Wade was chewing on one of the strings of his hoodie while he scrolled through his phone and Peter was watching that in disgust when Blondie fell into their verse and hauled Peter off the couch. Wade blinked and waved as he disappeared into the ether.
One of these fucking days, Peter was going to have the time to put on some shoes, but it was not this one and his feet were freezing as he stood out on the brick wall outside Gwen’s house. Blondie manhandled her out of bed, too. And then they were off to throw Miles off his top bunk, to ruin Tats’s only good night of sleep for the week, and to pry Peni out of her blanket cocoon—she did not come quietly. Ham told them in no uncertain terms to fuck off.
“Benj is gone,” Blondie finally told them all.
Oh.
Welp. All hands to battle stations or whatever.
Benj was a sweet kid. Very softhearted. Highly socialist. He and Tats got on like a housing riot.
He was also nineteen years old and just so, so painfully young in the grander scheme of things. Guy went out punching fascists by night, getting shot at and throwing himself, James Bond-style, through fancy parties to catch his marks.
Benj was faster than the rest of them, simply by merit of having to constantly fucking gun it at a moment’s notice. He didn’t have the benefit of sophisticated tech like the rest of them. He could, however, drive, and even more impressively he could drive stick.
He could also whip up a Molotov cocktail in a heartbeat and hammer a nail through his hand without feeling the need to scream or give up his secrets.
What he couldn’t do was read a goddamn map.
Bless him.
Benj was constantly lost. Perpetually floating around in space, asking people where he was and how to get to such-and-such place and moments later, repeating the process after he’d inevitably made the wrong left or right. If Benj had been born 80 or 90 years later, he could have been a functional member of society, provided someone taped his phone to his hand and kept his goddamn location turned on.
But alas.
Benj was a century too early for smartphones.
Blondie could usually find him, though. Blondie tended to be able to pick a Spidey out from any crowd at any time. So the fact that he’d been actively trying and couldn’t find Benj was concerning.
He thought that maybe their combined Spidey senses might kick start Benj’s and lead him more or less in their direction. It had worked once, it wasn’t exactly out of left field. So they gave it ago; everyone crunching their eyes closed and holding their heads. But still no dice. No Benj.
“Maybe he left town?” Gwen asked.
Fat chance. Benjamin was not a natural born traveler. See the issue with the map for more information. The chances of him leaving the city were slim, which could only mean one thing.
They found him. It took three hours and Peter needed another tetanus shot from all the fucking glass he’d stepped on, but they found him. In about the condition that they’d expected to.
“Oh, hi frien’s,” Benj slurred, sitting up in the darkness of an alley. He was slumped to the side and made no move to change that. “Fancy meetin’ you here.”
Yeah. Alright, up you go.
“Y’prolly ‘tractin’ all kinds of attention, you know?” Benj slurred against Peter’s shoulder.
Yeah, buddy. They knew.
“S’many colors.”
Right. Someone check the box for blood loss.
“I don’ feel so good.”
“What’s your street number?” Tats asked with Peni settled in a piggyback grip on his back. He’d offered the same to Miles but Miles didn’t want it.
“Oh, it’s….uhhhhh. I can’ remember, sorry.”
Blondie knew, thankfully.
So someone was trying very hard to give their aunt a heart attack and the major hint here as to who that was, was that he was colorblind. Someone’s aunt was extremely displeased with him about the heart attack but even more displeased to find that someone had been very poorly keeping secrets.
Allegedly, Benj had told his aunt that he was going out on a date.
A date, he tried to explain, with justice.
Peter couldn’t help but react to the following dressing down as though he was the guilty party. Blondie cringed the exact same way. Benj’s aunt looked like theirs’ and the instinct to roll over and expose his belly under May’s furious gaze was a deeply instilled one.
Benj pleaded with her to not do this in front of their guests but she would have none of that.
“What would your uncle say if he were here?” she demanded.
“May—”
“What would he say? With you going out with guns like this?”
“I didn’t take the—”
“Tonight, boy. You didn’t take them tonight. You lied to me!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Please stop shouting, I’m sorry.”
“I asked you a question!”
Yikes, yikes, yikes, this was giving Peter heartburn and a whopping case of secondhand embarrassment. He asked Blondie and Tats with his eyes if maybe they should leave these guys alone. Blondie couldn’t keep both his eyes open at the action in front of them, he was so pained by it. Gwen and Miles either.
No one likes to be home when mom is yelling.
“Sure, okay. I am. Whatever you want. Can we do this another time?” Benj finally said with his hands, having had enough of this.
“No, you’re going to sit there and you’re not going to bleed out in this damn house, you hear me, young man? Haven’t we lost enough? Have you even thought of what happens if you don’t come back, Peter?”
“Yes, yes, yes, already,” Benj snapped.
Man. Just. Do not.
“Are you takin’ a tone with me?”
“Maybe if you’d stop nagging I wouldn’t fucking have to.”
Noir, you stupid, stupid boy.
May straightened her back and stared at her bloodied nephew and his round glasses. Benj couldn’t see well, despite his mutation. He could do distance but up close wasn’t so good. The glasses were too big for his face, really. Even behind them he dropped eye contact, knowing he’d taken a step out of line.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was disre—”
“Save it,” May said. She stood up and left Benj clenching his teeth, fighting back tears.
“Thank you for bringing him home,” she said firmly to Blondie and the rest of them.
That was a dismissal if Peter had ever heard one.
Miles, Peni, and Gwen were so certain that Benj was going to be forced to quit Spiderman and join the teaming masses of normals in 1930s society that they held a little funeral for his suit. It was unbelievably fucked up, but they were so genuinely distressed that Peter bit his knuckles and alternatively side-eyed Blondie and Tats to get through it without interrupting.
Peni asked their line of Peters if they had anything they wanted to say to their fallen brethren and none of the three of them could make any non-rude noise and so decided as a hivemind that they were going to pass on the last words.
Benj wasn’t dead. He was probably just young-adult grounded. Well-scolded and guilty. Probably being forced to get a job as a clerk or something equally safe and mundane and hating every second of it while May watched his punishment with satisfaction. The idea of the guy viciously stamping business letters was beautiful enough to inspire tears in Peter’s eyes.
He scrunched them closed and pressed his fist harder against his nose to contain himself.
Benj showed up late to his own funeral and was immediately horrified. He gleaned from the candles and the little offering plate serving up his goggles and some daisies that he was being ritually ejected from the team.
A whole new kind of tears.
Once everyone was settled back down and it came to light that no, Benj wasn’t grounded, and no, Benj wasn’t giving up Spiderman; his aunt was just royally pissed at him and had banned guns and other Spidey implements from the house until he proved to her that he’d ‘learned his lesson,’ they got to a point to ask the real questions.
“Dude, what happened back there?” Blondie asked.
Benj shrugged.
“Brought a knife to a gun fight,” he said with painful honesty in his voice.
“Do you know how to use a knife in a fight?” Peter dared to ask. Benj produced the knife in question and very helpfully demonstrated that he did not. Peter had just the thing for that.
Benj was a quiet tough kid, but he was terrified of Wade. Granted, Wade was six inches taller than him, fifty pounds heavier, and very capable of using a knife. This wasn’t an unreasonable fear. Wade was a pretty significant threat. He would not be killed by Benj’s cute little pistols, and any punch sent his way would have to be on target, or else he’d just use it against you.
Still, though.
Peter didn’t do knives. Blondie didn’t do knives. Gwen’s Murderdock did knives and Miles’s Little Red did knives, but they all collectively decided that Noir didn’t need to learn knife skills from two blind men. Especially not when he could learn it from a someone a little less likely to stab him in demonstration.
“Kay, so if you want to stab—”
Wade was doing his best, but Benj had hidden behind Blondie and refused to engage beyond occasional over the shoulder peeking. Blondie would not drop Peter’s eye, silently insistent that he intervene in this hiding business. Peter finally gave in and rolled his own eyes back.
“Benj,” he said, “Wade’s out here trying to teach you how not to get stabbed. Maybe at least pretend to listen to him when he’s talking to you?”
God. Peter was turning more into May every day with these kids.
Wade paused. He wasn’t offended. He’d gotten Blondie to try holding the knife in the proper grip. Blondie’s blood pressure was making a vein in his neck stand out. His baby blues were edging into desperate territory.
Benj glanced at Peter and then back at Wade and jutted out his bottom lip.
“I know how to use a knife,” he argued.
Debatable. Peter knew how to use a knife better than Benj knew how to use a knife and Peter’s knife usage was frenetic at best.
“Then at least humor my old man, eh?” Peter tried.
Benj huffed at him. Definitely still a nineteen-year-old. Knives, guns, and secret detective work aside.
“Are we gonna learn too?” Miles asked a little nervously.
“No.”
No knife lessons for anyone younger than 18. Peter would hear none of it.
Tats and Peni were bonding over Tats being abysmal at coding when Benj reemerged from an hour of individualized Deadpool knife and gun training. He was quiet. Contemplative. More so than normal. Peter was suspicious.
“So,” he said, “What did we learn?”
Benj looked up at him, frowning.
“I need a rifle,” he said.
Thanks, Wade. That’s worse.