Chapter 8
Peter spits a tooth onto the cement, wiping the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand. His opponent today is a crocodile human hybrid. Peter’s staggering, he’s not sure he has any ribs left to break, and his breath is coming in short, painful, bursts. He rarely takes the offensive in his matches, preferring to let his opponents wear themselves out as he dodges, and then take them down. He’s tried to lose before, but they release the scent that wipes him, leaving him completely suggestible, and he wakes up in his cell, having killed someone anyways. He tries not to think about how he’ll kill the crocodile hybrid, focusing on jumping from wall to wall and landing hits where he can.
What he isn’t expecting is the tail. It hits him mid jump and sends him sprawling through the air. His fall is stopped by something white hot clamping on his arm, and for a moment darkness threatens to take over his vision. He feels bones cracking and blood dripping, but can only manage the very minor thought, at least it’s my bad arm. He twists, bringing his fist down wherever he can, the top of the crocs head, his shoulder, and the grip lets up just enough for him to twist, getting his legs around the crock’s non-existing neck in a modified hold. He starts to apply pressure, trying to get his arm free.
The adrenaline and panic of his arm locked in the monster’s jaws wrecks his control, and he hears a crack. The mister goes limp and his arm is free. Peter, with great difficulty, drags himself one handed away from the body. Not body, he corrects himself, it’s still alive. He’d probably just popped a shoulder out of socket or did... something with crocodile biology. There’s no way he would have— there’s no way he could have. They didn’t even release the gas. Peter was entirely himself. They haven’t ended the match, he reasons, so he wouldn’t be–he’s not.
And then time speeds back up and the room lights up. Peter is pulled to his feet and he watches the crocodile man be rolled into a body bag. And all he can smell is the distinct lack of that smell. The clean air, mocking him, telling him it was his choice. He stumbles, struggling to keep pace with the cleaners, who are practically dragging him. The woman, who he now knows is his manager, walks beside him, tapping a few things on her phone. She says something to the cleaners in a language Peter doesn’t recognize, and then they part ways. Peter is thrown into a room, different from his regular cell, and it takes a moment for him to realize it’s a medical room. A bed with actual blankets and pillows sits against one wall, there’s a sink with a mirror, and a porcelain toilet. Peter hauls himself to his feet, inspecting his arm. It’s mangled, and his healing factor isn’t touching it yet. There are bone fragments and muscles, the entire thing is decimated. Then he catches sight of his own face and his mouth falls open. He looks different. The most stark change is his hair, which has streaks of white through it, and the white patches are much shorter than the rest. He has a gross partial beard, but before he can stare any further the door opens.
“I remember you,” a pleasant voice says, but before Peter can see his face, that clean, sharp scent fills the room and he’s waking up on the bed, his arm wrapped in bandages. He curses his compliance. He’d let the man bandage him with his eyes closed. What was he thinking? Peter sits up, inspecting the bandage on his arm. Experimentally, he tries to flex his elbow and is met with a dull ache. It’s probably well on its way toward healed, but not quite there yet. Memories come flooding over him and he puts his head against his knees, struggling to breathe.
“It was self defense,” he whispers, one hand wrapped around his cast. “I would have died.” He squeezes the arm until the pain grounds him, forcing him to be present. There’s a miniscule zing of his sense and a knock at the door. It isn’t really telling him that whoever is out there is dangerous, more just letting him know someone is there. He doesn’t move, doesn’t reply. The door opens anyways, and he’s used to it. He can tell by the sounds that it’s someone bringing food, but he doesn’t look. They leave. It’s the regular slop he’s used to.
Peter eats it. He watches his hand handle the fork, remembers the fatal crunch of bone under skin, the way the crocodile’s scales had felt and the way its eyes hadn’t closed, just stared, glassy, empty. The fork shatters, most of the pieces ending up in his hand, but it barely registers. Peter stands, walks to the sink, and puts his hand under the water. He doesn’t have a way to pick out the metal shards, but one again he stares at his reflection. Unrecognizable, a piece of him mutters, you’re a killer and they’ll all know. You think your parents would want you back? He remembers that first fight, that night spent ridding himself of his dinner. He doesn’t throw up after fights anymore. It’s a waste of time.
“They would,” Peter says, but it’s hollow.
Steve spends every day trying to catch people like you. Killers. Monsters. Tony stopped making weapons because the death toll disgusts him. What would he do with a son who has a death toll?
Peter begins to pull on the shards of the spoon, trying to distract himself, but it isn’t incredibly successful on either the removing shards or the distracting front. The fingers of his bad hand are near useless, still shaking, and wrapped in gauze. Only the last two knuckles stick out from the thick layer of bandage, and Peter only manages to get the largest piece out before he gives up, laying back down and closing his eyes. He’s exhausted, and the lifelines he had been clinging to are starting to disintegrate, so sleep comes easily.
“It’s so good to have you back,” Babbo says, wrapping him in a hug. Dad joins in from the side, and for a moment the horrors melt away.
Then Babbo steps back, looking him up and down as he usually does. This time, his gaze hardens and he takes a step back. “Peter, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing—“ Peter tries to say, but the words are stuck in his throat.
“I know that look,” his dad says, “he’s a killer.”
“Peter,” Babbo says, “what have you done? You need to leave.”
They glare at him, the two people in the world who he thought loved him unconditionally, finding his mistakes to be too much for them. He runs for the exit, but the hall is filled with people who love him, each noticing something different about him and scoffing, turning away, shoving him, or, worst of all, taking a step back in fear.
Peter screams himself awake, something that’s more and more common, his spider sense falsely alerting him over and over of a danger that isn’t there. He’s clinging to the ceiling, adrenaline spiked, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. It was a dream, he reminds himself, slowly crawling toward the wall and down it. His muscles freeze up every so often, too overwhelmed by the onslaught of danger signals. “It was a dream,” he says aloud, hoping the sense will hear him. It doesn’t, and it takes a few minutes for him to finally land back on his cot. Even once he’s there, an intense paranoia is sitting at the edge of his consciousness.
The handlers who bring him to and from the matches have started doing their best to slam the cell door, make unexpected movements, and appear when he’s least expecting it. Their raucous laughter over his massive startle reflex is only stopped when his manager is there. She says something or other to them in another language and they become less overt with their antagonism. The past few times they’ve come to get him, it’s been for training, rather than to go to a room and be the only one to walk out. He even got a haircut, bringing his whole head to the same length, shorter than he’s ever had it. He’s spent hours in what he calls the dart room, blinded and dodging hundreds of acid-filled darts until he collapses and gets shot with a few anyways. Sometimes there are people in the dart room, rather than darts, and Peter does worse on those days. It always ends with him on the floor, being kicked by steel toed boots. He’s started to hold his own for longer, though.
The worst part of his week, or month, he isn’t sure how time passes here, is when, at some kind of regular interval, he is turned over to someone else. He doesn’t know who the other person is, but the experiments are horrific to endure. They test his memory, his cold tolerance, and most recently, how long it took different bone breaks to heal. He nearly gets caught in a loop, remembering the way the scientist had picked up a hammer and he’d started shouting, struggling fruitlessly against the restraints, until it came crashing into his knee. They came in, measured, took x rays, and when it was healed they started snapping other bones. Peter can’t help babying his knee, even though there’s nothing physically wrong with it.
The thoughts of his knee are insistent, and his mind tries to play him a host of unpleasant memories. Peter stands, paces. He covers the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, counting his steps aloud in a desperate attempt to stay grounded in the present. When the lights shut off, he lays down, but doesn’t get very far into falling asleep before he’s jumping to his feet, trying to ward off the memories that threaten to consume him.