Chapter Text
“I dunno, man - probably Thursday?” Peter shouts, his phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder as he swings towards the fight. Another fight. He barely bites down a groan as whoever’s on the other end of the line berates him for the last time he slept. Is it his fault they ask him to help out all the time? Is it his fault people are consistently in danger either through no fault of their own or because of their poor as fuck choices?
No.
But it does mean it’s Saturday and he’s running on no sleep and a diet of three day old take out. It’s just the same shit, different day. Every day since he got bitten by that damn spider, he’s been helping people. Half decent people and people that don’t deserve to be helped - but there’s a pull in his chest when he tries to ignore the calls. Because if he stays at home he’ll spend the entire time replaying the times he didn’t go out. And if he thinks about the reason he didn’t go out - all those unanswered calls - then he’ll think about the time he lost her.
“Spider, you gotta get it the fuck together,” someone shouts at him as he passes the street he’s meant to be on. Peter rolls his eyes because he didn’t even wanna fucking be here but they didn’t stop blasting his phone until he turned up. Something about a dangerously strong guy running around Queens that they needed his help with.
It’s not like he doesn’t want to help - it’s just that he doesn’t really want to help. He will because that’s what he should do - what he has to do when he has these powers he didn't ask for. So he’ll go and help, and he’ll fight and he’ll get broken and he’ll get back up. But it doesn’t mean he wants to.
He hears the snide remarks whenever he throws himself towards the biggest blasts and starts fights that realistically could have ended already. People mumbling that he fights like a man with nothing left to lose. And they’re lucky he’s usually being pummeled to the ground when they say shit like that, otherwise, they might be the ones at the end of his right hook.
Peter lost everything. They know that - they don’t even know who he is under the mask, no one does anymore. But everyone knew that Spider-Man lost his wife. Lost his true love. And everyone noticed the difference in his fighting style when he finally left his apartment thirteen months later.
He wills his mind not to go there. To keep the way he let her down at bay for a little while longer. Just until he can help and then he can deal with his failure afterwards. Because if she gets into his head the way she still lives in his heart - he’ll either be useless, or he’ll channel all his heartbreak and brokenness into his punches. And then someone else will die.
But it’s no use. He doesn’t have enough time to convince himself to not think about her - to not let her into every thought he’s going to have for the rest of the day. If he’s lucky, he’ll get knocked out in this fight and he won’t have to deal with it for thirty-six to forty-eight hours.
He sees the villain he’s supposed to be helping takedown and he’s already staring right at him like he was waiting for Peter to show up.
At first look, they’re taller than him, but in his defence, he isn’t wearing big combat boots like a tool, he’s just got his spandex slippers on. He’s covered in belts and has a ridiculous, borderline terrifying amount of weapons hanging from various loops on his body. He has a mask covering eighty-five percent of his face, and though Peter’s is surrounding him, he thinks that must be hard to breathe in.
All the signs point to a trained assassin - though he can’t figure out why he’d have been personally targeted. Although, he’s never managed to figure out who killed his wife either, so he figures he’s just set up to lose, and never get the answers he so desperately craves.
Peter wonders who they’ve been trained by as he walks towards them, neck rolling as the memories filter into his mind and he thinks if this prick wanted a fight - they came to the right guy.
The worst thing though is that the closer he gets, the more he stares at the only skin he can see - their forehead. Because it’s the same colour, he swears it’s the same colour as -
“Ow!” he shouts, his palm against his face as he realises he spent too long looking and not enough time blocking punches. Peter doesn’t have time to figure out why his senses are fucking him over, maybe it’s the overwhelming leather odour seeping from this guys outfit. He's a bad guy! He gets it! Do they need the full black and the buckles and the guns? Probably but it still seems a little over the top.
Kinda looks like the Terminator though. That’s pretty cool, he should tell Ned.
Peter barely gets out of the way of the guys next punch, possibly because he was asking Karen to text Ned, it’s whatever, but the guy catches the side of Peter’s jaw enough to whack it out of place.
It’s not something Peter is particularly proud of, but his spider senses have been failing him for way too long. Almost as if letting himself get no more than twenty hours of sleep a week and eating nothing remotely healthy and relying entirely on his healing factor to save him - hasn’t been good for his mind. It’s whatever. He’s always been able to rely on his brute strength anyway. He doesn’t need to jump out of the way of screaming bullets or avoid being slashed by a knife. The pain helps to dull his thoughts anyway, so he usually welcomes it.
Peter throws his fist only to have his punch blocked, and then they’re twisting his arm until it’s too painful not to struggle away. He heaves out a sigh as he kicks their heavily padded thighs and laughs to himself that they need that much protection - where’s the thin spandex suit for this guy? It tells him all he needs to know - their muscle power is in their machines and not their bones.
Not that it makes a difference right now as his limbs ache with the exertion of being borderline equally matched in a fight. Neither one manages to hit the other more than twice before they’ve taken another blow. Peter’s brute force not being able to connect with the guy in front of him, who keeps dodging his blows and he realises they’ve studied his fighting style. Every hit Peter goes to throw is dodged, and they’re never in the right position for his webs to attach to them.
The other guy has a stick he’s pretty sure is pure vibranium or something equally as awful, and they don’t make it connect each time - but when it does the air is knocked from his lungs and it takes him too long to recover. So he also realises they’re clearly powered, but they’re not a match for Peter without their weapons - so he needs to get him alone. Without the backup of guns, knives and are they fucking throwing stars?
Peter's not holding back now - he thinks if someone wants to come for him that’s fine. He’ll win this time. He won’t be taken for a fool and lose whatever is left of his life. Not this time.
He hears the cracking of bones when his knuckles hit their ribs, though he can't tell if it's him or them. But when his arms ache, he thinks about her, and what he lost and how he let her down and he digs deeper and he hits harder.
He knows the other guy is just as hurt, they are favouring their left leg while before they were favouring their right - and the way they’re breathing has changed from almost silent to choppy and laboured.
“Wanna take a moment,” Peter heaves out. “Figure out what it is you want?”
He takes the butt of a gun to the temple for that and he thinks that’s rude, he was only trying to help but fuck this guy.
“Not a chatter, I get it,” he winces, taking another hit to the skull. Nothing’s broken yet and he wants to tell them that they’ll have to work a little harder to kill him but he’s not sure he’ll be able to fight for as long. Not with the way he swears he can hear her heartbeat or the way he feels her presence. Maybe he’s already halfway gone.
Peter wants to say it’s unfair to use weapons in a fight, but he does have his iron spider chilling in his suit so if need be he could pop it out. Eurgh, he likes to win the good old fashioned way - but if he takes another headbutt from those freaky ass thick goggles, he’s probably not going to see tomorrow.
And he tries to call for Karen but the sound of whirring catches him off guard. He’s like… sixty-seven percent sure that this guy isn’t mechanical but Peter has insane hearing so he knows what a motor sounds like. Plus, he can’t see any skin so this guy may have mechanical arms - he should text Ned about it. He wonders if asking would get him a bullet to the chest this time. Well, worth a go.
“Are you a fucking robot, or what?!”
Welp. He made him angrier than he was before, and Peter really wishes he could focus on the fight at hand and ignore the lingering thoughts of her. So he throws his hands wildly, and he tries to remember any of his training or any of the hits he knows would knock them down.
Not that it matters when Peter can’t get his mind off her and onto not dying in the middle of a parking lot. He sends webs that get torn apart, and he leaps around trying to avoid the blows they keep making with their freakishly long legs.
“Fuck,” Peter grunts as they pin him to the ground, the sound of his nose breaking vibrating through his skull as he takes another blow to the face. He could let it end here - he could finally see her again. With the way Karen is shouting in his ear, he knows he doesn’t have long left before his brain is scrambled on the pavement.
And his mind drifts to her, as it always does. But it’s not the memories he wants to leave with. It’s not what he wants to remember when he sees her again.
The room is empty. Nothing but old stacking boxes and a dripping pipe. It makes no sense - why would he chase something all over Queens for no reason? There's no one here.
The fear settles in his bones before he even has time to tense a muscle - to articulate any thought.
It's a trap.
Because of course, it is. His worst nightmare has never been dying and leaving her. It's her leaving him. Trying to figure out how to live in a world where she doesn't exist. It's selfish, but he's always selfish when it comes to her.
His wife. His first love. His last.
And he turns and he runs and he screams her name. But before he's even made it past the door he knows it's no use. He knows deep in his soul that she's already gone.
“I miss you,” he strains, his jaw is definitely dislocated but it does the trick. The guy on top of him with his creepy full face mask stops his assault and Peter has a second to grab onto the mask, kicking them in the stomach watching with a smirk as they fly through the air.
He calls for the iron spider now, it’s just good sense. He feels the legs around him and he thinks this is it now. The fights over.
The guy comes to crouch, dragging their fingers along the ground to stop themselves moving and Peter’s ever so slightly annoyed that that might be one of the coolest things he’s seen. Because he can’t tell them that, because they’ll definitely shoot him in the face.
But then the guy lifts his head. And Peter's heart stops as they turn to face him because it’s not a he, and wow he should check his biases at some point when his heart isn’t breaking.
He holds her mask in his hand, the thick plastic cracking under his fingers and his chest seeps onto the floor. Because it can’t be. She’s gone. He saw her body, and he went to her funeral and he’s never been the same because living in a world where she doesn’t exist is something he never managed to do. It’s obvious in the way he lives, in the way her photos still live on his bedside table, in the way he’s never come close to liking anyone ever again.
“MJ?”
She works her jaw and he hears the bones click back into place and his entire being threatens to disintegrate because he hurt her. He’s spent the last twenty minutes trying to hurt her - when all he ever tried to do was make her happy and keep her safe. He failed though. He failed then and he’s failed now.
She stands, throwing her gun to the ground. And he’s still on the floor when she stalks over to him, spinning a knife in her hand as he watches four mechanical legs come from behind her - with claws at the ends that he should realise mean he has no chance against her. Not now. Not when they thought of trying to hit her now makes him want to dig his own grave.
His mind is spinning, and his body is breaking, but he can’t take his eyes off her. Until she speaks, the sound he’s missed hearing - only being able to hear it on the voicemail he replays daily, and the home videos he watches even though he promised May he’d stop.
She says the words that threaten to take him out for good. Because what did they do to her?
“Who the fuck is MJ?”