staying power

He got to SI just in time to meet the moving trucks as they pulled in to the loading bay. He knew the guys behind the wheels by then. Josh and Jerry. They were institutions in their own right; seemed to have been moving shit for SI since the dawn of time. Jerry was a staunchly conservative guy who lived his life grumbling about the pansy, snowflake tendencies of his employers. He’d told Peter on multiple occasions that if either of his kids was ‘held hostage’ by a position in an institution such as theirs, he’d go ‘Frank Castle’ on the whole damn building.

Jerry thought that the Punisher was all that was right in America. He was very proud that he and the guy had a similarly strong old-school Queens accent.

Peter daydreamed sometimes about telling him that Frank Castle was, at heart, a flagrant hippie trapped in an armored tank. Castle thought that Montessori schools were the cream of the crop in pre-school education and, according to Karen Page, was currently obsessed with the zero-waste Youtube gals. He’d become That Guy who brought his own jars with him to grocery stores in their image.

Peter tried not to talk to Jerry if he could help it.

The guy gave him a curt wave as he ducked into the building from the back, though, and Josh, the polar opposite of Jerry in every way humanly possible, gave Peter a huge smile and a friendly hello at the sign-out desk.

The lab was a box of cats by the time Peter got upstairs. Folks all over, kicking up dust and stacking and labeling boxes. He passed by Himani directing two of her interns—the ones who they all suspected were joined at the hip—to wrap all glassware in newspaper before putting them into the waiting boxes.

Most of Peter’s crew wasn’t there yet, probably waiting down in the security line in the atrium. He’d told them to come around the back way in the morning, had sent an email out the night before, but alas. Anyone in the lab under the age of 26, he knew from his teaching days, would die if they read more than the first three lines of any email.

As such, he had exactly one-fourth of his twelve man team present. They were his trouble-trio. Lovett, Alvarez, and Wallace. He was, at the moment, avoiding Lovett and Alvarez like his life depended on it. Rescue two gals from a load of shitheads by the docks and the next thing you know, all they got for you are questions. That you couldn’t answer, obviously. Because who the hell is Spiderman, anyways?

The trouble-trio that morning, however, was thankfully groggy; they offered him coffee in lieu of a hello. He held up the cup he’d picked up on the way in greeting.

Loading the shit into the trucks wasn’t the hard part; the hard part was getting everyone to take the damn train together without them all looking like a bunch of schmucks. Their labcoats were pretty fucking obnoxious, but they couldn’t afford for people to take them off because the lab managers had to keep doing head counts to ensure that they hadn’t lost anybody. The whole thing felt like some kind of grown-up school field trip.

Someone on the car they crowded into took a panorama picture of them all. No doubt to post on Instagram with some snippy comment about Stark Industries not providing transit for its workers. Peter sighed, stared at the ceiling, and started counting stops.

When once again above ground, it became immediately and unfortunately clear that someone had gotten left after all. One of Bo and Avery’s kids; Bo stepped away to try to explain the subway system to this recent Midwestern migrant who was, no doubt, crying on the other end of the line. Bo headed back to meet this poor soul and the rest of them soldiered forwards toward the college. Ryan was allegedly already at the facility.

“I’ve never been in this part of Queens before,” Bautista bubbled at Peter’s side on the way.

Peter hummed.

“It’s fine, I guess,” he said. “I grew up west of here.”

“No way!”

“Why else you think I agreed to this? Commute’s shorter.”

“Wait, so you live nearby??”

Aw, shit. He had his whole team’s attention now.

“None of y’all are coming to my house,” he snapped to disappointed groans.

The building was.

Well.

Not exactly what Peter had been dreading, but you know. Close enough.

Brutalist architecture. Ominous cracks in the outer walls. Covered in streams of multicolored algae which stained the sides of the building red and green and mustard yellow. There were two concrete planters set across from each other in front of the place’s entrance. Both were filled with dead foliage and one was half-swallowed by tendrils of ivy which had snuck over from the neighboring flower beds. The entrance was a set a of old double doors with tinted glass. The frontside of the glass was taped over in caution tape. A lock, with its hole filled with water, had been lovingly draped on a thick chain which itself had been threaded between the doors’ handles.

On the other side of the tinted glass was a charming view of the rotting sheets of wood used to board up the entrance from the inside.

Somehow, just standing staring at the lock, Peter already knew what the inside was going to smell like.

Must and dust and damp.

“This is…charming,” Saanvi said.

Girl.

“How do we get in?” Himani asked. She tried to pull at the lock, but it was steadfastly rusted in place. Peter thought that she might have been the first one to touch it in years. He took a few steps back and stared up at the building’s windows. A few of them on the second floor looked like they’d been opened.

Ryan maybe?

“Maybe we need to go around?” Leo thought out loud.

Around to where?

“Well, there’s gotta be a back, doesn’t there? Someone call Ryan, maybe he can let us in?”

Himani called. Ryan didn’t pick up. The staff started murmuring and clustering together. Saanvi tried next, but still no answer.

“Well, fuck,” she said, “What’re we supposed to do? We’ve got the trucks coming.”

Well. Peter had a solution. He had multiple solutions actually, none of which any of these folks could see, especially not in daylight.

“Guess we’re gonna have to break in,” Leo said.

“Break in? It’s our first day and we’re already committing a felony?” Avery asked.

“Misdemeanor,” Peter corrected before he could stop himself. He abruptly realized everyone was staring at him. “Usually a misdemeanor,” he repeated. “Unless you plan to steal shit or you’ve got a weapon.”

More silence.

“We’re leaving that,” Saanvi decided for everybody. She tried to call Ryan again, then again, but finally on the third go, with everyone’s eyes on her, she sighed and gave up.

“Anyone know how to break into a building?” she said, defeated.

Peter slowly raised his hand.

“Dude, what the fuck?”

He told people to see if they couldn’t find a fence or something like it.

He didn’t need a fence to get to the open second-story windows, but he needed a boost so as not to out himself to all 50-odd persons on the team at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning. A fence was not found, but, thankfully, Himani was a great sport. She found a fire-escape and turned to Peter with determination in her face before hunkering down into a crouch.

“Climb on my back and grab that,” she instructed, waving at the end of the ladder.

Peter chewed his lip.

Himani was the size of a large bug on a good day. He was not putting even half of his weight on her back, not even if God himself told him to.

“Why don’t we do this the other way?” he negotiated.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” Himani said proudly, already all tucked into herself under the escape. Peter heard people behind him covering their faces so as not to burst out laughing at her.

“Girl, for real. Here, just climb on my shoulders,” he said.

Himani popped back up with huge eyes like her greatest dream was about to come true.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Oh my god. Oh my god—LEO. PARKER’S GONNA LET ME RIDE HIM.”

Peter almost whimpered in despair. He’d walked right into that one. He could already hear Alvarez and Lovett turning this into a chant. He did not need them to make any more chants. They already had so many chants.

“Hold on,” Leo called, “I wanna film it.”

“YOU KINKY BITCH,” Himani screeched back.

What had he done to deserve this?

Himani was very proud of herself for getting the ladder down. Peter had never seen her happier. She struggled to get off his shoulders and he had half a mind to leave her there to be jostled and to think about what she’d fucking done. But alas. They had actual problems to solve.

Such as determining whether their fire-escape was weight bearing.

“I dunno,” Saanvi said, side-eyeing it, “Seems pretty sketch to me.”

Ehn. Probably.

“I got this,” he said before anyone else could sacrifice themselves. He wouldn’t fall, he could guarantee that much.

And he didn’t. It was easy enough to climb the nasty-ass, pigeon-shit coated rungs up to the first story window. And then it was a piece of cake to climb the next set of rungs, right into the pigeon nest itself. Then: wham, open window. Entrance located.

The room inside was old. Huge blocky tables with sinks dug into their centers and ends. Bunsen burners from like, the 70s. He carefully brought a foot onto the window sill and leaned in to see more of the place. It was dark. The only light came from the window he was standing in, the others had moth-eaten shades over them. Tiny fragments of light showed through them.

“Peter, be careful,” Someone outside called.

He brought his other foot in and placed it tentatively on the floor.

It did not fall in.

Excellent. Building foundation: mostly func—

Building foundation: hazardous.

Peter levered himself up onto his elbows and shook his head. He looked straight up at the remnants of a boarded up hole in the ceiling. Some nasty-ass plaster took the opportunity to trickle down onto his face.

Well, so much for viable.

He was glad they’d brought the hard hats.

The front entrance was locked from the outside and the new window-access was a fucking death trap, so Peter ended up going from room to room on the ground floor, yanking at ancient, rusted windows until one of them screeched open. When he finally found one, he leaned out and found himself a good 120 yards from the crowd of people staring up at the second story window he’d climbed through to begin with.

He whistled. The crowded turned his way and then hurried over.

He held lots of hands to steady folks coming in through the window while Leo on the other side helped those who couldn’t easily hop up get through.

It was an adventure and they’d only just gotten there.

“So this sucks,” Avery said for everyone as they all stood in the lobby and stared up at the mold crawling its way across the ceiling. Jackson Pollock had nothing on it. It bloomed and crusted in swirls and blobs around cloudy, water-filled light fixtures from the locked west entrance to the equally locked east entrance. There was an abandoned mop sitting in a yellow cart leaned up against one of the room’s corners. The furniture looked like that of a doctor’s office, except these chairs and couches were 100% guaranteed to be filled with vermin and soaked through from the humidity.

“We’re supposed to make a lab out of this?” the interns started whispering to each other.

There was a clicking noise and everyone shut the fuck up.

Click. Click. Click.

What the fuck was that? Sounded like water dripping onto a carpet.

Click. Click. Click.

“This place is fucking haunted,” Himani whimpered.

Yeah, no. Absolutely.

Click. Click. Click.

“Guys, it’s the fucking blinds,” Leo sighed. And it was. The handle from the blinds rattled against them in the first breeze it had felt in probably decades. The relief in the room was palpable.

“Okay,” Saanvi said to herself, but also the group, “This looks bad. But it can’t be that bad. Mr. Stark wouldn’t have—”

Chaos briefly burst out when an honest-to-god bat blustered from a corner of the room out the open window.

“I CAN’T,” Himani wheezed.

Peter agreed.

“This is insane.”

Yes, it was.

“We shouldn’t even be here. This place is probably a squatter cemetery.”

“Why, hello!”

Peter almost died. Ten years of Spiderman, of actually throwing himself off buildings and into traffic and Ryan was going to be the thing that killed him. God. What a life.

Ryan laughed at everyone’s panic. He was wearing no labcoat and all of his many bracelets were on full display. He wiped at his eyes when he was through cackling and then stood tall and proud with his hands on his hips and a smile on his face.

“What do y’all think of the new digs, then?” he asked.

No one said anything. No one dared. He was smiling. Why was he smiling?

“They’re…lacking,” Saanvi finally said diplomatically. Ryan laughed again.

“Yeah, they’re pretty grim,” he decided. “But have no fear! We can make this work.”

Could they? Could they really? Also, sir, where the hell have you been?

“The trucks are around back. Everyone follow me,” Ryan said and turned around to walk down what could only be a cursed hallway between the two entrances on the sides of the lobby. Avery watched him go and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Himani shook her head lightly as though she was trying to wake up from a dream.

The spidey sense started humming in the back of Peter’s neck.

Because the interns and half the research staff were convinced that the place was haunted and because the other half had the goddamn sense to refuse to work in the place until it was up to code, Peter and the other lab managers found themselves doing more managing than they had anticipated on the first day.

They had to divide everyone up into groups to go through and check all the rooms to compile a safety report. Each room on every floor needed a risk assessment and that would have been fine if Peter was not now aware that some of those rooms on some of those floors had impromptu easy-exits in them. Also known as holes in the floors, but hey, you say tomato, he said ‘Jesus fuck, be careful where you step—everyone hold onto your buddy at all times.’

So he and Saavni and Bo and Ave were handling that while Leo and Himani handled getting all of the shit in the trucks out of the trucks and into the building. Did they want this highly fragile, potentially hazardous material in the crumbling, brutalist wasteland they now found themselves in? No. Did they have a choice? Not at the present.

Peter passed by the un-loading team working with slightly desperate optimism on his way to pick up two boxes of hardhats for his group of adventurers. He wished he’d gotten the ones with lights on them now. Floor two had no power.

The following two hours were extremely insightful. Peter learned many things which boiled down to: the even numbered floors had no power, the odd numbered floors had no working water, there was a stunning lack of fire doors, and an even more stunning number of unnecessary walls. The place felt crowded with tabletops, but there weren’t enough outlets to set up a computer lab in any one room. The outlets that did work were so old that Peter didn’t want to chance plugging in any device made in the last ten years on the off-chance it caused the whole floor to short-circuit.

In terms of storage space, they were looking at lots of rooms with lots of cabinets, which was good, but they were also looking at many of those cabinets being filled with forgotten materials and bottles of ancient chemicals and specimens.

Just in general, the place was in bad repair. The flooring throughout the building was nasty and mold and water had seeped through it. Uncontained flooding from faulty water pipes and lack of maintenance had weakened ceilings and the concrete and wood between floors. About 75% of the windows in the place were rusted shut in some way or another. Sinks were full of rat droppings and dust and bits of plaster from cracking and sunken ceilings. There were vermin everywhere, of all kinds.

On the upside, they had adopted a resident raccoon and her brood as lab mascots.

On the upside, the place was mostly still standing.

On the upside, with some serious construction, love, and attention, Peter could see the place transformed into a pretty good lab.

If a few walls were taken out on every floor and the space opened up a bit, there would be plenty of room for collaborative spaces. If walls were brought down between lab spaces, then there would be more room than they had at the Stark facility to increase the scale of projects. The basement, although filthy, was solid and would be good for some of the more violent and explosive developments which needed to be tested.

The very top of the building led out into an atrium space. Beautiful, intricate steel and glasswork held up an abandoned and overgrown greenhouse. Besides it just being a nice space to be in, Peter could see it repurposed for some of the AG sustainability projects Mr. Stark had started to work on and support on the side.

Spatially, it was good. Situationally, it was good.

Practically and temporally, it was a nightmare.

Ryan jokingly called it one giant DIY project, but Peter wasn’t laughing. He hadn’t seen Ryan at all, all day. Peter was over here with little Bautista clinging to his arm, begging him not to step further into a room out of fear he’d go right through the floor again, and where the fuck had Ryan been?

Couldn’t he see that this was a health and safety lawsuit waiting to happen? Did he not understand that they were all taking huge risks here, just doing the damn risk assessment forms?

They weren’t construction workers. They weren’t architects. They were a bunch of scientists in hard hats. They were paid to use their brains more than their hands and even if they had agreed to turn the place into a lab, it was above their paygrade to be making decisions to knock down walls and shit.

And where had Ryan been throughout all this?

No one knew. Himani and Leo hadn’t seen him downstairs and neither Bo or Ave had seen him on their floors. Peter and Saanvi certainly hadn’t seen him.

Saanvi said that he must have been doing paperwork or checking the equipment in the basement. Peter almost asked just to be sure, but decided against it. A month, they’d said they’d give him. And so a month, he damn well would.

Six hours of oscillating between terror and disgust had passed by the time they all decided to call it a day. It was getting dark and the lobby didn’t have power. Bautista and Lawrence begged Peter to be allowed to call a priest. He didn’t have it in his heart to tell them no, but he also didn’t exactly know how to bring it up to the others. He promised them he’d talk to Ryan about it. He also promised them that they didn’t have to stay there, they could request reassignment back at SI.

“No!” Bautista barked for both her and Lawrence, “We’re on your team. We’ll stay on your team, right, Ray?”

Lawrence bobbed his head as hard as his delicate neck would allow him to.

Aw.

Babies.

Peter was touched. He was also the one who everyone suddenly turned to for bar recommendations.

“Sorry, what?” he asked the masses.

“We’ve earned a drink, Pete. You live around here, don’t you?” Ave pointed out.

“No, man. I live—wait a second here, nice try, you little shits.” The managers and staff snickered at him. He gave them a threatening finger, “No one is coming to my fuckin’ house, alright? Y’all are obsessed. It’s weird.”

“Dude, your office is crazy, we need to see how you live, unbridled,” Bo said.

His office was not crazy. His office was full of perfectly reasonable things. Talismans. Stones. Plants and post-it notes.

“My home is a sanctuary for me to escape you guys,” Peter said. “And anyways, just go back to Manhattan if you want to drink.”

There was a thoughtful pause.

“I know a place in Forest Hills,” someone piped up from the back.

God, no. No, no, no. He just wanted to go home in peace. He just wanted to go lay on Ned and bitch about the insanity and unfairness of it all while getting hair pets.

“There’s nothing in Forest Hills,” he lied, “Just go up to Flushing. Hella stuff there.”

There was another thoughtful pause among the others standing outside at their new gate.

“Do you live in Forest Hills, Parker?” Lovett needled at his right.

The goddamn brains on these people, man.

“No,” he said tightly, “I live in hell. And y’all need to mind your own damn business. I’m out. Peace.”

“YOU DO.”

“I don’t. Bye!”

“We’re coming with you!”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Why are you running then?”

“I’m not running!”