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In hindsight, Peter should have known something was wrong because Aunt May had left a bottle of red on the counter.
But he hadn’t known then, so he’d just pulled off the mask and padded over the counter to inspect the damage. He picked up the bottle to measure its weight and found it only about two glasses lighter. He rescued the cork from where it had rolled into a pool of its own blood in a crease in the counter and then paused to consider: do you put opened wine in the fridge? He’d seen May leave bottles of whiskey out on the counter before. He figured it couldn’t hurt.
He took an experimental sip, gagged, and stashed the bottle.
He closed the fridge and noticed a piece of paper sitting on the scrap of counter between the fridge and the stove. His fingers stuck to it when he picked up it, as they occasionally did to things now. It proved inconvenient at the best of times, but none more so then when he couldn’t drop that note like it burned him.
A Notice to Vacate.
His hands started shaking. That didn’t make sense. There must have been a mistake. They paid their rent on time; May told him they had direct deposit, so that they would never miss a payment.
She was always painfully honest with him and their finances were no secret no matter how hard she might have tried. And Peter wasn’t stupid. May and Ben had had two salaries when they’d picked the apartment. Any gaps in the monthly expenses were now filled by his uncle’s life insurance payments, and May was meticulous about checking her accounts every week.
Peter knew May would live in that space as long as she could work, even though she was always talking about downsizing once he left for college. He knew she’d stay because he could still sometimes smell his uncle in the wood in the floors and in the air in her room.
He’d promised himself that once he started working, he’d send home some money to help her keep the place, even if it meant eating sandwiches and mac and cheese more often than not. Both of them feared that his uncle’s ghost might get lonely without them.
He read the notice three times, but it didn’t make sense. The landlord had only listed a breach of contract as the reason for the notice.
He wanted to find May and ask her what was going on. What they were supposed to do. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he knew that, until he’d spoken to her, he probably wouldn’t sleep. But the silence in the house and the bottle on the counter told him that she already had enough on her plate without the interrogation. She’d tell him in the morning. She always did.
Peter could find no evidence of a noise complaint. He checked with the neighbors after May left for work with raccoon eyes and a deep sigh. She told him that they’d be okay, she just needed to sort some things out and that surely the whole thing was just a misunderstanding.
Peter thought that it sure was interesting that five other tenants on their floor had received similar notices for breaches of contract. Two cited noise violations. One claimed that the tenant was subletting when really her girlfriend just spent a lot of time there.
So yeah, Peter was suspicious as hell, and not just because NYC just did that to you--although running around the best parts of the city at night certainly didn’t help that particular vein of constant vigilance.
May told him she’d handle it, but the date on the notice was getting nearer. Peter knew she was busy and stressed right the fuck out. He didn’t want to bother her with the fact that every day, every hour sat heavy in his stomach. He didn’t want to eat, and he desperately wanted to sleep but the anxiety roiled and kept him awake.
When he did sleep, he dreamt of pressure at the foot of his bed and when there was no one there when he startled awake, he found himself swallowing back tears and calling softly for his uncle’s ghost.
There is a feeling which all superheroes and vigilantes share (in various degrees, of course). It doesn’t matter how big or small you are. Doesn’t matter whether your name makes it to the papers or festers in an alley on a dying man’s lips. It always boils down to the same thing.
Your heroism will eventually become both the pride and the bane of your existence.
On one hand, you do the work your soul screams for you to do. The ringing in your head and the crawling under your skin finally, blissfully, stops. People say thank you. They actually mean it. A bad guy gets what he deserves. You feel like you’re making a difference in a way which the normal you never could. It’s amazing and addicting and you never want to stop.
On the other hand, you are constantly vigilant. Borderline paranoid. Someone is always crying. Someone is always dying. The pace never slows. The streets never sleep. Every stumble feels like dropping a foot into a grave. Something is always your fault and you are always running, not just to make things right, but to make them even.
Most deal with it through self-harm, in a vast variety of ways.
Peter is new to this game. Deadpool tells him that he’ll get used to it and honestly, he’s fucking has to get used to it in some damn way or another, or he’s not going to last too long. He lays out Peter’s options for him: Get sanctimonious. Get jaded. Or wait and see which mental illness the universe decides you need.
He asks Double D if this is true, because sometimes DP likes to tell him horror stories to see his reaction. Red is quiet for a long time, though, and Peter has a hard time telling if it’s because he’s tuned in to something far away or if he’s ignoring the question.
“No,” Double D finally tells him, “The argument is a false dichotomy—or trichotomy, I guess. You don’t really pick one, they blend into each other and you eventually pick up all three.”
“Do you have a mental illness?” Peter asks, then realizes how insensitive that sounds and apologizes.
Double D just shrugs and says “Probably,” before he’s off like a shot, chasing a whine which only he can hear.
Deadpool is great at making Peter feel better when he feels like trash. He’s full of terrible jokes and his life is so much shittier than Peter could ever imagine his to be, and he’s not self-conscious of that at all. He has a gift for poking fun at himself to remind others to be thankful for what they have, and Peter admires him for it.
He is also really perceptive and reads into Peter’s silence on the edge of a skyscraper, settled there loose and exhausted after a few fights with some assholes and several nights punctuated with his uncle’s phantom weight at the edge of his bed.
After he needles the story out of Peter, he wraps his huge arms around him and lets him cry on his shoulder, one hand rubbing rhythmic, wide circles into his back.
“It happens, Spidey, it happens everywhere in the world. I’m really sorry that its happening to you,” he murmurs in a rare moment of seriousness, “But it happens, and you and your aunt are going to get through this. It feels really shitty now, like the world’s falling down and fuck, you’re just a kid, so it probably feels like floor’s falling in right now, too. But trust me on this one: everything is going to work itself out.”
He let Peter call him Wade after that, and Peter was so touched by the show of trust that he hiccupped his own name in return into Wade’s shoulder. He wondered when it had become easier to talk about normal people problems to super-people than it was to talk to normal people about normal people problems. But then he figured that there was a kind of relief and comradery in another super-person having issues with something that wasn’t their crippling guilt. It reminded them that they were still human.
Wade sent him home for the night, saying that he and Red would share his patrol once the other guy got there, and he was alright until the wind fell out of his sails when he found that the bottle of red on the counter was empty. He heard May crying in her room and knocked on the door gently.
She tried to clean herself up, but waved him in and they sat together for a long time.
“What do we do?” Peter asked. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”
May hugged him close and smoothed his hair. Peter could see her looking around the room, probably reading the ‘what if’s in her head written all over the walls.
“I don’t know, yet,” She told him. Then nudged him so he sat up. She held his hands and he held hers. “We are going to be okay, though. Worse comes to worse, it is just a house.”
“But,” Peter hesitated, “It’s not just a house. It’s Uncle Ben’s home. It’s our home.”
May’s eyes overflowed and he offered her a tissue.
“It’s just a house,” she told him firmly.
Peter had finished a patrol with 14 days left on the notice. May was trying to look up both housing law and new places to live when she got off of work, but it was hard because she got off when most lawyers and realtors closed shop. He’d put a few punks into their place and had guided a drugged girl to a hospital. She’d cried and thanked him as he handed her off to the nurses.
He felt wrung out and the breeze felt warm several stories up from the street. He wanted to go home and sleep for a week, but he didn’t have a week to sleep because then he’d lose one to mourn.
“Deadpool says you’re having a hard time,” Double D said from behind him. He hadn’t heard him creep up, but then again, he was kind of out of it to begin with. Peter sighed and nodded.
“It just really sucks,” he said, choking on the crack in his voice. He swallowed hard because he was tired of crying and he didn’t know if he trusted Double D like he did Wade yet.
There was a long silence, were Daredevil just let him sit on the edge of the roof and breathe. Then he stepped up next to him and sat down close by. Not touching, though. Double D had a thing about touch.
“It always sucks. Do you want to talk?” Peter took a breath through his aching throat. He sighed and figured, hell Wade already knew, why not one more person?
“I think we’re being evicted, my family and me.”
Daredevil hummed. Peter looked at him, but he was looking out over the city.
“Have you ever been evicted?”
“Yeah, a few times.” Peter startled; he didn’t know why. Wade had told him it happened to people all over, but he hadn’t figured that Double D was one of those people. He seemed pretty responsible.
“How--? I mean, what was it like?” He asked, trying to figure out what he really wanted to ask. Double D waited, as if he knew that Peter was working around a better question.
“No, how long does it take to stop hurting?” He decided on. Daredevil tipped his head, as though weighing the question.
“Depends on the place. Some of them never stop hurting,” he finally looked at Peter, “If you don’t want to, you don’t have to tell me. I don’t mean to pry, but I might know a guy who can help.”
Peter ended up telling him, because he wasn’t stupid enough to turn down an offer of help when he really needed it. Besides, he was a kid and Double D was a hero (even though he denied it). He was allowed to need a hero every so often.
Daredevil was quiet for a long time after Peter finished talking. Peter had just started wondering if he’d actually been listening when he stood up.
“Would Mr. Stark help you?” he finally asked. Peter sighed.
“Mr. Stark has been really good to me, but this isn’t—he doesn’t understand this kind of thing. He thinks that problems like these can be solved by money and I—I don’t want that and my aunt wouldn’t want that. It’s not the money that’s the problem. My—my uncle—” he choked. Couldn’t get any more words out.
“Wait here for a minute,” Double D told him, then disappeared into the shadows.
He was gone for less than five minutes before he turned, which gave Peter some time to collect himself. He didn’t sit down this time, but held out a card. Peter frowned at it and reached out and took it. It was a business card.
“This person can help,” Daredevil told him. Peter looked up and felt bone weary. He was so tired.
“Did he help you?” He asked. Daredevil chuffed.
“No, that’s not really his deal, but he can help you.”
Peter took the card home with him and held it out to May.
“Daredevil gave me this,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t be mad that he’d told someone else about their situation.
“Daredevil?” she said, raising an eyebrow, “First Deadpool, now Daredevil?”
“We’re a team,” Peter told her. “Double D said that this guy could help, he said he’s, uh, been evicted a few times.” May hummed.
“And he said this guy helped him?”
“Well, not in so many words.”
May called the number on the card and set up an appointment with the guy who answered. She said he’d been really nice and had arranged an appointment late in the evening, past his usual hours, once she told him her shift didn’t end until six.
“I told him that I wasn’t sure I could pay for a suit,” she told him as they both scraped through dinner, not hungry, “He wasn’t a jerk about it; said that we should come by first and if he couldn’t figure it out or if we didn’t want him, he’d just write it in as free legal advice. Seems like a pretty good guy.”
Google’s reviews were unusually positive.
They had 13 days until the date on the notice, but Peter couldn’t help but feel a cautiously optimistic.
May picked him up from school, because they were doing this together, and they made their way to the address on the card. Google maps led them through a maze of streets and dropped them off at a slightly run-down building. They climbed the stairs to the office and knocked on the door.
A voice told them to come in.
The lights were off, but it the sunset was bright enough to bathe the room in orange. The guy must have shut everything else down for the day.
“Hello?” May called, walking into the office.
“Just a moment,” the voice answered.
A tall guy with dark shades and stubble emerged from an office on the left. At first Peter thought he looked like a douche then he noticed the long white stick leaning against the filing cabinet beside the guy’s office door and felt guilty for making assumptions.
“Mr. Murdock, I’m May Parker, we spoke on the phone,” May said, “This is my nephew, Peter.” Peter nodded, but May nudged him and gave him a look and he remembered the stick.
“Sorry,” he blurted, “I’m Peter.”
Mr. Murdock’s lips curved into a smile.
“I know,” he said simply. May frowned and looked at Peter.
“Have you two met?” she asked. Peter squinted at the guy, then looked at May quizzically, shrugging his shoulders up high.
“Just a second,” Mr. Murdock said, before returning to his office. Peter thought hard. The guy’s voice was kind of familiar. He tried to place it but didn’t have a face. He shook his head at May.
“I thought it was fair,” he called from the room, “Since you shared with me.” He stepped back out holding something roundish in his hands. He reached out and caught Peter’s wrist like he knew exactly where it was. He placed the thing in his hand and pushed it back towards him. May hovered nervously, trying to decide whether he was being a threat or just being a weirdo. Peter watched him too, trying to read him before looking down at the ball.
It was Red’s mask.
He jerked his head up.
“You’re a lawyer?” is what he blurted out. Mr. Murdock—Daredevil—laughed.
“A blind lawyer?” Peter elaborated. His mind wanted answers, closure, something, but he only came up with more questions. Double D—holy hell—laughed again and ducked his head to cover his mouth and collect himself.
“A very good blind lawyer,” he assured them both, eyes crinkling. “And I’m pretty sure I can help.”
Peter startled himself by dropping the mask and throwing his arms around Double D’s chest.
“Thank you,” he murmured. He felt hands very gently press him back.
“Don’t thank me yet, Spidey,” Double D told him.
“Thank you,” he said anyways, hugging tighter.