Chapter Text
Peter Parker had been in Gotham City for exactly two days, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and nine seconds, and it had to have been the worst two days, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and nine seconds of his entire life. This takes the fact that two days, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and ten seconds ago he had disintegrated on an atomic level after losing an intergalactic war to a giant, purple thumb-thumb from Spy Kids into account.
Over the last two days, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and nine seconds, Peter had been mugged at knifepoint twice, drenched in approximately three different unknown fluids, had his first meal in ages stolen right out of his hands by a ten year old, and had been turned away from four different homeless shelters on account of ‘being a minor.’
Peter was twenty-one.
Peter also had not had the foresight of taking his wallet with him to the outer-space, alien war, so he was completely and totally broke. He had somehow managed to become more broke than he had ever been in his life, which he had not thought possible, as he was already completely fucking broke.
If it wasn’t for Tony’s pushiness occasionally outweighing his pride, he would have probably been homeless at least seven times in the past two years.
His only saving grace thus far had been the coins he had been picking up from the sidewalk after spending hours wandering the streets of Gotham just looking for something that could help him buy any sort of food to satiate the absolute unit that was his enhanced metabolism.
He had yet to stoop as low as to steal money of any sort, but another day without food might force his hand. At least he had sticky fingers.
It had only taken Peter about thirty minutes (of time not screaming out in pain and terror as his body pulled itself apart into a brightly colored conglomerate of molecules, something he did not want to think about) for Peter to figure out a few very important things about his situation.
- Peter Parker was currently in a universe incredibly different from his own.
- Peter Parker should under no circumstances interact with anyone running around dressed as some sort of bat or bird.
- Peter Parker was completely and utterly alone.
Facts one and two were decently manageable. While he had not popped up in his usual haunt, at least he had not woken up stranded on some planet many galaxies away from Earth with no way in hell of getting back. Additionally, he was fairly sure that as long as he laid low and didn’t try to rob any banks or commit elaborate murders in brightly colored, carnival-inspired costumes he should not have to speak to any of Gotham’s protectors.
The last fact, however, was different.
Peter had been lonely at many times throughout his life. He remembered the heaviness when he had to come home to an empty apartment the day after May died. He remembered holding Gwen’s lifeless body in his arms and knowing that he would never be the same. He had lost friend after friend just because he couldn’t be both Spider-Man and Peter Parker, and so he wasn’t unfamiliar with the emptiness that isolation tended to bring with it.
Peter had never, ever been completely alone. Even when he had lost people, even when he had lost everyone, there had always been at least one other person. After Gwen, he had met Tony. After May, he had stumbled his way into Team Red. Hell, when Harry had completely cut him out of his life, and rightly so, the weird girl MJ who sat behind him in calculus had invited him over to draw him in his ‘peak pathetic Peter Parker’ state.
Peter still was only twenty percent sure on what that had meant.
Here, however, he had no one.
He had helped Karen scrub through hundreds of government databases for any trace of Peter Benjamin Parker, or anyone that might know of him, and he had come up with absolutely nothing.
He realized very quickly that he was in a world where Peter Parker, and anyone even vaguely involved in his life, did not exist.
He was fine with this, though.
Really.
Peter loved fresh starts and clean states. In fact, he preferred it to the comfort and safety of people that loved and cared about him, as it meant he could now make new friends and relationships with people, even though he didn’t fucking exist.
Whatever. Peter was fine.
Peter was so fine that he barely even registered when his body would periodically try to tear itself apart and turn him into a disco ball of atomic Peter Parker before rapidly putting itself back together. That was definitely no big deal. I mean, Peter had fought a maybe space-god.
Well, he had died fighting the maybe space-god.
But that also meant that he had died, and nothing could be worse than that, right?
Ha! Take that atomic disco ball Peter!
Eventually, his totally-not-spiralling was interrupted by another growl and painful set of hunger pangs in his stomach. Peter wondered if he could ethically push up his timeline for stealing up, especially considering that his metabolism made him feel more like he had not eaten in a week, rather than two-ish days.
He stuck his hands in the pockets of the shorts he had very luckily been wearing under his suit, though now they were so drenched in Gotham mystery fluid that he would have to burn them when he found something else to wear, and wiggled his fingers around.
Yep. No cash has magically appeared there.
Fuck.
Peter glanced up, catching sight of the rapidly disappearing sunlight behind the clouds of smog hovering darkly over Gotham’s skyline, and realized that he was about to be really fucked.
After two nights of wandering around Gotham, he had learned that if he didn’t want to be mugged again, then he really needed to find somewhere to sleep for the night. His first instinct was to find a rooftop, but he also had learned that the bats tended to stick to rooftops when traversing the city, and he would rather not be woken up to Batman’s boot on his face.
Considering the fact that homeless shelters were out of the question as well, his choices were getting fewer by the second.
Peter decided to try a rooftop anyways, if anything to get a decent enough vantage point to plan his next move.
After glancing around the street for the least rickety fire escape to climb up, as he didn’t want to be spotted scaling the walls like a spider in civvies just yet, Peter started to make his way up the rusty stairs. The building to which the fire escape was attached seemed mostly abandoned, the remains of a sign for an autoshop half covered by vines and graffiti hanging off-center in front of the building. All of the windows and doors were boarded up with rotting wood panels, the fact that the fire escape didn’t fall apart under his feet was an honest to god miracle.
Eventually, he pulled himself up onto the ledge of the roof, and took in his surroundings.
Most of the buildings around him were in various forms of half-occupied, half-falling apart, a state which had come to learn was normal for most of Park Row, or, as it had been lovingly dubbed by the Gotham general populous, Crime Fucking Alley.
Because, of course, Peter may not have been dumped on an alien planet thousands of lightyears away, but rather he was stuck in the most dangerous part of the most dangerous city in the world that was technically not an active fucking war zone.
Got to love that old Parker luck, huh.
At least no one had stopped him to ask why he wasn’t in school, yet, considering the fact that he wasn’t sure most kids in Crime Alley went to school, a fact that was equally vaguely relieving and horribly depressing.
Peter, honestly, wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for. Part of him hoped that by standing on the roof he might catch sight of Iron Man flying in the distance to come rescue him. Maybe there would be hidden cameras and crazed producers that jumped out and said, “Ha! Pranked you!” After, he would spend the rest of his life living off of the royalties of his thirty minutes of fame from some hit reality TV show that only pranked superheroes, and he would be perfectly content and safe back home in New York.
Maybe he would even get a cat.
Peter sighed, and took a step off of the ledge towards the middle of the roof, about to make his way across to the other side to see if he had better luck looking in that direction.
Look out!
Peter whipped his head around, expecting some bat-shaped projectile to be flying at him, but instead he felt the concrete underneath him shift slightly.
Oh fuck, was all he managed to think before the roof underneath him gave out entirely.
When Peter first opened his eyes, he half expected to look down at the rest of his body and find nothing there. Maybe, he thought to himself, Gotham was just a weird limbo before I can spend eternity watching Star Wars with Albert Einstein, or whatever it is people do in the afterlife.
Instead, Peter opened his eyes to someone shaking his shoulders aggressively and saying something to him.
Well, someone wasn’t exactly the right word. It was more like a shiny red egg with vaguely eye-shaped white slits was making noises at him while gloved fingers tried to shake him out of his stupor.
“—ake up. Hey ki— — — at happened? Why the fuc—”
It was that moment when the universe decided it was atomic disco ball Peter time again, and Peter was only distantly aware of the gut-wrenching scream that crawled its way out of his atomically out-of-order throat over the garbled molecular symphony that his body was playing.
It only took a few seconds for the disco ball to go away, but after taking one glance at the large red bat symbol on the red egg’s chest who was currently standing over him, he figured he now had much bigger problems than colorful protons and electrons.
“What the actual fuck?” The egg yelled, and Peter, after being shocked from his half-conscious stupor by the never-ending wrath of the universe, now realized that the person before him did not in fact have a red egg for a head. It actually looked a lot like Tony’s helmet, just slightly larger, and completely scarlet. The person himself was an absolute tank.
Peter swore that his thighs alone were probably the size of his head, and if he wasn’t as terrified for his life as he currently was, he would probably find this fact hot.
Okay, well he still found it hot.
But now is not the time, Parker.
God, when was the last time he had gotten laid?
The man took a tentative step towards him, and Peter tensed at the motion. He stopped in their tracks, and held out his hands placatingly in front of him.
“Listen, kid. I’m not planning on hurting you, but I would really like to know what the fuck just happened.” His voice was warbled, probably by some modulator in his helmet, and Peter assumed that it was meant to sound intimidating.
Peter had spent enough time around vigilantes, that he just found it kind of funny. Or maybe that was the possible concussion and residual atomic misalignment talking?
Peter laughed anyway.
This seemed to startle the man, and Peter caught out of the corner of his eye the way one of his hands reached to settle slightly on the gun strapped to his hip.
Okay, Peter. Maybe laughing at the clearly heavily armed and twitchy bat-person is not a good idea.
Peter sat up slowly, and sucked in a few deep breaths to try and stifle the laughter, deliberately ignoring the spots swimming in his vision at the movement. He glanced around properly for the first time, taking in his surroundings, and realized that he had definitely fallen through not one, not two, but three stories of the abandoned shop, and had definitely hit his head hard enough that a normal person should have died.
All Peter had to show for it was a mild concussion and the trickle of what he now realized was blood and not sweat gradually gushing down the back of his neck.
The helmet guy stepped forward again, not moving his hand from where it was resting on his gun.
“Okay, this is really fucking weird, so I’m only going to ask this one more time before I start shooting,” he said, and his grip tightened around his gun. “What the absolute fuck just happened?”
Peter furrowed his brows together, as if he was thinking really hard about his answer, and tapped his chin a few times with one finger. Then, after another round of neurons firing in the wrong fucking direction, he gasped a little and pointed to the sky as if he had just had the biggest lightbulb moment of his life, and chose to not focus on the man’s fingers twitching on his gun again.
“I think,” he started, making his voice as cheery as possible. “I really do think that I fell!” Peter gave the guy the biggest, most disarming smile he could muster. Then he felt liquid that was definitely blood start trickling from his nostrils and figured that the whole ‘I’m perfectly innocent and am totally not from another dimension and am totally a perfectly regular person’ face was probably no longer as effective as it might have been.
Peter couldn’t see the man’s face, but he swore that if he could egg-guy (Peter still felt like calling him that) would be glaring at him very intensely at the moment.
“No shit, Sherlock. I think I got that part,” he deadpanned, and then took another step forward. “I was talking about the screaming light show a few seconds ago.”
Peter’s brain helpfully supplied, Play dumb!
“What screaming light show? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Not that dumb!
The guy reached forward and hauled Peter up by the front of his tattered t-shirt in one hand, a feat which Peter once again was desperately trying to not find hot.
“Don’t fucking lie to me, kid. You and I both know that won’t work here.” This close to his face, Peter could hear the faint voice underneath the modulated sound coming out of the speakers.
“I’m not a kid,” Peter responded, slightly annoyed at once again being mistaken for a literal child. “I’m twenty-one. I just have a youthful glow.”
“Are you really gonna be snarky with me, kid?”
Peter pursed his lips.
“Are you fucking pouting?” The man held Peter a bit further from his face, and Peter once again could feel him glaring down at Peter through his helmet.
Peter crossed his arms as much as he could with a hand still holding him up by the front of his shirt. “Well, it’s not necessarily polite to put someone in air jail, and then proceed to make fun of them.”
“You’re not a cat.”
“You don’t know that.”
Peter was summarily dropped, and it only took him a few seconds to find his footing and blink away the spots in his vision.
“I swear to fucking god, I don’t get paid enough for this shit,” egg-guy muttered, but Peter was pretty sure he would not have been able to hear it without enhanced senses, so he chose to ignore the statement.
“Don’t you have, like, bad guys to beat up? Or maybe some giant lizards to wrangle with your little bat friends?” Peter asked, putting his hands on his hips.
“The fuck did you just say to me?”
“I said, don’t you have more important things to do than interrogate a kid in the ruins of an abandoned building who very clearly needs medical attention?” Peter barely resisted the urge to stick out his tongue, but he figured that doing so would ensure he ended his night with a bullet through his teeth.
“I thought you were twenty-one.”
“When it suits me.” He watched as egg-guy’s shoulders slumped slightly, and Peter could tell that his horrible strategy of annoying the guy packing at least three visible guns into leaving him the hell alone was somehow actually working.
Peter watched egg-guy suck in a breath, and raise a finger like he was about to say something, but then Peter heard s small click of static.
“Hood, come in,” another modulated voice spoke, one Peter definitely shouldn’t be able to hear without super senses.
“Oh, thank fuck,” Hood sighed, and tapped a hand against his helmet. “What is it?”
“RR needs backup over by the docks. He was looking into one of Sionis’ operations,” the staticky voice stated.
“Never in my life would I have thought I would be happy to help that kid, but there’s a first time for everything,” egg-guy responded quickly.
There was a pause, before the voice asked, “Are you alright over there?”
“Oh, I’m absolutely fuckin’ peachy. Tell me where I’m headed.”
“Sending the location now, have fun with your brotherly bonding time.” Peter swore he heard the voice giggle at the end of the statement.
“Fuck you.” Egg-guy then proceeded to tap his helmet again, and the static cut off. He turned back to Peter, and pointed at him. “You got lucky this time, but I swear if I see your ass again I’m going to put a bullet through your skull before you can say anything else fuckin’ stupid.”
Peter reached a hand up to wipe at the blood now pooling above his lips, an action which just smeared blood all over his face and hands. He grinned, and gave egg-man his signature Parker finger guns. “Good talk, egg-guy!”
“What the fu— you know what? I don’t care,” egg-guy said, and then proceeded pull a grappling gun from somewhere and pointed it at the roof. “Don’t cave any more roofs in my neighborhood,” he said sternly, and then disappeared into the night.
Well, then. That guy was an asshole.
Peter brushed off his clothes, and tapped a finger onto the bracelet wrapped around his wrist.
“Hello, Peter. What can I help you with?” Karen said, whirring to life as a small holo-screen was projected in front of him.
“Hey, Kare. How far along are you on the whole ‘temporary identity’ thing you started a day or so ago?” He asked, starting to climb his way over some of the larger pieces of rubble as he spoke.
“As of this moment, you are legally a real person in this universe,” she stated.
“Oh thank god,” he muttered. “Is there any way for you to make me a bank account?”
“Certainly. I can quickly open an account within Gotham City Bank.”
“Alright, let’s do that.” Peter’s feet faltered a moment, and his stomach chose that moment to loudly remind him just how fucking hungry he was.
“I would advise you to find a source of nutrition as soon as possible, Peter.”
“I would advise that too, Kare.” Peter had made it fully inside the non-collapsed section of the building, and flicked on the small flashlight Karen made for him on his bracelet. “However, I don’t necessarily have the funds for that.”
“We could remedy that problem, Peter.”
Peter raised an eyebrow as he pushed through a door, trudging deeper into the building. “And how do you suggest doing that?”
“There are two multi-billion dollar corporations with local servers in the area. One is Wayne Enterprises, the other is Drake Industries. Drake industries, however, is most likely soon to be bought by Wayne Enterprises after a recent plummet in stock following the deaths of the two largest shareholders.”
Peter stopped walking about halfway through her statement. “Are you suggesting that we steal from billionaires? Are you supposed to suggest that?”
“Mr. Stark had it built in as a failsafe protocol in case you were stuck in a situation such as the one you are in now.”
“Of fucking course he did,” Peter chuckled, and continued. “The problem is, Karen, I don’t have a card to use to withdraw cash with.”
“I am a highly advanced AI, Peter.” If Karen had the ability to deadpan, she would definitely be deadpanning.
“Yeah. Okay. Sure. Uhhhh— how about Wayne? I’ve heard of that guy a lot these past few days. Plus, he’s super big on the whole philanthropy thing, right? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind helping out the little guy.” Peter winced a little as he spoke, but then again, out of every billionaire in this universe he could name (which was only two, Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne), he figured Wayne would be less likely to hunt him down with a golden pitchfork if he skimmed a little money for him.
“Of course, Peter. I am transferring ten thousand dollars into your account now. The next time you are at an ATM, connect me directly, and I will withdraw however much cash you desire.”
Peter gaped. “I’m sorry— ten thousand? I—no, hold on. I thought you were only gonna take like fifty bucks? I don’t need ten thousand dollars—”
“Peter. According to my research, it will cost about ten thousand dollars to procure a safe and comfortable shelter, a continuous source of food, and time for enough leisure to make connections in Gotham City.” If anything, Karen now sounded pleased with herself.
“Connections? Karen, I just need, like, a few sandwiches,” Peter continued as he crawled over a collapsed support beam into what seemed to be the old reception for the shop.
There was a slightly rotted wooden desk in the corner, and a logo was painted across the front.
Parker’s Autoshop
Huh.
There were four walls, an only slightly collapsable roof, and a decent corner for Peter to web himself a hammock for the night.
Peter guessed this was as good a place as any to stay.
“Peter. As of right now, there are no current solutions to bring you back home. It is best to anticipate a long-term placement in Gotham while we work to find a way back.”
At her words, Peter felt his stomach drop.
Long-term.
Yeah. Okay. Peter could do long-term in the worst fucking city he had ever set foot in. He could definitely do long-term while his body tried to tear itself apart at least twice a day. He could absolutely certainly one-hundred percent do long-term after already coming face to face with a member of Gotham’s most violent emo band.
Peter was going to be completely and totally fine.