The water's warm
He was walking back from the Daily Bugle, an envelope with his paycheck in it and a coffee in hand when it happened. A man wearing the most unimpressive jumpsuit he had ever seen burst into the street, maybe a yard in front of him. The lower half of his face was covered with a bandana and he was holding, you guessed it!, a gun.
A few days had passed since that night against the weapons smugglers, and Peter was proud to say that he only felt a light sting in his back. That didn’t mean that he was immune to bullet wounds, and it certainly didn’t mean that he had suddenly gotten a new and creative way to disguise his identity when he was wearing normal clothes. He wished that the spider that bit him had given him super speed. Or maybe foresight.
The man had shoved him roughly as he spun in the road, making some type of getaway. Peter had tried to stop him, in the most reasonable way he could outside of the suit, and he had spilled his drink all down his front. They had gotten into a bit of a verbal spat, one where Peter was trying to stall him, mostly, but eventually he got away, booking it down the road. He wondered if he should chase after him, but he really needed to stop at the bank, and the police were still active in this city, weren’t they?
He felt guilty about it, but he couldn’t afford to get into a fight when his paycheck was on the line. Being poor kind of sucked in the whole ‘vigilante’ scene.
It was a day later when he saw the article about the robbery, about the violent assault and the very general ties to the tracksuit mafia. Of course, the guy in the blurry pictures fleeing the scene had a coffee stain down the front of his shirt. Peter wondered if he could pretend he hadn’t been involved—how many other New Yorkers spill coffee on themselves everyday? Then, he had scrolled further down on his phone, and that was where he saw the victims. An old man, a worker, and a little girl. It was a small business, and they were all hospitalized.
He couldn’t quite ignore that.
He considered suiting up immediately and diving in headfirst (which is what was usually deemed the ‘Parker Method’ as he’d coined it) but he didn’t have much information besides his own memory and a coffee stain. He needed to get more intel. He needed, and this truly disturbed him, help.
In his apartment, in between shoveling a bowl of cereal in his mouth and filling out financial aid for the next semester at ESU, he tried to think of anyone who would have information on the tracksuits. There was a huge stint a while back with Clint Barton and the other, newer Hawkeye, but he knew for a fact that both of them were out of the city for the month. That at least meant that the Avengers probably had something on them. Maybe a location?
He thought back to the most recent interaction he’d had with the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, fighting alongside Sam Wilson and the Winter Soldier for their weekly scuffle in the center of Manhattan. He wasn’t sure if the bad guys were HYDRA or international terrorists or what, but they had big, alien guns and a vendetta against the lunch rush downtown. Peter had been making his way to the library, hoping to get some work done for a summer course, saving himself a few extra credits later in his degree, and he’d jumped into the fray. He was nice like that.
Sam had promised him that he would repay the favor, as he had the last fifty some-odd times that he had lended a hand.
“Don’t be a stranger,” He’d said amiably as they moved rubble away from storefronts and sidewalks. “If you need help, we’ll be there. We certainly owe you that much, Spidey.”
He entertained the idea for no more than a minute, fighting the sour taste at the back of his mouth that always seemed to follow any situation in which Peter needed something. He tapped through the contacts on his phone, hesitating over the number of the former Falcon, sighing through his nose as he scrolled right past.
There was another option, a new alliance he had tentatively formed with his fight at the docks. Daredevil would probably know more of the inner workings of the tracksuit mafia—hell, he’d probably already know how to take them down. He was also less likely to act superior if Peter called for him; he’d seen the man whipped to the curb, spitting blood and saliva into the concrete before kicking and biting his way back to his feet. There’s not much high ground in street brawls, he had learned.
So it was either the new Captain America and his trusty pal, Bucky Barnes, or the supposed Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, who was some guy in a red suit who smelled like whiskey and Catholic guilt. He tapped the corner of his phone against his temple, considering each to their full potential.
The poster-boy for anger issues won by a landslide.
After they had fought together, Daredevil had given him a number to a burner, or so he’d explained. Peter wasn’t really expecting it, but unexpected things tended to happen after you took down an entire subsection of a drug ring within an hour in the middle of the night. He had been smiling, tiredly, and began rattling off numbers at him as Peter scrambled to regain cognitive functions. He ended up just asking the other man to repeat himself as he found his phone, and then asked him to say it again when he started typing the area code in wrong.
He could text him. He opened his phone and then clicked on a new chat. Then he sat there and tried not to feel a little happy about how he had the number to one of the coolest vigilantes in New York City. He was still a superhero fanboy, afterall.
He needed to seem confident and assured, he thought to himself, he needed to ask for help but phrase it in a way of indifference. He’d learned over the past few years that you should never let anyone see your desperation, especially not in this line of work. He opened the keyboard and stared at the blinking cursor.
DD, he started, then huffed a laugh at his failure at learning normal, casual human behavior. Know anything about the Tracksuit Mafia? He reread the line a few times, chewing on his lip and trying to figure out if it was too exposing. He read it until his eyes got blurry, and his thumb skimmed over the enter button, sending it before he could yelp in alarm.
He threw his phone down on the table, jumping out of his seat and hopping up and down a few times. He hoped his downstairs neighbors wouldn’t complain, but he began to pace, keeping his entire body busy as his mind raced. He had probably just embarrassed himself in front of one of the most intimidating vigilantes in the city. He would have to ask the Avengers for help because he had been so embarrassing. Daredevil was going to delete his number. He gripped at his hair, groaning in frustration as his socks hit hardwood.
Then, his phone dinged. He froze, sliding a little with how quickly he turned back to it. He picked it up with shaking hands, staring at the two texts on his homescreen.
I know their route, he read, feeling his heart lurch with excitement, Meet me at the town line, 11.
“Holy shit,” He whispered to himself, clutching the device to his chest like a lovesick teenager. “I just texted Daredevil,” He rushed to grab his backpack, pulling his suit on and then a sweatshirt over it. He would have to patrol earlier; he didn’t want to be late to his second team up.