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When he thinks of Ben’s body, the first thing that comes to mind is that a man such as him didn’t deserve such an undignified death.
Peter had found the half-devoured corpse in Ben’s own study, mouth agape in horror on both pale faces; the stench of dead meat, of a body left open to the air and rot, was so foul he was sure he would never forget it. That sight had been tar on his memory, sticky and dark, never quite seeming to fade. He told the detectives that came that he thought he’d been eaten by dogs. Nothing else could explain this horror, this monstrosity. Nothing else could justify the desecration of his uncle’s copse, the defilement of a man who had held the world in Peter’s eyes.
At the funeral, the casket was plain and simple, as blunt as Ben’s declarations of justice had been. May did not cry; Peter forced himself to hold back tears as he helped to carry the casket. Though all seven pauses, it took all of his willpower not to break down again as the image of his uncle’s face resurfaced like a bottle in water. By the time the casket was finally in the cemetery, he thought he might be sick at the thought of his face, eyes gaping as wide as his mouth in his final moments of shock; he thought he might be sick at the thought of never seeing his face again, scarred and wrinkled but still alight with determination.
(He forced the image of all too human bite mark on Ben’s face from his mind with the fervor of religious zeal.)
(He forces it away with every passing nightmare determined to bring it back.)
When he remembers the god who cursed him, he imagines it as a death, if not of the body then of the self. Undignified, but perhaps deserved.
The god had stripped him bare, in vision and soul, laid him out to examine him like a beetle beneath a microscope. It said it had found no evil. Peter begged to differ. There was evil in his mind, the stench of rotting meat, the vision of cruelty beyond what he could have imagined, the feeling of hot, shameful tears running down his face in streaks of silver. Was that tar not enough? Was it insufficient to earn him the same death of the men screaming beneath him, bodies and faces disappearing under a flood of the god's children?
It apparently was. ‘The curse of power,’ the god had called it with its hissing laughter echoing in Peter’s ears. When he had awoken, the image of the god imprinted on his mind right beside that of a cannibalized corpse, he had screamed. Surely this was worse than death; surely, surely this was worse than the peace oblivion would offer. The black webbing wrapped around him had been sticky and warm, all too much like blood. He loathed it. But when the opportunity arose to help another, to save a youth not much younger than him from an early death, had it not been an inevitable realization that this was his purpose? What else could he choose to do with this curse than help, than to find those who were responsible for so much death and pain in his city and make them pay?
(And when he found the Vulture clutching his Aunt May, what choice did he have but to kill, to put an end to him as he had ended Ben’s life?)
(And when Aunt May had reprimanded him with dark disgust in her voice, had said she didn’t want to live in a world where humans killed each other like animals, what choice did he have but to accept that he, then, could not be human anymore?)
(The shame weighs heavy beside the stench of slaughter.)
An undignified death, yes, but surely a necessary one. Peter Benjamin Parker could never have achieved the fame, the notoriety, the hatred of the Spider. But with the bad came the good; Nazis whispered his moniker like children afraid to invoke the boogeyman, and it made it that much easier to spread fear like tendrils of darkness through the shadows. He didn’t enjoy being feared, no, but it made his job easier, and he couldn’t lie about the sense of violent satisfaction that arose with the waves of fear from his enemies. At night, he would go through the city and strike, leaving bodies where there had once been murderers and black webs that hung from rafters like breaths of the void. In the day, he would visit his aunt and listen patiently as she planned rallies and muttered with disgust musings about the Spider, hiding the marks of battle and pain beneath gloves and long sleeves, passing off the growing scars on his face as the results of bar fights.
She didn’t need to know.
When he thinks of his Robbie Robertson, he wants to howl and scream with rage. His best friend had received even worse than an undignified death; his mind may have been destroyed, but he lived on in an unresponsive body, an undignified life destined to view the same cityscape every day until the reaper took mercy.
The feeling of dread, that peculiar swoop in his stomach he had thought himself immune to, stays with him even now; it had hit him like a bullet through the heart when he had turned his friend around and found naught but a vacant expression and a white bandages that stood out far too violently against Robbie’s dark skin. A lobotomy, a Nazi experiment for a perfect slave. Peter couldn’t think of enough words to describe the vileness of the mere thought; nothing could encompass the sheer wretchedness of such a stance, such a belief, such actions and their consequences. He hadn’t realized just how abhorrent the whole thing was until Octavius clarified it, metal arms pinning a corpse to the wall with mad triumph in those mad eyes; it still hadn’t quite stuck in until he’d been greeted with the sight of Robbie at home, his lover weeping over him as he stared vacantly over the Apple.
(It haunted him at night, just as much as the smell of Ben, the sight of the god; the swooping feeling of grief, unparalleled on both a moral and hateful level.)
(He could have stopped it. If he had just been faster, been better.)
(The memory still makes him sick sometimes, forcing him out of bed with bile rising quick in his throat.)
Felicia suffered a death, too, all at his hands; her dignity, her sense of self, her sense of safety--no matter how meagre it was--had perished with a long shard of glass and a hamper of bloody clothes.
She had sheltered him, nourished him, loved him as he had never been loved, and how had he repaid her? His own clumsiness had cost her her face, her dignity. After his fight with the Sandman, he had fled to her for safety and recovery. Now, she could barely stand to see him, refused to show her face without a porcelain cat mask all too similar to the masks of the girls she herself employed at the Black Cat. He couldn’t blame her for blaming him. It was his fault her lover had attacked her like he had, had carved her scars deep enough to ruin a woman of her employment.
When he had dropped onto her balcony and found nothing but a ruined room and her staff waiting to tell him of her denial, he had been hurt, then horrified. What else was he supposed to feel? Everything else but the anger and violent grief had been long swallowed by the gaping maw of his city, his hell. The news she never wanted to see him again had been knives in his skin; first he had lost Robbie, now Felicia within the same day. Nobody else would take in the Spider; nobody else would take in a criminal hero.
(It was what he deserved, he had thought as he swung far away to grieve in solitude. He had let her down; he had destroyed her life.)
(Even now, when he sees shards of glass, the image of her beautiful face being sliced to bits just as Octavius had cut apart his experiments is enough to make him want to vomit.)
Now, when he looks in the mirror, he thinks bitterly that there is no perhaps; his death had been exactly what he deserved. The face in the mirror is nothing like what he had viewed even a year ago; skin that should be unwrinkled and smooth is marred by scars that map his whole face, by lines of worry and stress and anger. There is no smile left, only a grimace that hides the jagged teeth that remind him all too much of the Vulture’s. Eyes that were once aflame with determination are naught but low coals, simmering with quiet, desolate hate and anger, and his hands are scarred enough with burn marks that one could presume he burned himself on his own gaze. He looks at the mirror, and hates what stares back with unblinking eyes; those limbs that bend backward aren’t his, those spindly fingers that trace the battlefield of scars over rough, patchy skin cannot belong to him. The spinnerets in his wrists burn when he digs at them with his nails; sometimes, he wishes he could rip them out and renounce his title, but who, then, would continue his work? Could he really stand to let down even more innocents as he had let down Robbie, had let down Ben, had let down Felicia?
An undignified death is the only rightful penance for his crimes, for the deaths on his conscience.
And if the god finds him again and deems him evil enough to escape this living torment, he will gladly join the countless souls and planets that have already fallen victim to the god’s hunger, gladly accept his judgement. He is a murderer, after all, inhuman and numb to everything but his own hate and grief.
What can be more evil than that?