"Peter," Matt immediately said upon Peter picking up the call, and the teen was instantly wary, muscles tensing and eyes flickering to his window as if he was expecting a brick to suddenly come flying through.
"Yeeees?" he tentatively answered, drawing the word out and beginning to slowly pace his room as he considered what possible reason the call could be for. Considering the slight tingling at the back of his neck as the hairs there rose… probably nothing good.
He and Matt hadn't exactly interacted all that much (or at all) since the whole driving assassination fiasco last week - mostly due to the interference of Matt's friends (Claire and Foggy), nobody's friend (Frank), and Aunt May, the last of who's reaction to finding everything out had honestly made Foggy's righteous fury genuinely pale in comparison.
The point, however, was that Peter was pretty sure he and Matt didn't have anything that they needed to imminently discuss - certainly not something important enough to break the other-people-mandated separation and grounding between the two of them.
"You need to come over," Matt said, completely dashing Peter's self-assurances and gleefully stomping them into a finely powdered dust.
"Matt, my man, my buddy, my dude," Peter lightly heartedly cajoled, turning on his heel to begin pacing back the other way across the length of his room. "There's this teeny tiny, really not exactly important, super insignificant little thing that I think mayhaps has slipped your mind, but I'm grounded. G-r-o-u - rounded. From you. As in, I am allowed to do almost anything besides murder or martyrdom except for having any interaction whatsoever with a certain Matt insert-M-middle-name Murdock - wait. Isn't your middle name Michael? I'm pretty sure Foggy said it was Michael. Mike? Mikeeeey." Peter paused. He rebooted himself back on track. "Anywho, point is, your request has been summarily denied," he stated firmly, crossing his free arm over his chest and frowning as he gave a single, sharp nod to his empty room.
There was a drawn out pause on the other end of the line, and the only reason Peter didn't bother checking if Matt had hung up on him was because his super hearing let him pick up on the faintest yet most exasperated sigh he'd heard in a while. And he heard a lot of them. "I've been given a heads up that the cops are coming to interview me sometime this evening," Matt informed him.
"Ah." Peter said. "Uh. Hm." He continued. "Yeah, okay fair enough. I'll be there in two."
.
"So," Peter started, taking a seat across from Matt and clasping his hands together between his knees as he leaned forwards, his sneaker-clad foot tap-tap-tapping away on the - huh. Matt really ought to get better at removing blood stains from his rugs. "Cops?" Peter questioned.
"Cops," Matt affirmed, nodding his head brusquely.
Peter hummed in understanding, gaze trailing across Matt's apartment and landing on the eye-searing billboard shining in through the window. An ad for dental care attempted to burn itself into his retinas with neon blues and blinding white.
The silence dragged on for several seconds more as Peter valiantly attempted to blink the spots from his eyes.
"Okay, Matt I'm - why are cops gonna come for you, exactly?" Peter caved, bringing up a fist to rub against his eyelids. "Cause I gotta say, out of all the people you know, choosing the sixteen year old high schooler reeeally doesn't seem like the best decision-making skills to me, ya know? Like, you've got your co-partner in actual lawyering - Foggy - and you've got Claire, who's at least a licenced professional and, better yet, an adult, and you've got Danny Rand, who could probably just, like, pay off whatever the cops are after you for, and you've got the literal Punisher - no wait, okay, I admit I'm definitely a better option than the Punisher, yeah. But - you see what I'm saying, right?" Peter pressed, waving his hand around.
Matt pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing tersely as he pushed his glasses further up. "I am well aware of my options, Peter," the man informed him wearily, not wasting any more time before reaching to his side and whipping out a glossy paper. With a dramatic flourish, Matt slammed the sheet down onto the table between the two of them. "This is why I called you," he emphasized forcefully, gesturing at the creamy white, completely blank laminated paper.
Peter was one hundred percent positive that this was an inappropriate time to giggle, so he cut off the sound with an aborted squeak that sounded like a decompressed balloon. He shot his hand up to his mouth and bit down on his nails to smother the rest of it.
With his lips still flattened in a grim line, Matt wordlessly reached forwards and flipped the paper over.
Peter inhaled sharply, amusement quickly taking a backseat (through sheer force of will) as he leaned further forwards and turned the newly revealed photograph around to face him.
There, captured in a semi-clear picture, were Peter and Matt. Peter's features were basically hidden behind his hands, which were pressed to his face from his forehead to his chin, but - although slightly blurred with movement - Matt's iconic, slightly reddish-tinted glasses were in clear view below his dark, windswept hair. The both of them were seated in a very familiar-looking Porsche, with Matt unmistakably behind the wheel.
"Shoot."
"Yes, 'shoot,'" Matt replied tersely, leaning back in his seat and frisking a hand through his hair.
"Did Foggy get this for you?" Peter asked, taking the photo in hand and squinting at it, tilting it this way and that.
"No, Foggy doesn't know about this yet. I've got a guy," Matt told him vaguely, standing abruptly from his chair and heading for the kitchen. "From what I was told, there isn't any clear identification of you in the image - which is from a traffic cam capture, by the way - but if I'm implicated, they'll likely find records of us having been together at the cafe beforehand."
Peter let out a breath through his teeth. "Double shoot," he commiserated. He tilted the photo to the left again, a furrow forming between his brows as he narrowed his eyes further towards Matt's tiny, grainy face. "It's not like they've got a clear ID on you either, though," he absently pointed out, snorting at the comically large dent in the front bumper of the Porsche.
Matt's movements slowed from where he was reaching for a cupboard, hand coming to rest on the knob. His lips pursed. "I know for a fact that my glasses are in plain view and my face isn't obstructed, either," Matt replied, raising a brow.
Peter shrugged, waving the photo around as if to brush the comment aside. "So?" he scoffed. "They're glasses. Tons of people wear glasses. Plus, the pic's kinda blurry on your face - pretty sure you were moving around or something when the cam took it. And all that's left is your hair, which - it's hair. You've got, like, the most generic forty year old white male haircut ever," Peter finished off satisfiedly, tossing the now less-than-incriminating photograph back onto the table.
"I'm thirty-two," Matt stressed, very obviously miffed, and Peter groaned at him, throwing himself back onto the couch seat.
"That's what you got from that?" Peter groused, flinging his hands up in exaggerated exasperation.
Matt scowled in his direction and clearly struggled with himself for a couple of seconds before letting the line of inquiry drop, yanking open the cupboard with a tad more force than necessary. "No," he bit out, proceeding to stew in silence for a few more moments thereafter before visibly letting himself soften into something more grudgingly inquisitive. He pulled his desired mug out and meandered over to his coffee machine. "You genuinely believe it's not a giveaway that it's me?" he questioned somewhat dubiously, turning on the device.
Peter nodded energetically, snapping and shooting finger guns at Matt's back. "Yeah!" he exclaimed. "There's totally not enough to go off of in this picture. I mean, unless they've got more footage stored away without you knowing, there's basically no way they could prove it was you unless -" he cut himself off, finger guns abruptly wilting. "Unless they take your fingerprints," Peter breathed, eyes wide.
Matt frowned, turning towards the teen and talking over the sound of his coffee machine burbling and sputtering to life. "My fingerprints?" he questioned, tilting his head.
Peter paused. He took a moment to simply stare at his fellow vigilante. A small, genuine little part of him wondered how in the world this man was a lawyer. "Yes, Matt," Peter said slowly, carefully, as if he was talking to a wounded dog. Or an infant. "Your fingerprints, which'd match the ones on Mr. Rand's car," he delicately explained.
Contrary to expectation, Matt's expression cleared instead of darkened, and he even had the audacity to let out a single chuckle. "Ah. That. The car's gone," he clarified, clarifying nothing.
"'Gone?'" Peter echoed, jerking his head back at the unexpectedness of it. What, the car just went poof? "What do you mean, 'gone?'"
"Blown up, 'gone,'" Matt told him dryly, finally deigning to elaborate. "Apparently, one of the gang members had either very poor or very good aim. They hit the Porsche's gas tank not long after we left. The whole thing was up in flames in seconds."
Peter whistled, eyebrows raised. "Dang."
Matt chuckled and shook his head. The last drops of coffee finally dribbled into the man's mug, and he lifted the ceramic to his lips, not even bothering to blow on the steaming hot liquid before taking a liberal swallow. Then, blatantly ignoring the look of absolute disgust and unrivaled horror on Peter's face (because the teen refused to believe that Matt couldn't sense it), Matt pointed out, "My glasses are quite a unique shade and shape, however."
Peter shuddered, having to look away from Matt's abomination of a coffee and his equally abominable coffee-drinking-ways to reorientate himself. "Yeah, but isn't that, like, circumstantial or something?" he tried.
Matt hummed ambiguously. "Your suggestion is that I - what, convince the cops that they have the wrong man?" he asked wryly.
Like a switch had been flicked, a slow, creeping grin spread across Peter's face, and his eyes lit up with an unholy amount of glee. Matt visibly shuddered and cringed away from the teen like a vampire from sunlight, but Peter paid him no mind, leaping to his feet and beginning to cackle maniacally. Without warning, he bolted towards Matt, reaching him in less than three spider-powered strides and grabbed hold of his shoulders despite the man's desperate attempt at warding him off by holding out his tar-black coffee in front of himself like a cross. Peter shook the lawyer in his grips back and forth like a Magic 8 Ball, Matt's head flopping around like a dead fish as coffee splashed out over the edges of the mug held in his white knuckled grip to splatter across the tiled floor. "Matt," Peter announced, abruptly releasing the man, who stumbled back into the counter behind him and nearly slipped in the growing puddle of still-warm coffee on the floor. "You-" Peter continued, thrusting a finger out at Matt, who recoiled and blinked rapidly towards the offending digit as his physical equilibrium clearly tried and failed to realign. " -are gonna Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss the shit outta those cops."