under fire

Gwen dumped Miles into Tats Spidey’s capable arms, then chased Noir back into the building, amid a chorus of calls for her to wait.

“Wade, go with her!” Tats Spidey barked somewhere behind her.

She entered the building again and crashed right into Noir’s back. He surveyed the whole warehouse slowly. Head moving left to right methodically. The noise had died off. No one screaming, no one shouting. No screeching metal anymore.

“Where were the others?” he asked.

The nice Murdock was clear across the warehouse up high, Gwen remembered. She couldn’t quite see him now even with the place illuminated. He.

Dread twisted her guts.

He may have laid down. Fallen asleep. Bled out.

Where was dog Murdock?

They approached the drop-off, the edge of the maze of metal and piping, and peeked over the edge carefully.

Murderdock’s black suit was down there, pinning Doc Ock down to the floor with his knees. He seemed to have done away with all the tentacles. Evidently, he’d gotten all up in her face, gloating about it.

“We can’t let him kill her,” Gwen whispered. Noir gave her wide, alarmed eyes, and then slowly and meaningfully took his hand out of his pocket.

“That’s my plan out, then,” he said. “Any idea—”

The pop of a bullet made both of them jerk in shock. They looked over their shoulders and saw Deadpool standing there with a pistol pointed at the opposite side of the warehouse. He noticed them and shrugged.

“Well, someone had to do it,” he said.

Gwen ground her teeth together and when she looked out over the drop back to Murderdock and Doc Ock she was not unsurprised to see that Murderdock had vanished.

Shit.

“He’s headed this way,” she said, “We need to move.”

“Nah, y’all are gonna move,” Deadpool said.

“He’ll kill you, DP, you need to move.”

“Mmmmm, we’ll see about that. Go on, target is recovering at your 11 and attempting to make a speedy escape.”

And sure enough, Doc Ock had managed to get to her feet and appeared to be limping towards one of the side walls. Gwen threw out a line of web and Noir threw one out with her. He didn’t follow her when she swung wide, though, he went the opposite way. Towards where the nice Murdock was, thank god.

Gwen hit the ground hard enough that she felt the shock in her knees and she gunned it after Ock. Ock looked over her shoulder and then frantically kicked up the speed. She was running towards a door—an elevator looking thing. She crashed into it and threw in a code in the little reader adjacent and the door opened and—

Not today, motherfucker.

Just as Ock scrambled through the widening double doors, Gwen sprayed a line of webbing to jam them, but Ock somehow predicted this and tossed out her hand to catch the worst of it, then drew the whole thing into the elevator with her.

Fuck.

The doors started to close.

No.

Two bounds. That was all it would take.

Gwen put more knee into her sprint and hit the first jump. She pulled back her arm.

Second jump.

Her knuckles connected.

The sound of metal caving in was deafening; it always was. The ring of a smashed dumpster echoed for blocks in the city and so did the rending of crushed steel throughout the warehouse.

But it was too late.

It hadn’t been an elevator. It had been one of those little chambers; a security room with doors and each side. Ock hadn’t had to wait long after the first doors closed. She had the code to open the second set and make a break for it. Gwen had to tear through those and by the time she came out on the other side, she found herself in a car garage. Empty but for the screeching of tires.

One of Fisk’s men, probably, had been waiting for her.

Goddamnit.

The disappointment and frustration sat high in her chest, crammed in there next to the urge to give chase, but she had to go back in.

She’d made a promise.

No one was in the warehouse when she returned. No Noir; no Murderdock, no Wade. She walked into the middle of the cavern with the smears of blood on the ground a few yards away. The overwhelming silence and the lack of anyone, anything in her hands made her throat ache and her lungs burn.

Failure was unacceptable.

Miles and Peter were stuck in the In-Between.

The nice Murdock was dying. Dog Murdock was wounded. Murderdock was probably running rampant now, in this verse.

Failure was bitter and suffocating.

“Gwen.”

She’d been too late. Too slow. Always too slow.

“Gwen, come here.”

She couldn’t.

“It’s okay, honey. It’s okay, come here.”

She’d really fucked it up this time. She didn’t deserve Peter B.’s arms or sympathy or his calm fucking heartbeat. She’d fucked it all up and people were dying.

Peter B. sighed.

“Someone’s always dying. And no, it’s not your fault. Come on. Let’s go back, we need to regroup.”

There wasn’t anything else to do but follow his directions at this point, so she went. With her head bent low.

They didn’t go back to Peter B.’s verse; they went back to Tats Spidey’s and when they got there, most of the team was missing. Bitsy Miles was the one who reached back to them and he took them back to Tats Spidey’s apartment where he said the guy would be back soon. He told Gwen it wasn’t her fault. The words in Miles’s voice made her feel worse. He left and she and Peter B. waited for Tats in his cold apartment.

There was a post-it note on top of the others on the fridge with a date written on it in the corner. It was from two days ago; from someone named Ned.

It read, “I love you anyways. Don’t forget to eat today.”  

Ned left a lot of notes that Tats kept on his fridge.

When he finally got back after two hours or so, Tats seemed years older. Tired. He looked up into Peter B.’s eyes and said firmly, “They’re back with Banner. He’s going to keep them safe for now and get them to the point of waking up again. There’s nothing we can do at the minute. We’ve just got to wait until they stabilize again.”

He sighed and sat down heavily on the floor in front of his couch. His knuckles flexed and unflexed in unspoken fury.

Peter B. waited a moment, then went and knelt down next to him; he touched his shoulder and Tats shook his head as though answering a question that hadn’t been spoken.

“Is Mr. Murdock—Matt—is he okay?” Gwen choked out.

Tats Spidey and Peter B. looked at her sadly at the same time.

“We don’t know yet,” Tats Spidey said. “We’ve just got to wait. I got him to friends, though. They’ll look after him until we find and crush this asshole.”

Peter B. sighed.

“We’re not finding or crushing anyone tonight,” he said. “Everyone’s too tired. It’ll only get sloppier from here if we keep this up. Let’s go home for a bit. Clean up. Refuel. We’ll meet back here in say, twelve hours?”

Tats Spidey agreed quietly, though reluctantly. He was still pissed.  But then he sucked it up and asked if they could make it twenty-four to give Miles and Peter as much time to settle down as possible.

Twenty-four hours, Gwen was supposed to wait before finding out if her slowness had killed her friends. Yeah, she could wait twenty-four hours. It was only one day, wasn’t it?

They could hold on for one day; they were strong people, all of them.

Right?

She turned on the shower to maximum heat and pressure when she got home and only cried for maybe twenty minutes in there before trying to sleep.

Twenty-four hours felt like an eternity when each second could be someone in your heart’s last. She timed her call to the second. She reached out to Peter B. first and found him looking somewhat better. Shaved and showered at least. He didn’t bother with the suit, this time. Just stepped into her verse in a hoodie and sweats. They matched, almost.

When they reached out to Tats, they found that he too, owned and was wearing a hoodie, although his was black had the word “Cornell” plastered over his chest in red and white block letters. The sleeves were too long; they drooped past his fingers.

“Oh, dope. We all got the same fashion sense,” he said without humor.

He stepped aside to reveal the Spideys of his team, all engaged in an intense competition of who was the most exhausted. Bitsy Miles’s sweatshirt was a faded version of the Visions Academy sweatshirt Gwen had nicked in her original pursual of Miles. He’d draped himself over the arm of the couch and was apparently down for the count. Little Spidey wore an enormous PINK sweatshirt and grey leggings; she didn’t lift her head from the table when Gwen and Peter B. came in. Louis, in his gray Howard University zip-up, surreptitiously checked her pulse on the wrist not wrapped in a black brace. He gave them a little wave when they entered and, apparently satisfied with Little Spidey’s continued existence, carried on typing on his phone.

Tats Spidey refused to let anyone say anything until they were holding tea. In the meantime, he gathered Bitsy Miles up carefully from the couch arm and transferred him to the loveseat so that there was more sitting room. He ran into some trouble because Bitsy Miles was something of a clinger in his sleep. He wrapped his arms around Tats’s neck and nuzzled in there happily. Peter B. had to intervene to facilitate the removal process.

Gwen felt sick seeing watching them.

Bitsy Miles was fine; he was tired. He had a cut across the top of his brow and a swollen jaw. But he was okay.

Her Miles? Well, they still didn’t know.

Once tea had been consumed and all Spiderpeople reawakened, Tats announced that he’d just gotten word from the Daredevil crew that they were all in the clear.

Finally.

The relief from that, at least, made Gwen’s heart a little lighter.

“Fogs says that everyone is highly medicated and chilled the fuck out and ready for a chat if that’s what we want to do,” Tats Spidey read out from his phone.

Yeah. That’s what they wanted to do.

They met Dave, and his tightly wrapped arm, in Hell’s Kitchen. He had his kid with him. She had huge eyes, which she kept trained on her dad’s arm and his face and, Gwen learned through whispers, she was being unusually well behaved.

Gwen knew what that felt like. Worry was a heavy thing to carry at that age; especially when there was no guarantee that Dad would come home after this kind of thing.

Dave said that he was just checking in; he’d visited the Murdocks and confirmed that they were alive. He warned them all to try to be quiet at least when they said hey and then pointed them in the right direction before taking off back home a few blocks up.

“Is Wade okay?” Gwen asked Tats while they wound their way to where the Murdocks were staying with a friend of theirs.

Tats Spidey raised an eyebrow at her.

“Yeah, he’s fine. He had another job he had to do.”

Another job? After that shitshow?

“Wade’s a secret workaholic, but don’t tell him I told you that.”

“So he’s not dead? He’s not hurt?”

She received incredulous looks all around.

“Wade’s mutation makes him immortal,” Tats explained, “He heals faster than even me sometimes.”

Oh, no shit? Gwen wondered if the DP in her verse was the same.

They were greeted at the door by the woman who owned the apartment, Karen Page, an unbelievably attractive woman with a hand on her hip and propensity for teasing Tats Spidey. They were then greeted by a dog who thought they were all demons straight from Hell.

“Haze, no,” Karen said. Haze started barking at her instead. Karen growled back through her teeth and then called, “Fogs, deal with your daughter.”

“Matthew, call your child,” Mr. Nelson’s voice instructed from another room.

“Hazel, no,” Mr. Murdock’s exasperated voice said. He sounded muffled. The dog would not be deterred. Tats Spidey tried to soothe her but with no luck.

“HAZE,” Mr. Murdock snapped at full voice.

She shut up immediately and whimpered, looking back in that direction, then back at the intruders mournfully. She abandoned them to trip Karen on her way back into the other room. Karen clawed her fingers after her.

Tats Spidey snickered.

“She’s a bad girl,” he said.

“The worst,” Karen agreed.

Karen fawned over how tall Peter B. was while the rest of them tried to contain their reactions to the sight of Karen’s living-room-cum-sick-room. Mr. Murdock, shirtless, scarred, and scandalously fit despite his age, had curled himself protectively around the younger, darker-haired Murdock who laid under his arm quiet and still and pale as a sheet. He shivered a little in his sleep. Between the two of them, they almost had one functional, non-damaged body.

Hazel tried to squirm under Mr. Murdock’s arm to get between him and Matt and in doing so, set off a flurry of sneezing, coughing, and groaning.

Mr. Murdock blearily shoved her away, telling her, “No. Go bother Papa.”

Papa, AKA Mr. Nelson, was nowhere to be seen. Hazel, therefore, refused to budge. She laid down between both Murdocks and wagged her spry plume before resting her chin on Matt’s face. He made a soft noise of disgust and tried to turn over without much success.

“Why’s ya got so many dogs?” he slurred.

“Don’t be talkin’ shit ‘bout my babies,” Mr. Murdock grumbled back.

“Baby needsa bath.”

“You two got tha’ in common.”

They were a mess. Tats Spidey squatted down to poke at his Murdock’s ribs and got his shin smacked for it before getting waved off instead upon the guy recognizing him.

“Glad you’re not dead, Double D,” he said. “Where’s the problem child?”

“She’s right fuckin’ here.” Mr. Murdock gestured vaguely at the dog.

“The other problem child,” Tats Spidey asked.

“Other? Oh, him. Hey Kare? The fuck is my husband?”

Kare leaned a hip on her doorway and cocked an eyebrow up with it.

“Dealing with the problem child,” she said.

“Tell ‘im I’m jealous.”

She snorted.

“When are you not jealous?”

“’Scuse you? I’m not jealous like. Most? Half? I dunno, much of the time.”

“Uh-huh, go back to sleep, gorgeous,” Kare said.

Mr. Murdock snickered and jostled Matt.

“You hear that? She still thinks I’m handsome as fuck.”

“S’alright, just ‘cause you got sight don’t mean you got taste,” Matt mumbled. Mr. Murdock thought that was funny as hell and had to clutch at his ribs while he laughed.

Somehow, the two of them taking the mick out of each other made Gwen feel eons better. Her cheeks hurt a little with her grin and then she felt bad because Miles and Peter were still stuck in the deep end. Peter B. nudged her and gave her a knowing look. She didn’t know what he was trying to tell her. Then Tats Spidey stood and stared directly at her.

“Your Murdock is a spectacular asshole,” he announced. The other two Murdocks gave a cheer of ‘hear, hear” in agreement. The dog was confused and started licking Matt’s ear and he swore.

“He’s here?” Gwen asked; she could practically feel the second her heart sped up.

“The problem child,” Karen emphasized. They all followed her finger to a light green door across the hall. Peter B. looked back at her with the corner of his lip twitching.

“Is that a bathroom?” he said.

“We’re calling it Time Out, but yeah. Bathroom works, too,”  Karen said sagely.

What the fuck did that even mean?

What it meant was that somehow, these crazy assholes had wrestled Murderdock off the scene in the warehouse. Wade had allegedly done the heavy lifting here, which Gwen could not make her brain understand, even though everyone on Team Red accepted this easily. They responded to her repeated ‘but how?’s with vague hand gestures appearing to suggest that the guy had been given a love tap and sat on until he stopped screaming.

Tats Spidey finally told her that screaming-violent-fuckhead type behavior had been run of the mill, early-thirties Red behavior, and between him and Wade, they’d more or less developed a tried and true set of methods of dealing with it.

“He doesn’t like to be sat on,” he told Gwen like this was some kind of secret family recipe.

Gwen didn’t need to know this because she never, in her life, anticipated every having the chance to put it into practice.

“Wade made him take a nap and he calmed down a lot after that,” Little Spidey interjected helpfully.

Gwen examined the body stretched out before her. She’d never seen Murderdock even close to relaxed before. He didn’t seem to be sleeping, but he also didn’t respond to being talked about, like. At all. And his Time Out companion, Mr. Nelson, stared up at them patiently as though he did not have a serial killer splayed out across his lap.

Gwen was in awe of his bravery.

He had a novel in one hand and petted Murderdock’s thick hair with the other.

Like he was a cat.

“This one’s got a lot of problems,” he diagnosed. Gwen finally realized that that lump of blond over there in the corner was not in fact, a towel; it was Tues with her head laid heavily on top of one of Murderdock’s knees. He did nothing to dislodge her. She was kind of scared he was slipping under; dying slowly.

“Fogs, don’t fall in love with him,” Mr. Murdock ordered from the other room. “I’m still prettier.”

Mr. Nelson hummed thoughtfully and settled in with his back against the sink cabinet for some more petting and a highly noticeable lack of murder, death, or torment around him.

Gwen was going to have a stroke.

“You guys broke him,” she whispered.

“No,” Karen assured her, “Just gave him Matt’s Monday dose; he skipped it anyways.”

What the fuck did that even mean?

“Means your Matty needs an anti-depressant, an anti-anxiety tablet, an aspirin, and some serious one-on-one therapy in order to rejoin society as a functioning human,” Mr. Nelson said.

That was. Uh. A lot. Gwen didn’t know what to do with this information.

“Don’t worry, honey. The end all be all is that we got him stable. He likes Fogs and he likes Tues and the meds got him mostly even, so he’s not much of a threat right now,” Karen summarized.

Murderdock didn’t like anybody. Or anything. He wasn’t allowed to. Gwen couldn’t conceptualize him with—

Hold up.

“He likes you?” she asked Mr. Nelson. He gave her a curious expression and stopped petting. Murderdock’s eyes flickered and his arm jerked around as though to shove himself off the floor. Mr. Nelson sunk his fingers back into his hair and, like magic, the arm’s tension released and its elbow dropped. So did Murderdock’s eyes.

Way, way relaxed.

“I’m going to go with ‘yes,’ your honor,” Mr. Nelson said.

Gwen’s whole chest went from cold to bubbly and giddy and she had the jitters all of a sudden.

“He likes you,” she said. “You.”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Oh my god, no. You don’t understand—he likes you.”

Mr. Nelson looked over to Tats Spidey for more information, but he could only shrug. He looked back at Gwen.

“Matt’s my partner, Gwen. My husband for the last, what, going on nine? Ten? Years now. Of course he likes me. I don’t know if there is a universe where we wouldn’t be together; right Matty?”

There was a sneeze from the living room followed by a choke of pain and hushed murmuring. Eventually Mr. Murdock threw a ‘fucking duh,’ in their direction.

No, but they didn’t understand.

“Mr. Nelson, I told you. You’re the DA in my verse,” she tried to explain. “Him—he’s the kingpin. I work with you a lot; like. Trying to protect you from him, sometimes. But if he likes you, then maybe he likes. Maybe he likes my Mr. Nelson, too?”

“I dunno, let ‘em at each other and see what happens,” Mr. Nelson said offhandedly. “Actually, you probably don’t want to see what happens.”

“Gonna fuck,” Mr. Murdock illuminated helpfully from the other room. Matt made a scandalized noise and told him not to speak ill of his best friend. “Don’t worry, you two’re gonna fuck, too,” Mr. Murdock promised him.

“Don’t jinx it, you heathen,” Matt hissed. “Think of the HR violations.”

“The good thing about owning your own practice, is that you get to write those things,” Mr. Murdock said.

“That’s malpractice.”

“No, that’s just being practical.”

“Malpractice. You’re a disgrace to the legal profession.”

Peter B. suddenly stood up straight. He left the rest of them to go stand over the decent Murdocks in the living room.

“Say that again,” he said.

Gwen could just see over her shoulder the two laying on the floor become suspicious as hell. They kind of pressed closer together around the dog.  

“Mal…practice?” Matt offered nervously.

Peter B. stared emptily at him. Then his head snapped over to the rest of them.

“I have an idea.”

Miles woke up and felt like he was dying for a second, only to realize he was laying on the floor of Tats Spidey’s apartment with his own face directly over him.

He screamed.

Bitsy screamed.

And then people were rapidly all around him, fussing over him like no one’s business. He felt like he couldn’t get enough air in his chest. His whole body felt heavy and then flooded with relief.

Only part of that came from having finally escaped Peter’s endless recitation of dad jokes.

He could just about cry.

Gwen cried for him instead. She almost crushed him with the strength of her hug. She kept apologizing for some reason and it took Peter B. to get her to let go and explain to Miles what exactly was going on around him.

It looked like a veritable sea of paperwork.

It hurt his eyes to look at, so he pressed his forehead into Peter B. chest instead. His laugh was low and comforting and he, crucially, did not make any dad jokes.

He was the superior Peter.

Peter B. let him stay there, curled up across his lap, to get his bearings while he read through papers over his head.

“You happen to know if Peter is planning on joining us any time soon?” he asked after a little while. Miles found that light didn’t hurt his eyes anymore and pulled his head out of the safety of Peter B.’s sweatshirt to try to see what he was reading through.

It was a whole lot of text.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Malpractice,” Tats Spidey said firmly, leaned up against the other couch with a red pen stuck in the corner of his mouth.

“Miles, Peter?” Peter B. asked.

Oh, right.

“He’s the worst,” Miles told him. “He sang the Baby Shark song for a million years, Peter. A million. He kept forgetting where he was and he had to start over every time and now I’ve got the Baby Shark song in my head.”

Tats Spidey choked on the pen.

“I’m keeping him,” he said through peals of laughter. Miles thought that this reaction was not the appropriate one in the face of his pain and suffering. Peter B. snorted and shuffled to the next page in his hands.

“Yeah, he’s the worst, but he’s a techie and we could use his brain any time now,” he said.

Miles felt like he’d fallen asleep during class and had woken up in the last five minutes.

“Why do we need a techie?” he asked. “Did we get Doc Ock?”

Tats Spidey smashed his pen and moaned about it. Someone behind him in the kitchen threw another one at him and missed by a mile.

“Negative, space cadet,” Peter. B. said. Miles squirmed out from under his arm to look around and was stunned to find everyone else—literally everyone else on the team, sitting in various positions of academic contempt, reading through piles of papers like those in Peter B.’s hands.

Tats Spidey had produced a huge whiteboard and leaned it up against his wall. Someone had drawn a line down the center of it and then at the top of each section, drawn an angry octopus with glasses. One in blue and the other in green.

There were scattered notes under each section.

Little Spidey appeared to have melted under the burden of assigned papers. All that was left of her was a defeated arm, bent at the elbow, weakly grasping at two sheets covered in yellow highlight.

Louis stared at the work in front of him like he was staring directly into God’s eyes. Enraptured and unmoving. And the other Miles laid over the back of the loveseat, his head next to Tats Spidey’s.

And then there were all the Murdocks, and ‘all’ was indeed the right descriptor here.

There.

Were?

Three?

Well. There was Matt whose head kept dipping while his fingers traced page after page, and then there was Mr. Murdock laying with his whole weight on top of someone who was actively trying to kill him. Both the two visible Murdocks were heavily bandaged. The skinny Mr. Nelson arrived with a model and they both passed around coffee orders and congratulated Miles on his new lease on consciousness. Then that Nelson shooed Mr. Murdock off his prisoner and told the guy, who leapt up in a fury and made for the door, to sit down, shut up and be good.

Gwen watched with her hands plastered over her face in delight when the guy faltered and slowly, confusedly, followed the directive. Mr. Nelson shoved a pile of text into his lap and told him he was educated, and therefore had a job.

Then he sat down between that guy and his own Murdock on the floor and picked a few pages of his own out of their mutual pile to read.

Miles looked at Peter B. desperately for context.

“Ock got away,” Peter B. said, chewing on a pen cap, “All the DDs took a beating save Mr. Grumpypants over there who did some beating of his own—way to go, by the way, man, you really helped us out back there—and seeing as this is the second of our offensive plans which has failed, we decided that we’re gonna try a new tactic.”

The angry Murdock made a sound like he was dying and tried to escape again. He got to the door and went stiff like a cat because, at the same moment, it opened on its own.

Wade didn’t wear his mask this time.

He was pretty scary—with and without it; but he had a stunning smile under all that gnarled skin. That angry Murdock carefully edged away from him and settled back down, nervously, next to Mr. Nelson.

“Which is?” Miles asked, watching Wade sit down happily next to Red. The angry Murdock kind of squirmed a little further away from both of them. Mr. Nelson patted at his arm and put his assigned papers back into his lap.

“Which is that we are thinking smarter not harder. She wants to fuck with us, that’s fine. We’ll just ruin her career,” Peter B. said.

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Miles was missing something here.

“We’re doing what now?” he repeated.

There was a cry from the bedroom and Tats Spidey lit up like a Christmas tree.

“He’s back!” he cried. He dumped everything in his lap into a pile and was off like a shot into his bedroom. They all knew Peter was awake because they heard him say “oof!” and “Not this again.”

“Our techie has returned to us from beyond the grave,” Tats Spidey announced to the room shortly thereafter with a dazed Peter balanced on his shoulder.

“Tech..ie?” Peter repeated, flinching at the light.

“You ever published in a journal?” Tats Spidey asked relentlessly.

Peter stared at him. Then stared at everyone else in the room.

“Why is everyone looking at me?” he asked.

“Hey, hey, focus,” Tats Spidey said, “Journal. You. Published?”

Peter blinked at him.

“Uh, yeah. I guess. Co-authored a bit with my supervisor for a piece two years ago—why?”

Tats stared soulfully.

“What journal?” he asked.

Peter rubbed at his eyes, trying to keep up.

“Uh, Nature, I think. Or was that the one we got rejected from? I dunno, there were a lot. I taped all the rejections to the inside of the cabinets—why?”

“Because we need you, you precious ray of academic sunshine and tech support, to do help us do a little bit of academic finagling,” Tats Spidey said.

Miles pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t still dreaming. He wasn’t.  

“For an academic journal?” Peter clarified.

“Yes.”

“For what? I’m a biologist, I don’t—”

Tats Spidey’s undivided attention was entering ‘eerie’ territory. He hadn’t blinked in too long there.

“You’re a biologist,” he said.

“I—uh. Yeah. Chemistry. Biology. Kind of my thing,” Peter said nervously.

“I’m an engineer,” Tats Spidey told him.

“Oh, okay. That’s cool. Is that what we’re, uh, reading?”

Silence.

Tats Spidey jabbed a finger at the whiteboard and said, “You see that shit?”

Peter saw it. He was too terrified to say he hadn’t now, just as Miles was.

“Blue Ock is my Ock. He published all this shit; and I mean it’s absolute shit. Look at it. Failed to complete ethics board certification. Failed to record results in an accessible database. Failed to pass notes and all other records onto the funding body. And most importantly, results are on too small of a sample size to make any justifiable conclusions—BUT, this motherfucker got this shit published in Physics, which is some next level horseshit.”

Miles wasn’t sure he was following here. He tried to find Gwen for clarification but she didn’t meet his eye.

“Your Ock is in green,” Tats Spidey continued, “And she is a biologist, which I am but a shell of, but that’s not important. What’s important is that she, unfortunately, does follow procedure and best practice, etc. etc. EXCEPT. These two are the same horrible people, so they’ve got to have something in common here, we just need to find it.”

“And we’re finding that because?” Peter asked.

“Because we’re gonna sue her for malpractice,” Matt said simply.

Wait a second here.

“We’re suing Doc Ock?” Miles clarified.

“She only gets Fisk’s support because she’s got the name and status to keep his focus,” Peter B. said. “And then she gets away with all these shit because she’s the head honcho at her institute. She gets caught for plagiarism or academic dishonesty, and well. That’s enough to bring her back down to normal-people level. She won’t have access to the resources to keep ruining all our lives on the current scale she is.”

That was.

Remarkably sound.

“We don’t have to sue her,” Mr. Murdock clarified, “We just need to lodge a formal complaint. Need evidence to do that, though.”

“But how do you know she’s plagiarized or done this malpractice thing?” Miles asked.

Peter kind of winced. Tats Spidey waved it off like it was nothing.

“Dude, you have no idea how common this kind of shit is,” he said, “Something like 1 in 10 researchers at this level engage in some kind of plagiarism or falsification. Mr. Stark caught shit for it a few years back and now we have a fucking ‘show your work’ policy for everything in the lab. He even made us these special tablets for note taking and if he catches you without yours there’s hell to pay.”

“Good,” Mr. Murdock said.

Tats Spidey rounded on him.

“You’re cramping my style, old man,” he said. “Impinging on my academic freedom and creativity.”

“Peter, you are the tablet patrol in your labs.”

“Doesn’t make it any less dumb as fuck.”

“Oh, be careful, what if Mr. Stark hears you?”

There was a long, tense pause.

“I’m not scared of him.”

“Lie.”

“I’m not.”

“Anyways,” Peter B. interrupted, “Basically, those two are the same people so whatever the Doc Ock here got knocked on, chances are the Doc Ock in your verse ran into a similar choice. We just have to figure out which one it was she slipped up on, which means, unfortunately, we’ve got to go through her work with a fine-toothed comb looking for any of those things which are suspicious.”

Miles saw now that someone had set off a part of the white board at the bottom and scrawled inside it a list of things to look for including, “iffy citations,” “weird sample sizes,” “Numbers that do not add up to given values,” “percentages which do not add up to 100%,” “cure-all claims,” “any type of ‘cure’ or ‘solution’ language whatsoever,” “Noted lack of hedging words—i.e. may, might, could.”

“That’s…ambitious,” Peter said. He almost sounded impressed.  “I mean, unless you have a background in biology or stats, you wouldn’t necessarily—” he trailed off in the face of Tats Spidey’s intent expression.

Tats pointed at Mr. Murdock who did not acknowledge the finger.

“Valedictorian, Summa cum Laude, Columbia University,” he said. He moved onto Mr. Nelson. “Class VP, Summa cum Laude, Columbia University.” He pointed at Matt who snapped awake and looked around to figure out what was happening. “Alumni of?” Tats Spidey started.

“Oh,” Matt said. “Columbia.”

“Grade point average?”

“Uh, 3.95.”

Tats Spidey directed the finger at the hateful Mr. Murdock who grimaced at it.

“You’re a lawyer,” he said, “And a kingpin. You do stats in school?”

“No—”

“Yeah,” both the other Murdocks confirmed.

“Thank you. Me? Cornell grad, Masters. You?”

“Uh,” Peter said reluctantly, “NYU?”

“Wade’s ex-special forces. Bitsy is a baby genius, Louis went to Howard, Miles is probably also a baby genius, Gwen’s brilliant,—what I’m trying to say here is that we have a room full of fucking smart people. With the exception of Little Spidey, who we all know and love anyways--we can do this.”

“HEY.”

“I just said we know and love you, girl, it’s fine you can be dumb as fuck. We need some of them in the world, too.”

“Says the guy who walked in wet cement last week.”

“WE SAID WE WOULDN’T SPEAK OF IT.”

Peter B. hid his smirk with his hand and gave Miles a wink.

“I got a feeling this one’s gonna stick,” he said.