Chapter 14
Where a bullet should have been lodged in Peter's arm, nanites were spreading.
More followed suit, blooming over his arm and racing toward his chest. The barrel of Fisk's gun sank as he stared, almost entranced, while the nanites appeared to overrun the man before him.
In the space of a couple seconds they had swallowed Peter up entirely until he straightened again, sheathed in the Iron Spider.
There was a comical beat of silence.
Then: “Surprise!” said Peter, firing a web at Kingpin's gun and yanking it from his grip before the stunned giant could recover from his shock. The weapon flew to Peter's hand and he emptied its chambers without further preamble. “No cheating,” he tutted, unconsciously echoing Miles's words from another universe.
“Where the hell did that come from?” demanded Davis from behind him.
“Told you I was wearing a suit,” Peter said over his shoulder. To Fisk he added, “This will go a lot easier if you surrender and come with me quietly.”
Peter didn't really expect Fisk would surrender and come with him quietly. They never did. Supervillain Trope Number One, just ahead of monologuing.
Frozen rain battered the penthouse windows, marring the skyline outside into streaks of color.
In another universe, thanks to the efforts of Ned Leeds while Peter was busy sneaking into—and, regrettably, busting out of—the Met, S.H.I.E.L.D would be waiting.
Everything clicked for the Kingpin. “You're Spider-Man,” Fisk said, eyes narrowing. “You're Peter Parker.”
“The one and only—in my universe, anyway,” Peter affirmed, rotating his shoulders to get used to the nanite suit. Part of him had admittedly been afraid there wouldn't be enough nanites to go around.
“So...that's why you did all this? Think if this dimension's figured you out, yours will too?” The industrialist's hands were clenched in shaking fists and Peter was struck by the man's utter obliviousness to decency, that he could first leap to a contrived, far-fetched theory of self-preservation as the motive behind Peter's actions, rather than the simple truth.
“No,” Peter told him, “We did all this because you're done ruining people. You're done.”
Peter shot webs at those ham-sized fists intending to pin them to the floor, but Fisk surprised him by immediately yanking forward. It was a common retort villains often tried in a fight but it was the strength behind it that surprised Peter, pulling him forward off his feet. He tripped forward and gracelessly regained his footing, spasming throughout, but by then Fisk was already barreling toward him.
Peter launched to the ceiling and webbed Kingpin's back before the industrialist's momentum could carry him to Davis. Yanking, Kingpin was pulled back in his tracks like an enraged dog stopped short by its harness.
Wong was moving before Peter even shouted for him. Another sizzling gold portal opened up, throwing sparks. Fixing it in midair, red glowing bands snaked from Wong's hands, whipping toward Fisk. All pretense had been abandoned and the only objective now was forcing Kingpin through that portal.
But Kingpin hadn't run out of Chitauri tech yet. Taking a page out of Wong's ancient tome, and shockingly fast, he whipped out a device that threw four glowing points in the air, stretching an iridescent blue window between them. Wong's Bands of Cyttorak passed through it and Fisk snapped the window shut, cutting off the Bands. They vanished in a flash of light.
“Matter Phase Shifter,” cautioned Davis.
Peter knew. It'd been a migraine clearing all Toomes's Chitauri tech from the streets in his own universe; Parker had his work cut out in this one.
With a venomous snarl Kingpin threw the points at the floor, creating another window, and jumped through it. Peter yelled and leaped for it, but glitching froze him halfway and he stumbled to a knee. Davis dived for the portal but it snapped shut just short of taking his head off.
“Shit,” Davis swore, slamming his knuckles to the ground. “Shit. He can't escape!”
“He can only go one floor at a time,” Peter said, quickly regaining his feet. “I'll take the outside, you guys stay indoors and try to herd him toward the windows.”
He didn't wait for their assent and hurtled toward the penthouse windows, which stretched ceiling to floor. One kick shattered the glass and he leaped out, twisting midair to reach for the skyscraper's sides.
Frozen rain pelted the Iron Spider with a metallic rhythm. Sleet slicked the tower's glassy exterior, and it became almost immediately apparent he wouldn't manage this with his usual panache. Over the years the act of controlling the molecular bond between himself and any surface he touched, the means by which he could stick to anything, had become as mindless as breathing.
Well, breathing wasn't mindless anymore. Every act demanded considerable effort now and he found himself having to devote more concentration than he'd ever had to climbing down the glass, energy sorely needed to marshal his atoms for the final charge.
This division of his attention resulted in a spastic bout of glitching and a heart-stopping slide down several feet of glass. Suddenly he became aware of just how very high up he was. New York City sprawled before him, bright even in the night-time, the neon signs of Times Square glowing like a lighthouse beacon on the distant shore.
His webs didn't stick as well to slick, icy surfaces and he didn't know if the nanites had packed a parachute. The suit's waldoes would only shatter the glass; there were no other surfaces on this godforsaken modern structure for them to find a purchase. If his ability to stick failed him, he was most likely toast.
“Okay, you've had better ideas,” he muttered to himself, carefully navigating down the glass side while keeping his atoms from spilling all over the place.
On the bright side, he'd certainly had worse.
The suit was equipped with a radar system he activated now. His viewscreen switched to a heat zone image, rendering everything in density-sliced pseudo color. Infrared alone didn't give him a clear view through the sleet-frosted glass, resulting in a visual feed difficult to interpret. Well, if something big and red barreled for him, that was warning enough.
His breath frosted the glass and created puffs of steam. Kingpin couldn't have traveled far, a few stories at most, but Peter was maneuvering too gingerly to keep up. Against his better judgement, Peter released his electrical grip on the windows and free-fell a few stories. He slammed his hands and feet back on the glass after a couple seconds, sliding another ten feet before he found a firm hold.
“Woah!” he yelped when the window above his head exploded into fragments.
Glass glanced off his suit as he dropped another two stories. Shards cut shallow swathes through the nanites which were quickly repaired, but his bigger concern was the Chitauri weapons now poking out of the hole in the building's side, aiming at him. Three hired grunts were firing deadly blasts of energy at his head.
“Kill him!” one screeched. “Kill Spider-Man!”
Peter actually took comfort from this. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear that,” he called back through the roar of the sleet. Kingpin hadn't thought to blurt out his real name when ordering his men to fire at Spider-Man.
If he escaped, though, he'd have all the time in the world.
Peter shot his remaining Volt Bolt at one of the guns, disabling it. Another narrowly missed and he had to make a bloodcurdling sideways leap to avoid the third, like a lunatic rock climber jumping from one stone handhold to another. One hand and both feet slipped, leaving him to swing from the three fingers which had managed to stick to the windows.
“Holy crap!” he shouted shakily, scrabbling at the glass. “Knock that off!”
They didn't. He planted his feet firmly on the glass and fired webs that claimed one of the other guns, but the third goon pulled back just in time. Then he leaned out the window again, firing once more.
Peter shot a web that finally found the third weapon and drew back to yank it from the man's grasp.
Instead, the stubborn jackass tumbled out of the window with it. Peter's eyes widened in horror as he saw the man drop in freefall, now screaming.
In an eyeblink the man hurtled past Peter. He wrenched one hand away from his precarious hold and fired a web that caught the grunt's back, stopping his downward flight a couple stories down and swinging him into the tower's glass side.
The man stopped screaming at falling from seventy stories up and started screaming at being suspended from seventy stories up.
“It's not a picnic for me either, pal,” Peter snapped at the guy.
His chest burned. He was using too much energy. He could feel it, like a racehorse breaking too fast around the last turn and saving nothing for the final stretch.
A pinging alert notified him of an incoming call, which was piped in through the Iron Spider's internal audio system.
“Well, well, my prodigal suit returns to its reality,” came Stark's sarcastic greeting. If Peter's viewscreen had not switched to infrared he would have been treated to Stark's irate face.
“Not a good time,” panted Peter, peering at shadows through the glass.
“You won't get a good time. Not after you robbed me blind!”
“Overstatement,” Peter objected. “I needed a suit—”
“You have a suit!”
“I had to give it to Wong! No—shut up for a second—I'm at Fisk Tower, this is almost over. Prowler's bailed on Kingpin, I have S.H.I.E.L.D waiting, I just need to detain Fisk long enough for Wong to get to him!”
This was enough to stall Stark mid-yell.
Peter glanced down at the jerk he'd saved, who had subsided into high-pitched whimpering. He didn't dare remove another hand to hoist the man up.
“You know that suit has an override,” Stark said in a flat voice.
“Yeah,” said Peter. “And you know I haven't had time to program a bypass.”
There was a long, baited moment. Peter tensed, wondering if he should try to shed the nanite suit depending on the next syllable Stark said. He was about to explain his delicate position at the moment when Iron Man spoke.
“Fisk Tower?” he said shortly.
“Yeah. I gotta go, I'm playing King Kong with Fisk. And no, I don't know which of us is Kong.” Glitching mangled his words and he slid down a yard. The hanging grunt shrieked at the sudden, sharp drop. Peter made to end the call but more seizing prevented the intuitive suit from interpreting his command right away and he froze against the building.
Stark didn't miss this and said: “Your shot clock's winding down. Make it fast—”
A hand crashed through the window directly before Peter's face. Peter yelled in surprise as the fist wrapped around his neck, suspending him eight hundred feet in the air, then dragged him close to the broken glass.
Fisk's face loomed through the gaping cavity, wild-eyed with fury. Rendered in infrared, he appeared a demon.
Helpless before the glitching, Peter struggled pathetically against the fingers gripping his throat. His strength was draining fast. Every last reserve was now focused solely on keeping his atoms from tearing themselves apart.
“Pete?” Stark demanded unexpectedly, still connected.
Peter ended the call. “Sorry,” he gasped, “wrong number. Damn sales calls—”
“Look at you,” breathed Fisk through bared teeth. “You're falling apart.”
“OK, ow, way harsh,” Peter panted. He'd found Fisk—yay—and hopefully Wong would show up any second. All he had to do was stall. “That's kind of your fault, you know.”
Kingpin pulled him inside and threw him bodily to the floor. Still connected to the dangling henchman outside, he was just able to transfer the lifeline to the ceiling before Fisk wrapped his giant hand around the back of Peter's neck.
Peter activated the waldoes, which struck Fisk in his face and chest, throwing him backwards. “Wong!” Peter hissed over his communicator as Kingpin lurched back to his feet. “I found Fisk. We're on...crap, I don't know what floor we're on. Maybe twenty down from the penthouse.”
“On my way,” said Wong crisply.
This was about the only reassurance Peter had as Fisk charged like an angry bull. There was a matador gag in that somewhere. By this point in most fights, he'd usually made way more dumb jokes but he was in too much pain to come up with a punchline. Automatically, his viewscreen reverted from infrared mode to normal, which did not make Fisk look any less demonic.
He didn't even have time to appreciate that they seemed to be in a kind of ballroom resembling the party they'd crashed in Miles's dimension, floored in expensive shining hardwood. He skittered back on the waldoes, which then retreated into the suit to let him crouch and fire a web at Fisk's face, blinding him.
Panting, Peter leaped with barely enough energy to clear Kingpin's head, grabbing his shoulders and throwing him into the floor in a Lucha Libre move Fisk could probably appreciate. He had no more mustard to put on it, however, and the hit wasn't forceful enough to knock the giant out. Howling in rage, Fisk's hand shot out in uncanny reckoning of Peter's location and grabbed his skull.
Somewhere he'd gotten another Glock. Blindly, he put it against Peter's head and emptied the clip into it.
The Iron Spider was bulletproof. However, the shock of seven bullets fired repeatedly in one spot, point-blank, thinned the nanites until Peter was left with a ringing headache. He threw a right hook solidly into Kingpin's chest, winding him without doing much else. Peter was no longer capable of much else.
Fisk did not lose grip of Peter's head. If not for the suit, he would have crushed Spider-Man's skull in his fingers.
Glitching almost did the work for him. Kingpin's hand clutched at air as Peter's head phased in and out of this universe.
Peter cried out in pain and staggered back with clenched teeth while Kingpin tore at the webbing over his eyes. Nothing would dislodge it save for Spider-Man's solvent.
Wong appeared like a godsend in the far end of the hallway, Davis following close behind.
Was it just him, or did they appear out of focus?
Peter tried to web Fisk up again, he really did, but when he raised his hand it fractured into shards of color and so did the rest of him. In the space separating Fisk from Wong and Davis, there wasn't much they could do as the giant heard them coming and grabbed Peter by the scruff of his neck in another wild guess at his bearings, producing the Matter Phase Shifter and holding the device perilously close to Peter's jugular.
“One more step and I'll guillotine him,” Fisk growled lowly.
The Iron Spider was bulletproof, not portal-slicing-through-the-head-proof. It would cut through the nanites like cheese. Though Wong still approached cautiously, making no noise, Fisk had the upper hand. Davis was tensed, white eyes narrowed in the mask Fisk had given him.
Peter cursed his own swiftly dying strength. He always had strength. That's why being tired was never enough to stop him. Superhuman durability had always robbed him of any excuses.
But he was every kind of tired now.
Fisk backed up, blind to the rapidly closing gap between them and the gaping window, through which sleet was showering. He must have felt it on his back.
Peter strained against the grip. His chest fragmented with each heavy inhale. Every atom was rebelling against this universe. Sensing his difficulty breathing, the nanites receded from his face to give him more air.
“Careful of the edge!” he hissed.
Fisk stopped. “You all get out,” he snarled in Wong and Davis's direction. “Get out before I throw him out!”
He twisted to the side so that Peter's right flank was exposed to the shattered, open window. He felt sleet on his cheek.
“This doesn't have to end with anyone dying,” Wong said calmly, as though to a skittish horse.
“What he said,” grunted Peter.
“It does now,” Fisk said wildly. “That's the only way it ends now. I won't spend my life on the Raft. I will not give up my empire! You will take it,” he roared, “over my dead body or his!”
Peter was forcefully reminded of Olivia Octavius's final abandonment of all reasoning, back at the supercollider, and knew Kingpin had reached the same point. It existed beyond rationale and ended only at an ultimatum of its own feral reckoning. Supervillain Trope Number Fifty-Six.
“If it makes you feel any better, I might die anyway,” he informed Fisk, haughty despite the glitching. “Your leverage isn't that great. I'm Monopoly money.”
Kingpin made an animalistic noise. Shaking Peter roughly, he yelled, “SHUT UP!”
“My enemies tell me that only half as often as my frenemies,” gasped Peter, stalling again for Wong to move closer. “I don't shut up for anybody, pal.”
Abruptly he put every last ounce of strength he could cobble together or invent to duck and get out from under Kingpin's grip, knocking aside the Matter Phase Shifter before Fisk could bring it up to bear. Wong raced forward and moved his hands in the preparatory motions of creating a portal.
Kingpin reached again for Peter's neck right as his bottom half glitched, abruptly throwing Fisk off balance and sending him stumbling toward the window, Peter trapped in his grasp.
Dimly he heard someone shout, “NO!”
It could have been any one of them.
Kingpin and Peter careened out the window and fell.
Rain kept pace as they plunged, down and past the panicked henchman still dangling from a web, down the endless plain of glass.
Peter struggled to free himself from Kingpin's grasp. The waldoes sprang out and scrabbled at air like a spider's death throes. They tumbled end-over-end in a fatal tangle, pulled inexorably to Earth.
If he could just get loose he might be able to activate something else in the suit to save them, but whether out of panic or rage Kingpin kept a stranglehold on his neck and Peter had just spent his last strength. He couldn't throw him off.
Fisk Tower loomed up and away. The tops of other skyscrapers joined it, rising like imperious judges in Peter's plummeting line of sight.
Desperately he fired webs at the building's sides, but in the sleet they snapped under the pressure of Peter and Kingpin's velocity.
He couldn't survive this fall.
“Let go!” he snarled. “LET GO!”
Kingpin only drew his lips back in a wordless howl, clawing at Peter, the only thing he could reach.
Twisting around, Peter saw the terrifying visage of the street rushing up to meet them. Out of some dormant instinct the mask drew back over Peter's face. Nanites, though, would not save him from shattering against the pavement.
No one braving the frozen rain was looking up; they were huddled beneath umbrellas and would not know of the two men falling from the sky until they smashed against the concrete.
All but one face directly below, turned up to watch them.
Wong?
As he craned his head down to stare, the sorcerer made a motion like he was stirring a pot and a gold portal sizzled open parallel to the ground. Beyond it Peter saw a black sky to match the one he was falling from.
“KEEP STILL!” he bellowed at Kingpin, who miraculously stopped thrashing.
They fell, and fell, and the concrete raced closer, and they crashed down toward it...
And then they kept falling.
All of a sudden the rain vanished, save for the last sleet that escaped the portal above them before it shut. Peter spun and saw they'd reset at the top of Fisk Tower, except it wasn't the same one they'd just left.
The air was clear.
This time Peter lost no time in spinning Kingpin around, wrapping him up in the same cocoon he'd used to trap the three Avengers back at the base. Taken by surprise, Fisk had barely a chance to resist.
Peter quickly fired a web at the far end of the building, allowing them forward momentum to swing without the neck-breaking jerk of a sudden stop.
At the bottom of the Tower, red-and-blue flashing lights reflected off the Tower. Peter let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Good old Ned. Thank God for Wong's quick thinking.
They descended to the ground again, much more slowly than the first time. This tower wasn't so tall as the one in Parker's universe. It was still kind of a hair-raising drop, made more so by the glitching Peter was unable to bottle up anymore.
He dissolved the webs that covered Fisk's eyes. Peter wanted him to see what was coming.
Blinking once his vision was clear, Kingpin struggled against the webbed straitjacket, craning his head and seeing a distant fleet of S.H.I.E.L.D vehicles waiting for him. “What—what the—”
It didn't take long for him to cotton on. “NOOOO!” he screamed, swinging in his bindings. “NO! I'LL KILL YOU!”
“You brought this on yourself,” Peter told him tiredly. What Kingpin had brought on himself, he'd brought on others too.
At long last they touched ground, twirling gently. Fisk lay bound in the webbing, looking like an unfinished mummy. Peter never thought he'd be so happy to have two feet on solid pavement again. Maybe adrenaline was on his side because he managed to stay upright, though with considerable effort.
S.H.I.E.L.D agents approached with upraised weapons. Against the police lights they were framed in silhouette, dark shapes in the night. Automatically Peter's eyes searched for a familiar face.
Behind them, in the gathered crowd around the police cordon, he saw Ned's beaming grin. Peter gave a little wave and Ned returned it enthusiastically, earning slightly impressed looks from bystanders.
Kingpin was not taking the loss well. His irises were rimmed with white; his nostrils flared, and his chest heaved. “No,” he said again, through his teeth.
“This is a kinder fate than you might have gotten in your universe,” Peter said quietly. “You'll live.”
Fisk's wild eyes found him. “You think you've won?” he sneered, his face twisted and ugly with hate, alternating red and blue before the police lights. “You've just changed places with the boy. I'll tell them all. S.H.I.E.L.D and the FBI and all the rest. They'll all know Spider-Man is Peter Parker!”
Bargaining never crossed the man's mind. Others might have tried to negotiate with Peter or even threaten him, holding their final card above his head, but Fisk took it and slammed it in his face. He would go down taking Peter's name with him.
“Shout it from the rooftops, for all I care,” said Peter.
This wasn't the answer Kingpin was expecting. He lapsed into stumped silence.
“You know, I've been a soloist for a long time,” Peter went on, putting a hand to his chest with dramatic irony. “I dunno how much that will change, but I have learned one thing these past couple of weeks: 'Cheers' was right.”
Fisk stared at him uncomprehendingly.
Peter leaned in. “Sometimes, you just wanna go where everybody knows your name.”
One of the dark silhouettes stepped forward, slighter and shorter than the rest and wearing a black suit, emblazoned with a bright red spider.
“Hey,” said Peter.
“Hey man,” Miles Morales said with cocky cheer. “Just couldn't stay away, could you?”
.
.
Fisk was led away with every security measure known to S.H.I.E.L.D, which was considerably more than any known to everyone else. It was a little like watching a crowd of people maneuver one of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. After talking with them in a questionably low timbre Peter suspected he'd adopted for dealing with the police, Miles jogged back over lightly.
"Our universe will take it from here," he said brightly.
Crouched on the ground, hand to his ribs, Peter called hoarsely over to the armed operatives shepherding Fisk away: “Careful, the webs only last a couple hours. Then it's all you.”
A granite-jawed agent nodded at him and turned to pass the information along to her colleagues.
Still refusing to concede defeat, Fisk reared his head back and screamed above their heads: “IT'S PETER PARKER! HE'S SPIDER-MAN! PETER PARKER—”
“Duh,” one of the younger agents said annoyedly while forcing his head through a door, “one of 'em, anyway. You been living under a rock? Knock it off!” The other agents rolled their eyes, and soon the confounded Fisk was stuffed into the back of a heavily fortified S.H.I.E.L.D van.
Miles snickered at the sight. “Someone should introduce him to his doppelganger,” he commented. “Think they'd get along?”
They'd probably bond over a mutual desire to exterminate all known Peter Parkers. “Knowing my luck, I wouldn't press it.”
His giggle turned to ragged coughing. At this point he was glitching more often than he was whole.
Though Miles wore his mask, Peter could read the worry on his face clear as day. “We gotta get you back,” said Miles with a kind of anxious calm. “Ned said they have to stick you in a rock tumbler.”
Ned himself sidled up, casting a sideways glance at agents and police content for the moment to ignore him. Eyes on Peter's constant, shivery oscillating, he said lowly, more to Miles than Peter: “Wong'll be here any second.”
Together they watched Peter heave to one knee, then helped him stand. All the while, Ned craned his head looking for Wong.
“I see you're still in one piece,” Peter rasped to Miles with a lopsided grin.
Miles matched it. “I see you still aren't.”
Head hanging, Peter briefly closed his eyes and laughed. “Good going, kid. Not bad.”
Even though he'd had faith that Miles would take care of things on his end, and had even banked on it, he was really proud of the kid. And, similarly, of Ned. OK, he definitely wanted kids.
Miles caught a look at Ned's shoes, the same he and Parker had admired in the shop window on the way to Bleecker Street. “Sweet kicks, man. Where'd you get those?”
“My dimension. You want a pair? You'd be the only one in this universe with 'em. You can say it's a, like, really limited edition. Like, exclusive.”
The two sniggered and Peter rolled his eyes.
“Wong's here,” Ned announced, suddenly brisk.
Peter looked in the direction Ned was pointing. “Where?” He couldn't see him.
Ned frowned, looking at Peter and back to where Wong was approaching. “Right there.”
“I can't—” Peter squinted. All he saw beyond Miles and Ned were bright swatches of color and light. Swirling police lights assumed an abstract light show in his vision. He looked back to the boys' faces and realized even those were starting to blur and split. “I think—”
He reeled. The pain hit again like a lightning strike.
Ned shouted something but it was garbled and nonsensical.
Before, it was Peter who had been fracturing but now it was the rest of the world that seemed to fall apart.
Peter lurched and fell.
His vision splintered completely and he convulsed in fragments on the ground, on his side. Indiscriminate noises rose and fell like pulsing static, with no reason or comprehension.
His head was submerged by the blight and it drowned out all else. Overwhelming pain built to a white-hot pitch at which he almost couldn't feel it anymore, as though he'd stuck a hand under scalding-hot water. In the eyeblinks between searing glitches, his side heaved like a dying animal.
Peter couldn't fight it now. He still tried, lame swats at a raging beast, but his atoms had made the decision for him and said no more.
What was everyone doing? He couldn't tell, it was as though he were growing more distant from his own eyes. There were shadows and movement at the other end of the tunnel but he could not see. Everything was color or it exploded into white static; there were no shapes or faces anymore.
You traitors, he wanted to shout at his cells, dumb mindless things that did not understand they were killing themselves, just idiotic lemmings diving off the cliff one after another. I thought you wanted to go home!
He gasped for air but his lungs were heading elsewhere.
What an ugly way to die, some weird grisly voice said from deep within his skull, from the last rapidly shrinking bastion of conscious thought. It didn't feel like it even belonged to him. And there won't be anything left to bury.
MJ was waiting. He'd promised her.
Peter always wanted to go out on a joke. But everything went red, then black, before he got the chance.