Forgive the long delay in updating but I've been rather enjoying my Christmas presents as of late. :)
The Spider and the Man:
Issue Two of Three
Man
The Parker Home
"I still can't believe I did it." Peter remarked depressingly, "Those kids looked right at me as I took their dad away." He shook his head and rolled his head back until he faced the ceiling, "Their faces…I haven't seen that kind of expression since…Harry."
Mary Jane approached him with two cups of coffee in her hands, one of which she passed onto Peter. "Do you think that that you did the right thing?"
Peter sighed, "I don't know…I mean is my job just to haul them off? Should I have made an exception? When I first sewed this costume together, I was fifteen, I never in a million years thought I'd be dealing with stuff like this."
"Don't beat yourself up." Mary Jane responded.
"Well…that's not the end of it. You see, after I dropped their father at a police station, I called social services, for the kids." Peter shrugged, "And well, one day after I was done teaching at school, I decided I'd drop by and make sure they were okay."
Harlem several days ago
Spider-Man swung past the large tenement still trying to forget the day's worth of mathematical formulas and equations. Several pedestrians looked up and took noticed of the costumed hero in the sky, a sight not commonly seen in their little run-down neighborhood.
He'd been trying to forget this whole mess for the last two days. Peter had hoped that it would just fade out from his mind over time, that he could just block it out like some of the more ghastly sights he had witnessed during his career. But his conscience nagged at him at every turn. This was something that he had to see through.
Coming up on the apartment building, Peter fired a web-line and swung upward at amazing speed. At the peak of his swing, he released his hold of the line and with an overly flashy spiral landed on the apartment's rooftop. Silently, he crept across, careful not to alert the occupants of the homes below him to his presence.
Making his way over the ledge, he crawled along the exterior of the building towards the window he so fatefully had slipped in through that night; as he came up alongside it he peered into the apartment, again affronted by the stench of urine. Peter felt mocked.
The social worker who had been ordered to supervise them for the time being, an elderly women with gray frazzled hair, sat in a chair facing the television turned to an episode of Judge Judy. He could see the youngest brother playing with a small action figure in the corner with a rather dejected look about him.
"Hey, kid." The old woman barked, "Get me a beer from the fridge."
Uh-oh. Peter watched the child vanish from view while the social worker seemed to doze off for just a moment until the little boy returned and handed the woman her alcohol.
The old woman scornfully grabbed the beer and snapped her finger at the child, "Now get out of here, stupid, and clean the mess I made in the bathroom like I told you to!"
The Parker Home
Mary Jane frowned and grabbed Peter's hand, pulling the gloves off and placed them carefully on the ground, "Did you call social services about the problem?"
"As soon as I got to the nearest payphone." Peter responded with a war-torn expression across his face. "I went back another two days later. The new woman was little improvement. She wasn't as abusive to the youngest but she looked like she was popping pills."
"What about the older son?" MJ inquired.
"What?"
Mary Jane took a sip of her coffee as did Peter before elaborating, "You told me that there were two sons, so far you've only mentioned the younger one."
"Yeah." Peter replied staring into the swirls of his coffee.
"He's not much better off I suppose." MJ guessed to her husband's immediate nodding.
Putting the mug down onto the coffee table, Peter leaned back into the couch and rubbed his eyes slowly collecting himself again. "The second time I dropped by and found the new social worker, I noticed the older son wasn't home yet, so what I do is I start heading towards the nearest public school, it didn't take me very long to find him."
Several days ago in Harlem
A seventeen year-old accosted the young Isaiah Mason in the privacy of the alleyways that the latter took as a shortcut in between school and home. "Please, don't hit me!" He screamed behind tears shielding his face against the overwhelmingly more powerful teenager. "I don't even know you!"
"Your pops was one of the guys that killed my dad a couple of nights ago; do you know me now? Huh? Answer me you little piece of crap." The teenager threw the young child against an open dumpster.
Without warning, the teenager was suddenly lifted off the ground and hovered several feet in the air, screaming for dear life.
"Have you ever supposed that you are only adding to the ongoing cycle of violence?" Spider-Man asked for the right side of the alley holding the teen in place via expert use of his webbing. "The next time you decide to pick on a little kid, do me a favor, okay?"
The teen's eyes began to water, "Anything! Please! Don't kill me!"
Peter dangled him over the open dumpster, "Throw yourself out with the rest of the trash and save me the trouble, got it?" He dropped the marauding teen into the dumpster and with additional web-lines slammed it shut. That should knock some sense into him until the webbing dissolves. He dropped down into the alley, just a few feet shy of Isaiah, "How are you doing? You're okay?"
The young boy's eyes trembled with hatred, "You took my daddy away."
Peter turned away for a moment feeling Isaiah's words cut deeply into him, "Yeah, about that…" He clenched his jaw, "I don't know."
"I can get home now." The child declared defiantly and walked past him without so much as a second look.
"Well I have to hand it to you, Spidey." Peter began sadly, "You've royally screwed up this poor kid's life."
"Man, this sucks, let me out of here." A voice called out from inside the dumpster.
Peter grimaced and loudly slammed his hand against the side of it, "Quiet."