Hello, friends, and welcome to Chapter Fifteen! Here's hoping you enjoy it. Please read and review, I really appreciate the feedback!
Disclaimer: All characters owned by Marvel.
Chapter Fifteen
Another bead of sweat rolled down his chin, saturating his month's growth of beard before soaking though the mask to the floor. Somewhere, in the part of his mind that still liked to crack jokes, Peter remembered why he always tried to stay clean shaven. The mask pressing against his facial hair was unbearably itchy. Of course, given that a shard of sharp metal could stab into his spine if he exerted any more pressure, a little discomfort seemed like a minor concern.
He'd been straining against his metal confines for hours; in that time, it had groaned once, and the shard had torn through his suit and pierced the top layer of his skin. Peter shifted his torso to the left as much as possible, so that, were he successful, the shard would have a slightly lower chance of slicing into his spine and rendering moot this entire exercise.
There you go, Pete. Gotta maintain that optimism.
Resuming his efforts, Peter pressed against his prison. The metal shard dug in further as the pressure increased, but only enough to cause a fresh bleed.
Damn, Ock really did… tailor this thing to my strength, didn't he?
He kept going, felt the shrapnel dig just a bit further, maybe cut some new layer of the dermis, but it wasn't enough. The muscles in his… well, everywhere, were already burning. Peter ran through the list—Midtown High anatomy coming back to him—as a means of attempted distraction: brachioradialis in the forearms; biceps and triceps brachii; pectoralis major and minor; core muscles serratus anterior, external oblique, rectus abdominus and tendinous inscriptions; deltoids in the shoulders; sternocleidomastoid and trapezius in the neck and back, along with infraspinatus and rhomboid major.
All of these were on fire, and had been for hours. Peter knew that whatever he'd been getting fed for the past month wasn't designed to keep him fit and strong; Octavius would take whatever precautions necessary to ensure that—even if he should somehow escape his confines—he would have little chance of returning to Avengers Tower without help. His powers could only go so far, after all. Eventually even muscles with the proportionate strength of a spider would begin to atrophy.
Peter relaxed, and felt his weight settle against the cold. God, if he could just get his mask up on the bridge of his nose, take a breath of air without tasting the salt of his sweat. His entire body felt frigid; he was sure that if his mask were up, he would see his breath in the air. Either that, or he'd perspired so much that it was like stepping into the hallway after a shower: his body was so hot that by contrast, room temperature was freezing.
Without leverage, or any way to bring his lower body into the effort, there was no way Peter was going to be able to break his way out of this machine.
All this, just so I can get back to people who think I'm one bad day away from super-villainy.
Peter hung his head low, sweat spitting between his lips, enough to pass through the red fabric and onto the concrete floor. The metal shard scraped against his skin. He could feel blood streaming down his back, mingling with the sweat—to his hyper-sensitive nerves, the thicker texture of the blood was like a boulder rolling down the hillside of his skin, the perspiration pebbles tumbling alongside it.
Logan, Thor, Tony, Natasha, Clint, Cage… they all watched me. Fought me. And once they'd determined I wasn't a shapeshifting alien, Cap let me off with a warning about a "probationary period!" I'm sorry, Steve, were you not paying attention to how I put some teenagers in the hospital, or started monitoring the entire city with little spider robot cameras?
He tried to bring his knees up, and heard the machine groan for the second time. But the increased pressure pushed the metal further into his back, and Peter whimpered. Relaxing his legs, Peter felt the sliver slide the half-millimeter out of his body.
I think Steve hurts the worst. After everything we went through in Latveria… as reassuring as he was about how he knew I wasn't that kind of man… to then just accept Ock's… my behavior as normal…
Peter settled against the metal around him, leaning on it as much as he could. His breaths were coming ragged, rough; shoulders and arms shook with every exhale, his chest heaved.
Even Jess! She and Kaine and Anya and every other Spider-Someone all supposedly bound to me by this "Great Web" Cassandra and Julia always talked about… why didn't she know? And Jess even has the distinction of being Carol's best friend, so if anyone…
He swallowed hard, what little saliva was left in his mouth, and took a breath through the nose.
Carol.
And Peter remembered, again, as he was so often wont to fall into those doubtful moods, how she had known from the beginning that something was wrong with him. That he wasn't himself.
How disappointed would she be if she could see me now? Ready to give up, just because no one believed in me?
Peter had been in this situation before, dozens of times, hundreds; the city, the world, even whole dimensions doubting him, openly deriding him, calling him a menace or a criminal. He'd never let that stop him before. He'd always pushed forward, driven by a force greater than himself.
"With great power comes great responsibility." And I do have great power. If Ock showed me anything, it was that. But Carol, at least, always believed I knew what great responsibility meant, and doubted my choices when they were outside of that responsibility.
He took a few breaths, slow, calm—into the nose, out of the mouth. The concern had been leverage. The damage to the prison was probably enough that Peter's strength should be able to overcome it, but he was nearly vacuum-sealed into the machine. There was no room to move. Except that he didn't need to.
Those words mean more to me than anything; not because I lost Uncle Ben to learn the lesson, but because the lesson brought me here. To this moment. Where I've laid waste to the schemes of an egotistical, mass-murdering madman so often that he felt the need for pure personal vengeance. Those words are who I am—not because they've unconsciously been woven into my being, but because they're what I've chosen.
Few knew that Peter's adhesive abilities would function from any part of his body. He most often employed them with his feet and fingertips, simply because it was easier—it had become so engrained into his muscle memory that it was virtually an unconscious decision. But if he wanted to adhere with his forearm, or calf, or shoulder blade, he absolutely could.
I took up the hammer and chisel and carved those words onto my soul. It was Uncle Ben's death that laid the tools at my feet, but it was my choice to bend down and pick them up. My fingers around them. My hands against the stone.
Peter pressed himself against his confines as much as possible: heels, calves, backside and some of the thighs; fingers, palms, and nearly all of the forearms and arms. The metal dug further into his back, but he managed to get all of his shoulders and upper back touching the cold. He then stuck himself to the machine with every inch of his body he could.
They are part of me. My choice.
Before, he had been trying to force his prison apart by pushing what was against the front of his body away from the damaged section behind him. Force, however, requires motion. Mass and acceleration. Confined as he was, Peter had no room to generate movement.
And so is she.
With his body adhered to the back of the prison, Peter became a wedge—using compression to bend the cracked pieces apart, rather than force to try to bash them. The pressure his powerful muscles exerted switched from working on both sides of the machine (what was in front of him and behind) to focusing solely on the back side.
And it's high time I proved it.
He breathed again, like a weightlifter during a regular workout: steadying breaths. With a final, deep inhale through the nose, Peter contracted his arms and legs, trying to curl them back into his torso.
Nothing happened. At first.
Come on… come on!
The problems with this new method were twofold: first, it had the possibility of taking some time. The process itself could be slow. Secondly, it would be unbearably painful—not just for Peter's muscles, but also because the closer Peter came to success, the further the metal shard would dig into his back. He was essentially stabbing himself by inches.
Which he began to experience firsthand as the machine let out another groan.
Gaah!
He grunted, but kept pulling. His joints were burning, the hips and shoulders more than anything.
That's it… move!
The metal wailed again; a higher pitch this time, like an ocean liner listing in stormy waves. More blood rolled down Peter's back, and he couldn't stop a small cry from escaping his lips.
Gotta try to stay quiet… If Ock catches me here, I'm finished.
Peter knew that this was a war of attrition. If he could break the machine apart before his muscles tore free of themselves, he would win.
Except that they felt like they could go any second. And the infernal thing surrounding him had stopped moving.
Come on, Peter… come on…
He gasped in another breath. Oxygen burned through arterial fuses into powder keg muscles—the fibers reinvigorated, however briefly, by reddened blood. His body contracted again, the steel stake driving deeper. A stream roiled down his back, now, cascading over the ridges of scar tissue left from the shrapnel of Avengers' Tower's basement. He'd saved Carol's life that day, and nearly lost his own in the process; the explosion of her power had sent him careening into the wall, filling his back and shoulders with shattered shards of stone. The trauma and blood loss had sent him into a coma, and only a time-travelling supervillain holding a knife to his throat had caused his Spider-Sense to scream at him enough to wake him from it.
Given how every millimeter of skin on his body felt as though it were ripping free of his bones, a coma might have been a nice reprieve.
But there would be no rest. Another breath, another pull, another river of blood flowing through the canyons of muscle and scar.
I… will not… give up here…
The machine groaned again.
This is… my life, Otto…
Peter could feel tendons near his joints stretching to their limits, taut like guitar strings.
And you… will not… keep me from it…
Blood spurted from the gash in his back, now, running down the metal rather than the skin.
From her…
Heat streamed around his head and neck, a sweat waterfall pouring from his chin.
Anymore!
With a cry of anger, anguish, and abandon, Peter gave a final pull, curling his limbs inward, and his prison shattered. The back side of the machine cracked in half, and Peter peeled himself free of the metal; his eyes snapped wide as the shard drove into his torso, firing another burst of blood; and the intact front side of the prison rolled forward, down the track that had led Peter out of his cell to the meeting room.
Peter fell forward, crashing to the ground on his left side, instinctively twisting into the fetal position. He lay there for a moment, breathing, trying to stretch it out to hours. But he knew that Octavius, or at least a few guards, would be coming to check on the noises they'd heard, so he tried to stand. Only to have the edge of the metal shard scrape against his rib cage.
Feeling a bone be touched—hearing the sound of metal grinding against the hardest substance in the body, especially when that sound is muffled by the body's muscle and skin—is damn unnerving.
But Peter reminded himself, again, that Octavius could be on his way, so he reached behind his head with his left hand and stuck his middle finger to the side of the shard.
And then, in a single motion and a howl, he pulled it out and brought it around to face.
The shard was relatively triangular, reminiscent of a prison shank, and about as bloody. Roughly two-and-a-half inches long and an inch wide at the base, two-thirds of the sliver were covered in Peter's blood.
He stood and dropped the shard to the floor, listening to it clink. He stretched his aching muscles, wincing against the pain in his back.
Aah… If I had my webs, I could at least do some patch work until I get out of here. He rubbed his shoulder and back near the wound. I'll just have to deal with it.
He pushed the door open, slowly, poking his head into the hallway before emerging from the cell. As soon as he exited the room he leapt to the ceiling, sticking to the shadows provided by the low-hanging lights. He crawled down the corridor, electing not to follow the track that had led his metallic confines to the Superior Six (Five?) conference room.
Peter passed several groups of patrolling guards. What did Ock call them? Arachnauts? Yes, because even in a stolen body the man had not one creative bone. None of those guards were rushing back in the direction he'd come, however.
Hmm… either Ock genuinely didn't think I could escape, or my cell was way thicker than I believed.
The second thought seemed to have some merit, as Peter had felt a pressure on himself since he'd entered the hall. Something he couldn't quite place, but was there nonetheless—a ringing in his ears, a weight from the air settling on his torso as he crawled along the ceiling.
He didn't like it. Combining this with the feeling of familiarity he was getting from the place, and Peter found himself sufficiently uneasy.
I could try to find whatever Ock's using to block my Spider-Sense.
He turned right down another corridor and found himself face-to-handle with a door.
Or I could just get the hell out of here.
Peter dropped to the floor and cranked the handle, stepping over a massive threshold into a mostly dark room. As the door creaked closed behind him, he heard the sound echo, but muddled.
Creepy echoes? Weird salt smell? Yeah, I don't need Spidey-Sense to tell me this one's not gonna turn out well…
Floodlights snapped on and Peter threw his hand over his eyes; as they adjusted he could see that the floor extended for several dozen yards in each direction. A pool of some sort sat in the center, with a waist-high guardrail. Several steel shipping containers sat next to the water, unopened; Peter wondered if Octavius was sending something out or bringing it in.
Once his vision improved, Peter lowered his hand to examine the rest of the room and found himself standing before Electro, Rhino, Sandman, and, of course, Doc Ock-as-Spider-Man.
"We need to get these out. I imagine we haven't much time before—" Octavius turned around upon hearing the door slam, and he was forced to take a half-step back upon seeing Peter. "You! How... That's not possible!" Octavius shouted. "I did those calculations myself! It would have taken—"
Everything Octavius had done to him came rushing back to Peter all at once, like waves at high tide during a winter storm. He dove at Ock, without regard for the other villains surrounding him; Octavius, however, saw Peter coming and flipped away with a half-second to spare. Sandman tried to grab him, but Peter bounced off the guardrail and leapt away from his adversaries.
Octavius was on him as soon as he touched the ground, however, snatching Peter up and slamming him into one of the containers. "Are you sure you want to do this, Peter?" Octavius whispered. "No Spider-Sense, no webs; your two greatest assets are gone."
Peter pushed Octavius away with his legs, and the Superior Spider-Man stood next to what remained of the Superior Six. "This doesn't seem fair, does it?" Octavius asked his comrades, "So many of us, only one—"
"Ock!" Peter shouted, crouching down into a ready stance. "Shut up and fight."
Sandman had already moved to Peter's right—his form growing in size, his fists reshaping themselves into massive blocks of concrete. Rhino dropped to the ground, a gust of air bursting from his lungs, his horn aimed at Peter's heart; Electro flashed blue like exploding bulbs, and he floated into the air, energy arcing over his torso and lancing around his fingertips; and Octavius simply cracked his knuckles before bending low into Peter's same fighting stance. "As you wish, boy," he said.