in technicolor

Brett drew his gun with full intention to shoot a fucker in the alley, but all he got when he got his light on was a tangle of limbs and black clothes.

Then all he got was a punch to the head.

A visit to the ER.

A subsequent order to be off of work for a week.

And finally, his mom suffocating him in completely unnecessary distress.

When she went to the senior center two days into his house arrest, he grabbed a jacket and made his escape.

“You okay to be out and walkin’, detective?” Barnes asked him.

No. But that didn’t matter.

“I need you to find someone for me,” Brett said. Barnes stopped in his abandoned phone booth inspection to cock an eyebrow Brett’s way.

“You sayin’ you need the Winter Soldier, Mahoney?”

No.

He just needed someone better at tracking that he was. And he didn’t feel like asking an officer right now because he didn’t like what he suspected he was about to find.

Barnes told him to go home, he’d think about what they’d discussed. He was uncomfortable now, too. It just didn’t make any sense—none at all. There had to be something else—someone else.

But things as they were.

Matt was nowhere to be found.

Peter slipped out of the woodwork around 2:30 the following afternoon and came all the way to Hell’s Kitchen to watch Brett watch him down from the window of his apartment. How the kid knew where he lived was no great mystery. The boy was too smart for his own damn good and Foggy, try as he might, was bound to leave some personal device unlocked in the kid’s presence.

Brett closed the window blinds and made his way downstairs.

“This is beyond you, detective,” Peter said lowly. His breath made clouds and he kept his hands shoved in his coat pockets and he didn’t look Brett in the eye even once.

“I dunno, Pete. My head’s my business,” Brett noted.

“You don’t know what you’re putting your foot into,” Peter said, even and cold as could be.

“But you do?”

Peter pressed his lips together.

“It’s only going to upset you,” he said.

“And it doesn’t upset you?”

“It does,” Peter breathed.

“Peter.” Brett stopped walking. “Sweetheart, look at me.”

Peter glanced his way, but otherwise refused prolonged eye contact. Brett frowned. It had been ages since Peter had been this closed off with him.

“Peter,” he repeated.

Peter glanced up again. But that was all Brett was getting.

It was fucking weird. Just strange.

“You’re sixteen years old, kid,” Brett said. “I’m nearly twice your age and I’ve got professional training in criminal activity. If you think I can’t handle something, you’re makin’ unfounded assumptions.”

Peter shrugged ever so slightly.

“If you say so, detective,” he said in a cloud of white smoke.

Then he turned and walked away. Alone.

Brett watched his back with the tips of his ears stinging with the cold.

JB: hey Mahoney

BM: what’s up

JB: listen man

JB: I don’t say this a lot

JB: but you need to drop this

BM: is there a reason for that?

JB: just fucking drop it man it’s not worth it. take your concussion and go.

Hawkeye the elder must have heard from Barnes what Brett was looking for. He didn’t even open his door. Brett knew he was home. There were still-wet paw prints in the frost outside the door.

He didn’t want to take the next step. Really, he didn’t. But what choice did he have here? No one else was talking. Gates were being closed all over. Shields came up and suddenly the once-loud city seemed sluggish and quiet. And it wasn’t just the cold.

It was heavier than that.

“Detective Mahoney,” Wade greeted languidly at the predetermined bar. He drummed his fingers against his gnarled cheek. “Glad to see you’re learning to play the game. How might I be of assistance to you?”

Wade had never been this cordial.

But then again, Brett had never hired him before.

“Where’s Red?” he asked.

Wade grinned.

“Which one?” he asked.

Brett was not hallucinating. He was not. Wade would neither confirm or deny that he’d seen what Brett had.

But he definitely wasn’t denying it. And he was absolutely covering for Matt, wherever he was.

“Having a nap,” Wade said when Brett prodded him around the Matt Murdock question. But for the second, more nebulous question, he just smirked wider and wider like a shark.

“I don’t know if you can handle it, Mahoney,” he said, leering. “You tell me, where are your limits, sir?”

What did that mean?

“Whatever you think it means.”

Brett forced himself to keep his head up steady over his shoulders. He squeezed his fingers together across the sticky table from one of the bloodiest murderers New York had ever known.

“Hit me,” he said.

Wade laughed and for just a second there, he sounded like the devil himself.

Wade told Brett a story. Not an explanation. A story.

Once upon a time, he said, the world was never whole and nothing they’d ever known had ever been real or set in stone.

And one day, in a land far, far away, some people were born who were cursed to be extraordinary.

At the same time, in a land further away than that, people with the same faces as those others were born and were cursed to be ordinary.

And at the same time as that, in a land much closer than anyone wanted to believe, some people were born who were cursed to be born again and again and again in infinite ways in infinite dimensions.

And their names were—well.

You already know all their names.

“The question now is, detective, what are you willing to believe?” Wade asked with his own fingers folding together between their fellow’s gaps in an imitation of Brett’s.

“Do you believe in fairytales?”

It was colder the next day than it had been any previous. It was only the beginning of November and yet frost and ice had already started dusting the pavement and the leaves jutting out and hanging listlessly from the bushes arranged along the houses on Brett’s street and those which stood guard in front of the police station.

Brett was not allowed back in there yet, the police station. And that was fine with him.

JB: I heard you spoke with wilson

JB: Mahoney listen. Please. For your own sake stop this. drop it. it’s not worth it I promise you. it’s never been worth it. it just complicates things.

BM: why are you so afraid of it JB?

BM: is there something else I should know?

SW: hey brett it’s sam Wilson.

SW: Buck is really worried about you. Like, real people worried, not Winter Soldier worried.

BM: That’s kind of him, but unnecessary.

SW: alright let me just be real honest with you then.

BM: I’d love that.

SW: if you fuck with this, you will get burnt.

BM: it’s really interesting to me how many of you all are saying this, Sam. And yet none of you are willing to be direct about exactly what the hell is going on. I’ve got DP telling me fairytales, my own childhood best friend ignoring my messages and someone who I have been building a relationship with for nearly a year now has gone missing. and yet no one is doing anything about that. Makes a guy really start to wonder what’s really going on behind the scene with you people, you know that?

SW: I understand that this might be frustrating. And I’m sorry no one is talking. But we have our reasons.

BM: which I presume involve keeping civilians safe and warm in their comfortable houses?

SW: you’re a cop, Mahoney. You aren’t what we are. Or rather, what they are. I was there. It doesn’t feel good, but trust me when I say that I wish I could go back all the time. Every day.

BM: So you’re all happy to scare the living shit out of teenager, but not willing to tell a man who got punched in the head by someone who looks EXACTLY like one of his informants what’s going on because I’m too human?

BM: is that how this works, Sam?

SW: Peter has no choice. He is a focal point. He carries this burden more than any of us do and there is nothing anyone can do about it that we know of. We are looking into the problem—not we, as in the Avengers, but we as in our community as a whole. But in the meantime, what we’ve got is Peter and when Peter tells us not to fuck with it, we drop everything. We’re taking HIS cues, Brett. Not the other way around. I can’t tell you more than that, I’m sorry. That’s already too much.

That was fine, that was all Brett needed.

He found Peter sitting on a swing in an empty park lit by white streetlights. He wasn’t wearing a jacket and his breath puffed out through the suit.

He didn’t swing so much and sway back and forth on his heels, face down. Staring at his knees.

“It’s kind of cold out to be playing, isn’t it, Pete?” Brett asked from the short fence around the playground’s entrance.

Peter swayed. Back and forth, back and forth.

“I thought you’d come here,” he said.

“Did you, now?”

Peter nodded, still swaying.

“You’re angry,” he noted. Brett pursed his lips. He wasn’t wrong. Brett was angry.

“I’m not angry with you,” he clarified.

Peter shivered. It had to be in the thirties. Where was his coat?

“Do you believe Wade?” Peter asked.

Ah. Of course they’d talked.

Brett waited and watched as Peter flexed his knuckles on the chains holding the swing up to its beam.

“I don’t know what to believe,” Brett admitted.

“If you believe Wade, there’s no turning back,” Peter said. “Things only get more complicated from there. You don’t need to believe him. He’s got problems. He tells stories and lies all the time.”

“Sounds like you’re giving me a push here, kid,” Brett said.

Peter shut up and kicked off into a short swing this time. He caught the ground with his red toes and shivered again.

“Tell me what you believe, detective,” Peter whispered. “And I’ll tell you as much as I can.”

Do you believe in fairytales, detective?

“I believe that you wouldn’t lie to me, Peter,” Brett said. “And I believe that there are things which I will never understand about the universe. And I believe that there are extraordinary people in this world with all kinds of powers and stories to tell. Is that enough for you?”

Peter’s shoulders rose with the breath he sucked in.

“I’m not supposed to tell,” he whispered into a cloud of condensation.

“Did Stark tell you that?” Brett asked, stepping forward through the playground’s gate with care.

“Dr. Banner,” Peter said.

“Why you, Peter?”

“I don’t know.”

“You sure?”

Peter’s fingers curled tighter around the chains. His body and shoulders seemed to be lightly trembling.

“Peter?”

He rode out the chill and finally lifted his wide, white eyes to meet Brett’s.

“I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” he said.

“But you’ll tell me,” Brett finished for him, stepping in closer and settling down into the freezing swing next to Peter’s red and blues.

“They’ll know I told you,” Peter murmured.

“They already know I’m looking for answers.”

“Matt’s been hurt.”

“I gathered that.”

Peter took in a shuddering breath.

“We can’t talk here,” he said.

Peter changed into street clothes. He wore a jacket that was at least three sizes too big for him and had put all his clothes on, on top of his suit. His lips were nearly purple. They got paler and pinker in the light of the 24 hour diner he’d known the location of off the top of his head. He rubbed his fingers quietly over the top of a cup of tea.

Brett hadn’t seen anyone order tea at a diner in years. But this one had wanted chamomile and milk and shitty plastic packets of honey.

It was as though he was trying to comfort himself.

Brett held his own cup of coffee and let the warmth leech into his fingers.

“Go on,” he encouraged.

Peter shivered, even inside from the cold.

“A couple months back, I started hearing calls from people who I couldn’t see,” he said.

“What kind of calls? Like voices?” Brett asked.

“No. Calls. People screaming. Calling for help. There was one person screaming for help. And I tried calling back and I tried to reach them, but no matter where I went in the city, it was like he was just—just there, out of reach.”

He?

“He,” Peter confirmed. “Just him at first. But after a while, I shut up and listened. Listened as hard as I could and there were others. All calling back to him. We were all calling back to this same person. He was scared. He was lost. And everyone was calling back the same things. It was like—”

Peter sucked in a deep breath.

“It was like we were all the same person,” he said. “We all wanted to help. I’ve never heard so many people wanting to help. But it was the same thing, over and over. He screamed and people would call back, but he wouldn’t answer. And everyone would be calling over and over ‘where are you? I can’t find you. Where are you? I want to help you.’ But no one was getting anywhere and sometimes he’d scream louder and sometimes he’d get really quiet, like he was hurt and falling asleep. And I couldn’t find him, detective. I looked everywhere. Everywhere.”

Brett leaned his elbows on the table.

“He wasn’t real,” he said.

“I knew he was, though,” Peter said, stirring his tea. “I just knew it. In my gut. I started talking to him. Just comforting him when he started to get really upset. I didn’t know if he could hear me—it seemed like he couldn’t, but I couldn’t just not do anything. You can’t—he sounded like he was dying, detective. I couldn’t—anyways. I was talking to him in my head, but I didn’t realize I was talking to him out loud sometimes. He was so real. So, so real.” Peter’s eyes were pleading. Pleading for understanding. Pleading for Brett not to think he was going insane.

“Did it help at all?” Brett asked.

Peter dropped his eyes in relief.

“No,” he said. “Colonel Rhodes heard me. Then Mr. Stark. Then Dr. Banner. They thought something was wrong—with me. And that was fair. I must have seemed pretty sick. But still, they called my aunt and she came and Dr. Cho called Dr. Turner and she did a bunch of things with me and said that she didn’t think it was anything like what Wade has. ‘Cause the people—they were people. Not voices. They didn’t talk to me at all. So Dr. Banner took some blood and did some tests and found this weird something. It’s got to do with my mutation. It’s like.”

Peter frowned in trying to find the words.

“It’s like. I don’t—it’s like it was lighting up. Dr. Banner had never seen anything like it before, so he talked to Thor about it, ‘cause Thor knows all kinds of things about the world that he takes for granted and doesn’t tell anyone and he said, ‘oh, that’s funny, he’s been linked up.’ And so we were all like, ‘what’s linked up?’ And he said that I was linked up with a me in a different universe from us, which was nuts. Obviously. But he said it wasn’t. He said that it happened sometimes; that dimensions or universes are like soap bubbles, all bunched together and slipping and sliding against each other. There’s just an eensy, weensy bit of space in-between them, and someone—a me from somewhere, had managed to get himself wriggled in there somehow and was lighting all of the versions of himself up from there. The only way to make it stop happening was to get him out from there and to close up all the holes that had let him get there to begin with.”

That sounded…complicated.

“Yeah, even Mr. Stark wasn’t so sure how we’d make that happen,” Peter sighed. He’d still barely touched his tea.

“So what did you end up doing?” Brett asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Just one day, it—the screaming—it just stopped.”

Huh.

“And everything went back to normal, I presume?” Brett said.

Peter huffed a little.

“I met him,” he said.

“Sorry, what?”

“I met him, the one who got stuck in between all of the universes,” Peter said. “It was a mistake. He thought he had died. Everyone from his home thought he had died. Wilson Fisk—his Wilson Fisk, the one in his universe—had killed him with his—”

Peter gulped in air and shook his head.

“He killed him,” he said more simply. “But this Wilson Fisk was searching for his family, I guess they’d died. And he got it into his head he would get someone brilliant to make a machine for him which would let him get them back—it would take them from alternate universes and give them back to him. And the guy, the Peter Parker who got stuck, went to stop him ‘cause he knew that that couldn’t end well. He’s Spiderman, too. So he thought he’d go stop Fisk before anything got started, but it didn’t work. Fisk killed him. And then while he wasn’t looking, his brilliant scientist took that Peter’s body and did things to it to put him in a kind of stasis, half in and half out of the hole she’d made between the universes. So he couldn’t die all the way. He got better even, except he was scared, ‘cause his brain was trapped in a loop. He just kept dying and he was scared.”

Brett’s throat ached. He picked up his napkin and gave it to Peter to press to his welling and spilling eyes.

“But he’s okay now?” he asked gently.

Peter sniffed hard and swallowed.

“I met him,” he repeated.

Brett sighed.

“Is he nice?” he asked.

“There are thousands of them,” Peter hiccupped. “Millions. There are more Spidermen than you can imagine. More Captain Americas. Tony Starks. Wade Wilsons. Millions, billions—there are infinite universes, detective. And this one Wilson Fisk and his one scientist made hole just big enough for one line of connection between all of them to come through and it just happened to be made through a Spiderman. And now I’m connected to all of them—well. I’m like, significantly connected to a handful of Spidermen from a couple specific universes. But we’re all generally connected to each other. If we know someone, we can find them in our heads and reach out to them and if we try really, really hard, they can feel us and reach back and we can meet.”

Peter sighed and rubbed a thumb across the lip of his mug.

“We can help each other,” he said.

He lifted his eyes to Brett.

“Sometimes, we can bring people with us when we go to meet another Spiderman,” he said.

Brett frowned.

“When you ‘go meet’ another Spiderman?” he repeated. “What do you mean, you ‘go?’”

“I mean that if I reach out to a Spidey and they reach back to me, we can make our two soap bubbles touch each other like this.”

Peter curled his hands into circles and held them with the knuckles facing each other.

“And once they’re good and smooshed, we can open them up like this.”

He lifted the tips of his fingers so that he had a bridge between the two circles he’d made.

“And then we can move between them. To an extent, obviously. When you’re in someone else’s universe, it doesn’t always want you there, so you kinda glitch. All your cells freak out and start working really hard to cope. Because Spideys have a healing factor, we do okay in each others’ verse, but normal folks’ cells start to die faster than usual, so they can’t be in the verses for as long as we can and it takes them longer to recover afterwards.”

Brett breathed as evenly as he could. Peter was watching him. Peter was explaining something so strange and bizarre and impossible in such detail that calling bullshit seemed like it would crush him.

“What does this have to do with the man I saw?” he asked as calmly as he could.

Peter dropped his gaze and picked up his tea, finally. 

“People can come with us into the verses,” he said. “But sometimes, they force their way through. The man you saw—he’s a Matt Murdock from a different universe. He doesn’t play well with others. The Spiderman of that universe is here right now in this one. She’s trying to get her hands on him and drag him back to their universe.”

“What’s he come here for?” Brett asked.

“Wilson Fisk,” Peter said.

Brett tipped his head and narrowed his eyes.

“To kill him?” he asked.

Peter pursed his lips and shook his head.

“To use him,” he said.

What now?

“As a bargaining chip. The Wilson Fisk in Gwen—Spiderwoman’s universe has just gotten out of jail. He wants his throne back. But Gwen’s Matt Murdock doesn’t want that.”

Well, at least all these Matt Murdocks had that in common.

The corner of Peter’s mouth twitched.

“He doesn’t want it,” he said, “Because he’s Kingpin.”

Brett’s breath froze in his chest. He slowly set down his coffee cup.

“He’s the Kingpin, this other Murdock,” he repeated. Peter nodded.

“He’s an assassin,” he said. “He was Fisk’s right-hand man until Fisk went to prison; Fisk had him run his crime circles for him in the meantime, but Murderdock took them over as his own. He doesn’t want to give them up now, he’s built them out bigger and better than Fisk had.”

Holy shit.

“And he wants our Fisk for what? To torture?” he asked.

“As an example,” Peter said. “Gwen won’t let that happen. She’s going to stop him. But she needs help. I want to help her, but Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner and Colonel Rhodes won’t let me.”

The tops of Peter’s knuckles turned white with the force he curled his hands with. Brett watched them and then set his own forearms down on the table.

“Since when did you listen to authority, Peter?” he asked.

Peter’s gaze snapped from his fork and knife to Brett’s face.

“If I want to be an Avenger, I have to learn,” he said spitefully.

“Do you want to be an Avenger?” Brett asked him.

Peter said nothing.

BM: hey foggy. Hope you’re alright. Talked to peter just now about some wild shit. He’s starting to sound like wade you know?

BM: hope matt’s okay. Tell him I appreciate him and have head trauma solidarity

He only had to wait fifteen minutes.

FN: I’m going to murder that motherfucker brett.

BM: not very lawyerly of you.

FN: He nearly killed matt

BM: he sounds like the type

FN: Matt can usually handle himself. I don’t know what happened. He’s trained to be a weapon, brett. How do you out weapon a weapon?

BM: you find the second non-lethal one in the city.

FN: what did Peter tell you

BM: a lot. It’s very confusing. But I think I’ve got the important points of it.

BM: any idea why the avengers are pinning him down?

FN: probably because it was a spiderman who brought this fuckhead into this universe, and so they don’t want anyone finding out that they could use pete to access another universe. Imagine what HYDRA or SHIELD would do to him if they knew.

That was more than fair.

BM: Peter’s angry

FN: wade said this

BM: he wants to help this girl named Gwen

FN: I want to help her, too. But I don’t know how. Matt’s evil twin just vanished. And he stabbed the fuck out of the only guy in the city who could find him.

Man was clever.

BM: I think peter knows a way. But he’s not telling anyone. Kid’s brewing some rebellion. I dunno if he’s gonna wait for avenger approval.

FN: I’ll see if wade can talk to him

BM: thanks man. For real, give matt my regards.

FN: I will when he wakes up. Claire’s put him on some big drugs for now. Full sentences are challenging.

Matt was safe, then. That was good. If he was with Claire Temple, then Cage, Jones, and Rand were probably setting up a guard for him. In the meantime, though, Brett wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself.

He still had four days to kill.

He decided he’d go home and sleep for a bit. It was late.

SW: Mahoney have you see peter by chance?

BM: saw him last night in a park, someone needs to get that kid a coat. Why

SW: he’s not answering texts and hiding again. Freaking stark out, you know how it is.

Hm. Imagine that.

An hour later, his phone buzzed again.

JB: yo have you seen pete?

BM: I feel like I’ve already had this convo with one of your boys. Maybe ask them?

JB: right right sorry

As if Brett had never been interrogated before.

SR: cop.

BM: cap.

SR: cut the shit please.

BM: ???

SR: I am old and tired and frail. What the fuck did you say to peter?

BM: I told him to get a coat and I bought him a drink, cap. Why are you all texting me? What’s happening?

SR: Mahoney I am an idiot 70% of the time, but the rest of it, I know my head from my ass. What did you say to peter?

BM: I don’t know what to tell you aside from the fact that it’s great that you’ve come to terms with your idiocy. Saves me a lot of trouble in the end.

SR: he trusts you

BM: ha

BM: no he does not. He trusts Franklin Nelson though, maybe try him.

He could say for certain that he’d never that he’d be standing toe to toe with Captain America.