in technicolor

It started with a t-shirt.

It showed up on Amazon and Brett laughed for far too long before ignoring it and buying a new HDMI cable. His mom was insistent that the Nelsons would have one of these at the store, but Brett had once watched Fogs explain to his dad in four different ways what the difference between hardware and software was.

If Edward Nelson had purchased an HDMI cable for the store over the last month or so, it could only be by mistake.

He left the computer at that.

Sasha came to pound on his door wearing said shirt and demanding that he introduce her to fucking Spiderman already. She’d brought friends this time, god. He was a cop, for crying out loud, these kids were supposed to be afraid of him. He went downstairs and snapped the door open between her knocks so fast that she screamed and leapt back. Then called him a jerk.

“Brett, you have to,” she informed him. The kids around her went awkward and refused to make eye contact. “We got his shirt. We’re basically friends now.”

Right, because that’s how that worked.

“No,” he told her. And slammed the door.

“BRETT,” she shrieked on the other side, “I’M TELLING NANA BESS.”

Fine. Tell her. See if he cared.

Goldberg walked into the station to drop off some paperwork and the whole place went quiet and still. Maynard’s mouth fell open and her grip on her thermos went dangerously slack. Ellen’s face over her current clipboard went drawn and tight. The Captain stopped talking to Brewer and started to turn purple.

Goldberg finally realized that no one was fucking talking, including Brandy at reception across from him and looked around.

“What’d I do?” he asked, because by then it was basically a guarantee that he’d done something, it was just a matter of what.

“What the fuck is that?” Maynard barked, jabbing a finger at his chest. At the abdomen of the spider stretching its legs up and down the guy’s front.

“Ah,” Brewer sighed, “My roommate got it for me as a joke and then broke our damn washer last night, so I had to take all my shit to the laundrymat. This is all I got that ain’t a uniform right now.”

Yeah.

A joke.

Real funny.

The Captain made a strangled noise behind his teeth and stormed off to slam his office door closed behind him. Besides the fact that that kind of shit was just going to encourage local vigilantes, the Captain and Peter had developed a…complex relationship. Brett might even go as far as to say that the Captain was jealous that Peter liked Brett and Maynard and flat out refused to work with, talk to, or accept bribes from anyone else. Including you-know-who.

It didn’t help that Peter had started to occasionally go out of his way to find Brett or Maynard these days to alert them of something going afoul in the city which he either didn’t want to deal with or didn’t have time to deal with. Naturally, he demanded payment for these tips. Which was how Brett discovered that tips could be purchased for lollipops. The Dum-Dum brand specifically. He tried tootsie roll pops once and had been met with disgust and betrayal, and more importantly, a drop-off in the number of tips being brought to his attention over the next two weeks. So, Dum-Dums it was; he had a whole bag of them in his car now because this was his fucking life.

Although, that being said, they did come in handy for scared kids and for, oddly enough, getting Jessica Jones to cough up a few tidbits of info of her own.

He made a note in the notebook to investigate favorite foods and sweets among the night folk for the purposes of softening future interactions. Then the notebook was confiscated by the Captain for the time being so that all the information in it might be recorded in non-shitty handwriting. Brett wondered if he’d ever be getting it back at this rate.

Goldberg bared his teeth awkwardly and informed the room that he was just gonna go now.

It was the best thing for everyone.

It was fine—well, it was whatever—until a load of shit went down with Matt and then out of the blue, suddenly he had a shirt.

It read, in giant white block letters on a red background “I AM NOT DAREDEVIL.”

Matt had three printed for himself, one in red (of course), one in black with the words encased in a neat red rectangle, and an inverse of the red one, so that he could wear it unobtrusively under his white collared court shirts and bust it out, Superman-style, for any lingering paparazzi trying to get in his face on the way back to his office.

Matt was basically a model, what with his far too pretty face, far too toned abs and ass, and ridiculous hipster glasses. And his antics all essentially amounted to free advertising for Able’s Printmaking around the corner.

People in Hell’s Kitchen fucking loved that shirt. Brett looked up one day and instead of all those damn “Supreme” logos, he was looking at the word “Daredevil” plastered across everyone’s chest. Including the kid sitting in front of him with a smashed nose and a missing tooth, trying to explain that he and his buddies weren’t trespassing, sir, they were just trying to practice their parkour.

Brett stared at the kid. Then stared at his shirt. Then back at the kid.

He eventually got it.

He was let off because they truly couldn’t find anything on him or any of his other buddies besides a load of dumbass. And dumbass was, thankfully, not a malicious or illegal substance at this stage of the game, otherwise, they’d have run out of holding cells at the station.

Brett drew the line at Wade’s shit, because that stuff was far, far to cute to represent all of Wade’s Wade-ness.

Some folks, however, thought the logo was adorable and made a Spidey version of it. Some other folks would swap one of the half-moon sides of Wade’s logo for half of a Spidey version and went along on their way, talking about how they just loved those two, weren’t they cute together?

No.

No, they weren’t.

Wade was the worst influence. He’d taught Peter how to open bottles with his teeth. His teeth for fuck’s sake. That wasn’t even bad vigilante shit, that was just bad life shit. Kid had a chipped right canine now, but he was oh-so proud of himself. He did his new trick for Brett and smiled at him beatifically before handing Brett a beer he was way too young to have purchased.

Now where could he have gotten that from, huh?

Three guesses.

“May trusts them, man, what can I say?” Foggy sighed.

“You can say that underage drinking is a crime,” Brett pointed out reasonably. Fogs gave him a look flatter than Kansas.

“Dude.”

“Shut up, I don’t wanna hear it,” he countered.

“Dude, we drank so much.”

“That was before I got a badge,” Brett qualified.

“Yeah, and after you crammed a stick up your ass.”

Well, Fogs was in a mood. Probably had to do with the fact that his latest hobby including dragging his boyfriend out of fights with reporters.

“It’ll pass,” Brett tried to assure him. Foggy groaned and dropped his forehead onto the tile of his kitchen counter.

“Will it, though?” he lamented.

“It’ll pass.”

It didn’t.

Brett could not fucking believe that he’d gotten his ass woken up in the middle of the goddamn night by his childhood neighbor to come break up a fight in the middle of the goddamn street.

When he got there, still in his pajamas since the journey of two blocks hardly warranted a dramatic costume change, he was met with, not Daredevil, but Battlin’ Jack’s fucking kid laying the fuck into a guy who was becoming increasingly hellbent on killing him.

It was hard to decide who to arrest. Especially because both of them were drunk as hell and screaming expletives at each other.

Brett couldn’t quite make out the whole situation because he was busy half-laying on Matt, trying to calm him down enough so that he would remember that he was not wearing one of his ninja get-ups and so needed to play poor, defenseless blind man, but what he rapidly became aware of, while waiting for backup to get the other guy under control, was that for once Matt hadn’t started it. His neighbor tried to explain over Matt’s uncoordinated jerking and squirming, that she’d heard someone shouting really loudly outside her window and had peeked out to see Matt tapping his way home, swaying a bit.

She’d called Brett when the other guy had grabbed ahold of the back of his shirt and started calling him names. Matt had, in his fairly intoxicated stupor, gotten a good hit into the guy’s jaw and tried to meander away from there, but the other guy was bigger and drunk and persistent and had gotten ahold of him again. That’s when the fight had really started.

Teesha was terrified for her neighbor. So was most of the crowd which had gathered by the time Willows and Brewer got there to lay on the other guy.

Brett tried to reason with Matt who had moved rapidly through being drunk and aggressive as fuck to being drunk and sad and sick-looking. Brett knew, he just knew if he put him in the car he’d puke all over everything.

Willows asked him what was the hold up and he sighed and grabbed Matt’s shoulder. He startled and jerked as though to lash out again.

“Hey. It’s me, it’s Brett,” Brett said. Matt cocked his head a bit and made a confused sound. Senses must have been all jumbled up from the head-smashing and liquor. “Easy, man. You’re drunk as hell. Some guy beat up on you. We gotta go to the station.”

Matt blinked at him. Glasses gone. Brett looked around but couldn’t find them, or the cane for that matter.

“Man, be cool,” he said, hoping that Matt understood. He guided him to the car and put a gentle hand on his head to keep him from smashing it against the roof.

Matt was really feeling them extra shots and was way off his game. The other guy in the altercation took his moment of weakness to call him a series of names unfit for polite or hell, public company. Matt lifted his head out of the trashcan to wipe his mouth and shout a few back at the guy.

Brett sighed.

Willows shook his head and carried on with the paperwork.

Matt grumbled something into the can, but Brett couldn’t make it out over the wretching. He figured that maybe once he finally got some of that liquor out, he’d be sober enough to make words happen in sentence.

In the meantime, he called Foggy.

The tragic irony of it all was that the screaming dickface informing the room of Matt’s alleged sexuality was wearing one of those Daredevil shirts. He obviously had missed their whole backstory. Or maybe he hadn’t? Maybe he’d seen Matt and gone up to him to talk about the shirt, but Matt had been at that fun point of intoxication where he didn’t want to talk to anyone, he just wanted to find and cuddle Fogs or Karen or honestly? Whoever and whatever the hell you put in his hands.

Matt was kind of a cute drunk, Brett could admit that much. Although it took a hell of a lot to get him there. Brett hoped that this other guy hadn’t been within reach at the time of meeting. That would make things complicated, even if it would certainly explain a lot.

Willows sarcastically asked the guy in the cell if he was wearing the Daredevil shirt for the irony and then the tables fucking turned like Brett’s stomach.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the guy slurred, “I am Daredevil. And this—this—this fucking poser’s all over here tryin’ to, tryin’ to get in on my good fuckin’ name.”

What.

Seriously. What?

Matt made a curious sound and took a break in trying to pop his thumb out of its joint to escape the handcuffs Brett had had to put on him to keep him trapped to his desk. He didn’t want to put him in the cell as he was, without his cane and disoriented, but he also could not be trusted not to wander off on his own in that very same state.

“You’re Daredevil,” Willows repeated incredulously. “Is that a fact, man, or are you talking out your ass?”

“Fuckin’ yeah, I’m Daredevil” the belligerent shithead snarled, “What, you think some puny-ass motherfucker like him’s got shit on me? C’mere motherfucker, we’ll go. Let’s go. Can take your ass lying down.”

Brett thought that pointing out that taking a blind guy in a fight wasn’t exactly a show of physical prowess was not a move to be appreciated at the present time. Matt, though, bless his heart, took that one hard.

“The fuck you saying?” he slurred in that guy’s direction. “Y’ain’t need eyes to catch your ugly mug, pal. ‘S a pretty wide fuckin’ target.”

“C’mERE YOU LITTLE—”

Jesus Christ. This was all so unnecessary.

“I’m DAREDEVIL, YOU HEAR ME?” the guy roared, “ME. NOT YOU.”

“ALRIGHT, FUCKIN’ HAVE ‘IM, ASSHOLE. SEE IF I CARE,” Matt roared back.

There was a pause.

The guy in the cell frowned, evidently confused at having been given his way so easily. Matt scoffed at him and folded his arms across the edge of the desk. He dropped his head into them and scoffed again. Brett could have sworn he heard him mumbling something but decided not to engage. They had bigger problems on their hands.

Matt was asleep by the time Fogs got to the station to pick him up. And Brett and Willows were shaking their heads because by then the Captain had been there for fifteen minutes, too. He couldn’t exactly not be. They had a moron claiming that he was Daredevil in their custody and now they were going to have to investigate him at 3 o’clock in the damn morning.

This was madness.

Daredevil was right behind them, snoozing and drooling adorably on his arm while slowly slipping off the corner of Brett’s goddamn desk. Investigating this other guy could not be a greater waste of time or resources. The Captain knew this. The Captain was still beyond convinced that Snoozy over there was the real Daredevil, but he’d already bungled his chance to sort that out and so now he was faced with this shit.  

Matt fell off the desk and wrung his hand right before Foggy got there.

The Captain sighed like he was staring into a bottomless well of hopelessness.

“Sir, we need you to really think about what you’re saying,” he tried to reason with their new angry friend. “This is a very serious allegation—”

“He—him—that guy over there. He thinks—he thinks he’s Daredevil, you know that?” Friend Andrews informed them. Brett had found Friend Andrews’s wallet which had bestowed upon them his good name and thirteen bucks in ones.

The Captain looked over his shoulder at Matt who Fogs had managed to wake up and was presently trying to talk some sense into. It wasn’t working. Matt had finally been reunited with the optimal hugging target. The only thing holding him back was the handcuff, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him.

He did not look very Daredevil-like.

“Sir, that was a story run by the press,” the Captain said carefully. “Mr. Murdock has denied these allegations; he does not claim to be—”

“ME. I’M DAREDEVIL. ME,” Friend Andrews informed them at max volume. “And Imma put ‘im—that guy, Imma put him down, lemme tell you that.”

God, way to find the exact wrong thing to say.

“Mr. Andrews, are you suggesting that you wish to cause Mr. Murdock bodily harm?” the Captain groaned, rubbing his eyes in exhaustion.

“Yeah, I fuckin’ am,” Andrews said.

“Is that why you jumped him?” The Captain asked.

“No, no, you ain’t listenin’. I jumped ‘im ‘cause I’m Daredevil.”

Yep. Totally.

“Mr. Andrews, here’s what I need you to do, son,” the Captain negotiated, “For everyone’s benefit right now, I need you to drink that water over there and sit down for a minute, alright? You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“No, I do,” Andrews insisted. He yanked his shirt forward so that he, as well as the three officers in front of him, could read it. “Here. Says I’m Daredevil. Right here.”

Ah.

No. Nice try, though. There's a big “Not” you’re missing there, buddy.

“Alright, we’re gonna go ahead and call this one drunk and disorderly for now,” the Captain decided. “Mr. Murdock, are you--?”

No. Whatever the Captain thought he might have been, he wasn’t. Fogs had done his best, though, and gotten him more or less back into the chair.

“Witness says it was self-defense,” Brett told the Captain from his left side. Matt nuzzled into Foggy’s neck and made soft happy noises. Fogs tried to convince him that this would be easier if he unfolded the leg he’d twisted under himself.

No dice. Could not possibly compromise prolonged contact for comfort.  

“He’s too drunk to be making decisions on his own right now,” Brett added. “Not to mention blind, sir. He didn’t know what was coming.”

The Captain sighed even harder.

“Just take him home, Mr. Nelson,” he said.

Brett prayed to every god that he could find a shrine to that that would be a one-off case. Clothes do not always make the man, he wanted to scream from the mountaintops. Wearing a Daredevil shirt or a Spidey beltbuckle or a Hawkeye undies does not make you that person. It just. Does. Not.

Brett understood inspiration. He understood admiration. He understood wearing a hat or a shirt to as some kind of statement or group solidarity thing.

But people, he could not stress enough, were so fucking stupid. They struggled to distinguish between what it meant to look like a superperson and to actually be that superperson.

Case in point.

Someone had posted a video of Cap ripping a log in half with his bare hands on Instagram and now Brett was reading an article in The Times informing the city at large on behalf of Metro Gen that this was not an activity normal people should be attempting to perform for a myriad of reasons. Unsurprisingly, the folks trying this new challenge all strapped on their Captain America gear before turning on the camera.

Before this, there had been a brief trend of idiots trying to strangle each other with their thighs like the Black Widow. Brett didn’t know if it was a meme or a sex thing, but it had gotten to the point where he had a whole pile of battery claims sitting on his desk.

Exhausting.

The whole thing was exhausting.

And it only got worse.

Friday night saw three guys in the holding cells, fighting over who had the best Spidey shirt and pretending to shoot web at each other.

Saturday night saw a murder by a freak literally obsessed with Deadpool. He was taken into custody and argued that he had allegedly had a breakdown over his schizophrenia which had cause this whole chain of events.

He didn’t even have schizophrenia. That was what people thought Wilson had. And because Brett’s life was horrible, he actually had to go knock on Wade Wilson’s apartment door and ask him if he had an associate and maybe also schizophrenia?

Wilson, sans mask and draped with cat, blinked at him and then slammed the door.

“What the fuck is wrong with the world?” Brett heard him ask the cat through the open window.

It took some serious pleading and promising to convince him that A. He did not have to pack up and move house now that the police knew where he lived and B. that all he had to do was say no to both allegations.

He said no. He demanded to know where Brett got his address. At gunpoint.

He then lamented the fact that he had gotten insurance for his new scooter before getting a damn ticket for parking it illegally. He didn’t even have it anymore, he told Brett. Shit got totaled and he really didn’t want it anyways.

Brett left with his life at least, although he wasn’t convinced he left with the whole of his sanity.

Brett cupped his face in his hands and counted to ten so that he could deal with the gang of three sitting handcuffed on the curb in front of him.

They didn’t say anything, but they had the grace to look at each other a little sheepishly.

“Have you guys even seen Spiderman?” Brett finally breathed. The Spiderman in front of him lit up.

“Yeah, I look in the mirror every day,” he proclaimed.

Brett needed another ten count.

“Then you know,” he said slowly, “That Spiderman is approximately the size of an ant?”

Silence.

“Dude, are you calling me sho—”

“I’m saying you’re not Spiderman,” Brett snarled before the idiot could finish his sentence. “You are not Spiderman. You know how I know? Because I know Spiderman. He is this big, you see? This. Big. You, my friend. Are this big. Do you see this? This is at least a foot, here. Furthermore, I cannot catch Spiderman. I have tried to catch Spiderman. Spiderman has fucking hugged me and I cannot catch Spiderman. It took me two minutes to catch you. Do you understand? Do you see this, man? This is how I know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you are not Spiderman.”

Silence. The guy’s lip stuck out defiantly under the edge of the mask he’d pulled up to his nose.

“I got the suit,” he said firmly. “And you don’t know who's under the suit so—”

Brett yanked the mask off the rest of the way and leaned into the guy’s face. He swallowed anxiously. Brett raised an eyebrow at him.

“Looks like I do now,” he said.

He then rounded on the Daredevil and Deadpool squirming next to their buddy.

“You guys want to play ball or no?” he asked.

Funny how now they did.

Wade and Matt would be disgraced.  

Peter showed up a few days later on the hunt for a Dum-Dum and willing to part with some information for it, but Brett needed him for something entirely different this time.

He placed his hands on the kid’s shoulders. Peter gazed up at him through the mask; it kept his face blank, but Brett knew him well enough by that point to recognize confusion on it.

“Peter,” he said, “I need you to do me a huge favor. I will give you the whole bag of Dum-Dums. And some gummy bears.”

Peter made a twitter account.

A fuckload of other vigilante twitter accounts cropped up in his wake. Everyone’s usernames were just jumbles of letters, but they all had one thing in common and that was a crazy impossible selfie or video.

Peter posted a short, oddly artistic video which started out focused on the night city skyline. It was cut in half by the shadows of a rooftop, wet and lit by streetlights. Peter then lowered the camera to see his opposite hand. He flicked his suit-covered fingers and something sprayed out a line of web from his wrist. He raised the camera so it could see where the line had stuck, even though it looked like it just flown out over the city and disappeared.

And then he started running. Barreling towards the edge of the roof. His shadow showed him loping while holding his phone in his left hand.

He jumped.

The camera held remarkably steady as it tracked his descent, showing his little red feet flexing out over the blur of city lights. The lights blurred more and then went from going down, down, down, to moving up and up and up until Peter reached the crest of his arc. Then in a flash, the camera spun around so that it showed Peter’s mask.

He made one of the suit eyes wink and then threw out another line of web at the last possible second.

It was pretty damn terrifying to old people like Brett who fucking hated rollercoasters. It was also pretty damn terrifying to half the station team who now knew intimately that Peter played games of fate with freefall every night he went out.

But.

Peter ended the video with a freeze frame and a bar at the bottom which read, “Stop trying this at home, please. People are getting hurt.”

And somehow, the whole video felt a whole lot gentler.

People on twitter went wild. They tried to figure out if it was green-screened or faked, but then Peter’s random assortment of letters started answering people back.

“No, I made it last Wed.” he wrote.

“I make the web myself. There is not a safe alternative on the market. You can try, but man, let me tell you, it’s gonna be a long fall.”

“Falling without knowing how to land can actually break your knees, and if you’re really not careful, can permanently paralyze you, friends. Please stop doing this. Even superpeople make fun of the ‘superhero’ landing.”

“It’s cool if you want to run around in a Spiderman onesie, just know that if you go around claiming to be me, you’ve got like 100+ counts of assault which people could hold against you. And trust me on this one, they WILL press charges ;0”

It was a beautiful, beautiful thing, Twitter was, when it was used as a force of good.

Or, uh. Something like that.

Wade posted a picture of himself chilling with his cat in his living room, surrounded by ammunition and bags of what was 100% cocaine. He captioned it, “Can y’all stop using me as an excuse to mutilate pets??? Deadpool is a friend of all animals and not your fucking excuse to be a sociopath. #killpeoplenotpets”

Wade got thousands upon thousands of followers within mere hours.

Jessica Jones said that the next person who ran around pretending to be her was now responsible for her taxes. She reminded everyone that they were small business taxes and ergo Satan’s worst nightmare. Trish Walker retweeted the post with the cute little note “<3 love you girl, I told you we could just hire a guy.”

“I got a calculator and a bottle of Jack. I don’t need no man,” Jess wrote back.

Jessica Jones got several thousand followers as well.

And they kept cropping up. More and more of them. Other superfolks on twitter started retweeting their pithy little slogans. Barnes retweeted Peter and wrote “woah, talk about calling the cavalry. We got the night crew on twitter now, too?”

Peter replied with an image of Barnes smoking on his couch typing out the text on his phone.

“YOU LITTLE SHIT, IMMA FIND YOUR ASS SPIDEY,” Barnes replied.

And from there, it appeared that legitimacy was established. And more importantly, the city had been warned.

If people were going to scour the internet for the latest superhero merch, then it was only fair that their heroes showed them how fucking insane they actually were. Would it prevent those who were really determined to be shitheads? No. But it would discourage a lot of potential shitheads before they even got started, or at least Brett hoped it would.