“Murdock, Matthew,” Matt told the lady at the desk in the reception area of the firm’s office.
“Murdock?”
“Murdock,” Matt confirmed. “M-u-r-d-o-c-k.”
“C-h?” the gal asked without looking up.
“C-k,” Matt corrected.
“Murdoch, M-u-r-d-o-c-h.”
“No, no. C-k.”
“Are you sure?”
Peter watched this with his eyebrows as high as he could make them, then turned back to Foggy and MJ, who both appeared unsurprised by it.
“Does this happen often?” he asked.
“Every time,” MJ said dutifully.
“Murdock,” the lady read out again.
“Yes,” Matt told her, exasperated.
“Matthew.”
“Yes.”
“I have you down as C-h.”
“So it would seem. But it’s C-k.”
“Can I see some form of ID?”
None of the rest of them had had to provide ID, but Matt sighed and dug out his wallet. He flipped down the center part and offered it to the lady. She took it and squinted at it.
“This says Murdock, C-k,” she said.
“Yes, it does. Because that’s my name and that’s how it’s spelled,” Matt told her patiently.
“I’ve only got a tag for Murdoch, C-h.”
“Yes, that was the impression I was operating under.”
“I’m sorry, sir; no match, no entry.”
“Oh, for the love of—”
“Actually, it’s Nelson,” Foggy said over him. “He’s with me, honey. We just got married.”
The gal finally looked up and placed a hand over her heart.
“Oh my god, congratulations,” she said directly to Matt. His face lost all expression and he stared blankly dead ahead at the wall behind her. “Here, our mistake; I’ll print you a new badge.”
Matt turned his flat stare onto Foggy. Then took the new badge the gal handed him with zero comment. He stiffly joined the others and took Foggy’s elbow with a firm grip.
“I hate it when you do that,” he sniffed.
Foggy smirked at him.
“Just trying to help, sugar.”
Matt made a sound of disgust and abandoned Foggy’s arm for the elevator.
“Parker?” Abe gasped with every finger on his hand splayed across his chest, “Benjamin Parker?”
Peter took it all back. ‘Penis Parker’ was not the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Sweeny Todd was.
“BENJamin Parker?” Flash and Felicity blustered with new attention from the desks in the back corner of the room.
“Ignore them,” Ned said, nudging his elbow with his own and then turning back to his binder.
“These are your friends,” Flash sang two minutes later, shoving a calculator, a pair of scissors, and a highlighter at the side of Peter’s face. “See how they glisten? See how they—WAIT NO.”
Peter bounced his eyebrows in challenge with the calculator held securely behind his head in preparation for an overhand pitch into the copy room.
Wade had been on the phone with Immigration for literally the entire three hours they’d been out doing jobs. Peter wanted to know where he got his phone. His own battery was fried right to hell. Couldn’t keep a charge for more than a few hours these days.
“No, Wade Wilson, not Sam Wilson, Sam Wilson’s the F—no, I just told you this—He’s a fucking American citizen, Jacob, why the fuck would an American citizen be talking to you right now? Have you even been listening to me?”
Peter asked Matt why Wade had to talk to Immigration and he didn’t know. He thought it maybe had something to do with his visa.
“I literally— No. Look, I know exactly what screen you’re looking at. You see that pretty number under Permit Number? That’s my fucking permit number.”
Visas sounded complicated.
“Yes, I was out for—no, it wasn’t thirty days. It wasn’t. I left on a red-eye, we both know that you start counting from touch-down.”
“WADE Wilson, motherfucker.”
Wade was gonna get deported. Matt was dictating his future immigration court defense into his own phone between perps.
At one point, Wade just stopped in the middle of a confrontation and left Peter and Matt to it so he could sit down on the curb and give this situation the attention it deserved.
By the end of the night, he’d laid himself out on his back on top of a concrete wall. He’d covered his face with his free hand and had graduated to saying things like, “It is 3am, man. You cannot possibly be being paid for this. There cannot possibly be anyone else in your call center. Why are you doing this to me, Jake? Like, do you have a family? Tell me about your family.”
Peter thought the issue had resolved itself but then he ran into Wade on the way back to Queens after school. Wade was looking down and Peter thought it would be cute if he surprised him with a hug. It was a good idea in theory. In practice, it just made Wade drop all the shit in his hands onto the sidewalk.
“Oh, shit. Sorry,” Peter said, kneeling down to pick it all up. Wade knelt down at the same time, saying it was fine.
Except that his passport had landed open face down when Peter picked it up, he could only see one thing.
“Your middle name is Winston?”
Wade sighed and took the thing back.
“Sometimes,” he said miserably, “Your folks are painfully European. And sometimes they’re also white-trash, life-long alcoholics who think alliteration is the height of respectability.”
Peter felt a wave of pity for his friend.
“You can always get it changed,” he said. Wade snorted.
“To do that,” he said, tapping Peter on the nose with the corner of the passport, “I’d have to go back, and I’d rather gargle acid. Peace, munchkin.”
Peter watched him disappear into the crowd of people on the streets.
Well, at least he wasn’t Peter Patrick Parker or something like that, he thought.
“You’re Matthew Michael??”
“Is this surprising to you?” Matt said. “I have been reliably informed that my parents were going for ‘desperately Catholic.’”
Jesus Christ.
“Fogs is ‘Franklin Philip’ if that makes you feel better.”
“Oh my god,” MJ whispered.
“MATTHEW.”
“Ah. Duty calls,” Matt said, throwing himself off the floor and scrambling for cover behind his office door.
Peter was now on a mission.
“Oh, it’s Grant,” Cap said simply. “Like the president, but more like my ma’s older brother. Guy died in uuuuh, Germany? France? Somewhere in France I think.”
“Why the hell you wanna know?” Sam Wilson demanded.
“Everyone knows my fuckin’ middle name kid, I tried to fuckin’ bury my first one, but no fuckin’ dice.”
Sergeant Barnes was very unhelpful. He recognized this in Peter’s pout and then shrugged.
“Steve’s ma used to call me ‘Jamie,’ I guess. And my daddy’s team at the docks all called me ‘Jimby’ and ‘George Jr.’ because why the fuck not?”
“But Cap calls you ‘Buck?’” Peter needled.
“Yeah. Buck. Bucky. Bucko. JB, whatever the fuck you want, just not Buchanan,” he paused thoughtfully, ”Or Asset, yeah?”
Yeah.
“Classified,” The Black Widow said like an armored wall.
“Fuckin’ Francis,” Hawkeye bemoaned from his old dumpy couch, where he was ignoring Peter’s baby-talking to Lucky. “Like, why? Why in God’s name would you do that to your child?”
“Double D told me Frank Castle’s name is Francis,” Peter offered him as a consolation prize.
He had Hawkeye’s immediate and undivided attention.
“Kid, sorry you gotta go. I got shit to do today.”
“Edward,” Mr. Stark said to the ceiling of the lab as though speaking directly to his dead dad.
“Bruce,” Dr. Banner said to an immediately silent lab. He looked around quizzically. Mr. Stark stopped cursing his dad to set down his blow torch.
“Your name isn’t Bruce?” he asked, horrified.
“No, it is,” Dr. Banner said. “But it’s my middle name.”
More silence.
“You lied to me?”
Wuh-oh. Peter hadn’t meant to cause controversy. Maybe he should make tracks.
“I didn’t lie to you, Tony. You’ve had my file for years—”
“YOU LIED TO ME??”
“My first name’s ‘Robert,’ Tony—did you really not know this?”
“Robert?” Mr. Stark gasped like this was poison. ”ROBERT?”
“So obviously this is upsetting to you,” Dr. Banner started.
“You don’t even look like a ‘Robert.’”
“Ah, yes. Well. That is the point.”
“How fucking dare you. I thought we were friends, Robert.”
That was Peter’s cue to bounce.
“Edward Harris,” Antman told him. Antman was fucking weird; he kept telling Peter that he had to learn to commune with his people. Peter generally avoided him so folks didn’t get the wrong idea that there was any kind of association between the two of them.
“You have two?” he asked.
“Yeah, well, honestly the Universe took one look at me and said, ‘nah, this one, now he deserves two.’”
Peter was pretty sure the universe in question here was the size of exactly two adult human beings.
“Mr. Stark is Edward, too,” he pointed out.
Antman chuffed and swiped the bottom of his chin with his knuckles.
“Yeah, but is he Edward Harris, huh? No, didn’t think so.”
“Double D said your name is Francis.”
“Double D is looking for a cap in his ass.”
Mr. Castle was about as scary as Antman was weird. Peter still kind of liked him, though. He let Peter play with Max, and Max had a head which was almost a perfect cube. Max’s favorite person in the world after Mr. Castle was Karen Page and then Matt, and Matt hated Max with such fervor that if he got near and Karen wasn’t around to act as a buffer, Matt would half-crawl up into Mr. Castle’s arms.
Mr. Castle thought that this was a great trick Max had. He used it often and only for evil.
“I thought your name was just Frank.”
“It is.”
“But it isn’t, though. Double D’s a bad liar.”
Mr. Castle sighed. Peter was pretty sure he wouldn’t hurt him, not after Wade had threatened to castrate him when he’d held Peter at gunpoint over a job gone bad on everyone’s end. Wade got a little scary when he wasn’t facing Peter sometimes, his crazy was a whole different level from Castle’s and that gave him seniority and respect in their circles.
“Castiglione,” Castle said after a long moment. Peter blinked and then stopped massaging Max’s cheeks to look back at the guy.
“Castigli-what?”
“Castiglione,” Castle repeated. “Francis Castiglione. Changed my name a while back.”
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
Woah. Frank Castle was way hard core. Peter told him so and he laughed really hard.
Thor said that he didn’t have a middle name or a last name, which Peter pointed out was untrue.
“Odinson,” he said, “You’re Thor Odinson.”
“No, no,” Thor explained while reaching over to tip Bruunhilde back towards their table instead of the floor. She seemed super sleepy and amazingly drunk. “This is just how people know who I am. Thor, son of Odin.”
“Right, but that’s a last name, isn’t it?” Peter asked. “You and your brother have the same last name, right?”
“No, he’s Laufeyson, the son of Laufey.”
“Right, ‘cause he’s adopted. But like, hypothetically, he could also be Odinson.”
Thor gave Peter a look of complete lack of understanding, although he was optimistic about it. Peter could tell that this was not computing.
“Me, I’m Peter Parker,” he said. “I get my name from my dad, right? So if I had a brother, then he’d be Parker, too, right?”
“Right.”
“So—”
“What was your father’s name, small one?”
“Huh? Oh, uh. Richard. Everyone called him—”
“Richardson.”
Silence.
“No, no. Parker,” Peter informed him.
“Peter Richardson.”
“No. Parker.”
“Richardson. You are Peter Richardson.”
“Literally, no. I’m Peter Parker.”
“Literally, yes. You are the son of Richard.”
This was going nowhere.
“Yeah, but I’m also the son of Mary,” Peter pointed out.
“Women don’ matter for boys,” Brunnhilde slurred over the beginning of Thor’s next statement. “’S always the man.”
“Yeah, I get that, but what happens when there’s two Richards in a village?” Peter asked. Thor stared at him in sympathetic patience.
“The second is usually named for his father, no?” he said.
What.
“What, like, if he’s Richard Jr., he’d be Richard Richardson?” Peter asked.
“Now you’re getting it!”
Good god. Okay, this was not worth it. Demi-gods apparently had a different system going on.
He made it back home and flopped down on his bed to ruminate on all this new information. He was Benjamin for his uncle, he knew this. Cap was Grant for his uncle, too. Matt was Michael for the saints, Sergeant Barnes Buchanan for the president. Hawkeye was Francis for God knew why and Mr. Castle was Francis because it turned out that he’d been Sicilian this whole time, right under everyone’s noses.
Thor told him, before Peter left him and Bruunhilde to bask in the sun in their chosen beer garden, that names are important. Names have power.
Peter thought that yeah, he was right. He saw the power in ‘Benjamin.’ He saw in it a prayer, a plea for him to carry with him his uncle’s kindness and warmth. Benjamin, forever following ‘Peter,’ made him feel like he was a walking legacy.
He didn’t mind because Ben had been the kind of guy who deserved every bit of the legacy people sought to give him, but others, like Mr. Stark and Hawkeye had these names which they didn’t want. Legacies forced upon them; memorials they didn’t know much about or they weren’t interested in carrying.
Names are heavy, Peter decided. They have power and they are heavy. But, thinking about Mr. Castle and Dr. Banner, he thought that it was kind of amazing that some folks had the strength and courage to push back against that stuff hanging onto their names, and to twist it so that it worked for them.
Nicknames, he thought, and new names picked by those who wore them, were probably the strongest tools in the world. Deciders of personhood.
He’d picked a nickname, himself, hadn’t he?
Spiderman.
He wondered if it was as powerful as ‘Benjamin.’ Maybe not to him. But maybe that was because it hadn’t become a legacy yet. Maybe there would be another Spiderman one day, and maybe then Peter’s chosen name would bear more weight than it did now, in his hands.
In the meantime, though, Matt and Wade’s initials were mirrors of each other and that was some information which needed to be abused as soon as humanly possible.