Mistake #2
Peter wakes up to a text from Harley scaring him onto the floor. In his defense, his phone hadn’t made a noise this early in at least a month.
Hey darlin’
It’s Harley from the coffee shop
What was he supposed to say?? He’d never been great at socializing when he could see people’s faces and know what they wanted to hear, but texting??? There was no tone, no face, no personality or body language. He had to respond. Play it cool. Pretend to be normal, he could do that. Wait… Harley texted again.
You wanna hang out sometime?
Grab some food?
Yeah.
Sounds great!
Play it cool??? I can NOT do that. Now he sounds bland. This is so stupid. He doesn’t even care, why is he freaking out? Peter powers off his phone and suits up again. Helping people was much easier than whatever he’d (un)willingly gotten himself into. He immediately jumps into patrol. After a few near-muggings and a very lost tourist group, Peter was sitting on a building. He sees a car doing some crazy driving, which was actually really common for New York. What wasn’t normal was the way the car set off his spider sense. That’s suspicious. That’s weird.
Peter follows, obviously. The person driving hadn’t technically done anything yet, but there was no way he was going to let them out of his sight. The car slowed down on a practically empty street. Weird, but maybe they lived there? Nope, there were two teenagers walking alone. The car slowed down beside them and people jumped out and grabbed them. Dumb. Dumb as hell. Didn’t even cover their mouths, the scream would’ve caught his attention if they hadn’t already.
Peter got the kids, They looked his age. They’re all kids, clear and took care of the thugs easily. He calmed the teenagers down enough to get them to call the cops. He turned back to the kidnappers. He had business with them before the cops got there.
“What were you doing with these kids!”
Whoops, that was harsher than he meant. It was deserved, but not very neighborhood friendly. The criminals looked panicked, which… yeah. Wasn’t the greatest, but as long as he got what he needed to know. They fessed up embarrassingly easily. Must not have been paid enough.
“The Ringleader! He called himself The Ringleader when he hired us! We’re sorry, Just arrest us, man. Whatever pissed you off, we didn’t mean to!”
They were terrified. That was going to haunt his nightmares for a little while.
“Awesome! Thanks guys!”
He tried to keep his voice more bright than he had the energy for. The Ringleader? That sounds familiar, right? He went back home to follow up on The Ringleader. He was no Ned, but he had helped fix Karen enough times to know how to hack her. S.H.I.E.L.D was nothing compared to Tony Stark’s paranoid security. His laptop had parts old enough they probably remembered WWII. Plus, who honestly was going to notice?
No Ringleader. There was some guy called Ringmaster that was around at some point. So… he’s a knock-off? Walmart version? Kroger Brand? Nothing explained why he wanted teenagers. Teenagers can be aggressive and hard to predict or control. He knew, he was one.
Nothing makes sense! Some random guy he had never heard of goes straight from anonymity to running a trafficking ring? Right, because that happens. Looks like he’d have to actually, gag, do detective work.
At some point he’d passed out on his laptop, and he woke up cursing at the time. He was supposed to work again. Please don’t be fired. It was wayyy too late now, they were closed. Peter moved himself to the bed and went back to sleep. Any and all consequences to be dealt with later.