Peter snatched it by the handle mid-spin as if to verify his claim.

“Here,” he said, handing the cup over, a little bashful.

“Thanks,” Foggy replied plainly. His voice rose half an octave, and he slammed a fist on the counter under Matt’s nose: “Fucking Spider-Man? You’re running with Spider-Man now? You have Spider-Man over, eating your corn flakes?”

Matt nodded pliantly.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Foggy said. “I didn’t give a fuck about your bootleg pals and… you know who, because they’re all losers, but you’re running with a fully certified Avenger, and you didn’t feel the need to tell me?!”

“Ex-Avenger,” Peter amended. “Who’s ‘you know who’?”

“No one I’d sully your little ears by mentioning.” Foggy snapped. His one-sided archrivalry with Frank had survived another day, Matt noted.

“It’s very recent, if that makes you feel better, and I’ve been meaning to. But, you know, it’s the kid’s own business, not mine, so I had to do it on his terms,” Matt began. “I’m… a bit ashamed it happened like this, to be honest.”

There. Get mad at that.

“It was on my terms,” Peter said. “Matt obviously really trusts you, so I’m gonna trust you, too. Would’ve just, like, watched him struggle to make up some lie otherwise.”

“You’re so sweet. Aw, Matty, he’s so sweet,” Foggy said. Matt grinned. He really was. “Thank you for putting your trust in me, Peter. It’s a treasure. I’m sorry I ever thought you came from this bastard.”

Matt’s smile vanished. Foggy began to distribute coffee.

“Do you like brunch?” Foggy asked.

“Dunno,” said Peter, “don’t think I’ve really had it. I definitely like breakfast, though.”

“How pitiful,” Foggy said wistfully. “Matt, we gotta get some brunch in the kid.”

“You did come over to get actual work done,” Matt reminded him. “There’s been, uh, developments. Molina’s turning out to be… a little more interesting than we thought.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Peter huffed.

“Lest I wear out the phrase—hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Matt gestured to the general state of his face as an answer.

“These were intended for Matt Murdock,” he said, “not the other guy.”

“Jesus,” Foggy breathed. “I’d just assumed it was…”

“The group that framed Molina—and now I’m quite confident that he was framed—paid me a visit last night,” Matt said, “and they weren't given the opportunity to finish their job, so I suspect they will be trying again. You and I should get a hold of the prosecution, let them know someone's intimidating counsel.”

“Right,” Foggy said, his voice some crooked kin of serious. “Brunch would be a lot more fun, but I suppose the safety of our client takes some degree of precedence.”

Peter bounced a leg. “So, uh, what should I be doing?”

“Resting,” Matt said.

Hey, how come his heart-rate had doubled?

“Why, you got something in mind?” Matt asked, the beginnings of a frown tugging at his lips.

“Maybe,” Peter said, excusing himself to put his bowl in the sink. “And it might be stupid. I just thought, uh, knowing Wes is probably still in lock-up, it might be… you know… an important opportunity to snoop ‘round his office. He had a lot of paperwork in there. A lot.”

Matt ran his hands over his face, slumped a little over the counter.

“Would anything I say make you reconsider?” he muttered.

“I mean, nah, not really,” Peter said.

“Oh my god,” Foggy said, far too pleased. “It’s divine punishment. The Good Lord hath provided you with a teenage mutant mirror of your sins.”

Peter seemed equally amused and offended by the statement as he washed his dishes.

Foggy excused himself up to the roof to make a call, cash some favor. He and Matt cleaned themselves up, Peter in some of Matt's clothes—the ones he'd gone to work in last night were hopelessly bloodstained.

“I look like an asshole,” Peter said, straightening his collar. None of Matt's tees covered his suit well enough.

“I dress like that almost every day,” Matt said. “What are you implying here, Mr. Parker?”

“No, but see, you wear it well,” Peter hummed. “You look like John fucking Constantine. Keanu version. I look like the world’s shittiest Bar Mitzvah. Sweating like he’s at a track meet even though he's standing still. He doesn’t even actually know the letters. Just reading off a romanization.”

“You always paint the most vivid pictures,” Matt said.

“I've been to that Bar Mitzvah, actually,” Foggy said, rounding the stairs. “Was unaware it was a universal constant. Murdock, let's go. We have an office to barge into.”

Matt assumed that had been a figure of speech, but they quite literally did end up barging in. The young lady at the front desk had half a mind to physically stop them, but she had quite not dressed for the occasion—her ultra-fashionable heels meant she couldn't do much past stand up straight, startled.

“Mr. Nelson,” Assistant District Attorney Galan said as they pushed through the door. “What a surprise.” She was a middle-aged woman with the sort of deep, rich voice Matt associated with the scent of black cherries.

“ADA Galan,” Foggy said, reaching out a hand. She took it, though lightly. “Allow me to properly introduce my partner, Matt Murdock.” 

“I’m glad you could see us on such short notice,” Matt said.

“Well, your partner hardly gave me much of a choice, did he?” Galan said. “You know, Mr. Nelson, I think you’ve dropped in more without an appointment than you have with one. Isn’t that… interesting?”

“You could call it rude, sure,” Foggy said. “Disrespectful, maybe. But you could also say it’s a clear indicator of how I let nothing get in the way of pursuing justice for my clients.”

“Of course,” Galan said flatly. “Certainly not my calendar. But let’s focus. What justice are you doggedly pursing today, counselor? It's odd to see you here on your own behalf.”

“We're representing a Ross Molina as Nelson and Murdock,” Matt said. She seemed to take him properly in for the first time—there was a minute stutter in her heart-rate. Must be inventorying his injuries. “He’s facing a GTA charge from your office. We need it dismissed or dropped.”

“On what grounds?” Galan asked without faltering, ever the professional. Matt heard the faint clink of her rings against each other, the frustrated hum of her hard drive—pulling up some records from her computer. “Your client’s accused of a six-figure theft. Federal time involved. Hardly something I can handwave.”

“On a dire lack of evidence, let alone intent,” Matt said. “The police still don’t know who the car actually belongs to, for God’s sake. But, most damningly, on the grounds that he was set up by a malicious third party.”

“You can make such claims at discovery,” Galan said. “By the way, Mr. Murdock, are you…”

“Then we need the deposition moved up, and by a lot,” Foggy interrupted. “And by a lot, I mean today, if possible. We believe the third party in question is actively intimidating those involved in this case. My partner…”

He trailed off, turned Matt’s way, unsure of what story he’d like to spin.

“I was attacked last night in my apartment,” Matt said plainly, “by unknown men who were ready to kill to keep me from representing Molina, to ensure he went to jail. They told me as much in their own words. And I would be happy to testify about what happened under oath, but I’m sure you can see the evidence, and understand its urgency, with your own eyes.”

He leaned over towards Foggy.

“You, uh, can see it, right?”

“Yes, partner, you are indeed visibly injured,” Foggy chorused. “Just beat to absolute hell. Hurts just looking at you.”

“Right,” Matt said, turning back towards Galan. “It hurts just looking at me.”

“Hm. Yes,” Galan said. “But there are proper channels for such things. Must be… is it safe to assume you didn’t have a police report made?”

“And what exactly would I tell the police, ADA Galan?” Matt smiled widely. If he was lucky, he might draw a little blood from his lip, let it drip down his chin, really sell it. “How the perpetrators sounded? I don’t believe we have the time for bureaucracy. I believe these men would do anything to ensure Molina takes the fall, and that includes coming after me, my partner, or Molina himself until the job is done. We cannot allow them the chance.”

“Speaking of,” Galan said. “You said they were ready to kill you. Pray tell, what exactly stopped them, Mr. Murdock?”

“It’s, uh, a little fuzzy,” Matt said, gingerly setting a hand over the worst of the bruising at his temple, putting on a wince. “I was hardly coherent by the end of it. But as I was about to be shot, ah… this feels a bit absurd to say out loud… before they could shoot me, Spider-Man swung in and stopped them. The perpetrators were gone by the time I regained my senses, so he must’ve… webbed them, or whatever he does.”

“You were saved by Spider-Man,” Galan intoned. “The Avenger.”

“Yes,” Matt said. “Well, ex-Avenger. Seems he’s working at a much smaller scale these days. It certainly sounded like him, anyway, but I’m not personally aware of anyone else who… drops from ceilings, shoots webs?”

“Surely not a single other soul fits that description,” Foggy offered.

“Spider-Man. In your apartment. In Hell’s Kitchen,” Galan sounded out. “Well, I suppose if it happened to anyone, it would be one of Nelson and Murdock.”

“Am I hearing an accusation in there, ADA Galan?” Foggy said, scandalized.

“Save the outrage,” she said. “Surely you’re aware that your firm has a reputation with, uh, extralegal methods of justice.”

“Pure hearsay,” Foggy said.

“More or less,” Matt said over him. “Perhaps that’s why he had an eye out for me. Though we’ve never met before last night. Not that I’d call what happened a proper ‘meeting,’ anyway.”

Foggy bristled at his side, but Galan laid a pondering finger upon her chin. May as well ground the story as much as possible, Matt figured. Their reputation… well, by now, it’d surely take a miracle to fix that.

“It may be worth checking if any of the local boys heard from Spider-Man last night,” Galan concluded. “Would be decent enough grounds necessary to warrant emergency proceedings, in my opinion, though it’s ultimately for the judge to decide.”

“That’s all we could ask for,” Foggy said. “We just want our client safe. And, uh, ourselves, of course. That means this crude frame job must be exposed for the farce it is. As soon as legally possible.”

“Hm,” was all Galan gave him.

“Well,” Foggy said in a mock whisper, leaning Matt’s way, “she’s not actively rolling her eyes at us, so I think we’re in.”

“You should probably get your partner some medical attention, Mr. Nelson,” Galan said. “Mr. Murdock, please speak with an officer, make a formal statement. I’ll see if I can find anything that verifies your story. If it checks out, I’ll file for an immediate hearing.”

“Much appreciated,” Foggy said, rising and taking Matt’s arm.

“I’m glad you’re taking this seriously,” Matt said.

Galan hummed another assent.

“Off the record, Mr. Murdock… do you know anything more about this supposed third party? Anything I should be aware of? Why frame your client for this particular crime?”

Matt chewed on that for a moment, no longer than was reasonable. Foggy’s hand tightened slightly around his forearm in warning.

“I really wish I knew, Mrs. Galan,” Matt hummed, “and I’d rather not hazard a guess. My client is a self-made man who found redemption after a troubled youth. Maybe his enemies merely found that unpalatable.”

“Maybe,” Galan parroted, unconvinced. “Well, I do hope you recover quickly, Mr. Murdock.”

“Not too quick,” Foggy said. “Those shiners are great evidence. Thank you for your time today, ADA Galan.”

“I’d say any time, but surely you’d take that at face value,” Galan sighed.

“You’re the best,” Foggy called, leading them out of the room.

“She eats out of your hand,” Matt said as soon as they were out of earshot. “Hell’s that about?”

“I, uh, may or may not have gotten her elected,” Foggy said. “In no official capacity, to be clear, so if someone asks, kindly say you have no idea what the hell they're talking about. I consulted off the books, was lead for most of her messaging. Gave her that perfect blend of tough on crime, tougher on excessive force that the yuppies and hippies alike eat up.”

Matt let out a dry little laugh.

“Jesus, you already own an ADA, and you haven’t even switched sides of the bar yet,” he said.

“Well, I don’t think I’d use such crass terminology,” Foggy hummed. “But yes.”

“Hey, dear, do me a favor,” Matt said, “wait til I’m dead to go into prosecution, yeah?”

“Sure. That’s not too big an ask,” Foggy said. “What’s a few extra months in my five year plan?”

Matt took half a step back to lay a punch on his shoulder.

“Sorry, not funny,” Foggy amended. “But I can definitely pencil a little extra time. Anything for you, Matt. Can you aim for a Q1 demise, though? I don't like going into a new year without clear goals in mind.”

Notes:

spider-man, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kitchen?
matt absolutely got 'run point' (he used it in chap 9) from foggy btw:3 i like overlapping their speech patterns a bit. cause theyre soulmates or whatever

Chapter 16

Notes:

[knocks you over the head with brute-force plot advancement]

Chapter Text

The chop shop looked different in the daytime, Peter thought, wriggling through the half-felled fence. More of its rot shone through in the sun.

The back door wasn’t propped open like it was during working hours. Peter frowned for a moment; he was sort of counting on that. Sometimes it’s shockingly easy to forget you can just scale walls for a moment or two, you know?

Peter crawled up, tried the second floor windows just above it—left unlatched, hardly still attached to their prohibition-era frames. Sweet.

He perched in the sill, listened closely, but no presence cared to make itself known. Peter dropped himself inside. Even the near-silent scuff of his clever feet rung out like a church bell in the hollow quiet. He winced. He’d probably have to swallow his pride and ask Matt for tips one of these days.

He cracked the door open behind him—there, now he had a story to spin if he got made. He’d figured it would be much less trouble to get caught as Benjamin Beck than Spider-Man, so he was there in Matt's borrowed civvies instead of the suit.

Wes’s office was the goal, but Antonia’s little department on the way; while Wes was undoubtedly the one with the vision, Antonia seemed to be the one responsible for bringing it into reality. Should be worth the detour.

She and her team were based in the basement, nice and soundproof. The near-constant whine of hydraulic power tools was apparently not super nice to hear while on the phone, and that was what she was doing most nights. That was a funny one, when Matt—still just Daredevil then—explained the misinterpretation. “Think the girls just, uh, work here,” he’d said. “Some kind of administrative work?”

The back wall was lined with ancient file cabinets. Analog. Smart. Peter didn’t even need to try and open them—a few files were left on top of the nearest, and the neat little printed label on the top proudly read Ross Molina.

Ah.

Hey, was this going too well?

Peter leafed through it.

Jesus. They’d clearly been tracking him for a while. They must’ve somehow cloned his cellphone, gotten into his email—they had all of his digital communications and his location down to the yard and the hour for a full week prior to the arrest. He was done for the moment he’d decided to pay Club 78 a visit, wasn’t he?

But there really wasn’t anything in the file but pure data; too bad Peter was no closer to knowing precisely why they’d been tracking him, what had made him a target. He grabbed the one behind it, began to skim the front page…

Goosebumps ran along his arms, and Peter dropped the file like it burned.

He narrowed his senses to a razor’s edge—footsteps, not quite yet in the building but approaching it fast, two pairs, one heavy, one light.

Peter vaulted out of the basement, closed the door as quietly as he could. The front gate began to roll open with a thunderous series of clanks—he could hear their voices now, chatting idly: Wes and Antonia.

How? How?! Come the fuck on, man. Take the hint, stay in jail for half a damn second!

The goddamned chop shop was just one long corridor. They’d see him if he ran. He could… leap up to the ceiling, but, ugh, it was so damn bright in here and he hadn’t brought the mask…

He was thinking too much like Peter Parker, he scolded himself. Come on, Benjamin Beck. Why are you here?

Peter sprung forward at full tilt, nabbing a bucket of soapy water on his way, and dove behind one of the more intact cars. He dumped half the water out, let it wet the car and the concrete below it, grabbed the sponge and prayed…

The gate finished its excruciating ascent, and the pair strolled in.

Peter got visual through the car window—Wes appeared to do the same, held a warding hand out in front of Antonia, drew his gun.

“Who’s there?” he called.

“It’s me! Just me,” Peter said, coming out from behind the car, both hands up in surrender.

“The fuck are you doing here, Benji?” Wes breathed. “Shit, I almost blew your damn head smooth off.”

Peter let the sponge slip down out of his hand. It made a miserably loud splat. Paid actor, Peter thought wryly.

“I, uh, had a really bad night,” Peter stuttered, scrunched his eyes shut. “Really, really, really needed to do something with my hands… somewhere that wasn’t my place. I know it was stupid, but… I mean, the back door was open, so I just figured…”

“It was? Shit, we gotta work on our closing routine. Well, can’t say I don’t get it,” Wes said, regarding Peter with a tilted head. “Devil’s got plenty of his work done with my idle hands, sure.”

“And I, uh…”

“But you listen, Benji,” Wes said, cutting him off, voice at a rolling boil. “And you listen carefully. You ever come sniffing around my shop without my express goddamn permission again, I’ll have to assume you’re a rat. And there’s only one good kind of rat.”

“A dead one,” Peter finished.

“Clever boy,” Wes said. “Nice to be on the same page, yeah?”

“Course,” Peter said. “Should I, uh, leave?”

Wes pursed his lips, slid his gun back in its holster.

Hm. He never had the safety off, Peter realized dully. Nor his finger on the trigger. Excellent discipline. Where’d he get that beat into him?

“Nah,” Wes said. “You’re here already. Be cruel to make you waste the subway fare, hm? This ain't going on your timesheet, though.”

“Course, of course. It won’t happen again,” Peter said, nearly panted. “It really won’t.”

“Sure. Hey, once you’re done with whatever you’re doing, Ben,” Wes said, “once you get all those jitters out. How about you check in with me in my office before you leave?”

“Yessir,” Peter said. Had he left anything out of place? Should he just flee preemptively, disappear into the ether, never show himself in the chop shop again?

No, no, he told himself. He’d been careful. You need to learn to trust in your work, Peter Parker.

Wes gave him a two-fingered salute and sauntered off. Peter let his shoulders slide down from his ears, peeled off the harried expression.

Was it just him, or was he getting good at this? Getting himself into jams, that was still a problem. But talking his way out of them…

“Hey, Ben,” Antonia said.

Peter flinched. He’d almost forgotten she was here.

“Hi, Antonia,” Peter intoned. Felt a little like getting yelled at while a classmate was watching.

“Bad day, huh? Sorry about whatever you got going on,” she hummed. She was sweet, wasn’t she? Probably too sweet.

Hm.

Peter never really had any facetime with the career criminals he occasionally dispatched, and it was a little hard thinking of her like that, but Antonia was a proper criminal, wasn’t she?

He came around the car and hopped up to sit on the hood.

“Hey, I know you, uh, already yelled at me for all the questions,” Peter said. “But can I ask you a personal one?”

“I guess,” she said, fussing with her lanyard.

“You, uh, seem really nice and smart and good at what you do,” Peter said. “And, uh…”

“Aw, that’s sweet, but I’m way too old for you, baby.”

“No, no, not that kind of personal question!” Peter groaned, running a hand over his face. “Just, um. You could probably do literally anything else. Why work here?”

Antonia pursed her lips, glanced at the ground, where the grayish water from the dropped sponge was making its leisurely journey to one of the drains.

“Would you guess I’m a first gen college student?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t really… wanna guess. Don’t like assuming things about people,” Peter said. “But no, not really.”

“Yeah. When I say first gen, people always, I dunno, start looking for an accent,” Antonia said. “I feel like people always forget just how little a lot of Middle America has, especially up here. Poverty’s some tacky little thing they do down South, right?”

Peter hummed a vague assent. He wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this.

“But yeah, first gen,” Antonia said. “Got in at a mid-ranked CUNY on a full-ride scholarship. And had absolutely no support, no prep, not the faintest idea of what I was in for, with college and the city… so of course I go and completely blow it in my first semester. Lose all the money.”

“Oh,” Peter said.

“Yeah, oh. That’s what I said, too,” Antonia grinned, humorless. “So I get a real job. Too many hours, not enough pay. It sucks. Grades keep tanking, still can’t actually cover tuition.”

She leaned herself against the car door, parallel to Peter.

“So I pivot,” Antonia said. “And I find this exploit in the online servicer the City uses for a lot of public servant pensions… cops, mostly, they got the best plan. I figure, you know, it’s my tax money, and the interest is gonna make up most of the difference before they’re retired, anyway. So I start making these calls. Never really took enough to ruin anyone’s lives, but it was certainly enough to change mine.”

“Like a real social engineer,” Peter noted lightly.

“Super fancy way of saying scammer, but yeah,” Antonia said. “Anyway, one day, this random target of mine ends up being Wes. Thought I had him, but turns out he totally had me. Said he wouldn’t take the attempted theft too personal if I leant him my skills for a while. And here we are.”

“Are you, uh, still in school?” Peter asked.

“Course,” Antonia said. “24 credits left on a Computer Science and Marketing dual major, clean 4.0 my last two semesters. Flexible hours and a fat paycheck will do that for you, I guess. If anyone asks, I’m a waitress who serves some excellent tippers.”

“You can, uh… totally tell me to fuck off if you’d like to,” Peter said, glancing at her shoes. Chic little sneakers, light pink and white and hardly stained. “But it doesn’t ever… get to you? The violence involved? The lives lost?”

Antonia stood, came around to face Peter, crossing her arms to rest atop the side mirror. Her face was flat, free of malice, not quite upset, but not really neutral, either—contemplative?

“There’s this kid on my floor,” Antonia said, spinning a ringlet atop her finger, “and he’s had this placement at one of those blue-chip defense companies since he was a freshie. Always dragging around his fancy work laptop. And his hard work, it's making bombs better at killing, a whole lotta blowing people to bits. Innocent people, mostly. Do you think the lives lost ever get to him? And there’s a gal in my cohort, a senior. Really lovely person to be around. But she’s got this side hustle writing algorithms for health care companies to bulk-deny claims. Think it ever gets to her?”

Peter chewed on that for a moment.

“Fair enough,” he tried. “But maybe that’s all gotta go too. Maybe all of it’s bad. Petty crime like this, but the legal shit, too.”

“And maybe I want a pet unicorn,” Antonia giggled. “Listen, what I know about people… you could get society all neatened up, all clean, all free of nastiness, and people would still find a way to game the system. To fuck other people over. May as well get yourself a hot meal out of it.”

“But there’s always gonna be people helping, too,” Peter said. “It’s nice to be a helper.”

“Right,” Antonia said. Peter had expected resistance, but there was a faint spark of fondness in her voice. “Right, I forgot, you’re the Spider-Man fan. You still believe in the heroes.”

Peter shrugged, made a noncommittal noise. Sounded kinda lame when you put it like that.

“Hey, uh, sorry about the interrogation,” he said.

“No, no, it’s all good,” Antonia said. She paused, chewed on her lip. Her eyes brightened a little as she turned back his way.

“Sometimes it’s just nice to say this kind of shit out loud, you know,” Antonia mused. “Can’t exactly talk about any of it with my real friends. No offense.”

“None taken. And I definitely get it,” Peter said. “A double life… usually means you don’t really live either.”

Antonia gave him a light smile.

“You seem like a good kid, Ben,” she called, heading to her office. “Kinda hope you don’t have to stick around with us too long.”

“Guess we’ll see,” he called back.

Peter wouldn’t be sticking around much longer if he had anything to do with it. And he definitely did. He sort of hoped whatever he and Matt ended up pulling off wouldn’t screw Antonia over too bad.

But that’s exactly how she believed the world works, isn’t it? Someone was always going to get fucked over. What a shame Peter would be the one to vindicate those beliefs.

He ran both hands through his hair and breathed out a rough sigh.

Right. Wes.

Peter slid off the hood, wandered up to his office, feet heavy with dread, and gave the door a cautious rap.

“Open,” Wes said.

“It’s, uh, Ben,” Peter said, slipping inside.

He cut a remarkably close match to Peter’s first impression of the man, fresh little bag of snacks in one hand, keying something into a laptop with the other. The main difference was the line of butterfly bandages holding part of his brow together and the accompanying bluish bruises, courtesy of Peter introducing his skull to Matt's bedframe at a fairly high velocity. Whoops.

“Hey, kiddo,” Wes grinned. He held the bag out Peter’s way without glancing away from his screen. “Hungry?”

Peter faltered for a moment; was there a wrong answer? No, no. That wasn’t quite Wes’s style. He nabbed a chip, swallowed it down, hardly tasting it.

“Everything alright, boss?” Peter said.

“Hm? Oh, the face?” Wes hummed. “Shit, you should see the other guy.”

Hey, the other guy looked great, thank you very much. Aside from that big tear in his side, anyway (and its extremely itchy stitches that he was definitely not going to scratch).

“You, uh, wanted me to drop in,” Peter said.

“Sure, have a seat,” Wes said. He still hadn’t so much as peeked Peter’s way yet. Was that a sign of disapproval, or an oblique show of trust?

Peter settled in.

Wes’s side of the desk had some real Herman Miller-looking beauty; Peter’s chair looked—and smelled, just a little, anyway—like it came with the abandoned building. He bounced a leg.

Wes snapped the laptop shut, loud enough to startle Peter into a flinch. He pulled a paper from the top of a messy pile, held it out Peter’s way.

Peter took it. It was a print-out of a photo of a car, a few technical details in a table beneath it. All that over-engineered bodywork was, uh, certainly shiny. Looked expensive. It all meant little to Peter aside from the half-formed recognition that those specs must be on the very, very far end of the street-legal bell curve.

Peter glanced back up to Wes, hoping whatever this was all about might be clearer on his face.

All that waited for him was an illegible little grin.

“Is this a test?” Peter asked.

“Sure, something like that,” Wes smiled. “But let’s call it a thought exercise instead.”

“Right,” Peter said, anxiety already assuaged by the faintest hint of instruction. “What exactly am I thinking about?”

“You’re thinking that’s your car,” Wes said. “Well, not in the eyes of the law, or the, uh, guy who bought it, that is. But you want it, so it’s gonna be yours. Tell me, Benji, how’d you like to make it work?”

Oh, god, this was the interview question from hell.

“Gonna go out on a limb here and guess ‘knock the owner over the head, snatch the keys’ isn’t quite the answer you’re looking for, sir,” Peter said.

“And that means you got good instincts,” Wes said. “This is a one-of-twenty six hundred. Can’t get driven without a video going on someone’s story, and you gotta bet the owner puts down a damn mortgage payment in insurance alone. And those sorts of insurers? Their recovery division’s more stacked than some armies.”

“So it needs to be, uh, cleaner,” Peter reasoned. “Subtle.”

“Sure,” Wes said. “Walk me through subtle.”

“Maybe… make him think dropping the insurance is what he wants to do. It would be easy enough to spoof a call through his broker’s number. Falsify jacked-up rates, try to kick him off on a fake technicality, say if he drops the one vehicle, the other shit he insures won’t get let go, too?”

“Owner’s a very wealthy man,” Wes offered. “Doubt he looks too close at the rates.”

“Wealthy men love saving money,” Peter reasoned. “S’how they stay wealthy. Or, uh, make the number big enough even he does a double-take.”

“Hm. Fair,” Wes said. “Let’s say it works, and you got yourself an uninsured car. You still can’t sell it once you swipe it, unless it’s for dirt cheap. Much too distinct. What are you doing, Benji?”

“Man, I really don’t know how this works,” Peter huffed.

“Humor me,” Wes said. “Give me your very best guess.” He kept his voice light, airy; Peter could tell it was all hunger right beneath.

“I’m guessing the me in this scenario doesn’t want to sell it for parts,” Peter said.

“That he does not,” Wes laughed. “But sometimes you got no other choice. Make a different one here, yeah?”

Peter scratched at his neck.

“Maybe we don’t steal the car,” Peter said. “Maybe we steal the profit.”

“How’s that?”

“Could, uh, put on some rich guy persona,” Peter said. “Corner the guy when he’s out driving, say I absolutely must buy it off of him for a ridiculous price, mention how I know some, uh, especially discreet broker who avoids all taxes, doesn't take commission.”

“Get him implicated, I like it,” Wes said.

“Yeah. Fake the sale, have him legally transfer over the deed to a false identity for a dollar. Give him the profit via a check he’ll have a little trouble cashing. And he won’t be rushing to tell the cops because he knows what he did was just as illegal. Now, I dunno how you’d keep all the other variables tight, but…”

“Hey, it’s a thought exercise, not a thesis. Don’t sweat,” Wes said. “But I like it, the core of the idea. Owner won’t know he’s been robbed until it’s too late, and then he’s gotta think about what he wants to admit to. As long as you can cover your tracks, you’d be golden.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, pursing his lips. “That ‘as long as’ is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting, though.”

Wes cracked a smile.

“Can, I, uh ask,” Peter said, “what’s all this about? I don’t… actually have to put on some rich guy persona, do I?”

“Nah. I just like knowing how people tick, that’s all,” Wes said. “If they’re capable of looking problems in the eye. Seems to me you’re ticking away just fine, Ben.”

Peter nodded blithely. He was mildly upset by it, but he did have that same sort of pleasant frontal-lobe buzz he usually got from balancing an especially complex chemical equation or untangling some unseen-since-the-nineties network error.

His brain unwelcomely churned up memories of the odd nights he actually spent in a Stark Industry lab. Most of them had been intern photo-ops, sure, signing bullshit timesheets, building up his alibi. But a few times—just enough to count on his hands—he and Mr. Stark did some real building; he recalled Tony standing across from him, parsing through Peter’s blueprints, quotidian smirk gone all soft, eyes gone all glittery with holograms and the pure spark of creation.

Mostly the holograms.

The involuntary association made Peter a bit nauseous.

“You wanna know how I’d do it?” Wes said.

Peter gave him another nod.

“I actually had a real similar idea to you, Benji,” Wes said. “Make sure the sale’s the legit part. Only I figured, no need to reinvent the wheel. There’s already a completely legal way to sell a stolen car.”

“How?”

“Police auction,” Wes said. “New York's Finest move more stolen goods than all the city’s best fences combined. When a car comes in as evidence and never gets claimed, they all eventually get auctioned off with fancy new papers.”

“But how do you make sure the car never gets claimed?”

“Well, uh, let’s circle back to that first idea of yours. How’d you put it? ‘Knock the owner over the head,’” Wes said. “Only we better be real sure, yeah? Do the knocking with a little chunk of lead.”

Chapter 17

Notes:

yap fest (featuring a special guest)

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

It was unbearably hot and incomprehensibly humid, the sort of day that had everyone on the street, even the kids, looking like they'd just done a double shift. A tombstone-colored sky hung low and heavy, threatening rain but too stingy to make good on such promises. This must be what a dog left in a car on a hot day feels like, Peter thought.

And wasn’t that an excellent metaphor? Wasn’t New York City just God’s overgrown, ungroomed husky, left in a 2011 Toyota 4Runner as their owner ran into a Bev-Mo for a bottle of twelve-dollar Rosé, only to get caught up in a forty-five minute chat with a fellow member of the PTA?

God as a suburban mom made a lot of sense, Peter realized. G-dash-D, anyway. All of those specific little rules and customs, mandatory family dinners on Fridays.

Peter had done a proper Shabbos exactly once, when a Reform-but-hardcore neighbor from a floor down—how she’d even known they were Jewish, who really knows, maybe she’d seen the Menorah in their window one year and somehow triangulated their unit’s location—dragged them out of their apartment, insisting her Brother-in-Law’s side was down sick and they needed two more for a Minyan.

The dinner became quite stilted once all parties realized exactly how little Hebrew and ritual the Parkers knew. Less than the little ones, probably four or six years old, and they didn’t even count towards the Minyan sum.

Their door was not knocked on another Friday night after that. May had taken that quite personally, but was willing to forget about it once Peter gathered up the courage to admit he was so, so, so alright with being an in-at-Rosh-Hashanah, out-by-Yom-Kippur type of Jew.

“It’s how Sandy Koufax did it,” Peter had said. “And who do we think we are, aiming higher than the Left Hand of God?”

Bringing up Koufax was always a good way to win an argument.

Peter’s stream of reminiscence was crudely dammed by a buzz in his pocket. It was a text from Matt, reading—well, no reading necessary, it was just a question mark. He sure had a way with words.

Peter gave him a call.

“Hey, Peter,” Matt said, “Manage to get yourself killed?”

“Yes,” Peter said, “this is my corpse speaking. I’m going to haunt you forever.”

“Save it,” Matt said, and, hey, why did he sound sort of serious?

“Right, uh, what’d you learn?”

“Struck out, not gonna lie,” Peter said. “Wes was, um, decidedly not in lock-up? Dunno how he managed that. Dude doesn’t know how to take a day off.”

Matt made a displeased noise.

“You still in Manhattan?” he asked.

“Yeah, just now headed to the station,” Peter said.

“I’m going to send you an address. Meet me there instead?”

“Sure,” Peter said. “Do I get to know what we’re doing there?”

“Touching base with our private investigator.”

“Oh, badass,” Peter hummed. “Always wanted to do something like that.”

He heard Matt laugh a little over the line.

“Be there soon,” he said, hanging up.

Peter reviewed the address. Well, that sucked, he’d need a completely different train than the one he was headed to.

The howling of the overworked subway AC was still ringing in Peter’s ears as he rounded the last block and spotted Matt waiting for him by the door.

He was leaning against the wall with his cane resting against his chest. He cut a real Norman Rockwell silhouette in his shirt and slacks, though the dark daubs of bruising across his face landed him a little closer to Lucian Freud.

He wore a light smile as Peter approached—he’d probably kept himself entertained by tracing Peter’s path since he’d hopped off the train.

“Hey, counselor,” Peter said.

“Hey,” Matt said. “Got made at the chop shop, hm? How’d you get out of there?”

“Spotted, not made,” Peter said through a wince. “I think I, um, sufficiently talked my way out of it with my cover intact. Bossman just thinks I have an exceptional work ethic. I hope.”

Matt put on a particularly martyrlike face, let his head dip slightly to one side.

“How are you feeling, by the way?” he asked, tucking away the long-suffering frown. “Don’t think I properly checked in on you this morning.”

“Peachy,” Peter said, pleased to be spared a lecture. “But you can probably smell or, ew, taste that, can’t you?”

“More or less,” Matt said. “You seem well into your recovery, but I’ve been told I have a non-standard concept of pain tolerance.”

“No shit,” Peter said. “But me too, so… where’re we headed?”

Peter reached towards the callbox, but it was apparently unnecessary. Matt caught his shoulder and just nodded towards the door.

“Okay, uh,” Peter hummed, holding the door—unlocked, unminded—open for Matt, “this place is a shithole.” The lobby was filthy; little piles of trash gathered along edges of walls and furniture, and an unattended front desk was piled with packages, half of them opened and pawed through.

“I love a good shithole,” Matt said, smiling genteelly. “Best parts of this city are always the shitholes. Elevator’s ahead on our right.”

Peter took his arm. He was in a good mood today, wasn’t he? Did broken ribs usually have that effect on him?

It was no less of a shithole on the higher floors. The air was heavy with that marvelous blend of an all-pervading rot and the industrial strength chemicals that maintenance deployed to hopelessly fight back its tide. Peter was intimately familiar with it these days; his own place had a similar perfume.

“Apartment at the end of the hall,” Matt said, and Peter led him on dutifully.

“It’s unlocked,” someone called upon their arrival.

“To be ‘unlocked’ implies it’s possible to be locked,” Matt said, letting the brutalized door swing open with a gentle tap of his cane. “Seems inaccurate here.”

“Mora-fucking-torium on the pedantics, Murdock,” she snapped. “You—who’s the child?”

Peter had followed Matt in lockstep and peeked over his shoulder.

“Peter, this is Jessica Jones, Alias Investigations. Jess, this is Peter Parker, uh, boy detective. We’re collaborating.”

“Know what? I’m completely buying it,” Jessica said. “Of course the blind Catholic orphan lawyer knows a boy detective. Hell, I’d be surprised if he didn’t. Why’s your whole life a shitty pulp noir, Murdock?”

Jessica Jones looked plenty the pulp noir part herself, Peter decided. She was all contrast: black hair and leather against skin that made Peter’s seem tan, divvied up further by the razor-thin beams of afternoon sunlight that slipped through her half-drawn blinds.

Peter was tempted to point out the whole raven-haired private eye thing, but instead settled on, “Listen, I do not know why he said that. I’ve never detected a thing in my life.”

“You do plenty detecting,” Matt said, settling down at a chair in front of her desk. Peter joined him warily at its pair. “No need to be shy about it.”

“You, uh, known this kid long?” she asked Matt. “Don’t usually care to discuss casework around random folks off the street. No offense, random… kind of filthy child off the street.”

“Excuse me?” Peter said, face gone warm. Okay, yes, so there was dirt all over Matt's ill-fitting dress shirt, and yes, he supposed such an ensemble didn't typically make a spectacular first impression. But it wasn't his fault he had to spend his morning scaling fences and walls. Or, well, it was, wasn't it…

“Hm. Sensitive,” she said. “And I'm supposed to believe you're running around with this piece of work? He hasn’t eaten you alive yet?”

“What? I’m great with kids,” Matt said, lightly scandalized. “You forget where I was raised, Ms. Jones. I was the favorite big brother to no less than twenty-three maladjusted children in my prime.”

Peter was less than pleased by the implication that he was the twenty-fourth maladjusted child, and landed a soft kick to Matt's ankle that he wore with a grin.

“I was informed you were a little hellraiser in your prime,” Jessica said, matching his tone. “Did my sources mislead me, Mr. Murdock?”

“No, that sounds quite accurate,” Matt said. “It was precisely the Hell-raising that made me the favorite.”

What? Only Peter was allowed to stalk Matt.

“Sources?” he frowned.

“Ah, just me,” Matt said, dropping the distinguished-professional voice he’d been putting on. “Me after four or five drinks, anyway. Jess and I are drinking bu—drinking acquaintances.”

“No, see, ‘acquaintances’ still implies some degree of equality,” Jessica corrected. She’d shed hers too. “You and I are not remotely on the same level, lightweight.”

“You’re the only person who’s ever accused me of being such a thing, Jess,” Matt said, “and I was raised by Irish boxers.”

Ah, Peter thought. The broken ribs had absolutely nothing to do with Matt's good mood. It was the company.

“Anyway, Peter’s one of the good ones,” Matt said, smiling blithely.

“So, Ross Molina,” Jessica refocused. “I got good news, and I got bad news.”

“Hm. Start me off with the bad.”

“Well, bad news is your guy looks to be dealing again. In stolen cars, I mean. He must’ve put a girlfriend or someone’s address down on his intake forms, but I tracked down his real apartment. Comes with its own automated parking garage. Guess who pays a whole second rent in extra parking spaces?”

“Mr. Molina,” Matt said. “All of them full?”

“All full,” Jessica concurred. “Unless he's a collector of uh, coveted mid-range beaters, not sure what else you’d make of that.”

“He's a mechanic, isn't he?” Peter tried. “Maybe he's just doing some side work for friends in his spare time.”

“Wes seemed pretty damn certain he's a thief, and this is perhaps the only area I'd be inclined to trust his judgement,” Matt said. “That’s the bad news?”

“I mean, I thought it was pretty damning,” Jessica said. “He’s facing a GTA, right? If they are stolen, it’s a pretty colorful pattern of behavior.”

“Hardly matters,” Matt said, waving a hand. “He’s facing one very specific GTA charge, and that happened out on the street, so they never got a warrant to search his property. Never thought they needed one. I don't believe they'll get the chance.”

Jessica paused, raised an eyebrow.

“Dude, I knew you were ethically ambiguous on the obvious, but this seems…”

“A lot like aiding and abetting?” Matt said. “I have reason to suspect whoever set Molina up is far more sinister, and Heaven forbid I aid or abet them. What’s the good news?”

“The good news is that I think I found the supposed owner of the Mercedes,” Jessica said, sliding a stack of glossy print-outs Peter’s way.

“The guy with the keys, anyway,” she added. “Security footage was, uh, shockingly on the fritz the night of Molina’s arrest—never heard that one before—but I spotted him in the back of some social media footage, cross-referenced it with what little footage they did have, spotted him in the flesh a few nights ago. He’s a total regular, VIP-type, real cozy with the valet.”

“Holy shit,” Peter said. “It’s Wes. I know this guy. Matt, you, uh, also know this guy. He’s the head honcho of the Hell’s Kitchen chop shop Mr. Murdock and I have been following.”

“Night shift job,” Matt clarified. “Peter’s presently undercover with them.”

“Our man’s running sting operations and a crime ring? Busy guy. This gets a lot darker and twistier, real fast, then,” Jessica said.

“How so?” Matt asked.

“I’m pretty sure he’s a cop, undercover or ex.”

“What makes you figure?”

“Saw him rubbing shoulders with some assholes I'm actually sure are undercover,” she said. “Big old knowing grins on the lot of them. Total co-conspirators.”

“How do you know he's not the mark?”

“Well, I also may or may not have gone home with him,” she said.

To Matt’s raised eyebrow, she added, “What? I hang around the line to blend in, but the damn club had a cover. For a pretty young lady like me, can you believe it? I wasn’t going to pay that shit, and our man just so happened to be feeling very generous. Offered free drinks back at his place instead when I asked. Murdock, quit looking at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you at all,” Matt said lightly. “Besides, you know I’m the last to judge when it comes to 'generosity.'”

“You and I should so totally go out together one of these nights, Matthew,” Jessica drawled. “No way they’d charge cover on some poor blind guy and his gorgeous and charming companion, right? We’d make like bandits.”

Peter shifted in his seat uncomfortably.

“Boy detective can come too,” she hummed. “You got a fake, right?”

“I don’t even have a real,” Peter sputtered.

“Raincheck,” Matt said. “And, Peter, you should fix that. Anything important in the apartment?”

“Just that standard-issue 15-round Glock 17 he carries around,” Jessica said. “Cop. I'm certain.”

“Ah, I’m familiar with it,” Matt said through a half-fond smile. “But he could’ve… borrowed it, had it modified to fit spec.”

“Sure, but the gun safe he has right at the door to stash it in? Total cop behavior,” Jessica said. “Rest of his apartment was a bust. He’s smart enough to keep life and work separate. I snuck out soon after that.”

“Not that separate,” Matt said, “if he was the one on site to arrange Molina’s arrest, and the one who came to execute me.”

“Came to what?” Jessica asked.

“I get the sense that he’s the type who doesn’t trust anyone else to do the super important stuff,” Peter offered. “Maybe that’s why he got off on bail or whatever so quick. Scared of his op shriveling away without his constant care.”

Jessica narrowed her eyes at Matt, but apparently didn’t care enough to press further regarding talk of executions. She really must know him well, Peter thought. Really, really well.

“You said your guy’s name was Wes?” she asked Peter.

“It’s how he introduced himself, anyway,” Peter said. “Might be fake. Didn’t give me a last name, either.”

“I heard the bouncer address him as Mr. Smith,” Jessica said. “Figured it was total bullshit, but let’s see if your boss is an honest man.”

She keyed in the name, reviewed the results.

“Eat shit, Matt. Weston Smith, ex-NYPD,” Jessica said, turning the laptop Peter’s way. It was undoubtedly Wes, though a few years younger and a little rounder, not a shadow of that starved look he currently had in his eyes.

“No way in Hell that’s his real name,” Matt said.

“Huh?” Peter said.

“You know,” Matt hummed, “like Smith and Wesson.”

“No, it’s, uh, shockingly real. His parents must’ve been gun freaks,” Jessica said.

She’d pulled up his file from the NYPD roster (Peter wondered how she had that database on hand) and read it to Matt; he’d made it all to Sergeant before getting fired a few years back on some pretty scandalous accusations: smuggling, racketeering. The charges had never made it in any court higher than Internal Affairs, however. Seems he was just asked never to come back like some chastened private school boy.

Antonia had called Molina’s arrest a hand-off, hadn’t she?

Type of word you use when both parties are on the same team.

“That’s probably how he got Molina collared so cleanly, right? Called up an old buddy,” Peter said. He turned to Matt. “And my red Charger. Bet whoever was on patrol that night knew to look the other way when they scooped it up.”

“An ex-cop-turned-car-thief using department resources to thin out his competition,” Jessica summarized. “That’s a clever little scheme.”

“Think they planned on running it a ton,” Peter said. “They’d been tracking Molina a while before the arrest, and he was just one of a bunch of different files.”

“People who'd go down easy,” Matt said. “People who a jury would have no problem putting back under, even if the evidence against them was thin. Would explain why they didn’t want him well represented. He’d be pretty damn exposed if the investigation pressed any farther than whatever story his men on the inside were telling.”

But… no, that wasn’t quite right, was it? Wes was a pretty straightforward guy. He didn’t take U-turns to get to his destination.

If Molina off the streets was the goal, why even bother with the arrest? He loved that shiny pistol of his. Didn’t seem all that afraid to use it.

“It’s not… I don’t think it’s all that simple,” Peter said. “Or, I guess, if it is that simple, why is Molina still alive?”

“Last I checked, murder in the first degree has a slightly heavier sentence than obstruction of justice or false reporting,” Matt offered.

Peter shook his head.

“We’re missing something,” he insisted.

“Like what?” Jessica asked.

“Dunno,” Peter hummed. “That’s why it’s missing.”

“You really know how to pick them, huh, Murdock?”

“Let the kid think, Jess,” Matt said.

Evidence, he thought. Department resources. Ringing quiet but ominous little bells. If he could just listen in a little closer, find the fixed variable…

A conclusion was forming, but Peter didn’t like the sound of it one bit.

“Hey, do we know who actually owns the car Molina was found in?” Peter tried.

“Last owner was some businessman up outside of Albany,” Matt said. “It was reported stolen over a year ago. Why?”

Peter’s blood flushed cold. Knocked over the head with a little chunk of lead…

“He’s, uh, dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Cold case. Shot with his own gun several months back,” Matt said. “But Molina had nothing to do with that. He hasn’t left the city in years.”

“The car’s still unclaimed, isn’t it?”

“Seems like it,” Matt said. “He had no relatives, and insurance had written the Mercedes off as a loss long before he was killed. Peter, you…”

Peter tucked his nails deep into the flesh of his palm.

“This isn’t about Molina. It was never really about Molina,” he breathed. “It’s about the car. Shit. It wasn’t a theoretical.”

“What’s it… oh,” Matt said. He stiffened.

“What wasn’t a theoretical?” Jessica said.

“Before I came, we… me and Wes… we were doing this thought experiment thing,” Peter said. “Thinking through how you’d acquire and move a super distinct car. And he brought up, uh, NYPD auctions. Killing off the owner, letting the car fall into unclaimed evidence, selling it in auction with clean papers.”

Tension rolled off Matt in waves.

“It’s a laundering scheme,” Matt said, voice flat with rage. “They’re using the NYPD to launder stolen cars.”

“All they needed Molina to do was bite at the hook,” Jessica said. “Turn the car into evidence. The fact that he’s a possible competitor was probably just a nice little bonus.”

“And I really don’t think Molina and the businessman were the first,” Peter said. “Or the last. Shit, how many have they…”

“Even one is too many,” Matt said. “We stop them here. In court or otherwise.”

“Okay, uh, sidebar,” Jessica said. “You’re telling me this guy just laid out his nefarious plans for you? How come mine never do that? Is he stupid?”

“No,” Peter said. “I mean, maybe a little overconfident, sure. But I think he’s, like, lowkey designated me as some kind of, uh, heir candidate.”

“I reiterate: is he stupid?”

“Hey, some of us happen to think Peter would make a perfectly acceptable heir candidate,” Matt said.

“Yeah, yeah, get in line,” Peter said, a glimmer of smugness winning over the abject dread of the final conclusion. “I was Tony Stark’s heir for a hot minute.”

“Bullshit,” Jessica scoffed.

“He’s telling the truth,” Matt said, frowning. “That doesn't make sense.”

Notes:

would peter know who norman rockwell and lucian freud are? he seems like the naturally inquisitive type even if he's a total stemmie.. needed a lot of trivia for acadec...

Chapter 18

Notes:

suggested listening is summer in the city by the lovin' spoonful. it's what peter sings for a bit
this is a total beach episode sidequest filler chapter but everything after it is lead-up to the conclusion(😱) so i'll leave it in and let the boys play for a bit longer before i wrap up

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

It was nice to have a reason to fit Fogwell’s back in his routine, Matt thought, running mindlessly through long-perfected bag work. He’d allowed himself to avoid it for far too long. Left, right. Getting soft, one voice snapped. Left, left, right. Just you and me, Matty, another offered, a phantom ruffle of his hair.

Matt heard the door creak open, the footsteps he’d been tracking from half a mile off light upon the linoleum.

“Matt?” Peter called, a steadying hand on the knob. Then, muttered: “Dunno why I said that like I might be able to startle you. You ever been startled before?”

Matt stilled the bag, turned Peter’s way.

“Peter,” Matt sounded out, “what did you eat today?”

“Uh,” Peter said. “Food, I think.”

Around six grams of protein in him in the last twelve hours, and even that super-powered marrow of his still hadn’t quite topped off his blood supply since the other night. Matt gave him a plaintive look.

“Listen, man,” Peter said, crossing his arms. “The whole, um, involuntary health checkup thing you do… it doesn’t exactly make a guy wanna keep hanging around.”

“Don’t see you running,” Matt said.

“Well, it’s like I told you,” Peter said, “I just got nothing else going on.”

“There’s a twenty-four hour diner a few blocks over,” Matt said, reaching for his hoodie. “How about I let you leave the tip this time?”

“Deal,” Peter said, perhaps a little too quickly. “Gotta do something with all these ill-gotten gains.”

“Wes paying you well?”

“Honestly? He makes a great boss. Aside from the whole, you know, crime thing.”

Matt grabbed a ball cap and sunglasses, the plain ones from his locker—weighty mementos of darker times, but it wasn’t exactly appropriate to be going out as Murdock like this—and the pair headed over to the restaurant.

It was leisurely tipping towards midnight, but it seemed tonight was of those nights were the entire city collectively realized the summer was slipping away, and they’d be stupid to stay cooped up inside. Impromptu barbecues and little parties spilled messily out of the buildings they’d started in, flooding into the sidewalks and even the streets. Steps and curbs were clustered with people, most of them young, laughing, arguing, kissing, drinking.

My city, Matt thought fondly.

“Think it’s going to rain soon,” Peter said at his side.

Matt was inclined to agree with him. Soon, but not tonight.

“That a spider thing?”

“No, it’s a, uh, reading the contrails from LaGuardia thing,” Peter hummed. “Pre-dates all the spider stuff. Their staying power depends on the amount of moisture in the air, so when they’re this long, long enough to stretch all the way up to the Bronx, it’s probably gonna rain within the week.”

“Fun trick,” Matt said.

“Uncle Ben taught me it when I was little,” Peter said plainly, though the little stutter in his heart suggested it was an admission with some weight. “Hasn’t failed me yet.”

Matt knew the aunt, but he hadn’t yet heard tell of an uncle. Was it an invitation to inquire? He must be gone, too. What more could there be to tell?

“What does it look like tonight?” Matt said instead. “The sky.”

Peter let out an amused little puff of air at the semi-non-sequitur.

“It’s real low,” Peter said. “Like you could reach up touch it if you just jumped high enough. I probably could, actually. Marine layer, all lit up in that grey-orange light from the city. It’s patchy. Big black gaps in it, no stars. Easy to spot the contrails. They’re way too high to be lit by the city, but they must be catching some moonlight or something, because they’ve got a sorta whitish glow…”

“You ever considered becoming a writer?” Matt smiled.

“Don’t patronize me, Murdock.”

“I’m serious,” Matt said. “You clearly have an eye. Would need to work on your formality, though.”

Peter gave him a sheepish little laugh.

“I’ve been, uh,” he said, “getting into photography.”

“That does explain why you occasionally smell like a darkroom. Real film, huh? Very old-school.”

“Found a brand-new kit in a dumpster a few months back, and unfortunately it was super fun, so now I have to pay real money for the nonsense. It’s so much chemistry, you know? Really fun to fine-tune the timing and ratios and temperatures. Plus, it, uh…” Peter trailed off.

“Gives you something to look forward to?” Matt guessed.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Something like that. Gives me something to do with my hands that's not…”

Matt gave him a terse nod. No need for him to finish that sentence; he knew exactly what Peter meant.

Matt ordered toast, a steaming hot black coffee—perfect time of night for it—and Peter had his heart set on a pancake-egg-sausage combo the moment he’d learned they served an incredibly cheap breakfast all-hours.

“So,” Matt tried. “Tony Stark’s heir, huh?”

Peter’s fork slipped to screech through a sunny-side-up egg, spilling out yolk like arterial flow, then the utensils clattered atop the plate. He’d instantly gone white-hot with embarrassment.

“I should not have said that,” Peter muttered, tipping his head back, covering his eyes with both hands. “My big fucking mouth.”

Matt used the opening to sop up the yolk with the corner of his toast.

“Why? Some kind of secret?” Matt said. “You know I’d be good for it.”

“No, it’s just… I mean, I got no secrets of his left to keep,” Peter said. “Any connections we had died with… anyway, me and him… I guess we were just a bit complicated, that’s all.”

“How so?”

“I really was supposed to be the next Tony Stark. Entrusted with his legacy. An incredible legacy,” Peter said, nearly whined, like he’d rather be discussing anything else. “And not Stark Industry's, but his, Iron Man's. It was… I mean, I fucked it up either way, so it doesn’t really matter now, but at the time, it felt like a burden. Which is, obviously, an awful thing to feel.”

“I’m sure anyone would feel burdened,” Matt noted. “That’s quite a heavy load to put on a teenager’s shoulders.”

Peter snorted.

“What?”

“Damn if that doesn’t perfectly sum up our relationship,” Peter said.

Matt leaned back in the booth, crossed his arms.

“If I ask you to elaborate, I’m not going to like the answer, am I?”

“No, probably not,” Peter said, pitch gone a little high. “We sorta met through blackmail? He busted in on me one day, said I was helping him out with some Avengers gone AWOL or he was telling. I mean, thinking back, I really don’t believe he would’ve gone through with it, but at the time…”

“Must’ve been… Berlin, right? But you would’ve been…”

“Fresh outta middle school,” Peter said. “So even without that, we were never exactly on the same playing field. But he was very considerate of that when it mattered, I think. In his own way.”

Matt took a long pull from his coffee to swallow down what he’d like to say to that.

“I mean, it was for a good cause,” Peter added. “What he thought was a good cause, anyway. At the time, at least. His intentions were good, that’s my main point.”

“Good intentions are for reducing sentences, not dismissing charges,” Matt said through a dispassionate little frown.

“But even then, it felt good to do good, you know?” Peter said. “I was… still am… grateful for the opportunity, even if it wasn’t entirely optional.”

“It’s nice to feel needed,” Matt said.

“Exactly,” Peter said, cutting him off, the vinyl of the booth complaining under his weight as he slid slack. Far too grateful to pry a single concession out of Matt.

From the lowered vantage point, he seemed to notice the bit of yolk now staining Matt’s plate.

“Hey,” he huffed.

Matt cracked a grin, though it felt a little manic.

“It’s nice to feel needed, and that’s how I ended up a child soldier, is what I was going to say.”

Peter stiffened, sat back up straight.

“Okay, hold on, back up,” he said. “Ended up what?”

“I told you as much, didn’t I?” Matt said, tilting his head. “About the warring sect I was a part of as a boy.”

“Yeah, but I thought it was, you know, a rhetorical usage of ‘boy,’” Peter prattled. “Like a ‘in my youth’ meaning college kinda way. Not literal.”

Matt traced the lip of his mug with his finger with a dampened smile, reading nonsense patterns in the microscopic bubbles of the glaze. He figured he should be annoyed by the willful misunderstanding, but instead he found himself a little charmed. It must be nice to still live in a world where one doesn’t automatically assume the worst.

“No, quite literal,” Matt said. “I was a trained assassin before I took pre-algebra. I exceeded expectations at everything aside for that very last step; Stick never managed to make a killer out of me.”

“That’s—that’s awful, man,” Peter said. “Sorry, Stick?”

“Codename,” Matt said. “Possibly his real name? Never asked. Doubt he’d answer. Or, if he did, I’m sure I’d get something along the lines of, ‘the only name a warrior should concern himself with is his next target’s, Matty.’”

“Awful,” Peter said. “Again, that’s totally awful. But I’m, uh, I am not really getting the comparison. I was never asked to kill.”

“But you were asked to hurt, get hurt,” Matt said.

“Not to totally throw your words in your face,” Peter said, sounding perfectly pleased to be throwing Matt's words back in his face, “but I’m pretty damn good at taking hits, if it wasn't obvious.”

“Listen, I was a smart kid,” Matt tried. “I’m sure you were too. I knew what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like. Even got special little blind-specific lectures about how to spot signs of bad actors hoping to foster dependency.”

“But it didn’t help you.”

“No,” Matt said. “If anything, it… because I knew the rule so well, I was absolutely convinced I was the exception to it.”

“But that’s exactly what you and I are, right?” Peter said. “Exceptions. Who can defend ourselves. It doesn't make sense to ignore that.”

Matt knit his brow. He reached over, heavily choreographed, and loaded Peter’s last egg on a slice of his toast.

“Dude, what the hell,” Peter frowned.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Matt said coyly. “I thought you were an exception. That means it’s okay for me to try and take whatever I want from you, right? Because you’re good at defending yourself, the responsibility’s on you, not the adult in the situation, isn’t it?”

“Okay, you’re being totally childish,” Peter muttered. “But fine, point made.”

“Of course I’m childish,” Matt said. “I spent my actual childhood getting beat up by an old blind man, remember?”

“Come on! You already won, man,” Peter groaned. “No need to go below the belt.”

Matt slid the egg back on Peter’s plate with a loose smile.

“For what it's worth, I don't believe you 'fucked it up,'” Matt said. “Iron Man's legacy, I mean. You’re keeping it alive, keeping his city—your city—safe, best you can.”

“But I could always be better,” Peter said. “Could always do more. If I hadn’t…”

“Same goes for everyone. Let’s leave perfection to the angels,” Matt hummed. “You’re, uh, still hungry.”

“Hate how there wasn’t a question mark at the end of that,” Peter said. “But yeah, I could go another round.”

They did—this time Matt ordered a side of eggs of his own.

On their way back to Fogwell’s, Matt caught faint threads of a narrative on the hot, damp wind.

“Hey, I know we were planning on running through some kata today,” Matt said quietly, “but how’s a little field exercise sound instead?”

“Why, what’s up?”

“Massive heroin shipment on its way to the docks,” Matt said. “Fifty minute ETA. Couple different distributors en route. Not sure if the supplier is expecting all of them.”

“This neighborhood, man. Sounds messy as hell,” Peter said. “I’m in. Don’t have the suit on me, though. Meet you there?”

“Be quick,” Matt said, breaking into a light jog himself.

Behind him, Peter disappeared into an alley, scaled the façade, and launched himself high into the sky. He did manage to touch his gray-orange marine layer, Matt noted with a little grin. He heard the vapor gather into dampness atop his clothing and hair.

Matt was soon balanced atop the steel pipe of some scaffolding, awaiting his partner.

Strange thing to await as Daredevil. He tried not to think to hard about… how most of that persona's partnerships seem to end.

The sky above him was churning, weighed down under millions of tons of water displaced from the Gulf. Matt entertained himself by imagining the scent of sweet oranges from the South, isoprene from the dense forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains—unfortunately, the only compounds that actually possessed such an intense staying power were the byproducts from the oil refineries that squatted along the Texas coast.

The parties around the neighborhood had mostly wrapped up; only a few remained to spill out excess noise into the night. Matt mourned the silence, but it did give him a clearer picture of the scene below.

The cargo, nearly a hundred neatly-wrapped bricks, was still on the little fishing boat—its engines were long-cold, they'd ridden the night tides of the Hudson into the bay for a stealthy entrance—and a dozen or so heavily-armed men were maintaining a wide perimeter around the half-ruined dock.

It was one of many like it, a relic from a more optimistic time, fated never to see completion. The whole place was a graveyard of a construction site, tools and materials left in the places they were last laid when the money ran out, gathering dust and nefarious intent.

Much like the chop shop. Too expensive to sell, too worthless to invest in.

Story of half the damn Kitchen.

Ah, there he was, Matt noted, about three blocks to the northeast, cutting clean curvatures in the air between buildings, fast and light as a sparrowhawk. He was singing some manic little song under his breath: “walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…”

Matt heard him settling atop a neighboring roof, shuffling about uncertainly. 

“But at night it's a different world…”

Matt waited patiently to be spotted. It did not take all too long—Peter perked up, his pulse quickened.

With a grand running leap, he flung himself off of his roof, web singing through the air above Matt’s head.

“You’re a hard man to find, DD,” Peter said, scaling the last of the scaffold. He hung himself loosely off the pole, one hand and foot holding his weight, ankles crossed leisurely. 

“Wasn’t hiding,” Matt said. “We might have to work on your looking.”

“Cut me some slack. You didn’t tell me you were dressing down, man,” Peter said. “I was looking for the Halloween costume.”

“It’s hot,” Matt said plainly. Though he mostly just hadn't felt like going all the way back to his apartment; he kept the stolen habit and a black top at Fogwell's. And he didn’t think Peter had much ground to stand on regarding Halloween costumes.

“They’ll definitely have guns,” Peter chided. “Seems like an awfully nice night to be bulletproof.”

“I just won't get shot.”

“How does that work, anyway? Speed-wise. You’re not actually enhanced beyond your senses, are you?”

“Am I faster than the velocity of a bullet? No,” Matt said. “But I typically am a fair amount faster than the physiological tells that come just before someone decides to pull the trigger. I get a few milliseconds of early warning, that’s all.”

“See, I got this, uh, sense,” Peter said. “Very unspecific and sometimes unhelpful precognition thing that warns me of danger. You triggered it, actually, in this very vague kinda way.”

“That’s… gratifying,” Matt said. The men below them were milling about with a little more purpose now, Matt noticed. The staging was almost complete.

“It’s super inconsistent. And I think I assume too many spikes are false positives, because it’s always those you least expect, you know,” Peter mused. “They look like total pushovers until it’s, grah! Switchblade an inch in your gut. And they always got that same excited gleam in their eyes. Like they’ve been waiting their whole damn lives to stab someone. So you’re almost thinking, like, hey, at least one of us is happy?”

“Christ,” Matt muttered. He wasn't quite used to this much chatter before a fight, but he supposed he was the one who set this up.

He tilted his head, narrowed his focus to a needlepoint.

“Heads up,” he said. “They’re prepping to unload.”

“Right,” Peter said, peeking down. “You wanna… flank them?”

Matt gave him a quick nod, too focused on the delicate work of triangulating everyone’s final positions to vocalize a response.

Peter seemed to get the idea. He gave Matt a little salute and hopped up to swing silently through the void above the group’s heads, settling high on a wall opposite to Matt.

Matt stepped off of the scaffold. Few experiences gave him feelings purer than an uninterrupted fall through the night air, but the ground was quickly approaching, so he swung himself along the frame to slow his descent.

He landed softly behind tarp. Two men were nearby, salsa verde and American Spirit cigarettes; each were on high alert, watching each other’s blind spots.

Both would need to go down in rapid succession.

He hadn’t brought the batons, but a bin of scrap rebar left nearby should do the trick—Matt took a piece, spun the steel in his hand, committing its weight and balance to memory.

He burst through the tarp.

The rebar found the soft part of Verde’s zygomatic arch, stunning him, and his fist found the gut of Spirits. It doubled him over, but did not incapacitate him, Matt noted with dull anticipation.

Spirits landed a return blow to the side of Matt’s head that he wore with careful precision, riding the momentum. Spirits scrambled back for some distance, went for his sidearm.

Matt caught the arm and wrenched it towards him, jumped up slightly to slam a knee against his side; as he buckled, Matt's hands found the back of his head and the bone of his knee found his face. Matt heard the cartilage collapse into his sinuses, a flush of capillary spill. There went his blood pressure—he fell limp.

Verde had regained his bearings and reached for his weapon.

Without turning, Matt nabbed the rebar where it’d rolled behind him and flung it his way again; this time, it hit his temple dead-center.

Matt dove to catch his limp body before it toppled a pile of wooden planks, laying it quietly on the ground.

Peter had brought two men down himself, Matt registered semi-consciously—web to their mouths and hands, their weapons crumpled into themselves like high-speed wrecks.

Matt involuntarily let out a little huff of jealousy. The things he could do with that strength…

Not important right now.

He nicked two nicely-shaped pieces of rebar and tucked them into his belt, then held his breath to reassess. The background hum of the docks had done well enough to cover their tracks, it seemed. No one had alerted beyond their elevated baselines. Matt dipped back behind the tarp, took a low and quiet pace towards the next set of foes.

The next few were less attentive, able to be dispatched with much more grace, but far less excitement—heads slammed into concrete pillars and posts got three, a firm arm reaching from behind, pressed upon carotids for no longer than necessary got down another four.

Matt crouched behind a pallet of half-rotten two-by-fours. He was hardly a dozen yards from the little boat and the tightly-wrapped packets they'd begun to cart out of it, the densest cluster of guards and what sounded like the brightest lights. Stealth would not be much of an option from here on out, he quickly determined.

Peter seemed to have made a similar conclusion. He was a ways to Matt’s left, ducked low atop the raised arm of an abandoned excavator.

“P, do you copy?” Matt whispered to himself, then felt a little absurd—he knew Peter could listen in from afar, but could he listen from afar anywhere near as well as Matt?

“Copy,” came the quick and quiet reply.

Well, he’d give him near.

“In on my count.”

“Yessir,” Peter said.

“Three… two…”

The pair lanced their way in, Peter from above and Matt from below, rebar scraps at the ready. 

Peter dropped onto one's shoulders, letting his momentum knock him on his ass, then leapt off of him to find another target; Matt ducked between two men, letting them stumble and strike each other—this had them both off balance, but nowhere close to downed, so he readied the rebar…

Peter webbed a spot just behind one of them, then darted in a quick loop around the other, binding them up together in a tight and ineffective bundle.

Huh. Handy.

Not too much time to marvel—the heat and smoke of gunfire cut a loud streak through the night, scattering everyone.

“Hey, no need for all that,” Peter chirped, landing knee-first on the gunman’s back, then stomping on the weapon.

Matt huffed a laugh while knocking another upside the head with the rebar, splattering blood and lymph.

“The hell are you even doing here?” one muttered in disbelief, bracing himself before the payload.

“Didn’t you know? Wherever a spider is, I got eyes,” Peter grinned. “We’re always watching.”

He grabbed the thoroughly spooked man by his collar, flung him into the pile of his comrades, and webbed him there. Easy work, Matt noted. It would be efficient to have a way to incapacitate an enemy without beating them senseless, though that was the fun part.

“So, uh, what are we supposed to do with all this?” Peter said, kicking at the side of the pallet of heroin.

“You’re the chemist,” Matt said. “You tell me.”

“It's an organic compound, so we gotta denature it, I guess. Could use heat… well, that’s probably not ideal with heroin, actually, not unless we can get it crucible-hot… a very strong acid would do the trick.”

“Can't be too hard to find at a construction site,” Matt hummed.

His usual method involved the Hudson, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning.

Poor fish. Happy fish?

Notes:

do i sound too much like a bitter cap stan who never really got over ca:cw being iron man 4? bc thats exactly what i am tbqh

Chapter 19

Notes:

ok i lied theres more chatting. by all standards this bit should be cut but i like very small parts of it too much arghhhh. my darlings won't let me kill them! pacing's overrated anyway

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Things were going well.

ADA Galan had come through: they had a court date soon after. Matt probably should’ve trusted as much the moment he learned she was one of Foggy’s people. God, could he pick them.

The hearing had been blissfully brief.

The judge had been disgusted—near physical disgust, Matt noted with dull glee—that the prosecution was proceeding with such vague charges. They had yet to convincingly demonstrate just who exactly Molina was accused of stealing the previously stolen car from. As such, all charges would be dropped.

Not dismissed, which was to be expected. If the prosecution could gather meaningful evidence against Molina, they were welcome to present it at a later time, but the lack of proof or intent and the senseless attack upon his counsel was plenty mitigating for now.

Molina had been quite stoic the entire time, though he did crack a little at the end. Matt took his half-swallowed sniffle as a sign to offer the man a side hug, which he accepted.

“Free legal advice,” Matt had whispered in his ear. “This is an excellent opportunity to find yourself a new side hustle.”

Molina had stiffened against him, slowly pulled back, gave Matt’s shoulder an appreciative tap.

“Sure, yeah,” Molina had muttered through a strained little grin. “Yeah, probably.”

Celebrations were in order, Foggy had insisted. Yes, the chop shop was still operating, and yes, they were probably still going to profit from the Mercedes and the murder of its owner. But one segment of their scheme had been unraveled and a more or less innocent life had been spared, so it was important to celebrate the small victories.

Josie's was a comforting place. Probably a bit sad, how comforting it was.

Matt actually knew what it looked like.

It was one of a few places he could say such a thing about: the bar, the ring, and the church, as his childhood apartment complex had since been a victim of gentrification (or perhaps the Battle of New York—he hadn’t paid too much attention until he noticed it was gone). Matt had recounted the fact fondly to Foggy one night, and Foggy was forced to very tactfully let him know exactly how sad that was.

The tobacco lingered deep in the walls, still rolling strong decades after indoor smoking had been banned, the same smell that'd been there when he could still see the yellowish stains that seeped through the paint.

Josie’s—well, it wasn’t quite Josie’s back then—was still a shithole in its younger days, but a shithole with a high reputation: it served as a kind of town hall, a place for doing business. As the time, Matt thought of it as a sort of smellier, noisier bank, because Jack walked into it with a nice shirt on and out with neat little bundles of cash. 

Jack would always give his kid a few bucks and instruct him to sit at the bar, right by the door and windows (just in case, he always said, but never quite clarified in case of what), while he disappeared into the darkened rooms upstairs to meet with the businessmen.

Even at the time, age seven or eight, Matt understood such businessmen were loan sharks, racketeers, gangsters of every variety.

But dad wasn’t a bad person, so the loan sharks he did his business with couldn’t be too bad, either.

“What can I get you?” the bartender always asked. She was amused, but never quite surprised, by a child's presence at her bar. Matt doubted he was the only kid in Hell's Kitchen to be taken along to the 'bank' on weekend mornings.

“Shirley Temple,” Matt always said. “On the rocks.”

“Think I need to see some ID,” the bartender said, sliding over the bright pink drink.

Matt had heard this joke before and came over-prepared for it one time—he’d drawn himself a driver’s license with his nice markers, put his age down as “ADULT.” Even taken the subway by himself all the way to the library to get it laminated.

He slid it across the damp counter. The bartender picked it up, patently unamused.

“Alright, smartass,” she said, tossing the scribbled little card back. “But if you’re an adult now, you gotta drink like one.”

She pulled his Shirley Temple back under the bar, filled a shot glass up with a bit of bottom-shelf, half-diluted vodka and a sad little olive on a toothpick, and put that back in its place.

“What’s that?” Matt said, eyeing the tiny glass with a bit of venom.

“Martini,” she said. “A grown man like you should have no issue.”

It was already a bad idea to challenge Matt Murdock's pride back before he broke five feet. Without breaking eye contact, Matt swallowed the whole thing down, then took the olive like a pill. He kept a straight face for a whole five seconds before collapsing into a little cough.

The bartender paled. That wasn’t how this lesson was supposed to go.

“What th—listen, kid,” she said, leaning in, “you cannot tell your dad I gave you that.”

Matt recovered from his fit, composed himself, and used the toothpick as a bit of decoration for a terribly smug grin.

“That could be arranged,” he said, tenting his little hands under his chin. “But I’d need two cherries in my Shirleys.”

“Deal,” the bartender said. She tossed another maraschino in the drink, handed it back over.

“No, no, you’re not getting it,” Matt chided, stirring it in with his straw. “Two cherries in all my Shirleys. From now til forever. And ever.”

“Fine,” she conceded.

“I want it in writing, ma’am,” Matt said. “It’s important to get these kinds of things in writing.”

She scribbled a contract on a scrap of receipt paper. It took a few sets of revisions before Matt was pleased with the language.

“You’re gonna run this town one day, little Murdock,” the bartender hummed, wedging the finalized slip between a gap in the paneling for all to see with all the other little exceptions.

“Damn straight,” Matt said, admiring his work.

“Matty, the hell I say about swearing?” Jack barked, rounding down the stairs like a roll of thunder. He must’ve finished up his business.

“Sorry, daddy,” Matt said.

“He give you any grief?” Jack asked the bartender.

“Always,” the bartender sighed.

“That's my boy.”

And after all that effort, the Shirley Temple Declaration was only honored a handful of times, Matt recalled dully.

Not too much long later, Battlin’ Jack would decide he'd rather get his loans from a real bank, and that was one of the last decisions he ever made. Matt wondered if the receipt was still back there somewhere, tacked to the same filthy wall, ink long faded; they really hadn't changed… or cleaned… all that much when ownership turned over.

Too bad he'd long since lost the taste for drinks that sweet.

“Heard through the grapevine that you have a new little friend, Matt,” Karen said, voice gone saccharine with good humor and liquor, cutting him clean from his cherry-flavored recollection.

Matt shot a glare in the grapevine’s general direction that Foggy parried with a sheepish little shrug.

Technically, Karen was here to take statements from Nelson and Murdock regarding the Molina case and its alleged connections with the recent uptick in auto theft, slowly working towards building a story against the chop shop (one that wasn't entirely based on unsourced accounts from vigilantes, anyway). There was no firm rule that stated such statements couldn’t be made at a bar.

“Really? You told the reporter?” Matt said into his whiskey.

“Hey, it’s public knowledge at this point,” Foggy said. “Wasn't too much left for me to tell. They got pictures in the paper, brother. You and the mini-me busting up that heroin drop the other night!”

“They’ve got what?”

“Very cute pictures, too,” Karen said. “Nice ones. I swear, you can see his admiration of you through the mask. God only knows how you charmed such an innocent thing.”

Matt tilted his head. He didn’t recall hearing any other people lurking around the dock that night…

Oh, come on, Peter. Really?

“Now, I don’t appreciate the insinuation, Ms. Page,” Matt said. “I don’t need to stoop to tricks to charm.”

“Yeah, we know, harlot,” Foggy huffed.

Matt and Karen choked through simultaneous swallows of their drinks.

“Anyway, I just think it’s nice that you’re not out there alone for a change,” Karen said. “And his heart seems to be pretty firmly in the right place, so I already like him better than… you know…”

“Does Karen get to meet him?” Foggy said. “Whichever him he’d be most comfortable being, of course. Spider-Man or otherwise.”

“He’s working his own neighborhood tonight,” Matt hummed. “But I suppose I can inquire on your behalf, Karen.”

“Oh, I’d love to get a first-hand account of the bust,” Karen said. “Too bad Daredevil never talks to the press.”

“Because he’s smart,” Matt said.

“Because he’s a total asshole,” Foggy corrected.

All three drank entirely too much, and staggered back to Matt's for a nightcap. Funny how he'd signed the lease thinking it would be a little sanctuary of solitude, but it was now quite the social hub. Must be what happens when your only friends decide to get real jobs and move uptown but hate all the bars there.

Giggling, Karen snatched Daredevil’s burner from the little dish on the console he sometimes chucked it in the moment she crossed the threshold. Bad practice, Matt noted. Foggy nabbed Matt's arms and held him back in a laughably weak grip, but he was in a good enough mood—and thoroughly intoxicated—to play along tonight.

“So,” Karen asked, furiously tapping buttons, “what’s Spider-Man under?”

“Check the recents,” Foggy suggested.

“Ah. Must be, uh, P for Pider,” Karen said, nodding sternly. “That makes… total sense.”

Foggy laughed by Matt’s ear.

She hit dial, put the phone on speaker.

“Matt? Everything okay?” Peter’s tinny voice said.

“Oh, he’s fine,” Karen said. “Hello, Spider-Man. This is his, uh, dearest, most favorite friend. Who would so love to interview you.”

“Pe—kid, you can hang up,” Matt called. “I’d strongly advise you to hang up.”

“Hi, Matt. Are you guys drunk?” Peter asked.

“No,” Matt said.

“Yes,” Foggy said.

“Oh, hey, Foggy,” Peter said. “Should I hang up?”

“Why are you asking him?” Matt frowned. “You don’t trust me?”

“Wow, you are drunk,” Peter noted. “I’m getting interviewed?”

“Yes. This is Karen Page with the New York Bulletin,” Karen said, though her well-practiced introduction did come out a bit… slurred. “I’d love to hear how the other night at the docks went down in your words, Spider-Man.”

“Speaking of the other night,” Matt said. “Who exactly took those pictures, Spider-Man?”

The line went quiet. Well, quiet aside from great gusts of wind, little flickers of indeterminate city noise—was Peter on top of some building?

“Shit,” Peter said. “They told me those wouldn’t get published until next week. I was so gonna tell you, I promise.”

Karen let out a little gasp of amused disbelief as she put two and two together.

“Your new little friend is a freelancer for the Bugle?”

“Qué escándalo,” Foggy exclaimed.

“The Bugle? Jesus,” Matt sighed.

“Listen, man, it’s a living,” Peter said. “I mean, it’s not, but, uh… it’s definitely an amount of cash.”

“You should speak our licensing department,” Karen offered. “Bet we’d pay you at least marginally better.”

“Oh, I’d… I might like that, actually,” Peter said.

“Hrm,” Matt said.

“Are you mad, Matt?” Peter said, sheepish.

“No.”

“Not mad, just disappointed?” Peter tried. “You look pretty fucking badass in them, in case that helps.”

“No,” Matt said. “More like… slightly annoyed.”

“Oh, start running now, kiddo,” Foggy said. “A slightly annoyed Matt is the most dangerous thing on two legs. He’ll use his ninja powers to very, very subtly make your life hell. Speaking from experience.”

“I don’t have ninja powers,” Matt muttered.

“Okay,” came over the line, measured and perhaps a bit done with the trio of drunkards. “So, uh… no interview? Can I hang up yet?”

“Where are you, anyway?” Matt said.

“Up top of Brooklyn Bridge,” Peter said. “Don’t ask, not really worth telling. Involved pigeons. Wouldn't mind giving a statement to the press about the heroin bust, though.”

Matt shrugged Foggy off and snatched the phone from Karen in one smooth motion.

“Absolutely not. Good night,” he said.

He ended the call. Peter’s last words were crudely cut off.

“Hey,” Karen huffed. She went to retrieve the phone, but overshot and tipped over. Matt caught her, her head on his shoulder.

“Ninja powers,” Foggy whispered grimly. He joined Karen at Matt's other shoulder with slightly more grace.

“If you really want to talk, I'll arrange a real meeting,” Matt said, giving both of their soft heads of hair clumsy pats. “When all parties are in complete possession of their, um, faciliti… faculties.”

“We can do brunch,” Foggy said, much in the way one says ‘we should make a pilgrimage.’

They did not do brunch, to Foggy’s continued dismay. All parties were far too hung over for such grand plans. The next morning, Matt shot Peter a text, asking if he really would be willing to be interviewed, that Karen had stayed the night and was hanging around for breakfast—he got back a ‘sure, be there soon.’

He was, exceptionally so—Spider-suitless and bearing a box of coffee. Matt was surprised by both aspects. He was pretty laissez-faire with that identity of his, wasn’t he?

“Oh, Jesus, now we got the unemployed teenager buying us things,” Foggy said, nursing a Pedialyte, because Matt was far too picky to keep real sports drinks around. “How far have we fallen?”

“Get over yourself,” Peter said. “It was like five bucks. I was just raised never to go over to someone’s place empty-handed.”

“So polite,” Foggy mused. “And yet… so rude. What a fascinating paradox.”

“Allow me to introduce the incomparable Karen Page,” Matt said, taking the box off his hands and gathering mugs. Perfectly generic American drip, Matt noted. Definitely had worse. Definitely had better.

Karen reached out a hand.

“Nice to meet you, uh…?”

“Parker,” Peter said, shaking it. “Peter Parker.”

Karen blinked at that.

“Wow, that was, uh, way easier than Matt,” she noted flatly. “Nice to properly meet you, Peter Parker.”

Foggy and Matt got a bit of actual Nelson and Murdock business done at the couch while Karen got the notepad out at the bar in the kitchen, expertly guiding Peter through a rather colorful account of the events at the dock.

Foggy was soon forced to excuse himself.

“Some of us have careers, unfortunately,” he said in the tone typically associated with a pallbearer. “Thanks for the coffee, kiddo.”

“Course,” Peter chirped.

Karen, apparently satisfied with Peter's account, clicked her pen closed, pulled the elastic over her notepad.

Matt hovered in the kitchen, cleaning dishes that were already fairly sterile. While he knew this had been a perfectly voluntary exercise, he felt mildly responsible for any additional secrets Karen might manage to get out of Peter.

“Now, off the record,” Karen said. “Purely personal interest. Why come here as Peter Parker?”

“Matt trusts you,” Peter said. “He trusts Foggy, I told Foggy.”

“Foggy is a lawyer, trained in discretion. I have very different obligations as a reporter. Plus, Matt saved my life,” Karen said. “On several different occasions, by my count. I don’t have any such debts with you.”

“I really don't think you'd tell. But, you know, Peter Parker also has a lot less to lose than Matt Murdock,” Peter tried. “No career. No more family, no more friends.”

“No more,” Karen said. Her voice still had that careful cover of compassion, but Matt heard her heart go vaguely vulpine, eager to bite on to a lead. “Would you mind telling me what you mean by that?”

“Well,” Peter said weakly, “To be fair, Parkers were in pretty short supply before I even started. I saw the last of them out recently.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Peter,” Karen said. “What about your friends?”

“They’re too dangerous to have,” Peter said. “I’m sure Matt gets it. You said he had to save your life, right?”

Matt opened his mouth to correct him, but Karen was on it faster.

“It’s not like I unwittingly stumbled into danger just because I’m Daredevil’s girl,” Karen said. “I was only in danger because of my own choices. Choices I made because I knew the risks. I'd be… unhappy if Matt tried to cut me off for that reason, to put it lightly.”

Shit, don’t I know it, Matt thought, grimacing to himself over the sink.

“We just got different lived experiences, then,” Peter said. “I put my friends in danger, so I had to cut them off, simple as that.”

Matt heard the back of Peter’s throat tighten, a sound he now recognized as a pre-flight tell, and decided it was time to intervene.

“And how’d that go over?” he asked, setting the last of the dried plates aside. “They take it well?”

“They are perfectly peachy without me,” Peter intoned.

Matt frowned.

Not quite a lie, he noted, but far, far the whole truth. But perhaps more alarming was the misery that flushed through Peter’s system like rainwater flooding the subway: all at once, nowhere for it to go.

“Karen,” Matt said, and the delicacy of his tone conveyed the rest of the statement.

“I should probably get going, get this properly written up. Peter, I…” Karen began.

“I’m not mad, if you’re, uh, sorry,” Peter muttered. “All good.”

“No,” Karen said. “I wanted to thank you, actually. For your willingness to talk to me at all. I'm sure it took a bit of bravery. I thought it was important to acknowledge that.”

Peter gave her a noncommittal little nod, and she gathered up her bag and departed.

The two remaining sat alone for a quiet moment.

“Are you gonna yell at me?” Peter eventually asked, sounding far younger than his seventeen years.

“The Hell for?” Matt said, working a hand over what was left of the bruising on his face.

“Being mean to your friend,” Peter said.

“Mean? Karen can handle herself, Pete,” Matt said lightly. “She handled the Kingpin, for God’s sake. Doubt you could put a dent in that armor of hers if you tried. I’m just… a little concerned. About the things you said.”

“About me being a loner,” Peter said. “But I think I’m allowed to be a loner. Kind of a standard thing to be as a seventeen year old. Or a vigilante. Definitely normal if you’re both. Would be weirder if I wasn’t, right?”

“Maybe,” Matt said, “but it’s obvious you don’t want to be. That’s the concerning part.”

“You’re not getting a different answer outta me, man,” Peter said. “I told Karen the truth, the whole truth. I was putting my friends in danger, so I cut them off. End of story.”

Matt rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“But only one side of the story,” Matt said. “Did the friends in question have any say in the matter?”

“That’s what you’re not getting, Matt,” Peter said, voice throwing off sparks of frustration. “There is no other side to the story. Peter Parker doesn’t exist for them anymore.”

“You’re being literal,” Matt said, frowning, as that made absolutely no sense.

“Very,” Peter said. “Involved universe-bending magic, erased me from their lives. When I say cut, I mean… katana-clean. Severed. Done. They don't have say in the matter, because I took that from them.”

Matt had nothing to say to that. Funny how often Peter had that effect on him. He was typically so good at having something to say.

“Did they know?” he asked, rounding the bar to sit by his side.

“Yep,” Peter said. “Right up until the moment they didn’t. They left thinking I would fix it, fix them.”

“They’re waiting on you.”

“The ones waiting on me don’t exist anymore,” Peter said. “I killed them.”

So resurrect them, Matt wanted to say. Beat the memory back into them. If they were worth disappearing for, they must be worth reappearing for. Worked with Elektra, more or less. But he suspected Peter hardly wanted to hear such things.

“I, uh, told Karen voluntarily, you know,” he tried instead. “Foggy was a cruel little twist of fate, but Karen was a choice.”

“Good for you, man,” Peter huffed.

“I’m not bragging,” Matt said. “I’m trying to say…”

What was he trying to say? He wasn’t quite sure himself.

“Sometimes, in this line of work, you're forced to assume a little risk,” he shrugged.

Notes:

ngl i almost forgot to post today. one long weekend and i immediately forget what day it is

Chapter 20

Notes:

the rain's been building since chap 4 and its finally here hehe

recommended listening is piazza, new york catcher by belle and sebastian for silly reasons that'll become obvious shortly. and i think it's just nice music to read to
i feel like belle and sebastian in general is a good fit for this pete... esp get me away from here, i'm dying. perfect peter parker song to me. if you want a frame of reference for where i'm coming from with his characterization it's a solid place to start. maybe with a bit of bug - fontaines d.c. on top for a little more of that teen angst edge

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Matt was alone with his thoughts—first time he had been in a while—when it happened. It was around eleven at night, and he was laid out on his couch, bottle of nearly-flat beer hanging off his lip, wondering if he should try and call it early before he passed out here, still in his belt and tie.

Early for him, anyway.

What was left of the beer’s carbonation sounded like light rain as he spun it in the bottle. The real thing had been building overhead all night; Matt was very certain the skies would split open before the sun rose.

He’d been so busy lately. That, on its own, was not unusual. As a criminal defense attorney (and-slash-or vigilante), one goes into the dog days of summer expecting to work like a dog. It’s a well-established fact: crime rates go up with the heat. Simple physiology. Hot weather intensifies irritability, saps impulse control.

Of course, there was a more frustrating reason, too. Every year, there were crime waves from June to August—the months that kids were out of school. Meant they had no structure, sure, a Hell of a lot less supervision, but more damning was the lack of free lunches. A hungry kid makes bad decisions. Life-changing decisions. Life-ending, even.

Matt worked with a few organizations that tried to fill those gaps. Felt about as effective as cleaning the trash out of the Hudson with a kitchen colander.

Idle hands, the Devil’s work… he really might hate the summer, Matt thought.

Baseball was one of its few redeeming features. He was halfheartedly listening to the Mets broadcast off someone else’s AM radio—they were playing a West Coast team under a sun that had recently set, so they’d barely started, and yet they were already trailing behind. Impressive.

How had Peter put it? A miraculous ability to choke.

Being busy with Peter—that was the unusual part about this summer.

He was already idly knitting together schemes to reunite the kid with his… magicked friends. He could admit to himself that such things were well outside of his wheelhouse, and, sure, such an action would be a fairly wide step outside of his nebulous role of ‘friend-not-mentor.’ But he couldn’t just leave Peter like that, all alone, ties all severed. He’d just dragged himself out of that particular Hell; it’d only be right to throw a rope behind him, wouldn’t it?

“Nuns must’ve loved you,” Frank had once hissed at him between enemy engagements, one bloody night or another.

He hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but he didn't really mean it as an insult, either. Frank was always frustrating that way—just one layer more nuanced than the Punisher had any damn right being. Sometimes Matt thought Frank was a little fonder of Matt's bleeding heart than he was himself. Not that the bar was high. Stupid thing left stains everywhere.

Maybe Peter was the one being brave here, making the choice Matt couldn’t. Maybe some ties were better left cut.

“Kindest thing you can do for a wounded animal is crush it quick,” Stick once advised. “You're a kind boy, aren'tcha, Matty?”

Matt took a long pull of his beer to swallow that memory down.

His phone rang, announcing a blocked number.

His—Matt Murdock's. Far too late for that, he thought, grabbing it with some dread.

“Murdock,” he answered.

“Hello again, Mr. Murdock,” came Wes's all-too familiar voice.

Matt set the beer aside.

“Would love to greet you properly,” Matt said, “but I never got a name.”

“And I’m sure you can understand why it’ll stay that way, yeah? I got a mutual friend here with me. Say hello, Ross.”

A distant ‘fuck you’ caught the fringes of the line. Molina, unquestionably Molina. The correct modulation for a voice from a mouth, not a speaker. Wes had Molina, Matt recognized with dull rage.

“Mr. Molina’s completely unharmed, by the way,” Wes said. “A little freaked out, sure; ideally that’s as bad as he’s gonna get, but how that plays out is up to you.”

“Get to your demands,” Matt said. He said that a lot these days, didn’t he?

“Always so impatient, Counselor. Let’s keep it brief, then,” Wes said. “There’s a taxi headed to your apartment. Go downstairs and wait for it, then sit politely until your ride is done. Be sure to thank your driver, but keep all other conversation brief, capishe? Then you and Molina can have a little attorney-client reunion. That all sound doable?”

“I have an after-hours call soon,” Matt tried, “with a client who might get suspicious if I miss it without notice. May I dial him first, keep him from alerting anyone?”

“Sheesh, the hours you lawyers pull. You got a landline?”

“Yeah,” Matt said.

“Call him on that, put him on speaker,” Wes said.

Damn. Clever.

Matt prayed Peter was decent at this sort of thing as he keyed in his number.

“Hello, Mr. Piazza,” Matt said as soon as the call connected, “this is your attorney, Matt Murdock, speaking.”

“Huh?” Peter said, and Matt’s confidence levels immediately halved. “Hey, uh… hi, Mr. Murdock?”

“Listen, I’m going to have to reschedule our upcoming call. Your case is important to me, but a conflict I can’t get out of has come up. I’m very sorry for the late notice.”

“Uh, yeah, no worries,” Peter said. There was a high-pitched streak of nervousness in his voice that could probably pass for someone in dire legal straits. “Some kind of… problem with that, uh, newest case of yours, Mr. Murdock?”

“Well, Mr. Piazza,” Matt said, “you know I can hardly tell you such details. But I apologize for the inconvenience. I know your work schedule can be hectic, but I’ll do my best to accommodate you as soon as possible.”

Peter paused. “Should, I, uh… check in with Mr. Nelson, maybe the P.I., see if they’re free instead?”

That’s it, Peter, Matt thought, almost willed.

“Sorry, Mr. Piazza, but they wouldn’t be much help. Neither have been briefed on this case. Just you and me on this one.”

“That’s alright… well, it’s fine if we reschedule. Is there anything else I should be doing between now and our next call, Mr. Murdock?”

Look at him, getting into the rhythm of it.

“Get some sleep,” Matt offered. “Or, well, sorry, you work a night shift, don’t you? My bad. Wash up and head to work, I suppose. I’ll be in touch shortly.”

“Course,” Peter said. “Thanks for the heads-up. See you soon.”

Matt set the phone back in its receiver.

“Happy?” he asked Wes.

“We’ll all be happier once everyone's here with us, Mr. Murdock,” Wes said. Cold, but not infuriated. Good. “Go catch your taxi. Keep us on speaker. We’ll make sure your journey is safe and quiet.”

It took all of Matt’s efforts to keep from introducing his cellphone to the hard brick of his wall, but he was able to slip it gently into his breast pocket instead. He raked both hands roughly through his hair to keep them occupied.

It was going to be another long night, wasn’t it?

Microdroplets of drizzle were suspended in the hot night air when Matt left the apartment, whipped into millions of minute gyres by the faintest triggers of motion.

He heard dense sheets of proper rain not too far off, probably half a mile west, arriving in ten or fifteen minutes. Lightning, too, if the heady curl of ozone at the back of his tongue was any indication.

“Hey, pal, you call a taxi? Matthew?”

“Something like that,” Matt hummed, folding up his cane with restless hands.

It’d been a while since Matt had been in the chop shop.

There were a few changes, some more obvious than others—the leisurely watchmen had been bolstered with what appeared to be a small paramilitary troop, two dozen or so unfamiliar scents and healthy pulses wrapped in Kevlar, radio chatter, and gunpowder. Not just standard-issue jarheads, either—a few hand-to-hand specialists in there, too, if Matt was reading their muscle distribution correctly.

Guess it took only two run-ins with vigilantes for Wes to get smart about just who he was up against. Great.

It was pissing rain when Matt arrived, but the new security insisted on a pat-down before he crossed the threshold, leaving Matt soaked down to his underclothes. The cane was taken away from him, replaced by a rough hand at the scruff of his neck and barked orders.

Inside, Matt was greeted by Wes, who tutted his tongue at the sight of him.

“Hey, let’s be nicer to our guest, yeah? He’s a human. No need to drag him around like a dog,” Wes said. The guard pursed her lips, but her grip slipped from Matt’s neck to his upper arm without protest.

“Besides, the counselor's going to be nice and cooperative, isn't he?”

“Yes, if you bring me to Molina,” Matt said. “I need to confirm he’s alive and well before I do anything else.”

“S’alright. We’re very hospitable here,” Wes said. “Our boys can chat for a bit. Bring him up to the office when he’s done.”

The old guard took over here, the more amateurish men Matt remembered from that first night, and the stiff-backed reinforcement resumed her post outside. He was led by both arms to a small room. Its one window was busted, letting in little windblown flushes of rain, percussive patter, and plenty of hot, heavy humidity coiling around their ankles.

It seemed to be a break room of sorts, empty except for a poorly maintained kitchenette and a table and chairs. Ammonia rolled up off of the half-rotten bits of food stuck in the sink’s piping. Matt felt the hum of a thirty-year-old fridge resonate inside the flesh of his teeth. Molina was there, eyes closed, reclined flat over one of the chairs.

Matt was thrown down upon its neighbor with a little too much force, nearly enough to tip him over, then the two were left alone, the door slamming shut behind his escorts.

“Murdock!” Molina said, sitting to attention.

“Mr. Molina. They hurt you?” Matt asked, reaching out an arm. Molina took it, gave his hand a firm squeeze between his own.

“Hell, who gives a damn about me, how are you?” Molina said.

“Fine,” Matt said. “I’m fine. How’d they get to you?”

“Some plain-clothes knocked on my door, said I had to come out, answer a few more questions,” Molina said. “Thought it was something routine, so I wasn’t really paying attention. Guess I should’ve demanded my lawyer, huh? Soon as I realize something’s off, it’s too late. I’m being shoved in a black Suburban, brought here. You got any idea what the hell is going on?”

“Nothing good,” Matt said. “But I’m going to keep you safe, one way or another. I promise.”

“Sure,” Molina said, in that usual way of his, the one that hardly sounded sure.

“Mr. Molina, are you a praying man?”

“Not since grade school,” Molina replied.

“Well, I am,” Matt said, laying a hand over his heart. “Is it alright if I take a moment to pray for us?”

“Sure,” Molina said, this one a shade of unenthused.

Matt crossed two of the fingers he had splayed out on his chest.

“Oh,” Molina said, heart skipping a beat as he parsed the meaning of the sign. “Uh, please… please do.”

Matt clasped his hands and leaned over the table, carefully wading out into the depths of the seething waves of his perception, seeking the strange heartbeat that was nearly as familiar as his own these days…

Ah, there he was.

“Peter, please tell me you can hear me,” Matt whispered, grateful he'd had the chance to test this sort of thing the other night.

“Loud and clear, DD.” Peter’s voice rung out quick and heavy with concern. He was crouched on a rooftop overlook about 700 yards westward. The sound of rain atop his suited silhouette traced his shape in pristine detail.

“Heads up, fresh cavalry on the payroll since our last visit. Military-grade. Think these ones actually know how to fight,” Matt whispered. “Before you come in, you should get the cops involved. We have an opportunity here to blow this whole thing open, but it won’t matter much if the evidence doesn’t have a legitimate chain of custody.”

“Should I call them in before I come round?”

“Something like that,” Matt said, and then his shoulder was yanked backwards, nearly pulling him and the chair over.

“Who the hell are you talking to?” the guard spat, his forearm pressed hard against Matt’s neck. “You got a fucking wire on?”

The back feet of the chair screeched like a struck animal against the linoleum. With his focus narrowed across the street, Matt hadn’t noticed the man reenter until it was too late, and now his feet were dangling in the air for his negligence.

“Hey, he’s just…” Molina tried.

“I’m—I’m praying,” Matt breathed, gripping the man’s arm for balance. “That a crime? I’m alone in a strange place, held against my will. Is it alright with you if I ask the Lord for a little serenity, shithead?”

“Y’know, he’s probably telling the truth,” his partner offered. “My nonna sees him at church a lot. And has to call me up and tell me about it every goddamn time. 'Look, men your age still take confession.'”

The arm withdrew, and Matt’s chair slammed back down on all four legs with a bang.

God, this was a small town, he thought.

“And I’m going to pray for her, too,” Matt said. “That her grandson may one day see the light of salvation.”

He got a blow across the back of his head for that, which he wore without complaint, because, well, yeah, he deserved it, though it did upset Molina a bit.

“Don’t forget. You’re here to talk to the boss. The one on Earth. He’s a very patient man, but I really wouldn’t recommend trying to test his limits,” the guard said. “I’ll give you ‘bout thirty more seconds to consult with your Lord and Savior, Counselor.”

“Well, might be with the Virgin,” the other suggested. “Catholics love the Virgin.”

“Shut the hell up, man.”

“Thank you,” Matt said, and he settled back to bow his head.

“Pete, let me talk to Wes for a bit,” he whispered into his hands. “Think whatever he wants from me might be important. And, hey, if you can find the fuse box… sounds like… northeastern corner of the basement… and knock out the power, I’ll join you. Would really love to join you.”

“Copy,” Peter said.

Matt sat up straight.

“Amen,” he intoned, then crossed himself. “Mr. Molina, we’ll meet again soon.”

“Sure,” Molina said, giving his shoulder a cautious pat. “Shit, uh, good luck, Mr. Murdock. Counting on you.”

Just a little lighthearted joke to cheer up the Mater Dolorosa, Matt winced to himself, running his tongue over his teeth. He’d throw a few Hail Marys her way as recompense later.

And then he was being dragged to his feet again, through the door, down a long, echoing hallway and up some thin metal stairs. Matt missed his cane. He was getting awfully tired of getting other people’s skin all over his clothes.

Matt was nearly thrown through the door, where Wes awaited him behind his desk. In such a contained space, one fully inundated with his scent, Matt noticed a new detail about the man—he’d quit smoking, probably around a year or so back. The tar staining his lungs was infinitesimally faint but unmistakable. Seemed he'd replaced the habit with little bags of snacks that filled most of the trash bin under his desk.

“Hey, stranger,” Wes said, standing, sauntering over to Matt. “How’s our pal Ross doing?”

“Fine,” Matt said. “Aside from the obvious.”

“See? I’m a man of my word,” Wes smiled. He took Matt’s hand, guided it to the back of a chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, won’t you, Counselor?”

Silently, he waved off the guards that’d escorted him up. Matt hummed an assent and settled down.

“What’s this about?” Matt said. “If you’re going to give my murder another go, that could’ve been done at home, saved me the trip in the rain and you the cash for the cab.”

“No, nothing of the sort, Counselor,” Wes said. He didn’t settle to sit himself—instead, he leaned himself against the desk, right at Matt’s side, peering down at him with almost tactile attention. “Hey, between you and me, I’m really hoping you walk away from this.”

“Suggests there are scenarios where I don’t,” Matt noted.

“Nature of the beast,” Wes said, almost sheepish.

Matt leaned back in the chair, hooked an arm over the backrest, crossed a leg. He flicked his eyes in Wes’s direction, up through his glasses.

“I assume you’re aware of the circumstances regarding Molina’s charges being dropped,” he said.

“Yep,” Wes said. “Congrats, I guess.”

“I figured you’d, uh, be pleased with the way it went,” Matt tried. “The emergency hearing meant very little evidence went in on the official record. That was the idea, right? Subtlety?”

“Something like that,” Wes said, scratching his chin. “Would've liked him serving a little time, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

“In that case, nothing else connects us,” Matt said. “What could you possibly need from me?”

Wes bounced a leg.

“It’s pretty simple. Good people are hard to find,” he said, “and I think you’re good people, Mr. Murdock. I’m a big enough man to admit it outright: I want you on my side. This is a recruitment. Saw how quick and clever you worked for Molina. Wouldn’t mind a bit of that myself.”

“Recruitments don’t typically involve hostages.”

“Well, see here I thought you’d be clever enough to pick up on the scheme by now, Mr. Murdock,” Wes said. “This is hardly about Molina. Molina was just the invitation. The RSVP, if you will. This is about you and me.”

“I’m not on the side of criminals,” Matt said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Counselor,” Wes laughed. “Being on the side of criminals is quite literally your job description.”

“Criminals by necessity, criminals by false accusation,” Matt said. “Not criminals by seemingly gleeful choice.”

“Now, don’t misrepresent me. Nothing gleeful about it,” Wes said, “besides the very natural pleasures of a job well done. I’m making a living for me and my people, that’s all.”

“All people are my people,” Matt said through a blithe smile. “I don’t do things at the expense of others.”

“Very Christian of you,” Wes said. “I’m not saying I was innocent, Counselor. Never claimed that. I’m saying I live by the Golden Rule. Nothing I did that wasn’t done to me first.”

Really? That was the full scope his motivation? Nothing grander than a I-got-screwed, now-I'll-screw? Matt didn't exactly think highly of the man, but he was almost disappointed. 

“You killed that businessman up in Albany,” Matt said. “The real owner of the car my client was dragged out of. What did he do to you, hm?”

“Hm? Did I? Well, damn, first I’m hearing about it,” Wes said. His voice remained cool and wry, but his heart rate had elevated. “Can you prove it in a court of law?”

“I can prove plenty, Mr. Weston Smith,” Matt said.

Wes didn’t like that, didn’t like hearing his full name from the mouth of a man who had no business knowing it. The sound of it ran through him like a jolt of electricity, and his easygoing rhythm completely evaporated.

But he didn’t lash out, either. That put Matt on edge. Restraint was a dangerous thing for a man like this to have.

Instead, he reached out and took off Matt’s glasses, careful as a neurosurgeon, and set them on the desk at his side. Matt felt like he’d been doused in ice water, laid bare like this.

“Guess we know each other well, then, Matthew Murdock,” he said. “That’s, uh, that can be good. Knowledge is the basis of understanding.”

“Enlighten me,” Matt said. “What exactly do you think you know about me?”

“I’ll put it plainer: I suspect you’re an extraordinary man, Mr. Murdock. I’ve always liked to think of myself as extraordinary, too. All I’m saying, all I’m offering—I know that ordinary rules can be grating to an extraordinary man. I thought you might like a place to be yourself, where you can be understood.”

Ah, he had nothing. Nothing at all. How disappointing. 

“I will never understand men like you, Mr. Smith,” Matt said. “And I don’t believe you’ve ever understood men like me. Nothing you want from me can be taken by force. It’s a no.”

“Damn shame,” Wes muttered.

“I was never walking out of here, was I?” Matt asked.

“Honestly, I probably could’ve coped with a no,” Wes hummed. “I’m a big boy. I know it ain’t kindergarten and we don’t all gotta hold hands anymore. Maybe we let you scamper out of here with some strongly worded threats in a doggy bag. Except you had to make it clear you know way too damn much, Counselor. Make yourself a liability. Now why’d you have to go and do that?”

Matt nodded. Fair enough.

“Well, how about I let you think on it for a bit anyway?” Wes said. “Just in case, you know, you'd like to change your mind.”

Matt kept a frown off his face. He knew what killing intent was like on Wes—how come he wasn't wearing even a flicker of it tonight?

“My decision is quite firm,” Matt said, smiling genteelly.

“Then I give you a little prayer time, how about that?” Wes hummed. “Check in with the Heavenly Father, be sure he's expecting you.”

Matt had never been the one impatient for his own execution before. What was Wes waiting on?

Shit. Molina was the invitation for Matt. But Matt was the invitation for…

Wes certainly liked a two-fer.

Just then, every inch of the miles of twisted buzzing wires inside the walls went quiet. Matt heard gasps, startles, twitches at the sudden flood of darkness. The rain was singing unaccompanied until a lash of thunder shook through the building.

Matt tasted the damp air through his teeth.

Wes held up his gun, triggered his radio.

“Heads up, boys. Looks like he's here, right on schedule,” Wes said. “'Let's get it done.”

Notes:

fratt if you squint lol. i'm not really a shipper per se but i am a matt's-probably-hooked-up-with-literally-everyone-he-ethically-could-at-some-point-or-another truther

okok so fun detail in piazza, new york catcher if you listened to it. there's a line that goes "the statue's crying too and, well, he may", but those with a passing familiarity with the san francisco giants might instinctively hear it as "willie mays," the hall of famer center fielder commemorated in a statue who made one of the greatest catches of all time. he passed last year. only giant you'll ever catch me shedding a tear for

guys please know i could really be a lot worse with the baseball references. this is me exercising all of my restraint. there's a stub chapter in the og draft where they go to a game like jesus christ man what the hell was i talking about

Chapter 21

Notes:

man this is still a long one and i already went and chopped it in half! apologies in advance for the cliffhanger-y ending... if you don't like those i'd sit on this one til next week.......
actually who am i kidding if you don't like them you probably haven't read this far cause it's all i seem to love doing! battingonethousand stop cutting away at the peak of the action challenge FAILED

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter had always had this button in the suit’s interface—soldered it in place with a little childish glee—but never really had a good reason to press it. It just was the sort of thing you should only do in extreme moderation, lest one invite the entire weight of the FCC to come down upon themselves.

Peter radioed in.

“Good eeevening, Lower Manhattan's finest, this is your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man reporting in,” Peter said.

“Clear the line,” Dispatch said. “This frequency is for official use only.”

“Of course, Dispatch! But I just wanted to let the cops know I’m about to raid this totally massive crime ring and give them a chance to get in on the action.”

“Clear the line,” Dispatch insisted.

“I will, I will, I promise. Soon as I’m done. But they’re really gonna wanna hear this one,” Peter said. “We got probably millions of dollars in auto theft in there. Seen it with my own two eyes. Listen to me, giving you all this probable cause. Oh, yeah, and they got a hostage. There’s one, maybe two, innocent lives at stake. Now, I’ll be the one doing most of the heavy lifting. Boys in blue can keep playing Candy Crush until I’m done, all I’m asking is you lock them up after. How’s that sound to everyone?”

There was a long moment of audibly frustrated silence.

“All available units, be advised,” Dispatch relented. “Investigate the following address, unconfirmed reports of auto theft and kidnapping…”

“Hey, gimme a 10-4, and I’ll hop off,” Peter said. “Always wanted a 10-4 from Dispatch.”

“10-4, Spider-Man,” Dispatch said. “Now clear the fucking line.”

“Spider-Man, over and out,” he said.

Peter grinned to himself. Street-level stuff was just plain fun sometimes. He hopped over to the ledge and squinted through the rain, assessing his options.

Matt had not been kidding about the cavalry.

The front of the building looked straight out of the climax of a spy movie, all tarps and plastic barriers and high-caliber weaponry slung over tactical gear and some mean looking mugs. A pack of black Suburbans idled along the street and sidewalk, headlights catching the steady flow of rain in crisscrossed beams of solid white.

Peter hardly recognized the place. Gee, Wes, you really know how to make a guy feel special.

Recreating his superhero entrance from that first night was out of the question, he quickly determined. Not unless he wanted to immediately get turned into Swiss cheese, anyway.

Peter gave the chop shop a wide berth as he leapt soundlessly between the rooftops of surrounding buildings. Well, soundless was relative—he couldn’t be louder than all that rain if he tried.

A roll of thunder shook the broad windows of the warehouse Peter clung to, and Peter ducked in the sill to avoid the eyes of a patrol. He wondered idly how Matt did in this kind of weather. He could see it going either way: either it was disruptive white noise, or it was a million extra teeny-tiny points of data for him to interpret per second.

Peter leaned more towards the former. Just a little harder to stay focused with all that patter, a little harder to stay stuck firmly to things when they were absolutely soaked wet.

The moment the coast was clear, Peter dropped himself down on the half-flooded asphalt, slinging himself over barbed wire fencing, into the untamed overgrowth that surrounded the chop shop, metallic sting of petrichor strong enough to taste, wondering how the hell he was supposed to get inside and all the way to the basement unseen…

Ah. A sunken stairwell leading to a door. Looked a hell of a lot like an exterior entrance to the basement. Convenient, Peter thought. Too bad he hadn’t known it was there the other day. He knew he should’ve pulled the blueprints.

Peter braced himself by the sunken door, listening in for movement. No one immediately behind it, no yells of alarm from the yard outside. So far so good.

Door was locked. Not as good.

Kicking out the deadlock made quite a bit of noise, even with the cover of rainfall, but Peter still winced through it. He slipped inside to a blissfully empty hallway and relaxed into a little sigh.

The fuse box wasn’t too hard to find in the labyrinthine basement, even with Matt’s vague instructions. Peter tore through the steel hook of the padlock like it was baling wire, pulled it open.

He held his breath, adjusted his audio filters for the office overhead.

Matt and Wes were still talking. Seemed Wes wanted Matt on his side—well, he was a man of discerning taste, Peter thought wryly.

Peter heard negotiations fall apart, and flipped all of the breakers at once, webbing the switches in the off position with a generous layer of web for good measure, then slammed the door shut, giving that a coat too.

Nothing worth doing that’s not worth doing well, May had liked saying.

Peter did not let his eyes adjust to the darkness, which was quite complete, even for his excellent vision: no light from the streets this far inside the belly of the windowless whale. He hopped up on the ceiling and crawled ahead, letting subtle bends in shadows guide his way to one of the stairwells he knew must be somewhere up ahead.

“Hello?” he heard. The sound startled him stock-still. “Is someone there?”

Light fingers dragging along damp concrete walls, a scared voice, a familiar Jersey accent.

Antonia?

“This is a good time to run, lady,” Spider-Man said, dropping down from the ceiling in front of her. “About to blow this joint wide open.”

“Spider-Man, is that you?” Antonia said, a bit hysteric. “I need some help. Can you help?”

Peter paused, studied what he could make out of her face. Flecks of nervous tears lit up her dark eyes.

“Wha…”

“One of the new soldiers totally freaked out on one of my girls when the power went out,” Antonia said, grabbing his hands. “Please, he really, really hurt her. You gotta help.”

He hadn’t overheard anything like an assault in the social engineering office, but he hadn’t exactly been listening anywhere close to there, either. Matt could… probably handle himself for now.

“Lead the way,” Peter said immediately.

Antonia gave him a quick nod and set off down the hallway, hands up to feel blindly through the black.

Peter followed.

Each step forward was heavier than the last. It felt like the dark walls were narrowing to a point ahead, crowding in behind Peter’s shoulders. Peter’s heart thudded bitterly against his ribs, and cold sweat beaded under the suit.

Spider-sense? Peter couldn’t spot any danger as he glanced around. Was whoever hurt the girl still here?

Antonia pulled open the door to her office, waved Peter in ahead frantically.

The moment he crossed the threshold, the dull base of anxiety strengthened into a fever pitch, and Antonia caught both of his wrists again. Her hands were… no, it wasn’t her hands that were cold, it was… a set of… futuristic-looking handcuffs?

Peter wrenched himself away from the touch, but he could hear some tiny mechanisms already going to work; the cuffs locked together, binding his hands, then dragged, Peter and all, to a hitch made of the same material on a brick pillar in the middle of the room.

So strong for such a tiny machine. No obvious cooling system for the amount of power necessary for force like this, so probably nothing electric. Some kind of juiced-up extraterrestrial magnet, maybe? Or magic. Magic didn't seem to concern itself with thermodynamics.

Alright, focus, Peter.

The key takeaway was that he was completely trapped, hands bound. He got himself up to his feet, but only barely—the hitch was just a little lower than where his hands normally fell, so he could only sort of stand up to his full height, couldn't walk more than a step or two without dislocating a shoulder. 

“What the hell is this?” he barked, wriggling around.

“Nothing personal, I promise,” Antonia said, hysterics already discarded. Shit. “We’d like you to stick around for a bit, Spider-Man. My boss just wants to talk.”

She bent to turn on a little battery-powered lamp, slung herself in a desk chair with a quiet sigh, pulled out a laptop from her bag.

“This is Toni. Package secured, over,” she said into the radio clipped to her top.

Peter resented being referred to as a package and wriggled a little harder.

He pulled with all of his strength, but he hardly got them more than a centimeter or so away the hitch. The moment he let his burning arms rest, they snapped back together with a metallic clank that he felt inside his teeth.

“It’s probably best if you chill out,” Antonia offered. “We got those installed special. Cost a fortune. They were invented to hold, like, Captain Americas. You’re only going to hurt yourself.”

“Good thing I’m definitely stronger than that senior citizen,” Peter huffed.

He hopped up to put both feet on the column, tried prying himself off with all of the force he could exert from his legs—no dice. The bricks were definitely going before the cuffs would, if the ominous creaks and tiny puffs of reddish dust accumulating at his feet had anything to do with it.

Which wasn’t exactly ideal. His expert assessment as an amateur civil engineer indicated that he’d been tacked to a load-bearing structure in a building with already questionable integrity, and he probably wasn't getting it down without taking the ceiling overhead with it.

But, hey, toppling it might do in a pinch; he had a winning record against collapsed buildings. Not that causing a mass casualty event was exactly on his to-do list today…

Peter flipped himself upside down on the column and crossed his legs instead.

“What about a Hulk? I was told they’d work fine on a Hulk,” Antonia said.

“You’re buying from a crook, then. No way in hell this is Hulk-rated,” Peter said. “Have to be quantum-locked on to some kind of point of multiversal constant to be Hulk-proof… man, why am I even talking to you? Get me the hell outta this, lady.”

“As far as I understood it, that’s about the concept, actually,” Antonia said, eyebrows raised. “Solid guess.”

“No shit?” Peter said, a little too impressed. He shook it off. “I mean, shit, who's selling this kind of crap to crime rings?”

“We’re living in a brave new world, Spider-Man,” Antonia hummed.

“Yeah, you really don’t have to explain that to the radioactive bug-person,” Peter said. “Okay, okay, again, why am I talking to you?”

“Because you’re nice,” Antonia guessed.

“Exactly!” Peter said. “I’m super nice, so you should totally let me go.”

Antonia just smiled placidly at that from over her laptop screen. A bit later, Peter heard the interior doors to the basement open, letting in the faintest flood of flashlight trickle down the stairs, then Wes followed.

“Oh, look at that, Toni,” Wes said, practically glowing with pride. “This here’s why you’re the best. Isn't she the best?”

“Not sure if I'm a fan of her work, honestly,” Peter said dryly. “Gonna go out on a handcuffed limb here and say that you’re the boss who wants to chat.”

He dropped back down to stand up straight-ish, trying to make himself look big as possible. Which was… not very, given the circumstances.

“Yessir,” Wes said, giving him a little salute in greeting. He crossed his arms behind his back, leaning in a little to peer down Peter, just out of his narrow striking range. “Nice to properly meet you, Spider-Man. We can, uh, ignore all the times you blew my shit up and hurt my people.”

“Nothing personal,” Peter stage-whispered.

“Oh, I’m sure. Neither is all this.”

“When do I get to learn what ‘this’ is?”

Wes brought over a stool from one of the desks. Settled down to sit, he drew his sidearm from his holster, checked for a bullet in its chamber—seemed pleased by the telltale gleam of bronze that danced across his face—then let it hang low between his legs.

“You and your lawyer friend came to me at a strange time in my life, Spidey,” Wes hummed, wax-poetic. He held out a hand. “Mr. Piazza, I presume?”

“Dunno what you're talking about,” Peter said flatly. “Unless you're saying that Spider-Man's secret identity is 62nd-round-choice in the '88 draft and Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza, in which case I will neither confirm nor deny such a sick-ass accusation.”

Wes just gave him a little shark smile at that. Alright, fine, guess the gig is up. Damn, he really thought he’d pulled it off.

“See, lately, I’ve been thinking I’m tired of cars,” Wes hummed. “Only so high you can go with them before you get Feds, or, hell, superheroes up your ass, and seems I'm there. Feel like I'm at a crossroads, and you were my sign to move on. And I don’t ignore signs, ‘specially not when they’re in candy paint. It’s time to find a bigger stage, yeah? You’re gonna help me with that.”

“Oh, am I?” Peter said. “Clue me in. What’s your bigger look like, boss?”

“Little bit of everything, I figured,” Wes said. “Gotta keep the portfolio diverse. Anything and everything that’s good money.”

Peter heard the words Wes left unsaid loud and clear: drugs, weapons… people… he dug his nails into his gloved palm.

“See, I figure we got two options,” Wes said. “You come work for me for a bit. Just a few gigs, no huge commitment, nothing too dirty. These are tough fucking industries for a newcomer to break into, you understand, real old boys’ clubs. I need to borrow just enough of your super-strength to make a first impression they can’t ignore. Then you’d get your cut, and we’d go our separate ways. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?”

Honestly, it didn’t. There’d probably be tons of little opportunities to sabotage him, keep him from doing real harm, trick him or his enemies into incriminating themselves. And Peter knew that the money would be good. Hell, it was good as a grunt, can you imagine how lucrative it'd be for a right-hand man? All that money could go back to people who needed it.

But he glanced towards Antonia, her face strained, knee bouncing, thought about how he’d blackmailed her into ‘lending him her skills for a bit,’ and here she was, months later, still fully implicated…

If he got in here, he’d never get out, would he? He’d just keep pretending he was the good guy for the rest of his life.

“Worked with Daredevil on this,” Peter said. “Is he getting the recruitment pitch, too?”

“I knew it!” Antonia muttered, mostly to herself. “No one else believed me!”

“Not all that interested in that skill set, don't have easy access to one of his people. And, uh, frankly, you seem… a hell of a lot more agreeable, Spidey. Sociable.”

Hell of a lot more exploitable, more like.

“Nah, think I’m good,” Peter said. “What’s behind door number two?”

“I introduce nine millimeters to your gray matter,” Wes said lightly, illustrating his point with a wave of his gun. “Correct me if I'm wrong, but that, uh, super-shit of yours, I’m willing to bet it can’t raise you from the dead, right?”

“Hardly seems like a win for you,” Peter noted. “Going through all this trouble just to get yourself a corpse you gotta dispose of.”

“Nah,” Wes said. “I only play winning games. Either you help, or a pesky bug stops getting in my goddamned way. I’d prefer one option, but I can live with both. You can’t.”

“I see what you did there,” Peter deadpanned. “Door number two, please.”

“Hearing a lot of that a lot lately. You hero types really love sacrificing yourselves for shit-all, don’t you?” Wes said. “I don’t get it. You all suicidal or something?”

What?

“No, I…”

“Come on, genius, think it through,” Wes scolded. “Who the hell do you save by dying alone in some basement? Think about all the people who you’d be able to protect in the future if you didn’t kill yourself over one little favor. You like your shiny morals better than all them? How would you explain that to their families, hm?”

“That’s not what this is abo—”

Wes cut him off by reaching over, tearing the mask off in an unkind tug, pressing the muzzle of the gun to his exposed forehead. Peter blinked.

“That’s… that's a no-no,” Peter mumbled, tearing his head away from the gun as best he could, cheeks hot with frustration.

Wes breathed out a perfectly amused little laugh of recognition and withdrew his weapon, letting the mask fall to the ground.

“Hey there, Benji,” Wes said. “You know, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sorta thinking it, but I’m… I’m still pretty damn impressed. You have this on your bingo card, Toni?”

“Not at all,” Antonia said, wide eyes flicking between Peter and her laptop. “But I am definitely not surprised.”

“I went through all this effort,” Wes grinned, “and here you are, already on my payroll. Now I definitely don’t get the fuss. You’re plenty complicit, kid.”

“Are you stupid or something?” Peter said. “I took the job to go undercover, nothing else. I’d never do shit like this for real. I’m not…”

“Nah, nah, I’m not buying any of that bullshit,” Wes said, cutting him off. He jabbed a pointing finger near Peter's face, and Peter thought idly about biting at it. “And I don't think you are, either. I saw it. Can’t fake that hunger I saw in your eyes, no sir. You’re starving, and I don’t mean food. You want more, kid. You’re always gonna want more. Let me help you take it, Benji.”

Strong enough to have it all, a distant voice snarled. Too weak to take it!

“I don’t want your help,” Peter said. “Never gonna want your help.”

“Unfortunately, you don’t got much of a choice,” Wes said. “Because, well, I’ll be honest here, I don’t wanna kill you. Hell, I think I like you, kid.”

Peter tilted his head, narrowed his eyes.

“So I’ll just, uh, threaten to kill your loved ones instead,” Wes finished. “That sound agreeable? Toni, doll. We got loved ones on deck yet?”

“No biometric matches, boss,” Antonia said, sounding a bit harried. “He’s not in the State or Fed database, nothing in the SHIELD dump, no matches through private companies, nothing on Interpol… dude’s a total ghost, or he's been…”

Peter shook his head sympathetically, tutted his tongue.

“Like I told you my first day,” he hummed. “Identity issues. Sorry to disappoint.”

Wes scratched at the back of his head. He stood to tuck the stool back under its desk.

“Well, don’t apologize yet. You know me, I always double-tap, Benji. Dunno about love, but we gotta remember I brought you in with a guy we both know you at least like,” he said. He activated his radio. “Hey, bring the counselor downstairs, will you?”

There was a noticeable pause in the line. Peter rubbed his nose against his wrist to scratch it, flipping himself back upside down again. Much more comfortable than all this peering over his shoulder.

“He’s gone, boss,” eventually came the crackling reply, panic evident even over the air.

“The fuck you mean he’s gone?” Wes snapped. “How the hell do you lose a blind man in a locked room?”

“The men stationed at your office are down… and, uh, looks like the skylight’s been popped…”

“Down, or dead?” Wes asked, running a rough hand through his hair.

“Just… just unconscious, looks like,” said the man. “Beat to hell, though.”

Oh, Peter thought. They were so fucked. Nobody has ever been this fucked in the history of being fucked.

Wes swore and switched frequencies.

“Pegasus, do you copy?” he said. “Get off the exterior, get in here. We’ve been breached. Need a unit to the basement now.”

“Copy,” came the measured response, and the clatter of reinforcements followed a few tense minutes after.

A handful of the archetypal jarheads with their rifles held at eyeline, sure, but most had a variety of cruel-bladed melee weapons strapped to their belts and backs. Which was smart, Peter noted happily. No need to pack too many bullets in this smallish, probably extremely ricochet-prone room…

“Clear the level,” someone said, and a scuffle of jackboots and the flutter of flashlights distributed themselves across the office and the rest of the basement.

“Clear,” eventually came a far-from-synchronized chorus, and they regrouped around Wes.

“This is A-Team. Basement is secure,” another voice said into their radio. “Target must still be upstairs, over.”

Peter laughed. Quiet at first, kept under his breath, then loud as the storm outside.

“What’s funny?” Wes snapped. “This ain’t changing your situation, Ben.”

“Oh, come on, boss,” Peter said. He hopped back up straight, smiled coyly. “I got the Devil on my side, remember? And now he's coming for me. Or, well, sorry… probably be more accurate to say he’s coming for you, right?”

Wes grit his teeth, flipped the gun in one hand, then slammed the back of it against Peter’s head, stunning him silent. Peter glared at the floor, where a few wayward drops of his blood were sinking into the thirsty concrete. Well, guess he’d finally found the limits of the boss's professionalism.

“What now?” Wes said.

“We wait, sir,” a woman—short blonde braid, a big, nasty machete-looking knife sheathed behind each shoulder—said. “We keep you and the package secure down here until we’re certain that the rest of the building is clear.”

“Not very exciting,” Wes noted, already pacing.

“It’s important to stay calm in a situation like this,” she insisted, “and trust that we know what we’re doing.”

“Shit, do you? You let him in, didn’t you?” Wes snapped.

“May I remind you, sir,” she said mildly, “that it was only upon your insistence that your own men covered the office, which we correctly identified as a breach risk. Something about continuity?”

Wes scoffed at that, resuming his pacing.

“Can't put my people outta work,” he muttered, low enough that Peter suspected he was the only one to hear it.

There was a lull of quiet; everyone seemed to take a collective breath in the gap in the action, temperature dropping a few degrees. A jarhead hopped up to sit on one of the desks, knocking over a little cup of colorful pens in the process, and Antonia side-eyed him scathingly. All anyone could do was listen to the roar of rain overhead, coming in steady, then in occasional lashes of pure violence.

Peter took the time to assess his options, peering curiously at his new enemies, all these strangers that now knew his face. There was machete-woman. Generic jarheads one, two, and three. A younger dude, almost every accessible inch of his gear covered in little throwing knives. There was this ponytailed guy with a full-on samurai katana-wakizashi thing going on, which was honestly a pretty badass combo with the rest of his modern tacticool getup… and…

And there was… there was something wrong with the empty corner behind him. 

Why couldn’t…? Peter frowned, squinted. Like a scratched record, his eyes almost seemed to skip over that spot of darkness without his permission.

Did the pistol-whip have him seeing things? A trick of the dim light, maybe? Felt odd, almost unnatural. It was like there was something there his body just didn't want to let him see.

Dull waves of spider-sense caught thick in his throat, and Peter shook his head through it.

Focus, Peter. Just look. There’s nothing there. It can’t possibly be that hard to just make yourself look at an empty…

Oh.

His eyes clicked cleanly into place.

Not empty. Decidedly not empty corner.

Peter was halfway through a gasp in shock when he regained his bearings, playing it off as a yawn. Now, the hard part was keeping his eyes away from the corner and the motionless figure in black standing in it, but Peter really didn't want to be the one to blow this.

“You’re definitely going to have to teach me that one,” Peter muttered under his breath, and the shadow in the corner of his eye grinned back.

“Hey, he’s talking to someone,” one jarhead said. Astute observation, jarhead.

“Hell you say?” another barked.

“Oh, come on, fellas, don’t mind me,” Peter chirped. No, seriously, you should really be minding the other guy. Peter watched one of them check their six, look almost directly at him, and immediately turn back, none the wiser. Straight out of a horror movie. “Maybe being stuck in a basement with all you mouth-breathers is just driving me nuts.”

“Lock the doors,” machete-woman ordered. “If he's in contact with someone, let's not make it easy for them to get down here.”

“Might be wearing a comm,” another jarhead offered. 

“Did you even check the target after you got him secured?” machete-woman asked Antonia, who just shrugged irritably and turned away in response. These hard-ass paramilitary types seemed like way more than she’d like to be dealing with.

“You're welcome to check,” Peter prattled. “Seriously, I got nothing. I mean, yes, actually, I do have full radio capabilities, but, uh… you know, I don’t exactly have voice-activation money these days. It's all mechanical, and I can’t press the buttons like this. So at the moment I got nothing, is the important conclusion… that we should all be focusing on…”

He wiggled his useless fingers in demonstration.

Machete-woman frowned, unconvinced. She rushed forward to press the sharp edge of one of the eponymous machetes to the base of his chin, then examined his bound wrists, displeased at the myriad buttons and sensors he had arrayed on his palms and forearms. Behind her, the shadow in the corner started moving.

“Christ,” she muttered. “This is completely out of control. This is why I hate civilian jobs.”

“I know, right? Amateur hour.” Peter agreed, swallowing dryly against the blade. Man, she kept these things polished. Could see his reflection in the steel.

“We should cut him out of that suit,” katana-guy suggested, thumbing the kashira of his wakizashi.

Absolutely not. Peter was wearing Yoda-themed underwear today. Machete tilted her head, pondering the suggestion. Or maybe just where to start cutting.

Any day now, Matt, Peter thought, almost yelled inside his skull.

“Hey—hey, friends, there’s a zipper,” Peter said. “I'll show you where it is. Seriously, this thing’s hand-stitched, we're talking months of work, and I really don’t…”

The Devil of Hell's Kitchen stopped hiding in plain sight, and all hell broke loose shortly after.

Notes:

ok i guess this is really more comic matt-ish but come onnnnn it's fun isnt it ... who cares about gritty realism whatever mcu matt should really be allowed to do more creepy ninja shit

Chapter 22

Notes:

jsyk at the moment chapter 24 is this fic's last! haven't changed the /? just yet because i'm not completely firm on that (chap 23 is a little lengthy, so if i can't pare it down, i'll split it up, which would put it it to 25) but also i dont want you guys to be surprised if it is ~

gratuitous violence ahead but uhhh doubt that part is surprising

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter saw two silvery streaks of light—torque wrenches from an upstairs workbench, maybe?—whip through the air, just a little too quick for the others to register.

One found Antonia’s battery lamp, knocking it under a chair in a clatter and rendering much of its light useless, and the other found the soft part of machete-woman’s thumb, knocking the blade from her hand and Peter’s neck.

She was quick enough to catch it with the other before it could reach the ground, but the opening was all Peter needed to flip most of his body up along the column and outside of the reach of a retaliatory slash, then drop himself back down into a very equine kick. She hit the wall across the room hard enough to put tiny cracks in the plaster.

“We got contact!” someone hollered, and the now-dark room lit up with a red-hot flutter of unfocused gunfire. Peter heard Antonia scream as she dove for cover under a desk.

Spent casings sung a glissando atop the concrete, and the silence that fell after was just as deafening as the gunshots. Every single person in the room was holding their breath, it seemed, looking for their enemy. Grayish flashlights ticked on, one by one, until there were countless layers of shadows on the floor, a colorless kaleidoscope that distorted itself into a dozen different patterns with the slightest shift of movement.

“I don’t got eyes. Who’s got a visual?”

“Hold fire until we have visual!”

“I got a whole lotta nothing.”

Must’ve been the wind, Peter wanted to say, but he was pretty sure that joke would go over the heads of his present company. Well, he wasn’t 100% sure… throwing-knife guy sort of had that telltale gamer gleam in his eyes.

“Perimeter,” machete-woman said, dragging herself back to stand, and the jarheads paired up and distributed themselves dutifully across the basement. Oh, Peter knew that posture very well. That was a textbook bruised-rib lean. She shot visual daggers, but thankfully not real ones, Peter’s way. “Room was sealed. Must’ve been… how did you do that?”

“Do what?” Peter said, leaning his chin down towards his wrists to put an innocent who-me finger to his lips.

“Mr. Smith. We should be treating him like the hostile he clearly is,” machete-woman said, turning to Wes. “Terminate him. The situation is completely out of c—”

“Then get it back under control!” Wes hissed. “Remind me. Terms of our contract?”

“Defend your enterprise. Capture Spider-Man,” machete-woman said. “And we—”

“Got beat out on the important part by some random girl,” Wes said. “And now you wanna go and put him down like a dog because your job’s not a goddamned walk in the park? With the number of zeroes at the end of that check I signed? Give me a fucking break!”

“Sir,” katana-guy tried.

“Don’t sir me,” Wes said. “Do your fucking job, and tell your people to do it with your fucking safeties on, capiche? We got kids in here, Christ!”

What, did he mean him? Couldn’t be. Antonia? Probably Antonia (who'd apparently decided she’d like to live underneath the desk permanently, which was probably the smartest choice anyone in the room was currently making). Wes's dearest 20-year-old kid. Peter was given no additional time to chew on that, however, as another rattle of gunfire down the hall to the tore up the temporary calm, and everyone snapped back to high alert.

“Regroup. Now,” machete-woman said quietly into her radio. Don’t think quiet’s going to be much help here, Peter thought.

Only one pair of jarheads jogged back.

“Charlie-Three, sit-rep,” she tried.

No response.

“Charlie-Three,” she repeated.

“Alright, that definitely couldn’t have been me,” Peter offered.

No one got the time to appreciate that quip, as one half of Charlie-Three quite noisily reintroduced himself to the office, disarmed and dragging a half-dead leg behind him, brow bone gleaming with blood. All of the flashlights came together in a shivering spotlight—made the fear in his eyes easy to spot.

“Daredevil,” he panted, and the accused finished the job with a dropkick from behind that left him flattened underfoot.

Machete-woman was the closest to the door, but she’d been slowed considerably by Peter, so her vicious dual-handed slashes cut little more than the air above Matt’s head. He grabbed her shoulders—his knee found the soft part of her stomach, then her nose, and she crumpled to the ground.

Throwing knives decorated the wall behind Matt as he spun himself out of their way, too far beyond the column for Peter to rubberneck. Ah, this was absolute torture, Peter thought, only being able to see one half of the battlefield.

And he could try and listen, but the room was small, and every scuff of a shoe, every crease in fabric, every blow finding flesh was bounced around four or five times before it reached Peter’s ears, and he found himself more and more unmoored the longer he tried to listen. How does… how in the hell does Matt do it?

Matt scrambled back into Peter’s view, grappling an opponent from behind, each laying unfocused blows to the other’s skull. Matt caught his neck in the crook of his elbow, squeezed hard, stumbled back, and both slid down against the wall.

Peter spotted a reflective gleam streak through the air towards Matt, one of the tiny throwing knives on a deadeye trajectory—but his arms were all weighed down with struggling jarhead, Peter recognized grimly. He saw Matt’s head jerk back on impact… no… no way it’d been a direct hit, right?

Matt straightened his neck slowly, and Peter almost wanted to look away, anticipating a blade buried deep in his prefrontal.

He was smiling around the blade he’d caught cleanly between his teeth instead. He spat it out, dropped the now-slack soldier, and sprung forward in the direction of the knife, back outside of Peter’s view.

Peter heard metal-on-flesh, metal-through-flesh, flesh-on-flesh, all sorts of unmentionable noises, but movement ahead of him caught his attention. Matt’s jarhead, up on some manic second wind. Peter still couldn’t see Matt, but what he could hear sounded like he wouldn’t have too much attention to spare.

“Hey, stupid!” Peter tried, kicking with one foot uselessly in the soldier's general direction. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to beat on the tied-up teenager?”

Apparently, it would not. The jarhead was barely on his feet, one eye already swollen shut, and he didn't bother even flicking the other Peter's way. He staggered like a drunkard towards Matt. His rifle hung loose from its strap, and he pulled something from his back instead—the barrel of a compact shotgun gleamed coldly in the low light.

Looked like a 12-gauge, Peter registered dully, or something close, something with high enough caliber to turn things into fine mist, to make silly steps like ‘aiming’ or even ‘picking a target’ completely optional.

Peter hated shotguns. The dislike seemed mutual. The memories that churned up unwelcomely behind his eyes were so haphazard they’d almost be funny if they weren’t borne from pure horror: the twitch in the mugger’s eye, the scent of the street at night, the red-blue strobe of the police lights on his hands, damp with sweat and Ben's…

Peter leapt half-blindly backwards and stretched himself out as far as he could. He knew he was bendy, knew his tendons and ligaments were more suggestions than commands these days, but even he was a little shocked at his own extent. Peter’s foot just barely hooked the barrel up towards the ceiling as it went hot, and bright pain streaked up his calf like floodwater across a wheel-well, followed by immediate numbness. His ears rung.

Peter squeezed his eyes shut as he collapsed to one knee, half-dangling by his wrists. There was a heavy splatter of… something upon the concrete. He wasn’t convinced he was still in full possession of that leg, but he was way too scared to look down and check.

Somewhere just outside of Peter’s periphery, Matt roared like he’d been the one struck. That didn’t bode well, Peter thought miserably, as Matt didn’t exactly have the privilege of deciding where to look.

He emerged from the cloud of white plaster that the slug had let loose from the ceiling in an avenging streak of black, fist-first. Jarhead was unconscious, properly this time, before he hit the ground, but that hardly seemed to discourage Matt from slamming both fists down on him again, then again, then again, then…

“Four o’clock!” Peter cried, and Matt tensed, then spun out of the way of a wicked downstroke of a katana with milliseconds to spare. The blade wedged itself deep within the jarhead’s armor instead, and Peter wondered with a little wide-eyed horror if he’d just watched the man who doesn’t kill let someone die.

Katana-guy set a crude foot set on his buddy’s chest for leverage and wrenched the sword free, revealing the whitish gleam of unbloodied steel.

Ah, good. Also, goddamn, who the hell supplies their armor?

Katana-guy brought the sword back down over Matt, but neither he nor Peter had noticed when Matt drew the wakizashi from the man’s own belt, and the bright sparks that flew as he parried the blow with the blade shocked them both. They danced apart, and Matt settled in a practiced stance, sword at the ready. 

Well, that didn’t look right at all, did it? Daredevil holding a sharp object. He flipped the blade in one hand, dull side out, and pressed back in.

It was an odd spot of elegance in the otherwise graceless, almost awkward foray: all subtle footwork and winglike flutters of steel. Someone went to grapple Matt from behind; the hilt of his stolen blade embedded itself in their forehead, a termination of the same flowing motion that’d warded off katana-guy’s strike. It was hard to follow, even for Peter, but the match ended almost as quickly as it’d started, with the tachi embedded uselessly in a desk and its wielder downed.

The room went silent again.

Matt’s head jerked around, as if pulled by a dozen different strings at once. He’d found something out of place, it seemed, as he lashed out in a kick to the skull at what had appeared to be a perfectly unconscious enemy.

Then, he turned to the only man left standing.

Wes dislodged himself from his hiding place by the wall, sheathed the 9mm, and held up his hands in a gesture of peace.

“Listen, we…”

Matt was apparently not in the mood to listen; he grabbed his collar, and a subtle rearranging of his balance had him slammed face-down on the floor well before he could comprehend what had been done to him. Matt pinned him down, a knee on his shoulder.

“You said you thought you and Murdock were similar men,” Matt muttered in his ear. “You still believe that?”

Wes gave him a series of quick, awkward little nods against the floor.

“Means I’ll have to teach you a lesson the only way he’d learn it,” Matt said with an overplayed sigh.

He adjusted his knee atop Wes’s forearm, tucked it right above where the cords of muscles narrowed into slender strands of tendon, then yanked his wrist high in the opposite direction. Peter flinched with him.

“This hurt?” Matt asked. Peter heard fluttery little fibrous snaps of sinew build into creaks, then breaks, of the ulna, fractures in the radius; sounded like burning green wood. “Would you say it’s some of the worst pain you’ve ever felt?”

Wes just writhed in response.

Matt let off a little, allowed him to curl over on the arm. He stepped over his heaving form, knelt at his side.

“Fuck,” Wes hissed, letting his head fall back. He was slick with cold sweat. “Yeah, hurts pretty fucking bad, asshole.”

“Alright. With that in mind,” Matt said, slowly, carefully, a professor to a stubborn student, “you tell anyone what you saw under that mask, and God as my witness, you’ll wish you were feeling as little pain as you are now. You’ll beg for it as bliss. Nothing will stop me from getting to you and hurting you worse than you can imagine. No walls, no laws, no code of ethics. Are we clear?”

“Crystal,” Wes breathed.

“You’re going forget you ever met ‘Benjamin.’ You’ll cooperate with law enforcement,” Matt said. “You’ll admit to your schemes. You’ll verify any evidence presented to you.”

“You talk big, but you’re not making it out of here,” Wes growled through his teeth. “Boys are gonna tear you apart.”

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” Matt said, words heavy with hunger. “Attempts thereof, anyway.”

He took a fistful of Wes’s short hair and slammed it into the ground. Wes went pleasantly slack underneath him.

He turned to Antonia’s hiding place under the desk, who ducked away from his attention in a full-body flinch. He held out a hand; when she didn’t take it, he grabbed a wrist and dragged her out.

“Get him out of those,” he said, pointing at Peter.

Antonia obliged wordlessly, and the mechanisms began to unfurl under her complicated gestures. Peter rubbed at his freed wrists, rolled his shoulders, tested his feet. Huh. Still had two of them. Great!

“You can’t tell,” Peter said, catching one of hers.

“I won’t,” Antonia said. “Wouldn’t. Really. I didn’t see nothing about nobody, and I… I ran that algo on a local server. Christ, this is so not my business.”

“Truth,” Matt offered. His back was turned—he was crouched over a downed enemy, liberating them of their weapons. He’d found a set of clubs, spun them happily in his hands.

“Listen, you made it your business,” Peter said. “I know all this, uh, started out as blackmail, but you really gotta be more discerning with your choice of business partners, Antonia.”

Peter let her go. Antonia gave him a frantic nod, a nearly inaudible thank-you, then set off towards towards the exit. Faltering, she paused at the doorway.

“Hey, Ben?” Antonia said.

“Yeah?”

“What you said the other day… the, uh… think the violence finally got to me,” she muttered, then jogged off before he could muster together a response to whatever the hell that was.

Matt finally turned to Peter. He tugged a corner of the mask up with a thumb.

“We have a moment to catch our breaths,” he said, though Peter hardly comprehended his words. “They’re still strategizing upstairs. Putting together a breach team.”

An over-retentive part of Peter wondered where or when he’d lost Murdock’s glasses and clothes—he definitely hadn’t come dressed like this—but all the rest had just gone haywire, system a little overloaded with pain, violence, and a dual-edged sense of both dread and relief. He slid half-consciously down against his column to sit, leg burning. He'd been freed, but he still felt somehow welded to the spot.

“Pete?”

There was a strange look on Matt’s face. Flat, somehow detached, a million and one miles away.

His half-lidden eyes caught what little light there was in pinpoint gleams, twin morningstars, the only flecks of brightness in his shadowed silhouette. There was blood on his hands, splattered down his face and heaving chest, almost black in the dark. As if on theatrical cue, a drop skipped down his brow and around his nose, descent stopped by a subtle flick of his tongue. Was it his or someone else’s? Either way, he wore it with comfort.

It then occurred to Peter that he had misread his expression. It wasn’t detachment, no. Couldn’t be much farther from it, actually.

It was ease.

Matt had the perfectly serene look of a man in complete control of himself, of his surroundings, of anyone stupid enough to get in his way. Peter had faced all manner of deadly weapon and dangerous villains of all sorts, but he suspected he might prefer any combination thereof over this empty-handed man. The horned costume suddenly seemed silly in comparison, almost offensively so, a crude cartoon scribbled on an intercontinental warhead.

This was the Devil, Peter recognized. The Adversary made flesh.

It was easy to forget that the epithet came first until you were confronted by the primeval reality of its origins: this was the stranger in the mask that’d appeared to the darkest alleys of Hell’s Kitchen like the burning bush to the shepherd, a herald of troubled times.

Matt breathed out a quiet laugh, probably at whatever jokes Peter’s sympathetic nervous system was telling, and the sound of it was enough to shake him out of it.

“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this, man,” Peter said.

Matt crouched down in front of him, a vaguely bemused look on his face.

“Me, in some Hell’s Kitchen shithole I’ve got no business being in,” Peter clarified. “One of us all tied up. You, blood all over your face. There’s literally always blood on your face.”

“Don’t worry. Most of it’s not mine this time,” Matt said, perhaps a little too quickly, almost shy, wiping at it uselessly with the back of his hand.

“Yeah, not sure if that’s… I don’t think that makes a whole lot better, dude,” Peter muttered.

“How are you doing?” Matt said, an ear set towards the shallow wounds scattered across Peter’s calf.

“Peachy,” Peter said, swallowing and taking a glance of his own. Still there. Shallow pitting in the first few layers of skin, mostly. Only a few odd spots had gone subdermal, still bleeding, but lazily.

He pulled himself back up, tested to see how much weight the calf was willing to hold, and Matt followed, open arms ready to catch him.

But the answer was just about all of it, apparently. He had been lucky, very lucky. It was a little hard to think about just how lucky he’d been. He was unaware if his souped-up regeneration could work with limbs that resembled pulled pork, and he was profoundly unenthusiastic about tackling such a hypothesis.

“I got you hurt again,” Matt said, a little divot forming between his brows, downcast eyes fluttering. His voice had gone heavy with resignation. “Almost got you killed.”

“Funny way to say ‘saved my life,’ asshole,” Peter snapped. “Anyway, I got you kidnapped again, so I think we’re even either way. Or, uh… guess you can’t really be kidnapped inside your own apartment, so, what, held against your will, maybe?”

“I… both instances would qualify as false imprisonment, I suppose,” Matt offered.

“Yeah, I just keep getting you false-imprisoned. Totally my B, DD,” Peter said. “Hey, Mr. Piazza? Really? Piazza, New York catcher?”

Matt’s only response was a flicker of a toothy grin, which Peter took as a sign that he’d successfully shook him out of his mini fit of guilt. Matt turned away, setting his ear towards something Peter couldn’t quite pick up on.

“Your friend is going to get away if you don’t stop her,” Matt said quietly. “Nobody's on the basement exit.”

“I know,” Peter said. Now it was his turn to feel resigned.

“She was blackmailed, you said,” Matt said. “I, uh, heard a similar story myself, just the other day. You feeling a little sympathetic?”

“Shut it,” Peter said. “I just… I don’t think she’s a good person, but not so sure she’s a bad one, either. I think I wanna give her another shot to decide. That make me an idiot?”

“It’s possible,” Matt said lightly. “But there are worse things to be.”

Peter found Spider-Man's mask where it'd been discarded on the filthy floor and liberally stomped over the course of the scuffle, dusting it off best he could.

“It’s about having a little faith in humanity, right?” Peter said, tugging it back on. “Just like our Mets.” 

“Just like our Mets,” Matt agreed, pulling the bandana down over his eyes.

He stood, crossed the room, pulled something out of one of the jarhead’s many velcro’ed pouches.

“They’re, uh, currently losing, by the way,” he said, tossing it Peter’s way. “Eight-one Dodgers. One down in the top of the ninth.”

Peter caught a little roll of elastic bandages.

“Hey,” Peter breathed. “Sounds to me like we still got two more outs to win it.”

Notes:

real mlb game btw. timing's not at all right for the fic but w/e i've def committed worse sins.. dunno if i gave you enough information to figure out which? :P

Chapter 23

Notes:

sorry for the late upload! actually had to do WORK at my silly little office job today, and that's when i usually do my last checks and post....... and then after i got home i totally spaced it..... ummmmmmm anyway
btw allow me to extend my formal condolences to mets fans and their team for going out sad this year but shit it really works for my running metaphor doesn't it?

Chapter Text

Matt liked basements.

(The literary implications of that fact were plain, and, as such, Frank—a book club member from truest Hell—could never be made aware of the fact. He could hear him now: of course the Catholic wouldn’t mind taking a page from the book of ancient martyrs in Roman crypts, of course the Devil would feel most at ease just the tiniest bit closer to Perdition.)

He’d accumulated memories in plenty of rooms just like this one—being dared by the other boys at St. Agnes to sleep in the mausoleum, calmer in the dark and dried-rose scent of death than all of them, Stick’s lessons in the abandoned rec room. Funny to think of those fondly, knowing—understanding—what he does now, but the fact of the matter was that he’d never felt so special. Hasn’t since.

More recent, less fond: his time as a bitter Lazarus, far too busy feeling sorry for himself to roll away the stone.

Point was—happy or otherwise—he always felt like himself in a basement.

But heavy-handed sentiment aside, his world simply had more stability inside them—ten-something feet of hard-packed dirt on all sides was a much better conductor for vibrations than open air, and New York was crisscrossed by subways that shook up the shallow bedrock on routine paths; he got a fresh mile-wide map in extreme detail through his feet every three to five minutes.

He was never lost in an underground room. The world around and above always arranged itself in orderly patterns with much less effort and guesswork.

Sixteen members of the paramilitary group remained conscious upstairs, preparing a breach team for what they’d correctly assessed was a complete catastrophe in the basement. They'd switched radio frequencies, which would have been smart if they were up against any other opponent.

A few of the amateurish originals milled around upstairs nervously. They’d spotted the undercovers that’d been circling the block, though they were unaware of the police snipers already unpacking their rifles on rooftops. They were considering slipping out the back. If they did, they would meet the SWAT team that’d rolled in mere moments after Antonia departed.

Matt found it hard to care too much about their decision or its outcome.

While the gunshots had confirmed the truth of Spider-Man’s report to dispatch, the cops seemed to be waiting on him to fulfill his promises of getting everyone restrained before busting in. More of a stakeout situation than a raid, it seemed. They trusted Peter.

Matt knew that Daredevil done very little to expect such treatment from New York’s Finest—Hell, he’d actively discouraged it—but he still found himself a bit jealous, not necessarily of Spider-Man’s clean reputation, but of the red carpet they apparently had ready to roll out for him.

Also meant that they were relying on a teenager to do their job for them, which…

“You have, like, a ton of knives sticking out of you,” the teenager noted, sounding terribly displeased by the observation.

Peter had wrapped up his mangled leg, though it was already half-scabbed over by the time he’d finished. Matt had gotten over most of his strange biology, sure, but listening to his flesh knit itself back together in real time—that was still pretty damn unsettling.

“Just five,” Matt corrected. And they were tiny little things. Not even fit to be called stilettos, glorified needles.

Peter grabbed Matt’s collarbone, and Matt allowed himself to be spun around for a check-up. He hadn’t let any of them to go anywhere near vital points. One in his forearm, far from the arteries, one in his thigh, another two in his abdomen, though they hadn’t even broken through the fascia, one atop his shoulder…

Just five,” Peter said, aghast.

Alright, on closer inspection, that last one was a little too close to the subclavian for comfort. Some weak shit, Matty. He ripped it out with a grunt, let it clatter to the ground, applied a bit of pressure.

“Four now,” Peter narrated dryly.

“I’ve had worse,” Matt said, shrugging with one shoulder.

“Worse? Worse than five!?” Peter stuttered. “We should call you the Pincushion of Hell’s Kitchen.”

And that—the kid so had clearly meant it as one of his quotidian laugh-so-you-don’t-cry jokes, but he hadn’t quite gotten his tone leveled out in time, so ‘pincushion’ came out a little broken, grave and sorrowful as the diagnosis of a terminal disease—that had Matt bracing himself against the wall, trying not to widen his many wounds with swallowed laughter.

“Looked all kinds of wrong,” Peter said. He’d looked away—peering down at Wes’s crumpled form, poking him with the fully functional foot—and missed Matt’s reaction, which probably saved Matt his ire, both of them time. “A sword in your hand. I thought you said you never got to knives.”

Matt steeled himself. The breach team was set: a unit of six, split into subgroups of three: one for each office entrance. Their shoulders were weighed down by high-caliber weaponry.

“I didn’t,” Matt said. “Most formal instruction I ever got was sneaking into a kendo dojo when I was still feeling, uh, young and rebellious.”

“I’m sorry, I simply do not believe you,” Peter said. “You and katana-guy… your form looked better than his. That fight was straight out of a Kurosawa flick.”

“Never met a weapon I wasn’t already a master of,” Matt said lightly, testing the balance of the new ill-gotten clubs. “Precisely why I try and stick with the dull ones.”

Human bodies were pressurized systems, and pressurized systems took any opportunity to rapidly disassemble themselves; the heart was so eager to rid itself of lifeblood. No, Matt could not allow himself sharpened objects.

“So disciplined, our St. Matthew,” Peter said. He kept it out of his voice, but his hummingbird heart, miserably elevated since he’d first been captured, had spiked a little.

Matt tilted his head. He felt the slightest bit bad: he’d put some real fear of God in Peter during that little spat in the locked room, especially his work with Wes. Or perhaps it was being restrained that’d upset him? Either way, slightest bit was all he was getting—it would ultimately be more of a disservice to shield the kid from the harsh reality of this kind of work, wouldn’t it? Sparing him from the consequences, not of trusting—he should never be ashamed of trusting—but forgetting to verify?

Ah, shit. Was that Stick talking?

“They’re flanking us,” Matt said, dropping his voice to a whisper, a rough gesture towards each door. “Thirty seconds out.”

“Oh shit,” Peter hummed, a little grin in his voice. He stood up straight, cracked his knuckles. “Almost forgot we still had company.”

Come on, kid, keep your head on straight, he almost wanted to say, but he was half-anxious with errant thoughts of perpetuating cycles, so he stuck with, “You good with flashbangs?”

“Uh,” Peter said numbly.

Then, he sprung up to the ceiling, seeming only half-cognizant of the action himself, and the charges rolled in, one from each office door. The twin pops of detonations ripped through Matt’s hearing like a buzzsaw, but he was, after all, in his beloved underground; he was operating more off of touch than sound, and thus remained undeterred.

He lanced through the smoke. It took three long strides with heavy pivots, and he was through the door, back behind the breach team. Matt hooked one muscled neck with an elbow—good cover, kept his comrades from getting trigger-happy—and pulled backwards. Both collapsed to the ground. As consciousness faded from the man within his grip, Matt rolled out from beneath him, palmed the concrete floor, and spun himself in a low kick that took out the legs of the other two, folding them with twin gasps of shock.

From here, all three of them splayed out and half-stunned, the remainder of the work involved very little strategy: draw the clubs, let the Devil out.

Back inside the room, Peter had dropped on a set of unsuspecting shoulders, then, just as quickly, leapt off, dangling from one hand overhead. He knit up the soldier’s arms and ankles together with keen jets of webbing, and she went down hard, teeth first.

Peter swapped anchors to hang from a foot, faced the other direction—he shot a bit of web at the half-open door, then yanked it forward on its hinges to slam into the soldier crouching next to it. It hit its target with an audible pop, the break of the unlucky bone in the forearm that caught the bulk of the momentum, and a scream. Peter braced himself against the ceiling in a spring-loaded crouch, and launched himself down from his perch fist-first, knocking the final one flat.

“Love flashbangs,” Peter said, webbing the last to the ground, half-manic, finally getting to Matt’s earlier inquiry. “Nothing better than flashbangs.”

“Molina,” Matt breathed, driving a heel into a stirring man’s chest. “Need to get him out of here. He’s still in the break room.”

“Copy,” Peter said. “How many…”

“The remaining ten are just up the stairs,” Matt noted. He'd definitely pushed himself a bit too far tonight. He could feel each breath widening the splits in his skin, bones and muscles stirring up deep bruises in his flesh.

“Perfect,” Peter said. “I just hate fighting man-to-man.”

Matt grinned.

“Well, after you. Age before beauty,” Peter said.

“Though I’m unable to confirm such details myself,” Matt said, “trusted sources have suggested I may have the advantage in both fields.”

“Dude!”

Matt slunk up the stairs—thankfully, the breach team had left the basement access doors ajar behind them—and into the main body of the chop shop, finding quiet pockets of absolute shadow to slip into behind strides.

Peter scaled the wall behind him, following along a story and a half up on the pockmarked ceiling overhead.

The next encounter was clean until it got filthy. Involved a soldier, back turned, perhaps a bit scared of the dark, and the club Matt introduced to the soft part where the spine meets the skull. It stunned him, but fell short of incapacitation; he whirled around, readied a retaliatory strike.

Matt was aware he'd been slowed down; he was unaware that he was so slow he'd be unable to get one of the knives in his abdomen out of the way of the blow. He swallowed a roar as the tiny blade was driven in deep under his opponent's fist, a fresh gout of his blood splattering atop the concrete. He threw himself atop the man and beat down onto him, any sense of reserve long since dried up.

His comrades quickly caught on to the sound of the struggle, and a lancet of semi-automatic fire lit up the wall just behind Matt. Peter was already on it—a sharp-eyed shot of webbing caught the rifle, yanked it sky-high, stuck it to the ceiling.

Peter’s next target was just behind another three—a massive steel rolling tool chest. They’d avoided the web, thought they’d avoided danger—Peter gave the chest a quick tug, and its sharp-edged weight barreled through the group, nearly crushing the last of them flat.

Shame. They’d really wasted their best fighters on that first wave, Matt noted idly, fist on cartilage in one hand, club on bone for the other.

The last of them were unremarkable, scared shitless (appropriately so, Matt supposed) by watching their allies getting picked off one by one. Fists to flesh, webs binding limbs, sidearms and rifles ripped out of their straps and holsters…

“I’m going to get Molina. Meet you in Wes’s office?”

Peter's voice cut Matt clean from a reverie he hadn't quite known he was in; Matt was bent over some semi-conscious enemy, chest heaving. Smelled of blood and a bit of gunsmoke. The only conscious heartbeats belonged to he and Peter. The rain had stopped, he realized. When had it passed?

Matt nodded, stood. Peter secured the enemy with a little flick of webbing.

No quips left there, then. Hm.

Matt made his way to the foreman’s office upstairs, where Matt Murdock’s clothes had been stashed. Matt felt for the cotton shirt folded under the desk—not quite dry, but certainly no longer in the soaked state he’d shed it in—and immediately knew he couldn’t don it quite yet.

He heard Peter and Molina a floor below him. Molina had startled as Peter entered the break room, wielding the folding chair he'd waited out the storm on like a defensive weapon. Really, man? There were knives in the silverware drawer.

“Stay back,” he said, voice hollow.

“Hey, pal,” Spider-Man said, easing in, close enough that his trademark colors and symbols must have been visible. “Heard you had a rough night. Here to get you home. How’s that sound?”

“Spider-Man,” Molina said. Seemed like he’d meant it as an exclamation of shock or disbelief, but he didn’t have the energy to add any intonation. “In Hell’s Kitchen? How'd you get here?”

“MetroCard, just like the rest of you,” Spider-Man said, tilting his head. “Come on, it’s safe.”

“I got… there’s someone else here,” Molina said. “Might need you a hell of a lot more than me. My lawy…”

“Well, that’s nice, but he’s safe too! Murdock, right?” Spider-Man said. “No worries. Got a, uh, buddy of mine with him.”

Matt smiled a little at that. Peter escorted Molina outside and joined him in the upstairs office shortly after.

“Hey,” Matt said. “Your webs any good at stopping blood?”

“Only in a pinch,” Peter replied, peering at some corkboard in museum posture, hands clasped behind his back. “It’s more, uh, watertight than wicking, so really not so great for the long-term. Why?”

“Need you to wrap me up,” Matt said. “My chest, anyway, the knife wounds. I’ll bleed right through the white.”

“And why would I do that when you’re going straight to an EMT?” Peter frowned.

Matt stared pointedly in his general vicinity.

“Matt…” Peter started.

“Exactly,” Matt said, “I’m here as Matthew Murdock, who happens to be in possession of some extremely unlawyerly wounds. Ones that would have the cops asking all the wrong questions. I can’t see an EMT.”

“Then we don’t get you out of here as Matt Murdock, easy,” Peter said. “We get you out on the roof, get you…”

“I need to testify, Pete,” Matt insisted. “Molina alone isn’t going to be enough, but Wes practically confessed to me, and we already have history on the record. Don’t see a case against him holding much water otherwise without me as a witness. In a manner of speaking.”

“Dude, you really don’t get the right to be worried about some random-ass future case when you’re currently standing in a little puddle of your own blood,” Peter said, voice gone sharp.

“It’s not… he knows your face, Peter,” Matt snapped, though the words came out a little closer to scolding than he meant them to. “He doesn’t know your name, but he knows exactly how to get to you, your weaknesses, and that may be more dangerous in the hands of a man like him than a name. You think you’re ever going to feel safe again if we don’t get him off the streets?”

Peter stilled.

“Ah,” he said plainly, as though the thought hadn’t yet occurred to him. “But I don’t think…”

“I was the one who got you involved,” Matt said. “Got you unmasked. Please. Please, kid, let me help you get out of it. You can think of it as a favor to me, yeah? Keeping my delicate conscience clean.”

“I still think… I don’t like it,” Peter said, almost whined. “It’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” Matt said, giving Peter’s upper arm a pat. “But we both know that.”

“You’re breaking my heart here, Murdock,” Peter sighed. “Fine. Come on, lemme see it.”

Matt pulled off the polyblend undershirt with a wince. The thin fabric had wicked up much of the dried blood, crusted into the shallow wounds.

“Oy gevalt,” Peter muttered, heart immediately leaping up to his throat.

Well, if his injuries looked even a quarter as bad as they felt, that was probably a perfectly measured reaction. The webs came out cool, almost icy on his skin, as Peter sealed his wounds down. It would be a relief if it wasn’t quickly accompanied by a burning alcoholic sting, so instead he had to grit his teeth through it.

“You ever seen Lord of the Rings?” Peter said.

“Read the books,” Matt hummed. “Movies were a little after my time.”

“Oh, well, uh,” Peter said, “Frodo, post-Shelob, is my point. That was in the books too, wasn’t it? Anyway, that’s what you look like right now. If Frodo was fucking ripped, anyway.”

Matt breathed out a laugh. Yeah, he could picture that.

Tugging back on Matt Murdock’s tie felt something like closure, though he never did manage to retrieve his glasses. Half the damn NYPD had heeded Spider-Man’s call, it seemed. They’d closed off the empty street, lined it with prison busses, patrol cars and undercovers parked with their engines running. Squadrons bustled into the chop shop the moment they’d seen Spider-Man escort the last of the civilians out, checking over his and Daredevil’s thorough work.

An EMT cornered them before they could cut through the crowd, where the detectives were already pondering logistics over a fold-out table.

“Here, let me take him,” she said, snapping on a fresh pair of gloves, reaching out for Matt.

Peter stiffened at his side.

“Nah, he’s totally fine! Cosmetic damage only on this model,” Spider-Man said, Sunday morning cartoon voice on, hand digging a little into Matt’s shoulder. The stabbed one. Damn, kid was pissed. “Checked him myself, ma’am. He just wants to get his info to the cops and get himself to bed!”

“Heavy emphasis on bed,” Matt offered through his meekest smile.

“A basic check won’t take long if he’s ‘totally fine,’” the EMT said, resolute.

“I know my rights and your RMA policies,” Matt said, setting aside the good humor. “I’m denying care while of sound mind, understood?”

“If you say so,” the EMT hummed, profoundly unconvinced.

“Sound mind, my ass,” Peter muttered by his ear, then, louder: “Hey, officers, we got your key witness here! He’s gonna die if he can’t give this statement right this minute! Figure of speech, obviously.”

A detective perked up, jogged over to them.

“Spider-Man,” she greeted. “What do we g—Murdock?” She laughed, a little wry. He recognized it—a local shield, on the younger side… what was her name?

“Hm? Is that one of mine?” he said, tilting his head innocently. “Fifteenth precinct?”

“One of… well, you ain’t wrong,” she said. “Man, how are you somehow always involved in this kind of…”

She trailed off, but the direction of her breath suggested a pointed glance towards the masked vigilante at his side. Spider-Man passed him over with a little pat on the back and a two-fingered salute, disappearing into the crowd.

“Let’s get you somewhere quieter and take that statement, yeah?” the detective said, taking his arm.

“Much appreciated,” he said. Though hopefully nowhere brighter—he wasn’t sure how much longer he trusted the webs to keep in the steady flow of blood.

On their way, Matt ran into a blissfully familiar pulse. This close up, it was clear he was unharmed, almost beaming with health.

“Hey, Mr. Murdock!” Molina called.

“Molina,” Matt said, half a sigh of relief. The detective walked him over.

He was perched off the back step of an ambulance. An EMT had draped an emergency blanket over him, probably more to keep him dry than anything else. The aluminized plastic didn’t read very well within the World on Fire, especially while speckled with light drizzle, the last murmurs of the passing storm—made it appear like Molina was just a head hovering over a cloud of noisy ether.

“How you doing?” Molina said.

“Just fine,” Matt said. “You know, I’m not presently on your retainer. You could probably call me Matt.”

“Well, I like Ross, Matt,” Molina said.

“Noted, Ross,” Matt said.

“Now, I gotta ask,” Ross said. “What was with the crossed fingers, the prayers? Clearly, uh… worked, not doubting that. Was there a wire?”

“Oh. Right, you’re a relatively recent addition to our neighborhood, aren’t you?” Matt smiled. “We’ve got, uh, something like a proverb here. You pray out loud in Hell’s Kitchen, the Devil’s going to hear you.”

“No shit,” Ross hummed.

“Of course, he’s only one man, nothing more,” Matt amended. No need to overrate himself. “Can’t save everyone. But I figured it was worth a shot.”

“Well, good thing he had an extra pair of hands tonight then, hm?” Ross said. “Dunno if you ran into him on your way out, but everyone’s talking about how his little buddy Spider-Man dropped in, too. He pulled me out! Nice kid.”

Huh.

Good thing I did, Matt supposed.

“Oh, hey, there he goes!” Ross said. Peter was vaulting the gap between the buildings, swinging low over the street, putting a little more distance between himself and the small army of police.

“Wish you could see him, Matt,” Ross mused. “The way he moves… shit, it’s really something.”

“So I’ve heard,” Matt said. “He’s a very special young man.”

Perched six stories skyward, Peter blushed furiously, the kind that spilled over past his collarbones.

Chapter 24

Notes:

just a short little cooldown/cleanup before the epilogue!
heads up for the standard graphic medical stuff+some descriptions of violence

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter already up in Matt’s apartment when he made it home. He’d dressed himself in a dry set of Matt’s clothes, laid himself out on the couch, propping his wounded leg up on its arm.

Soft breaths, relatively slow heart—he sounded half-asleep, maybe fully. Down at street level, Matt found himself a little charmed by the scene of familiarity. It was like he was right back in the dorms, only this particular roommate was nearly two decades younger than him, had a bad habit of getting himself shot at.

“Up we go,” Foggy said, helping Matt out of the taxi they’d arrived in. The cops had refused to allow him to make his own way home—only thing that saved him from being dropped off in a patrol car (and what an awful blow to the reputations of everyone involved that would have been) was a Hail Mary call to his partner’s cell.

Foggy had picked up within a ring, thank the Lord.

The half-hour testimony he’d provided while blood sloshed around inside his shoes had taken all of what little Matt had left, and he had to brace most of his weight on Foggy’s shoulders to get himself up the stairs.

“Neighbors are gonna think you’re a drunkard, brother,” Foggy muttered by his ear.

“Sweet of you, assuming they don’t already,” Matt said. “I have company, by the way.”

“The kid?”

Matt nodded.

“Past his bedtime,” Foggy noted.

“Past ours, too.”

The two of them shambled into the apartment. No keys necessary, as Matt still hadn’t quite gotten around to getting his door fixed. Peter startled awake at the quiet complaints of the brutalized hinges, sitting up straight.

“Sorry for waking you, Pete,” Foggy said. “You know where he keeps his first aid?”

“Uh,” Peter said drowsily, rising to stand. “I’ll go get it. Should… probably let him have the couch.”

Matt shed the sodden suit—half-propped up on Foggy the entire time—then dropped himself down on the couch, head spinning, hardly coherent, faintly nauseous. Didn’t take a doctor to know those were symptoms of exsanguination.

Blood loss sucks, Matt thought bitterly. Mostly because he might actually kill a man for one of the ice-cold bottles of beer sitting pretty in his fridge right now, but introducing a blood thinner to an extremely thinned-out supply was shockingly self-destructive, even for him. He hadn’t had the chance to finish the one from earlier that evening, felt like lifetimes ago: it sat right where he’d left it for Wes's taxi, miserably stale.

Foggy spotted the bundle of stained bandages around Peter’s calf as he returned from the bathroom with the kit and breathed in a sympathetic wince through his teeth.

“What happened there, kiddo?” he said.

“Buckshot,” Peter said.

And though it immediately filled Foggy with a head-to-toe flush of indignant rage, the sort that Matt had hardly seen since the mornings after Nobu and Frank or inside the occasional courtroom—who points a shotgun at a kid, Matt could practically hear him thinkingto his credit and limitless tact, all Foggy did was smile and say, “Well, good thing you’re not a deer, then.”

Peter managed to return the smile, but not much else. He set the first aid kit down on the coffee table, then ducked down for something in his shorn suit.

“I can, uh… I’ll do nurse duty this time,” he said “I owe him one. And you… probably got work in the morning, don’t you?”

“That I do. You drive a hard bargain,” Foggy said, “but let the record show I have moral qualms about the situation. Amateur medical care is inadvisable under any circumstances, yes, but amateur medical care administered by a minor? I shiver at the sheer scale of liability.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, man,” Peter said, waving him off.

“Thank you for getting me home, dear,” Matt said.

“Don’t you ‘dear’ me, Murdock, I’m still mad at you,” Foggy replied. He paused at the door. “You know what this asshole did, Pete? Had me thinking he’d actually gotten himself out of a dangerous situation without getting stabbed! You know, using his words! And I don’t think he was ever going to correct me, either, because he didn’t say shit until I gave him a friendly pat on his back and my poor, delicate, lily-white hand came back all red.”

“You didn’t ask,” Matt said weakly.

“I shouldn’t have to!” Foggy said, just shy of yelled.

Peter stiffened a little at that, and a hard knot of unsaid words gathered at the back of his tongue.

“Fogs,” Matt rasped, but Foggy didn’t need to hear heartbeats or smell sorrow to recognize that might’ve been the wrong thing to say, that Peter had immediately begun to pile all the responsibility for Matt’s injuries on his own narrow shoulders.

“Hey,” Foggy said. “Hey, Peter, no one’s blaming you. Hell, you’re probably the only reason he got out of there in any shape at all.”

Peter just nodded quietly, hands clenched, nails digging into his palms.

“It’s not your fault, Peter,” Foggy repeated. “You gotta say it back out loud, or I’m not going to leave. Going to just stand out in the hallway, talking loudly about someone getting stabbed until the cops get called.”

“‘It’s not your fault, Peter,’” Peter recited, though with enough spirit that Foggy’s strategy had clearly paid off.

“Smartass,” Foggy said. “Take good care of him.”

There was a brief beat of silence as Foggy’s footsteps retreated, then Peter knelt at Matt’s side. He cracked open what he’d grabbed from his suit: a little glass ampoule, sounded like. He let careful drops from it fall over the webbing. Some kind of specialized solvent, apparently, sizzling through the strands, but gentle on the tender skin underneath it.

“He’s right, you know,” Matt said. “Nothing about tonight’s really worth beating yourself up over.”

“Dunno,” Peter said, wiping around the wounds. “Did, uh, quite literally walk into getting myself captured. What if Wes wasn’t so damn stuck on… what, living out his wildest dreams of having superheroes on his payroll? Probably’d be dead already. Both of us, cold and dead.”

And that was… unfortunately, it was a pretty accurate assessment, but corroborating it wouldn’t really do anyone any good in hindsight.

“Wes didn’t tell a single lie tonight,” Matt offered instead.

“Not sure how that’s relevant to me sucking at this,” Peter hummed. He’d begun to stage various instruments and treatments on Matt’s coffee table—iodine, forceps, pre-strung needles, bandages—though perhaps with a little too much care: scared of actually getting started? He’d need to get over his fear fairly quickly if that was the case, as Matt probably had about fifteen or twenty minutes of consciousness left.

“He… well, he tolerated Matt Murdock, but he was genuinely fond of you, of Benjamin,” Matt said. “The moment you and Spider-Man overlapped in his head, he thought of you as one of his people. You were probably walking out of there on your own feet even if I didn't intervene. Wasn't going to hurt you.”

“He smacked me in the head!”

“Right, well. Never would have hurt you permanently,” Matt conceded. “But my point is… if a Goddamned crime boss can see the worth in you, I don’t know why you have such a hard time with it yourself. You’re the best of us.”

Peter was quiet for a moment, chewing on his lip, and…

“Did you just roll your eyes at me?” Matt huffed.

“Maybe,” Peter sniped, snapping on a nitrile glove. Matt rarely used them himself—they messed with the finer points of his tactile perception—but he supposed it made sense that the lab rat might have a different preference.

“Did you want to pull this out yourself, or should I do it?”

Must be referring to the knife that’d been punched into his gut to its hilt. It was the only one left—the rest had been shed with Daredevil’s shirt.

“Be my guest,” Matt said, sitting up a bit, breath already spiked in anticipation.

“Alright, need, a, uh… countdown, or something?” Peter said. “Glass of whiskey, maybe. Leather strap bite down on? Or is that just a Hollywood thing?”

“I am ready when you are,” Matt enunciated blithely.

That was not the answer Peter wanted, it seemed, and he started taking it on his lip, gnawing through the feathered flesh.

“Pete,” Matt hummed. “Say the word and I’ll do it myself.”

“Finish what you started, meshuggah bastard,” Peter muttered under his breath. Matt raised an eyebrow—wasn’t completely certain which one of them the mantra was meant to address—then Peter steeled himself with a long inhale, found what little of the hilt was left to grip between the tips of his fingers, and pulled.

Felt a bit like he was yanking Matt’s soul out with it—his senses all went alight with white-hot pain, but the sensation went about as quickly as it came. Perks of super-strength, Matt thought. Soon as he had the capacity to think, anyway.

He came to (ah, so he had actually passed out for a moment, then) with both of Peter’s hands pressed firmly atop the wound.

“Still with me, Matt?” he said, tension hitching his voice high.

Matt managed to make some kind of noise in acknowledgement, but God seemed fixed on making him a liar tonight—his consciousness quickly spun itself back into dust.

“Ah, shit,” he heard, then he slipped back into nothing.

Matt’s eyes fluttered open as the world around him rushed back in. His apartment, same post-storm humidity heavy on the air, spilled blood not yet oxidized, Peter’s strange heartbeat still right at his side: so he hadn’t been down too long. Good.

The deep wound on his abdomen had already been stitched up, sterilized, and tightly bandaged. Down just long enough, then: he was not terribly sorry about missing out on the procedure.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Peter said, sounding dog-tired. He was finishing up on the smaller cut on Matt's thigh, faint sting of the needle barely registering over his baseline.

Kid had gone as far as to pop a bag of Ringer's Lactate for him, Matt noticed, his bloodstream carrying the cloying scent of salts and chlorides. In lieu of an IV pole, Peter had suspended it from the ceiling overhead with a long strand of webbing. It swayed gently in the empty air, a deep-sea diver’s tether. There was a butterfly needle taped down in the crook of his arm—it’d taken Peter a few attempts to find a vein, if the fresh bruising in the area happened to be related, but that was hardly Matt’s main concern at the moment.

“Sorry about that,” Matt winced. “Didn’t know you were a fully-fledged field medic.”

“I’m really not,” Peter said. “Panicked, was half-ready to drop you off at a hospital when you conked out, but someone put an extremely detailed cheat sheet in the front pocket of the kit. Assuming you’ve never read it?”

Christ, Claire, Matt thought, equal parts charmed and chagrined.

“Doubt it was meant for me,” he said.

“No, it was certainly not,” Peter hummed, maybe a little too amused. “Author was, uh… pretty damn clear on that. ‘To whomever’s got a half-dead vigilante on their hands…’”

Matt flushed slightly, running his hands over his face.

Peter stood, snapped off his gloves, tossed them atop the rest of the soaked post-op refuse. Poor kid reeked of Matt’s blood, almost head to toe. He lifted up Matt’s legs and sat himself down on the couch underneath them.

“Don’t think I ever ended up mentioning this, but, uh, my uncle got done in by a shotgun,” he said, letting his head drop back on the cushion. “I was there for it.”

Matt stilled, unsure where Peter was going with this.

“And, you know, like in video games and movies… they’re always this close-range enemy deleter,” Peter said. “But even knowing that, it didn’t really prepare me for the way they just hack into someone. And I remember he didn’t bleed, not really. Because you bleed liquid, you know? The stuff coming out of him was, uh… it was all pretty solid.”

Peter’s hands had tensed ever so slightly atop Matt’s shins.

“Geez, that was graphic,” Peter said, voice gone light. “My bad. Anyway, the point is… I’m sorry I broke my promise, took a bullet for you again. Because if you got killed by a shotgun in front of me, it would… I wouldn’t survive it either. I’d be just as dead. So you can’t really be mad.”

Huh? Matt eased himself up to half-sit and face Peter, gentle as he could be with his stitches.

“Peter,” Matt said carefully. “What made you think I’d be mad at you?”

“Well, you said so, didn't you?” Peter said, vaguely indignant. “No taking bullets, or else. And then I went and stood in front of a shotgun.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt said. “But, uh… when I said that, I wasn’t exactly operating under the impression that you were… at all taking me seriously.”

“What?”

“There was no way in Hell you were listening to me,” Matt said. “Why would you listen to me? I’d never listen to me.”

“Why the fuck wouldn’t I listen to you?!” Peter snapped, rising to stand.

And why wouldn’t he, really? Matt bit his lip. He really should’ve known better, throwing around empty ultimatums like that.

He was treating Peter too much like himself, he realized.

Key difference: Peter was clearly raised with love, start to (so, so close to the) finish. He'd had people taken from him, but he'd never been left behind, so he was perfectly capable of depending on others at the end of the day, even if he'd recently taken a liking to the idea of pretending otherwise.

Why wouldn’t Peter heed the advice of someone he trusted, do his very best to live up to their expectations? He didn’t have anything close to that impulse that Matt had beat into him, the one that made him buck against any sliver of guidance, any sign of coddling.

Didn’t grow up needing it. Matt couldn't be the one to introduce that sickness.

“The only person who has the right to be mad here is you, Peter,” Matt said. “Had to stitch me up, watch me pass out. It's not fair. I wish I never put you in that position, especially knowing…”

“Don’t,” Peter growled, stalking around the coffee table to pace. “Don’t you dare. The last thing I need is your pity. We were doing so well without all the pity.”

“It’s not pity, it’s selfishness,” Matt said. “I think I’m just afraid that I’ll break you like…”

Matt trailed off. He couldn’t quite make himself say ‘I was’ out loud. That would be tantamount to admitting defeat, wouldn’t it?

“Like what?” Peter said. “You think I'm breakable? You can't tell me that's not pity.”

“No. No, Pete. Don't want to mess you up like I was messed up. I just think that, uh,” Matt tried instead, “there’s a chance that we may be bad for each other. Screwed up in incompatible ways.”

It was Peter’s turn to go still. He crossed his arms, tilted his head a little, started worrying his lip again.

“You know, this, uh, total hypocrite once told me something,” Peter said, “and, not gonna lie, I kinda thought it was dumb when I first heard it. But now I think I might actually get it. He said, ‘if you don’t get hurt, it’s not worth it.’ That the best relationships are gonna get you hurt, and the good stuff’s all in between.”

Matt huffed dismissively at his own words. Peter wandered back over to drop himself by Matt's side on the couch again.

“So,” Peter said to the ceiling, “you’re definitely not mad?”

“No. Not at anyone named Peter,” Matt said.

“And you’re not disappointed?” There was a tiny grin in his voice.

“Not even slightly,” Matt said, looping an arm around Peter’s shoulders. “Cross my heart. And, hey, even if I was…”

“I probably shouldn’t be listening to you anyway,” Peter finished, “on account of the whole bloodthirsty maniac thing.”

“Now you’re keeping up,” Matt hummed.

There was a little lull. Matt heard Peter's heartbeat ease, his eyes flutter closed.

“Hey, you, uh,” Peter said, “manage to catch the end of the game?”

“Hm? Ah. Mets lost,” Matt said.

“Well, we'll get 'em next time.”

Matt breathed out a laugh. “Will we?”

“Hm. Probably not. But that's fine, too.”

Notes:

see you next week one more time🥲

Chapter 25

Notes:

"will probably end up around 40-50k" LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

hopefully you guys dont mind the nested vignette style of this epilogue too much. but if i wrote this out the same as the rest it'd probably be another spare 40k and nobody wants that. though this ended up a whole eighth of the way there on its own which is. really fucking hilarious. probably should've chopped this up too but i did already commit to the /25...

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Peter squinted into the white glare of the early morning sun as he hopped up the subway steps, gripping a shitty coffee like a pilgrim’s totem. It was still much too hot to sip on without scalding, even though he'd gone and risked popping the lid to let the steam loose on a moving train. How poetic: its blessings of caffeine were quite literally in hand, yet still tantalizingly out of reach, the curse of his cat’s tongue. Spider's tongue?

He should really grow up and start shelling out the bit extra for the iced stuff.

Peter hadn’t really been up—let alone out and about—at a time that began with ‘six’ and ended with ‘ante meridian’ since high school, and the light headache buzzing behind his eyes was a firm reminder thereof.

But he had a court date.

Or, to be more accurate, Matt Murdock had a court date, which Peter had eagerly asked to attend before he’d learned exactly what such a thing entailed. Wasn’t a trial—they weren’t anywhere close to a trial, Matt said, something about indictments, preliminary something or others… Peter hadn’t really been listening past “You’d need to be there around 7.” May as well have been “you'd need to peel a fingernail off,” “wear a Sox hat in the Bronx.”

The prospect hardly seemed fun after that. But May always said to finish what you started, so Peter Parker always sees his things through to the end, goddammit.

And here he was, courthouse, thrifted button-down, ass-crack of dawn, sleepwalking through the metal detector.

Not even the courthouse—the deal would be much sweeter if he also got an excuse to marvel at the iconic architectural achievement that was Thurgood Marshall—just some courthouse, perfectly generic 1970's pastiche, all concrete and boxed ceilings and faded paneling and people who looked like they really really didn't want to be there.

See, it’s funny: apparently, after you leave something in the legal system’s hands, it doesn’t just wrap itself up with a neat little bow within a few days. No, it takes way, way longer than that.

And that made Peter revisit his work, wonder how many of the muggers he’d bagged and tagged over the years still haven’t seen charges. He’d inquired, and was then left a tad heartbroken when he got Matt to admit that a trust-me-bro post-it testimony from an anonymous vigilante wasn’t usually quite enough evidence for anyone to do any actual prosecution on.

But deterrence is deterrence. Maybe it’s a good thing for a criminal to face consequences while still avoiding the less-than-rehabilitative aspects of incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. A harrowing encounter with Spider-Man might be more than enough motivation for someone to rethink their rough and rowdy ways.

That was about what Matt had said to talk him down, anyway. Edited generously for the layman.

Peter wondered if that was what Matt believed. He'd probably given him the Criminal Justice for Dummies version; surely Matt operated off of some ultra-complex inner penological code with eight billion contradictory layers of precedents or exceptions or special cases.

Oh, wait, that was just the Catholicism.

The hearing only dealt the charges related to Matt and Molina’s kidnappings, and had been (rather aggressively, Matt said) fast-tracked. He mentioned that he’d heard the Feds were taking over on the whole criminal-enterprise part, and it was looking like a prolonged investigation, a bit of gossip from his own NYPD contact. The paramilitary group Wes had hired was apparently notorious for this sort of thing—picking up illegal side jobs between legitimate security stints—but they also happened to have a cracked legal team, knew exactly what shade of gray they operated within, so Matt seemed unenthusiastic there.

But, again, he was there to reassure Peter: the ass-whooping they'd so generously received from Spider-Man and Daredevil might be deterrence enough to have them sticking with just the legit gigs.

Peter slipped quietly into the stiff bench and worked the skin of his palm, vaguely nervous for reasons he couldn't quite seem to narrow down. Maybe it was the gun on the hip of the bailiff, maybe it was the roaring hum of fluorescent lights overhead, maybe it was just the lack of sleep. He’d really hoped for more of a crowd, but he was one of just a few in attendance. Better hope his hair, actually combed and parted for once, and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses were disguise enough, then.

They weren't, of course. First time that Wes took the stand, his eyes caught on Peters’, and he gave him a quick little wink before dutifully returning his attention to the prosecutor, smoothly enough that Peter suspected he might've been the only one to notice its absence.

Peter didn't know what the hell he was supposed to make of that. 

But aside from that flicker of drama, the first half was a total drag: dull recitations of names and dates that Peter already knew firsthand, a bunch of requests and motions that Peter knew absolutely nothing about. Things really picked up after that, though.

Seeing Matt in his bloodless natural habitat was definitely worth the price of admission. Dead-scary on the stand, wielded the truth like a dagger, tricked the defense into stumbling headfirst into their own traps of rhetoric with careful parries of logic. Shame that you could object to leading a witness, but not leading the defense. He did it all far too delicately to be accused of being hostile.

Shame for Wes and his representation, anyway.

Peter thanked Matt's God for the nuns or Jack Murdock or whoever else had preserved that immaculate heart of his back when he was still young and impressionable. Could you imagine Matthew Murdock as a supervillain? Hell, one with a moral compass just the slightest bit more askew than it already was? They'd literally all be done for. 

'They' meant New York City, of course. Even as a villain, Peter couldn't quite picture him being interested in much else.

“By the way, heard from Antonia last night,” Peter said, chewing on the straw of an overpriced iced coffee, Matt’s insistent treat during recess. “The gal from the chop shop. Pinged the burner I used to apply for the job.”

“Oh?” Matt said, picking at a bagel. “And what’s she up to?”

“Apparently, she was able to drain a good chunk of the cash out of Wes’s accounts before the Feds froze them,” Peter hummed. “Guess almost all of it’s very quietly going back to the victims she could identify once the heat goes down.”

“Almost all?” Matt said, eyebrows ticked up.

“I mean, to be fair, we’re probably getting the guy signing her paychecks indicted,” Peter shrugged. “Girl’s still gotta eat.”

Matt just shook his head at that, a humorless little grin tacked to his face.

Now (not that he'd ever admit it, barely even to himself), Peter had been half-convinced that Matt was going to vanish from his life entirely after they’d tied up their little collaboration, and he'd end up right back where he'd started before wandering awkwardly into the coffee shop. The song and dance about accompanying him to court was mostly just a brute-force method of staying in touch.

It soon became clear that his fears were completely unfounded, however.

In fact, Peter was quickly confronted by the fact that he couldn’t shake Matt off if he tried: Nelson and Murdock were going on retainer for Peter, and his identity issues were getting sorted whether he liked it or not.

Again. Thank god he wasn't a supervillain.

It felt a little silly to sign all those waivers and forms to attend a formal meeting with Matt and Foggy. Surely after you've stitched one another up, your relationship was strong enough to skip all that paperwork, wasn't it?

“Both Matt and I agree that the best way to get out of your lease agreement is as quietly as possible,” Foggy said. “By knowingly signing a form with an incorrect date of birth and misusing a notary stamp, you’ve, uh, clearly committed fraud.”

“Whoops,” Peter said.

“Precisely the word I’d use,” Foggy said. “And besides the fact that those are crimes—and crimes that prosecutors dream about, what with how open and shut they are—it also means your lease has never actually been legally binding. You’re not technically your landlord’s tenant.”

Peter leaned back in one of the frayed chairs of the Nelson and Murdock office, staring at the city reflections that danced across the ceiling.

“And I’m guessing that includes all of my protections against illegal evictions and stuff.”

“Not all of them,” Matt offered, quietly rapping his nails on the desk. “New York City has incredibly robust squatter’s rights. Since you’ve been there longer than 30 days, your landlord would still need a court order to remove you.”

“And a judge is probably going to like the look of a signed lease, even a totally bogus one,” Foggy said. “Might not be able to get you out at all.”

“Of course, such a scenario would mean said fraudulence goes on his permanent record,” Matt said. “Not an especially flattering thing to have on there if you intend on renting in the future.”

“We could argue he was a minor at the time of the infraction,” Foggy hummed, a pen pressed to his lip. “It's a non-violent offense, so, what? A few hours of community service before it gets sealed?”

“You forget that'd also mean admitting he was an unattended minor, so that, and getting a CPS case opened, getting assigned a social worker. Hell, getting thrown into transitional housing, extended foster care,” Matt said. “Might, uh, significantly disrupt his present lifestyle.”

Peter’s head swung side to side like he was watching a tennis match. Was he supposed to be contributing to this conversation, or was it more of a spectator sport?

“Hey, I don’t really want to be a squatter, guys. That’s an uncool word,” Peter said.

Foggy glanced at him with a blink—maybe he’d actually forgotten he was there—and shook his head to refocus. 

“The point is,” Foggy said, “let’s plan to play it smart all the way up until we can’t. We can avoid any confusion or litigation… or squatting… if you just never give your landlord a reason to suspect fraudulence.”

“And what's smart look like?” Peter asked.

“I’d suggest you very, very politely ask to break out of your lease, cite some unverifiable emergency, leave it way cleaner than you found it,” Foggy said. “Hell, maybe go ahead and refresh the paint.”

“Ideally, you'd want to avoid the slightest appearance of push-back,” Matt said. “Even if that means eating what's left on the rent when you break the lease. Still a Hell of a lot less trouble than the fraud or forgery charges.”

“Or jail,” Peter sighed, “or foster care.”

“God forbid,” Matt said brightly.

Legal business aside, Peter was in and out of Nelson and Murdock more often than he had any business being. The first few times, he’d come armed with excuses (“Foggy, check out these pics I took of Matt looking badass on a roof,” “I tried making a loaf of babka and have no other taste-testers,” “I had this super-specific legal question and Google is dogshit.”). But he very quickly stopped selling, as absolutely nobody was buying it.

He was just there to be somewhere other than his lonely apartment (now literally just boxes and a mattress; he'd packed all the non-essentials up already) and they all knew it.

Peter still hadn’t shook the cleaning bug he’d acquired while vacuuming cars for the chop shop, so on the worst of the unforgivingly long late-summer days, he decided to take it out on the dust bunnies hidden in the odd corners of their office.

“We should probably start paying him,” Foggy said to his partner. “Child labor… yeah, sure, I can work with that, but unpaid child labor… that’s just a skip and a hop over the line for me, man.”

Peter was in the other room, attacking the Cold War-era blinds over the windows. The layer of dust they’d gathered was genuinely thicker than the brittle plastic slats themselves. Bits of the Berlin Wall were probably somewhere in there.

“You’re welcome to try,” Matt huffed. “I was unsuccessful.”

“Hey, Peter!” Foggy called. “Go get a real job!”

“No, you!” Peter said. He was much too focused on said blinds to put together a comeback with a little more finesse.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Foggy said. “I could not possibly be more gainfully employed. But… it still stings. Why does it still sting?”

“Anyway, I do pay him,” Matt said. “Just in lunches, the occasional dinner, a martial arts lesson or two. That’s all he’ll take without physically fleeing my reach. He’s faster than me.”

“Are you going to make me cite ILO Conventions? You and I both know renumeration’s gotta be in cold hard cash, brother. The taxed kind. State and federal.”

“I’ve tried, but he… you know, that’s not too bad an idea, actually. Hey, Pete,” Matt called. “Want us to launder some money for you?”

“I beg your fucking pardon?” Peter called back.

Nelson and Murdock would come to launder an extraordinary amount of Peter’s under-the-table earnings. They’d take his cash, sneak bits of it inside various invoices, and pay it back to him over-the-table as an office assistant.

Had the bonus side effect of establishing a history of employment and strengthening the case for his existence.

“I gotta ask,” Peter said, peering over Foggy’s shoulder as he shuttled money around, “where did you learn to do this stuff?”

“I was born unto small business owners, compadre,” Foggy hummed. “Find me an honest man with an LLC, and I will show you the crime.”

Peter could never betray them. They owned his sorry ass.

Good thing that destruction would be mutually assured, and they all knew it. Also probably helped that he just plain liked them, and the sentiment seemed to be reciprocated.

One odd day, when he'd come armed with a steam cleaner he'd borrowed from the library, Matt cornered Peter in his office with a neatly-wrapped gift. He had Daredevil’s grim resolution in the set of his jaw as he pressed the little package into Peter’s hands, so Peter knew better than to refuse.

Peter opened it to find a matched stationary set: a handsome leatherbound pocket planner and one of those fancy old-fashioned enamel pens.

He ran his fingers over the rich cream-colored paper of the planner with quiet awe.

Looked like the kind of thing you got in a bookstore that was more locked glass cases than open shelves, Peter thought, the kind that he sometimes accidentally walked into, then immediately back out of. Was it a repurposed thank-you from a well-meaning but ignorant client, or had Matt gone out and bought it special?

If it was the latter, had someone at the store picked them out for him, or had he somehow known they were bright Spidey red?

Peter was far too verklempt to ask any of these questions. Or do what he'd been raised so carefully to do, for that matter: say thank you with a bright and clear voice, immediately offer smiles and hugs in return.

“It’s an early birthday gift,” Matt explained, a little bemused by Peter's silence. “But I feel bad, as it comes with a bit of hard work, so maybe I’ll get you something fun later. Sit. We’re marking down a few dates in there.”

Peter stubbornly refused to cry. Good thing he had been given a task to do instead.

The first date Matt dictated was when Peter’s successfully-truncated lease was up, and the next was when a new, legal one should be signed by to avoid being keyless, though Matt insisted he was welcome to the couch for a few weeks if need be.

Matt refused to help him house-hunt (“Not like I can comment on the natural light, and you do not want to know what I can smell in the floorboards.”), but Foggy handled rental brokers like a reintroduced wolf pack does native deer populations, and was delighted to spend an afternoon or two with Nelson and Murdock's newest stray.

“You think I should give up on Queens and Astoria? Move to the Island proper?” Peter hummed, shutting his laptop, cheeks a little warm with frustration after another unsuccessful trawling of the web. “Nothing really left for me out there. For Peter Parker, anyway. Spider-Man’s gotta stick around, no matter what, it’s in the name, but…”

“I’m not really the right person to ask, as I currently live four and a half blocks from the room I was born in,” Matt said. “But I’ve, uh, heard rumor that a fresh start can be good for the soul.”

Intrepid reporter Karen Page was the source of said rumor, Peter quickly sleuthed. She dropped by the office a few times when Peter had been lurking, and he learned she'd been born in the far-off foreign country of Vermont, apparently, somewhere with these things called ‘mountains’ and ‘old-growth forests’ and ‘towns with a population of eight hundred.’

Peter was pretty sure his current block housed eight hundred. Talk about culture shock.

Karen even offered to drive him to a few of the more out-of-the-way, off-market showings, as she was, somehow, the only licensed member of the trio.

Matt had a government-mandated excuse, sure, but Foggy certainly dressed like he should be cruising to court in something fast and German-made. He liked taxis, Foggy'd said. Important part of New York culture. It was his moral duty to do everything he could to keep the profession alive in the cruel digital age, some nonsense like that.

“You know, once you're eighteen, you can learn to drive with adults outside of your family,” Karen said. “Any interest?”

They were waiting at an intersection; Peter glanced over, saw the colors from the traffic light dance in her light hair. She seemed the faintest bit nervous when she drove him, hands at nine and three, her usually ready and clever commentary put on pause between red lights and heavy bouts of congestion, so Peter was more than a little surprised by the offer. 

“You'd wanna teach some random-ass kid to drive? Not worried about me, uh, somehow immediately finding a way to explode your car?”

“Hey, I'm an excellent teacher,” Karen smiled. “Parents were too busy, so I taught my kid brother, and he passed his first try. You and him… sometimes I see… sometimes I think the two of you would've gotten along. Similar spirits.”

And though she was all kinds of nice, and seemed about as battle-tested as anyone Peter'd ever met, he just didn't know her as well as he did Matt and Foggy, so he left the questions raised by the usage of past tense unasked.

The next date Matt gave him to add to the planner was the latest he could take the GED and get the results back in time to enroll in a community college for the upcoming fall semester, followed up with the soonest. The latter was just a few days away.

“You could pass this test in your sleep,” Matt said to Peter’s immediate protests. “Go on, get it over with.”

“I’m scared,” Peter whined.

“You aren’t scared of stitches,” Matt said. “God knows you aren’t scared of getting shot at, stabbed. What self-respecting superhero lets themselves get scared of a little standardized testing?”

“I dunno,” Peter said. “What if I’ve been stupid this whole time, and I just forgot? What if I get my results back and it just says, ‘your dumb ass has been banned from every single higher education institution in America, we hate you,’ or something?”

Matt pinched at the bridge of his noise from under his glasses.

“Please,” he huffed from behind his hand. “Cut the bullshit.”

“Hey!”

“I don’t think you’re scared of failing, Peter,” Matt said, driving his pointer finger into the desk like it owed him money. “I think it’s passing you’re scared of. Because passing means you actually have to move on, take your next steps, and… I get it, that’s always frightening. But you cannot let fear hold you back. You cannot let yourself stay in the same place forever. If not now, then when? I think it’s high time you move on.”

The textbook application of anaphora and chiasmus made Peter sick. How was he supposed to win against Cicero himself in a pair of slick red glasses?

God, if he knew this was gonna be his life, he would’ve taken Debate instead of AcaDec like all the actual cool kids did.

“If you have no further comments, mark next week’s test, and let’s move on,” Matt said after a beat, though his light grin suggested he knew damn well Peter had no fight left in him.

After that, there were the more sundry adult responsibilities: Medicare open enrollment, benefit application deadlines, an appointment at the DMV for a State ID, when he should try and move his money from an account with teenage training wheels to something a little more adept at handling the vast (LOL) Parker fortunes… Peter noticed the beginnings of a headache prickling behind his eyes. August was decidedly not going to be fun.

Then, Matt told him the day MIT freshies were expected to report to orientation. Peter practically growled at that one.

“It’s safer if they don’t know me,” Peter muttered. “They’re just fine without me.”

“Yeah, they tell you that? It’s not fair to make those decisions for them. You told me you promised them you’d try,” Matt said. “Did you ever really try?”

“What if… what if there’s nothing left to try for? What if it’ll never be the same?”

“Nothing is ever the same,” Matt said, borrowing the Devil’s voice, low but firm as far-off thunder. “What has been is rarely what will be. That’s how the passage of time works. It’s a hard truth, but people change, relationships change, even when there’s not magic involved. Doesn’t mean it’s a good reason to live like you’re dead.”

“Hypocrite,” Peter said.

“Of course,” Matt said. “I’ve been there, so I know what’s best. What not to do.”

“Smartass.”

“Guilty on all charges,” Matt said, nodding sagely. “Talk to your friends. Just try. If there’s nothing left, there’s nothing left, but you owe it to them, even if you don’t give a shit about yourself, to check first before you give up.”

Peter was gonna kill him. He really was. While he was busy fuming, Matt stood, circled the desk to lean against it, gave the back of Peter’s shoulder a pat.

“Hey, it’s going to work out,” Matt said.

“Yeah, yeah, can’t let it do anything else,” Peter recited.

“You will not,” Matt corrected. “Can suggests circumstance. Will suggests intention.”

“Know-it-all,” Peter said.

“You’re going to run out of things to call me eventually.”

“Now, counselor,” Peter said. “It would be a ruinous error to trivialize my superlative vocabulary.”

Matt ducked his head down in a little laugh.

Peter spun the bright red pen atop his fingers. What a gorgeous thing, perfectly balanced, wrote smooth as a cool summer night; it made his hand almost unrecognizable just by proximity to its sheer luxury. He should be holding a gnawed-on Ticonderoga over some buck-fifty notebook, not this.

But it’s time to move on, take his next steps, isn’t it? Time to grow up.

He wrote in the date, set the pen down.

Then, Peter did something Matt wasn’t expecting, he only had half-formed notions of himself—he stood and threw his arms around Matt. Matt stiffened, then just as quickly softened, returning the embrace.

It confirmed a suspicion that Peter held in a very dusty corner of his mind since they’d first met: Matthew Murdock was really, really good at giving hugs.

“Thank you for the birthday present, Matt,” Peter said, pulling back. “Means a lot. Probably too much. I, uh… I really didn’t think I was getting one this year, so…”

Or the next, or the one after that, or the one after that…

“You’re welcome, Pete. Really, it’s the least I could do,” Matt said, face gone round with fondness, “what anyone would’ve done.”

“God hates liars,” Peter said.

“Good thing He adores the humble,” Matt said.

“Someone in this room is humble? News to me.”

Turns out, Peter had been overthinking the whole reclaiming-friendships thing, and Matt’s hard-assery was an excellent framework to step back and reassess things with.

Things won’t be the same, so there was no real reason to swoop in with some grand explanation of that mystic shitshow, no need to let them know what they’d lost, just how much he’d taken from them.

All Peter really had to do was remember why they’d meshed together so well in the first place.

Once he’d figured that out, Ned was shockingly easy. Peter logged on that old game of theirs to find he was still on his friends list. Guess his username, ParallelParking, was just enough degrees removed from Peter Parker for the spell to leave it unaltered.

07/26 08:43:37 PM ParallelParking said: hey pal. dunno if you remember me but we used to play together like wayyy back and im gettin back into the game you up for some coop?

Peter really doubted he’d hear back. He’d ignored plenty of similar messages thinking they were bots himself. So, he was more than a little surprised when he logged back on a few days later and saw a notification in his inbox.

07/28 12:28:39 PM Nedhead said: ngl bro i dont remember you at all lmao
07/28 12:29:03 PM Nedhead said: but yeah i still play!!!
07/28 12:29:41 PM Nedhead said: here’s my discord send me a request n we can hop on vc whenever :) you’re est right?

God, Ned was so nice.

And, like, so needed to brush up on his infosec if he was still actually going into software engineering. Peter had his social media and real name and phone number within days. What if he had hidden intentions? You know, ones worse than his actual hidden intentions?

Much, much more shocking than Ned was MJ, however.

“Hello, Peter Parker,” she said, cornering him at a table the next time he’d been brave enough to visit her coffee shop.

It’d been what felt like an eon, even though he knew it hadn’t been much more than a fortnight since he’d embarrassed himself here. Good thing New York was a dusty old city with an awful short-term memory.

“Hi,” Peter replied placidly, a little too pleased to see her up close to be frightened by the unexpected ambush.

“I’m quitting my job soon,” MJ said.

“Oh, uh… sorry? Or congratulations?”

“Congratulate me,” she said, though nothing in her tone touched celebratory. “I’m leaving for college.”

“Wow, that’s like, so exciting,” Peter intoned. “I hope you have fun.”

MJ stared pointedly, crossed her arms. Peter blinked back. What was she…?

“Ask me for my phone number, Peter Parker,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Did I fucking stutter?” she said.

“No, no, no, but, uh,” Peter said. “But, uh… what for?”

MJ titled her head, pursed her lips.

“To text,” she sounded out. “Or call, if you’re one of those annoying call-only sorts of guys. I’m gonna be back in the city a lot, and you won’t have a designated place to stare at me after I quit, so.”

“You want me to text you? Even after, the, uh… staring?”

“I mean, sure, I guess,” she huffed, glancing at the ceiling, and this was the moment Peter noticed she was almost as nervous as he was. “You were always considerate about approaching me, which means you’re capable of respecting boundaries, and maybe I like being watched from afar like some kind of rare Amazonian bird. But, uh, mostly, I just think you might wanna text me. And I’m a very kind and thoughtful person, if you hadn’t noticed. Doing you a favor.”

“I mean, uh,” Peter mumbled, immediately casing the joint for possible exits. Then, he sat up straight, lit up head to toe by some bright flare of courage. “MJ, may I please have your phone number?”

“Why, I thought you’d never ask, Mr. Parker,” she deadpanned, then burst into a wide grin. It was the first time in a very long while he’d seen her smile.

He realized, blood running cold, that he’d almost forgotten what one of those looked like. God, what an awful tragedy that would’ve been.

Matt was right. He always was, apparently. That sick, sick bastard.

Peter had been deathly afraid of moving on, dragging himself out of the purgatory he'd wandered in for the last six months, not just because that meant he had to take his next steps, but because it was impossible to take them without first accepting his old life was dead and gone. That nothing would be the same.

And it wasn’t the same, of course. Ned was not too much more than a gaming buddy, and MJ as an awkward acquaintance was just as shitty a texter as she was as a loving girlfriend. Honestly, Peter mostly thought of it as an especially timely way of knowing that they were both still alive and happy.

Not too long later, he was sitting on the floor of a new apartment, aimlessly running his fingers along the tangles in its ancient carpet. This one actually belonged to the real Peter Parker, not the imaginary kid with the Stark Industries guardian and a cushy spot at some university, and that somehow made him… it was silly, but he already felt like more of a person, less of some ghost pretending to be one. But intangibles aside, there were very few differences between it and the old-new one: he could see this entire little domain from his spot underneath the window, too.

Matt pushed open the door with an elbow, a box under each arm, and Foggy half-tripped through the threshold behind him with a sticky-wheeled suitcase.

“Oh!” Karen said, the last in, glancing around, car keys jingling from a strap around her wrist. “Well, it’s, certainly, uh, cozy.”

“She's got such a way with words,” Foggy mused.

“This the last of it?” Matt asked.

“Yep,” Peter said, rising to stand, taking the boxes from him. It'd been a busy day—he'd gotten a last-minute lease signed about three hours before the old place decided they wanted him out, so they'd been running back and forth in Karen's little sedan all day. He'd been here getting the power turned on, while the three of them dropped off the keys. Peter was trying not to think very hard about what he would've done without their help. Chucked just about everything, probably.

“Wardrobe’s a bit small, isn't it?” Karen noted, staring at the pair of carry-on sized bags that held all the clothing he owned.

“Not to worry,” Foggy said. “By the first week of school, he’s gonna have more oversized t-shirts for orgs he’ll never interact with than he’s going to know what to do with.”

“That happened at Columbia, sure,” Matt said. “But are we certain it happens at community colleges, too?”

“It must,” Foggy said, mouth pulled to the side. “Why wouldn't it?”

The three four-year degree folks exchanged uncertain glances. Well, two of them, anyway; Matt just had his head tilted in their general direction.

“Well, in the case they don’t, I’m taking you shopping,” Karen said, smoothing her fashionable blouse, perhaps a show of expertise. “You know what? We’re going shopping either way. Housewarming gift.”

“Oh, before I forget,” Matt said, reaching into his pocket, “think you left something at the old place? Not really sure what it is, but it was still up by the door when we locked up for the last time. Has your scent on it.”

He pressed May's brass mezuzah into his hand. How had he… no way he’d forgotten it. Faintly warm from Matt's body heat, the little thing almost seemed alive, some kind of small, hard-shelled animal, rainbow stones gleaming happily back at him. Welcome home, Peter, it almost seemed to say.

Sounded a whole lot like her voice.

Peter wrapped his hands tightly around it, and his vision quickly blurred into soft shapes and colors. Ah, and he'd been doing so well, too, goddammit. It'd been months since he cried! Peter buried his face by his clasped hands and burst into tears. 

He couldn't decide if he was mortified or heartened by the fact that three pairs of hands were there to immediately reach out and comfort him. All things considered, it seemed like a pretty nice thing to be undecided about, though.

Nothing is ever the same.

Peter realized that he really should’ve understood this already. He was a chemist, after all. It was an undisputed scientific truth: nothing can exist in this world and remain unaltered for too long.

Things fall apart. Entropy always wins.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and hold the pieces together for a little while, Peter decided.

Notes:

aaand we are done! certainly isn't perfect... maybe isn't even good! haphazardly cobbled together over the span of almost four years, incoherent plot, drags on with the useless things, doesn't really get to the heart of the important ones, but it's done!! fully completed! and honestly that might be wayyyy more exciting than perfect

pretty fun way to kill time all summer all things considered... bet im gonna get all sad and confused like a dog not getting taken for its daily walk next tuesday. might have to start on something new

a heartfelt thank you to everyone who read along at home all the way here, especially all the kind folks who shared their thoughts! and i guess if anyone's reading in the future you guys should get some thanks too:) let me know highlights? lowlights? perfectly mediocre midtones? idk would love to hear absolutely whatever you got from this!!!! love ya<3