Chapter Text
The warehouse doors had a hydraulic closure that, if Peter was being generous in his estimation, probably quit working and died sometime around the Bush administration. Instead of slowly whirring to a silent shut, it WHAMmed shut behind him and then the echo cannoned off sheet metal rafters.
Sorry, he thought to nobody. At a door. Sorry, sorry.
Shit, fuck, okay.
Really nailing the whole in-and-out subtlety thing, and he was already on edge enough as it was. He’d been counting potential charges all morning. After being up all night on the computer looking up federal regulations. He could now recite most of Part 30 from memory. Possession of stolen property, assuming he got out of here holding anything in the first place. Conspiracy to acquire byproduct material without a license… which… he couldn’t get because:
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The application wanted a social security number and transcripts from colleges along with documented hours of training.
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Peter didn’t have any of those things considering a certain spell four years ago had erased him from existence.
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The application for a license also cost money.
There were also a few fun charges related to transport, storage, and improper shielding, and—if anyone got creative with the sentencing—conspiracy, which carried a mandatory minimum sentence time that would throw him into a federal prison until he was older than even Aunt May had been when she died.
Aunt May, who’d told him about responsibility at the end of all things. Aunt May, who died because he hadn’t been fast enough or smart enough, hadn’t been enough, period, and if she could see where that great power and responsibility had led him these years later, standing in a shipyard about to buy dangerous wares from dangerous men, maybe she’d have rewritten her last line to something more like:
Don’t go, Peter. I love you. I don’t want you to go and get hurt or get into trouble, so don’t put the suit on, Peter. You don’t have to do everything alone, the world needs to learn how to stand up and take care of itself without you for once.
But… she hadn’t said that. And here he was, her good nephew, her good responsible sweet boy, paying cash for medical waste to sort of, maybe, hopefully fix his mutating ass because Peter Parker had been so responsible he’d let a wizard erase him from existence to save… well, everyone, and no one would ever know his name and would never, ever thank him for it.
You volunteered for that, he reminded himself. And you didn’t do it to be thanked.
Though that would’ve been nice. It would be nice to get a little support, a little encouragement, too about this thing he intended to build on a workbench four feet from where he slept.
Which was great, great, totally great. Yes. Good.
Also great: balancing all those odd jobs of appliance repairs off Craigslist to scrape up enough cash to earn all these illicit awards. Recently he’d been buried in four ceiling fans, fixing a dryer belt, six computer motherboards (one of which belonged to a sixteen-year-old whose browser history and downloaded porn viruses had required Peter to do a full wipe and say nothing about it to the kid’s mother, because he had been sixteen once and the world was hard enough), two dishwashers.. and then there’d been that woman who’d tipped him twenty dollars and a Tupperware of arroz con gandules on top of it, still hot, and asked him three separate times whether he was eating enough.
He’d said yes ma’am. He said thank you so much, ma’am, you didn’t have to do that, really, and got out of her apartment before she could ask him a fourth time.
And all of that, and he was still miserably short of what he thought he’d need to buy what he wanted.
Peter also had recently considered selling pictures of his feet on the internet.
He was still considering selling pictures of his feet on the internet, honestly.
Fetish photos aside, those paired with tutoring and every other odd job within reach had all amounted into a crisp stack of hundreds, all of them folded up in his inside pocket. He was hyper aware of that fat stack, all the hours of hard work and stress on top of patrolling the city, and he was also uncomfortably aware of…
Everything else.
Just because the hydraulic closure was dead didn’t mean that other machinery wasn’t whirring away inside, all of it as loud as a freight train in his skull. The lights were too bright. Grease and trash and garbage in this squalid wreck of a building were too pungent. Every sense was dialled up to fourteen out of ten turning the mundane into the monstrous. Inside his pockets, Peter’s hands were balled into fists, nails biting into his palms.
Keep it together, Parker.
And then a crane started up in the far bay.
Because of course, goddamn, they would need to be using it now.
Groaning, Peter squeezed his eyes shut in a grimace. The motor caught with a grrnk! that became a whirrrrr that became seventy decibels of steel cable on drum, ninety feet off, with three men standing directly under it arguing about the Mets bullpen. This was a normal sound in a normal place and it wasn’t loud. But in Peter’s skull it climbed past decibels and measuring at all into nothing but cacophony; leaning against the nearby wall it was all he could do but stand there breathing out of his mouth until the motor found its load and quit rising, and his hearing came back down to a range that didn’t have his brain melting out of his ears.
Two weeks ago, these episodes spaced themselves out, one every few days maybe, which was not great but not terrible Now they clustered in paroxysms, three or four between sunrise and dusk and patrol, each one resetting the baseline a notch farther from where it’d been a day before.
He needed to make that inhibitor, and fast.
But to make that inhibitor he needed to buy… well, things normal people couldn’t buy. Which had him here of all places.
Further inside, there was the dealer. Or… at least he hoped that was the dealer—whoever he was, he was on the phone while smoking a cigarette when Peter reached the table, and he stayed on it, holding up one finger without looking at him to finish his conversation. Behind him two men stood around a space heater and one of them ate takeaway out of a carton with wooden chopsticks, and Peter smelled the cooking oil from twelve feet out and hear every schlck of the man’s tongue sliding wetly against his teeth—disgusting, disgusting, misophonia didn’t have shit on him these days—and then the crane started up again.
Agony.
“—no, because that’s what I told him in March, and the dumb motherfucker didn’t listen then, and he’s not listening now, and its not my fuckin’ problem now that he needs shit. What? What do I care here’s your cousin? Everybody’s got a cousin. You either get me my money and I sell you shit, or you don’t and you get off my dick about it. Man’s gotta make a living.”
He hung up, set the phone down, and rubbed at his temples before sparing a glance over to Peter, his cigarette bobbing as lips pursed to frown. “And what do you need? Who the fuck sent you in here anyway, I’m not taking couriers out of my office.”
“Uh… Sorry. Sorry, sir. Actually no one sent me, I’m… I heard this was the right place to ask for a sealed gamma source.”
“A what?”
“Something like iridium-192, or even iodine-125 seeds would work.Uh, palladium is fine too, I can make that work, anything but cobalt-60 honestly. Spent seeds, that sort of thing.”
“‘That sort of thing’’,” The dealer repeated. He leaned back in his chair and sucked a deep inhale from his cigarette until the cherry ate halfway down to the orange filter. “Yeah, I got some of that. I got a lot of weird shit back there people don’t come asking for, especially not by name, which makes it real interesting when somebody does.” He tapped ash off the side of the table and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “So sure. I have some of that. For six thousand, it’s yours.”
“I have eleven hundred and forty.”
“Then you’ve had a wasted trip, and I’ve wasted my time listening to this shit. Get the fuck out.”
“Would you break the lot?” Peter asked, taking a step forward. Okay, so he was begging. “I really just need one capsule, that’s all I need, one. Or if you… I can work? I’m good with anything mechanical. That hoist in your far bay has a dry bearing and it’s going to seize on you inside a month, and then you’re paying a rigging crew to cut the drum off in a building you probably don’t want a rigging crew standing around in. I can fix it tonight, for free, and I… I can keep coming back. Trucks, boards, wiring, whatever you want.”
“I don’t need a handyman.” Ramone crossed one leg over the other and smoked. “I need money, or if you don’t have that I need bodies. I need somebody who can move product from Point A to Point B without getting pulled over or getting cute about what’s in the bag. You got a car?”
Move product. Peter had pulled enough baggies out of enough coat pockets during enough arrests in enough stairwells to know what that meant when a shady man said it. He knew the weight classes, too, and with his senses on overdrive he could probably sniff out the purity of that product like a hyper-specialized arachnid version of a trained K9. Drugs. Drugs or alien tech in the form of weapons that would kill people just like drugs did. He’d held both sorts of killers in his gloved hands while cops wrote up the report and all he could think about in that split second was, no I don’t have a car, why would I ever need one living in New York?
“I can… get one.”
“Alright. Then here’s how this works. You run for me. Three, four trips, depending on weight, depending on where. Each one knocks a piece off what you owe, and when we’re square, you get your little science project and we never see each other again.” Ramone shrugged. “Or you walk out the same way you walked in and I don’t think about you ever again. Makes no difference to me.”
No.
It’s what he needed to say. Peter knew he needed to say no. All he had to do was open his mouth and push it over his tongue, past his gritting teeth, and walk back out the broken door to return to the drawing board. There were other ways, had to be other ways, to get an isotope he could use, ways that didn’t involve becoming a drug mule for a man who sold stolen nuclear material and other ‘weird shit’.
But… instead he needed a way out, and right now the only way he could think to do that was by stopping his mutation in its eight-legged tracks. More than he needed to say no, he needed it, and that’s why he was just standing there, flexing and unflexing his hands, trying to run the problem. Reactants in. Products out. Life and most things in it were an equation, and he’d never met one of those that he couldn’t, eventually, figure out. If these… runs… were local like Jersey, Connecticut, or even taking the Metro-North as far as New Haven, he could maybe fit them around patrols, early mornings when the highways thinned out and cops were cycling through shift change at the precinct houses. Did he really need a car? He could swing there, probably. Carrying things to Jersey, across state lines, was another federal charge for the pile, but the pile was getting taller and taller at this point. Was one more thing going to topple it over?
He could make it work, and—
Wait.
What… what was he doing?
Peter was planning on making these runs work. Spider-Man was planning how to do drug runs.
And his hands weren’t flexing anymore, they were shaking ever so slightly. Nerves? Stress? Maybe he was about to be overloaded again and break something new. He’d broken three coffee mugs this week alone from grabbing them too tightly and since switched to disposable paper. Last Thursday he’d caught a fire escape railing on heading down from a roof and bent the steel bar to a forty-five-degree angle before shearing it off outright. Catching generic purse thieving skells and nerdowells never needed him to break someone’s arm… but… that… what happened too. Twice. Spider-Man was supposed to catch the bad guys, he never went out of his way to hurt them.
He needed this inhibitor. This was a biological imperative like eating, like the drowning gasps of air on the edges of panic. Peter’s dread was phenotypic and measurable, which was worse than if it had been mystical, because mystical meant you could blame wizards or sorcerers like Dr. Strange. Bargain brand Parker Luck and it being phenotypic meant it was him—his own genome rewriting its instructions, a corrupted compiler spitting out aberrant code where the original used to be. Peter’s senses were continuing to widen past mammalian range, struggling to adapt a body plan meant for eight legs and eight eyes rather than two and two.
He kept wondering what would happen next. Fangs? Additional eyes? There were already spinnerets where his blank wrists, fucking up his homemade webshooters. There was no clean stopping point anymore. His body was becoming something chitinous in its logic, even if his skin still looked human.
Peter had always been a smart kid, a witty shit-stain on the inner city sidewalk, but he’d also always been kind. Now though, his startle response tended to jump right over reason, conveniently skipping cortical processing entirely and routing through a more base pathway that didn’t bother with should I before it reached done.
Month by month since the spell, nucleotide by nucleotide, he was slipping farther away. Farther from person and closer to spider. He was scared. He was lonely. Time was only eating the distance between what he still was and what he was becoming.
He didn’t have months, and he might not have weeks.
And he could not run drugs, only adding to the cycle of violence and crime in his neighborhood… so Peter opened his mouth to try one more time.
“I can’t… listen, I can’t… do that, but what if I…”
“Oh, sweetheart, no. No no no. Baby boy, we are not taking that deal. Don’t even consider it.”
We? Where there’d once been nothing, there was now someone looming behind him, and a voice near his ear.
There had been nothing. No footstep, no shift of air, no crawl up the back of his neck that meant move. Nothing at all, and Peter could hear a phone vibrate in a pocket from twelve feet away with a wall in between. Working on a rare delay, Peter whipped around into red and black leather and a chest at eye level. Big, his mind supplied unhelpfully. Very big.
Peter stumbled backward in alarm; his feet planted wrong, weight forward, one hand already coming up before he caught it and made it drop. Somebody had walked up on him. Somebody had gotten inside four inches and his spider-sense had not! Done! Anything!
That somebody was six-two and built out to match it, with wide-spanning shoulders that blocked out light from overhead holes in the roof. Tightly-clad leather panels hugged the deltoids, the biceps, all the other many muscles that built up the battle hardened body, all of the suit scarred and re-stitched in a dozen places. The twin katana hilts rose above each shoulder like antenna—ha, funny, arthropod humor, great timing brain—and below them the holstered pistols, one at each thigh, and pouches, so many pouches, all of them bulging with ordnance or snacks. And through the mask two white lenses that were watching Peter with a fixed, cheerful focus.
Deadpool. Of course. Of course.
Peter had put him through a plate glass window in February and Deadpool had gotten up out of the broken glass and street ice-sludge and asked him (pretty please) to do it again. He had webbed the man’s hands to his own katanas in a parking structure on the West Side and gone back forty minutes later to check on him and found nothing but cut webbing and a Wendy’s bag. He had watched Deadpool shoot a man in both knees on a rooftop in the Bronx while narrating it in a Werner Herzog impression.
And now here he was, standing in Peter’s blind spot, and Peter was a guy in a hoodie.
… which… fuck, this was bad. Though they were far from friends, only sort of, kind of occasionally allies in the street when it served both their interests, Deadpool knew him. He’d heard Spider-Man talk for hours. Up close, too, while they were grappling distance in fighting (with a villain or each other), webbed-to-a-wall distance.
Close enough to have learned just how Spider-Man moved through a fight.
And Peter had learned just how perceptive Deadpool actually was in those violent, chaotic, fists-to-face moments. Deadpool noticed everything, filed it under a joke, and produced it three months later at the worst possible moment.
Peter dropped his chin and rounded his shoulders forward, shaving two inches off his frame and giving himself a more pronounced, non threatening hunch. He was a student. A nobody who wandered in off the street. Deadpool was watching him with open, cataloging delight anyway.
“Wow, look at that face,” Deadpool said, delighted. “You’ve got a face. Ramone, doesn’t he look like someone to you? Face like that you’re looking for trouble or you are trouble.”
“Wilson.” The dealer—Ramone—hadn’t stood up. “This isn’t your business! Why are you even here?”
Deadpool swept a hand at the dilapidated room at large. “Why am I here? Why is anyone here? Very Kierkegaard of you to ask! A freelance practitioner of violence. An independent contractor with terrible impulse control. Why the fuck do you think I’m here? I need my special-fucking order, Ramone! I need those Chitauri plasma cells, those sweet sweet Kree munitions, the armor-piercing rounds, and the two vials of alien neurotoxin you promised me, another nine-mil, I need .45 ACP, I need a new Ka-Bar because I sat on mine—tragic incident, bean bag chair, not the time—and you owe me a callback, and I’ve been very patient, which is not a thing I’m good at. So imagine my feelings, Ramone, when I finally walk over here and instead of getting my order you’re trying to send Dimples here on a drug run that’s going to get him killed. Not great customer service” He wagged a finger between Ramone and Peter. “This little situation you two have cooking is way more interesting than my shopping list.”
“I don’t have dimples,” Peter said.
Deadpool turned his gaze towards him. “You absolutely do. Don’t lie to me. We just met.”
We didn’t.
“Also—and this is a sidebar, we’ll come back to the main plot—what’s a boy scout like you doing sniffing around for all this hot material and heavy metal goodness? The Converse and kicked puppy look is giving nerd that has a science fair project more than terrorist that might try to make a bomb, and that’s—“ Deadpool put a hand over his chest. “That’s extremely attractive to me. Actually, are you? Building a bomb? I’d still help, I just want to know up front, because the real question, the one nobody at this table is asking, is why a guy who knows the difference between these super fun radiometric whizbangs off the top of his pretty head is buying from an ugly dope like Ramone instead of walking into a hospital and flashing credentials, which… Oh! That means no credentials, which means you’re totally making a bomb.”
Ramone looked between them. “What? Then just buy one like everyone else. I have a bunch of those, exotic and otherwise. Regular Earth explosives are cheap.”
“No! No,” Peter snapped, brows knitting together as he scowled, “I don’t want to buy one!”
“Adorable. A self-made man of morals and grass-roots armament assembly. We love to see it.”
“Shut up!”
“Look.” Ramone said, now talking past Deadpool, directing himself at Peter alone. “I don’t give a shit about bombs or dimples or anything other than cold hard fuckin’ cash. You don’t have the money and your hype man over here doesn’t change the number for what you want. You give me six thousand, or you take a fuckin’ job, or you walk out the fuckin’ door.”
“Bzzzzt. No,” Deadpool said, flouncing again. “I have an idea. New terms! Let’s talk new terms. I am fantastic at terms.”
“I’m not negotiating with you, Wilson.”
“Everyone’s always negotiating, you just don’t know it yet, and that’s the best kind of negotiation—one party doesn’t realize it’s happening until the paperwork is already signed. Has a lot in common with both arranged marriage and ambushes. The Venn diagram there is practically a circle.”
Ramone’s two men by the space heater had stopped eating. One of them had his hand resting at his hip, thumb hooked over his waistband.
Peter could tell without even turning his head, his peripheral field had widened again this month, encroaching past what any ophthalmologist would chart as human, biting degrees like a colonizing species devouring the competition. It was another gorgeous little mutation courtesy of whatever his arachnid-influenced endocrine system started to express recently. Twelve feet, two shooters. The one at the hip had his finger indexed already; the other still held chopsticks in his dominant hand. Four seconds to disarm both, three if he stopped worrying about breaking fingers. Or arms.
Or spines.
“Wilson. Walk away from my table before I make you.”
“Or?”
“Or your boyfriend here goes home empty-handed.”
“He’s not my…! Ugh! What is even happening,” Peter grumbled, and he stepped past Deadpool’s shoulder to plant himself directly in Ramone’s sightline. “Please, I’m willing to figure something out with you, I just… don’t… I can’t do those runs or hurt people.”
“A beggar with morals, the worst kind,” Ramone flicked the dead butt at Peter’s sneakers, at the strip of duct tape holding the left sole to the upper, and when his gaze dragged back up it moved at a scrap-yard crawl, pricing Peter’s frame by the pound. He smiled around the cigarette. “If you don’t want to do runs, fine. I got friends in Bay Ridge who like them small and mouthy. You’d clear nine grand by Sunday night. On your back, on your knees, whatever you’re into, they’re not picky. Hell, half of them wouldn’t even make you take the hoodie off. Beats getting shot on a New Haven run, doesn’t it? Think about it, sweetheart. Use your head. Easy work, easier money, and you get what you want plus some.”
“Oh, that’s a bad idea.”
Ramone laughed.
“No, seriously. You should pick a different idea.” He turned to Peter and gave him another once-over that started at his face, lazed down his body in big, lascivious sweeps down to his sneakers, then back up. “If anything, If anything, I think that price range is low for you, doll.”
“Don’t call me that,” Peter recoiled, frowning. “Can you not flirt with me while I’m committing a felony? Is that a thing you can do?”
“No, sorry not sorry. We’ll workshop it. What about ‘angel’? ‘Pumpkin’? I’m partial to ‘baby boy’ but Ramone already used ‘sweetheart’ and I don’t want to crowd the pet-name space—there’s an etiquette to it, believe it or not.”
Peter turned away from him and back to Ramone, “Can we get back to the actual—”
“That’s fine. Dodging’s a love language. You know who else dodged? Every woman I’ve ever—actually, most people I’ve ever—you know what, that one got away from me, let’s start over.”
“Let’s not.” Peter looked at the ceiling. The crane motor had paused and the reprieve from the grinding was the only mercy this entire night had offered him. Deadpool was still talking—had not stopped, might never stop. “Why are you always like this?”
Wait, shit, shouldn’t have said that.
Deadpool tilted his head. Even through the mask Peter could see the gears catch.
“Wait. Wait. ‘Always’? Have we met? Did I make a first impression? Was it a good first impression? It was bad, wasn’t it. They’re usually bad. Okay—scale of one to ten—”
“Negative four, and I’m not doing that so please stop talking.” Peter stepped sideways, putting himself back in Ramone’s sightline past the wall of red and black leather that had hijacked his negotiation. He needed to salvage this, and fast. “None of this, none of him, is relevant. You have material sitting in your back stock that nobody wants to touch. No buyer, no market, and every day it’s here it’s a liability that makes your whole operation hotter. I’m the only person who’s walked in asking for it by name. I have cash that I can give you right now, and that’s always better than waiting for a buyer that might not show up.”
“Cute and smart, be still, my heart,” Deadpool said to the rafters. “He’s right, by the way. Forget him for a second. Are we doing business or not? Because I’ve got places to be and corpses to—well, no, I was going to say ‘make’ but that’s a terrible thing to say in a room full of witnesses. Let’s say ‘appointments to keep.’”
“I really need you to stop talking,” Peter said.
“And I need you both to get the fuck out.” Ramone stood up from his chair for the first time, grinding the cigarette out under his heel. “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know why you two are doing a bit in my building at eleven o’clock at night, but I’m not selling you shit—” at Deadpool, “—and I’m not selling you shit either—” at Peter, “—because this whole thing got weird five minutes ago and I don’t do weird. You come into my place with lint in your pockets and you want to talk down to me? You know what you look like? Some dropped-out junkie freak who wandered off the goddamn street. I’ve seen strays with more going for them. Nobody sent you, nobody’s backing you, and nobody would fucking notice if you didn’t walk back out. So take your eleven hundred dollars and your big fucking mouth and go.”
Ramone didn’t know how right he was. Nobody would notice.
No one would ever notice.
You volunteered for that, Peter reminded himself again.
“So just so I’m hearing you right,” Deadpool said, “And I want to be really clear here, Ramone, because I think communication is so important in a business relationship, you’re telling me my order is cancelled. Because of a vibe.”
“I’m telling you to get the fuck out.” Ramone’s hand dropped under the table and when it came back up, it was holding a mean looking snub-nose pointed directly at Peter.
Dodge! Thwip! Disarm! His body screamed, this was not the first time anyone had ever pulled a gun on Spider-Man and it wouldn’t be the last but he was… just… Peter right now.
Peter Parker didn’t have reflexes like that.
“See, now that’s rude.”
Deadpool’s own pistol was out of the thigh holster in a millisecond, aimed at Ramone’s head, and Peter’s weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet before he could stop it—no, stay, you’re a civilian, civilians don’t—and then the table went next. One boot to the underside caught the folding rig at its center and drove the edge right into Ramone’s outstretched wrist, smacking the gun free to bounce off a shelf and skid under a pallet of shrink-wrapped crates. Ramone yanked his arm back with a howl, phone and ashtray and space heater crashing across the dirty floor, the extension cord ripping out at the wall in a shower of sparks.
One of the goons shouted and reached for his own piece, and in that same second Deadpool’s gloved left hand whipped out the second Beretta from the opposite thigh and fired without looking
CRACK!
The sound split Peter’s skull open from the inside. Every decibel he’d been managing all night had been annoying and manageable. A nine-millimeter detonating eight feet from his unprotected ears was neither of those things for his frazzled system.
Meanwhile: bullet, meet hand. It ripped though the thin membrane of skin between the goon’s thumb and trigger finger, sending his gun spinning across the floor leaving whorls of red in its wake. Peter’s vision was spinning, he felt that feeling of sinking down down down, so dizzy, no he had to stay himself, he couldn’t black out now. One shooter left, the second goon fumbling chopsticks out of his dominant hand, reaching for his waistband, three seconds to close twelve feet and—
CRACK! There went the kneecap. CRACK! Oop, fuck that elbow, too, and the man dumped directly into the space heater and a stack of crates.
And Peter Parker, anonymous nobody, flinched. Loud gunshots lanced through his head, each bang a railroad spike shoved through his already oversensitive ear canals. Three concussive pop!pop!pop!s that wrapped around the base of Peter’s brainstem and squeezed. He was a hero. People were being hurt. Deadpool would probably kill them.
But all Peter could do to right now, as Peter, was freeze and breathe through his mouth while the world dissolved.
Deadpool, of course, was unfazed. Having a grand old time, cooing at his victims. “Stay down, stay down, stayyy. Good boy. We’re learning. Play dead and get a treat.”
Three shots in a sheet-metal box. Peter’s vision swam, and the ringing drilled into both ears and camped there, a single piercing frequency that ate every other sound in the building. Colors swarmed past the edges of his shut eyelids, greens and golds and a hot sulfurous yellow that didn’t belong to any light source in this building, seeping through like dye dropped in water. His feet were still planted wrong, every strand of arachnid-engineered muscle fiber locked and begging to go, and he made himself rock back on his heels and stand there like a scared kid at a gun deal gone bad.
Which this was.
Deadpool retrained his aim onto Ramone.
“Hands. Hands in the air. Higher. Higher, Ramone, show me those nasty jazz hands. There we go.”
With the pistol settled against Ramone’s forehead, Peter watched Deadpool’s shoulders drop half an inch as he leaned into it, enjoying himself.
“So Ramone, Ray. Buddy. Pal. Here’s the situation as I see it,” Deadpool said amicably, tilting his head as the white eyes of his mask crinkled at the edges with a sinister smile. “You’re fucked.”
“You put me down and Hammerhead hears about it by sunrise,” Ramone grunted, “You want to be the asshole he’s looking for when I vanish? You want Fisk tracking you down? Because they will take you apart and enjoy every second of it you shitstain of a—”
”Tsk tsk tsk,” Deadpool clicked his tongue, and without breaking eye contact angled the left-hand gun and shot the kneecapped goon in his other leg.
“FUCK!” The man screamed, gargled whines of pain wrapping up in the sound.
“Shh. Shh. Shh. My turnt to talk, you listen. You know what I love about this job?” Deadpool asked the room over the groans of pain, “The community service element of it all. Really. People think it’s the violence, and sure, yeah, the violence is a huge perk, I’m not going to sit here and lie to you that it isn’t a throbbing, hard, glorious perk, but it’s moments like these that really turn me on. These teeny tiny little teachable moments. Where I get to help someone grow.”
Peter watched as Deadpool swung his attention to the two men on the floor, a substitute teacher surveying a room on its last warning. The one with the ruined hand had crawled behind a forklift tire and was pressing his palm against his thigh, blood soaking through denim in a spreading Rorschach blot. The other with his flip-flopping useless legs, was mostly just curled into a miserable ball.
“Okay! Housekeeping,” Deadpool announced, clapping his hands together once, both pistols still in them, which produced a clack! from polymer on polymer that made everyone in the room flinch. “Rule one: nobody moves. Rule two: nobody dies. If either of you reaches for anything, a gun, a phone, a granola bar, I will shoot that thing and also the hand holding it and probably a bonus body part. We clear? Thumbs up. Actually, no, you—” he pointed left BerettaTM at the hand-shot goon, “—skip the thumbs up. Poor taste. Nod.”
Both men thumbs-upped and nodded, respectively.
“Gold stars.” Deadpool pivoted back to Ramone who was cradling his wrist, and the showmanship snicked! off like a dropped coat. His posture squared, shoulders locking, spine straightening. “Now. Business.”
“You’re insane,” Ramone spat from his seat.
“No, I have a problem. It’s different. My problem is it’s been months and I’ve been so good waiting and tonight I come in here, wallet out, ready to do business like a functioning member of society, and you’re too busy trying to pimp this kid out to fill my order. Worse, you’ve got product sitting in this shithole that’s irradiating your inventory, you’ve got zero buyers who can tell isotopes apart by name, and this fine young gentleman—” a thumb hooked at Peter without looking, “—is your only customer within five boroughs. Supply, demand, Econ 101, very sexy. So here’s your two options, and I want you to really sit with them, Ramone, let them marinate. Option A: How much do you have again, dear?”
“I… ele-ev-shit. Eleven hundred and forty.”
“Beautiful. Eleven hundred and forty. Let’s just take it down to eleven hundred. Round. Beautiful. You take that cash, Ramone, and you hand over the goods, and you and I finish our own transaction like adults, and then nobody here has to explain any new holes to an emergency room nurse. Option B: I shoot you in the face, take everything in your back stock for free, and probably set this building on fire on my way out à la Milton because I think it’d look cool.”
Ramone’s eyes tracked between the muzzle and Peter and back. “…Fine.”
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“I said fine, you psychotic piece of—”
“Ah-ah. Manners. Say it with your whole chest, Ray.”
“I’ll take the eleven hundred and… you can have your shit. Take whatever the fuck you want.” Ramone’s cigarette had gone out at some point during the negotiations and he hadn’t relit it, which said more about where his nerves sat than any twitch of his face could have. “Then for the love of God, get out of my building.”
“Music to my ears. And also,” Deadpool added, “if you ever try to pimp out a customer in front of me again I’m going to come back here without the kid and we’re going to have a version of this conversation that ends with my dick in a brand-new bullet sized face-hole out the back of your skull. Now let’s just sit here together nice and toasty while ugly over there, yes, yes you Mr. Hand with the working kneecaps, you go get the goods.”
Limping, the goon that’d tried to hide behind the forklift slunk back into the stacks of equipment, leaving his boss sweating under the muzzle of Deadpool’s pistol.
And just like that, there was quiet. A ringing vacuum in the warehouse, but for Peter, quiet was never actually just quiet anymore. There was always room for a microscopic nightmare of noises to rush back in and fill the space, and he could hear the rapid, terrified thud of Ramone’s pulse against his carotid artery, the distant screech of a subway train over on the elevated tracks, and the completely infuriating, unwaveringly steady rhythm of Deadpool’s breathing.
Adrenaline was a toxic sludge in his veins. Had–had he just become an active accessory to armed robbery? No, this was extortion, probably, or some other legal definition was for abiding a heavily armed lunatic holding a dealer hostage. Felonies, counting felonies, collecting felonies…
“You’re shaking, Sweetums,” Deadpool said pleasantly.
Peter looked down at his hands and… oh. He was and… and was it overload? Nerves?
Maybe it was just Deadpool.
He shook them, stretching out his fingers, and shoved them deep into his pockets. “I—yeah. It’s been a long week.”
“Yeah, it’s like that sometimes. God gives his baddest baddies the thickest asses and the toughest problems,” Deadpool nodded, sounding genuinely sympathetic, “You want a taco? Lemme take you out for tacos after this. There’s a truck a few blocks down that does birria until two and I have a very generous relationship with the owner, by which I mean he’s scared of me, by which I mean he gives me extra lime. You look like you haven’t eaten in a while, and while it’s very 90s heroin-chic, I worry.”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t try to bullshit the bullshitter, baby.”
One of Ramone’s men came back carrying a steel case in one hand and a duffel bag in the other, setting each down on the floor before opening up the former. Inside, nested in foam, was a lead-lined transport container the size of a prescription bottle, and next to it three titanium capsules individually sealed in blister packaging. “Here you are, princess. Your precious Iridium.”
“And… then here’s the cash,” Peter said, still feeling slimy about the transaction. He handed over the fat stack and snapped up the case into his arms, hugging it there greedily. This was going to save his life. This was going to fix everything, and he’d be like Dr. Banner, or at least himself before his mutation started to go haywire, and things would go back to normal. “Maybe buy a new folding table.”
“Pleasure doing business with you, Ray-Ray.” Deadpool finally pulled his pistol back from Ramone’s damp forehead, tapping the muzzle affectionately against Ramone’s nose one last time before he twirled it around his fingers and slotted it back into its thigh holster.
“Aaaand I’ll be taking this,” He stepped away from the dealer, bending at the waist to snap up the duffel. “Next time, pick up the phone.”
Peter, not wanting to say thank you or goodbye or even be here one moment longer, turned on his heel and scurried back towards the entrance, outside, and the greater expanse of New York.
And he was followed.
He could hear the duffel shifting against Deadpool’s leg several paces behind him. Irregular scuffs of his boots (was he… skipping? Peter didn’t want to glance over his shoulder to check) against the ground.
The sensible thing would have been to lose him somewhere in the next block, but Peter wasn’t sure he could actually lose somebody who could teleport? No, Deadpool didn’t teleport… could he? He’d mentioned once a thing about a belt, but anytime Deadpool ever said anything important or honest, it was buried in hundreds of lines of bullshittery. Teleporting or not, Peter knew he could reasonably web to the nearest overhang and be three boroughs gone before Deadpool registered the thwip! But… then again, Deadpool had always managed to keep up well enough for a rare team up.
And nervous nobodies like Peter Parker didn’t clear eight-foot chain-link without touching it, and if Deadpool saw any of that, the questions were going to stop being fun.
So Peter walked, and Deadpool’s lazy half-stride closed the gap behind him and every few steps the rhythm changed just enough to suggest that Deadpool was doing something profoundly stupid back there, until yard by yard, with the inevitability of a tide the gap was gone.
“So while the view is impeccable, I’m kinda lonely back here,” Deadpool said, falling into step beside him like they’d been walking together for years, “and I have a couple of questions. In no particular order. One: what’s your name? Two: on a scale of ‘I tinker on weekends’ to ‘I could build a reactor out of a toaster’ like David Hahn, how much of a genius are we talking? Three: are you single? Four—”
“Thank you,” Peter cut in, because if he didn’t Wade would reach fifty. “I think? I sort of think you used me as an excuse to hustle to get your own stuff for free rather than out of the kindness of your own heart.”
“Oh, absolutely I did that. Hundred percent. Two things can be true, sweet cheeks. I saw an opening and I took it, because I’m an opportunist and also a Sagittarius. I used you, sure. I also saved you from becoming either a drug mule or a twink fleshlight, and the going rate for that kind of intervention is at minimum one favor to be named later. You know it, I know it, God knows it, and the readers know it. We’re not square. We’re not even adjacent to square. We’re like… a very lopsided rhombus.”
“I… What…?”
“But, if I’m being honest, and I like to be honest to break things up sometimes, I also didn’t particularly enjoy watching some sweaty little shit try to force you into something you didn’t want. And I meant that offer for food, too, and—oh, shit, I didn’t even—I’m Pool. Deadpool. But you can call me Wade. Or ‘hey you.’ Or ‘sir,’ if you’re nasty. What do I call you?”
“I can’t ,and I already ate anyway, I’m not hungry,” Peter lied. His metabolism was incinerating everything he ate at a rate that would’ve made a hummingbird nervous. “Uh, I really need to get home. I have a—project.”
“Dodging again, science-fair. You know, you’re allowed to tell me to fuck off rather than make an excuse like that.”
Peter peered over at him, annoyed that he had to tilt his chin upward to meet those white eyes in the mask. “Really? That’d be enough for you?”
“Sure,” Deadpool nodded, the up and down rapidly devolving into a shake side to side. “Okay, okay, no. I’d probably still follow you home. You gotta give me at least a crumb here, cutie.”
“Does this count as the favor I owe you?”
“Not a chance, slick.”
“It’s… fine, fine. It’s Peter. And since I have your permission, please fuck off. Kindly.”
“Peter,” Deadpool repeated, tasting it. “Peeee-ter. Pete? Can I do Pete? Petey-Pie. Okay, Petey, so the taco truck on—”
“I said I’m not hungry, and I have to go.” Peter pulled the case tighter against his side and picked up his pace, which required considerable restraint given that the pace he wanted to set would have put him over the nearest tall building in roughly four seconds. “Thank you. Again. I mean it. But I have to go. Please don’t follow me home? Goodnight, Deadpool.”
“Wow. A genuine dismissal with eye contact. I do respect it, damn. You know most people just sort of speed-walk away and pretend they’ve gone deaf—oh. You’re really going now. Hey—”
Peter was, in fact, doing that.
“—if the science fair project goes sideways and you need somebody who’s both incredibly handsome and literally unkillable to scramble some atoms, I’m your guy!”
Yeah, screw that. Knowing Deadpool, he’d have moved on from this to causing other problems within 24 hours.
Ignoring him, Peter put four blocks between himself and the warehouse before he thought there was a good enough chance that Deadpool wasn’t following him. Still… better safe than sorry. Boring mode was better for this particular mission, so he walked home instead of swinging, navigating blocks he knew by rooftop from the sidewalk. South on Vernon, then over the Queensboro… yeah, this would take longer but it would work and it was safe; fewer people on it past midnight and fewer people meant fewer sounds and fewer smells and less of a chance of the overload catching him in public where he couldn’t hide what it did to him.
And freed from the dual occupation of sensory assault and flirtation, inside his head, Peter cracked the capsule open and started building.
Iridium-192 had a seventy-four-day half-life and was… reasonably… safe to be messing with in his attic apartment unit. Still, he needed a beryllium window and a collimator sleeve to shape the field, both of which he could thankfully fabricate on his printer. Beyond that, he’d made a prototype housing (half-machined from a titanium block he’d fished out of a dental lab’s dumpster), so what remained was to solder the emitter array, calibrate the field geometry against his own genome… that would be the tricky part. He’d need to draw his own blood and then run it under the microscope he’d found at the thrift store, and then mount the whole assembly small enough to sit flush against skin under the suit.
If he stayed but a bit later between patrols, he could have it done by Wednesday, probably.
Tuesday, if he pulled an all nighter and didn’t sleep.
And Peter was spectacular at not sleeping.