The Tenant of 141
The rooftop stone was rough, and cold. Not the most pleasant thing to lie on. But there he was, at the edge of the city, staring at the sky while his body felt like it was burning beneath him. Peter wasn’t sure who this friend of Talia’s was, but if they were the reason Talia saw fit to take care of his injuries he’d have to thank them one day. That proved to be enough of a reminder to get Peter up off his ass at least. To an extent he was glad to know that the threat of ninjas finding and killing him was still enough motivation to get moving. He had his doubts that they’d follow him this far, but if they did, rooftops would be the first place they went if only for the better view of the city when searching for him.
Which meant he couldn’t be up here, not now. And given the frankly horrific injuries he still had and his complete loss as to where he was, now was not the time to try and make his way back to NYC. A few nights holed up in Gotham then while he healed and got his things in order, sounded like a plan. Step one of that plan? Go down the fire escape. His ribs were still killing him so the less wall crawling he needed to do, the better. This side of the city seemed mostly abandoned at least, so finding shelter for the night wouldn’t be too hard, even if it was breaking and entering.
Spider-Man’s a good guy, right? Even if he occasionally has to break and enter? Yeah, that sounded about right.
The fire escape nearly did him in as much as his injuries had. Making his way down yet another floor, his spider sense flared up in time for him to scramble back up a few steps right as they gave way and fell off the building, followed by the next two floor’s worth of rusty metal. And that turned the remains of the fire escape into a jump that he just wasn’t going to deal with right now, especially with these kinds of injuries.
Guess this was his stop then. The window gave way quick enough, though the shattering was unfortunate to say the least. If anyone was looking for him he’d just given them a fairly loud clue. But when he got inside he realized he just didn’t care. It was cold outside, very very cold, he just hadn’t realized it. The adrenaline was helping him ignore it but his blood just wasn’t circulating right. He could feel it, sluggish in his veins. Like a dormant system that just received a kick start, shaking off years of dust. The inside of the apartment building was warm. It may not have had heating, but it still had four walls, a floor, and a roof. And with the biting wind of Gotham, that was a god send.
The window he had broken led him into a hallway, doors in repeating sequence on either wall and ultimately leading to a stairwell at the far end. Small plaques adorned some of the doors, reading off numbers for the apartments they were still attached to.
“173”, “174”, then a gap of two where the plaques were missing, hazy outlines showing where they used to be, followed by “177”.
Down two flights of stairs, and he couldn’t tell how much of the blood on them was his own. His bandages had soaked through in a couple of spots, and the adrenaline was finally wearing off enough for him to realize just how much pain he was in. Peter was hurt. No, more importantly, Spider-Man was hurt. And Spider-Man doesn’t get hurt. When he puts the suit on, Peter doesn’t have to worry about the aches and pains, it gives him a confidence that maybe he doesn’t deserve, but by god is he willing to take it. And now? Now the suit, the tattered remains of it, they draped off him the same way his bandages did. The symbol of wounds and damage. He couldn’t look at it. His own suit brought him dread that permeated his whole body. An implacable feeling of anger and fear and overwhelming dread. Dread the likes he had never known before. But that’s all it was, the feeling, he couldn’t remember why.
Somewhere, lost in his own thoughts as he was, he had chosen to stop struggling his way down the stairs, shambling down a hall and leaning against the first door he could, hoping and praying it would swing open. It had, and now he was not-so-proudly the temporary resident of apartment 141. The apartment had all the amenities a suddenly homeless superhero could want. A tiny kitchenette with broken appliances, a room too small to be called a living room but arguably serving the same purpose, a bathroom that surprisingly still had water connected if the leaky faucet was to be believed, and a bedroom with nothing in it but a bed frame.
He’d make it work, somehow.
That being said, he had to sleep, and like, now. His spider sense would be screaming at him if it didn’t know he’d break down crying. Luckily it did, so instead it simply gave an incredibly persistent hum. Still, that was annoying enough to make Peter turn back to the tiny living room, pulling the drapes off the windows there and taking them over to the bedroom, where he threw them on the ground to make his bed for the night. Sure the drapes were filthy and moth-eaten, but the floor was somehow worse. And while his immune system was no slouch, he did not want to give his healing factor anything else to contend with. Not right now. So he laid on his makeshift bed, and he slept.
—————
The dream was one he’d not had before. He was sitting in the lounge of Tony’s penthouse. Looking out the windows of the avenger’s tower. Looking over the city on a dark, clear night. New York laid before him, every street a bright light reaching out from the tower. Spreading and connecting and bending and curving and reaching ever outward. A spider web of lights in the dark. It was extraordinary. And it felt far too real. Then he turned to look at the room. He saw them all there, the avengers, but they didn’t seem to see him. He’d only ever met three of them (Black Widow had given him some lessons in self defense after Tony had practically begged her, and he’d happened across Banner once while making his way up to the penthouse to bring Tony some paperwork concerning his internship. He got along with Widow well enough, she actually seemed to take a liking to him, but it was Banner he really got on with. They talked science for an hour and Banner had nearly considered stealing him away from Tony). Captain America and Thor were sitting on one white couch. Banner sitting on another with Hawkeye on the floor in front of it. Widow (Natasha, he had to remind himself. Sure he knew the names of all the avengers, but for some of them he’d never be able to separate their hero name from his thoughts of them.) was sitting in a chair on her own, and Tony and Rhodes (War Machine, one of the few that had the reverse problem when it came to names. Made even worse by his constant nickname Rhodey. It was all a bit much to remember about a guy he never really met.) sat on another white couch. They’d all flank a glass table, and on it would sit, amongst pizza boxes and drinks, Thor’s hammer. Mjolnir.
They all looked so young in this dream. He had to keep reminding himself that that’s what it was. It felt far realer than any other dream he’d ever had. It was before the other’s had joined, well before his own time, but Peter couldn’t help but notice their youth. He hadn’t realized just how the stress and pain aged them just as much as the years had recently. He’d watch them as they all talked and laughed, and sometime during the night someone would bring up some topic that eventually settled back on Mjolnir, and then they’d all try to lift it. It was a good dream. One where he could watch all these people he admired having fun and feeling real for a moment. One where the heroes were allowed to be just people too.
When Peter awoke, he was crying.
—————
It was also the next day, or more accurately, the next night. His bloodied suit and bandages had dried uncomfortably, but the noticeable lack of aching in his movements told him his healing factor was working wonders with what it had.
That being said, Spider-Man probably still shouldn’t be seen around here right now, and he had to get that suit off, now. As he slowly got up from his makeshift bed Peter stumbled to the bathroom, peeling away the last remaining tatters of his suit and tossing them in some far corner of the room where he wouldn’t have to look at them anymore. Wouldn’t have to feel that dread. His bandages were next to come off and they felt uncomfortably stiff as they did so, the blood dried into them. Realizing he couldn’t be seen with blood all over his shirt and pants either, he stripped out of them as well. Though they were tattered and scuffed up by the bandages having been put in place over top of them (something he found odd but likely happened as a compromise with Talia originally wanting to allow him his privacy). If he could get the blood out of his clothes he could at least wear them around as some sort of homeless civilian.
The first thing he tried was washing them in the sink, filling it with nearly frigid water and dunking them for a while, and while it helped, blood stains were not so easy to get rid of. Rooting around outside the apartment (in a sort of toga fashioned from one of the drapes. He was really getting tired of losing his dignity) eventually turned up an old janitor's closet, and while bleach can go bad, it really just tends to break down into salt, water, and oxygen over time. (He chuckled to himself as he remembered that little chemistry fact. Really putting his knowledge to work, wasn’t he?) And opening this bottle still gave off plenty of that pungent bleach smell, so it should do.
The end result was a clean white t-shirt, a jacket that had been red, but now looked far more pinkish, and a pair of sweats that had been gray and now looked like some sort of monochrome tie-dye with how the bleach had, well, bleached them in places. Both were ripped and torn in various spots.
Looking up at the remains of a mirror above the sink, he took it all in. His shoes were scuffed and torn in places. His sweatpants looked like something he had pulled out of a dumpster, the color all faded and wrong, the fabric a lot more than what one may call distressed. His shirt was probably the part of his outfit that looked the most normal, and even it was tattered and torn. It didn’t hide the enormous yellow bruises that covered his arms, but his jacket could do that, and besides, it was cold in Gotham, so the jacket wouldn’t be coming off any time soon.
Looking further up he met his own eyes. They were bloodshot, deep purple bags underneath them. His bottom lip was cut on one side, and the tiniest trickle of blood still came from it. His nose had a scar across it that had been an open gash just last night. And just in front of his forehead, in a bit of hair that dangled down like bangs, was something interesting.
The hair was changing color. His brown hair gave way to grey, almost silver at the end of the strand. And the gray was moving up, he could see it, moving up and down the strand of hair, with a bit of green tint at the line of demarcation. Like it was trying to turn the rest of his hair gray and his healing factor was fighting back, to be honest it was a bit distracting. His eyes followed the struggle, up and down the length of his hair as the grey would win a bit more territory than the brown would push it back. For a moment he had to stop and think, hair was essentially dead the moment it left your scalp, but here he could clearly see his healing factor fighting against… something. Still, it would be one in a long list of weird quirks of his anatomy ever since the bite. For now he decided to leave it be.
All of that is to say, he looked like shit. Homeless, injured, shit. Which wasn’t entirely wrong for the time being. It would work, it would have to.
That didn’t mean Peter had to be happy about it. Quite frankly there were a lot of things he wasn’t happy about, and this apartment wasn’t helping. It was stifling him, closing in on him. He needed air, he needed distance from his suit, he needed…
He needed to be on the rooftop. Not as Spider-Man, not this time, but as Peter. Where Spider-Man used rooftops as a vantage point, and even traversal, Peter used them as a place to think, away from the constant hum of the city streets that seeped into his head no matter how hard he tried to block it out. And try as he might to separate the hero from the human, that bit of spider that enjoyed being high up was still in him, always. So he made his way back out to the hall, then to the stairs, pushing up them one at a time, slower than he would really like. At the top he found the roof access he was so hoping for, locked and chained off. That had never stopped him before.
—————
The crashing sound had rung out a few minutes ago, a rooftop a few over from the one he now sat on, but Jason was a bit too busy to deal with a break in when he had a drug dealer in the alley below him. Priorities, the worst part of the job.
Still, that didn’t stop him from making his way over after business was taken care of. If he was lucky he might be able to find the criminal still in the act. He doubted he would be. There was never anything worth stealing in these run down buildings. And he was never lucky. Where he had been expecting a break in, though, he found something else entirely.
Perhaps a break-out wasn’t quite the right name for it, but clearly that’s what the kid had done, the door pushed open so hastily it had left tracks in the roof. And the kid, he was standing far too close to the edge for Jason’s tastes.
—————
He heard the whisper quiet sound of two boots landing on the roof behind him, then hesitation in their movements. Analyzing the door he had broken open most likely. Though that didn’t quite explain what he heard next.
“Damn it, this is more Dick’s speed…”
It was mumbled, muffled even more by the mask the man had covering his face. He hadn’t seen the mask, nor the man yet, but Peter could hear the way the sound reverberated. Of course, a normal human wouldn’t have heard the mumble at all, and so he pretended not to.
Friend? Wary. Careful.
His spider sense thrummed at him. His first instinct upon seeing -or rather, sensing- any sort of masked person approaching him in such a clear attempt to not be seen would be to fight them. Or at the very least to turn to them, let them know he could see them. But right now he was just Peter. Just Peter out to think when this weird guy had to come and bother him. It didn’t matter that the man hadn’t really done anything wrong. It didn’t matter that his spider sense, though hesitant, seems to trust this man (no, even to like this man. And that made it worse). Peter was angry. Here he was, hurt, potentially miles away from home, and alone. And this man had the gall to try and sneak up on-
“I’d really appreciate it if you took a step back now.”
Peter startled, had he really been so lost in his own thoughts, own anger? The voice was clearly modulated electronically, but even through that it had a cold, calculating tone to it. Something that spoke to his statement being more of an order. A demand even. The demand didn’t make sense though, I mean what’s one step going to do? And a step back would only bring him closer to the man anyway? And then it dawned on him.
Peter looked back and forth between the city in front of him and the ledge directly below him. The ledge markedly high above the street, and rather close to his feet. One step forward and anyone who couldn’t stick to walls wouldn’t be having the best of times.
“I wasn’t- thats not-“
He could hear his own voice coming out, he almost sounded like he was pleading.
“I wasn’t going to do anything, you don’t understand-“
He said as he stepped back, turning to face the man.
The man had a suit on, not the cocktail-party-in-Tony’s-penthouse kind, but the superhero kind. Black and reinforced in places as it spanned from his waist to his neck. Where the suit stopped a large, round, red helmet of sorts took over, covering the man’s head. Across his chest was a large red bat insignia. Over top of the suit was a brown jacket, open in the front and with sleeves that cut short of reaching his elbows. Instead the suit was revealed again as it spanned to his wrists, where a pair of gloves took over the duty of covering the man’s skin. At his waist was a belt, various little compartments attached to it. The belt seemed to be holding up military-style pants that eventually tucked into worn combat boots at his feet. Perhaps the most notable part of the whole ensemble was the pair of pistols, one holstered on the outside of each thigh. Peter could only conclude that this was one of the bats the ninjas had talked about. And if the pistols were any sign, he was right about his suspicions of them being a crime family. This conversation was about to get much more interesting.
The man’s shoulders relaxed, and he could tell a sudden relief was found with Peter’s safety.
“I’m sure I don’t, why don’t you explain it?”
It almost sounded…. Not unnatural, but like the man was using a muscle that hadn’t been used in a long time. There was a stiffness to his voice that wouldn’t go away no matter how kind he tried to come off. The kindness was real though, just rusty.
“I…”
And suddenly Peter realized he couldn’t find the words. He was hurt, he had thought he was dying just two days ago. He was a long way from home, alone, with damn near nothing to his name. And on top of that all, the one thing he relied on, the one thing he took confidence in, no longer could be counted on for any of that. His own suit filled him with dread. Spider-Man filled him with dread and he didn’t know why. How could he explain that, any of that, to some man he didn’t know, in some rooftop he had never seen before, in some city he’s never heard of? And how could he do it without breaking his secret identity?
He was crying now, and where the man had relaxed he once more stiffened.
“I… I come up here to think.”
Was all he could get out.