Peter hates hospital gowns. They're thin, ugly, and uncomfortable, and he's been wearing this particular one once a day for the last week while Tony decides that, yes, he really does have accelerated healing. Even though Peter already knew that. He's struggling to not be bitter, and he's looking forward to the comforting feeling of pants again.
He kicks his feet back and forth off the table he's sitting on, trying not to rustle the paper that's covering it. The doctor Tony's hired walks in, and he sticks up a couple of x-rays on a light board, and he turns to Peter with a smile that should be reserved for small children. It's not that Peter doesn't like him, but he doesn't seem to understand that Peter isn't a child, or that he understands a lot more than the doctor thinks.
"Okay, Peter, your ribs are looking even better today! Obviously, we've never seen anything exactly like this, but I'd give you a clean bill of health, young man. Though, you will have to keep wearing the sling as though you were one of us mortals," Doctor Ramos chuckles and takes down yet another x-ray, and Peter smiles awkwardly. Doctor Ramos is way too enthusiastic, and definitely doesn't seem like someone capable of keeping his secret identity an actual secret, but Tony vouched for him, so Peter grins and bears it. Once Doctor Ramos finished chatting, Peter is left alone to dress and he quickly leaves.
Once Doctor Ramos lets Peter go back to school, he's even antsier than when he was stuck inside the tiny apartment with Aunt May. He's practically healed so he doesn't want to wear the sling and pretend to be in pain, but the good doctor was right. He has to keep up the charade, and so he lets his friends fuss, and when Flash even offers to carry his backpack for him, Peter lets him.
Everyone at school treats him like he's fragile, and Peter gets a kick out of it for a day or so until he realizes that he absolutely cannot stand Flash being nice to him. It's weird and it throws him off, and it's so pointless since he knows the guy will just go back to being a complete dick the second that Peter can say he's healthy. Also, having limited use of one arm is no fun at all. He can't eat and text at the same time in public, which is annoying. MJ takes a video one day, of him eating French fries with his one good hand and using his nose to scroll down his phone, which was set on the table. She sends it to May, and Peter doesn't know where or when she got his aunt's number in the first place but he wishes she hadn't.
Peter Parker may still be trapped by his injuries, but Spider-Man is free to do as he pleases, and right now what he pleases is going out and fighting organized crime. The newspapers and blogs have started picking up on the fact that after Spider-Man's short disappearance, he came back with a game plan. At least twice a week, the police are making busts on gangs. Usually only small groups, or even just individual members, but these arrests lead to more of them getting dragged in, after the criminals make any deal they can and give up everyone they think of, to save themselves from 10 to 12 in Sing Sing. Matt praises him for putting a dent in organized crime, but he warns Peter that once he starts, he can't stop. Getting rid of one gang leaves space for another gang to occupy, or someone else to expand into. If he beats people out too quickly, he'll have a power vacuum on his hands. If he slows down too much, then the gangs will grow right back to their former power.
Tonight, however, Peter isn't doing anything involving gangs. Over the past week, missing person posters have been popping up with a picture of a dark-skinned woman with close-shaved hair, and the name Angela Trenton printed on them. There's a phone number to contact with information, and Peter calls it, as Spider-Man, to set up a meeting with the woman to find out some details. The woman is hesitant to meet up, but he manages to convince her he's Spider-Man by sending a crappy selfie from the burner phone's camera of himself in the suit holding three spoons between his fingers like he's Wolverine.
He's waiting on a roof of the building of the address she texted him, bouncing on his heels and humming when she taps him on the shoulder, and he starts in surprise.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you! I thought you heard me." The woman says, and he laughs and tells her it's fine, he's just jumpy. The woman, it turns out, is the sister of Angela Trenton. Her name is Aelisha, and she's a waitress at a nearby diner.
Aelisha tells him about how her baby sister has been into drugs—heroin in particular—for years. Angela overdosed last week, and when Aelisha went to the hospital to pick her up, the nurse told her that she'd already been discharged and left. Aelisha knew her sister wouldn't just up and leave, so she called her and she called her, until one day she got an answer from a man who'd found the phone in an alley two blocks from the hospital. Aelisha went to the police and did her damnedest to convince them that her sister had been kidnapped, or killed, or something equally horrible, but they wrote Angela off as another junkie who'd either run away or overdosed and fallen into the river.
Angela tells him that she spends too much of her tip money at the library printing out more missing posters to replace the ones that had been ruined by the rain and from expanding the radius of where the posts them. Peter tells her that he'll keep an eye out for her sister and that he'll check back in if he gets any news of her, and leaves, hopeful.
Peter does try to keep an eye out for Angela, but his preoccupation with the gangs he's recently made his problem keeps him from looking too much into it. Four days after his meeting with Aelisha, Peter's just walking down the street when something catches his eye. In this part of town, he's gotten used to seeing the familiar missing posters. There's always one on this corner, on that electrical box, on this lamppost, and as Peter walks past a certain marker, he feels a shiver run down his spine. The Spidey-sense knows something's wrong, and it takes a minute for Peter to realize what it is.
There's only a chunk of the poster left up, and the edges are curled from where it's obvious the poster was soaked. It hasn't rained in three days, and Peter's heart sinks. He rushes home and pulls out the burner phone, dialing the number he remembers from the posters. There's no answer. He calls again. Still no answer. He suits up as fast as he can, and goes to the diner Aelisha said she works at most days from ten to eight.. Spider-Man has sort of become a fixture of everyday life in Queens, so there isn't a massive panic when he walks into the sparsely occupied diner and asks the girl at the hostess stand if she's seen Aelisha recently.
She hasn't.
Peter thanks her, before sprinting out of the restaurant and to the building he met Aelisha at. He looks at the names by the buzzers outside the front door of the building and finds Trenton easily enough. There's a butterfly drawn on the handwritten name tag, and Peter mashes on the button without a response. A man leaving the building holds the door open for Peter to get in, and Peter doesn't remember to thank him as he rushes up six flights of stairs to the right apartment. He pounds on the door, and when he doesn't get a response he mutters a quick apology before getting ready to break the lock.
He doesn't need to. The door is unlocked.
The inside of the apartment is tidy, but it's clearly lived in. There isn't any knocked over furniture or blood stains or anything, but there's a horrible rotting smell. Peter thinks of the woman he and Luke found when the stench hits him, but he pushes through it to find the source. There isn't a dead body, thankfully, but there's a raw chicken that's been left in the microwave, probably to defrost, for about three days, judging by the stink. There's also a big, gray cat who meows loudly at Peter, and then walks over to its' empty food and water bowl. Peter uses a glass from the draining rack by the sink to fill the bowl with water, and the cat immediately starts drinking. He looks around for a moment and spots a purse on the counter nearby; a quick glance in it shows that Aelisha's wallet and cellphone are in it.
He calls the police and anonymously files a missing person report as well as a welfare check. He tells them that Aelisha has a cat, and he doesn't want it to starve if she's really gone missing. One last apologetic pet for the cat and Peter heads out, leaving everything except the cat's water bowl just as he found it. He wants to take the cat with him and take care of it until Aelisha's found (he doesn't let himself think about what might happen if she isn't found), but he knows if the cat is gone then that will significantly sway detectives' decisions about whether or not she's missing or if she just chose to leave.
At school the next day, Peter's a little bit distracted as he tries to figure out what person or gang might have an interest in Aelisha. She said her sister was a heroin addict, so it's definitely a possibility that Angela was kidnapped or killed because she got in hot water with the wrong people. Peter figures that Aelisha making a big fuss about it, with calling the police, and putting out posters, probably got her in hot water with the same people who took her sister. He kept one of the missing posters, so he has a picture of what Angela looks like. It isn't guaranteed to work, but maybe Friday will be able to use her facial recognition tech to help him search.
He heads straight to the tower after school to see if Friday can help. Things between Peter and Tony are still a little bit rocky, but after his life-threatening injuries, they've become significantly better. They're talking again for one- just not about who Peter works with as Spider-Man. It's actually pretty nice to hear Tony ask how his day at school was, as opposed to how many bad guys he caught the night before. Occasionally he'll mention some sort of technology he's working on that might be applicable to his work in the future, but for the most part, they talk as Peter and Tony rather than Iron Man and Spider-Man.
When he gets to the lab, Friday informs him that Tony's across town at a meeting of some sort, so he just pulls out his laptop and gets to work. He takes a picture of the poster with his phone and opens it on his computer once he's hooked it up to Friday's interface. She starts running her scans on it and immediately comes back with a long list of arrests. Peter reads through those, and it's about what he expected to see, but that doesn't make it any less sad. Possession, larceny, possession, solicitation, possession, trespassing, possession, drunk and disorderly, solicitation, larceny… the list goes on. A few minutes later, he gets to the medical records that Friday supplies and finds himself saddened by just how many different rehab clinics he sees listed on there. He also sees the last hospital visit before she'd gone missing.
"Is there any more information you'd like me to retrieve?" Friday asks politely, and Peter thinks for a moment.
"Could you… could you run facial recognition and see if her face matches any Jane Doe's brought in recently?"
"Certainly. Would you like me to check hospitals, morgues, or both?"
"Both," Peter replies, feeling a little sick- the mention of morgues brings the woman he and Luke found to his mind.
He's been in touch with Luke since that night, and he knows that the living woman they found is still alive. She's in a coma, and nobody's sure if she'll wake up. They still don't know who she is, but she has a twenty-four-hour police guard assigned to her room at the hospital. He went to see her once, but it was painful enough that he doesn't think he'll do it again.
Friday returns the results on her search of hospital and morgue records a few minutes later, and there's one woman who was an inconclusive match for facial recognition. Peter looks over the picture, and if not for the woman's hair, he'd think it a possible match. Aelisha told him the picture of Angela with shaved hair was only about a month old, and the woman in the picture has much longer hair.
"Is there anything else?" Friday asks again, as Peter closes the image of the woman on an autopsy table.
"Yeah, actually. Do you think you could pull up a missing person report filed for Aelisha Trenton?" he asks. He hadn't stuck around long enough to find out what the police did, but he knows any officer with any brains in their skull would be able to see something was wrong with the scenario.
"Just a minute," Friday says, before going quiet for a moment. "There's a missing person report for Aelisha Trenton, filed yesterday and resolved yesterday."
"Resolved?" Peter asks with a frown.
"The report reads that when officers went to perform a welfare check on Aelisha Trenton, they were let into the apartment by the landlord and found it in perfect condition. It says that Aelisha's purse and other personal items including her toothbrush and prescription medicines were gone as well as the medium sized suitcase from a set that they found. The officers concluded that Aelisha Trenton is simply out of town."
Peter feels his blood run cold, and he doesn't know what to think, let alone say, so he says "What does it say about her cat?"
"The report doesn't mention a cat."
"Shit," he breathes out.
Peter's just now gotten into trying to deal with organized crime; he has no goddamn clue what to do about corrupt cops. He'd had his doubts before, but now he's absolutely positive that Angela did not check herself out of that hospital, and that she's not just off on a drug binge, or whatever it was that the police had told Aelisha. Think, dammit. What should he do?
"Friday, what're the names of the officers who checked into Aelisha Trenton?" he asks, biting his lip.
"That would be officers Wyatt Sanders and Lucas Eltman," Friday responds, automatically pulling up both of their files on Peter's computer.
He reads over them for a minute, and he's relieved to see that they're not too high up the food chain. Maybe the corruption doesn't run too deep. A few more documents pop up a second later, including a patrol schedule for both officers. They're partners and work out of the same car, so that's definitely convenient.
Peter packs his laptop back into his backpack and heads out, thanking Friday as he steps off the elevator. He leaves the building and makes a beeline for the one person he knows has experience weeding out dirty cops.
When he walks into the offices of Nelson, Murdock & Page, Peter isn't too badly surprised to see nobody in the waiting area aside from Danielle, who's at her desk doing something. She smiles when she sees Peter.
"Is Matt here?" Peter asks nervously, not even bothering with a greeting.
"He and Mr. Nelson are out right now, but Ms. Page is in her office," she says, and when she sees the way Peter's face drops she's quick to tack on, "They should be back within half an hour!"
"I… is Ms. Page with a client right now?" he asks, and Danielle shakes her head in response.
"Would you like me to tell her that you're here?" she asks, and this time Peter shakes his head.
"No, it's okay. I'll just wait for Matt out here," he replies, going to sit in one of the slightly worn armchairs of the waiting area.
After twenty minutes of sitting there, bouncing his leg and picking at the skin beside his thumbnail constantly, Danielle gets up from her desk and heads over to the kitchenette. Peter doesn't bother paying attention to what she's doing until she comes to sit in the chair beside him and hands him a cup of tea.
"Thanks," he says quietly as he takes the chipped mug and sips from it.
Danielle smiles at him. "Are you alright?" she asks softly.
"I… I just need to ask Matt a question," he replies, worrying the inside of his lip with his teeth.
"Alright… just tell me if you need anything, okay?" she says before heading back to her desk.
Peter knows that she's probably only three or four years older than him, so the caring instinct probably comes from her being someone's older sister. He lets himself wonder about Danielle for a few more minutes before he's pulled back to reality by the sound of a door opening.
"Hey, Peter!" Foggy greets with a wide smile. "What's up, man?"
Matt has a more serious expression, and Peter wonders how good he is at telling people's emotions.
"I need to talk to Matt," he says, and suddenly Foggy looks serious too. He also gives Matt quite a glare.
"Alright, Peter. Let's talk in my office," Matt replies calmly, inclining his head to tell Peter to follow him.
As soon as they're in Matt's office and the door is shut, Matt speaks in a low whisper, probably to keep their obvious eavesdroppers in the dark.
"What's wrong?" he asks, the death grip on his cane not relaxing at all.
Peter looks around the office and finds his eyes landing on the bookshelves, full of things printed in Braille. The papers in neat stacks across the desk are in Braille too, and there's a screen reader sitting beside Matt's laptop. He feels extra dumb for not noticing Matt's disability sooner, but before he can spiral into a horribly self-induced cringe-fest, Matt sets a hand on his arm and shakes him out of it.
"Peter," he says, and he's frowning now.
"I'm okay," Peter assures immediately, even though he's not quite sure that he is.
"What did you need to talk to me about that you couldn't over the phone?" Matt says, guiding Peter to sit in one of the chairs while he sits on the edge of the desk in front of him.
"There's this lady—her sister went missing and the cops wouldn't help her, so she was kinda making a big deal and putting posters everywhere. And I called the number on the poster and met up with her and talked so I could try and help because I just... I couldn't stop thinking about the woman Luke and I found and I needed to help someone—"
"Peter, take a breath," Matt guides gently, leaning forward to put his hand on Peter's shoulder for a minute until he gets his rapid breathing back under control. "So there's a woman whose sister is missing and you were going to help her."
"Yeah, and she always puts up new posters when one gets torn or taken or it rains, and yesterday I found one of the posters, but it was torn up and looked like it got wet, but it hasn't rained in days, so I went to her job to see if anyone had seen her and I called her and I went to her apartment, and when I got there nobody was home and the door was unlocked, and there was a chicken that had been rotting in the microwave for days, and her purse and wallet and cellphone were still there, and her cat didn't have any food or water, so I called the cops, y'know? Figured I'd file a missing person report since I figured she got taken or killed by whoever it was that her sister got in trouble with. I waited for the cops to show, then went home. But today I looked at the missing person report because it had been marked resolved, and they said that her door had been locked, her stuff was gone, and that there were no signs she was taken or that foul play was involved."
Matt frowns at that and sits back to think for a minute before speaking. "Do you have the names of the officers who investigated her apartment?"
Peter nods and then wonders if Matt can tell he nodded, and gives a verbal affirmation as well, just in case.
"We could do some surveillance on them, see if they do anything else questionable or say anything about the case," Matt suggests. "I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but she's most likely dead," he adds gently.
Peter knows that. He knew that the second he read the report. "Okay." Peter's shoulders are still tense, and Matt just seems to be able to tell that he's still not feeling much better about the whole scenario.
"Here's the plan," Matt says in a much more certain voice. "We're going to find out their schedules, and we're going to watch and listen to them to see if they give any hint of being dirty; it's possible someone else changed the report after it was entered. If we can confirm it's them, then we'll get the answers out of them. If we can't, we'll find who's responsible."
"I have the patrol schedule," Peter says quietly, pulling out his laptop to open the document and check. "Umm… Sanders and Eltman… there, they're patrolling from 21st to 32nd street tomorrow night. Starting at eight PM, going till four AM," he reads off.
"Good. Tomorrow night at seven-thirty, we're going to meet on your roof. I'll help you with this, okay?" Matt says in a way that makes Peter feel a little bit more grounded.
"Okay," he says. "Tomorrow, seven-thirty." He thinks about the cat left in Aelisha's apartment again, and he must give off some sign of a new wave of anxiety hitting him because Matt's hand is back on his shoulder.
"What's wrong?" he asks softly.
"Her cat," Peter answers. "Nobody's taking care of it."
"You can go get her cat," Matt says. "If you can't take care of it, I can take it until we find her. I'm gonna call you a cab, okay?"
Peter wants to protest that he'll be fine taking the subway, but he also knows that Matt's a human lie detector, so it would be pointless. Instead, he just thanks him quietly and waits there until Matt tells him the cab is coming down the street. He wants to ask more about Matt's abilities, but he figures that he can do that another time when he isn't on the border of panic.
The cab drops him off at his apartment, and Peter only stays there long enough to change into the suit before he heads for Aelisha's apartment. When he gets there the door is locked, and he has to break the handle to get in. Rather than the smell of rotting meat greeting him, he's instead met by the choking odor of bleach. The purse is gone now, and as Peter walks around the apartment calling out for the cat, he sees other things that are different- suitcases are set out in the bedroom, and the toiletries covering the bathroom counter are gone. After a minute of fruitless searching, he heads back to the kitchen and pours some cat food into a bowl and rattles it around.
Half a minute later, the cat comes slinking out from under the couch, completely different to how it had acted the day before. It eats the food but is so skittish it takes a solid twenty minutes before Peter can pick it up. He looks around for a moment and finds an old backpack, which he very apologetically puts the cat into before zipping it up and leaving out the window. He makes the trip back to his apartment as quick as possible, but once he gets inside and shuts the window behind him he can feel the cat wriggling around desperately in the backpack.
As soon as he takes off the mask and tosses it onto his bed he unzips the backpack, and the cat bolts into the living room.
The cat almost runs straight into May and hisses at her before slithering under the couch.
"What the hell, Peter?" May says in a very defeated voice.
"Her owner's missing. I'm just watching the cat until I find her!" he says.
May looks appraisingly between Peter and the low growling emanating from beneath the couch for a minute before sighing. "Fine. Go see if Ms. Landrin down the hall has a litterbox we can borrow," she says.
Peter grins at her and heads for the door, only stopping when May grabs his wrist as he walks past. He looks at her in confusion, and she raises an eyebrow.
"You might want to change first."
He blushes and heads back into his room to change into normal clothes before returning to the task at hand. Fortunately, the neighbor does have a litterbox they can borrow, along with a bag of cat food that she says none of her five cats will eat. He thanks her and heads back to the apartment to set things up for the cat.
By the time Peter goes to bed that night, the cat has significantly calmed down, with the help of many bits of sandwich meat and cat food. It even hops up onto his bed and curls up into a little ball right at the curve of his back. He can feel in purring as it sleeps, and he makes a quiet vow to get its owner back to it.
School passes by in a blur the next day; Peter doesn't remember a single detail of it but knows he must have gone, judging by the nice new pile of homework he occupies himself with until it's time to suit up and head to the roof.
Unsurprisingly, Matt is already there and sitting at the edge of the roof, his legs dangling off the building. Peter would say he was admiring the view if he didn't know Matt was blind.
Matt doesn't give the slightest acknowledgment in his body language that he knows Peter's finished climbing up the wall outside his window to get there. Instead, he just greets him with a "Ready to go?"
Peter nods. "Yeah, let's go."
Unlike the last time he worked with Matt, Peter sticks closer to him. He parkours right alongside him across the rooftops and alleys. Once they get within the patrol area, Peter sets a hand on Matt's shoulder to indicate they can stop. It's not like Matt can read the street sign marking this the corner of 23rd Street and 33rd Avenue. And then he stops and thinks because Matt obviously knew where he was, regardless of not being able to read the signs. Peter really needed to know more about what Matt's deal was.
"They should come through here at some point," he says, going to sit at the edge of the roof that they're on.
Matt comes to sit beside him, and he begins to tilt his head in that signature way of his as he listens to the world around them. "What did you say their names were again?"
"Wyatt Sanders and Lucas Eltman," he says, looking down at the few cars that pass by below them.
"Got it."
Things are quiet for a while as Matt listens in to all sorts of things that Peter can only imagine being able to hear. He jerks his head around in a way that reminds Peter slightly of a dog that hears something unusual, but eventually, he settles with his head one way.
"They're circling the block," he says. "I think we should wait until it's later. They'll be less alert, and there'll be fewer people around."
"Alright," Peter says before going back to the silence they were in. He wants to ask Matt about how he does what he does, but he also doesn't want to pry or come off as rude.
After five minutes of Peter's internal debate, Matt sighs. "Say what you want to, Peter."
Peter jumps. "How did you know I want to say something?"
"People's breathing changes before they say something. You keep almost saying something and then not following through," Matt explains simply.
"You're disabled," Peter finally says, even though that's not what he'd wanted to ask. It's not even a question.
Matt's mouth pulls into a tight line, and he nods. "I am."
"I just… I don't get it. You can still see, right?"
"The chemicals that enhanced my senses also got into my eyes and blinded me. I'm completely blind. My eyes serve no function at all. When I say I'm blind, I mean that I am really, truly, completely blind. So, no. I can't see anything."
"Then how do you do it?" Peter asks.
"I've told you my other senses are enhanced. I can tell where things are from how sounds bounce off of them, the way air currents move around them. It's like sonar, but more advanced. All of the input makes a sort of picture in my head, but I can't see."
"How old were you when you got your abilities?"
"Nine," Matt answers like he's had to answer these questions a lot.
"And how did you learn how to..?" Peter makes a vaguely, ninja-ish gesture that he hopes Matt can pick up on.
Even with the highly defensive aura radiating off of Matt, that still manages to make him smile for just a second. "My dad died not too long after the accident, and I got sent to live at the orphanage my church was associated with. When I was there, a blind old man named Stick found me and taught me how to use my abilities and how to fight. He left, I kept up my training on my own. I heard bad shit happen for years and eventually, I had enough and started stopping the bad shit on my own. I'm still capable of everything I was before you found out," he says, the last sentence coming out harshly.
"I mean, I'm not gonna treat you any differently now that I know," Peter replies, ignoring the derisive huff it gets him from Matt. "Well, that's a lie. I'll read signs for you. And I won't tell you to cut the red wire if we find a bomb."
Matt snorts at that, and although he's not relaxed, the air between them is definitely less tense. There's a moment of quiet before Matt speaks up though. "You're worried about me more now," he says, and it's a fact, not a question. "You got nervous every time I had to make a jump on the way here. Your heart rate spiked, and you stayed closer to me, did you think I might trip and fall off the roof or something?"
"I—"
"You don't need to worry about me, Peter," Matt adds in a voice of finality.
That ends their conversation, and they sit quietly on the rooftop so Matt can listen in on the conversation the officers are having when they're within hearing range. After nearly an hour Matt perks up, and Peter turns to watch him.
"They're talking about you," he says.
"Me?"
"Spider-Man," Matt elaborates. "Said something about you stirring shit. Disrupting the supply chain."
"Oh," Peter says.
They're quiet for another long stretch.
"I have a plan," Matt announces finally. "We're going to have to use you as—" He stops speaking abruptly and tilts his head again.
Peter wants to ask what he's hearing, but he doesn't want to be the reason Matt misses some important bit of dialogue between their targets.
"Change in plan. We're going to let them arrest us," Matt says decisively, and Peter almost chokes on his own tongue.
"What?"
"Their boss doesn't like me either. Apparently, I disrupt the supply chain too, whatever that means. It's probably heroin. Anyway, we're going to get their attention and let them arrest us. They won't take us to the police; they'll take us to whoever their boss is to try and suck up to him and get into his inner circle. They sound like they're pretty low in the ranks. If they haven't killed the woman they took, she'll probably be there."
"Are you sure about this..?" Peter asks hesitantly. "Won't they try and, like, identify us?"
Matt shrugs. "Probably not. Guys like this usually want to leave the honors to whoever they work for."
Peter gives Matt a skeptical look.
"I've dealt with a lot of these people. They're weird. They're theatrical. They get their rocks off on the thought of unmasking the people who make their lives hell, and they'd probably cut the hands off any of their disciples who try and take that moment for themselves."
Peter gives Matt a significantly more disgusted look.
"Look, if they go for the masks, we'll just take them down. They aren't in the greatest fighting shape considering I can smell the cheeseburgers from here," Matt adds on. "If it happens when we're cuffed, you can break the cuffs and I know how to fight with my legs. Simple enough, right?"
While Matt's plan had sounded like one concocted by a complete crackhead, the further explanation shows that he's actually thought things out. While he can't say he's thrilled with the idea of letting himself get arrested, Matt was right in saying he can break out of handcuffs.
"Fine," he says with a sigh. "Let's do it."
Matt smiles at him and pulls his own burner phone out before dialing 911 as Peter watches in mild confusion.
"Hi, yes," Matt says in a sweet voice. "There's someone trying to break into a car in the parking lot on 23rd and," He pauses, thinking.
"Thirty-third road," Peter whispers back, and Matt recites it to the dispatcher.
Matt hangs up and slides the phone back into one of the pockets on his suit. "Let's go. Sanders and Eltman are being dispatched to stop our imaginary car thief."
Peter nods and follows after Matt, and they quickly make their way to the parking lot just a few hundred feet away. They've just gotten into position when flashing lights pull up and the police cruiser's siren chirps twice at them.
"Down on the ground!" one of the officers yells at them, his gun held in obviously shaking hands. Matt was right about them not being in the best fighting shape; neither of them are morbidly obese, but they definitely have some dad-bod going on.
"Are you seeing this shit?" one officer asks his partner, tilting his head toward where Daredevil and Spider-Man are standing in front of them.
"Sure am, Eltman," the man replies, and Peter's glad for the confirmation of the officers' identities. "Down on the ground!" he repeats.
Peter grits his teeth but kneels when Matt does, putting his hands on top of his head in a mirrored gesture of Matt.
Both officers approach them, their guns still out, and for a second Peter's worried that they might just get shot and have their dead bodies unmasked by whatever druglord these two work for. His worries are laid to rest though when the officer closest to him holsters his gun and pulls out his cuffs, restraining Peter's arms tightly behind his back. He grabs Peter by the wrist and drags him over to the car, shoving him in the backseat. He hesitates for a second before clicking Peter's seatbelt into place. A moment later he has his gun back out and trained on Matt so his partner can cuff the matching Daredevil to their already collected Spider-Man. Despite Peter's well known superhuman strength, the officers still treat Matt like more of a threat. Maybe it's because Daredevil's been known to beat the shit out of cops, but Spider-Man is still of the friendly, neighborhood variety of hero.
Regardless of why it is, they still shove Matt extra roughly into the backseat of the cruiser, trying to knock his head on the edge of the door, though Matt manages to avoid it and growls at them. They buckle him in too, even though Matt looks ready to bite anyone who gets too close.
"Can't say I expected you to come this easy, after what you did to those guys from the fifteenth who tried to bring you in," Eltman says once he's back in the driver's seat.
"I don't hurt innocent people," Matt growls back, and the guy laughs.
"You just made the biggest mistake of your life assuming we were innocent," he says, and wow, these guys are fucking morons.
"There was no car thief," officer Sanders says into his radio. "Probably just a prank call. We're going back to our patrol route."
"Roger," a slightly static-y voice replies.
"You're welcome for stopping a grand theft auto, by the way," Peter says. "Saved you some paperwork, on it, didn't we? And this is how you thank us? I'm wounded."
"Relax, Spidey," Sanders says, rolling his eyes.
Matt snarls at the nickname, and even though the officers are separated from him by the metal grill blocking off the backseat, they still shut up at the sound.
They're headed further and further away from Manhattan, and Peter's getting bored. It's unnerving being in cuffs in the back of a police car, and he's a nervous talker, so he does his best to just bug the shit out of their kidnappers.
"Jesus Christ, you drive like you're eighty," Peter groans loudly. "You're already breaking the law. Would it kill you to speed?"
"Shut it," Eltman barks as he presses down on the gas regardless, turning over his shoulder to glare at Peter.
In that split second his eyes are off the road, a dark shape moves out in front of the car.
A dark, humanoid shape.
Peter screams, "Look out!" the second the car hits the person.
The windshield shatters, and Eltman yanks the steering wheel on reflex, turning the car directly into a street light. The car comes to a screeching halt, and both officers are groaning into the deployed airbags because although they put seatbelts on their suspects, they were too dumb to do up their own. There's some blood, and Peter assumes that one or both of the cops were cut by the shattered windshield. He has no idea what to say (he's just thankful the cops decided to put seatbelts on the vigilantes they were kidnapping), so he just turns to Matt.
Matt is muttering something under his breath, and before Peter can ask him what he's saying, a black-gloved hand attached to a red arm shatters the glass on the passenger side of the car and reaches in to delicately press the 'door unlock' button.
A second later, the door on Matt's side of the car opens. Before Peter can even see who it is, Matt kicks them in the knee. Hard.
"Ow!" a voice says. "Is that any sort of way to treat your valiant rescuer?"
"Wade, you dumbfuck," Matt snarls, getting out of the car with his hands still cuffed behind his back and posturing up to—oh God, is that Deadpool? "We were getting them to take us to their boss!"
"Hey, hey, hey! Calm down, shnookums," motherfucking Deadpool says, earning a growl from Matt who's now straining against his cuffs. "I can drive you to the police station if you wanna see their boss so bad." Peter's trying to fight off a smile, but Deadpool just rescued them. Or, thought he was. Still cool.
"They're dirty, you moron," Matt snaps.
"And so are you! Leather and handcuffs? You're really pulling out all the stops tonight!" Deadpool says, and Matt lunges at him.
Deadpool puts his hand on Matt's shoulder to hold him at arm's length and laughs, rooting around in one of the pockets on his belt for a second before procuring a tiny, silver object. "You're lucky I always carry these. Now turn around," he says.
Matt growls again but obliges, and Deadpool uses the thing that Peter's now realizing is a key to unlock the handcuffs.
Peter finally makes his way out of the car, scooting over to exit through the door Deadpool had opened for Matt. He pulls his hands apart until the chain snaps and then wrenches open the bracelet parts of the cuffs, tossing them onto the ground.
"Did you… did you get run over to stop the car?" Peter asks incredulously.
"Spidey! Nice of you to join us!" Deadpool greets cheerfully. "And yes. Well, I kinda bounced off the hood and over the roof, so I didn't really get run over, per se." The hand gestures Deadpool uses to illustrate himself bouncing off the hood of the car are slightly disturbing.
"Why would you do that?!"
"I couldn't just leave my bestest, red leather buddy to get arrested, could I?" Deadpool says in a syrupy falsetto, throwing an arm around Matt's shoulders and pulling him closer despite the way Matt is still growling at him. Matt pretty much goes feral as soon as he's in the suit, and honestly, it's pretty entertaining.
Peter thinks that Deadpool is even better at pushing Matt's buttons than Mr. Castle is. And he didn't even know Daredevil and Deadpool were acquainted up until this moment.
Matt elbows Deadpool in the ribs and shoves him back against the side of the car. "How many times have I told you to stay out of my shit unless I explicitly ask for your help?"
"You don't need to ask me to do anything explicit more than once," Deadpool coos at Matt, who just snarls at him again before taking a step back to consider their situation.
"Fine. You fucked this up, so you're helping me fix it," Matt says.
Deadpool nods eagerly, and he looks like a heavily muscled, 6'2" puppy with multiple guns and katanas. "Anything for you, Redthew."
Peter chokes on his laugh, coughing instead. Matt shoots him a look anyway.
Matt's face tightens up at that nickname, but he doesn't rise to the bait or punch Deadpool. "Get the driver," he says simply, before heading around to the passenger side and pulling out Officer Sanders who groans weakly. He doesn't put up much of a fight as Matt carries him into a nearby area around the side of the abandoned looking building they crashed in front of.
Deadpool follows close behind Matt, humming as he drags his charge by the wrist. "Come on, Spidey. Don't want to miss out on the fun now, do we?"
Peter has a bad feeling about it, but he follows Deadpool to where Matt's kneeling on Officer Sanders' back, holding the man's arm up at an awkward angle and pushing it toward a direction that it's not meant to bend in.
"Tell me," Matt growls.
The response from the officer is muffled enough that Peter can't hear it, but from the way Matt quickly shoves the man's arm down straight across his own back with a horrible crunching noise and a scream from the man, he can tell it wasn't the answer Matt wanted to hear.
"Wow," Deadpool says, still restraining Eltman with one hand firmly around the man's wrist. "Is it weird to say that I kinda wish I was the one he just did that to?"
Matt snaps his head up and turns it toward where Peter is standing frozen beside Deadpool. "Spider-Man, you don't want to see this," he says.
Peter nods and turns around, heading back to stand by the car. He listens to the screams that eventually die down into whimpers, cringing at each loud noise that comes from where Matt and Deadpool are interrogating—no—torturing two men. He's known this entire time that Matt tortures people sometimes, but it's always been sort of an abstract thought that he doesn't necessarily have to confront.
It's a lot harder to not confront it when he can match faces and names to the shrieks of pain he's hearing.
A little more than half an hour later, though it feels like hours have passed, Matt comes out looking especially grim, followed by Deadpool, who's looking particularly giddy if the way he's skipping is anything the judge by.
"Did you get what you needed?" Peter asks, sounding hoarse and feeling like he might throw up.
"We got a name," Matt replies.
Deadpool skips around to the side of the police car and leans in through the shattered window to speak into the radio. "Hi, dispatch," he says sweetly. "This is your old pal, Deadpool. Just stopping by to let you know that the officers who were in this car are no longer in this car because they made some bad choices. If you know the choices I'm referring to, then I'll come after you too." He finishes speaking with a hard note in his voice, before turning back to Matt and Peter.
"Let's get out of here before the cops show up," Matt says, putting a hand on Peter's shoulder to lead him down the street, Deadpool following behind them. They make it about six blocks before Matt yanks them all into an alley a few seconds before a police car with no lights or sirens zooms past.
"Where are we going?" Peter asks quietly once the car has passed.
"You can head home if you want," Matt replies. "Or you can come with me and Deadpool to check out the name we got from those cops."
Deadpool is doing something on his phone, not of the flip variety, and Matt is waiting for his answer. He stares at Matt, and does his best to give an unimpressed look. Matt doesn't look affected by it, but Peter's not sure if that's because Matt's blind or because he doesn't have a very good unimpressed look. He's going to go with the second one even though the first one is most likely the truth.
"This was my case," Peter points out a little less than politely. "And it's Friday so it isn't like I have to go to school tomorrow. If anything, you and Deadpool are coming with me to figure out who this guy is."
Peter doesn't even realize what he let slip until he notices the silence has gone on for far longer than it has up until this point in Deadpool's presence (the guy never shuts up).
"School?" Deadpool asks, his face oddly expressive even through the mask. "How old are you?"
Peter looks to Matt quickly for an out, but he just shrugs vaguely. The slight upward pull at the corner of his mouth shows that he's amused, that jackass.
"Umm I'm twenty," Peter tries, and his attempt at making his voice sound more mature is so laughable that even Matt can't keep the smile off his face any longer.
"Uh uh, Spidey. College kids say 'class'. You said school," Deadpool replies, his arms crossed over his chest.
Peter sighs and tosses another look at Matt before thumping his head back against the brick wall of the alley they're all hiding in. "Almost sixteen," he mutters.
Deadpool full on chokes on the air. "You're fifteen?!" he shrieks in the loudest whisper Peter's ever heard (and he's friends with theater kids). "You're too young to fight crime! You can't even drive!"
"I can't drive either," Matt replies, just to be chaotic.
"It's New York- nobody needs to know how to drive," Deadpool says, blowing him off.
"Then why's it such a big deal that I can't drive?" Peter counters.
"Because you couldn't get a license even if you wanted!"
"Neither can I," Matt points out again, earning himself a glare from Deadpool.
The two of them stare each other down for a minute, and there's definitely some eyebrow raising going on beneath both of their masks before Deadpool throws his hands in the air and sighs. "Fine. Fine, whatever. See if I care that someone tried to hire me to kill a little baby!"
"Wait, what?!" Peter asks, standing to attention as Matt adjusts his stance similarly.
"Don't get your onesies in a wad- I didn't do it! The guy offered me 10k. Ten K! For a superhuman hero! A child superhuman hero!" Deadpool laments, before glancing back down at his phone when it buzzes and switching the topic so fast it makes Peter's head spin. "Our guy's in Manhattan. Mount Sinai West."
Matt doesn't seem thrown off at all by the abrupt change in conversation. "How the hell did you get that so fast?"
"I added him on Snapchat. Duh," Deadpool replies, tapping one of Matt's horns. Peter swears he hears the man say 'boop' under his breath before he turns to look at the youngest member of their trio. "Snap maps are a hitman's best friend, kiddo."
Peter makes a mental note to set his location so nobody can see it.
"We have a location. Let's go," Matt says, but before he can take more than a step, Deadpool grabs him by the arm.
"We are not fucking walking to the Upper West Side," he says. "I'm calling a cab." Deadpool goes to his contacts list and scrolls until he finds one that simply has every heart emoji ever as the name.
A single minute conversation later, and apparently Deadpool's cab-driving friend is on his way to come get them. Peter's wandered over towards the other end of the alley to investigate the graffiti painted there.
"I spy with my little eye… something red," Deadpool sing-songs closer towards the entrance of the alley after a couple minutes of blessed silence.
There's silence for a beat followed by a defeated sigh and Matt saying, "Is it you?"
"Nope!"
"Is it me?"
"Nada!"
"Is it Spider-Man?"
"Yahtzee! Your turn," Deadpool says with a grin.
Matt looks Deadpool straight in the face. "I spy a colossal dumbass."
Peter realizes it's going to be a long wait for the cab.