who you gonna call
“No one say a fucking word,” Brett threatened the other detectives in his car with him.
The silence didn’t last long.
“I think,” Willows started.
“This is,” Maynard added in with a grin.
“A job for Spiderman,” Ellen finished off.
Aw, fuck. Here we go.
When you’ve got a violent heist situation with some crazy enhanced person running up buildings, who you gonna call?
Foggy fucking Nelson.
First anyways.
“Brett, this is my living room.”
“Foggy, this is detective Maynard, Willows, and Hernandez. We are, unfortunately, in need of your services as an intermediary.”
“At one in the morning?”
“It’s kind of time-sensitive.”
“Does your mom know you go around knocking up the neighborhood at one in the morning?”
“Don’t you dare call her and phrase it that way.”
Foggy tried Peter’s cell phone but didn’t get anything. He tapped his lip.
“Oh, actually. You know who he’s probably with?”
Don’t say Deadpool.
“Daredevil.”
That’s worse, actually. Go back.
Foggy had Daredevil’s number too. He turned the phone on speaker.
“Hi, dying right now. Call you back?” Daredevil answered to the tune of rustling clothing and fists meeting flesh.
“I guess,” Foggy huffed.
They waited five minutes. Maynard asked Fogs where he’d gotten his couch and he wrote down the website for her. They debated the merits of suede. The phone rang again.
“You’re on speaker. Are you still dying?” Foggy asked. There was heavy breathing on the other side.
“30%?” was the uncertain answer.
“Closer to 20 or 40?”
“20.”
“Alright you’ll do. Is Spidey with you?”
“Huh?”
“Detective Mahoney and friends are in my living room. Is Spidey with you?”
“At one in the morning? Nah, he’s out on his own tonight, is it dire? I can track him down?”
Foggy looked at Brett with a raised eyebrow. Brett cleared his throat.
“It’s a little dire, Daredevil. We’d appreciate it if you’d do that. Where can we meet you?”
“Uhhhh,” Daredevil drawled, evidently trying to figure out where the fuck he was. “Let’s go with Bryant’s Park? Don’t think he’s that far away, let’s say half an hour?”
This was Brett’s life now. Setting up dates with vigilantes.
“Roger that.”
Brett needed the chanting in his car to quiet the fuck down because he was not excited to meet Daredevil and he didn’t need these bozos fattening the guy’s head even more.
Willows called him a stick in the mud and informed him that he was going to get it printed on mickey mouse ears for his monitor in the station. He found that he had no fucks to give about this.
They were at a disadvantage here and Foggy and Daredevil knew it. Brett’s team had to trust all these underworld punks if they were going to find their underworld punk, and Brett wasn’t even going to pretend to be happy about it.
Nevertheless, they got to Bryant’s park and were shortly thrown into cardiac arrest by the Devil crashing through the bushes behind them.
He’d done that shit on purpose, the asshole. He wouldn’t stop fucking laughing. He loved having the upper hand for once.
“Double D, that’s not nice,” their miniature asshole observed above them. He hopped down smoothly from the tree to pout at his buddy.
Double D did not give a shit, he was leaning against the tree trying to catch his breath.
“Dude,” Spidey scolded. “You’re absorbing Wade’s energy again.”
That earned him, not one, but two busted middle fingers. Spidey remained unimpressed and leaned out Brett’s way.
“You rang, detective?”
Fuck. Yes, he had.
Now that he knew the face under that mask, Brett had located a hidden well of anxiety within himself for the kid flinging himself off buildings in pursuit of a highly volatile, extremely dangerous adversary.
Daredevil watched him go in interest, then turned to Brett.
“They a fighter?”
“Who? Our perp?” Brett asked. Daredevil waited patiently for him to get past the dumb question.
“Yeah, she’s good at hand to hand. Blew through the museum guards like they were nothing.”
A horrible smirk stretched slowly across the Devil’s face.
“Sounds like fun,” he pointed out like a monster.
The other detectives decided that he was devastatingly handsome.
“Uh-uh. No. We don’t need two vigilantes,” Brett warned, “I’m already catching shit for going to one of y’all. I don’t need any more of your—”
“Kid’s shit at hand-to-hand. I mean, not hopeless, but you know. Could be better.”
Lord, Jesus above, how did he know that? No. Brett knew exactly how he knew that.
“He’s a good kid, DD. You leave him the fuck alone.”
All those pretty teeth and not an innocent bone among them. How the hell did he keep all of them in his head?
“Too late, Detective. Me and Wade have been corrupting him for nearly a year now. The current task is getting him to say ‘fuck’ in front of other people.”
That poor, innocent child. He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve Tony Stark to begin with, and he sure as hell didn’t deserve Daredevil on top of that.
“Don’t you got Castle or someone to piss off tonight?” he asked to redirect the guy’s interest.
Daredevil jerked in his direction like an excited hunting dog.
“He around? You seen him? Which way?”
It was like holding a tennis ball.
“Sighting up around Harlem. Go play.”
And just like that, Double D went crashing through the bushes once again.
Brett endured exactly one hour of his fellows fawning over Daredevil’s sexiness before Spidey caught them following up on a lead in the Upper West Side.
He held out a handful of material and a black backpack.
Some of the material of his own suit was missing and there was a perfect circle of teeth on his inner forearm. Brett looked at the evidence, then looked up at Spidey.
“You have all your shots, Pete?” he asked.
Peter’s wide, white suit eyes gave nothing away.
“Can people give each other rabies?” he asked. “I tried to google it but Karen’s being glitchy tonight.”
Karen…Page?
“No, the Karen—she’s my, uh. Nevermind. Here, take this.”
The second the bag left Peter’s hand, it was snatched and a speeding ball of red went hurtling off down the street with it to get hit by a car. The resulting crash and shattering of glass was deafening.
Peter shouted in frustration and grabbed at his head.
“Wade, no,” he cried. “Why would you even do that?”
“’Cause it’s a fake,” Daredevil’s voice interrupted from behind him. Peter whipped around and punched him right in the side of the head without thinking and, upon realizing when he’d done, started apologizing immediately. Daredevil stopped swearing long enough to check for blood, then shook himself upright.
“That was a good one,” he hummed approvingly, licking at a newly bitten lip. Spidey was not soothed by this. He offered to go get bandages, then got stuck between dealing with that or the now-burning car in the street.
Daredevil grabbed a fist full of the back of his suit before he freaked out entirely.
“No one’s hurt,” he said, “No burning flesh, no screaming.”
“But what about Wade?” the kid whined.
Brett thought it was a little unnecessary to point out that Wade Wilson could not die, that was kind of his thing. DD, however, conveyed most of the same message through a shrug. He licked at his lip again and started dragging Spidey off the opposite direction, ignoring the kid’s protests.
“Shush,” he finally snapped after a few yards, “All’s not lost. Wade’s dumb ass is fine. He’s stop-drop-and-rolling for the neighborhood kids. Gimme your arm.”
This was a wild statement in itself, but of all the possible statements to follow this up, Brett could not have expected, “don’t lick it” to be one of them.
He asked Maynard to punch him so he could make sure he was on the right planet still. She did. He was.
Daredevil promised Peter he wouldn’t lick the bite, he was just going to smell it.
“That’s still weird, Double D.”
“You want your jewel thief or no?”
“Fine. Don’t lick it, though, for real. I think it’s rabies.”
There was a thoughtful pause over in that corner of insanity, followed abruptly by a betrayed squawk and then a full volume cry for “WADE.”
This? This was every reason why Brett didn’t work with vigilantes. Every single reason, including the ones he’d never thought of before. The other detectives were charmed right out of their minds, like children on a fieldtrip.
Wade Wilson appeared as the fiery blaze around the corner was put out. He was bagless. He was huge. And he stopped dead in his tracks to follow a path with a wider berth around Brett and his troop of detectives.
His means of handling the immaturity going on just a little further down the alley was to toss little Peter over his shoulder and put a finger in Daredevil’s face.
Peter struggled to be put down while explaining the rabies situation. Daredevil bit Deadpool’s finger in the meantime and earned himself a headlock.
“We are all very annoying today,” Deadpool sang, wrenching poor Double D’s head back and forth and he swayed all three of them. Peter hammered at his back and told him that they didn’t have time for this, there was an angry jewel thief lady getting away.
Deadpool did not see how this was their problem. He informed Spidey that that was fine, but they had all agreed that the next team target was some Fisk associate, which made Daredevil stop struggling and remember why he’d gone out that night to begin with. He joined Spidey in trying to escape Deadpool’s grasp.
Brett’s sister would have called everything happening right then a ‘hot mess.’ So he decided he was going to condemn it a ‘hot mess’ too. He decided he’d had it with vigilantes for the night.
He’d barely gotten two steps back in the direction of the car, when he found himself being yanked back by the back of his coat. He grabbed for his gun but found himself staring up at the guy who could not die. Deadpool wasn’t looking back at him. He had zeroed in on something across the street. The other two menaces had done the same. All three of them, suddenly still as statues.
“Engaging Plan B,” Deadpool announced. “Red, you got a job to do, take her home and keep her there.”
He released the demon and the Devil was leaping through traffic not a breath of air later.
“Spidey, find the bag,” Deadpool instructed.
“Roger that.” The kid was gone before Brett blinked. Deadpool turned on their quad of badges and coats.
“Y’all are gonna want to distance yourself for a little while,” he told them calmly, “Go for a walk. Grab a cup of coffee. Your gal will be in the green off 12th avenue in about an hour.”
Brett was almost scared to ask why the sudden interest and organization, but Deadpool made his suit eyes wink at them before he sauntered off, whistling, in the direction the Devil had gone.
“This is so exciting,” Ellen chirped as they all closed the car doors again. “We should all just become vigilantes.”
The idea was appreciated but vetoed. They headed to 12th avenue to wait.
They got there and found nothing but didn’t have to wait long before the excitement found them. Daredevil came screaming across the green, followed by their museum thief who was suddenly far less investing in getting away with her goods than she was hellbent on stabbing him to death. Daredevil, for his part, kept stopping every so often to goad her into stabbing him to death. They collided and tussled every twenty yards or so, and every time, Daredevil threw the gal back and took off again.
It was less fighting and more the deadliest game of tag ever.
Brett then nearly tumbled over, himself, with the application of a sudden weight in his arms.
Spidey caught him before he fell to the ground and gave him some space to recover his balance and his dignity. Brett found that he was now holding another black backpack, identical to the first one Spidey had tried to hand over to him. This one, however, looked and felt like it weighed a ton. He didn’t know how Spidey had managed to carry it with him up there on the web.
Spidey did not join the scuffle happening in the grass. When asked why not, he whispered simply, “she bites.”
Wade Wilson turned up as nonchalantly as he’d left and, just like he had with Spidey, plucked their thief right out of Daredevil’s grasp. The Devil tensed at first at the sudden intervention, then saw that it was just Wilson and let himself fall limp and dare Brett say it, almost bored. The gal redirected her attention to trying to slash Wilson’s everything.
Wilson let it happen and hummed in appreciation while she did this.
She started to lose confidence in the face of his indifference. Then she appeared to figure out exactly who he was and that she’d been had and she started shrieking and squirming.
Wilson asked Brett and company over his shoulder if they wanted her wet or alive, which Brett didn’t get until Spidey helpfully informed him that Wilson was offering to dunk her in the water to cool her off a bit.
No, no, that wasn’t necessary. Spidey related this information to Wilson in a way which he could understand. Wilson was evidently disappointed, but out of nowhere, he slammed the lady onto her back in the grass and asked her, in no uncertain terms, where they could find the guy she was working for.
To her credit, if Brett had been in her place, he would have fucking talked, too.
Thus subdued, Wilson cheerfully handed her over to Brett and his fellows to be cuffed and taken with her bag to the station.
Brett wasn’t entirely sure how you thank a motley crew of vigilantes, so he followed his heart. Or rather, since his heart was out of ideas, he tried to follow Maynard’s heart. Unfortunately, Maynard’s heart was a Pinterest board and she thought that these fuckheads (and Peter) might appreciate cute little jars of hot chocolate mix.
Ellen’s heart was a little better because she suggested that they ask his good old buddy Nelson what the fuck vigilantes considered objects of thanks.
Nelson stared them dead in the eye and said, “Well, mostly two things: not being arrested or a very specific tennis ball. Although food also works in my experience.”
Nelson would not elaborate on the tennis ball. It couldn’t be just any tennis ball, if they didn’t have the tennis ball, it was going to come across as an insult. He strongly recommended edible goods. Said that Peter in particular had a crazy metabolism that burned through calories like no one’s business.
Brett did not tell his mother that he was baking for Daredevil because she was already Daredevil’s number one fan and she didn’t need to know she had a semi-direct line to the guy now. Instead, he told her he was baking for Spiderman and that was just as big of a mistake because she had opinions on the kid’s height and weight and their effect on the work he was trying to do.
He asked Nelson if he could hand off these goods to the guys the next time he saw them and he said, sure, he would probably see all three that week.
That Friday, he walked into the station and found a little thank you card on his desk. It didn’t have any signatures, but someone had dipped their thumb in a pool of blood and drawn a panda with a huge smile for him.
He let the other relevant detectives see it and then burned the thing as a sanitary violation.