Finally being back in action as Spider-Man is a lot more tiring than Peter expects. Sure, maybe some of it can be accounted for by the simple fact that he's lost some of his endurance from when he'd been going out almost every night, but a more likely explanation for this newfound exhaustion is that he's pushing himself harder than he had before. He only took a week off from being Spider-Man, but that's still a week that Queens went without its friendly neighborhood superhero. That statement in itself is something that's been getting the gears in Peter's head to turn, too.
Is he a superhero? Sure, nobody would argue the fact that the Avengers and all the individuals who make up the team are superheroes, but with the way he's managed to distance himself from Tony and all of the man's ideas for who Spider-Man should be, it's like he's drifted outside the deep, still lagoon of being a hero, and entered the choppy surf of being a vigilante. He's spent way too long looking up different definitions of the word itself, 'vigilante'. The culture surrounding them is different than dictionary definition would have one believe, so it isn't a question that can be answered simply. Peter's starting to suspect more and more that it's a sort of social class thing that makes the divide, because the more he thinks about it, Tony absolutely used to meet every definition of a vigilante, even if he was always considered a hero. The whole concept is incredibly nebulous, but this is the theory that makes the most sense.
Tony Stark is a rich man who used to act outside the confines of the law to enact what he considered to be justice. That's textbook vigilantism, but he's always been labeled a hero.
Daredevil is almost exclusively referred to as a vigilante, but Peter thinks that might be partially due to his lack of powers that are visible to the naked eye. After diving deep into some vigilante/superhero forums on the internet he reaches the debates and discussions about whether or not Daredevil has powers or not. Most people think he's just a good fighter, but there are a few people who are adamant that he has abilities. There are even fewer (but still a surprising number) who are of the belief that Daredevil is actually Satan.
It seems like there might be an element of classism to it though, and Peter isn't quite ready to give up that string of thought just because he got derailed by some of the absolute lunatics on the Daredevil forums.
Jessica Jones isn't really in the public eye, so there's not much of a perception about what exactly it is she qualifies as, and the same goes for Danny.
Frank is widely regarded as a vigilante or a domestic terrorist, and Peter decides to attribute that to the fact that the man has no qualms about putting a bullet in anyone he considers to be someone who deserves to be put down. Nobody claims he's a superhero, and that's because of the definite lack of powers.
There's someone else, though, whose alignment between hero and vigilante is probably the most debated of anyone's in the city: Luke Cage.
The working people of Harlem will scream from the rooftops that Luke is a hero, but people in positions of power scream back that he's a lawless vigilante. In general, the police seem to side with calling him a lawless vigilante, but there are a few cops who have spoken up in favor of Luke.
Peter gets the chance to ask Luke which he identifies as the next Saturday.
Matt's been tied up in court all week with his day job, and both Foggy and Karen have forced him to pawn off his nighttime escapades to Frank and a few other unnamed heroes. He seems genuinely apologetic in his messages to Peter about why he won't be able to train him on anything that week, but it really isn't too big of a deal. Peter's pretty excited to have a little time to settle back into his routine—well, sort of.
His routine used to include going over to the Tower almost every day just to work on his homework, or something related to his alter ego, or to just hang out. He hasn't heard from Tony since the screaming match though, and he's not sure if he wants to go back there just yet.
Luke, as one of the most (if not the most) responsible adults Peter knows, offers to step in for Matt and bring Peter along on one of his jobs. Matt is incredibly grateful because after almost a week of not being able to Daredevil at all, he has some shady shit he needs to do without a kid who he's looking after having to see him torture people.
Since Luke is a responsible adult, he waits until the high school student has a day off from school to invite him on a nighttime, crime-solving escapade. Peter's given a cross street to meet Luke on, along with a time (9:00). He, much like Jessica, doesn't offer any sort of explanation about what it is they'll be doing, but Peter figures he'll be able to handle whatever it is.
Peter gets to the meeting place fifteen minutes early and camps out on a nearby rooftop as he waits for Luke to finally show. Luckily for both of them, Luke arrives five minutes after Peter, because he's one of those punctual adults who say things like, 'if you aren't early, that means you're late'. Peter never really understood that phrase, because you can be on time and not be late, but hey, old people say a lot of things that don't quite make sense. Like 'millennials are killing the napkin industry' and 'how do you talk to Jesus on the Facebook?'.
" Hey Luke," Peter greets, dropping down from his perch on the edge of the roof. "What's up?"
" Hey Spider-Man," Luke replies with a smile as he looks Peter over. "Nice suit. The pictures on Twitter really don't do it justice."
Peter beams at Luke under the mask, and from the way the man smiles back, it seems like the expression came across, regardless that his whole face is covered.
" So, what are we doing?" Peter asks as he falls into step behind Luke, who's now leading them down the street. It's a bit weird to walk around instead of vault over rooftops, but it's good practice for working with people that don't have the same skill set as him.
" I think there's a new gang moving into Harlem," Luke answers simply, slowing down so that Peter's at his side rather than behind him. "Somebody's moved into one of the warehouses that got cleared out when the last guys who used it got arrested. This is mostly going to be a stakeout, but we'll intervene if it looks like anyone's gonna get hurt."
Peter nods along with what Luke says, and reminds himself to check into the gang activity in Queens. Sure, he helps people, but it seems like Matt, Luke, Frank, and Danny all have the organized crime in their areas under a microscope. "A stakeout. Nice, I'll get to live out my law-enforcement dreams."
Luke snorts at that and rolls his eyes. "Oh yeah, stakeouts are a blast. Sitting still for hours and hours, and watching boring shit through binoculars until you feel like your eyes are gonna bleed? Dream come true."
" You sound like you've been on a lot of stakeouts," Peter replies, doing his best to very casually wheedle some more information out of Luke.
" Yeah, and I used to get paid for them."
Peter has to do a double take at that. "You were a cop?"
Luke nods, gives an affirmative hum.
" Huh."
Peter and Luke walk in silence the rest of the way until they arrive at an unoccupied and very dilapidated tenement building across the street from a warehouse, presumably the one that Luke had been talking about in regards to the gang. The two of them sneak into the building through a back entrance rather than the front door, and Luke leads Peter up a few flights of stairs to a floor that looks like it's in the process of being remodeled. The paint on the walls is covered with a new coat of primer, and plastic drop cloths litter the floor along with the occasional ladder a toolbox. Luke pulls open the door to one of the apartments.
There are two cheap folding chairs set up in front of a large window that's facing the warehouse, and two pairs of binoculars are sitting on an upside down, empty, five-gallon bucket that is a truly eye-searing orange color.
" You've been staking this place out for a while then, huh?" Peter asks, running his gloved finger along the dusty windowsill.
" A few hours, just over the past week," Luke answers honestly, as he takes a seat. "Haven't seen anything so far, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything going on."
Peter sits down next to him, nodding in agreement with Luke's wisdom.
They're quiet for a while as they just watch out the window, Luke with binoculars, and Peter with just his enhanced vision. Eventually, Peter just can't stand the silence, as his eyes trace over the graffiti and tags plastering the outside of the warehouse.
" Are you a hero or a vigilante?" he blurts out suddenly, without looking over at Luke.
He can see out of his periphery that Luke lowers the binoculars and turns to look at him for a minute before speaking.
" That depends on who you ask."
" I'm asking you," Peter says.
" I don't really consider myself a hero, if that's what you're asking," Luke replies, kicking his feet up on the windowsill. "But I don't consider myself a vigilante either. I'm just a guy doing what I can to help people, maybe try and make up for some of the bad things I've done along the way."
Peter lets that sink in for a moment. It seems a little bit prying, but he can't help but ask, "What bad things?"
Luke bites his lip and scrubs a hand over the lower half of his face for a minute before sighing. "I wasn't always a great person; most of the time I wasn't even a good one," he starts. "I grew up here, ended up running with a gang. I hurt people, I got big to try and intimidate them, but eventually, I realized that a gangster wasn't who I wanted to be. I left the life, joined the military, came home, became a cop. I was doing my best to help people as an officer, but I got caught up in some crap and ended up doing time for a crime I didn't commit. And in prison?" Luke gives a long whistle. "I was a mean man. All these guys coming in had heard that stupid advice to find the biggest guy in the yard and make him your bitch. I was the biggest guy in the yard, and I had no plans on being anybody's bitch."
" Did you have your powers then?" Peter asks. He knows that if people like them are caught, they get sent to an offshore hellhole—The Raft, he thinks it's called.
Luke shakes his head. "Got my abilities while I was inside. A doctor there did experiments on the prisoners—offered up reduced sentences for anyone willing to volunteer."
That one catches Peter a little off-guard. "Experiments? So they know how to make more people with your… abilities?" he asks, mirroring Luke's phrasing.
" Not exactly. One of the variables in my experiment got screwed up. Nobody's been able to replicate the results; hell, for a while they thought I died in the experiment."
" How—"
" There was a bit of an explosion."
Peter sighs. "Isn't there always."
They fall back into a comfortable silence for almost another hour before Peter finally thinks he has an observation worth saying aloud.
" There's nobody in this building."
Luke looks at him and nods. "Yeah."
" Shouldn't there be at least, I dunno, one homeless person squatting, or a junkie shooting up, or some dumb kids tagging the place? Have you seen anyone there when you've been watching?"
Luke considers this for a moment. "I haven't, actually."
" That's super weird!"
Luke sighs, and checks through his binoculars one more time. "Half an hour," he says. "We don't see anyone in the next half hour, and we go in. Got it?"
" Got it," Peter agrees with a nod.
Luke nods in return before going back to his observation.
Peter's actually pretty proud of himself for managing to be quiet and just watch the warehouse across the street for a whole fifteen minutes before he can't help but strike up another conversation with Luke. The guy's a lot more talkative than Jessica, and Peter likes hearing about the superhero stuff from a reliable source.
" How did you guys all meet?" he asks finally, not taking his eyes off the building.
" Who?"
" The people in the group chat," Peter says.
Luke lets out a soft huff that could possibly be the precursor to a laugh. "Well, I met Jessica first. She drank at the bar I used to own- before it got blown up, that is. Then I got mind-controlled by her supervillain, and she had to shoot me in the head. I met Danny next, ran into him while I was working the whole Harlem's Hero gig, and he punched me in the face with the Iron Fist. I met Matt because he was Jessica's lawyer, and he followed her to a superhero thing where Danny and I were."
Peter takes a moment to consider the fact that two out of the three people Luke mentioned definitely injured him, possibly even severely. "What about Mr. Castle?"
" Frank and Matt are all tied up in each other's crap. I only ran into Castle because Matt's like a bloodhound when it comes to him. I was working with Matt on something—we were on some roof in Hell's Kitchen—and Matt just stops dead in his tracks, shuts up mid-sentence, and walks over to this gross, bloody handprint on the ledge. I kid you not, he leans down and smells it, then growls 'Castle', and sprints off towards lord knows what. I caught up to him half an hour later because I heard them yelling at each other."
" What's up with them? In the news they made it seem like they hated each other, but Frank knows who he is and I've seen them work together twice. It seems like they, I dunno, get along now, even if they argue."
Luke shrugs. "I have a theory, but I don't think anyone really knows what their deal is."
Peter perks up at that. "What's your theory?"
Luke bites his lip for a second before sighing. "Matt doesn't kill people."
Peter makes an affirmative noise.
" Frank does kill people."
Another hum.
" And at first, Matt couldn't handle anyone dying on his watch. He just couldn't do that, but the city broke him down. Bad things happened to him, Peter. Really bad things. And I think those things changed him, because after that, even though he still can't bring himself to kill anyone, he's been able to handle Frank killing people. I don't agree with what Frank does, and I know Matt doesn't either, but it works. There are bad people Matt's thrown in jail time and time again—left them practically gift-wrapped for the police—but they always end up back on the streets. Matt knows better than anyone that the system doesn't always work. He knows that even his way doesn't always work, and I think he finally acknowledged that he needs Frank to deal with the people that he can't."
That brings a more serious air to the conversation that Peter isn't quite sure he likes, but regardless he's glad to have the information. "What kind of bad things happened to Matt?" Peter asks in a softer voice.
" I don't really think it's my business to tell, but I bet if you asked him, he'd tell you," Luke says.
Another ten minutes manage to pass by in silence before Luke sets his binoculars down and stands up. Peter follows suit and stands as well, looking up at Luke and waiting to be told what to do.
" I'm gonna go in through the front door. I want you to go through the roof, alright?"
" Okie dokie," Peter says with a nod, earning himself a little bit of a smile from Luke.
" You can head on up to the roof here and swing over there," Luke says. "Be careful, and be quiet."
Peter nods before heading out of the apartment they've been camped out in and goes up the remaining few floors to the roof. Once he gets out in the open air, he waits until he sees Luke exit the building to swing across the street and land on the roof of the warehouse. The building looks even more run down up close, not a unique feature in the north parts of Harlem, unfortunately. He waits at the edge of the roof to watch Luke make his way to the front doors of the building before he heads for a section of the roof that has caved in and created a nice, Peter-sized entrance.
Once he gets inside the building, the Spidey-sense flips. Out. In most instances it gets upset in abandoned, mildewed buildings because of black mold or something, but this time it's a much more visceral reaction that Peter can only attribute to the zombie apocalypse-esque surgery center that this place turns out to be housing.
There are some ratty curtains hung up between a few mismatched gurneys, cots, and hospital beds (complete with tears and spatters and smears of what's probably old blood), and there's a dented up, rusted IV stand beside each bed. As Peter hesitantly pulls back a curtain, he sees what looks like an autopsy table with a tray of rusted, bloody tools sitting on it. The whole thing is frankly so disgusting that it makes him feel a little bit sick. Whatever the hell this is, it certainly isn't a gang hideout. He's seen crime TV shows that mention black market operation centers for people who get shot but can't go to a hospital for whatever reason, but the bits of zip ties attached to each of the beds* (*read, any flat surface) makes it obvious that whoever had been on them hadn't been willing participants.
There's the faint sound of water dripping rhythmically somewhere in the warehouse, and Peter finds himself being drawn to the source of the sound. His skin crawls more and more with each curtain he has to pull back. A fresh shiver runs down the back of his neck when he spots a patch of blood on one of the beds, still red and wet, rather than the crusty, brown color of dried blood. The dripping continues at its unnervingly slow tempo, and when Peter pulls back the next curtain, he almost screams.
There's a woman in dirty clothes laid out on the table. Her skin is a horrible gray color, and her eyes are rolled back into her head. Her curly hair is matted up and tangled, and the closer Peter looks at her face the more he begins to notice just how sallow her cheeks are, and the way that bruises add a horrible purple and green mottling to her pallor.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Peter lets his eyes trail down her body to where her arm is hanging off of the table, a long cut on her wrist revealing itself to be the source of the sound as blood rolls from the gash, down her fingers, and drips down into the sickeningly large pool of red on the floor.
He can hear the sound of curtains being pulled back elsewhere in the room, along with Luke swearing under his breath as he sees what it was that Peter has already looked through. Peter's frozen though, and the only thing that manages to pull him out of it is the horrible, ragged rattling noise of the dead woman on the table taking a breath.
Peter jumps about the foot in the air before he comes to his senses and the horrible realization that no, the woman on the table isn't some sort of comic book zombie; she's a (barely) living, breathing, person who has been through God only knows, and has been left to slowly bleed out over the course of some number of hours, possibly longer.
Peter tears a chunk of fabric from the curtain and wads it up before pressing it down on the wound on her wrist and doing his best to elevate it. Her shoulder makes a horrible crunching noise as Peter moves the arm, and she makes another gruesome wheezing sound.
" Luke!" he calls out loudly, unable to keep the panic from his voice as the blood slowly soaks into the material of the curtain.
Peter hears the sound of footsteps rushing towards him, followed by Luke pulling back the final curtain and coming to an abrupt stop.
" Is she—"
" She's alive," Peter cuts him off. "She's still alive."
" Okay, okay," Luke says, clearly doing his best to keep Peter calm. "Don't move her too much; we don't know if she has some other injuries that we can't see, just…" He trails off and looks around for a second, before grabbing the gurney from the next curtained-off area over and rolling it to the edge of the table that the woman's on. "Get her on that, and take her out of the building. I'm going to call for help and check if there's anyone else in here."
Peter nods and follows Luke's instructions, carefully lifting the woman up and laying her down on the gurney as he hears Luke make the beginnings of a phone call. All he hears is, "Misty, I need you and an ambulance," before the sound of Luke's voice is masked by the squealing wheels of the gurney, as Peter rolls it toward the front entrance to the building.
He gets the woman out to the sidewalk, and continues to hold pressure on her wrist for the five minutes it takes Luke to join him again. Luke isn't carrying anyone with him, so Peter assumes that this woman was the only one left there.
" Was there anyone else?" he asks Luke quietly, doing his best to keep his voice from wavering as he stares down at the woman. Someone did this to her. Someone did this to a living person, and whoever did it is going to pay.
" One," Luke answers lowly, clenching his fists at his sides. "It was too late though. She was gone."
Peter feels his stomach roll with another wave of nausea. Too late. They staked the building out for over an hour. If they'd come in sooner, would it have been soon enough to save her?
Luke seems to realize what Peter's thinking. "She's been dead since at least this morning," he adds calmly. "Maybe even late last night."
It helps slightly, but Peter still feels sick. There were so many beds in there. What happened to the other patients? Why were these two left behind?
Peter's still lost in thought when the blue flashing lights come into view, accompanied by the sound of sirens howling. A car comes to a screeching halt in front of the warehouse, and a woman with dark, curly hair and what looks like a metal hand steps out, immediately making her way over to them.
" Luke—what is this? What's Spider-Man doing here?" she asks, eyes widening as she gets a good look at the woman next to Peter. "Shit!"
" Misty," Luke greets cordially. "Is an ambulance coming?"
" Yeah, it's on its way. Now answer my question," Misty, apparently, replies.
Luke shrugs. "I have no idea. It looks like some sort of organ harvesting operation, maybe. Set up like a hospital in the warehouse. Empty, other than one body and this woman."
Misty looks over to Peter, before looking back to Luke. "And Spider-Man?"
" We were in the area. Had reason to believe there was something suspicious going on here, and we weren't sure if the authorities would make it in time," Luke answers, the line sounding weirdly rehearsed.
Misty looks at him like she knows that it's bullshit, but she seems to accept it anyway and radios in for backup just as the red lights of an ambulance come around the corner.
The ambulance pulls up just beside Misty's car a moment later, and two paramedics get out with their own, much cleaner gurney in tow. Peter's still holding the scrap of curtain to the woman's wrist, and one of the paramedics, a young man with blond hair, gently pulls the woman's arm from his grasp.
" We've got her now," he says very professionally, as he loads her onto the new gurney and his partner takes her pulse. They get her back to the ambulance and speed off almost immediately.
Peter watches the lights disappear around the corner, and listens to the sirens fade away before he tunes back into Misty and Luke's conversation. She seems to notice when Peter starts listening because she turns to look at him, her arms crossed over her chest.
" You look a lot shorter when you're not swinging from skyscrapers, Spider-Man," she says in a measured tone.
" Not all of us can be, like, six foot six," Peter quips back with a gesture towards Luke, earning himself a raised eyebrow from both adults. "What? Everyone looks short next to him."
Misty gives Luke a look. Peter recognizes that look. It's the ' we're going to talk about this later' look. May gives it to him a lot. So does Mr. Stark.
" Alright, Spider- Man ," she drawls, giving him a different (but equally intimidating) look. "You want to go ahead and get out of here before the rest of the cops show and you need to make an official statement?" she asks.
Peter casts a glance over at Luke who nods. "Go ahead, Spider-Man. I can handle this."
Peter's shoulders sag with relief. "Alright, if you're sure… I'll see you around, Luke. And..?"
" Detective Knight," Misty says.
" Detective Knight," Peter repeats back, giving them both a nod before he shoots a web up at the building and heads off back home.