He leaned over the stainless steel table to squint at the open circuitry, and polished robotic units lit up under the fluorescent workshop lighting. Hundreds of tools organized neat and clean on the storage rack that spanned one whole wall. Nine monitors hovered over his head, each its own display of upload phases, code lines, program optimizations—thick bundles of wires organized and zip-tied based on color and function protruded out their backs like starving snakes hooked into the metallic husk on the table, sectioned and in various states of assembly. All painstakingly molded, all fitted with the latest technology mined from the Stark Industries redacted blueprint vault.

It looked like a mess, but everything would be wrapped up in a bow by the end of the night. And if the bait was good enough, they'd have that spider shithead off his home turf in less than forty-eight hours.

Kairo sniffed and crossed his arms. "So he's good, right?"

Welding sparks lit up in one corner of the room.

"Who is."

"The guy you're putting in the suit. Gargan." He kept his back to the tubes that ran from the unfinished suit to the solid metal stasis chamber on the other side of the monitors. He couldn't see shit in there, but it was creepy. Who the hell just gets inside, not knowing what all those treatments could end up doing to you? "He's compatible, or whatever?"

Dr. Farley Stillwell set down his welder and lifted his welding helmet to rest on the top of his head. "If he wasn't, he would already be dead."

"And-And you're sure he can take care of Spider—"

Farley cast a dark gaze his way and he ducked his head at the motion.

"Spider-Man's abilities are well documented. Not easily replicable, but highly accessible. Strength, agility, durability—this suit was built in functional mimicry, enhanced with my own... upgrades. I've been wanting to test what this experiment can do." Farley's gaze flickered back to his work. "How lucky of me that my idiot son grants me the perfect opportunity."

Kairo bit his lip and said nothing.

"Engaging in direct combat with Spider-Man will be invaluable data. If he manages to walk away, the suit will be upgraded and optimized to the collected information. If he perishes from the encounter, then that is all the data we need. It's nearly impossible to come out of this at a loss."

"Wait, if?" He jabbed a hand at the suit. "You said this would kill Spider-Man!"

"It's certainly capable."

"But he's coming after me—!"

"And whose fault is that?" Farley spat. "You botch a contact with one of the most valuable mercenary dispatch centers in the nation, blacklist yourself throughout the whole coast, and when you retaliate you end up hiding underground because you kidnapped an old cook and a dish boy that were far more valuable than you have cared to research, and then proceed to murder the dish boy's aunt, though not before losing one of your men in the process. Have I got that all correct?"

Kairo clenched his hands together behind his back, his nails digging into the soft of his palms.

"You are lucky that I'm here to help you clean up your mess." His father scowled as he strode across the room, and Kairo shuffled to the side to clear out of his path. "Has all your business been concluded at Ryker's?"

He jerked his head in a short bob. "Yeah."

"Yes, what?"

"Ye-Yes, sir."

"Then I have a lot of work to do in a timeline that doesn't allow for any delays." And the doctor went back across the room with the welding helmet back in its proper place, his light blue lab coat trailing over his heels. "Go do something that won't add to any more of your problems."

Kairo bit the inside of his cheek until it bled and slipped out of the lab.

::

Adrian turned a slow gaze around the metal room he was led into. Lots of shiny metal; a metal table and two metal chairs bolted into a cement floor, the windowless walls were no doubt paneled in layers of steel sheets and gray stone, and when he glanced up high, he spotted a singular speaker trapped in a thick wire cage.

"Not a lot of personality," he mentioned to the burly guard as he was pushed into one of the chairs. His handcuff chain was padlocked on a raised loop on the table surface. "I get it, I do. Budget cuts are a real bitch to juggle and I can't imagine it's rooms like this one that get priority. It's clean, though. Sparkling."

The guard said nothing—CJ, CC, CSomething—and turned around to leave without so much as a parting glance, and Adrian resumed his loose inspection of the room. He'd been here about seven months now and they hadn't been the worst months of his life. He was an old dog who kept up with his old tricks and within the first week of serving time, he had a list of inmates he could reasonably talk to, a list of inmates he shouldn't interact with in any circumstance, and a handful of lackeys who didn't know a hammer from a nail. He should be getting some community service merits for dealing with them.

Doris called two weeks ago. Liz still refused to speak with him.

Of course this was how he was supposed to live his life now, existing in prison jumpers in a shade of orange he didn't care for and being stuffed in a gray box where he was supposed to rot out the rest of his days.

Oh, New York City. Never change.

The door creaked and swung wide, and someone new stepped through.

A whistle looped out of Adrian's mouth. "Well I'll be," he said as he leaned against the cold metal backrest, the chains around his wrists clinking against itself at the movement. "Is that the Mr. Parker who took my little girl to last year's homecoming?"

"Hey now, Toomes. Mr. Parker was my uncle. Call me Peter. Or better yet, how about Peter Parker in bold letters, squeezing Benjamin with a capital 'B' in the middle." The boy sat down across from him with a bubbly smile stretched from ear to ear. "I mean, that's what you've been calling me to anyone who can hear, right?" He held both hands in front of him and wiggled his fingers. "Peter Parker, the teenage wonder, let's get his full name out to the alleys so that even people who didn't want it have it now."

Adrian's only actually seen the kid in person for a few pickings, all in suits: that fancy one he wore when he dropped into the lake, that tracksuit patched in singed cotton and bits of sand, that hand-me-down tux paired with a plaid tie from the 90s. So the full scope of the civilian get-up was—you know, it was always hard for him to take kids seriously, especially when he had one of his own. They always looked too young to be out on their own, too peppy or too angsty, too full of overconfidence or too crippled in their shyness. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, they were still learning how to walk. Still figuring out how to put one foot in front of the other while juggling schools and social lives and self-esteem.

And he saw the same in Peter seven months ago—a Spider-Boy. Not a man. But he'll give credit where credit was due, it was Adrian Toomes in the box, not young Peter Parker who sat in his seat with a jacket too big for him and eyes that were dimmer than when he saw him last.

Lost that spark, did he?

He'd seen the news on the channels they looped at Ryker's. Almost every week there was some variation of SPIDER-MENANCE AT LOCAL CHARITY AUCTION or WEBBY WEDNESDAY: SPIDER-MAN SAVES CIVILIAN FROM SKY-HIGH NOSE DIVE.

But then, very recently.

NOT SO FRIENDLY AFTER ALL - SIX RUSHED TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM AFTER TANGLING WITH SPIDER-MAN

CHILD ABUSER FOUND DANGLING FROM A WEB NEARLY DIES OF BLOOD LOSS

A CASE OF ARACHNOPHOBIA: DOES QUEENS HAVE SOMETHING NEW TO FEAR?

Wasn't that something fascinating.

"That's on me," Adrian admitted with a shrug. "You're a hard person to get a hold of through normal channels, but it's understandable. Completely understandable. You know, there'd be a lot of eyebrow raising if word got out that a convict was going out of his way to see his daughter's ex—people might think that I want to kill you."

Peter raised a brow. Adrian snapped his fingers and pointed as much as he could with his wrists anchored to the table.

"Like that! A bunch of faces, just like that. Which is why I had to get the word out some other way, and here you are." He peered more intently at the highschooler. "Who ended up finding you?"

"A guy who knows a guy who knows me, but also knows a guy who knows me. And I use 'guy' very gender-neutrally. Why are you surprised?" Peter questioned with an incredulous tilt to his expression. "I'm here just like you wanted me to be when I could've decided to ignore you."

Couldn't argue with that.

"So what do you want, Toomes? Because we both know this isn't a social call and I don't have all day to drag the answer out of you."

"You got places to be?"

"Even if I didn't, I don't think Ryker's makes it far up on the list of fun places I want to visit." The edges of his smile began to droop. "Talk. Or I'm out that door."

Adrian tapped his fingers against the table top.

"There was a guy here not too long ago sniffing around for info about this eight-legged pest we both know," he said. "He offered a lot of money for anything worthwhile and had lines around the prison to hear all of them out."

"I bet you guys wasted his time."

"Oh yeah, anyone here would jump at any opportunity that could help them back on the streets. The guy who came here was young, angry, full of attitude—a rich kid bomb with a short ass fuse. It's one hell of a combo."

"All for Spider-Man, huh? It's real... flattering."

The last word ground to dust between Peter's teeth. His smile fully fell off his face, the last vestiges of that homecoming kid sloughing off like shed skin. He was seven months older and every cut of it sunk into the shadows under his eyes, the tenseness of his jaw, the pallor of his skin.

"What did you tell him?"

"Nothing." When that got him another cocked brow, Adrian raised his hands until it clinked. "I told you, he was young and angry and full of attitude. You could get into a lot of trouble getting too involved with someone like that. You don't know where he'll fumble, where he'll fall... You know I got people important to me that I couldn't risk like that."

That eyebrow stayed where it was. "You had important people when you were The Vulture and still decided to jack a plane."

Adrian's mouth shut with a click. He did that for his family, but he wasn't going to get into that this time.

"My point stands," he continued deliberately. "I didn't say a word."

"Then who did?"

"The same person who broke out of here and didn't take anyone with him. Mac Gargan."

He waited for a flash of recognition, maybe annoyance that he had one more person to look over his shoulder for, but Peter's face only grew contemplative as he gazed at the side wall in thought.

"Mac Gargan, right, right. I've been trying to remember that for a while and I knew it was just sitting there at the back of my mind but—the arms deal on the ferry that split in half. Right. Totally understandable that he wasn't cheesed about that."

"He wants Spider-Man's head."

"He knows there's a line," was the careless reply. Doe-brown eyes snapped back to meet Adrian's as he crossed his arms across his middle. "You still didn't answer my question."

"... Pardon?"

"C'mon, Toomes. You think I showed up for some half-assed warning for the guy that put you in here? That'd I'd be happy with that and leave with a name I could've spared ten seconds to Google?"

slam

Peter suddenly leaned halfway over the table, his fists rammed into the table as he lurched out of his seat. Too caught in his surprise, Adrian jerked back as much as his chains would let him. Clink.

"Your business is gone, your family's on the other side of the country, you're a smart man with nothing to lose and I'm not a goddamn idiot. Tell me what you want," he demanded, "before I've decided that you've wasted my time after already selling out my name."

This, maybe, would be the exact moment that would have him rethink his previous evaluations on the boy behind the mask. Unburying yourself from building rubble was a feat, crashing a plane and surviving in the ashes was a miracle, but right here, right now had nothing to do with luck. There was no posturing or a stab at heroic bravado—this? This was Peter speaking with a gravity Adrian didn't know he was capable of.

So he answered with honesty.

"I want to talk to my daughter."

"You think I can help you with something like that?"

"I want to see her again."

"Does she even want to see you?"

Adrian grit his teeth, but kept his fingers laced together as he laid his forearms down, the cuffs digging into his wrists at odd angles.

"There's a list of transfers heading out of Ryker's at the end of the month with a shortage of guards working it that actually do their job," he mentioned. "And missing it would only make me forget where Green had Gargan run off to."

Peter pressed his lips together and didn't move from the statue he made of himself in this quaint little box. The harsh light at the back of his head cast his whole face in gray.

"When it transfers you out of state," he said, "you're never turning back, and you're never going to step foot in my city ever again."

Adrian's lip twitched. "I'll send my gratitude out from South Brunswick."

"Jersey?"

"Not too far of a haul if you ask me."

"Where?"

"Old factory by the main train station. Look for a green roof."

Peter pushed himself off of the table leaving fist-shaped indents so deep in the thick steel that they'd almost punched out holes. And he turned away—Spider-Man himself who exchanged information for a prison escape and didn't even think twice about it. Was he actually going to go through with it, hold up his end of the deal? Adrian would've said no seven months ago, but now... maybe this was just inevitability, how the system never changed and snuffed out every good thing that tried to claw its way out.

The news always looked down on him. J. Jonah Jameson's crushing vendetta had to hit hard sometime, right? Everyone had their breaking point—even superheroes with hearts of gold.

His mouth twisted up into a smirk, and he called out, "Hey, Pedro."

Peter half-turned.

"I liked your old hair better."

And he couldn't stuff his laughter when the door shut so hard the walls shook.

::

Neena lined her feet parallel to one another, bent down at the hip, kept her knees straight, and placed her palms flat against the yoga mat. Stretches were important at every age especially when -teen stopped being tacked on at the end of it; she was only a few birthdays off from thirty and there was no way she was going to start slacking off now. And hey, she was already pretty active—actively busting heads and taking names, but sometimes long drives wrecked your back after it got ashed by one of Diamondback's diamond-shaped grenades.

She straightened up, planted her palms behind her hip, and leaned back as far as she could without tipping it over. She never ended up more than bruised-to-shit on missions and those were typically from the rougher ones. This one? Cake. The biggest slice of carrot cake. It was a shame her shirt was the casualty of the week, but her and the girls were a couple zeroes richer at the moment; she could spare some change for a replacement.

She popped back up into normal posture with a sigh before she proceeded to drop herself onto the couch, the side rest catching under her knee ditches. Her head flopped to the side, eyes toward the coffee table where she still had bullet casings to clean off and five coasters to stack in a pile in the corner.

Wait.

She reached out for one of the coasters that wasn't actually a coaster and held it high above her face. Thick black stitching circled neon blue and green embroidery, a hard approximation of a 2D earth but only if you squinted and looked at it from about ten feet away. A few lopsided pink flowers splattered its surface with jank curly font reading Bloom Where You're Planet-ed all across and a little too low to be centered. It was an ugly-ass patch with a lame-ass pun she saw at a weird-ass gas station that had a space-theme going because of the museum across the street.

She made sure to snag it when she saw it. Peter loved this kind of thing.

And Peter's been... He was doing alright. After putting out an APB on Green she'd been expecting a bigger, bloodier explosion. They all were. Weasel refused to comment on it, but she saw the more frequent glances he gave his assistant and it was just yesterday she stopped by the bar on a Ferret-less day to put in a new order in person. Weasel, manning the bar and aggressively scrubbing at a sticky spot on the wood that better have been liquor, told her that he had to stock up on more bullets behind the bar because the rubber ones were getting dusty.

He didn't smile when he told her that. Neither did she.

Wade knew about it too, apparently being the one who witnessed firsthand what it was like to see their favorite dish boy spray lead into blood and bone bodies, but she didn't have to ask him about it. Seeing that—Seeing Pete as that, he wouldn't have hated anything else more. She trusted him to take care of it in his own way as much of a dumbass idiot he was.

He really loved that kid. And good on him, because the kid really needed it.

Lora had a hell of work cut out for her.

Neena tossed the patch back onto the coffee table. Peter's next shift was... Friday this week? She'd make sure she'd give it to him then before treating herself to buckets of charred wings if she was going to shoulder through all the leather vests that were going to burst the bar at the seams—

Her eyes slowly came into focus.

A spider was on her ceiling.

One of the usual house varieties, brown, spindly legs, harmless. But there was something wrong with this one. Each leg it picked up took three or four trees to set back down. Its first wobbly steps it managed a straight line, then it wandered to the side, back to the other side before it stilled directly over her torso. Then like it was snared in a trance, it slowly began to spin downward, twitching, spasming, until it stopped dead just inches away from her face, all eight legs curled perfectly inward.

She breathed in, tapped one of her most frequent contacts, and held the phone up to her ear.

It rang.

"Hey, this is Peter! Sorry for not picking up, I swear it's because I'm busy, not because I'm intentionally ignoring you or anything. Not that something like that would happen because anyone could be calling this number—"

Click.

"Shit," Neena muttered as she sat up. She plucked the spider by its string and set it on the coffee table the same time she pulled up Twitter where #SpiderMan was already trending and tapped the first video on her feed.

The first thing she saw was the growing familiarity of Spider-Man's blue suit.

The second thing she saw was green.

Spider-Man stood on a street she didn't recognize with his back to a shaky phone camera as he dodged the lashes of some metallic whip-like thing that jutted out the back of his opponent's jungle green suit like a tail. It looked like it moved on its own accord, fully automated, attached to hardened plaques that covered the entirety of their body. Something about it echoed the Spider-Man suit but that couldn't make sense; it was bulkier, yellow lenses shielded the eyes instead of white bones, and a pair of enormous mandibles protruded from the mask's open mouth.

Jesus, the tail. Was that a stinger at the end of it?

It wrapped around Spider-Man's ankle where he caught the stinger before it could make a new home through his calf, but couldn't stop himself from getting flung through a bus stop.

Neena winced. The lawyer poster in the bus stop ad panel crumpled into three uneven pieces, a plastic smile in shreds with the phone number underneath—

"New Jersey?" She said out loud. "The fuck is he doing in—"

::

"—New Jersey?!" Weasel shouted down into his phone. "He didn't call out of his shift tonight so he'll probab—what? The news? You think I just have all the states' news stations on the shit bar TV?"

He did, by the way. Kind of a fail-safe to access the nation's news if someone shot his phone out of his hands or went nuclear on all of New York's wifi—as if anyone had shit on his back-ups—but he snatched the remote off the bar to flip to the New Jersey section. Twenty-one counties, how the fuck was he supposed to find what Neena wanted him to—

In Middlesex County, South Brunswick, a suburban community with the Amtrak running through it, Spider-Man tightened a web noose around a green dude's neck and flung them up to hang from a streetlight.

"What the fuck," he repeated, "is he doing in New Jersey."

Oh god. Holy shit. Spider-Man was about to get the worst press across state lines.

He put his call on speaker and pulled up his text messages.

ALARM OVERRIDE: ACTIVATED

EMERGENCY POWER SYSTEM: ACTIVATED

SILENT MODE: DISABLED

AIRPLANE MODE: DISABLED

VOLUME LEVEL: 100%

VIBRATION MODE: CONSTANT

Me: link: JZxlMB59.stream [3:30 pm]

Me: u gota call olstad [3:30 pm]

Me: like YESTERDAT [3:30 pm]

But before Spider-Man could pull off an execution in broad daylight in what was soon going to be breaking news, Green Dude snapped the web like it was yarn and aimed their tail to shoot—fucking shoot a blast of equally green energy that could've burned through Spider-Man's skull but burned through three car windshields instead.

Dickhead: ??? [3:31 pm]

Dickhead: JEESWY?@!?,#!?@!, [3:31 pm]

Dickhead: WHYZ ITSY BITSYIG IN JETSEY?@,! [3:32 pm]

"Looks bad, huh?" Neena commented on the other side of the line. She sounded far away, probably from watching the videos on her phone.

"Last time Spider-Man was out of state didn't he, like, almost blow up DC or something?"

"Or something. Wouldn't be surprised if the blow out from this is worse. You ever seen this guy before?"

"I haven't even seen these specs before."

Eyes still glued to the screen, he slid out his laptop from underneath the Gold Card machine. Despite the number of upstanding fuckheads who commissioned specialized gear in this city alone, there were only so many people out there who would actually manufacture this sort of superhero-grade shit. You had your Anacondas with connections out the ass that made running her underground business as easy as opening an overpriced instagram-ready cafe. Then you had your Starks with more money that a single person should have, functionally, who could fund every single one of their own pet projects and still have an Avengers-sized budget to spare.

Green Dude's suit?

Weasel loaded up stills of the ongoing fight into one of his home-brewed processing softwares to analyze the projected make-up of the battlesuit... yeesh. The shiny parts had at least two layers of steel mesh and insulated rubber to ground the assumed circuit system. This wasn't something thrown together in a place downtown that paid the cops to look the other way. This shit was lab-cooked with a multi-million dollar baseline.

Spider-Man rammed his heel onto a sewer cover and caught the metal plate before he twirled once, twice, and hurled it like he was last year's ultimate frisbee champ. Green Dude smashed it to the side with the stinger of his tail—seven feet long, tool-steel articulated framework, segmented into twelve clear parts, a response level that was either the work of highly intelligent reaction determination or cybernetic control—but missed the web that flung past to grip the edge of the cover and yo-yo it back at full force, clipping the side of Green Dude's face and ripping off one of the mandibles and the trail towards it.

A long red streak was left in its wake.

"This is way better than WWE."

"It's Wednesday. My blood pressure's climbing on a fucking hump day and the sun's still out," Weasel moaned as he rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "How—What—Isn't he supposed to be in school?!"

"You should ask Lora that."

"I'm not asking Crazy Bread shit."

Was he worried? He shouldn't be worried. This wasn't something worth worrying about. Spider-Man fought bad guys all the time, it was practically a series that aired every Friday night and sometimes Wednesday afternoons apparently—

Green Dude caught every fist Spider-Man leveled at them. Sometimes they slid back at the force, but they returned every hit with one of their own, sometimes alongside their tail, sometimes in a double jab with their stinger, but even in the distance from shaky news camera footage, Spider-Man's hits were getting wilder. Faster. Angrier.

And then his incredulous shout echoed loud enough for the outside of the immediate battle zone to hear when Green Dude avoided a fatal punch by using their tail to spring them up on a train station overhang to which they stuck to with nothing but the bottoms of their feet.

"What the fuck."

"What the fuck."

Weasel opened his messages again.

::

Weezer: r u fuckign seing this shit [3:52pm]

Mounted on the dash of a shit brown junker, a cracked iPhone plugged into the car's AUX and played crackling audio on half of the speakers that weren't busted.

"Of course I'm seeing this shit," Wade replied as he flattened the gas pedal until it was one with the car floor. "Unoriginal, boring color-scheme, Spider-Man wannabe loser." He blew a raspberry at the news feed. "Everyone's got a gimmick and they all wanna do my favorite bug boy dirty. What even are they? The Green Hornet? That's not even a Marvel property!"

Disrespectful. Shameful.

"Why are there questionable stains on this automobile's floor," Olstad noted disdainfully as she poised her heels away from any said stains. Which she didn't have to—they were all already dry. Mostly. It wasn't like they were going to peel the paint off her red-bottoms or anything. "I know you have the funds to invest in a more appropriate machine, yet you insist on investing in such hunks of junk."

"I may be a hunk and I've definitely got the junk, but do not spit on my baby's good name."

The frozen gaze she leveled him with made his insides go all slushy. The cherry one. Obviously. Yeah, no shit.

"Hey! One of those stains was from Petey's lemonade!"

"Lemonade is not an unpalatable shade of blue-brown."

"Okay, but the stain under that is lemonade, a citrusy foundation. Citrusy. Citrussy."

Olstad pinched her brow and hoped she survived the next forty-five minutes to South Brunswick, and for the first time, Wade wished he'd splurged a couple more thousand on a shitbrick that could at least hit 80 mph.

The road ahead was paved with cracked asphalt and gravel-y potholes and instead of counting roadkill on the shoulders like he usually did on longer trips like these, his attention dragged back to the phone.

Fuck, he wished he had one of those car touch screens so he wouldn't have to watch the New Jersey news in 760p. Who the hell was this poser and why was Spider-Man kicking his ass in the middle of buttfuck nowhere? He'd just gotten back from an assignment in Guyana and hadn't even put a bow on the taxidermied Sabertooth Longhorn Beetle he was going to give to Peter when he saw him at the bar tonight when he got the text. Did he skip class today? No, our baby's a truant! The next thing you know he's going to go out after curfew and hang out at seedy bars and talk to people he shouldn't be talking to and... wait. He's doing his downward spiral way out of order. How come Weasel didn't have Olstad's number yet? Wasn't he HR enough to have an emergency contact list stuck to the mini-fridge?

On the screen, Spider-Man got thrown to the side of a stretch of train track.

"Wilson!"

A pale hand grasped the top of the steering wheel and jerked it to the right, pulling the car back into the lane and narrowly avoiding kissing bumpers with a semi.

Wheee!

"We could've eaten that," Wade said as he looked over at the passenger seat. The same hand pushed his cheek back forward.

"If I am willing to sit in this death contraption with you then we will arrive in New Jersey hale and unscathed," she hissed. But her eyes fell back to the phone screen too where she watched Spider-Man scuff his knee pads while avoiding stinger strikes on jagged rock pieces. "The faster we arrive, the faster we can scold him for this clandestine trip. We will need to intercept him before he takes transport back to Queens."

He bobbed his head. "His fights don't last the longest, so plus. He's getting pretty banged up so maybe he'll take a break before hopping on a train or bus back. Probably the train since he's already at the station. Plus plus." He poked her arm. She nearly snapped his finger in half. "How come you couldn't just boop us over there with your Dumbledore powers? Minus."

"I do not know of a sorcerer called Dumbledore," she said completely seriously. She was so dreamy. "But magic does not work as you see in your films. Yes, there are vehicles one could employ like the Sling Ring that maintains the ability to carve pockets between dimensional planes for immediate travel from one point to another, but as it is my... magic does not operate within those parameters. I can teleport, yes, though only to places I have already been and can clearly envision in my mind's eye. There is also the restriction of distance to consider that works against my current capaci—" She grabbed the wheel once more when the wheels began to drift left. "Wilson."

"Ye-es?"

"What," she seethed, her eyes a blazing fire of emerald, "could possibly occupy your typically empty skull so thoroughly that you have once again refused to mind the road?"

Her cheekbones sat high and sharp like razorblades taped to a theater mask. If they were taped they would probably fall off, so he would go for a hot glue gun next—would he want it to be that permanent? Spirit gum would work really well. Or Gorilla Putty. Those work so good for mounting posters or frames or—Ha. Mounting. 'Mounted' was already used in the first paragraph of this section. If you even care.

"Wilson," she snapped.

"You sound like Petey when you explain stuff like that."

For the first time since reluctantly ducking into the car, Olstad paused, and peered at him closely, and slowly allowed lithe, callused digits to sweep back into her lap as that burning, frozen, crackling gaze moved back to the phone. She straightened the non-existent creases in her dress shirt.

"Yes. Well. I am his mother."

Still so fucking wild. You're a wizard, Petey's hot mom. We already made that joke in Chapter Eighteen. There needed to be more MILFs going on chosen-one adventures.

Wade held both hands tight on the steering wheel at nine and three—just like he taught Peter—and actually kept one eye on the road and one eye on the news feed this time. Him and Peter sparred at The Gym all the time and he knew his kid held back for too many reasons: he was too strong, he didn't want to lose control, he didn't want to be a monster, and he would never be. Not when Wade Winston Wilson was around as living proof that it could always be worse.

People got their shit rocked in this business, guaranteed. And Peter could—he didn't have to get as many cuts and bruises and black eyes and broken bones and torn muscles and rattling concussions as he did if he just stopped. Holding. Back. What a frustrating shithead. What a self-sacrificing asshole. His heart would never stop being full, through and through and through.

There was a wildness on the live stream that Wade had never seen before. Those punches were not as controlled with their wide arches and off-beat lurches and when they landed, it was always in a spray of debris that went far beyond his own body. If he wasn't careful, that spray could be someone's innards.

Peter was trying hard not to be careful.

But Wade saw this for what this was. Deadpool clocked it from the twenty-five miles they still had left to go before they brought him home.

Hanging by web-spun noose. Guillotine by two-hundred pound sewer cover.

Grief manifested in a body that might not be able to handle it this time.

And it was in the midst of one open, erratic swing, his ring and middle finger poised over the pressure pad attached to his webshooters and his other arm stretched to the side on an instinct to swing away when there was nothing tall enough but phone poles to swing on, that his torso was wide open like a gaping, weeping wound.

It echoed like static in an empty hallway.

schluk.

Wade slammed both feet on the brakes.

::

All the news streams shut down their live feed simultaneously; not like a series of dominoes tipping each other over one by one, but like if a gust of wind had blown them all off course in one fell swoop. It was only on instinct that Weasel didn't know he still had that he was able to hook up to the cameras in the area, zero-in on the one that had Ferret—Spider-Man in full view and sent it out for Wade and Neena to access.

The neat thing about the blue suit was that red was only supposed to be for the spider on his chest. A bold pop of color. Red and blue, the age-old combo, the color scheme that worked out for Captain America and Mario and Sonic and Spider-Man whose left side was slowly growing a shade of dark purple that was going to make Weasel sick. Purple wasn't part of the scheme. Purple wasn't supposed to look like that.

Fuck, that was so much blood.

A green hand clawed into Spider-Man's neck to keep him still, why the hell did he need to be kept still? He wasn't going anywhere. He wasn't going to move, fuck, he wasn't going to move. Not like he could move with that fucking stinger that skewered him all the way through.

"Is this all I get?! Is this ALL Spider-Man is?!" Green Fucker roared. A deep cavern dug diagonally across his chest from the railroad Spider-Man yanked out of the ground and used as a makeshift dagger before that tail had come around and slammed him into a parked boxcar. One lens cracked and splintered from the center but the feed was too grainy for any attempt at facial recognition, but Weasel had a feeling that Spider-Man already knew who this was. "I shoulda' fuckin' known that fuckin' ferry was a fuckin' fluke!"

schluk!

The tail wrenched out of their target as smooth as room temperature butter. Spider-Man's head jerked and purple bled throughout the bottom half of his mask as Green Fucker shoved him back.

He stumbled a few steps, wavering, but dug one foot down into the rocks to keep his place. Even as his right hand came up to cradle his side, that purple spurting to stain his gloves as he wrestled his other arm to prop up in a weak, shaking stance. Still ready to fight. Still fucking standing.

"If t'was a fluke," he slurred, "y'wouldn've needed Daddy W'rbucks t'break y'out of pris'n t'give you a fancy f'rsuit."

Weasel pressed the back of his hand against his mouth to keep down the burst of laughter that could only come up from the pits of his continuous anxiety.

This fucking kid.

He was going to break everyone's heart one day.

But then the video feed began to shake. Weasel's brow twitched as he expanded his view to the multiple cameras in the area and saw them shaking too, but not the static type or something with a communications error, almost like it was physical, like it was—

His stomach dropped.

"Move," Weasel whispered.

"What?" Neena asked. He'd half-forgotten she was still on the line. The cameras shook a little harder. "What are you..."

"Boy-Wonder, move."

But Ferret stood still and ready, and Green Fucker raised his tail at eye-level and allowed the stinger charge up in a sickening, electric green.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no—oh shit!"

Weasel flinched away when a train came in from the left at its full 160 mph speed right on the tracks Peter stood on.

::

He was there and then he wasn't.

Like a magic trick.

Poof.

Horns blared as oncoming cars swerved around them, but they probably didn't know that Spider-Man might be dead in New Jersey because if they did they wouldn't be honking, they'd be commiserating. Dead in Jersey. That was a fate worse than death and he might already be dead.

Off-Brand Green Hornet let the train pass him by completely before he spat on the tracks where Peter used to be.

"Eat shit, Spider-Freak."

Wow. Crazy.

Wade was going to tie his own noose around that green neck and cut off his head with the slow, dull saw of a sewer cover.

He jolted out of his reverie when that pale hand was back on the wheel and the other gripped his shoulder as tight as Death often did, cold and close to snapping bone, and he looked at Olstad.

"Imagine the exact path to South Brunswick." Her eyes glowed, ethereal, and both her hands began to flare a wispy, curling green. "Imagine those tracks and the train station and the roads it will take to get there. Do not tell me you do not know because I will not accept that answer—you do not have your global positioning system and I know you have studied multiple routes to avoid traffic to get to Peter as quickly as you can." She leaned closer and her nails began to pierce through his hoodie, his shirt, his skin. "Think of it now!"

"I have it."

"Picture it clearly. If you do not—"

"Just do whatever you're gonna do!"

She pressed her violet lips together—what a shade to pick for the day—and suddenly the world was greengonegreenbackgreenthere.

And. Then.

The shit brown junker rattled as it dropped down from a few inches up. Wade bashed his dome on the roof and then honked the deflated whoopee-cushion horn with his forehead and the what the fuck was at the tip of his tongue before he raised his head and was greeted with the sight of a completely different street than the freeway they were just on. They were between buildings in some unpopulated part of town, a good open spot that could double as cover in plain sight away from civilians, exactly the spot he was planning to park the car when...

"Olstad! Baby!" He spun to face his passenger. "Did you actually manage to boop us to—"

Olstad gripped the dash with both hands and she hunched over herself, smaller than she'd ever been, in a seat covered in questionable stains and crooked patch jobs. Black hair strung out from its neat, tight braid, the shorter strands close to her neck stiff and literally frozen to her skin and tinged with light frost. Her chest heaved slow, heavy breaths, and he thought better of reaching out to her when he noticed that frost flared at the edges of the seat as well.

"—uh, if you're dying too I'll let you know right now that I'll probably have a mental breakdown so unsexy that I might go on trial for violating several Geneva Conventions."

"I am fine," she lied, because she was definitely lying about that. "The combination of teleportation distance, travelers of both the organic and inorganic variety, and relying on the destination through the mind of another has simply... overexerted my capabilities. I am. Fine," she repeated. "Merely drained."

With one last long breath she sat back up and leaned all her weight back in the seat. For a moment, he swore he saw red swirl and shrink beneath the dark of her pupils.

Wade lifted his feet off the breaks and the junker's wheels slowly turned forward. Still not completely fucked, at least. "And Petey?"

She reached under her shirt collar to curl her fingers around her necklace. "I will direct you. Forward."

He hit the gas. He didn't need to be told twice.

::

An empty train yard feed played on a phone next to a cheap patch next to a crumpled house spider on a thrifted coffee table, and Neena's leg bounced as her pointer finger tapped against her knee. She waited because patience was a game that needed to be played with caution and Luck was not always a gracious lady.

Weasel was right. What a Wednesday.

One leg of the spider suddenly twitched, and she let out the short breath she didn't know she was holding.

"Halle-fucking-lujah." Weasel's voice echoed from the phone speakers just seconds later. "They found him unconscious in a dumpster."

"There's got to be a better place for him to hide when he gets fucked up like that."

"You can give him a list of public properties he can bleed out on because that sure as fuck ain't any of my business. Ugh. Fuck. I need to lie down." Some kind of rustling took up the line and she was glad she didn't have that blasting directly in her ear. "Why the fuck does anyone have kids, all they do is become superheroes and try to kill themselves in fucking Jersey—Jersey! Whatever! I'm taking a goddamn nap before opening and I swear to shit if I get another phone call and Ferret's somehow shot himself into space..."

Neena snorted. "If that happens I'll make sure to call Wade first."

"Good. Jesus. Ugh. You coming in tonight?"

"Nah, catch me on Friday when the bar's overloaded. I want to see how many chairs you're going to have to replace."

"Fuck you."

"You wish. Later, Weasel."

He hung up first, and she went to sweep the sick spider into her kitchen trash. After, maybe she'll actually put away the bullet casings and stack those coasters and there was still plenty of sun left in the day, she could fill her fridge. Vacuum under her couch.

Or she'll take a nap too and try not to think about dead kids on train tracks.

::

When he woke up and felt softness instead of damp plastic, he knew he screwed the pooch again. Hard.

"Shit," Peter mumbled through his cotton mouth. The lamp light on his desk cast a faint glow around his room where he'd been neatly tucked in, the scent of herbal balms—mugwort, plantain, nettle— in his nose and the too-familiar stretch-scratch of bandages over his skin.

Double shit.

He should've known better to walk into a trap with half a plan and no one at his back. He figured it would have been fine because he was so sure it would have gone like this: Toomes offers him solid information for almost nothing in return because this wasn't the only deal he's made today, he goes to Jersey looking for Green and only finding Gargan because Green was too much of a coward to do his own job, and he'd wring the information out of Gargan about Green's whereabouts before dragging him back to Ryker's and going after his real target. But he didn't account for the suit, and he wasn't looking forward to seeing all the news outlets demanding for answers and plastering Gargan's new alias all over New York. He could see the headlines now.

SPIDER-MAN DEFEATED?

THE SCORPION MAKES A SHOCKING DEBUT

Scorpion.

If Gargan hated him so much, he should've picked a bug that wasn't related to him.

He reached over to his nightstand, wincing at the cold twinge in the left side of his abdomen, and tried to see if his phone was there. If it had a couple more cracks in it then yeah, deserved, but if it was in the train yard in the middle of an entirely different state it was going to be a little annoying hunting for it. Which again: deserved. But something else cool and smooth ran under the grooves of his fingertips and the texture was too plasticky, light. Chitin. Like an... exoskeleton?

He drew his hand back and stared at the ginormous beetle that dangled from it. It wasn't moving at least, and had a pretty gnarly set of mandibles that were almost half the length of its palm-sized body, a cluster of almost-yellow estuaries patterning its back. A tiny bow sat on top of its head.

"Wilson left that for you, of course."

"Yeah, uh. Seems like something he would get me," Peter murmured. He gingerly placed it back on the nightstand. "Um. Wade was here?"

Loki set down the tray they carried into the room. "He drove," they said simply. "There for half of it, back for all. He wants you to know that the 'shit brown junker has left him for a better world' and that he will be acquiring a new vehicle at the end of the week."

He watched them pour tea that further enhanced the already-prominent smell of herbs in the room—chamomile, fennel, crab-apple—and felt the roiling bubble of guilt push against the underside of his chest.

"I'm sorry."

"For?"

"I—Everything? I didn't... I didn't mean to ignore you. I wasn't trying to, I was just..." He screwed his eyes shut and breathed in deep. "I kept pushing it off and off and, I don't know why, I didn't mean to. And then I found out about Gargan who got out because of Green and I couldn't—I didn't mean not to tell anyone either I—ack!"

His throat squeezed and burned as he hacked up a red-and-purple glob into his hand.

"Affects of the stinger's venom," Loki informed him apologetically as they hurried over to his side. With a quick flick of a finger his hand was clean again, though he noticed her slight wince with the action. "With your heritage and mutation in tandem it was nowhere close to fatal, but there are ill effects to be suffered in your healing. I have cleared all that I can from your system, but it is your system's turn to do the rest."

They lowered themselves at the edge of the bed, right by Peter's side, and brushed the ends of his hair. It wasn't long enough to have to move out of his eyes anymore.

"Th—Thank you."

"Anything for you, my love."

"And thank you for getting to Jersey. You and Wade. I'll—I'll text him when I can, about the bug too, I guess, and—how did you even get there so fast? That's way too far out of your teleport range with both Wade and a car—no, wait. I'll bring that back up later. But, uh, I just want to..."

He began the slow pull of trying to raise himself to sit up and gladly accepted Loki's sure hands guiding him forward, then helping him shift back to lean against a pillowed headboard. His side didn't quite scream in pain, but droned on dull and constant as it worked to knit itself back together. The ache was... Like if his phone ended up with some lesser fate, again, again: deserved.

"I'm sorry," he repeated. And Loki looked at him so much differently than how they looked at the rest of the world. Out there it was cold and haughty and mocking and uppity—in a good way, if that made any sense. They were always so certain and unforgiving when they took to Midgard like a shark to water, but when they were on him they were so... "There's. There's a lot I have to say on my end, huh?"

The corner of their mouth quirked up. "I was willing to wait until you were healed enough to at least sit up on your own, but I commend your tenacity. My darling son, smart and true. Sometimes we must do things we wish we had other options for."

Peter bit his lip and nodded.

"So let us see. Would you like to speak first of... May?"

May was sunny. May was bright. May was gone.

"Not really," he admitted. "I miss her, and she... I don't know. That video of me getting stabbed is going to go viral and if they didn't cut the reel, so's the video of me and the train. If she was around to see it, that might've made her cr-cry. I'm glad she didn't have to."

"... Then your excursion," they said. A pointer finger twirled a small circle towards the ceiling and a cup of water floated over to his hands. "You spoke of Green and a new name, Gargan. Explain."

His shoulders dropped a bit, maybe from the corner he was backed into or maybe from the pain, and told them everything from the top. He talked about the ferry and the StarkSuit, the Vulture and Coney on fire. He talked about Ryker's and connections to it he got from the bar and sitting down with Toomes, then about Liz, then about clawing out of a building in joggers and an old sweatshirt.

"—and this Scorpion suit is advanced, like, not StarkSuit advanced, but there's someone out there with a lab, equipment, and millions of dollars. It adhered to the ceiling like I can, but I do it because of organic, intermolecular forces. The suit is trying to replicate that with its own system." Peter scoffed and drank the rest of his water before he set it down next to his new bug. "Gargan isn't smart enough for that. The faster Green runs away, the more people he can bring in to widen the gap. I won't let that stop me."

It sounded right to say that because that was no different than the truth, was it? He wasn't going to let him get away, and when Green was finally cornered and snivelling with nowhere else to hide, Peter... well.

Peter didn't know what to use. The dagger or the gun.

"The people who did this to her... they deserve what's coming," he said quietly, and he didn't know if he imagined his shaking voice at the end of that sentence. Green deserved everything that was coming to him and May, who worked so hard on so much overtime to raise a nephew she didn't plan on raising to send him to a college she was never going to get to see. Did that earn her a knife in her gut? For loving him?

He felt blood dripping down his cheek. He rubbed at it, but there was nothing there.

"You do not sound so sure."

A hand came up to cup around his phantom-stained cheek and for once in a long couple of weeks the warmth he felt didn't make him dizzy, and he was tired. He was so tired. He leaned his head into it, and Loki gently guided him so that their eyes met.

"You must be unwavering in your conviction," they told him. "What is it that you want?"

His hand pressed tight against his bandaged side. "For Kairo Green to pay."

"And will you do what you must to ensure his comeuppance?"

This was Peter in a room with the only parent he had left.

"I have to."

Loki smiled and pressed all the light protection magicks they could into the kiss they planted on the top of his head.

"Ferret, Spider-Man, Lokison," they said as they brought him into a hug so warm it was almost impossible to imagine with the literal ice running through their veins, and he melted into it. His face squished against her shoulder and her hand cradled the back of his head to pull him as close as she could without hurting him. "Peter, my moon and stars. When you embrace your will, you will succeed. Whatever it takes."

May was loud. May was funny. May didn't have to end up like this.

"And when you prevail, it will not take any by surprise. You have always been destined for great things, my dearest heart." He felt their smile against the side of his head. "So why not be destined for greater?"

But she did. And he thought that was worth killing for.

::

"It was crazy, y'know, you see Spider-Man all the time doin' flips if you ask and he still does! But I mean, I ain't never seen him clock a guy that hard, it looked like he coulda' snapped his neck clean off—"

Swipe.

"—the muggers strung in web in a Queens alleyway have all suffered concussions and severe abrasions by blunt force trauma—"

Swipe.

"—witnesses are saying that Spider-Man is fighting with weapons like guns. Could this be a sign that—"

Swipe.

"Not only is Spider-Man a menace, but a threat! A criminal! A plague! Don't you see what he's doing on these streets? Hell's Kitchen already has a devil—what's gotten into him thinking that Queens needs one too?!"

Swipe.

This one, an article, bold and spanned across a curved holographic view.

SPIDER-MAN BESTED BY SCORPION IN VIOLENT NEW FOOTAGE

"All of this was in the last couple weeks? Like, human determined weeks? Fourteen days? Thou-est fortnight?"

"Yes, Boss. It has been thoroughly documented that Spider-Man has become more aggressive and violent, though it is unsure when or why this has been occurring. It's only applicable to his actions with criminals, though. No innocents have been harmed."

"... No. Not yet, at least."

Tony Stark took a long sip of his coffee as he flipped through more articles and video clips of Spider-Man and his sudden darkside turn on what was supposed to be a calm Thursday morning.

When he stopped calling Happy, he thought he was finally doing what he could for the little guy and not looking out for the next big airport fight. When he stopped wearing the StarkSuit and downgraded into some military gear like some common thug, first of all, ow. That insult had a barbed edge. Second of all, even if it was barely an upgrade from that old onesie, nothing in that was going to keep him safe. And what about Karen? Had she really been deactivated all this time? But this was just a phase, right? Probably. Surely. Kid didn't have a mean bone in his body or anything close to a desire to take over the world.

When he got stabbed and hit by a train in Jersey yesterday, he thought: maybe this wasn't going to end well.

"FRIDAY," he called out.

"Yes, Boss?"

"Find me an opening in my schedule next week. My schedule, not Happy's, and make sure Happy changes his schedule to fit. Let's say, later half of the day. He should be all up and moving by then if the old healing rate calculations are still right."

"You got it."

"And compile what you can about how Peter's life's been going so far," he said. Tony expanded his view so that the hundreds of files encircled him like a glowing, futuristic snow globe. "Because it looks like I've got too much catching up to do."