Chapter Text
“I am not going back to prison.” Is the very first thing Spider-Man hears when he wakes up hog-tied on the floor.
Coming into consciousness was never something that came slowly. Nearly eight years of hero work have honed his senses into something sharp and quick. Even beneath the pounding haze of a concussion, Spider-Man could feel a myriad of sensations hitting him in a violent torrent. The rush of warmth nudges him into an awareness that spreads into blazing, burning heat. Tidal waves of pain licking at his insides and forcing him into harsh alertness.
He blinks. There’s a plastic covering spread out across the floor.
His head lolls to the left.
Knives. Varying in degrees of shape and size.
That...that was not good.
“C’mon, he can’t actually be dead, right? You would’ve seen the butterflies by now. Right? Right?” The muttering increases in its intensity, accompanied by the frantic sound of footsteps going back and forth. An attempt at gathering his bearings shifts his blurry vision into something clearer. He was in…a bedroom? The sticky press of blood pooling across the abdomen of his suit. “God, where the hell would I even hide the body?”
Wait a minute.
The plastic.
The rope.
The knives.
It takes exactly ten seconds for Spider-Man to conclude:
He was about to be fucking Dextered.
“What the fuck!” He croaks out and squirms against the skillfully wrapped bindings tying his prone form together. Getting out of this should be easy. He was Spider-Man goddamn it, but he was also dealing with a concussion and three broken ribs and apparently a goddamn nutcase planning to chop him up into mini pieces. “I’m not dead!”
“You’re not dead?” The voice echoes skeptically, and a hand unceremoniously rolls him onto his back. “You’re not dead!” Breathless relief colors the disembodied voice, and there’s the sound of something clattering to the floor. Spider-Man safely assumes it's the knife they were going to hack him into tiny pieces with.
“You were going to kill me!” Spider-Man blurts, voice pitching an octave he didn’t even think he was capable of reaching. It's not like people haven't tried to kill him before- but this? This was definitely new.
“You were going to chop me into tiny Spider-Man pieces with a-”
His eyes drop.
“A kitchen knife? Seriously?”
“I wasn’t going to kill you; I was going to dispose of you.” The woman corrects, and the absurdity of the situation makes him laugh a little hysterically. “You were the one who crashed through my window!”
A haze of memories floats into his mind, all broken and mottled. Vaguely, he recalls fleeing from someone. Someone dangerous enough to force him to hastily retreat, but for some reason, he could not dredge up who. What he can, however, recall is-
“It was an accident!”
“I’m on parole!” She shrieks back and lets out a laugh on her own. It sounds mildly maniacal, and it's then that Spider-Man notices that she’s wearing a poor excuse of a hazmat suit and a pair of rubber gloves. He immediately starts to squirm, and the ropes begin to fray in protest. Honestly, it’s not an easy task while hog-tied and bleeding like a stuck pig from a stab wound, he can’t even really remember getting-but hell if he's going to die like this by-
Spider-Man pauses mid-wiggle.
“What was your name again?”
“Nixie.” Nixie supplies helpfully, and maybe a little too cheerfully. “Nixie Davis-actually why am I even telling you this?” Nixie picks up the knife again and points it in his direction. She holds it with a familiarity that he mentally adds to his increasingly growing list of concerns. Right underneath murder-lair, and possibly deeply unhinged mental instability.
It wasn't every day he encountered someone who actually tried to cut him up. He was sure J. Jonah Jameson had more than a couple of fantasies, but even that man knew his limits within legal parameters. “You plan on snitching me out?”
“Of course not!” Spider-Man lies through his teeth evenly. He was going to snitch. He was going to snitch his ass off after getting out of this stupid goddamn rope and webbing her to the goddamn wall.
Unfortunately, the knots were done very, very well.
“Ugh, what are you, a Girl Scout?”
“Yes, actually.” Nixie kneels beside him and, to his relief, cuts the bindings around his wrist and ankles loose. Okay, so maybe she wasn’t that bad after all. "I was taking inventory of all the cookies we managed to sell this week before you crashed through my window."
“Seriously?”
“No, you fucking idiot." Nixie sticks her hand out to help him up. Spider-Man eyes the offered hand suspiciously and waits for that chill to zip up his spine. There isn't so much as a faint whisper or the familiar haze of static that tugged all of his hairs on end. For someone who was less than two seconds away from chopping off his foot, his Spidey-Sense was pretty goddamn quiet.
Reluctantly, his gloved hand grasps hers, and without so much as a grunt of exertion, Nixie hauls him up as if he weighs nothing. The world sways dangerously, and his eyes immediately drop down to the angry gash curving along where the blade had struck beneath his ribs. Deep enough to hurt like a bitch but shallow enough to not kill him. Blood had long welled up and dried beneath the fabric of his suit; the gash raw but slowly healing. Pieces of debris and concrete stuck in odd clusters around hints of his exposed skin.
“You got blood all over my carpet.” Nixie grumbles.
Spider-Man looks down at the plastic covering beneath his feet and abruptly realizes the assortment of knives was rather unimpressive: two butterknives, a pair of chopsticks, and a screwdriver.
Leave it to his luck to accidentally crash into the apartment of a serial killer. An arguably shitty serial killer with a questionable choice in murder techniques but a serial killer nonetheless. The plastic crinkles beneath his feet when he tilts his head down, it's to give Nixie his flattest, most unimpressed stare he could muster, the lens of his mask narrowing. “I seriously doubt that.”
“The living room carpet, jackass.” Nixie huffs and turns to march away, not once looking back when he limps after her.
Nixie's living room is a disaster. The apartment itself is a packed and tiny thing. A little cluttered and not really screaming villainy murder lair like he anticipated. No blood-spattered walls. No ominous chalk circles. Just chaos, junk, and a few pictures and lit candles.
There's shattered glass beneath the far right window, he vaguely recalled crashing into, and a drying pool of blood from the spot he had presumably unceremoniously crash-landed. Spider-Man might have felt guilty if Nixie hadn’t been actively considering whether he’d fit in a suitcase five minutes ago.
A thousand words bud on his tongue. He has a lot to say-too much to say- and his mind does that funny thing where it runs away with his thoughts. Half forming into incoherent equations before abruptly crumbling from an unknown variable. It also isn't exactly helpful that his head feels light, and his brain lethargically supplies another hazy memory of his skull being cracked against concrete.
Nixie suddenly looks at him funny, gaze suddenly intense when it lands on his shoulder. He follows her gaze and sees...nothing. Well, there's his shoulder, miraculously in its socket, and one of the few parts of his suit that wouldn't need to be sewn back together again. She sighs. “Please don’t land on my coffee table.”
His eyebrows pinch together. “What the hell are you-”
The world tilts as his knees buckle.
And then nothing.