Yeah, okay—so, Peter understood why this place was called Hell's Kitchen now.
And in hindsight he probably should have spent more time thinking through the implications of that name before he bulled into the place like he honestly knew what he was doing—as if he could single-handedly take down a human trafficking ring in unfamiliar territory and in a single night. While he was already sleep-deprived.
And when he had no backup whatsoever.
(Not that thinking through things would have changed his choice to at least try to stop aforementioned atrocities, but he might have taken a couple of minutes on that roof trying to come up with a better tactical strategy earlier).
Seriously, though—
These guys were mean.
He was currently surrounded by three men with his back to a shipping container. One had a gun, which was definitely Peter's first priority, and the other two were sporting at least as many knives apiece. Peter panted out a breath, then moved fluidly to web up the first guy's gun before he could get a shot off—
But the guy's two buddies took the chance to capitalize on Peter's focused attention and lunged forward to try and jab him with their knives.
"Didn't your mom tell you not to run with sharp, pointy things?!" Peter yelped as he jumped straight up to avoid said sharp, pointy things. He flicked his wrist at the same time, jerking the gun he'd secured up and out of his opponent's hands before twisting his body so that he landed in a tight crouch.
"You're out of your element here, Spidey," the knife-guy on his left growled, and Peter didn't even need his powers to let him know that he was coming in hot after his own words.
Peter used the potential energy he'd gathered from his crouch to spring up and land a stunning blow to the man's chest, and just as quickly snapped out his other arm to catch his would-be attacker on the left in the nose.
Thank you, Spidey-sense.
The first guy's breath left him in a momentous whoosh of air as he flew backwards under Peter's foot, and Peter felt cartilage buckle and bust on the other guy's face—ouch sorry but not sorry—right before his Spidey sense went off with such intensity that he pretty much flattened himself to the filthy pavement before he knew what he was doing.
A bullet zinged over his head, and Peter mentally slapped himself for forgetting about the gun. He'd taken it…and then he'd left it lying on the ground for the bad guy to pick it right back up again.
What was up with him tonight?
He quickly blamed it on the blow to the back he'd taken earlier—which had conveniently resulted in him faceplanting into a shipping container and almost blacking out.
He was pretty that hit had further damaged something deep in his suit's circuitry system too, because his mask wasn't quite giving him the visibility or accuracy it usually did. And there were definitely a few more holes and gashes in his suit than there had been before the whole ordeal.
But that was kind of beside the point right now because that guy still had a gun.
Peter rolled onto his back before gun-guy could shoot at him again, and two webs—one to the face and one over the actual barrel of the gun—took care of his most immediate threat. He took maybe two seconds to just breathe afterwards because he was pretty sure he was going to be one ugly, walking bruise in the morning, and then Peter pushed himself to his feet.
He quickly knocked out the two guys who were still conscious and then webbed them up tightly before propping them against the shipping container their buddies had tried plastering him against earlier.
"Justice served," Peter mumbled, already looking around him for the next threat.
That brought his count for tonight up to what…nine?
Peter frowned and scanned the dim area around him out of habit before he remembered that his suit was currently unable to tactically assess his environment and any potential threats like it usually could—in fact, the lenses of his mask themselves were physically distorted in a way that couldn't mean anything good.
Oh, well.
He could do this the old-fashioned way.
Peter quickly scaled the nearest shipping container—a big green thing that definitely smelled like fish and that had more sharp, rusty edges than Peter cared to count—and squatted low, scanning the pier for any more signs of life.
Surely that wasn't all the bad guys around and…surely he hadn't completely missed his chance to do what he'd come to do in the first place.
Surely he hadn't let them move their victims farther away from help.
It was so hard to tell how long a fight lasted when Peter was acting as Spiderman—the adrenaline and reactionary nature of combat always seemed to suck all the meaning out of time. For all Peter knew, he could have been fighting for either hours or mere seconds, and so much could have happened during either of those spans of time.
Swallowing down a rising swell of something thick and sour, Peter peered out into the gloom that had been condensing over the pier since the sun had sunk below the horizon. He heard nothing but the lapping of the water, the low hum of traffic on the main road—
And a scream.
Peter wasted no time in leaping off the container, adrenaline-spiked heart racing ahead of his hands and feet as he moved closer to the edge of the water, where the short-lived scream had come from.
He burst out of the patchwork quilt of shipping containers and into the relatively open lane of space between it and the actual water seconds after he first heard the sound. And then he stopped cold—the whole world seemed to stop cold.
He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting to see when he got to where the scream came from, but this wasn't it.
There were probably another eight men total, arranged in a loose circle with their backs to the water. In the middle of the circle was a single man with a gun—a gun that was pressed casually into the side of a young woman with a sack pulled over her head. She was streaked with grime, looking incredibly frail as she stood in a pool of bitter light from the streetlamp rigged overhead. Even from his distance, Peter could tell she was trembling from head to toe.
"Spiderman!"
The man holding the gun grinned broadly, and Peter resisted a shudder that was equal parts anger and disgust as grotesque shadows twisted and folded around his beady eyes, his sharp features.
"I'll admit, we weren't quite expecting you to join our little party. You're a little out of your comfort zone tonight, huh?"
Peter took the subtlest of steps forward, one hand half-raised in a placating gesture, and the circle immediately bristled with more guns. He swallowed, mouth unforgivably dry.
Not good.
"Not another step," the apparent ringleader said, the gun twitching against the woman's side. Peter thought he heard her whimper, and his stomach twisted at the thought of what this woman might have already endured at these monsters' hands.
"Where are all the others?" Peter said when he thought he could use his voice without it shaking itself into oblivion.
It was steady enough it surprised even him, but the leader only grinned even wider at his words.
"Bold, aren't you? We're the ones who could shoot you full of holes with the snap of our fingers—" The man snapped his fingers together loudly for emphasis; Peter went stock-still. "—and yet here you are, asking for information you know you aren't going to get."
Peter narrowed his eyes, mind still racing but the barest bones of a plan finally—finally—beginning to take shape in his head. He might be able to save the woman after all if he played this right.
He would save her.
Or…or he would—
"Anyways, Spidey, here's the deal. You disable your…web things, or whatever they are, and then put your hands up in the air. Then you turn around. We'll give you a little experimental dose of our brand-new sedative cocktail, you fall out unconscious, and then we might let the woman live for tonight. You do anything else, and she dies. Immediately.
Peter's mind blanked.
Empty—he was empty.
He was so far out of his league even after everything he'd done as Spiderman in the past, and never ever had he dealt with something quite like this and he had failed failed failed and…and—
"Why do you want me?" Peter rasped, the anger and fear and anticipation all so tightly interwoven inside him now he couldn't tell where one emotion began and the other ended. Didn't care. He needed to buy time because he had to save her—
The man shrugged with one shoulder, and the men and women gathered around him shifted, as if they were getting tired of the largely one-sided conversation and just wanted to see some blood spilled already.
"Why not? You aren't who we wanted, per se, but we could still have some fun with you. You might even help us perfect our techniques."
The way he said "fun" told Peter that whatever they wanted with him was absolutely not going to be fun. And he didn't even want to think about what kind of techniques this guy was referring to.
Was this going to be how everything ended? After everything, was he going to die on graduation night after failing to save even one woman—in Hell's Kitchen, no less, a place he didn't think he'd stepped foot in even half a dozen times? (that was his first mistake, wasn't it? He'd just left it up to—)
Peter didn't have time to let that train of thought go anywhere else because suddenly the man in front of him snapped, his former arrogance morphing into something altogether more unhinged.
"Alright! Enough chit-chat. Get to it!"
The man jammed his gun farther into the woman's side, and his face contorted into an enraged, twisted thing as he screamed out the order. Peter had less than a second to make his choice: would he die because he turned his back on a woman who would likely die herself without his help, or would he die because he tried until the very end to save her?
It wasn't really a choice at all, once it was framed that clearly.
I'm sorry May and MJ and Ned and Tony—
He moved faster than he thought he'd ever moved, snapping out a web at the man's gun and wrenching even as he sprinted to close the distance between him and the hostage. He was pretty sure he landed a blow on the ringleader and managed to put his own body between the woman and her captors, but everything happened at once after he started moving, so he couldn't know for sure.
The light overhead went off without warning, plunging them into a sudden, disorienting darkness—
There was a thumping noise, a cut-off cry—
More than one gun went off and their owners were spreading out, trying to tighten their circle—
There was a white-hot pain tearing across Peter's shoulder and his leg—
Please let her be okay please please—
The woman was pulling out of his grasp, running away—
And Peter's Spidey-sense rippled through him like a shockwave.
He wrenched himself to the side, at once intending to avoid whatever weapon was headed his way and to protect the woman fleeing behind him. He managed to avoid all but one of the three darts fired together at his form.
It unceremoniously stuck in the left side of his chest, cutting through the fabric of his suit with barely any resistance, and Peter pulled it out as fast as he could. But a sickening sense of desperation bloomed inside him even as it fell to the ground.
And he knew he shouldn't, but he was so focused on the woman that he turned his back on where he knew his captors were advancing on him from the darkness. He took a few steps, and the dizziness hit him.
It was worse than being hit by that train because he actually had time to think about what this meant.
He failed.
She was going to die.
He was falling—
May, I—
Down, down, down—
His head cracked against the pavement, and it felt like fireworks in his brain—
Did she make it?
Sooo...I once again underestimated my propensity for writing angsty/high-stakes scenes, hence the extended chapter-count and this convoluted Spiderman situation that probably doesn't make a lot of sense. The good news is that I should be finishing and posting the rest of this fic all before Thursday! Thanks for sticking with this, guys! I hope you've been enjoying it so far! :)
"But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander." ~ 1 Peter 3:15-16