staying power

There was a little Vietnamese joint right across the street from Peter’s apartment and if he added up the number of sandwiches and cups of coffee he bought there on a monthly basis, he wouldn’t have been surprised if it worked out to be something like a fourth of their rent.

He stopped by later that night to soften the shitty day he’d just had in addition to the one he was about to have in the morning. He ordered a meatball sandwich, hold the cilantro. Dan, the place’s resident teenager, had told Peter once that his mother took this as an insult to her cooking, but said that he understood that Peter couldn’t help his genes. Peter hadn’t slept in 72 hours by that point and his Spiderman brain told him that the appropriate response to this was to climb over the counter and go apologize profoundly to Mrs. Pham in the kitchen for being culturally insensitive.

She’d been surprised, but ultimately pleased by the groveling and had sat Peter down in the backroom with her and fed him cilantro until he was dying like some kind of torturous immersion therapy.

It didn’t work.

But Mrs. Pham had given him an A for effort and now allowed him his cilantro-less sandwiches with an air of satisfaction.

While he was waiting for his sandwich with a few other bored souls that night, Ned called and said that MJ had told him about the current Situation.

“I mean, have you even seen the location?” Ned asked.

“We couldn’t get any blueprints that weren’t from 1964, so we had to google maps that shit,” Peter sighed. “Can’t tell anything from the satellite, although allegedly it is not condemned. So, you know, on a scale of one to ten here, at least we know we’re starting at a solid 1.”

“Dude,” Ned said, “Did Stark say anything about equipment? Do you guys have to order that shit or can you go without it for a minute?”

“Yeah, no. He ain’t said shit. He’s been helpfully fucking invisible this whole afternoon. I think I’m gonna ask for a set of hardhats just in case.”

“How many hardhats are we talking here?”

“Uuuuuh. Well, six of us, 6 to 12 folks per team. Ave and Bo share one, so I dunno. Something like 50?”

“What the fuck. He should at least give you guys until the end of the month.”

“Nah, if it comes to it, I’ll just steal ‘em. Nate on 67 is hoarding shit again.”

One of the guys waiting next to Peter lifted his head from his phone and gave him a judgmental eyebrow. Peter gave him a bored glance which he hoped signaled for the man to mind his own goddamn business.

“Not for the helmet shipment, Peter,” Ned clarified, “For choosing to actually do this. I mean, what if you get there and there’s like, no running water?”

“What, in New York? No, there’ll be at least one sink, I’m sure.”

“What if there isn’t, though?” Ned insisted. “And even if there was, there’s 50 of you, you can’t all share one sink.”

“No, but by god we will try.”

“Peter just say no. This is outrageous.”

No, it absolutely was.

“Can’t. Himani told us that if anyone says no, she’s moving to Sweden and getting married to the first man she sees. I can’t have that shit hanging over my head for the rest of my life.”

Dan waved his paper-wrapped baguette at him at the register and Peter wordlessly stepped forward to take it.

“That girl is always holding herself hostage. Shit’s not healthy,” Ned grumbled in his ear.

“I fucking love her. She’s like my id in human form.”

“Peter.”

“Come again, Spiderman!” Dan’s cheery voice said just as the door closed with a jingle behind Peter.

He stopped. Looked behind him at the glass door. On the other side, Dan was handing out sandwiches to some of the other folks who’d been waiting too.

Had he--?

Was that--?

No.

A joke. Yeah. A joke.

“Peter? Hey man, you still there?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, putting the phone back to his ear. “Yeah, no. Sorry, go on.”

He filed Dan’s joke away in the back of his head for the time being because he had bigger problems and they involved tracking down some motherfucking blueprints. He almost overrode the whole thing by calling up Wade and offering him fifty bucks for the job, but his better nature caught up to him before he could reach for his phone. Mr. Stark would not appreciate Wade’s fingerprints on anything SI-related.

He resolved to sleep on it and see what he could scrounge up in the morning.

Morning came and went with a fire alarm, followed by a gas alarm, followed by a full-building evacuation which really put a dent in all that time Peter and his five compatriots had to do some logistics research. It wasn’t a complete waste, though. Since the day before, it seemed the staff from labs 30 to 49 had realized the plight they were collectively in, even if they didn’t completely understand it. They appeared to have banded together to start practicing working as a unit.

They all huddled around the Lab Manager Dream Team as they typed frantically into tablets and phones in the courtyard, trying to find out as much information on Queens College’s campus and infrastructure as they could on half and quarter screens. Peter looked up and noted a perceivable lack of shenanigans. He did a head count of his staff and found that, for once, they were all present and accounted for. Ave and Bo saw him doing this and did the same.

In the end, shockingly, it worked out that their whole imminent team of 54 was within thirty yards of their designated area.

Huh.

Peter had expected a greater degree of chaos than this. They must have been feeding off the managers’ moods. Uneasy. Seeking comfort in familiarity, numbers, and mutual suffering in the face of the unknown.

Bautista, one of Peter’s interns from Lab 32, touched him lightly on the arm. She was the smallest of his troop. He wasn’t positive the interns would be coming with to the Queens Catastrophe yet.

“Is everything really okay, Peter?” she asked him quietly.

No. Not even a little. According to the internet, the building the Catastrophe was supposed to take place in had had a date with a wrecking ball in 1980. Given Mr. Stark’s claims of viability, Peter assumed that it had been stood up on this date. But no one could find any mention of renovations or construction happening on it since then. Not in the city’s permits or in the university’s news.

This did not bode well for any of them.

“I don’t know right now,” he said honestly, “But we’re gonna do our best and that’s all anyone can ask from us.”

Bautista’s eyes flickered down for a second, then she looked back up and gave Peter a tight smile.

“Okay, if you say so,” she said.

Peter couldn’t sleep that night because he was doing mental math about all the costs and types of equipment and contracts they were going to need to build a lab in the middle of a goddamn sinkhole. He tried stuffing himself under the covers. He tried rolling over and telling his brain to shut the fuck up. He tried opening a window and putting on cooking shows to lull him to sleep.

No dice.

At 3am, he’d had enough.

He pulled on the suit and went out on a late, solo patrol.

He ran into Little Spidey just as she was turning in for the night. She spotted him first and scampered over to bump amicably into his side.

“He lives!” she cried.

Yeah, barely.

“Woah, full face McGrump. What’s up with you?”

“The universe is punishing me for pretending to be normal,” Peter sighed. Little Spidey cocked her head at him.

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” she asked.

Ouch. Come on, girl. At least pretend to be sympathetic.

“I guess?” he said.

“You’re doing a bad job.”

Wow, thanks. He’d gathered that. Little Spidey leaned far into his line of vision. Peter suspected she was frowning behind her mask.

“What?” he asked.

“You look stressed.”

“That’s ‘cause I am stressed.”

“You’re no fun when you’re stressed. Hey, did you know Bitsy joined a club a while back?”

“Bitsy? What, with other humans? Is it a human club?”

“Yeah, people and everything. I think he’s sick.”

“I think he’s possessed.”

“Right???”

“We need to keep an eye on him,” Peter decided, adding Miles to the mental list of people he was casually stalking in his very little spare time. That brought the total to five: Miles, Liz Toomes from highschool, both Osborns, and his Intro to Chem professor from NYU.

Little Spidey clapped her hands in delight and agreement and decided that if Peter was going to be out, then she was going to take a shortcut home. Peter waved after her as she hurried off.

The morning brought with it a job well done in the form of two guys trying to rob a second story office now sitting in handcuffs in a holding cell. It also brought with it a massive black eye which needed more concealer than Peter currently had at his disposal.

He was making a new rule: no more pistol whipping. For anyone. He was cancelling it for everyone.

The concealer issue made him late as hell, and so lunch became a grab-and-go type of affair. He lurched into the Vietnamese place and bought a box of spring rolls to take with him on the way to work. Mrs. Pham clicked her tongue and told him he was too skinny like she did any time she was minding the register. Rather than have that argument again while he was already late, Peter grabbed another box of spring rolls and dropped it on top of the first.

She made him buy some soup, too.

He crashed into the lab and swallowed the judgmental looks of everyone else with half a granola bar. He perched himself on the arm of one of the wreck room couches by Saanvi and tried to catch up with the discussion happening there.

They were going to say ‘yes’ to Mr. Stark’s offer, but only on a conditional and temporary basis.

They didn’t want to be at this facility for more than a year, two max. They’d build the lab up, provided that, in the meantime, all project deadlines would be extended and they could have a team working at SI on those while another worked to set up the new facility. The teams would rotate, both managers and staff, so that work was equally distributed.

There was much nodding and then much typing and printing and signing and then Ave and Leo led them all in some deep breathing exercises so they didn’t shit themselves when they went up to talk to Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark.

Peter forgot sometimes, in the haze of being an employee of their company, that Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark were fairly chill people. They were audibly fighting over Mr. Stark’s latest plant-based project when the Queens Team poked their heads in the door.

Mr. Stark was saying something about currents and how plants did not feel pain, and Ms. Potts was of the opinion that she felt pain when Tony electrocuted their leafy companions, to which Tony replied, ‘They’re watercress, Pep. You want me to bring in some kind of priest to bless ‘em first? ‘Cause I will if that will make you happy.’

It would make her happy.

Peter wondered sometimes what they talked about when they were at home, just the two of them.

Once the plant discussion had died down, the lab managers were allowed into the office to plead their case. Mr. Stark and Ms. Potts blinked once at them, then twice at each other and shrugged.

“Sounds good,” Mr. Stark said. “I like it. Give the papers to Marie outside and she’ll submit them to HR to amend the contracts. You can tell your staff now. Full-timers will move onto the rotation with you. Part-timers and interns will have the option to go or be reassigned.”

Ms. Potts was slightly more reserved. She put her hand on Mr. Stark’s shoulder before he stood up out of his chair.

“We understand that this is asking a lot from you all,” she said. “And we really, really appreciate the work you’ll be doing. It’s going to be a little rough at first, know that we know this, but just do your best, alright? If you need anything, you just let us know. Or you can let Ryan know and he’ll take care of it.”

Sorry, Ryan?

“Oh, yeah. I found y’all a project director,” Mr. Stark remembered. Ms. Potts gave him a narrow-eyed look which said that this was supposed to have been brought up earlier.

Peter certainly would have appreciated it coming up earlier.

“Let me go grab him,” Mr. Stark said. He stepped out to make the call.

“Ryan set up the tech clinic in Brooklyn,” Ms. Potts told them comfortingly, “He’s got experience with this kind of thing. He agreed to oversee the project until it gets off the ground.”

Peter looked at Saanvi and Himani and they looked back. A project director would be helpful, especially since none of the six of them knew what the fuck they were doing. This could be a good thing. A very good thing.

Ryan looked exactly like the kind of guy who wandered through Brooklyn, talking about how he’d had the best curry at this new Asian fusion chain that had just opened up.

He looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a lumberjack or a Steampunk cosplayer. Like he bought custom rings listed in the ‘rustic jewelry for men’ section of Etsy.

A dick.

He looked like a dick.

If Peter saw him and his lumberjack, craft-beer-brewing friends in a bar, he’d leave to go to the one next door.

Hipsters.

Tall. White. Beardy hipsters.

From Texas.

Saanvi asked him later if he’d seen the guy’s boat shoes, but Peter hadn’t because he’d been too busy focusing on his gauges and eyebrow piercing.

“Maybe he’s not so bad?” Bo tried, as though this man had not misgendered them twice in a fifteen minute meeting, during which Ryan claimed that he wanted to get to know each of them personally to talk about their individual needs as coordinators.

Leo was not sold. Avery said that he looked just like this guy she’d had a crush on in college who had gone on to become a professional scam artist.

Himani told them all that they needed to make a backup plan in case this man was exactly what he appeared to be, and it was agreed that Ryan would be given the benefit of the doubt for the first month of their acquaintance. After that, should his performance still be found lacking, he would be systematically fed to the wolves.

They were lab managers, not project managers. They still had a wide berth of petty they were expected to operate within.

When the others packed it in and collected the usual crowd for Friday drinks at the end of the day, Peter begged off like he always did, to the continued disappointment of the research staff and the one or two interns old enough to join them. They had evidently heard tales of Peter’s drunk alter-ego, Fun Peter. Only the other lab managers and one or two veteran staff were acquainted with Fun Peter.

And that was on purpose because Fun Peter sometimes lost count of how many drinks he had, and one time, the bio department managers counted for him. It was an instance never to be repeated because normal people could not safely consume two handles of any hard liquor and awe, amazement, and suspicion were neighbors in this city.

No, if Peter wanted to get drunk, he’d drink at home with MJ so that they would both inevitably end up crying over shit movies and calling Ned to try to get him to understand and appreciate their many, collective repressed feelings.

And if he really, really wanted to get fucked up, he could go hang with Wade and Cable and Dom or Jessica Jones and Karen Page to ultimately be reminded that he was but a tadpole in a pond of older, mostly functional, potentially cannibalistic alcoholics.

In short, Peter had a life outside of work in a way which most of the others didn’t. And he had plans that night which involved a mask and some very persistent, recently-released robbers.

He got in just before dawn and crashed into bed to sleep it off. His knuckles hurt. So did his abs.

The no pistol whipping rule hadn’t gone down well. It required a bit of a struggle to be enforced.

He’d slept what felt like two seconds when someone buzzed up to his door. He hated them. He turned over and dug into the covers. The door buzzed again and again. Then his phone buzzed instead.

Fuck you, he told it.

It stopped buzzing. He closed his eyes.

It started buzzing again.

He snatched it off the bedside table.

“Someone better be dying,” he growled.

“Get downstairs, loser,” MJ’s voice said in his ear, “We gotta get Ned from the airport.”

Ned had been off up and down the west coast for most of the month on an assignment which he could tell no one anything about, but Peter and MJ were used to that by now. What they weren’t used to and would never be used to was his lack of presence in between them always.

Ned told them that they were needy.

Peter maintained that he was not needy, he was clingy. There was a difference.

MJ said damn right she was needy. And she had opinions on Peter’s ability to meet these needs which consisted almost entirely of lies and slander.

Regardless, she and Peter pretended to be normal people on the train and then pretended to be normal people waiting for their friend right up until Ned made it through the arrivals gate. Then they were no longer required to be normal people because Ned was present to fill that role.

He dutifully endured the double-suffocation with awkward luggage in hand and then announced that he was ready to sleep a week in one place. Peter promised him that he would be allowed to before MJ could, and this done, they made the trek over to Ned’s place to pin him down and initiate a puppy pile for an hour before it was declared lunch time. At this, they all vacated Ned’s living room for poké and weird veggie juice.

Then, before Peter knew it, it was Spiderman time again and he had an axe to grind with these fucking burglars.

And then it was morning again and there were groceries which had to be bought, Neds which had to be laid on, MJs who needed attention and one Little Spidey reporting in that Miles was refusing to give up any more information about his so-called club which made it very suspicious indeed. She promised she’d keep up the pressure until he cracked and Peter told her she was doing a fantastic job.

Monday came too soon. And not just because he didn’t want the triumph of his burglar victory to end.

It came with the realization that, hoo boy.

It was moving day.