Chapter 13
The day finally arrives. Peter’s been jumpier than usual, on high alert since the night that the woman gave him the hamburger. It’s the first time he’s seen her since then, but he recognizes the clacking of her heels on the cement floor. He’s had that heel slice across his side before, and it’s an experience he generally tries to avoid. Honestly, he tries to avoid most things since being held here. In his defense, most things are unpleasant.
“Down,” The woman says, bored. Peter drops from his place on the ceiling, barely conscious of the fact that he’d jumped. Most of the guards just electrocute him into losing his grip, so this is a welcome change. The woman barely looks at him. She reaches a hand in her pocket and Peter’s arm flies over to the wall, dragging him with it. The magnet isn’t at full power, so he can walk, dragging it along the metal.
He follows the woman and her posse of guards down the hall, making turns that are definitely leading them in circles until they reach a wall of doors. The woman walks to the fifth one down and opens it. Peter is jostled through it by the crowd of guards and finds himself in a dingy shower. The room is small, and his arm is trapped to the wall, so when the spray starts, he is forced to splutter under it. The door is still open, the woman looking on appraisingly, the six guards that accompany her everywhere flanking her. The water turns soapy and Peter screws his eyes shut, but they still burn until he smells that the soap is gone and opens his eyes into the spray. It abruptly shuts off, and, with a whirring sound, he’s blasted with air from all sides. It’s not cold air, but to him, covered in wet clothes, it feels freezing.
Finally, he’s dry, shivering, and bewildered. He’s never had something like this happen while imprisoned. Every day has been a unique kind of torture, but there’s been a sense of routine to it, a sense of normalcy. He knows the scientists that experiment on him, recognizes the woman and her group of guards. He eats the same thing for every meal. The unknown of the day terrifies him, and it takes the warning jolt from his precognition for him to come back to himself, just in time to register a slap upside the head that makes sparks pop in front of his eyes. He blinks his vision back into focus and sees the guard holding what looks like a piece of black fabric. He grabs it with his free hand and realizes that it is a body suit. A massive one, but it has arms, legs, and what looks like a hood.
The clothes he came in with are in tatters, but he wants to cling to them as long as he can. He starts to put the body suit on, awkwardly, before he hears a sigh. There’s a light click and a smell reaches him–
Peter wants to destroy something. He's barely conscious of anything but his furious, annoyed rage. Every time his mind goes blank, he becomes a suggestible, idiotic nobody. He’d happily discarded his old clothes, the last remnants of his life, and donned the black suit, which vacuum sealed to his skin the moment he had it on. The hood portion had become a mask, obscuring his face. Then he’d followed them through the maze, and heard that click again before he was Peter again, standing in the middle of a tiny room.
His cuff releases from the wall and he lets out a shout of anger, kicking the concrete. The jolt of warning from his sense is quickly joined by a bolt of electricity from his cuffs, bringing him to his knees. “I kicked it lightly,” Peter fumes to whoever is watching. “I could have put a crack in it.” He sits in a corner of the room, which is basically all of the room, and curls in on himself, putting his head in his knees. They’re almost brushing up against the opposite wall, the room is so small.
He’s been putting a lot of thought into his request. Part of him wants to ask for his freedom just to be contrary, but he’s terrified of how that would go for him. The biggest contender is to ask for some bedding. A blanket and a pillow would go a long way toward making his living space more pleasant. Then again, she could refuse simply because it would make his living space more pleasant. He could ask for something to eat other than the slop they give him three times per day, but he remembers what the woman had said when she gave him the hamburger. Something about how it would be impossible to feed him enough real food in a day. With the rate he heals at, he reasons, it could be true. Maybe some ibuprofen, he thinks wryly, still stiff from a round of broken ribs and covered in painful sores from the acid-darts.
His sense gives him a tiny warning, more of a pinch than anything, and then the floor starts to move. Peter scrambles to his feet, feeling himself lifted on a platform up a square cement tunnel. Before he can try to stick to the walls to stop it or do anything, really, he’s blinded by light and sound.
There’s a chain link cage in front of him, and through it he can see something green and massive. There’s a crowd, on all sides, people in fancy clothes cheering. He glances around, frantically, and sees his manager. One of her eyebrows makes a tiny movement up, and Peter thinks of a pillow and blanket. The fence in front of him slides down, into a crack in the floor, and the wall behind him starts to push him out. He gets a look, for the first time, at what he’s being put into a cage with.
It’s a massive, green monster. Not like the hulk. This monster couldn’t even pass as human. It’s wearing the same kind of suit that Peter is, but poking out of the sleeves are taloned hands and clawed feet, the limbs are corded with impossibly massive muscles, and set in the face are yellow eyes. Eyes that are fixed directly on Peter. His sense gives him a moment’s warning before the beast is pouncing toward him, letting out a roar. Peter rolls out of the way, feeling the entire cage shake with the impact. He has a feeling he won’t even be able to take one hit from this monster.
Absurdly, he’s almost grateful for the hours upon hours spent dodging poison darts in the dark. It makes it laughably easy to dodge the powerful, but decently slow hits from the green-skinned goliath. Peter sees his opportunity when dodging a particularly sloppy swipe, and leaps, catching the top of the cage with the tips of his fingers.
As it turns out, the cage is electrified. It’s light, barely more than a tiny static burst, but Peter loses his grip, hurtling down in an uncontrolled fall. He’s landed practically in the creature’s lap, and as it stares down at him with an uncanny imitation of a grin, he’s hit with a memory. Teeth in his arm, green scaled skin against his hands, the deadly crunch of bone-dangerdangerdangerdanger– and he tries to clamber away.
Too slow.
A clawed hand closes around his ankle.
He’s hurtling through the air, slammed into the ground.
Once, he feels a tooth come out.
Twice, his good arm breaks with a sickening crunch, shoved out of his shoulder joint.
As the monster raises him for a third time, he thinks of a blanket, braces his knee in the fist of the monster, and uses his unbroken arm to shove the monster’s finger the wrong way. It howls, dropping him, and he rolls across his useless arm, fireworks of pain dancing across his vision as it makes contact with the unforgiving cement.
It’ll take fifty-six hours, nine minutes, and eleven seconds for his arm to heal. He remembers the scientists discussing it. The numbers help to keep his vision from blacking out as he stands, each sway of his useless arm causing his ligaments to scream. He spits out one of his premolars and finds that one of his front teeth is coming out as well. It joins the other in a bloody puddle. They’ll give me the mineral pellets with dinner tonight, Peter forces himself to think. He lets a hint of dread into his mind at the taste of the supplements that are given to him whenever he’s regrowing teeth. I’ll make it to dinner tonight, he tells himself. It’s a hard sell, trapped in a cage with an impossibly powerful monster and a quickly failing body.
The monster is angry now, snorting and huffing and sloppy. The pain is sharpening Peter’s senses, heightening his adrenaline, but it’s also dragging him down. He has to end this fast if he wants to come out on top. His dodges are sloppier too, with one arm out of commission. He’s relying on his legs, and they’re getting tired.
Peter ducks beneath a lumbering grab and kicks the monster’s knee. It buckles, but doesn’t give, and he barely dodges the hand coming to grab him. He jumps, sticking to the creature’s back with one hand, and uses the momentum to swing, bringing both ankles into the beast’s ribs. This time he feels a crunch and the beast stumbles to the side, holding its ribs.
Finally on the offensive for the first time in the match and fading quickly, Peter rushes forward. He grabs the beast’s thumb, planting his feet and pulling with as much force as he can muster. The beast stumbles to the side, reaching with i’s other hand just as its thumb snaps out of joint. A piece of Peter takes satisfaction in revenge for his shoulder, and he swings up, driving down onto the creature’s neck. It goes to its knees, and he curls his bad hand, which is now comparatively his good hand, into a fist, driving it into the creature’s face.
The beast raises one hand to claw at Peter, but he darts out of the way, vaulting onto its hand and driving its own claws into its face. Still using only his good arm, he lands blow after blow. The part of him that’s been brimming with unsaid taunts and unthrown punches overflows. The creature has gone still, but Peter feels his knuckles splitting with each hit. The monster isn’t just a leathery-skinned behemoth. It’s the woman, it’s every guard that’s taunted him, every lab coated torturer.
A shock jolts through him and doesn’t stop until he falls beside the creature, vision going black.