Chapter 20: The Fight
It was two weeks; Two weeks of pacing, two weeks of tears, two weeks of bedside vigils.
Mary Jane remained unconscious for two weeks, her inexplicable, terrified screams often marring the perfect, and otherwise unbroken, silence of her hospital room.
Gwen never left her side. Sometimes Peter would find her sitting beside Mary Jane's hospital bed with her forehead laid against the side of the bed, fingers laced through Mary Jane's, both peacefully slumbering. Other times he would find her sitting beside the hospital bed with her head bowed in a textbook, delicate whisps of golden hair falling into her concentrated face. Regardless of how he found her, he always found her in the same place: by Mary Jane's side. She never left willingly - but there were times when Peter forced her to leave; even if it was to simply take a walk around the hospital. Peter forced her to take a few moments every day away from the dismal room in order to salvage her heartbroken sanity.
The doctors had no idea how to diagnose the young comatose woman. It was late one day after class when Peter dropped by the hospital to check on her and Gwen, as he had done every day for the past fourteen days. He walked down the sterile hallways to her room, his sneakers squeaking against the freshly waxed floors. He hated everything about hospitals - from their nauseating chemical smell to their bleached out lights that shone upon everything in a searing white incandescent light. As he passed by one of the rooms, his superhuman hearing picked up someone speaking Mary Jane's name.
"Patient Mary Jane Watson?"
Peter's step faltered. He paused a few doors down, leaning his back against the hallway wall, trying to appear as inconspicuous as he could manage while eavesdropping on the doctor's conversation.
"Yes, I've never seen anything like this before -" The ruffling of papers, "It's not a hematoma upon the cerebral cortex - the lab confirmed that - but this dark mass here, and here... We can't explain it."
"What about the lab results on the dark viscous liquid coming from her nasal passages?"
"Unknown."
"What do you mean 'unknown?'"
"I mean the lab has never encountered anything with that specific molecular makeup! It's not blood, it's not human tissue, it's not even human at all! We have no idea."
He would have stayed and listened to the conversation even further had a sudden raucous not erupted amongst the nurses. As soon as he noticed their bustling bodies rushing from their station in the middle of the hallway to Mary Jane's room, his spidey-sense began to sound the alarm.
He took a single step down the hallway.
From Mary Jane's room, he heard Gwen's blood-curdling scream.
He began to run, his sneakers slapping wildly against the linoleum. Behind him, the doctors emerged from the room and began to run towards the room.
He was in the room in an instant, his chest heaving. Mary Jane was awake - her wide eyes nothing but giant pools of black. She convulsed in the bed, angrily fighting against the nurses as they attempted to sedate her. Gwen stood in the far corner of the room, staring in sheer terror at the chaos unfolding before her.
"Get the morphine!"
A sound erupted from Mary Jane's lips that was inhuman - a sound warped by incredible sorrow and pain, its deep tenor notes reverberating off the walls of the small room.
Without thinking, Peter threw his body atop her's, pinning her against the bed. She stared up at him, the whites of her eyes covered in darkness. It was only when she looked into his eyes did she stop fighting, although her muscles remained tensed and poised to begin again.
"Spider-Man," Her lips quivered as she whispered, her voice that of a young child's, "I knew you'd save me."
"MJ, it's me - Peter."
She began to shake her head from side to side, "No," with each word she began to lose herself again, "No, no," Her body began to convulse. "No, no, no!"
"Shh, Mary Jane," Tears began to fall from Peter's eyes. "It's okay, I'm here. I'm here."
"Spider-Man, please make him stop. Please-"
She screamed out as one of the nurses slid a needle into her arm, pumping her veins full of morphine. Instantaneously, he felt her limbs begin to slacken. Soon, she was fast asleep.
Visibly shaken, Peter pulled himself from her. Gwen ran to his side, giant tears streaming down her cheeks.
"My God, Peter," She sobbed into his chest as he enveloped her, "This is a nightmare!"
It was that word, that simple little word, that put all of the pieces together in Peter's mind.
"Nightmare."
Nightmares are dreams. Bad dreams. Dreamland.
Shriek.
His mind mulled over each part of the equation, methodically adding and subtracting each tidbit of information stored in his brain.
"She's sleeping in Dreamland, Spider-Man." He repeated Shriek's words from the night in the warehouse. What had she done?
He said nothing more; simply stepped away from Gwen and walked out of the hospital room, vengeance weighing heavily upon him. He had the forethought to text Harry and tell him to be with Gwen at the hospital in case something bad happened before all ability to think left him.
Revenge.
Revenge.
REVENGE.
His step sped up until he found himself sprinting down the hallways of the hospital, barely missing several collisions with the hospital staff. He ran with a terrible vengeance.
He was no longer Peter Parker.
He was the Spider; powerful, quick, deadly.
He exploded onto the rooftop - hardly pausing to rip the clothes from his body to reveal the red and blue webbed suit beneath them. As he ran, he pulled his mask over his face, yanking it into place as he stepped off the roof of the hospital.
-SCHWIPPP-
Furiously, he swung through the city towards his destination... Ravencroft Asylum.
As soon as Harry read Peter's text, he was on his way to the hospital. He found Gwen curled up in a chair in Mary Jane's hospital room, her red-rimmed blue eyes wide with fear. Mary Jane was heavily sedated but even in her drugged stupor, he noticed the pained expression upon her porcelain face.
"Harry," Gwen stood from the chair as he came into the room. She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him to her, a sob escaping from her tiny ribcage. "Thank goodness you're here."
Harry hugged her and when she pulled back again, he spoke with genuine concern, "I got a text from Peter. What happened?"
Gwen explained the chaotic scene only twenty minutes earlier.
"Yikes," Harry picked up a chair from the far side of the room and sat it down beside Gwen's. With a half-smile, he took a seat and patted the chair next to him. "Take a seat, my dear. She'll come around, but in the meantime, there's nothing we can do but wait." Again he smiled but with renewed vigor, his dimples deepening, "And wait, we shall!"
Ravencroft Asylum was heavily guarded. A herald to the future, Ravencroft Asylum boasted one of the largest collections of "automated defense units"; a gift from their friends at OsCorp Technologies. Spider-Man suspected it wasn't going to be easy getting into New York's infamous holding facility for the criminally insane but when he was buzzed in through the front gates, he was pleasantly surprised.
"I'm here to speak with Shriek." He spoke to a doctor at the main entrance of the facility, two security guards standing on either side of him, both guards nervously fingering the rifles slung on their hips.
"I'm sorry but it isn't that easy, Spider-Man." The doctor shook his head apologetically, "If you come in here, it's because you work here or you're coming to stay. Permanently. There's no visiting hours - not even for the police. Although we're big supporters of what you do for New York, we don't bend the rules for anyone."
Spider-Man nodded his head, "I understand."
"May 2nd, last year, you saved my son and I from our burning vehicle. A semi-truck rear-ended us and we were sandwiched between the semi and another vehicle when our vehicle burst into flames. We were unconscious from the initial impact and we would have died if it weren't for you-" The doctor cleared his throat and the guards nodded their heads and stepped away from Spider-Man. "I'm going to be in my office doing paperwork for an hour. I won't be checking up on Shriek for at least two hours. She's located in Hallway D, room 213. I can't let you go see her but if you happened to get in while I was in my office-" The doctor smiled as he retreated back into his office. "Thank you for saving me and my little boy, Spider-Man."
And with that, the doctor closed the door to his office. Spider-Man looked back at the security guards. They stared straight ahead, oblivious to him.
He only had an hour or two; he had to move quickly. Finding Hallway D, room 213 was easy enough. The hard part was going to be getting Shriek to talk.
He found her huddled in the far corner of the holding cell, her minute frame wrapped in a dinghy grey straight-jacket. Her long black hair, oily from lack of washing, hung over her pale face.
"I knew you were coming." Shriek spoke before Spider-Man, "Your sweet is having a Hell of a time, huh?" She began to laugh hysterically, her whole body heaving from the force of it.
"What did you do to her, Shriek?"
"It's not what I did but what you did!" She stopped laughing and stood. "I simply helped her remember. You are the one who set this all into motion, Spider-Man."
"I need you to tell me how to fix her. She's in the hospital, Shriek. She's going to die."
Mary Jane's eyes fluttered open. She first saw Gwen sleeping in the chair next to her bed. She said nothing, choosing to watch her friend sleep in silence. After a moment, she watched as Harry walked into the room, shoveling potato chips into his mouth from the plastic bag in his hands. When he saw that she was awake, he stopped chewing and his eyes widened.
"Hey there, sleeping beauty." He dropped himself into the empty chair beside the bed then sat the bag of chips onto the floor. "How you feelin', champ?"
"I know I'm dying, Harry." She spoke plainly, the morphine hollowing out the emotion from her words.
For a long while, Harry contemplated her words. After some time had passed, he finally nodded his head then smiled and spoke softly, "Well, we're all dying, MJ. Every single day. Living is just a fancy word for the interval between birth and death."
Mary Jane said nothing. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep - a morphine lullaby lulling her back into the land of nightmares.
"She's going to die in the worst way imaginable," Shriek's demeanor suddenly changed. Her wicked face shone under the low light of the single light bulb of her cell. "And there's nothing you or I can do about it now."
The Spider bristled at her words. Impulsively, he shot out a webline through the bars of the cell and yanked her to him. She collided against the metal bars, her face pressed up against the them. He released the webline and grabbed her by the throat.
"Wrong answer!" His gloved fingers curled around her throat, squeezing tightly.
Mary Jane can't die. She can't. I won't allow it!
Shriek gurgled as her airway was cut off by Spider-Man's strong grip. He watched as her face went from an ashen pale to a deep blue. Her black lips curled into a smile. She kept her eyes locked onto Spider-Man's and Spider-Man refused to look away - his rage boiling to the surface.
Her eyes began to flutter shut as consciousness began to leave her and finally, he released her from his grip. She collapsed onto the floor of the jail cell, gasping for air.
"The darkness is inside of her." She spoke between gasps, chest heaving as she gulped in lungfuls of air, "Her worst fears will eat her alive and they'll continue to eat her alive until one of us dies."
"I won't kill you, Shriek." Spider-Man paced outside the cell, "There has to be another way."
"I can't recall the darkness once it's found her." Compassion suddenly swelled in Shriek's wicked heart. She scooted her body to the far corner of the cell, coiling in the darkness like a wounded viper, "If she were to leave New York, the darkness would be forced to dispel from her. The darkness dies when it's too far from me."
There was the solution - Mary Jane had to leave New York City. Spider-Man stared into the cell, trying to imagine a world without Mary Jane in it. The thought alone stole the very breath from him.
Far from the hospital and even further from Ravencroft Asylum, Spider-Man sat atop the Chrysler building, perched atop one of the rooftop gargoyles overlooking the city far below. The wind whipped past him, ruffling his chestnut hair. Maskless, he looked out over the city.
"This is the only way, Peter." He whispered to the wind, "Force Mary Jane away from New York."
Harry had several homes outside of New York. Perhaps he could speak to him in confidence.
For the second time that day, the thought of a life without Mary Jane stole the breath from him. He looked back down at the city, his face void of any emotion.
"The lonely life of a hero."
There was nothing he could do; Mary Jane was going to hate him after this but, by God, Peter was going to make sure she lived to see another day.
Author's Note:five reviews for Chapter 21? (Holy Moley! Chapter 21! This thing is getting pretty long haha) Where would you like to see the story go?