between the bars
THURSDAY, APRIL 19 — 2:44 AM
(THIRTEEN DAYS INTO PETER’S CAPTIVITY)
(ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS BEFORE HE IS RESCUED)
Most of the wall in their cell is covered in tic marks.
Old markings of old prisoners of days they were trapped here—just like Peter and Cassie are now. Scratches of four lines with a diagonal fifth—five days—in so many rows and columns that the wall is patterned with it.
Peter tries to imagine it sometimes.
A man sitting on this bed—pissing in this toilet—washing in this sink—bleeding on this floor. Praying for someone to help him. Wracked by horror night and day. Sticking his head in the sink to drink greedily from the tap. That man—and all the ones before him—were probably all dead now. Their bodies zipped up in body bags full of rocks and dropped in a lake.
Like he would be.
Like Cassie would be.
Most of the wall is filled with tics like that—but there is a six-foot long stretch of blank wall underneath the bed, completely unmarked.
So after their breakfast at noon, they scoot beneath the bed, bellies half-full. They have a loose nail Cassie found ages ago that they use to make their own tic marks on the walls—and he brings it with him. “They’re not gonna look down here,” he says, and pain crackles through his collarbone. He thinks they might’ve broken it the last time they beat him. “You could write something—something you wanna say. Something you wanna…tell people.”
She nods, her brown hair pressed messily against the cement floor.
Peter hands her the nail, and she scoots forward a little more so that she’s only inches from the wall. She scratches in stiff lines, drawing the point of the nail over the cement. It takes a few minutes, and then her masterpiece is finished. Beside her, the wall reads, I MISS YOU DADDY in crooked letters.
Then she hands the nail back to him, and he writes that time, in smaller, neater writing: PETER WAS HERE like he’s carving his name in the underside of a middle school desk instead of the wall of a cell in god-knows-where.
It’s something kids write on locker stalls or high school yearbooks. But to Peter, it’s something different.
Because if one day, Charlie and his guys take them away—if one day, they accidentally bleed Peter dry and dump his body in a lake…
Then he wants Mr. Stark and Aunt May and everyone else to know: that he was here. That he was alive. And that he fought.
God, how stupid has he been? Peter thought that if he was good—if he never got drunk or did drugs or cheated on a test, if he saved every single person he could—that that would be enough. Who was he kidding? He’s going to die. Here, in this cell that reeks of feces and sweat and fear. He’s tried and tried and tried to escape—but the odds are, Charlie is fucking unhinged, and he’ll probably kill him accidentally: swinging the hammer too hard or cutting the knife too deep.
Man, he really, really doesn’t want to die here.
There’s a little warm hand on his, squeezing. “Don’t be sad,” whispers Cassie, and she pries the nail from his sweaty grip. A tear snakes down his face and drips onto the cement between them, darkening.
She takes it then and, pressing the nail against the wall, scratches something new beside his.
CASSIE WAS HERE TOO.
They’re so fucking hungry.
They’ve developed a routine to their eating now—Peter gets Cassie’s milk and half of her burger. Peter needs the calcium more than she does—he’s constantly being beaten, and he needs to keep his bones strong. With no other source of calcium in their diet, Peter needs it the most or he risks more bone fractures.
It’s pain prevention. Injury prevention. The only kind they have.
And Peter knows he should let Cassie have her whole meal. He knows. He does. She needs more than what he’s giving her—like him, she’s starving.
Sometimes he’ll think, Today. Today, I’ll give her the whole thing. Today’s the day. But then he gets so fucking hungry that every time their Happy Meals come through that food slot, he does it again. Eats the other half. He can’t… He can’t stop himself.
They’re so hungry, so starved that they even eat the wrappers now—tearing off little sections in bite-sized pieces, one at a time, when the hunger pangs are bad enough.
And when they’re hungry enough, they’ll gnaw at the boxes, too. They’ll each set the pieces on their tongues and chew and chew and chew—let it dissolve halfway in their mouths before they chew again and swallow.
Peter’s not stupid. He aced chemistry class. He knows there’s no nutrition in paper or in fucking cardboard—but they can’t help it. They’re just…hungry.
“When I get home,” Peter whispers, after a dosage of sedative so thick that he can’t lift his head, “I'm gonna…I’m gonna lock myself in my room—so no one can get to me.” The crook of his arm is sore and pink at the injection site, oozing milky trickles of a yellowish pus.
A blood-thick stretch of quiet as Cassie hiccups, looking up at him from her spot below the bed. “I'm gonna sleep in my bed,” she whispers, blinking tearily at him. “I'm gonna sleep in my bed with all my stuffed animals and you can sleep there too.”
Peter turns his drug-addled head, his eyes drifting over her blurry face. “You wanna have a sleepover?” he says, and a smile pulls at his face.
Cassie nods, and she rests her head on his stomach, blinking up at him. “Mommy never lets me have sleepovers.”
Of course. The little girl’s never had a sleepover before. God, she’s so little. “At your house?”
“Yeah,” she says, and she sounds almost happy, “at my house.”
Peter smiles at her, bringing his bruised fingers to her head and patting her hair. “I'll bring the snacks. Chips.”
“Donuts,” she says. “with the white stuff.”
The word sticks in his mind for a moment; he can’t remember what it’s called. And then it comes, clear, and he relaxes. “Powdered sugar,” he says.
“Yeah. And pizza.”
“What kind of pizza?”
“Pineapple,” she says. “I like the pineapple. Daddy lets me eat all the pineapple off his pizza.”
It's stupid, but right now all Peter can think about is mashed potatoes. Buttery and Filling and smooth - wouldn’t cause any harm to his aching mouth, would slide into his stomach and fill him up. “Mashed potatoes,” he says, even though that’s never been a sleepover food.
Cassie only grins. She loves this game. “Chicken wings,” she says. “The spicy ones.”
“Scrambled eggs.”
“Cheesecake.”
Cassie hugs his bare stomach, and he gasps slightly at the pain. There’s a nasty bruise on his side from where one of the guards kicked him. They’ve been draping strips of cloth over it, dunking them in the sink and draping them over the bruise to try (in vain) to relieve some of the pain there.
Their clothes, like everything else in the bunker, have its purpose.
Cassie’s old hoodie still acts as a sling for her broken hand. For bandages, Peter’s torn up so much of his shirt at this point that he doesn’t have one anymore—and his pants above the knee, the thick denim now used to help pad the worst of his cuts. Cassie’s clothes are all torn, too—her shirt now a vest, her pink pants torn off at the knee.
When the bandages get too bloody, it’s Cassie’s job to rinse them in the sink, and when she’s done, she lays them out on a hot-water pipe so they dry fast. Ironic—because the sink-faucet water doesn’t get hot at all; it runs cold, so cold, while the hot-water pipe along the ceiling runs so hot that it burns to the touch. So, hot enough to dry the bandages after Cassie washes them.
“Mac and cheese,” Peter says, once he regains the breath in his aching torso.
A sigh from beside him. “Bread,” says Cassie.
Tired, Peter glances over at her. “Bread doesn’t count,” he says.
“Yes, it does,” she says. “I like bread.”
“That's not a meal,” he says. “We’re talking about meals, Cass.”
“I don't care, I want to eat bread,” she says with that little frown. “That soft kind. From Thanksgiving.”
Peter hums lightly in response. “Hawaiian rolls,” he says, once he remembers what they’re called.
“Yeah. Those.”
More quiet.
“I wanna be home for Thanksgiving,” she says, lifting her little head. “Do you think we will?”
“Yeah,” he says, but at this point he’s really not sure. He hopes so.
He wants to see May again. Ned and MJ. Tony and Pepper. Happy. Hell, he’d be happy to see Flash. He’d be overjoyed to see a single normal face. A face that wasn’t blistered by meth or eyes bloodshot from angel dust.
He daydreams that they’ll find him—Rhodey in his blocky War Machine suit, the Winter Soldier with his metal arm, Thor in his mighty red cape.
But they’re just dreams, that’s all.
No one’s going to save them—not with Tony held so firmly under Charlie’s thumb.
So Peter and Cassie—they have to save themselves.
They come up with another plan.
Over the past few days, they’ve been working on it. Peter has started taking the pointiest of their McDonald’s toys and sharpening them—filing them sideways over the concrete until their edges turn bladelike.
He and Cassie do it together whenever they’re strong enough—shnk, shnk, shnk—sharpening and smoothing, sharpening and smoothing.
“A shank,” says Cassie chirpily, waving hers around—it’s the worn-down plastic of a Connect Four structure. Once a bright blue, it’s pale now, the coloring worn away by every scrape against the concrete. “Daddy told me!”
She’s too loud; Peter’s heart leaps into his throat, panic rushing through him like a white-water rapid, and he glances sharply to the door—no one heard. No one heard. No one heard. Peter hushes her quickly then, and she drops her voice down to a whisper for the rest of the conversation.
Day and night, they file these pieces into weapons: shanks. They make four of them in total—two for each of Peter’s hands, one for Cassie’s good hand, and one to hide in Cassie’s sleeve. Peter takes apart the soles of their shoes and wraps the flat rubber around their shanks as handles—and then they use their loose shoelaces to tie the handle tight, with a loop knotted to the side to wrap around their wrists. That way, they can’t lose it if someone tries to yank it from them.
Peter hides their sharp-plastic shanks in their ‘Treasure Chest,’ the bucket bolted to the floor, putting it below the rest of their McDonald’s toys.
They don’t have the passcode to the bunker’s door, but all of the addicts know the passcode by heart—all they need to do is find someone who does and force them to give up the code. That’s what the shanks are for.
The guards come in two at a time now to fetch Peter for hissessions. The plan is simple—target one of the weaker guards, force them to give up the code, and use it to escape the bunker.
It’ll work.
It has to work.
They practice fighting in the early morning when all the addicts are asleep, making stabbing and slicing motions with their hands. Cassie turns it into a game, making lightsaber sounds with her mouth as they pretend-fight; Peter doesn’t have the heart to tell her that this isn't a game.
Maybe it’s better if she thinks it is.
And that day, as Cassie naps steadily, head resting on their shared pillow, Peter strokes her hair away from her eyes. He hates this, he really does. What the hell is he doing, teaching a seven-year-old how to stab a man? She should be going to school—not asking Peter every question she has, ones he can never properly answer. She should be pleading for dessert—not begging her captors for another bite for her cramping stomach. She should be a kid.
But right now, Cassie’s the only help he has in getting out of here—and he needs every bit of help he can get.
“When we do this,” says Peter, wrapping the loop of the shank around her little wrist, “I need you to be brave, Cassie. I need you to be a superhero.”
“I can be brave,” she whispers, gripping that little plastic shank. She makes a stabbing motion and smiles at him. “See?”
“Really, really brave, Stinger,” he says.
She nods. “I can do it. I’m brave.”
It’s only been five days since their last escape attempt.
And they need to try again.
“We’re gonna make it,” he whispers, “we’re gonna do it this time. We’re gonna go home.”
“Pinky promise?” she asks, extending her little finger to him.
Peter’s missing every fingernail on that hand. They’re growing back painstakingly slowly, one sliver at a time; he raises his own pinky. “Pinky promise,” he whispers.
It’s almost seven when it happens.
They can hear them—two sets of footsteps down the hallway. Peter looks—hard—to Cassie, and he squeezes her hand with the shank gripped tightly inside. “Be brave, Stinger,” he says, and she nods. They’ve hauled the mattress up so that it lays flat against the wall—Peter stands behind the mattress with his hand gripping the top.
They’re gonna make it. They’re gonna do it this time. They’re gonna break free.
The metallic sound of a key in the lock—Peter squeezes Cassie’s hand tight—a voice on the other side, and then the door opens. The instant a figure comes through, Peter and Cassie shove the mattress over hard, and it hits the first guard—black-haired Zhiyuan—sending him sprawling, and Peter tackles the next one, knocking him to the side, twisting his body around and pressing his bladed shank to the man’s scratchy throat. “Don’t move!” yells Peter, dragging the man backwards. “Don’t fucking move!”
It’s working. It’s working.
“Now, Cass!”
She knows what to do. With a scream, the seven-year-old stabs her little shank down to the black-haired guard and plunges it into his side, and when she lifts it up again, the man knocks her backwards, shoving hard.
“Okay, man,” he says, and Peter’s entire body is trembling with a sweaty panic. “Tell me the code! Tell me the fucking code!”
The man flails in his grip, trying to knock away at Peter’s hands, his legs thrashing. “Help—HELP ME—ZHIYUAN! HE’S—HE’S GOT ME—HELP ME!”
He’s pleading. The man trapped in Peter’s grip is pleading.
“Shut up! Shut up!” he cries, and he presses that shank harder and harder, until blood beads at the man’s neck—he thinks suddenly, violently, of Charlie. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” His heart rattles in his chest—more people are noticing the commotion, and there’s a rush of people in the door of the cell, and a panic like a brass-capped pipe bomb in him, detonating inside of him— “JUST TELL ME THE CODE! TELL ME OR YOU’RE DEAD!”
—and across the room, Cassie launches herself at that black-haired guard, and she stabs into his back, clinging to him like a fucking animal, arms wrapped around his neck, legs wrapped over his back—and she stabs again, and again, her dark hair fraying everywhere, and she’s screeching something high-pitched and demonic. The guard stands up, screaming, knocking away at the girl, trying to grab at the little shank and she slices down hard, cutting the man’s hand open—
“HELP ME! PLEASE—CHARLIE! HELP—”
Peter presses down again, and something warm dribbles down Peter’s hand—he can’t think—he can’t fucking think— “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU! TELL ME THE FUCKING CODE!”
A rush of people towards their room—footsteps and more footsteps—and Peter panics, shouting, “STAY BACK! STAY BACK OR I’LL KILL HIM!”
A mass of people in the doorway, but there’s one in particular grasping the doorframe with both hands: Charlie’s red-haired wife, Renee.
The whole room stills with that woman in the doorway: Peter by the toilet, shielding his body with the guard’s, Cassie on the other as she holds her little bloody knife to her guard’s throat—the man’s bleeding profusely. “Drop it, Parker,” she says. Her red hair is tangled and swaying behind her, her smile something ghoulish. And she’s got a gun—lightweight and dark brown, and she’s pointing at him.
“Fuck you,” he snaps, but his whole body trembles at the sound of her voice. “Tell me—tell me the code—”
Her face twists. “I said drop it,you little freak—”
He doesn’t recognize his own voice—shrill and demonic, something twisted by terror— “No! The code! The FUCKING CODE!”
“I’m gonna count to three,” she says calmly, her eyes drawing lazily across the room, “and you’re gonna drop it, Parker.”
“One.”
His mind goes liquid-cold. “FUCK YOU!” he snarls, the sound of his voice grating and far too loud— “FUCK YOU! I’LL FUCKING KILL HIM!”
“Two.”
“SHUT UP! I’LL FUCKING DO IT! I WILL!” The guard is thrashing, screaming for help, and Peter tightens his grip on his weapon—
“Three.”
The guard twists his neck violently, and for a split second, he and Peter are making direct eye contact—
A bang! so loud that it rattles the entire room—for a split second, Peter thinks he’s been shot. Peter’s ears ring and whine—the sound echoes in his ears. Warmth spreads over his front, a geyser of warm spray on his front—and when he looks down his entire front is dark and the man’s, too.
Blood. He’s covered in blood.
Peter just stares at himself, blinking, unable to breathe, warm spatters of blood spreading over him, the man on top of him gargling with Peter’s knife still pressed to his throat. Blood spurts from one side of his neck, a spray like a rain gutter in a monsoon. What—what—what’s happening?
For some reason his mind is flashing images of his uncle Ben—bleeding out on the street, breath hitching in his chest, hands clasped around Peter’s, and all of a sudden Peter can’t breathe—
He’s trapped under this man’s limp body as the blood pools, slowly spreading around them both—the man chokes around a mouthful of red, and there’s a fucking hole in his neck, an open-blast wound of flesh and muscle and blood—and he struggles, limbs flailing weakly, his head now falling limply onto Peter’s chest.
The blood is all over him—thick and bubbling—and the man on top of him is gurgling for help.
Someone shot—someone shot the—someone shot him—
“Cassie?” Peter manages, his mind in cold, blood-spattered chunks. “Cassie?”
His hearing is starting to come back, and he glances left, realizing that Renee has stormed in and pinned Cassie down, caught her by the hair and dragged her sideways, and she’s screaming for him.
“Peter!” Across the room, his kid thrashes, slipping that extra shank out of her sleeve; gripping it tight, she thrusts it into Renee’s closest arm—and the woman drops her, screaming and gripping her now-bleeding limb.
Whose body—how did this happen—how—did he—did he do this?
Uncle Ben?
“Cassie?” he shouts, panicking—
But she’s not quick enough—the red-haired woman shrieks with a sudden rage and grabs Cassie by the ankle as she tries to get away, yanking her towards her. “Peter! Peter!”
And then Renee snarls, “You — little — bitch!” and hits Cassie hard across the face, backhanding her with such force that Cassie’s knocked into the bed, spilling sideways and sprawling out into the dead man’s blood.
Cassie stands up, slipping on the blood and falling back down onto her stomach. “Peter?” she says, her voice high and panicky, looking down at her now blood-covered front, “PETER!”
Peter can’t find it in himself to move—the man’s blood is drying on him now, and he can’t get it off of his bare chest. Too much blood. Too much. It’s fucking everywhere, and the man’s body is sprawled over his, lifeless and heavy. Peter’s still trapped. He can’t—he can’t—
The red-haired woman grabs Cassie again, a fistful of the girl’s hair, and she screams like a wild animal as Renee drags her bodily through the growing pool of blood, pulling hard.
Blood.
There’s so much of it, drying on his bare chest, drying stiff in what’s left of his pants… Peter sucks in a breath and finds himself unable to exhale, just breathing in and in and in and he’s freaking the fuck out—
“PETER! PETER!”
On the other side of the room, that guard Zhiyuan is still bleeding profusely, stab wounds burbling blood, and a blond man is standing above the guard, pressing cloth to him.
And Cassie’s gone down the hallway—kicking and flailing, and someone else is on him, pulling Peter from the body, and his breath is all tangled up in his chest and he fights—all frantic stabs and kicks, but they manage to get his arms cuffed behind him, ripping the shank from his wrists far too easily.
Someone stabs a needle into his side and plunges, and his mind warps with sedation, the world becoming slow and sickly.
Cassie’s little voice down the hall: “PETER! PETER! PETER!”
They drag him down the hallway like that, his head slung low, his whole body a paperweight, a guard dragging him forward on either side. “Cassie,” he chokes out, because he can’t remember where she is; his mind’s muddled with whatever they gave him. “Cassie?”
They’re in the Room now, the chair standing ominously in the center; one of the addicts is messing with the knobs on the side, extending it flat with one mechanical click: it slides flat, the arms and legs aligning to form a metal table.
Terror licks at his brain—wet and slow.
“No,” he mutters, pulling at the arms holding him down—even the drugs can’t hold down the fear that’s washing over him. “No, no, please…”
He forces his head up and finds Charlie only feet from him, talking in wide-eyed fury with his red-haired wife; beside him, a female guard has Cassie pinned against the wall on her stomach, and she’s crying incoherently, sobbing and bawling and shaking bodily, her little body still drenched in blood from when she fell.
On the other side of the room, tied loosely to his wheelchair with leather buckles—Scott Lang screams for his daughter, thrashing like a madman in his chair: “Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her! Take me! Take me! PLEASE—”
With one swing, Mason slams his hammer into the side of Scott’s head—his head falls limply sideways, a clear liquid dribbles from his ear and nose: drip, drip, drip onto the bloodstained concrete.
The two of them are trapped against the wall, helpless, waiting for what is to come: like two butterflies stuck to a bulletin board with steel pins.
“Charlie, please—” Peter chokes out, but his pleas are useless—they’re always useless—and tears are already coming down his face when the bearded man turns on him—his entire body goes taut in anticipation of the blow—hitting him so viciously across the face that his neck cracks.
“Tell me, spider-bitch,” spits the man, and saliva slides down one corner of his mouth—how high is he? He grabs Peter by the jaw, forcing his head back against the wall between the guards, and his skull grinds hard against the concrete. “What is this? Huh?” With his free hand, Charlie waves around one of Cassie’s shank—the one they made out of a Connect Four game.
Blood falls warm and runs into his eye and Peter blinks away the sting—Charlie’s ring always catches him in the worst fucking spots—shredded through his eyebrow. “Wh-what?”
—and he shoves it against the spot his ring just opened, poking the blade into the spot above his eye, and pain splits hot in his brow; Peter doesn’t dare move a muscle. “What the fuck is this, Parker?”
Tears slip down his face—his legs tremble, his whole body trembles. “We—we made—ah—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, wait—”
“Out of what? Out of what?”
“The—the—” Charlie presses harder, and Peter squeezes his eye shut to prevent more blood from going in, and he can feel the blade cut and move, sliding up his forehead— “The toys—the fucking—the Happy Meals—they come with toys—”
One hand still trapping his jaw, Charlie presses harder and Peter can feel the homemade shank scrape against bone—and it fucking hurts. “YOU NEVER LEARN—YOU NEVER FUCKING LEARN, PARKER!”
Peter’s crying like a fucking kid, blubbering, trying anything that might calm him down: “I’m sorry! I’m sorry—please—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Didn’t mean to?” Charlie snarls in his face, a wide-eyed glower— “YOU WERE TRYING TO KILL US, YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE FREAK! YOU’RE GONNA LEARN! YOU’RE GONNA FUCKING LEARN!”
Renee’s got something in her hands now—a shiny coil of wire, all looped up—and she unwraps it slowly, stalking closer to Cassie. “Oh, they’ll learn,” she says coldly. Without a second thought, she whips the length of it at Cassie—who shrieks in unbridled terror—the wire rips through her leg and blood rises to the surface of her skin, bubbling over.
Someone else wriggles between them, shoving Renee back with her hand, saying, “Not the girl,”It’s Ava, high as a fucking kite, hair all tangled—looking like she just woke up from a nap, but there’s a fierceness in her gaze as she pushes the other woman back with a force, “We’re not here for that.”
Renee spits at her. “The fuck do you know—the kid stabbed the living hell out of Zhiyuan—and we’re just gonna let her walk? She got me in the fucking arm!” She bares a slash on her forearm still bleeding loosely. “Kid needs to fucking pay.”
Cassie’s still crying—what’s left of her pink pants are dark now; she must’ve wet herself during the struggle.
The arguing gets loud, a few of the other addicts interjecting left and right: “I’m not hurting the kid—”
“You saw what she did to—”
“—seven years old—”
“Grow a spine, Daria, she did something, she pays the price—”
“—just a kid!”
“Oh, so now we’re drawing the line? Fucking mint—”
And eventually Charlie shouts, “Everyone shut up!”
And the room quiets—save Cassie’s crying.
And the bearded man, eyes bugged wide, teeth bared, says, “Put Parker in the chair,” and with a heartless glare in his direction, he adds, “Little Lang can watch.”
Renee smirks then, handing Charlie the wire, yanking Cassie’s head back so that she’s forced to look in Peter’s direction. He and Cassie make sudden eye contact, both of them knowing what’s about to happen, and Peter sobs hard— “No, please—please—please—”
Charlie coils the twisted cord in his hands, folding it over and over again in his palms and releasing it—again and again and again. That scraping, churning sound of the metal coil is all he hears as they drag him towards the table, forcing him down on top of it, his chest pressing against metal—he flails, kicking out, a full-bodied terror trembles in his body. “No!” he yells, his mouth tangy with blood, his face already fucking streaming with tears, “Please—please, no—I’ll be good—I’ll be good—I won’t do it again, please…”
He's choking on his sobs—choking on the thought—no, no, no, no—NOT THE FUCKING CHAIR—
He’s weak and drugged so it’s easy to lock him down on the table—one buckle at a time—and he sobs into the metal, forcing his forehead into the hard surface—he’s entirely immobile, entirely facedown. He flips his head around, frantic, trying to see—he can’t do it—HE CAN’T DO IT AGAIN—and he’s already sobbing so hard that he can’t see. “Please—please—I won’t—I won’t do it again—” The blunt sound of fabric against blade, and the remains of his tattered jeans are gone—he’s left with nothing but his dirty boxer briefs, his legs exposed all the way up the thigh. “No—no—wait, please—I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
From beside him, Renee whistles. “Nice shorts, Parker.”
At the moment, Peter can’t even remember what his underwear looks like; the sensation of cold air on his thighs makes his whole body freeze up. His spidey-sense is on fucking fire—sensing danger left and right, every hair on his body pricked to attention, his every cell singing like a horror-film choir: this is going to hurt.
“Wait,” he chokes out, a last resort— “Wait! PLEASE, CHARLIE, PLEASE—”
Then the first hit comes—the coil of wire whistling through the air, and the hit is sharp like a razor; it draws blood on the first hit, and he howls from the holy fucking pain of it.
The second is worse.
“YOU DON’T—RUN AWAY—FROM ME!”
Somewhere far away, he can hear Cassie crying.
Somewhere far away, he knows that she’s watching.
“YOU FUCKING FREAK! YOU’RE NOTHING! YOU’RE NOTHING! YOU’LL NEVER RUN FROM ME AGAIN!”
Another hit, and warm blood streams down the side of his knee—another, and his calf shrieks alight with something awful.
“YOU’LL NEVER ESCAPE ME, PARKER! YOU’LL NEVER—RUN—AGAIN!”
“Charlie,” Peter gasps, and his vision is spotty with it, “please, please—”
Hit—and hit—and hit—until the table is wet and he can’t think—it hurts so bad—NOT AGAIN, NOT AGAIN—
PLEASE—PLEASE—HELP ME—
Hit, and another hit—and one rips diagonal and he screams—
HELP ME, MR. STARK—
I CAN’T—
IT HURTS—
Peter barely remembers anything after.
One of the female guards takes the mattress—shreds it in front of them, sending bits of foam everywhere; Cassie cries as they do it.
Someone else goes through their bucket, finding the toys and half-made shanks, and dumps the whole thing, raiding it for anything useful.
He passes out—in and out—in and out—until at some point he wakes, in a nauseating haze of pain. He doesn’t know how long it’s been: minutes? hours? days?
When he finally gathers the strength to move, he turns his head—Cassie’s crying under the bed.
“It…hurts…” she sobs, and Peter tries to drag himself to her, in so much pain that he can feel it awash in his face, dizzy and dizzy and dizzy with pain—but it’s so much that he can only make it to the bedframe. “Mommy…”
He reaches out with one hand—it’s now he realizes he’s still coated in dried blood—to touch her, to reassure her, anything.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!” she screams, and she kicks at Peter, so he backs away, curling his arm back to his side. “Don’t… Don’t…” She’s hiccuping, coughing, and she’s so fucking scared and mad and she’s still so drenched in that man’s blood. “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!”
“Cassie,” Peter whispers, his chest tightening, “Cassie, please—”
When his blurry vision finally focuses on her, he sees that her hand is clamped over her side, guarding a spot there by her hip. Did they—did they— “YOU MADE THEM—YOU LET THEM—”
He hushes her once, through a haze of his own tears, but she’s not listening.
“You let—you let them—”
Shushing her and shushing her, he army-crawls to her again, this time managing to get close enough to touch her. “You know…you gotta be quiet—quiet, Stinger—”
“I WANNA GO HOME! I WANNA—GO—HOME!” and Cassie’s pulling at the battered remnants of her shirt and smacking her head with her fists and wailing, just the way that little kids do.
But she can’t. They can’t.
They don’t have that luxury.
She’s much too loud—so Peter finally reaches her, his body screaming for him to stop, and wraps her in a hug so tight that she can’t hit herself again, his arm snug around her torso, pinning her arms at her sides; “YOU SAID—YOU SAID—” He shoves his hand over her mouth then, clamping down hard enough that her cries are muffled into it.
“I know,” he says, just a whisper in her ear, “I know, Cass…” Because he stupidly, stupidly told her that she was gonna make it home this time. He lied to her—he won’t do that again. “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”
And she gives, sobbing wet and muffled into Peter’s hand, curling taut into his chest.
At last, he can see the injury to her side where her shirt has tattered away: an array of cigarette burns, pinkened flesh burned in circles, all lined up like a pattern.
It’s then Peter thinks to himself—with his legs screaming in liquid-hot pain, like someone took a scorpion’s stinger and scraped it down his body—he thinks, I’m not doing this again.
He can’t make her do this again. Not if they’re just going to hurt her.
Not if they’re just going to fail.
Hours later, when all the addicts have found sleep or something else, when the whole bunker seems to have stilled, Peter hears something across the hall—and his spidey-sense prickles all the way down his spine.
No, he thinks, and the thought feels like ice. No more, no more—
It’s only seconds before their door creaks open, and the sound itself sends a cold shiver of horror down his back. “Iron Man,” he chokes out, “Iron Man,” but neither of them have the strength to get up, so he just cringes, cowering on the floor like a beached seal tangled in plastic, putting his hand over his head. “Please—please—I can’t—no more, can’t—”
His vision is so blurry and dark that he can’t see who it is; he rolls onto his front, shrinking, in some stupid attempt to protect his stomach.
But when he brings himself to look up, he finds only the black girl with her wild hair: Ava. She stands, swaying in the doorway, skinny and brown and she’s holding something—
Peter flinches back—he really can’t help it—but it’s just a pile of clothes on the ground. And on top of it, a few needles filled with a pale yellow fluid. It’s just Ava, he has to remind himself. Just Ava. She won’t—she probably won’t hurt them. She’s sitting now, cross-legged on the floor of their cell, a few feet from him. “Morphine,” she says, rubbing the back of her neck and glancing backwards at the door. “You want…?”
She’s done this a few times—granted Peter the heaven of pain meds whenever she felt shitty about what was happening.
“Yeah,” he chokes out, laying his head back. “Please.”
He lays back, and Ava comes closer through the haze of pain, Peter’s vision blurry and hot. Her hair falls stringily over him. “Don’t—don’t move,” she whispers. “I’ll be quick.” She cleans a spot on his arm with the corner of her shirt, and injects one smoothly into the muscle of his thigh.
The prick of the needle is nothing compared to the whole-bodied hell his legs are in.
She picks up another syringe, sticks it diagonally into his other thigh. For someone as high as she is, Ava’s hands are steady when she presses the plunger. She injects a third into his calf, and then picks up the fourth, tapping it with her fingernail. “For Cassie,” she says, as she sways.
Most of them just call her the Lang girl or the kid or that little brat. But Ava—Ava calls her Cassie.
Peter doesn’t even have to think about it. “No needles,” he says. “Any… Any pills?”
Ava nods, rummaging through her pockets, and she pulls out some discolored reddish pills from her left one, dropping two on the floor beside him.
Then she takes the needle meant for Cassie, and she says, “Where do you want it?”
Peter points shakily to his knee, and Ava leans down, grabbing his knee with one hand—a flash of pain so intense that he loses all breath. “W-wait,” he tries, but she keeps going, pinching the skin of his kneecap and pricking the needle just below the skin—she presses down the plunger with her thumb, all the way.
Ava stays there while it kicks in, hand steady on his leg, as the morphine spreads warmly through his muscle, turning the slashed-up muscle sleepy and numb.
“Thank you,” he says at last, and she nods, shuffling away from him.
She picks up the two pills she dropped and beckons to Cassie—to the hiding spot beneath the bed. “I got…” she says, and her voice kinda trails off. “I got something that’ll make it better.”
Hesitant, Cassie scoots forward. “Ava?” she whispers, tears still drying on her face, poking her head from her safe space under the bed.
Ava unclenches her fists and holds out the two pills.
Cassie glances at them, worried, and then looks to Peter as though to say: Is this okay?
“Yeah,” he whispers, and even the act of speaking draws from the last reserves of his energy. “Take them. It’s okay.”
So the girl takes them quickly, swallowing them dry in a way kids aren’t supposed to know how to do—before she scampers back beneath the bed. Ava points to the clothes then—a couple of black jumpsuits. Prisoner’s jumpsuits, made of some kind of thick denim. “Found them downstairs,” she says quietly. “Sorry about your…”
Pants, they both think, but neither of them say it.
The burning humiliation of that moment threatens to overhaul him again, so he just hides his face in the concrete ground, turning away from her.
Ava rifles through her pockets again and finds a tube of ointment. “For…” she says, gesturing vaguely at Cassie, grimacing. “For the…”
It must be for the burns; Peter nods sleepily—the morphine climbs in him. “Thank you,” he slurs.
She shakes her head; the woman doesn’t say anything more.
With a slow and sleepy final glance, Ava shuffles backwards, stands quietly, and locks the door behind her.
That night, he dreams fitfully—of Mr. Stark.
He dreams that he is at the top of a very tall building—one gleaming with polished windows, tall enough that he swerves at the sight of the street below. And he hears something—something familiar—so he shuffles to the edge, up to a waist-high cement barrier interlayed with brick. And at the very bottom there, ninety-three stories down, is a dark fleck of a person waving his arms and shouting Peter’s name.
Peter knows who it is. He can spot that gold-titanium alloy plating anywhere—he knows that red-and-gold faceplate, those white-glowing thrusters.
But Iron Man isn’t lifting off the ground this time.
Peter is barefoot, and his feet are red, blood darkening at his ankles, skin peeling away from his heels. And Peter—he steps closer to the edge to spot him. “HELP ME!” he screams, but his voice is just a whisper, and he grasps the barrier with both hands and screams over the edge. “MR. STARK! HELP ME!”
But Mr. Stark isn’t moving. No one is. No one’s coming to help him.
He steps up then, one foot at a time, and Mr. Stark’s voice becomes shrill and high.
The height makes him dizzy, makes him swoon with something impossibly heavy. His toes curl over the edge of the cement, and he feels himself crying. Small, hiccupy sobs coming from him, fluid streaming from his nose and mouth, his head aching from it.
At the bottom, ninety-three floors down, Mr. Stark is on the sidewalk, grayed head craned up to look up at him, arms outstretched like a parent to a toddler he’s just tossed in the air.
Maybe—maybe, down there, Mr. Stark is smiling.
And Peter has a sudden want in his chest to be down there with him, to touch Mr. Stark’s beard in his hands, to press his face into his chest, to be held by him, to be rooted in something real and warm, something other than gravel and night sky. He inches forward until it’s just his bare, sticky heels against concrete, his toes in open air—ninety-three stories in the air—and his face is wet. He presses a hand to his face, brings his palm before him, and finds his hand sticky and red.
Peter looks once down at the street, and then up at the sky. The clouds seem to swallow him—all grayed darkness and mist. He takes a hitched breath.
I’m coming, Mr. Stark, he thinks, so clearly, wiping away at his face with his sleeve. I’m coming.
And Peter Parker takes a step.