Reassembly 16
The thing is that Peter is actually brilliant.
masterpost
“Keys, shoes… Okay!” Peter grinned and pushed his bangs back. “Where are we going to meet Lex?”
Kon hovered a little off of the floor and fidgeted with the sleeve of his leather jacket. “I really don’t want you to come.” The words burst out like he had been holding them in all day. He probably had.
Stung, Peter drew back.
‘I… Did he actually ever invite me, or did I just assume?’
Mortified, he jerked his head in a nod. “Yeah,” Peter said woodenly. “I get it. That’s fine.” He managed a sickly smile.
Kon fidgeted. “Yeah. Great. Um.” He coughed. “It’s not… it’s not you,” he explained. “It’s just- Lex isn’t very…”
“Yeah, no.” Peter didn’t try to make eye contact. “You don’t have to explain, I’m not entitled to come with you to visit your family.”
There was a long pause. “Thanks. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
“Take care.” Peter looked at his hands until he heard the door shut.
Hmm. That felt… It felt pretty bad. He felt kind of sick to his stomach at the reminder that he and Kon weren’t actually a team attached at the hip.
‘I’ve been getting too far off track. I need to focus on my needs.’
Peter booted up Kon’s laptop with a sour taste in his mouth and checked to see if there was a customer waiting for a website design. No bites today, so he spent an hour looking for clients by cold-contacting small businesses. Then he closed out of that and tried to take another SAT pre test.
“I’m gonna pass.”
There wasn’t really any doubt about that point anymore. He was a little weak on the literature and general knowledge, but it was good enough.
Peter pushed the laptop away and gave a stretch, trying to fix the soreness from an unusual workout and then a bunch of sitting. Maybe it was a good time to go for a walk or something.
Gotham was a dangerous city. That much was obvious. Kon was just a civilian and that limited what Peter could do around him. But if Peter went out alone… well. He could do a bit of investigating and deal with any problems that came up.
He shimmied out of the comfortable workout shorts he was wearing and exchanged them for a pair of jeans, but he didn’t bother changing out of the tank top. He just grabbed a zip up hoodie and threw it on loosely on his way out the door.
It was fully dark by then. Peter locked the door behind him and jogged down the long staircase, illuminated only by streetlights through the windows on every floor.
The night air in Gotham was crisp and sharp, heavy on cigarette smoke and the smell of hard liquor. Conversation and laughter spilled out the propped door of the bar Peter walked past on the end of their block. He glanced inside to see it was full of middle aged people, playing pool and darts and leaning against the counter to talk.
The next business that seemed alive was a drugstore. Peter wandered inside just to get a feel for his new neighborhood and ducked eye contact from the gum-smacking cashier. She had a gun. He could smell the oil and hear the gentle clack of her acrylic nails when she touched it under the counter.
He went up and down all the aisles to see what kind of neighborhood this was. The shampoo and makeup was all locked up, which was a pretty bad sign. Peter frowned at the display, unhappy about what that implied. The baby food was locked up too. “That’s awful,” Peter muttered to himself. He was full-on scowling by that point.
‘That explains why I’ve been mugged twice in broad daylight. This area is really poor.’
The thought that there was apparently tons of scholarship money for athletes in a place this poor seemed…
‘No, that’s irrational. That’s good, even, because kids from this area definitely need the help.’
His stomach twisted. He… really needed to get the academic scholarship, so that he wasn’t wasting funding that someone else could have used.
That was fine, though. Peter was confident that he would ace that test. He wished he could just get it done! He jittered, wanting to do something. Waiting was the worst, it was just—
“Aw, man,” he whined quietly. “Got worked up.” Peter scrunched his hair up with both hands and let his elbows splay to the side, scowling as he walked. He was full of excess energy again and there was nothing to do about it.
Unbidden, his eyes lifted up to the skyline. Gotham was no NYC, that was for sure. There was a depressing deficit of skyscrapers. But Spider-man could swing around on a few stories of height. And there, downtown, the buildings had some decent height to them.
A wave of longing crashed over him with enough force to make him stumble over a crack in the sidewalk that he didn’t see.
‘I don’t even know what I need to study to figure out a way to get home.’
He sort of wanted to cry. Peter blinked rapidly and rubbed at his breastbone. He was so sad that it actually hurt. He felt hollow, like his insides had been scraped out.
Belatedly, he realized what was going on. He had been in survival mode since he had woken up in that laboratory, with the sounds of violence down the hall and corpses floating in tanks. The last few days had been sort of…
“I just stopped thinking.” He huffed a dry laugh. It wasn’t funny at all. He had been ignoring his problems and how sad he was, keeping busy and joking around with Kon like he was Ned. He had… cheer practice had distracted him with movement and soothed him with the presence of scary, bossy women, and he wasn’t going to ruminate too deeply on why that made him feel better.
But distractions didn’t do anything about his very real problems.
‘Sure, I have a few friends now. That just means there are vulnerable civilian targets around me.’
He felt vaguely nauseous.
‘I don’t know where I am in relation to home. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know who was holding me captive, why, or what they’ll do to get me back. What on earth was I thinking, joining a sport? Acting like I get to just go to school and be a normal student? That was so selfish and childish.’
Bile burst up into his throat and he choked on it. Peter stopped in his tracks to force it back down, swallowing with a screwed-up expression. He hugged his torso and tried not to throw up on the sidewalk. Firstly, because it was disgusting. Secondly, because he had very valuable DNA that someone was looking for.
‘I have to get serious. I need… I need to figure out what it is I don’t know. Jeeze.’
It stretched out in front of him, lonely and impossible. He wanted to sit on the pavement and cry from the hopelessness of it all.
‘Science is overall behind here. That’s not great. But there were some tech giants. Luther Corporation, WayneTech… What else is there? If I can get a peek into what’s going on in their R&D departments, I can know what to aim for in my education. My best chance is probably getting access to their resources and information, so-’
He blinked. The world came into the vivid focus of Spider-man instincts and heightened awareness. Someone was rappelling down from the side of a building. It was silent but it was intent. He could feel that they were looking at him and approaching rapidly. Peter looked up instinctively to make eye contact through the tiny white-out lenses in someone’s bird cosplay fit.
‘His outfit sucks,’ Peter thought, and then sort of felt like a jerk. He closed his mouth a little more firmly to keep sartorial criticism inside. But come on, there was a fake little bird beak over the guy’s nose! Maybe it would have worked if his mouth was covered up, but it just looked dumb.
‘His head thing is just awful. What’s wrong with a mask or even a full-face thing?’
He seemed like a total loser, honestly, as he straightened up and retracted his grapple line. Not only like a loser, but like a specific loser, who was no particular threat to Peter but was weapons-grade-weird.
“Hello, citizen,” said the new guy, who was obviously Tim. He had the same pointy, slightly asymmetrical jawline. Come on.
“...Hey,” Peter said belatedly. He tried even harder to look like he wasn’t judging the other guy. Was Tim really so obsessed with Kon that he had put on a costume to talk to Peter? “Can I help you?” His tone came out a little unfriendly despite his intentions.
Tim fidgeted. “That’s my line. Is everything alright?” He was in a standard ‘hero pose’ posture, with tight muscles that made him look even more uncomfortable. He had none of the swagger and confidence that came naturally to people like Mr. Stark and Captain America. Peter could tell that Tim was deliberately timing his breathing pattern. He was directing that laser focus at Peter and it sent the hair up on the back of his neck.
‘He doesn’t actually have a reason to talk to me,’ Peter diagnosed. ‘Wow… He’s so weird.’ He cleared his throat and crossed his arms, tapping rapidly on his elbows. “I’m fine. Thanks. Have a good one.”
‘At least I have an explanation for the suit on a weekday morning, now. This guy just can’t dress at all.’
“Oh my god,” said a female voice. Peter felt his gaze sharpen. Where was- oh, shit, it was an ear piece. “This is embarrassing, Red Robin.”
“Alright. Carry on.” Tim flashed him a very white and expensive smile. “Take care.”
Peter tried to smile. It definitely came out more as a grimace.
Red Robin left the way he’d come, heading up the side of the nearby building. Peter shook his head a little as he walked away. “Cringe as heck,” he muttered to himself. “I feel better about myself, I guess.”
Yeah, sure, he might be lost and facing a hideous challenge. But at least he wasn’t that weird.
‘I can’t believe Stephanie dated him. I need to get closer to her to protect her from her own taste in men. Awful. Is she even okay? And Kon thought he was hot… Oh no. My friends have really bad taste. I don’t think Tim even blinks.’
Peter scraped his tongue with his teeth like he could remove the after effects of Tim’s bad vibes. Ugh.
Anyway. Peter ruffled his own hair and shook the encounter off. He turned back towards the apartment, desperately needing a palette cleanse.
He needed to look into the local vigilantes again. If he had met one of them, he might have ended up too close to their headquarters or social circle. It wasn’t smart to leave information on the table.
…Peter let out a heavy sigh. He was a bit in denial, wasn’t he?
‘Aw, dang. Come on. Who called Tim? An extremely athletic woman in a vigilante’s social circle is probably a vigilante. I bet there’s a blonde Gotham vigilante.’
That was a mixed bag. Without knowing who was actually good, it was probably really dumb to get involved with vigilantes. He didn’t know who had been experimenting on him. On the other hand, if she wasn’t a bad guy, Stephanie would be in less danger from his proximity than a regular cheerleader would be.
That was his evening settled, then. First thing: see if Stephanie was a vigilante. Second thing: make a list of tech giants to sniff around and maybe break into for a little look-a-roo.
The veil between universes wasn’t going to pierce itself or whatever.