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Chapter Text

People didn’t picture someone like Penelope Parker when they thought about the web-slinging vigilante swinging above Queens.

Nobody ever stopped to think that Spider-Man might be a young woman who kept her head down during the day so that New Yorkers could keep looking up at a superhero after dark. 

No, they imagined someone male in the faceless silhouette soaring through the city skyline. They preferred it, rather than ever consider the alternative.

Penny had learned first how to live with that, then how to make it work for her.

When she was fourteen, the first week she’d ever put on the initial iteration of her suit—

(still a baby bird figuring out how not to slam face-first into brick when she left the nest)

—a shaken victim in a police report had said he helped me, he was fast.

One pronoun was all it took.

The bodega shop talked to the NYPD, who talked to the Daily Bugle, who then sounded the alarm about Spider-Man with the same level of drama Sybil Ludington—forgotten heroine, the sixteen-year-old girl who’d rode farther than Paul Revere—might’ve once possessed, hollering about the British.

The vigilante is coming! The vigilante is coming!

Once the shock wore off, Penny was caught between her outrage—why was it that people assumed a man came to the rescue—and practicality. While she struggled with her pride, the truth was that Spider-Man had become a person of interest to the eyes of the law. As a freshman in high school scrolling through Reddit discourse about whether this new "vigilante" was even legal, that had scared her enough to squash her feminist protests.

Ultimately, Penny never corrected them.

It was for the better, really. “He” was the best armor she’d ever worn.

Spider-Man became the perfect cover for Penny Parker. Year after year, and no one had even come close to suspecting her. The cognitive dissonance required to connect timid Penny Parker with Queens' web-slinging vigilante was apparently insurmountable.

On record, Penny Parker had debilitating stage fright. Her medical history documented chronic asthma and a severe peanut allergy. Her classmates whispered she had some kind of binge-and-purge eating disorder because of how much she could demolish at lunch without gaining an ounce.

(Enhanced metabolism was a bitch. Penny was always hungry.)

Nobody trusted her to open a pickle jar, and she was always picked last in gym class after deliberately tanking her performance.

Her Instagram was private with exactly twelve followers, plus a pity-follow from Del Mar's sandwich shop after she hit twenty punches on her loyalty card and then become a part-time employee.

On record, Spider-Man’s most viral TikTok sat at 15 million views, partly because he stopped a runaway train, but mostly because he was rapping Cardi B’s “WAP” while doing so.

(MJ had insisted it was perfect and it had been surprisingly fun)

Spider-Man fight compilation videos regularly dominated trending pages across every platform. He was always gone before the cameras could focus, vanishing before anyone official could pin him down or ask questions.

He had millions of followers who either raucously cheered him as he constantly thwarted and escaped the NYPD, or called for his arrest. Spider-Man was an anti-establishment icon who created an endless cycle of discourse that only fed his legend.

Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg following him on TikTok had somehow made the whole internet lose its collective mind.

Spider-Man’s infamous reputation was crafted just as carefully as Penny Parker’s anonymous photography work; since she’d become a vigilante, Penny exploited her manufactured mythology by selling exclusive Spider-Man photos to the Daily Bugle.

It had been the only major publication which cared about Spider-Man at all at first.

So, fourteen-year-old Penny Parker—anxious, uncertain, and two months into the surprisingly expensive hobby of being Spider-Man—had snuck into the Bugle with her first photos and no concept of a long-term plan.

Just desperate to help Aunt May pay the bills now that Ben was gone.

The perpetually cranky J. Jonah Jameson had taken one look at Penny’s photos, scowled, and ushered her away into the privacy of his office.

“Kid, what’s your name?”

“Uh.” Penny panicked. Flailed wildly. “Benjamin P-Peters,” she stammered, improvising the first name to come to mind.

His blue eyes narrowed. “That’s a boy’s name.”

“Um,” had been Penny’s brilliant response. “It was my grandmother’s.”

His mustache twitched, and for a moment it seemed he might laugh. A second later, that begrudging amusement vanished, and his glare returned twice as fierce.

His eyes flicked to the photos again, then back to her.

“Fine,” he grunted. “B. Peters. You keep bringing me these, I pay cash. No names in print. We never see each other again face-to-face. You're a minor—I'm not painting a target on your back. Capiche?”

Penny capiched.

One reluctant handshake later, and Penny started to get cash through a PO box in Queens, and placed small deposits under a pseudonym into a bank account that Ned helped keep discrete.

It’d all been manageable until the past few months, when being Spider-Man had gotten risky. A peril which came not from the threat of violence, but politics.

Nearly every major government had ratified the Sokovia Accords, and unfortunately for any aspiring superheroes, the Avengers had signed on too.

Why they agreed remained a subject of great debate—there was a fifty-part podcast series, copious Reddit threads, unending YouTube essays with dramatic background music, but most of them agreed: Steve Rogers only put pen to paper after the President waved a full pardon in the fugitives’ and, most importantly, Bucky Barnes’ direction.

After seeing a few of the Winter Soldier’s leaked Hydra files—

(and oh, the nightmares she’d had of being buried alive in her own icy sarcophagus, Spider-Man caught, Penny Parker tortured, frost so cold it withered her soul, until she became vacant and barren and gone)

—Penny couldn’t judge Captain America’s desperation to protect his friend too harshly. Bucky Barnes needed all the help he could get. 

Some speculated about Iron Man’s guilt post-Ultron. Most said it was strategic. Tony Stark had been navigating political waters for decades, knew when the tides were inevitable. Rumor had it that he wanted the Avengers to have a seat at the table in order to rewrite the rules from the inside out.

As her personal hero, Penny hoped that Tony Stark didn’t actually believe in the Accords as-is. Really, really hoped that there was some long-game behind his choice.

Whatever the reason, the Accords had their signatures and the weight of their backing behind them.

There’d been exactly one “historic” press conference featuring Steve Rogers and Tony Stark shoulder-to-shoulder. Hailed as a triumph of reconciliation, a supposed show of unity on loop for weeks.

But beneath it…

Penny had watched the performance once, twice, then a dozen more times. Each replay further convinced her of one thing: these two immaculately dressed superheroes, left to their own devices, would try to render each other limb from limb.  

Tony Stark had leaned into the microphones with his usual rakish smirk and billion-dollar confidence. He spoke as if he were humoring the worlds’ assembled news outlets with his presence. Condescending to speak to them as he would to a lovestruck, small-time reporter who had been lucky to catch him for a quote. “What can I say? I’m irresistible. Not even good ol’ Captain America can escape my charm.”

The crowd laughed; the cameras loved him. But Iron Man’s eyes darkened as he deliberately turned to Steve and said: “He knows the Accords are the only way forward.”

Beside him, Steve Rogers had looked still as stone. An unsmiling figure of propaganda rolled out before the public, posture unfazed by how Tony played the audience. His voice was so devoid of warmth it sent a chill down her spine. There’d been no doubt, only fierce conviction in his words as he replied: “This isn’t about me or Tony. It’s about protecting people. That’s why we’re here.”

To Penny, the entire production was clearly a manufactured fairytale that shrieked at the masses: Look at how nice we play! Oh, Civil War? Such a nasty phrase. Even friends fight. And we’re best friends forever!

Whether they believed this, were bullied into, or bought by the government, the major news networks ran the clip of their handshake endlessly, always accompanied by praise and relief.

After Captain America and Iron Man disappeared behind the curtain, the task of speaking on behalf of the Avengers regularly fell to the alluring Black Widow.

Penny hated how good she was at it.

Natasha Romanoff was the real, perfectly-poised professional, her composure  terrifyingly flawless. Untouchable, unhurried, unaffected by the snarling reporters and careful verbal traps.

A mesmerizing beauty; her green eyes beguiling, her rose-red hair enchanting. Always feeding them soundbites in that silk-soft, persuasive manner that was a danger in and of itself. “Unregistered enhanced individuals operating independently need guidance and support.”

But Penny heard the subtext loud and clear: Play by our rules, or don’t play at all.

Spider-Man was an ideal pilot test-case for the Accords. Penny’s TikTok alone could topple entire marketing campaigns. If the Accords could roll Spider-Man out as Exhibit A it would flip the narrative from authoritarian to aspirational. Look, even Spider-Man signed up. Why haven’t you?

Penny balked at the idea of becoming an influencer, in any way, shape or form. It was against her religion. Accords brand ambassador? Government media campaign icon?

Her stomach roiled at the thought. No thank you, I already have three jobs. 

Meanwhile, it was getting harder to vanish. The Avengers didn’t need to personally hunt Spider-Man, the system tightened of its own accord.

New protocols, new surveillance, new consequences.

Every upload MJ scheduled, every exclusive Jameson bought, fed the mythology that might one day crush her.

MJ carefully managed Spider-Man's socials on Penny's behalf. It required careful coordination between them; Penny would provide the raw footage, while MJ handled the editing, captions, and posting schedule with the strategic mind of Sun Tzu.

It was a delicate balance because too much content for Spider-Man’s personal accounts meant less exclusive material for Jameson at the Daily Bugle, but her alter ego’s accounts were what really drove Spider-Man's cultural relevance.

Still, re-reading the comments section on TikTok remained Penny’s guilty pleasure. Especially the thread on that runaway train video.

@spiderman_nyc: POV: you’re just trying to get to work when things go off the rails 🕷️ anyway here's WAP

15.2M views • 3.8M likes • 847K comments

replies:
♥ 145K likes @Ned_Declassified: ok but the physics…sir you dropped this 👑

♥ 127K likes @emjay_writes the duality of this man... superhero by day, absolutely unhinged by also day

• ♥ 67K likes @Ned_Declassified: @emjay_writes did you see the conductor's FACE though

♥ 287K likes @Spotify_Official ✓ : NYC vigilantes really built different when they have Spotify premium 💯

• ♥ 178K likes @wecantstopwegamestop: we got Spider-Man rapping Cardi B before we got GTA 6

♥ 2.1M likes @CatsOfNYC: @blackwidow  is he the black sheep of your family or are all spiders like this  👀

• ♥ 523K likes  @marvel_stan_account: @blackwidow NAT WE NEED YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS

Less amusing, was that at eighteen Penny had learned this much:

A man could flip over Range Rovers in the name of justice, beat the shit out of muggers, swing impossibly through the city, and people would call him reckless, wild, maybe even noble.

They rolled their eyes and muttered “boys will be boys,” with fond exasperation. Some even smirked when he left a trail of webbed-up criminals hanging from streetlights like cocoons. They'd trend hashtags like #SpiderManIsHimothy and argue in YouTube comment sections about whether he could beat the Winter Soldier in an arm-wrestling contest. 

(For the record, Penny would very, very much like to try)

A girl doing the same thing?

The media would be vicious.

They’d call Spider-Woman undeserving of her power. Nasty. A spiritually lost, crazy, attention whore. Pick-me energy. Reckless in a different way. Reckless in the way that ends with Penny sitting in a windowless room while powerful people frothed at the mouth for the chance to get their hands on her, spitting words like competency hearing and indefinite detainment and psychiatric evaluation.

They'd psychoanalyze Spider-Woman: "she's clearly got daddy issues" or "bet she's not even that pretty under the mask." Someone would make a TikTok about how she was "very much desperate for male validation."

The think pieces would write themselves: Is Spider-Woman Setting Back Feminism? and The Concerning Psychology Behind Queens' Girl Vigilante. 

Someone would bring up her uterus, and her speculate about her fertility as an enhanced individual, because of course they would. Someone would ask where are her parents? Someone else would speculate about how she’d scared off any chance of a husband, ever.

And the anger—God, the anger would be the worst part. Because Spider-Man's anger was righteous. When he webbed up muggers and left them hanging from streetlights, when he got pissed at injustice—that was admirably heroic. Hot, even, if the thirsty comments on her TikToks were any indication.

Spider-Man got to be fierce and uncompromising; Spider-Woman would be called hormonal and unstable.

Reporters would dissect every moment of her life: talking heads would declare that she couldn’t be trusted with her power and criticize how skin-tight her suit is—is this appropriate? Is she sending the right message to young girls?

Cameras would drift from the hands she saved people with, to her figure, all before a witch hunt began.

It would never end with the simple acknowledgment of her strength and heroism.

Never.

So yeah, if the city wanted Spider-Man, Penny would let them have their delusion.

Let them be fooled by a natural voice modulator, a chest plate, padding, and elevated boots that all shaped Penny into the illusion of a man of below average height and muscular build.

It was degrading. It was exhausting.

It kept MJ and Ned out of crosshairs.

(It had kept Aunt May safe until the car accident last year. Penny couldn’t web-catch the drunk driver because she hadn’t been there in the first place.)

In high school, Ned and MJ had realized pretty quickly she was harboring an exhausting secret, but it took two months for Penny to confess.

While part of Penny delighted in the mischief of her secret identity, mostly it still grated: the feeling of being written out of her own story just because she didn’t fit the part. It grated in tiny, steady ways; a sunburn constantly scraping against another surface, a bruise forgotten until someone’s hand lands right on it.

Thing is though, Penny was used to bruises.

Even now, purple-black imprints from night’s patrol sat atop her skin in a painful crescent.

Penny had crawled into a clean hoodie and passed out for two hours, gotten up to take her Integrated Systems Challenge final, and was now basking tiredly in the sweet relief of it being over.

Finals week had turned the Empire State University cafeteria into a disaster zone; Penny managed to commandeer a table, but it was a bitter, pyrrhic victory.

She’d exchanged verbal blows in a particularly bitchy shouting match with a sophomore who thought his Constitutional Law study group was more important than her need to decompress after the brutal final exam she'd just survived.

Her altruism had warred with her need to recover, the angel on Penny’s shoulder urging her to give the table back.

The angel sounded suspiciously like every socialization lesson she'd ever absorbed: Be nice. Be accommodating. Don't make a scene.

The sophomore had a study group. He had friends to commiserate with. He probably had parents who'd pay for his therapy when finals drove him to the edge.

Penny had survived a semester of engineered torture, had three jobs (four if you counted Spider-Man), and she was operating on fumes and spite.

So Penny told the angel to go to hell, and Satan won today.

The sophomore guy left cursing as Penny unrepentantly planted herself like a flag upon the spoils of her recently-won territory, feeling dazed and haunted.

It was amazing she’d been able to form the words needed to argue for her spot at all, given that her mouth didn’t feel connected to her face. A symptom of the shell-shock syndrome inflicted unto her via the ISC exam.

Dr. Chen, grinning demonically, had warned their whole class on the first day that, “At some point this semester, you will hit your breaking point. Just remember: before it gets dark, it gets pitch black.”

The Integrated System Challenge (ISC) course, "From Molecules to Machines: Building Across Scales," was infamous across prestigious STEM universities for good reason.

It had been created by sadistic minds who sought to humble overachievers such as Ned, MJ, and herself.

Highly confident prodigies who'd entered university with enough AP credits to entirely skip gen-eds. Under the guise of preparing students for applied STEM in practice, the course merged science, computation, and engineering.

But what made ISC truly diabolical was the extensive non-disclosure agreement every student had to sign before applying for the chance to enroll.

Pages upon pages of legal language that basically boiled down to: you cannot discuss the specifics of this course with anyone, ever. Not the assignments, not the methods, not the final exam structure.

Nothing.

Which meant that despite the course's terrifying reputation, no one knew exactly why it was so brutal until they lived through it themselves.

The first two weeks had been difficult, yet comprehensive and interesting. The kind of elevated coursework that Penny had expected from university and found engaging. It had started to lull her into a false sense of security. She’d even thought to herself that the rumors around the class were nothing more than hazing.

(and, oh, how wrong she’d been…)

Then came the first Monday of Week 3: the horrible, horrible day when Dr. Chen walked in with an army of TA’s, each carrying stacks of boxes and darkly delighted smiles.

"Congratulations on surviving the theoretical portion," their professor had announced, cackling as he informed them of their impending doom. “Now we find out who can actually do something with all that knowledge. Not to worry, my dear students.” His grin widened, wolfish. “I know it feels hard right now, but just know…it will get worse.”

Blindsided, each student received a box of random components and one simple set of instructions: "You must use every single item, you may supplement with materials from the university lab within a $200 budget, and everything in your box must be integrated into your final design. Build something functional."

No specifications or help beyond that.

Penny had opened her box to find: two misaligned servo motors, a pressure regulator, a cracked reservoir, as well as an assortment of wires, sensors, and several springs.

To add insult to injury, it came with a handwritten, gleeful sticky note that read "Good luck :)" 

She'd stared at the components, her mind already sorting possibilities.

It wasn’t too bad at that point.

Immediately, it became clear that the $200 budget which had seemed oh-so-generous at first, would evaporate without extremely careful planning. Even pricing out the basics in mounting hardware, proper seals, and connectors would set her back.

The only saving grace in ISC’s infernal assignment was the unlimited, twenty-four-hour badge access to university labs. An all-you-can-eat buffet with an assortment of tools.

On and on they went: machine shops, welding stations, 3D printing clusters, CAD workstations, oscilloscopes, diagnostic equipment… They’d have been dead in the water without that access.

Penny already drafted full schematics when Week Four tore them to shreds.

Dr. Chen slithered in again, ushering in his worker bee TA’s who were once more carrying boxes. “Did you get comfortable with your components?” he asked with sweet venom, eyes lit with glee. “Excellent. Here's a new one! You must integrate it into your existing design."

Penny had stared at the pneumatic actuator sitting innocuously in her new box, her carefully planned hydraulic system suddenly requiring complete reorganization.

The pattern became clear by week five: new box, new component, new aspect of STEM to integrate.

Every.

Single.

Week.

"Ah, Miss Parker, I see you’ve got your circuit board working? Fantastic. Here's a heat-sensitive material that will melt if your current design gets too warm."

Then, Dr. Chen struck them with the most sadistic twist of all:

"Enjoying those springs? Great news—you're getting a gyroscope. Bad news—we're taking away one of your servo motors."

Fucking. Taking. Away.

Every week a new, random component would be added, just as another was removed.

A component you'd spent days integrating would simply disappear from your available inventory, forcing complete redesigns of systems you thought were finished.

After that particular constraint had been introduced, there was a small period of panicked purgatory before they all then descended screaming into the flaming pits of hell.

Ned had tears in his eyes as he raged against the unfairness. “What Dr. Chen gave he taketh away!” he’d snarled bitterly in the lab. “Cursed be his name!”

It became the unofficial slogan of the ISC cohort as they despaired over items given Tuesday, gone by Thursday of the same week.

Every dollar spent was a strategic decision: what could Penny fabricate in the labs versus what she absolutely needed to purchase?

She’d practically lived in the machine shop by Week Six, learning to weld at two in the morning because buying pre-fabricated brackets would have decimated her remaining funds.

Penny had watched Ned on his bathroom floor, face pressed against cool tile while she rubbed his shoulders. He'd just spent six hours troubleshooting his adaptive mesh network only to receive a box that morning containing a component that rendered half his work obsolete.

"I can't do this," he'd whispered between gasps. "I can’t believe I wrote a statement of interest and applied for this. I'm going to fail. I'm—" 

"You're not," Penny had said, finding it far easier to soothe Ned than her own worries. "We're going to figure this out." 

By November, MJ had been averaging five hours of sleep a night. Penny would get texts at 4 AM: they took away my pressure sensor, had to rebuild the entire feedback loop, or I have $17 left for components. More concerningly: can you explain eigenvalues again, words and numbers don’t make sense anymore.

On campus, they walked in lock-step with one another like drafted soldiers on extended tours, impotently marching to the tune of the ruthless ISC war machine.

They still had a full course-load of other classes. Their other professors gave no sympathy to the ISC students. The Dean of the School of Engineering and Science had sent an email out to the whole cohort to set them straight. “Your admittance to ISC is an honor. You made your bed, now lie in it.”

All the while, Penny’s pile of bills kept mounting.

She was hungry all the time. Mr. Del Mar had started giving her extra sandwiches to take home after her stomach kept growling on shifts.

Penny was struggling to cope with the realization that if she failed ISC, she’d lose her scholarship, lose everything. It would end with nothing but debt and broken dreams.

The stress kept getting worse, week after week after week.

“Say hello to your new pH sensor! And hand that over—oh, no need to look so glum, Miss Parker, it’s just a reservoir! Hah! Hope you weren't relying on that.”

She'd burned through her $200 budget by Week Nine, forcing her to salvage components from broken electronics in the recycling bins or hunt down spare materials.

By that point, Penny had no interest in building something flashy and just wanted to pass Dr. Chen's insane requirements.

But in the chaos… she had an elegant idea.

Penny had no doubt that she could build something new, nor that she could innovate under pressure, but given these constraints, she’d opted for a cleverer route; if it turned out the way she wanted, the construction industry would kill for it.

After all, there was a real market for precision fluid delivery systems. 

Her web-shooter mechanisms—the pressure regulation, the mixing chambers, the programmable flow controls—weren't just useful for swinging through New York.

Those same principles of adhesive application could work for commercial uses such as paint dispensing and industrial-grade coatings.

She'd started building a paint applicator system.

And the genius part? Nobody would ever connect it to Spider-Man.

It killed two birds with one stone: Penny could take the core mechanisms she'd already perfected and redesign them as a paint applicator, and use the ISC project as proof-of-concept to actually patent and sell later.

Spider-Man's web-shooters were sleek, wrist-mounted, designed for combat and acrobatics, but nobody knew how Penny managed to produce webs or swing around New York.

Almost everyone seemed to take it for granted that Spider-Man biologically generated them.

The only people who knew her web-shooters existed for sure were her, Ned, and MJ. Nobody had ever captured one on camera up close. Why would anyone look at a student's paint applicator project and think ‘vigilante equipment’? 

Her device had the same underlying physics, sure—but so what?

Pressure regulation and mixing chambers weren't unique to web-slingers. They were fundamental engineering principles used in countless industries. 

She’d even spent hours in the library database researching existing patents. There were hundreds of different designs out there, and none of them looked anything like what Spider-Man used.

The lab access had been crucial to pulling it off.

Hours spent at the CNC mill, programming precise tolerances; late nights with the TIG welder, creating pressure vessels that wouldn't fail; test runs on the flow bench, calibrating spray patterns.

Equipment she could never have afforded to access otherwise.

And Penny had shamelessly taken advantage of the state-of-the-art facilities to become even more effective in her vigilante work.

She took her actual non-academic web-shooters and the fluid itself to heights she’d never dreamed possible with precision machining equipment, new materials testing apparatus, and fluid dynamics simulation software.

Penny’d been incredibly, obsessively discreet about it, of course. She worked on the Spider-Man gear in the dead hours between two and five in the morning, and brought her own supplies so she wouldn’t be stealing from the lab.

The results were incredible.

Her web-shooters had never performed better, her web fluid had never been more reliable, her voice modulator aged up to be even more flawlessly masculine and mature.

No one would ever know that the infamous ISC course had inadvertently created a better Spider-Man.

When Dr. Chen announced in Week Thirteen that there would be no new boxes, there had been an audible, palpable sigh of collective relief. Some students had actually wept.

Though she’d never admit it aloud, the sheer rush of victory Penny felt as she’d proudly submitted her final project was enough recompense for her suffering.

She’d felt powerful, emboldened not only by her persistence and determination, but by that of her friends as well.

By their demeanors, Ned and MJ did not hold the same feelings.

Ned had practically thrown his project at the nearest T.A, as he loudly hissed, “Here! Outta my hands now, hope you people have the day that you deserve!”

The TA glared as she caught the plastic container. The wires, still visible through the translucent sides, jostled slightly at the force of it. She looked seconds away from actually shouting at him, but Ned turned away from her with completely disregard for her ire.

Penny’s eyes were wide as she gawked at him. “Jesus, Ned,” she said as he returned. “What’d she ever do to you?”

“Guilty by association,” he muttered darkly. “I just wanna sleep somewhere not in the machine shop.”

Penny wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him. “Ned, your mesh network turned out incredible.”

“Don’t listen to her,” said MJ with approval as she stalked over to the front of the room. “Stew in your resentment, Leeds.”

She’d turned in a brilliant, wearable safety device. As she did so, MJ said only one word, which by itself still managed to convey a promise of retribution if she ever were to find any of the ISC teaching staff alone in the dark. “…Enjoy.”

They thought they were done. They thought they could finally breathe…

A week after they performed individual demonstrations for the examiners, they'd walked into the final exam only to discover that it was the most fiendish and wicked twist of all.

Each student was assigned a table with someone else's randomly redistributed project at their desk.

Dr. Chen had stood at the front, laughing like a soulless demon ringing death’s knell before them all. The sounds of his boundless euphoria sent a violent thrill of terror up Penny’s spine.

"There is a light at the end of the dark tunnel you’ve been in this semester,” he’d declared, the ominous words underscored by his ghastly, dreadful smile. “That light is a train.”

“Your prize,” he’d continued, “for having the misfortune to survive is to determine what the device assigned to you does, how it works, and document the engineering principles behind it.” His eyes gleamed with anticipation. “Any damage to the device results in immediate failure and potential IP litigation under the terms of your NDA."

Only three fucking hours to decipher desperately assembled devices they'd never seen before, built by classmates who'd poured their souls into them.

Devices forged by the fires of creative rage.

Penny had fought actual villains more merciful than Dr. Chen.

Ultimately, she'd spent the time carefully probing, testing, and analyzing without damaging a single component, while simultaneously knowing that across the room, someone was doing the same thing to her modular adhesive dispensing system.

Penny finished first and stumbled out of the exam room, wondering if she was even alive and fighting the urge to cry from the stress of the whole ordeal.

As she'd left, she'd caught one last look at her friends.

Ned was hunched over with his face inches from circuitry as he tried to trace connection paths without touching anything. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he scribbled notes frantically.

MJ's famous aloofness was holding, but only just; her jaw was clenched with concentration as she carefully prodded at what appeared to be a bastardized bottle rocket, every movement deliberate and precise to avoid a catastrophic mistake.

Penny felt guilty for abandoning them in the trenches, but at least she'd managed to secure the table. Her phone was face-down on its surface, buzzing with notifications she was actively ignoring.

She had emerged from a battle, yes, but felt significantly improved already, and could not be bothered to check. Penny was too busy basking in the sweet, sweet glory of being free from that class, now and forevermore…

"What the fuck, Parker.”

Penny’s eyes flew open, ripped out of her daydream at once.

"Huh—I—what—?" she spluttered as MJ dropped into the chair across from her.

In one of MJ’s hands, she held a cheesy, overloaded breakfast burrito that instantly made Penny’s mouth water. Even more distracting though, was MJ herself. 

MJ too, looked rather revitalized just by virtue of the exam being over.  Still a bit pale, but drastically improved from her vexed and tightly wound disposition of half an hour ago. How was it fair that she looked so beautiful even after such an ordeal?

Penny admired her long, dark hair that was yanked into a messy bun; how it brought into focus her slightly flushed cheeks and sharp bone structure; how the light hit her warm, brown eyes.

Eyes that Penny could gaze into and see—

“You look like you got hit by a truck,” said MJ, and then viciously tore into the burrito.

Penny regretted so many things. She felt herself blush but managed to save some of her composure. "I wish,” she half groaned, half muttered. “Then I wouldn’t have had to live that nightmare.”

It seemed this shared misery was not enough to soothe MJ’s ire. Her eyes narrowed and she jabbed a finger at Penny in accusation. "I can't believe you left me there to die!”

She chewed savagely, the burrito taking the brunt of her fury. Penny worried that MJ might actually choke from the effort of simultaneously consuming calories and berating her best friend. “That was an attempted murder. Like, an actual, legitimate slaughter! And you—” another bite, another glare—"you left me bleeding out on the floor!”

Penny couldn’t help it. “How’d the… whatever-that-was go?” she asked, trying not to laugh.

MJ’s eye twitched. “Don’t.”

Penny nodded in faux sympathy, then cracked and burst into a chortle. “That bad, huh?”

“Too soon, Parker,” MJ warned, but she couldn’t suppress the twitch at the corner of her mouth. 

“My bad,” said Penny quickly, grinning. “Musta been the wind.”

MJ groaned, loud and theatrical, like she was reconsidering their entire friendship. Then she rolled her eyes, reached over, and stole a sip of Penny’s coffee. Immediately, she grimaced. “Jesus Christ. This is almost worse than your sleep schedule.”

Penny sniffed, and decided to ignore the insult. Instead, she redirected. “Did you see Ned on the way out? When I left it looked like he was about to set everyone on fire…and then himself.”

MJ pondered that for a while, chewing. Her dark eyebrows furrowed. Then she nodded her head sagely, and said, “Ned is Ned.”

Another bite of the burrito followed this declaration of wisdom.

Penny laughed. “Wow, so helpful,” she said, her words sarcastic despite the genuine amusement which coursed through her. “I just have a bad feeling, y’know? About his continued sanity? I hope he doesn’t—”

A human tornado slammed into the seat next to Penny, cutting her off.

Ned’s usually neat black hair was sticking up in deranged spikes, and his glasses smeared to oblivion. It was a wonder he'd been able to see them in the cafeteria at all. He panted like he had sprinted all the way there, eyes alight with a manic fervor.

"Guys," he said breathlessly, exhilarated and nearly vibrating. "I think I just had a breakthrough during that final. Like, an actual, publishable breakthrough."

Penny was sure she looked as confused as she felt, but MJ didn’t move at all, completely unfazed by Ned’s declaration. "Uh-huh," she drawled, somehow managing to convey serious doubts about this claim just in two syllables. "Please tell me you didn't actually submit this revolutionary new breakthrough as your final project."

"Oh, ha, ha—"

Penny blinked tiredly, but smirked. "Is this like when we accidentally ate those weed brownies sophomore year and you decided you invented the quadratic formula?"

"Oh, stop—this is different!" Ned shouted with enthusiasm. Ned's hands were already flying toward his laptop bag, undeterred by their doubt. His eyes gleamed. "During the final when I was looking at completely different components, I realized we've been thinking about your conductivity issue all wrong—"

While MJ managed Spider-Man’s social media and public image, and Penny handled building both her suit mechanics and web shooter fluids, Ned had taken it upon himself to shield their digital footprints and contribute electrical upgrades.

"Nope," MJ hissed. "No. Hard no. We're in a no-STEM zone right now. This is a STEM-free environment."

"But last week when you nearly got struck by lightning,” he babbled, “I think I figured out how to prevent that from happening again—"

"Ned—later," Penny interrupted, glancing around the cafeteria nervously.

"Yeah, Ned," repeated MJ menacingly, and this time his name was an inherent threat. "Respectfully? If you go on about the trauma we just survived, I will find a way to make your day even worse. It's a miracle I'm ambulatory."

“But—”

“No,” Penny and MJ bellowed at the same time.

They exchanged smiles, which usually wouldn’t have been enough to make Penny’s heart stutter quite so embarrassingly, but for some reason her chest did that cartoon-break-through-the-ribs thing.  

Ned clutched his chest dramatically. "The betrayal! From my own friends!"

Penny laughed, exhausted but giddy.

He deflated slightly but smiled too. "Fine. Later. But remind me to show you the security patch I wrote." 

“For Hero Watch?" MJ asked, perking up. "Did you finally fix that DDoS vulnerability?" 

"Fixed it and added rate limiting. No more crashes when Iron Man shows up and we get ten thousand submissions in five minutes." 

"Thank god," MJ said. "Last time that happened, the site was down for six hours." 

Penny winced, remembering.

“’Why even run a hero tracking site if you can't handle hero traffic?'" MJ quoted in a mocking voice. "Like I'm not doing this from my apartment with Ned's donated server space.” 

Penny felt that familiar pang of guilt and gratitude.

In eighth grade, a year before Penny became Spider-Man, MJ started a simple blog tracking local hero sightings and commentary. Hero Watch had now become the NYC hub for their generation’s relationship with heroes.

MJ ran and moderated this creative community forum, all while maintaining her status as an excellent student in software and mechanical engineering and managing Spider-Man’s online social media presence.

Penny didn’t know how MJ did it all, and suspected it was mutual.

"Hey, that server space cost me seventy-five dollars on eBay," Ned protested. 

"And I'm very grateful," MJ said solemnly, then reached over and tugged at a lock of Ned's disaster hair. "Did you stick your finger in a light socket, Leeds?"

"The device I was analyzing had some kind of electromagnetic field generator, okay? It wasn't my fault."

“Mmhmm.” MJ tore into her burrito again, unimpressed.

Distracted, Ned’s eyes locked onto it instantly. He leaned forward like a man starved, and licked his lips. “Hey…MJ…” he coaxed, “in the spirit of solidarity, how do you feel about sharing?”

MJ looked him right in the eyes, smiled sweetly, and said, “You can pry this burrito from my cold, dead hands.”

Ned withdrew mournfully, and slumped back in his chair. “Type of greed they talk about in the Bible,” he muttered darkly. "The kind that damns souls."

Penny let the sounds of their bickering wash over her, but even that was not enough to completely block out her phone. She tried to ignore the buzzing noise, but MJ's eyes flicked to her phone and back to Penny's face.

"You gonna answer that?" MJ asked, nodding toward it. "That's like, the fifth time it's gone off since I sat down."

"Probably Jameson wanting more Spider-Man pics," Penny said, which was both a hope and a strong likelihood. "He's been extra pressed since the whole Bushwick debacle.”

Ned perked up, pulling out his own phone. "Oh man, speaking of which, those shots you got of the fight? The staging is actually insane. How did you even manage that?"

Penny laughed nervously. "Raw talent and skill,” she said, because the alternative was explaining that she'd spent twenty minutes positioning her ring light and professional tripod while hanging upside down from a fire escape, negotiating with a one-eyed cat to keep it from pushing her equipment off the edge. “Right place, right time.”

“Right, but like seriously—”

“I know it’s hard to accept,” interrupted Penny loudly with a theatrical sniff, “but I am indeed, just better than you.”

Ned was the picture of amused despair. “How am I supposed to finish a thought around here?”

MJ snorted, then drawled, “How am I supposed to care?”

Penny laughed, and Ned shot Penny an indignant look. 

She coughed to hide a grin. "Um, anyway," Penny continued quickly, "I needed that shot. Jameson's been on one lately.”

Ned scoffed. “Tell us something we don’t know.” He scrolled through his phone. "Menace this, menace that,” he said, rolling his eyes, “real journalism would be following up with that one guy who's convinced Spiderman’s actually three kids in a trench coat."

Penny sighed. "Still?"

"Someone should check on him," MJ observed, nodding in agreement. “It’s a cry for help.”

"In other news,” said Penny, trying to keep her voice casual, “did you see that thread about Accords rally? The one with all the—"

Her phone buzzed again, more insistently this time. Maybe there was some reason to suit up and swing by—

No.

Not today. Today she was Penny Parker, not the friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man. And Penny Parker had two more finals before her first semester of college was over.

"Thanks, you really cleared that up for me," said Ned dryly. He put away his phone. "On the bright side, in exactly forty-eight hours, we will be free. Free from the demon Gods that call themselves our professors. Free from our eternal suffering.”

MJ rallied too, enthusiasm rising. She grinned. "Free to remember what sunlight feels like.”

Penny laughed. "Free to sleep.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a moment. Then Penny's phone buzzed again, and this time her curiosity didn’t just hum, it sang. Sharp, insistent, and impossible to ignore.

"Okay, you know what? Fine."

Penny glanced at the notification and her heart leap with anticipation. Even if it was outside of her usual jurisdiction, the notification from Hero Watch was too interesting to resist. It wasn’t even far from ESU campus.

BREAKING: Car chase reported near Brooklyn.

"Shit," she breathed excitedly, then looked up to find both her friends watching her with varying degrees of concern.

"Let me guess," MJ said, voice weary with resignation. "Emergency at work."

"Something like that." Penny was already grabbing her backpack, but MJ reached out and clasped a hand around her wrist.

"Penny, you need rest. Whatever this is—"

"Can wait," Ned finished firmly. "Right? It can wait?"

For a moment, Penny looked between MJ's troubled brown eyes and Ned's stubborn expression, and felt that familiar tug between her two lives. Even though her heart sank and her guilt flared, Penny already knew her best friends’ concern wouldn’t be enough to make her stay.

Seeing the decision on her face, MJ sighed and let go of Penny.

It felt like a loss.

She wanted to say something, to apologize—I'm sorry I'm like this, I'm sorry I keep choosing this, I'm sorry I'm not easier to love—but she knew MJ couldn't stand any form of deceit, no matter how well-intentioned.

Penny stood up, hauling her backpack over her shoulder. "I’ll be fine. It's probably nothing, anyway.”

"It's never nothing with you,” she said simply.

Despite the lack of annoyance in MJ’s voice, Penny still worried that one day, her friends would decide she was not worth the trouble anymore.

Because Penny Parker was trouble and required endless patience.

"Text us when you get there safe," Ned said. "And I swear to god, if you miss our post-ISC celebration dinner because you're bleeding out somewhere, I'm going to kill you myself."

"I'll be there," Penny promised. "If I’m late, will you order me some fries?"

With the ruthless air of a conquering warlord, Ned sniffed and said, "No prisoners, no mercy."

"Tch, you guys are the worst."

MJ managed a faint smirk. "We know.”

As Penny walked away, she pulled out her phone to check the other notifications.

One informed delivery email from USPS that she assumed was her latest deposit from the Bugle, a message requesting help in her ESU tutoring portal, and a notice that Mr. Del Mar needed her to cover a double shift this weekend.

Penny was almost to the cafeteria exit when she heard Ned yell, only half-joking, "Try not to get arrested!"

"No promises!" she called back, smiling.

Twenty minutes later, Penny’s heart was hammering, adrenaline surging through her veins. She’d seen dead bodies before, but these, God—

They were eviscerated.

There were three on the ground when she’d got there. The first had been decapitated brutally.

Penny swallowed bile. She’d—she’d never seen that before…

Another had a massive, cauterized crater where should have been his left eye.  The third’s neck had snapped grotesquely; the white vertebrae visible through torn flesh.

Penny had thought the “unusual activity” at the Mill Basin Bridge in Brooklyn would be a simple case of The Good Guys versus The Bad Guys, especially since the bridge itself was closed and under reconstruction.

Instead, there were six thugs, still alive, bolting away from a guy in a red and black suit. He was leaning over the last corpse, wiping a horrible, jagged blade clean on the dead man’s jacket.

Some of the scattered men fired wildly in their retreat, others ran without looking back.

The man seemed unbothered as his victims fled, but not in a way that suggested they were safe. Moreso that he was temporarily preoccupied and would resume murder shortly. He was monologuing to seemingly no one, stretching leisurely as he chattered:

"—and then Deadpool—that’s me, by the way, capitalization absolutely essential, just ask my lawyer, who I definitely have and who definitely doesn't cry every time I call—demonstrates a perfect emergency field tracheotomy on Patient Three’s itty, bitty neck!"

The nonsense raised the hair on the back of Penny’s neck, for it seemed deliberately idle, recited to disturb and disorient those around him.

A foreboding chill ran down her spine, a terrible wave of unease.

This man was not well.

One of the fleeing men had bravely decided to turn around, a look of anguish upon his face as he fired.

The killer—Deadpool?—jerked his head to the left with inhuman speed. He avoided a bullet to the skull with a second to spare, unharmed as the bullet missed.

In a blur, Deadpool’s hand pulled a gun from his holster. There was a single crack before his would-be murderer’s kneecap exploded.

The man went down screaming.

Deadpool whistled happily as he walked over to the sobbing man. “Ouch, kneecap! That’s physical therapy three times a week, sweetheart. Definitely an opioid addiction in your future. But hey—”

He put his boot on the ruined knee and pressed down. He continued speaking at the same level volume, even as the man’s wailing crescendoed into inhuman shrieks.

“—at least you're alive, right? That's what matters!"

He just kept talking, now picking up a crowbar.

It didn’t matter what these men had done to bring Deadpool down upon them; Penny had to stop him.  

A moment before she leapt down onto the bridge, Deadpool turned around and looked directly at her. "Oh! Oh! We have an audience!"

Penny landed in a crouch.

Deadpool dropped the crowbar and squealed. He clasped his hands together, bouncing in a twisted picture of girlish delight. Then he waved his bloody gloves, fanning his face like a fainting, Victorian maiden. “Spider-Man! My arachnid idol,” he gushed, voice going high and breathless, “I've been following your TikTok—I mean, not in a creepy way, in a 'I respect your work' way—and I just gotta say, that WAP video? Chef's kiss. Made me believe in art again.”

Just a few seconds later, the reason for Deadpool’s relaxed demeanor became clear.

The fleeing men had almost reached the end of the empty bridge when the lone van on the road exploded. The potent scent of fuel filled Penny’s nose, and they were shouting now, trapped between fire and flame on one side, and on the other—

Deadpool.

Who had clearly orchestrated the whole snare. A murderer who now regarded them with an arsonist’s bright mirth. “Whoops, forgot to douse you boys in gasoline first.” He made a show of rummaging through his pockets. “Anyone got lighter fluid?” He paused. “And a lighter?”

One of the men was already climbing the railing, preparing to jump into the river.

Deadpool didn’t seem to notice or care. He turned back to Penny, still talking to her in that overly cheerful, insane way of his. “Spider-Man, I was beginning to think you were camera shy! Don’t suppose you have a Zippo? Or is vaping—"

Penny didn’t let him finish. She shot a web to his face and flew at him with a kick that should have sent him sprawling.

Should have.

Deadpool pirouetted away, laughing even as he drew a gun again. “Oh, so that’s how it is? Fantastic! I love meet-cutes that start with violence! Very rom-com, very enemies-to-lovers—"

He fired.

Despite the fact that Penny knew all along that she was in very real, very serious danger, she didn’t expect the bullet to come mid-conversation.

Too late she realized: that was the point.

Shocked, she twisted mid-air, desperate—

Not fast enough. Pain exploded on her left side where the bullet grazed her, white-hot and immediate. She staggered, clutching her side. The seamless voice modulator in her mask turned her yelp into a rough grunt.

“Ooh, close one!” called Deadpool brightly. “I mean, I was aiming for center mass, but you moved, so mea culpa—"

My turn, she seethed.

Penny struck back hard.

She webbed his gun and yanked viciously. Deadpool clung to his weapon, sending him into a brutal crash with the pavement.

When he tried to rise, Penny was already there, an uncompromising boot aimed at his chest, violently knocking him back.

Mean.

And it felt—God, it felt good. Freeing to be as strong as she actually was.

She fired more webs at Deadpool and he dodged, but only part-way. A thick strand across his chest pinned his right arm to his side. 

“—alright, so that one was your bad.” Deadpool nodded, laughing again. “But that’s okay, baby. See, I’m like a Swiss Army knife. Very versatile. That whole, ‘I contain multitudes—”

One-armed, in the same manner that men pulled off their t-shirts, he reached behind him, drew forth a bloody machete—

(unbidden, Penny pictured it again: the decapitated head on the ground. its lifeless, unseeing eyes. she’d seen death, but not with that mess)

—and lunged at her with incredible speed. The kind of combat training that truly highlighted the insufficiencies of her own self-taught style. Deadpool was slashing at her in a terrifying blitz, forcing Penny back even with one arm webbed to his side.

“—well, I’m more of a fan of the lesser quoted, ‘Do I contradict myself?’ line. Whitman really speaks to me. But hey, bandwagons—"

She dodged to the left, moving faster than she ever had in her entire life. Her spider-sense shrieked as the sharp blade of the machete whistled through the air, missing her by an inch.

“—are boring. I got kicked off the Sinaloa cartel’s wagon. You give one Colombian neck-tie to the jefe’s son, and suddenly everyone’s telling me I need to be a cowboy solitario.”

The pain in her side flared as Penny pushed her body to its limits, the discomfort worsening with every prolonged minute of their fight. She pressed a hand to the wound, applying pressure for a few seconds of relief.

Deadpool used the momentary reprieve to try and free his other arm from the webbing. He hacked at it, confused as it refused to yield to the knife. The blade hit the webbing and slid down, unable to cut through the material.

He tried again with a powerful sawing motion, one which would have easily sliced through zip ties or rope.

Again, the webbing held with absolutely no sign of damage.

Penny felt a hysterical surge of relief flood through her chest. Thank god for unlimited lab access and that evil fucking course.

She’d spent weeks perfecting this formula, bringing it to new heights because of the Empire State lab access she’d obtained for ISC.

Penny’s most crucial innovation: shear-thickening behavior. When the web fluid was hit fast, with the force of a bullet or a knife, the non-Newtonian properties kicked in, polymer chains locking together under impact stress. They became damn near impenetrable.

It would be two hours before Deadpool could cut through.

Penny caught her breath for just a second, feeling the tiniest bit safer as Deadpool demonstrated proof of concept before her eyes.

“Huh,” he said, tilting his head. “That's actually impressive. What is this, some kind of—"

Deadpool kicked at her with such speed and force that he essentially flew. His boot, bladed at the tip, caught her ribs hard enough that she felt her bones creak at the same time her skin and suit tore.

Penny wheezed, barely managing to roll out of reach afterward. She stumbled to her feet as she danced back.

Penny had not fought another enhanced person with these insane, inhuman reflexes. Clearly unhindered by Penny’s own enhancements and not suffering the same disadvantage, Deadpool kept forcing her to dodge, striking at her in an endless, fluid siege of violence.

The handicap of one arm did virtually nothing to slow him down.

Enthusiasm aflame, he seemed to anticipate her rapid reactions despite being wildly unpredictable himself. 

They kept trading blows and his voice never stopped. A calculated, dizzying stream of stimulus that Penny had to actively banish in order to concentrate. A drain on her mental energy, constantly requiring her to narrow her focus on how Deadpool moved instead of what he was saying. 

"Aww, you're pulling your punches," he cooed, dodging yet another web shot. "That's adorable. Really. It's like watching a yappy puppy try to be fierce. All bark, no bite—"

Three of the thugs ventured close to their fight, perhaps figuring that they had a chance to bring down Deadpool while he was preoccupied, wanting to go on the offensive. Despite all of them possessing guns, only one dared to aim—

Already knowing what was coming, Penny moved. Threads of web shot out in two simultaneous blasts, shielding two thugs even as they were slammed down and stuck to the pavement.

In the same instant that the third man fired, Deadpool whirled around and physically shot forward, wrathful as he swung his machete.

Possessing the reflexes of an unenhanced, mortal man, his victim could not dodge.

Instead of going for one of the man’s major arteries, Deadpool stabbed him in the side. He twisted the knife before wrenching it out.

The man collapsed.

He was going to bleed out. Penny knew it, had seen it before.

(Uncle Ben in her arms, growing heavier, rasping his last words)

She shot more webbing at Deadpool, driving him to the side as she managed to stagger toward the man on the ground.

For a moment Penny had the opportunity to pick up the fight against Deadpool. Perhaps this time she’d be successful. It was the tactical choice.

But even though Penny Parker didn’t know the man on the ground, didn’t know what lived in his heart or his past, she refused to let anyone die if it was within her power to save them.

She dropped to her knees, wondering if web fluid could be used as a gauze or if it were better to apply pressure by hand. The webbing would run the risk of preventing doctors at a hospital from accessing what they needed to repair, but would her hands be enough?

Penny pressed down with one hand, warm blood soaking her fingers. She aimed the other at the wound, trembling as she thought of how the impact was going to hurt.

Her spider-sense went supernova.

“How sweet.”

A bullet tore through her shoulder, through and through. From the tunnel of destroyed tissue, hot blood started flowing down Penny’s arm.

The pain—

The pain was enormous.

She fell forward, hitting the ground hard. Penny barely managed to lift her chest up. Behind the mask, tears streamed down her face. She couldn't stop them, didn't try. The modulator flawlessly transformed her wounded sobs into ragged, masculine breaths.

But she could see Deadpool standing there. He’d traded the machete for a gun, presumably belonging to one of the thugs she’d webbed down.

Deadpool’s voice was dripping with false sympathy. “Aw, first time?”

He crouched down beside her, still aiming the gun at her head. “That looked like it hurt.”

She was literally nauseous from the pain.

With his other hand he reached out to pat her wounded shoulder. “Just a love-tap, Spider-Man. Something to always remember me by. Well, I say always, but who knows how much time we really have?”

Penny could hear it in his voice. He was going to shoot her again. Maybe it wouldn’t be fatal, but just as likely those odds were even.

(she thought about him lifting the mask off her dead body. wondered if knowingly killing a woman would give him pause. she bet he would make a point out of letting Penny die equally, just like anyone else)

Deadpool's hold grew fiercer. Penny gagged as he squeezed. "Oh, this is a special moment. Intimate, even. I'm your first, aren't I? First person to shoot you. First person to really hurt you. That's—"

Penny’s webs fired.

His gun. Hand. Chest. Legs.

Layer after layer until Deadpool was a cocoon stuck to the bridge railing.

He burst into surprised laughter, seeming both outraged and delighted. "Now we're getting somewhere! Oh, this is—bondage on the first date? Spider-Man, you romantic—"

Bondage.

No one—not one single person—in the entire four years of being Spider-Man, had ever spoken to her like this.

Not the cops who'd chased her, not the criminals she'd webbed up, not the bystanders who'd filmed her.

As Penny Parker, she’d learned to tune out cat-calling and lingering eyes, unfortunately accepting it as a disgusting side-effect of being female in public spaces.

As Spider-Man, she’d been free from sexual harassment, able to escape it anytime she wore the suit. Penny was armored by the grace of her camouflage and the general assumption that anyone who dared to degrade her would face immediate physical retaliation.

The suit, and the mask, and the perceived maleness meant she could just exist without being constantly reminded that other people felt entitled to comment on her body.

Now Deadpool was doling out the disgusting rhetoric in the one space she’d thought she was safe from it. 

Penny pushed herself up to her knees, rose to her feet, and glared, despite knowing he could not see her beneath the mask. 

The worst part was Deadpool didn't even know, because he thought he was talking to a man. Inflicting this deliberate discomfort wasn't even about her being female, this was just how Deadpool was.

For a dreadful moment, Penny contemplated how every fight and encounter would change if they all knew she was a woman.

She staggered back to the wounded man and pressed her hand against his bleeding side. 

"You know," Deadpool continued behind her, voice rich with that same disturbing amusement, "most people buy me dinner first. But I appreciate a partner who knows what they want. Very direct. Very—"

There was movement from her peripheral vision. The three remaining men had circled back, seemingly fearless now that she’d incapacitated Deadpool.

"—oh, we're about to have an audience. Should I be jealous? Are you the polyamorous type? Because I'm open to new experiences—"

They all aimed guns at his head.

Penny’s spider-sense buzzed insistently. Yeah, yeah, she thought deliriously. I’m on it.

Deadpool had brutally murdered three people tonight. He'd shot her twice. He was a killer, a psychopath, and absolutely deserved whatever those men were about to do to him.

The pragmatic choice was to let them pull the trigger and solve the problem.  Deadpool would die and there’d be one less murderer posing a threat out in the world.

Penny made her choice with no apology.

Despite the agony in her shoulder, more web-lines shot out, and suddenly all three men went down.

Then it was just Penny standing in front of three corpses, six webbed thugs, and an incapacitated Deadpool.

Flames danced behind them all.

Deadpool went quiet for exactly three seconds.  "Those guys were going to kill me,” he said slowly. “And you didn’t let them.”

Penny didn’t answer him.

She felt light-headed, had broken out into a frigid sweat.

Agony scorched in her shoulder, and pain radiated from her side in such anguish that Penny knew she would never, ever, forget the sensation of being shot. 

“What the—” sputtered Deadpool, incredulous. “Did you just save me? Did I just get saved by my own captor? Kinky. I like it. We're basically married now in seventeen countries. Very damsel-in-distress, except I need a corset and you’re the—wait, are you in shock, Spider-Man?”

He paused, and Penny just knew that he was smirking. His voice was rich with innuendo and amusement as he asked, “Did I… “ and he licked his lips loudly underneath his mask, “…shoot you stupid?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Penny snarled, aggrieved.

The voice modulator ensured the graveled words landed in a savage, hostile command.

It was an invention that expressed her voice completely without computerized tones; a perfectly manufactured, masculine register which wholly transformed what would have been dismissed as a tantrum into authoritative rage.

They were her first words to him, and part of her wished they’d be more dignified, but she was just so absolutely done with Deadpool’s special brand of crazy bullshit. 

She could hear how it landed: Spider-Man’s tone was an aggressive dismissal that she could not have managed on her own.

Even as overwhelmed as she was with agony, Penny was still immensely grateful for the modulator. The pain from the gunshot wound had entirely ruined her ability to seem cool and collected, even if she didn’t need to be right now. 

As Spider-Man she could just be angry the way men were angry: completely, furiously, and it was just—yeah Spider-Man’s pissed off. Makes sense. That guy’s annoying.

The freedom of it was almost as intoxicating as the rage itself.

“C’mon Spider-Man,” Deadpool wheedled in between laughs. “It’s a fair question. Did you miss the part where I shot you? Twice?” He sounded proud. “And the machete?”

Penny ignored him. Still applying pressure to the man’s wound, she pulled out her phone, sending messages back and forth with Ned and MJ, touching base to let them know she was alive.

They, in turn, alerted her to the fact that the cops, an ambulance, and the fire department would all be there in the next two minutes.

"And now you're ignoring me. Which, okay fair. I did shoot you. But you like me. You’re playing hard to get, I can tell. We’ve got chemistry, it’s okay to admit it. I'm very likeable, ask anyone. Well, don't ask those three dead guys, they might have some complaints—"

She turned toward him, burning with disgust and contempt so fierce it rose higher than the pain she was in. It was a disdain so great and heavy that its presence grounded her, and brought forth the level-headedness she’d wished for moments ago.

Just as his machete could not maim her web fluid, Penny knew her words would not hurt him; yet it brought her a vicious satisfaction to speak her honest opinion of the man.

Her fierce gaze burned into the white eyes of his mask as she willed her sincerity to scorch him, to make him understand that she genuinely, honestly mean it. "Deadpool,” said Penny softly.  “You make me sick.”

“And you,” drawled Deadpool in accusation, a note of suspicion in his tone, “saved my life. It wouldn’t have stuck. I come back around like a lucky penny. But you didn’t know that.”

Penny chose not to respond.

Like a needy, attention-deprived child, this only stirred his desire to poke at her. 

“Maybe I did read this wrong,” he said, letting out a theatrical sigh of anguish. “Do you have that lust murder thing going where you only kill your ideal victim type? Are you letting me live because you don’t think I’m pretty? You can tell me, Spider-Man. I’m a big boy. Am I not your type of psychopath?”

Despite his facetious words, Penny chose to answer him as matter-of-fact as she could, wanting him on some level to understand.

Penny thought of Ben and of the times when May could have become the most hopeless and despairing woman after her loss of him. Penny thought of how May had been heart-broken with terrible grief, well within her rights to withdraw from Penny, to abandon her…but had never once considered it.

She saw in both May and Ben the full spectrum of family and its worth: warmth, protection, safety, the shine of happiness, and unconditional love.

There had been a time last year after May’s passing when she’d truly believed that she could not bear their loss.

Knowing now the depths of darkness a person with her powers could descend to when unmoored from love, had made Penny realize all the more how incredibly lucky she’d been to have them.  

And Penny knew that this love, this goodness, was a gift that not all received.

She’d had the advantage of always being shown how to make the right choice.

It was her responsibility to pay that forward.

“What I am,” said Penny gravely, “is someone who doesn’t have the ability to determine who can be rehabilitated. Everyone has the potential to do good, and if there is any chance for your redemption, then I can’t make that call to destroy it.”

He was looking at her with interest now. His energy was almost sweetly curious, a desire to take apart something to see how it works. 

Deadpool sounded skeptical, still entertained. “That’s your answer? ‘Everybody deserves to live.’” He jerked his head at the men who she’d incapacitated. “These guys would put a bullet in your brain if they’d gotten the chance. If they get out of prison, they’ll kill again and sleep like babies. I am sorry to inform you, Spidey, but there really is rest for the wicked.”

Penny was already shaking her head. She didn’t spare the other men a glance. However valid Deadpool’s words may or may not be, it didn’t change anything.

“With great power, there must also come great responsibility,” she said, low and unwavering, quoting Ben directly. “When you can do the things I can, you have a responsibility to do what's right, not what's best. And I don’t know what’s always best for everyone. But I do know that killing is wrong, period, and with the power to do things like murder anybody who would act in defiance of you, comes the responsibility to uphold your personal best.”

There was silence. Real silence.

A short blessing.

When it finally broke, Deadpool’s voice had become both lighter and sharper, rid of that manic energy that had animated him so thoroughly. He sounded as though he would very much like to backhand Penny for her stupidity. “You're going to die, you know. That moral code is going to get you killed. For all you know, webbing me up means I'll just get free and kill you tomorrow."

Penny shrugged. “Then that's on you. But I’ll die knowing that people can weather the hardest times life can throw at them, and still be the best person they can be at the end of it. It’s possible for everyone.”

“No,” he said. “It’s really not.” It wasn't hostile, the way he said it, but it left no room whatsoever for argument. “But you believe that. You really, genuinely believe that.”

And then she stopped replying, because for the second time in Penny’s life, a man died in her arms. He went still as he finally succumbed to the wound Deadpool had inflicted.

She withdrew her shaking hand and couldn’t look at Deadpool at all.

There were sirens in the distance and Penny had said her piece.

Chapter Text

Deadpool was perched on a fire escape in Queens. Queens, of all the boroughs! The least exciting one, the Wonder Bread of New York City. Tragic location aside, he was eating his third sleeve of Oreos and watching a completely ordinary apartment building.

Or rather, ordinary to most. Not to him. Because Wade was very, very good at his job.

"Okay, so here's the thing," he muttered to himself, "Everyone thinks surveillance is about following someone. Wrong! Surveillance is about anticipating someone."

Deadpool’s constant, bizarre commentary and fourth-wall breaks distracted people enough that they forgot to dwell on the finer details of Wade’s gratuitous violence and psychopathic behavior. Psychopaths were morally insane, after all, and insanity and unpredictability were Deadpool’s bread and butter. 

He excelled at eliciting the type of discomfort that made people want to flee and avoid thinking about Deadpool for the rest of their natural life. They rarely lingered on his masterful skill-set. Which, in Wade’s opinion, was a bit of a shame.

“I am a professional. I have skills,” he bemoaned, shaking his fist at the sky. “I once tracked a target across three continents using nothing but their Starbucks rewards account and a really, really disturbing read through of their Archive of Our Own history."

Deadpool shuddered at the memory. He pointed directly at the reader. “And speaking of AO3—I’ve seen what some of you have done to me, and you better pray I stay fictional. God has abandoned us because of what you did. I did not consent to that 50k slow-burn about me and a sentient chimichanga. FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS. The chimichanga was named Barbara. I did not consent to Barbara."

It was truly a tragedy to be one of the most vicious, successful, independent intelligence operatives in the fictional comic book world, without being recognized for it.

Deadpool had no allegiances except money, but he supposed he could pretend at Canadian patriotism if it allowed him to compete for the title of best assassin on a worldwide level.

Unfortunately, none of the Silicon Valley angel investors Deadpool met with would agree to form a Special Murder Olympics unless he’d tortured them first.

He needed to work on his pitch deck.

Lack of shiny medals aside, Wade was one of the best of the best mercenaries. Why, he’d venture to say that he was self-made for the most part.

After all, the Winter Soldier had been borne from blood and torture at the hands of HYDRA. Black Widow molded by the Red Room.

Wade Wilson, however, had honed his violence from the bottom of his mangled, ugly bootstraps until he could slake his own bloodthirstiness. He’d been an extraordinary marksman, athlete, and killer before his latent mutant genes had been so rudely awakened by Project X.

From an early age he’d been remarkably self-aware that his calling in life was to cheerfully inflict violence. Among his many other talents.

Deadpool threw his head back and laughed. "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a mercenary." He smirked, shaking his head. “Hey Siri, remind me to rewatch Goodfellas.”

(Wade didn’t want to talk about his basketball dunking skills, but then again, nobody was perfect. Except for maybe Dolly Parton.)

Yes, Deadpool was an unsung villain. Villain wasn’t even a harsh word. He could lie and say he gave a fuck about things like preferring to think about himself as a ‘bad guy who killed worse guys and occasionally did good things.’

The good things he did were always at least slightly warped by bad.

Like high-fiving that little kid who mistook him for Spider-Man.

That had been a lie.

Speaking of that idealistic, evasive little shit. It was now three weeks since that charming Mill Basin Bridge encounter in early December.

Deadpool was currently hunting down Spider-Man as part of a discreet, one-sided get-to-know-you session, aware of how his single-minded obsession resembled the focus of a serial killer.

Serial killer, mercenary. Rotten tomato, smushed tomato. Spoiled marinara, sugar-free ketchup. Different flavors of the same variety, widely regarded as unpalatable and disgusting no matter the sauce.

Wade was in perfect physical health, but what little sanity and morals he’d once possessed, Weapon X broke and left to heal at wrong angles, so that the result was a crippled monster that had adapted to move through the world in a terrifying, voracious way.

“If you’re sensitive, you can squint and tell yourself that I could totally be an anti-hero instead of a murderous psychopath who kills for money,” he said, nodding to you. “Or shut your eyes completely. Really, it depends on which interpretation the reader prefers.”

Then he spoke to the pigeon that had unwisely landed next to him. “Now, you’re probably asking yourself: why is everyone's favorite Merc with a Mouth spending his valuable time—and I do charge $200 an hour, just FYI—stalking Spider-Man like the Zodiac killer?”

The pigeon cooed, which Deadpool chose to interpret as genuine interest.

"Well, dear audience—" he gestured broadly at nothing, "—it's because I have a mystery to solve. And also because I'm pretty sure Spider-Man is into me. Did you see how flustered he got? Classic deflection."

Wade did not want to talk about how being stuck in a webbed cocoon for two hours had left him with nothing to do but reflect on his meeting with Spider-Man.

Spider-Man had forced him to think about things that Wade had never wanted to think about.

Chrysalis-induced ideals such as morals, personal responsibility, drawing the line, blah, blah, blah.

But there he’d been, trapped both in stasis and metamorphosis, with nothing better to do than analyze why Spider-Man had saved his life even though Wade had attacked him with a machete, shot him twice, and been responsible for a man dying in his arms.

When Deadpool emerged from that cocoon, he did so as a fascinated, predatory butterfly.

“Since I’ve mixed the encyclopedia facts about both species, let’s just call this more of a moth situation,” said Wade, because he tried to be honest with himself. “Like the creepy moths in the Silence of the Lambs. Death's-head hawkmoths. But less attracted to dudes who wear human skin.” He gestured to his suit. “I, myself, am more of a spandex guy. And as they say, ‘moth to a flame,’’ he sighed dreamily. “I really, really like fire. Well, setting things on fire. Which is basically the same thing.”

He twisted an Oreo apart, licked the cream, then continued. "Okay, so maaaaybe I’ve become a little Obsessed. Capital O. Italicized. Probably should be in a different font for emphasis, but the author is a millennial who doesn’t know how to do that."

"And when I become obsessed with something, I am like a demonic, three-headed hellhound with a bone. This particular bone is a mystery swinging through New York.”

Unfortunately for this four-limbed spider, Deadpool’s insanely powerful regenerative ability meant immunity to the fatal effects of sleep-deprivation when he A) felt like it and B) downed enough protein shakes and liquid IV.

 “It’s the Ozempic protocol, really. I just gotta power through the nausea, accept the gastrointestinal distress, and ignore the hippocampus degradation.”

It had been 504 hours since he’d met Spider-Man, and Wade had spent all of them fixated on his naïve, annoying, almost-victim. 

So, he’d painstakingly mapped every Spider-Man appearance over the past four years. Truly mapped, with a timeline and yarn, with his hands sticking pretty, color-coded pins on his walls.

Old school.

He'd found it. A gravitational center that was obvious only in the first six months after Spider-Man appeared, which was then later buried under a better-constructed radius of operations.

"Queens," Deadpool said, highlighting a specific neighborhood. "Not Manhattan, where the real money is. Not Brooklyn, where the hipsters and the gentrification throw down. Queens. A residential, non-Instagrammable area where people actually live.”

Deadpool hummed thoughtfully. “So, he’s not the kinda guy who commutes from Manhattan to help the poors,” he patiently explained to the pigeon. "This is someone patrols outward but returns home. Like a very principled homing pigeon."

The pigeon, apparently not appreciating the comparison, flew away.

"Rude!” Deadpool called after it. "I was sharing my feelings!"

Spider-Man never changed in public and always emerged from an alley already suited up. The kid had operational security that would bring a tear to Nick Fury’s cyclops eye.

But operational security only worked if you maintained it perfectly, every single time, forever. Immortal Wade Wilson had nothing but time, the patience of a being with endless years ahead of him, and a concerning lack of hobbies.

Hopefully, that one wasn’t forever.

Maybe he could try and keep a sour-dough starter alive until the end of time? Food for thought, food for thought…

He'd identified seventeen buildings in the target zone that matched Spider-Man's probable requirements: roof access, fire escapes, older construction that wouldn't have modern security systems. Then he'd set up monitoring equipment.

Was it legal? No.

Was it easy? Also no.

Did the universe grace Deadpool with a stroke of luck at Spider-Man’s unfortunate expense? Absolutely yes.

The first small win came on a Tuesday in early-January, just as he was listening to Asia’s ‘Heat of the Moment’ on repeat. Deadpool laughed to himself. “See, any Supernatural fans would think I’m hilarious for that.”

Wade had been tracking Spider-Man's pattern for weeks, and one thing had been consistent: the guy never used the same entry/exit point twice.

Which is why Wade's attention sharpened when Spider-Man entered the same building for the second time in a month.

Building #4.

Again.

It was part of an older apartment complex on a quiet street in Queens. Spider-Man had swung onto the roof access and disappeared inside.

Wade waited.

And…waited.

But Spider-Man never emerged.

"Interesting," Wade muttered. Three hours had passed; Spider-Man had never stayed stationary this long during patrol before.

Wade sent a demand to the coward in City Hall who owed him a favor and settled in to wait for the building schematics to arrive to his tablet.

Four hours later, Wade had carpal tunnel from the binoculars, no visual on Spider-Man, but finally got a look at the layout because the aforementioned coward liked his knee-caps as-is.

Pity.

"Oh. Oh, you sneaky little spider."

Building #4 connected to Building #7 through a shared basement. Old construction, back when developers built multiple buildings as connected units. Spider-Man could enter one building and exit through another, completely breaking his visual trail.

"Clever," Wade acknowledged in a low murmur. "You left out of Building #7 and you’re long gone now. I’ve been watching the wrong building.”

He shifted his electronic monitoring to piggyback into existing building security and established fields of view for both buildings.

And then he started looking at residents.

Everyone knew Spider-Man was male. That was the easy part.

His voice was undeniably masculine, as were his proportions showing an athletic build below average height. By Wade’s estimate, Spider-Man was probably in his early twenties based on his boundless energy and cultural references.

Wade’s skip-trap bundle pulled via a shady broker yielded the leases and forwarding cards he needed to start investigating tenant records. He began by immediately eliminating guys with families and elderly men.

He focused on single men ages 20-30 with lease agreements suggesting they lived alone.

And one by one, he eliminated them from his list. A few automatically because they had the wrong build.

One guy got eliminated because he had a black eye that lasted over a week. Definitely not enhanced. Another because he binge-watched the Great British Baking show while weeping every night. Lazy and wrong schedule.

"Okay, Spidey," said Wade slowly. "If you're not living here. You're visiting here."

Wade pulled up the tenant records again. "So, who are you visiting?" he muttered. "Girlfriend? Friend? Family?"

He reset and started filtering again, this time looking for whoever’s couch Spider-Man crashed on instead of the bleeding-heart arachnid himself.

A person young enough to plausibly date or be friends with someone in their early twenties. People with a twenty-some male relative who could come to visit. Vigilante-friendly apartments that had roof or fire escape access.

He found fifteen possibles and began analyzing them.

"Alright, potential Spider-Associates," Deadpool announced to the photos he'd taped to his wall. "Welcome to America's Next Top-Secret Identity. I'll be your host, Tyra Deadpool. You're here because one of you is harboring Queens' most wanted arachnid, and I will find out who."

The first was a was a PhD software engineering student in her late fifties who worked remotely, but had a girlfriend she spent all her free time with.

Deadpool made a buzzer sound. "I'm sorry, but your lack of privacy and wrong generation means... you do not get a rose tonight. Please say goodbye and exit to the left. Your Uber is waiting."

He tossed the photo over his shoulder.

The second was an artist who had a rotating cast of guests and a twenty-six-year-old nephew that fit the estimated age range of Spider-Man. However, the guy couldn't keep a secret if his life depended on it based on his very public social media, and his nephew was on probation after a stint in prison for credit card fraud. 

“The tribe has spoken. Time for you to sashay away.”

Another photo went flying.

"And now, contestant number three..." Deadpool picked up the next photo with dramatic flair. "Eighteen-year-old Penelope Parker."

She met the building access requirements, but she was just too young. He went through the process anyway. Wade glanced at her file. No driver’s license, just a voter ID card. She was scrawny, isolated, and living in her dead Aunt’s apartment while working two jobs and going to school.

Hard pass.

Deadpool would later describe this moment as "the time I looked directly at the answer and went 'nah.'"

"Girl, you are giving us nothing,” he said, feeling both annoyed and oddly pitying. “You have no social skills and zero time to even breathe.”

Deadpool held up a sign that said "4/10" like an Olympic judge. "I'm sorry sweetie, but you don't have the stamina or the time for the competition. This is not your season. Please leave the tent. Your bake is underdone."

He closed the file and moved onto the next name without a pause.

Deadpool turned around and gave the reader double middle fingers. “Laugh it up, you omniscient fucks. I can hear you snickering. 'Oh look at Deadpool, master detective, getting fooled by a teenage girl.’ You’re real brave from behind your screen.” He tilted his head back and sighed dramatically. “It’s called anchoring bias and representativeness heuristic, you assholes. I was fooled until I saw her sad, sandwich Instagram.”

After two weeks of surveillance and total elimination of all possibles, Wade was forced to go back through all the records with a different question.

"None of them," said Wade furiously, staring at his notes after burning through every lead. “None of these match.”

He sat in silence for a long time, staring at the empty list, trying to figure out where he'd gone wrong.

Time for a new approach.

“Which of you sneaky fuckers,” he seethed, his fingernails clawing at his desk, “is the least suspicious, most interesting person?”

Spider-Man had stayed hidden for four years in an increasingly paranoid city full of heightened surveillance and proactive federal agents. Keeping an air-tight secret identity took deliberate, hyper-vigilant operational security.

His annoyance cooled a bit as he shifted into a more calculating mind-set.

“Well, dear reader, Professor Deadpool will give you one-time free trial version of operational security 101. But you have to promise to hit kudos and leave a comment to get the premium version.”

Deadpool cleared his throat theatrically. "So what does serious OPSEC look like?" he asked the empty room. "You hide what makes you interesting. Because interesting people draw attention. Interesting people get remembered. Interesting people get… investigated."

Deadpool started pacing.

"Rule one of deep cover," Wade recited, shaking a stern finger. "is don't be memorable. Rule two: don't be suspicious. But here's the thing about rule two—"

He grinned.

"—truly unsuspicious people don't work at being unsuspicious. They just... exist. They're boring because they're genuinely boring. But interesting people who are trying to be unsuspicious?"

Deadpool’s mangled lips pulled up on one side in a smirk.

"They perform a masterfully constructed performance of boring that always has tells.”

He started scanning through files, not looking for Spider-Man or his associates directly but just for someone who was trying too hard to be nobody.

"Interesting people have interests," Deadpool continued, teaching this logic to you aloud. "They have passions, skills, things that drive them. You don't become a vigilante because you're boring. You become a vigilante because you give a shit. Because something in you can't not act, can't sit still while people suffer. And people who give a shit? People with that kind of fire burning in their chest? They can’t help but be interesting.”

He started going through the files again, this time looking for contradictions. He scratched the back of his head, feeling the ridges of scar tissue beneath his gloves.

"So the question isn't 'who's suspicious,'" Wade muttered, more to himself now. "The question is: who's working really hard at not being suspicious?"

He eliminated people quickly now:

The PhD student? Interesting and capable, but openly so. She had an impressive resume of published papers and taught a few online courses on cloud-native computing. Genuine interesting, not performed boring.

The eccentric high school English professor? She was an aggressively interesting, aspiring fantasy author and avid rock-climbing influencer. Her social media was full of opinions about the outdoors and passion projects.

Vetoed.

The retired accountant? A bird-watching stamp collector who visited beaches to use his metal detector. This guy’s life was so boring that for a day, Wade seriously considered that it could be an elaborate cover.

But alas, bird-watching stamp-collector was genuinely boring, and thus, eliminated.

Wade kept going.

Next file. 31-year-old depressed nurse who worked night shifts in the ER. Genuinely exhausted. Her apartment had laundry everywhere and dishes in the sink. She was too tired to be performative.

Wade kept going and going, and then—

His motion detector camera pinged.

Wondering if his fickle pigeon friend had returned once more to keep him company, Wade checked the feed.

To his delight, it was Spider-Man, this time exiting into the alley outside. 

“Building #4, again!” crowed Wade victoriously. “That’s strike numero tres for Friend of Spider-Man’s Mojo Dojo Casa House! Got you, you beautiful, elusive bastard.”

All doubts that this building was important to Spider-Man vanished entirely.

Spider-Man glanced around, and for just a second, he tugged at his wrist, like one would when trying to adjust a bracelet or a watch.

Wade zoomed in and enhanced the visual. 

Spider-Man flexed his fingers, aimed his wrist at the wall, and web fluid materialized.

Then there was that deliberate adjustment of something at his wrists again. More tests, and this time the web fluid was different, the threads landing with a slightly different configuration.

A twitch that resulted in a new geometric pattern, like a damning, extremely informative, shiny snowflake.

The change occurred as though he’d chosen a different setting. 

Wade’s eyes were practically hitting the display. “What the—"

Another zoom: the tiniest, slightest motion of turning a dial under the suit fabric.

“Oh my god!” he shouted even as the digital lights burned his retina. "Homemade mechanical engineering! Jesus, Mary, Mother-fucking­-Teresa, he built those!"

That was completely contrary to the discourse and generally accepted knowledge about Spider-Man. It changed everything.

Why the fuck would he call himself Spider-Man if he couldn’t biologically generate the webbing? Without it, he had no other obvious connection to arachnids.

“If he can’t make spider-webs, he’s just—what, wall-climbing man?! Proportional-strength-of-a-spider Man?!”

Then Wade wondered if that ability had been engineered as well. Did Spider-Man have an incredibly tech savvy Fairy Godmother who gifted him a pair of magical reverse-gravity boots?

Because if Spider-Man built his web-shooters, that meant someone had the engineering knowledge to create custom equipment that Wade—with his extensive weapons experience—recognized as incredibly sophisticated. 

The kind of precision engineering that Tony Stark would probably sell Captain America to examine (though with the civil war debacle, Wade suspected Tony Stark would kidnap and give away Steve Rogers for free on the dark web if he could get away with it).

"So either Spider-Man is a genius," Wade said slowly, "or Spider-Man knows a genius."

From the comfort of his apartment, Wade watched thoughtfully as Spider-Man climbed up on the wall vertically, completely defying gravity before he reached the roof and disappeared into the skyline.

Deadpool steepled his hands together with glee, a gesture which he’d learned from Kevin O’Leary on Shark Tank. The one that always showed up before the poor entrepreneur who pitched to him was torn to shreds.

“Lightning Round,” he sing-songed. “Tonight we’re welcoming all of the fuckers from building #4 with technical skills into the arena!”

The first eliminated was a struggling Finance bro from Wharton whose path to a prestigious, Patagonia-filled life had diverged due to a debilitating coke and gambling habit. “Hasta la bye-bye, rookie!” Deadpool shook his head. “Wolf of Wall Street clearly went over your head.”

The next was a political science and civil engineering student at NYU. Ambitious, but more interested in urban planning and social justice than STEM. She’d also accepted a summer internship in the D.C. which would take her away from Spider-Man’s operations.

He tsked. “Oh honey, no!” he told the photo of her. “White House internship? At your age? Did we learn nothing from the Clinton administration? I might be a murderer with zero high ground but even I know the power dynamics between a 22-year-old intern and the most powerful man in the world means very-questionable consent.”

Deadpool tossed the photo over his shoulder and looked at you. “Wow, that got uncomfortable. Sorry reader. Sometimes Uncle Deadpool has opinions about workplace consent that he needs to share. We now return to my regularly-scheduled Spider-Man engineer hunt.”

And then Wade pulled up a file he'd glanced at before and dismissed in about thirty seconds.

"Contestant number three," Wade muttered, pulling up everything he had on her with narrowed eyes. "Penelope Parker. What are you hiding?"

He set her tenant records aside and started by simply Googling her. Immediately, he observed her sparse social media, which amounted to a private Instagram account with a whopping total of twelve followers. He’d had to hack into the account of one of her followers, the Del Mar sandwich shop which she worked part-time at, to get a look. Her most recent post was six months ago and featured a blurry photo of a sandwich she’d made.

"A sandwich," Wade said flatly, staring at the post. "Eggs benedict on sourdough instead of an English muffin? That's your content? Really?"

He sat back, considering.

Normal college students had more robust social media. They gate-kept the best matcha in NYC even though they posted about it on their stories; they romanticized their lives by taking misleading photos about the cleanliness of the subway, posted progress gym pics, shared pictures of the concerts and places they’d been to.

Not always, but most did. 

Penny Parker posted sandwiches and had twelve followers.

"That's not normal boring," Wade said slowly. "That's constructed boring. That's 'I need a social media presence so I don't look suspicious by not having one, but I'm going to make it so boring that no one looks twice.'"

He kept digging and on the fifth page of Google, found her name linked to a few posts on a site called Hero Watch.

"Well, well,” he said. “What do we have here?”

Wade clicked through an enthusiastic, amateur superhero fan community platform.

There was an app version available, but Wade chose to use his desktop.

The colorful and sleek homepage About Us stated:  “The Hero Watch is a student-run digital community dedicated to celebrating the age of heroes! Founded by Michelle Jones in 2018, we welcome everyone to discuss the supers here.”

Wade scrolled through a sea of earnest, youthful discourse and social media. The website was full of debates and opinion pieces about the Sokovia Accords, and fan comics about what the Black Widow did now that Hawkeye was retired. The users were obsessed with speculating about where the Hulk and Thor had disappeared to and whether or not it was off-planet.

There were a variety of cosplay photos and art of all mediums, including but not limited to dramatic readings of superhero fanfiction.

In a surprisingly competent show of journalism, users shared news about suspicious activities in the neighborhood mixed with community announcements of local meetups.

Prior to Halloween, a group of twelve-year-olds had posted their Avengers-themed outfits for feedback and received a riot of hype, as well as their older peers telling them to put stickers over their faces for digital privacy.

There was advice on how to throw a Captain America themed Fourth of July party and a hypothetical, Falcon-approved Thanksgiving turkey under the recipes section.

A forum thread titled "IMPORTANT DEBATE: Could Spider-Man beat the Winter Soldier in an arm-wrestling contest?” had been going on for two years and boasted 247 comments.

Wade hated that he was charmed by it. He should not be endeared by a teenage superhero fan community with absurdist political cartoons and terrible mocktail recipes.

“Nope,” he declared. “I do not care about these cherubic idiots at all.”

And yet.

The platform clearly had a small but dedicated following of a couple thousand active users. Mostly high school students from various New York schools but there was now a demographic who had stayed active going into college, including the founder, Michelle Jones, herself.

Wade quickly found Penny Parker’s profile.

She’d been active since 2019 and her header image was a blurry photo of the New York skyline at sunset. Her handle was @sandwich_artist

He smirked, remembering a particularly appetizing Reuben sandwich photo she’d posted on Instagram.

"Okay so you were already part of this community," Wade murmured. "Already established as a regular contributor before Spider-Man got his start.”

He found a list of various articles Penny had written, but there was a very telling number of articles whose titles focused on Tony Stark’s technology.

Wade felt a wave of reluctant amusement. "Aww, you have a crush on Tony Stark. That's adorable."

He clicked into the first one and started reading Penny’s article about Iron Man’s mini arc reactor.

Wade read the first paragraph. “Hold on. Hold the fuck on.”

Then read it again. “You had the audacity to post this next to someone's Captain America thirst trap?!"

Then Wade read it a third time. "You're telling me the girl who posts blurry photos of pastrami wrote this?” He gestured wildly at his screen. "She’s citing fucking Hawking. And Einstein. Because she understands Hawking and Einstein.” 

He sputtered with indignant rage and awe, reading her work again.

Chapter Text

Matt Murdock’s world was one of fire; only sleep doused the flames.

His dream world was vibrantly colorful and full of life, composed of stunning landscapes and brilliant horizons. In his dreams, he saw night skies glittering with sapphire stars, watched as fluid maroon swirled in glasses, admired soft green fields dotted with lavender purple. He saw the orange of koi fish swimming in ponds, and the quiet red of apples in orchards. The in-between autumn leaves falling atop rich, brown soil. Lily pads, bright and brilliantly white flourishing along ponds whose waters reflected sunlight in liquid prisms. The shouting yellow of taxi cabs and the rumbling black-gray of incoming storms.

He dreamt of people painted in their natural forms and how they looked under the sun; laughing orange freckles atop ivory, the beauty of umber hair in contrast to light. People in their many palettes and shapes.

Matt’s dreams were the antithesis of his reality. He’d once heard someone describe color as the language of light... it came close to describing his blindness and his sight, but he just didn’t know how to explain it to anyone who wasn’t him.

In the waking world, Matt knew nothing but disturbing, hellish flames and an extreme awareness of all around him. A three-hundred-sixty-degree carousel of endless, ever-transforming fire. The entire world orbited the sun of his senses, tugging at his awareness even when they tried to hide.

Shapes roared to life from echolocation’s pulse, distances translated through heat’s distortion.

Matt’s power was beyond radar: he simply knew too much all at once.

He heard the truth of people in their heartbeats and physical tells. Matt could even see the future from the miniscule vibrations in a person’s limb before they chose left or right, to draw a gun or surrender.

He could sense decisions as they were being made, hear the joy or sorrow in their breaths.

Death was darkness, and fire was life.

Figures of flame walked through Matt’s world, a scorching existence wherein fiery people resembled more closely the renderings he remembered of angels and demons, indistinguishable from one another. In that regard, his was not so different a reality than those who walked the waking world with natural sight, for who could really know whether the person beside them was an angel or a demon?

On the worst nights, it felt like watching a city burn and not being able to stop the flames.

Yes, Daredevil lived in Hell, and appropriately, he guarded Hell’s kitchen.

Tonight, Daredevil prowled after the prey that fire illuminated.

The heroin traffickers constantly moved their stash in circuits, from warehouse to safehouse to permanently closed storefronts. Of course, they never used the same location twice, but the physical and operational methods that would normally allow for discreet drug shipments did not work on Daredevil.

He’d seen the distortions in the van’s cargo bay, a void that indicated hidden compartments. A lightless absence whose attempt at invisibility sang to Daredevil like a beacon.

Daredevil drew closer and observed the spidery white light of unusual wiring and modified parts. He’d smelled burnt gunpowder, a sharp scent indicating recent combustion. 

Then he’d heard their voices, and their discussion damned them.

The warehouse was quiet now.

He’d incapacitated four men. The air was rich with the metallic smell of blood on skin, an iron odor that lingered on Daredevil’s knuckles. Their staccato heartbeats had rapidly turned into blistering fear. Now they lay trembling, four heat signatures zip-tied with broken bones.

That should have been the end of it.

But before Matt put a strip of fluorescent orange duct tape on the last man, he’d gasped: “Wait—wait! I got a message for you.”

Matt paused; the man’s heart was a terrified jackhammer.

“Someone paid me,” the guy panted. “Yesterday. This, uh, crazy, and I mean crazy, motherfucker in a red suit. Said Daredevil was coming after us, said to tell you—" he gave a hysterical laugh, “—'Deadpool wants to meet.’ Said he’d wait on the rooftop above Clinton Park.”

Matt’s disposition soured with recognition and extreme dislike. He’d never met the man, but he’d heard the name.

So, it had been Deadpool who’d ignited the panic in these men. He’d manipulated them into fleeing from their hiding places and onto Matt’s radar.

Deadpool must have heard about who Daredevil had been hunting lately, from whatever seedy criminal ties he had, and was luring him out with a gift.

Daredevil tilted his head in consideration.

The man seemed to take this as encouragement and kept talking. “I thought he was fucking with us, but you’re here.”

The man swallowed. “So, uh—” he gave a nervous laugh. “I helped you out, right? Message received? That’s gotta count for something. Please, c’mon, I’m not with them, this is my first time, I just drive the van, I swear. I just needed the money.”

Daredevil smirked.

The man’s pulse spiked.

“Wait, wait, wait!”

Daredevil didn’t wait.

Now, Matt approached a rooftop above the white-hot, geometric latticework of the city and its buildings.

In the center of that inferno, a figure of flame waited.

Matt’s senses honed in on it, forming a face in the fire. The usual indentations were muted, dying embers instead of the features usually sculpted by shadow and light.  

A mask, then.

His body was tall and so muscled it was a weapon in itself. However, the heat distribution across the figure’s body and face was wrong, uneven; mottled and lacking a uniformity that normal people had.

Scarring, Matt realized. Extensively so. Distorted warmth indicating massive tissue damage.

Matt heard a strong and steady heartbeat, the smell of leather, explosives, and… Mexican food?

That was definitely taco seasoning.

The man was an armory. Matt deduced that he had holsters at both thighs, the profiles the right shape for it; there were a variety of knives strapped along his sides. A greater heat at his back, two thin stripes that were likely swords.

This wasn't some amateur.

"Well, aren’t you a sexy devil?” the intruder said slyly, in a rasping voice. "Someone gel-electrophoresed you to be that scorching, or is this au-naturel? I mean, those horns and that black suit—” he wolf-whistled, “the Geefs brothers would weep tears of artistic joy at the sight of you. Nice night for the vigilante thing, by the way. The moon’s hitting my eyes like a big pizza pie. Blood on your knuckles says that’s amore.”

Irritation swept through Matt, as wholly unwelcome as the man before him. “You have one minute,” he said, hostile and on guard, “before I throw you off this rooftop.”

There was a crescendo of heat as the man burst out laughing, the fiery outline of him brightening and pulsing as his body shook with amusement.

"Sheesh, alright. Skipping the pleasantries. Ever heard of the not-so-friendly neighborhood Deadpool? That’s me, in the flesh. Well, in the suit. The flesh underneath is... a whole situation. Most of the original parts are gone. Like, aggressively so. We don't need to get into it."

Daredevil’s lips pulled back savagely. He felt like a feral beast, a skeleton of pure condemnation and spite. He'd heard the stories of how Deadpool fulfilled contracts with maximum violence, how the conditions of the bodies were grotesque, and more disgustingly, how the man joked during all of it.

It made Matt’s blood boil.

“The murderer for hire,” Daredevil clipped out coldly. “Get to the point.”

Deadpool leaned against the railing, casually folding his arms over his broad chest. "So grumpy. Here I thought beating the shit out of those dealers—you’re welcome, by the way—would put you in the mood. But before you try to throw me off this building, and fair warning, I bounce—"

Daredevil sneered, utterly revolted by Deadpool. “Thirty seconds.”

Deadpool’s hands came up, non-threatening. "I've been trying to track you down for a month," he continued, though faster now. "I found a guy who’d literally faked his own death from non-Hodgkin lymphoma and moved to a bunker in Tasmania last year, and that was easier than tracking you down.”

“Leave,” Daredevil barked.

Deadpool’s fiery figure twitched. “Okay, okay. You’ve heard of Spider-Man? He has no training, no backup—"

“Too bad,” Daredevil spoke, voice hoarse and guttural and in all ways a snarl. Disgust flooded his veins. He bared his teeth and said, “I don’t give a fuck.”

Daredevil’s stance shifted, weight settling toward the balls of his feet, body humming with that white-hot readiness just before a strike. "I don't work with murderers."

Deadpool made no change in his posture, though his voice became obnoxiously theatrical. “I'm not asking you to work with me! I need you to help Spider-Man. Think of it as... Murderous Guardian Angel Seeks Non-Lethal Guardian Devil. Like, divorced parents but you’ll get sole custody. I’ll be the deadbeat dad who fucks off with occasional child support.”

Matt struck viciously and to his surprise, Deadpool made no move to defend himself. He let the hit land, knocking him flat onto the ground.

Deadpool wheezed, but before Matt could kick him, he grunted sharply and spat, “He’s eighteen!”

Matt froze.

He’d come so close to dying in those early years of being Daredevil, even with Stick's brutal training. Even now, at thirty-nine, he’d made so many mistakes; he thought of all the near-misses, those nights he'd barely crawled home…

Deadpool immediately took advantage of Matt’s pause, rapidly firing off his reasons. “He’s not connected to me,” he said, coughing. “He doesn’t want to be. I’m a murderer, we’re all on the same page here. I'm not interested in character development, but he needs help.”

Deadpool’s breathing had finally quickened. His hands clenched and unclenched.

Matt scoffed, distrusting. “And you care about this because…?”

Deadpool didn’t answer immediately. His heartbeat spiked.

“Because—” Deadpool stopped, then took a deep breath. He was stressed now. “Look, I crossed paths with him on a job. It wasn’t pretty, there was this whole machete thing…but, yeah now I need someone to make sure he stays not-dead, because I’m literally the worst person for the job.”

It clicked. The inferno that painted Matt’s world surged inside him now, a fire of rage and protective fury.

“You tried to kill him,” Daredevil hissed. “You tried to kill a child. You’re pathetic, you’re a monster.”

Deadpool choked audibly. “I didn’t—I didn’t know he was a kid. I didn’t know who he was, but I admit it—I didn’t care. I shot him twice, but I figured, hey, Spider-Man’s enhanced, big whoop. He was between me and a paycheck. But he saved my life anyway.”

Matt rumbled low in his throat like a large tiger.  “Now you want me to clean up your mess. How noble.”

“You are the worst kind of self-righteous. It’s not about cleaning up—”

“No?” Beneath his mask, Daredevil glared, feeling flames of violence lick at his fists and feet, urging him to give them oxygen, to give permission. “Ah, my apologies,” he said snidely, “what would you call it?”

Now, Deadpool was furious. “I call it making sure a good kid doesn’t die because he thinks everyone is worth saving. He kept me alive and talked about how killing was wrong and everyone is capable of redemption. He’s an idiot, been winging it, his luck's gonna run out. He’ll face something he's not ready for and—"

Matt felt his face twist in understanding. His words painted the air with derision. "Spider-Man showed you mercy. He has principles and you think he’s weaker for it.”

"He’s dangerously naïve!” Deadpool roared. “Someone needs to teach him that you can be a hero without being an idiot about it! I’ve been scaring the living shit out of serious players, making sure everyone knows not to touch Spider-Man! I’m spreading misinformation, but it’s not enough!”

Deadpool was seething, a restrained unit of violent intent and guilt that Matt felt would lash out at any moment. Instead of worrying though, Matt felt his lips start to twitch, because he knew just how to needle Deadpool.

He felt a flicker of dark amusement. Leading the witness was Matt’s favorite hobby. He didn’t get to do it often in a professional setting without opposing counsel calling him out.

Now though…

“You're running around all of New York City, planting false information….neutralizing threats…You’ve come to me to beg for help. You're spending time and resources protecting someone you claim you barely know. Someone who, by your own admission, you have no connection to anymore…Just because he’s a kid?"

Deadpool’s rage diminished slightly as caution colored his tone. "You understand the situation.”

Matt smirked. "So, you're doing exactly what someone seeking redemption would do."

To Matt’s great satisfaction, Deadpool’s rage swelled once more.

“Redemption,” Deadpool spat the word with the same degree of revulsion Matt reserved for murder. He made an aggrieved sound. “I take that back. Not very bright, are you? But that’s why I’m here. You’re the same kind of stupid, but at least the guys you go after end up in hospitals wishing they were dead.”

Despite Deadpool’s manic fury, Matt wasn’t intimidated or impressed. “You’re making amends,” said Matt, delighting in the truth of it.

Deadpool’s heartbeat was erratic, signaling genuine distress by the turn their conversation had taken. "I am not,” he said, sounding absolutely horrified, “You lunatic. If I have to grab crayons or sock puppets to explain the difference between saving one person and trying to be a good person, I’ll try—"

“It’s the same thing,” Matt drawled, contemptuous.

"The fuck it is,” snapped Deadpool, baleful. “None of this matters! I literally cannot die—heaven, hell, redemption—” he spat the word again, “—none of that applies to me. Look, I'm just... making sure this one, specific Spider-Baby doesn't die.”

Matt cocked his head. He hadn’t known of Deadpool’s regenerative abilities, now intrigued and wary of the man’s supposed immortality.

He considered Deadpool’s well-deserved self-loathing. He thought about his own ongoing journey and mistakes; the nights he'd been too violent, gone too far, let his anger control him instead of his principles.

The slow, continuous moral battle waged by incrementalism.

"My mother used to say despair was a sin against hope," said Matt finally, "because you’ve decided your own flaws are so exceptional that you're beyond saving. It’s pride saying, ‘I’m so uniquely terrible that grace doesn’t apply to me.’”

"Oh my god,” bellowed Deadpool. “You’re Catholic!? This is worse than the cocoon! I am beyond saving! Deadpool does not pass go! Does not collect a harp!”

"So you've decided you're beyond grace," Matt said, deliberately emphasizing the pity he truly felt. "How convenient."

Deadpool bristled. "Convenient? For a spawn of Satan, you've got a real handle on being holier-than-thou."

"I'm not holier than anyone,” said Matt sharply. His jaw tightened. "And I’m not saying you deserve redemption—that’s not my place—only that you are capable of trying. I know despair when I hear it, and I know when someone’s given up on themselves. You’re still fighting.”

He could tell that Deadpool was starting to see where he was going with this, and did not like it one bit.

Deadpool hissed, "I'm doing damage control—"

“You shot Spider-Man twice. Yes or no?”

“Are you—what—"

“Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“He saved your life anyway.”

“The fuck are you going with this—”

“Answer the question. He saved your life and told you everyone is capable of redemption.”

“Yes,” Deadpool bit out, disdainful.

"And now you're here," Matt continued smoothly, “having tracked me down to ask for help protecting him. Is that accurate?"

"You're twisting—"

"Am I?" Matt cocked his head. "When Spider-Man told you that you were capable of good, what did you do immediately after?"

Deadpool's heartbeat spiked. “I tactically retreated and hunted Spider-Child down with the rabid, malicious obsession of a serial killer,” he seethed in open rage.

“And when you figured out who he was and how old he was, you started doing everything within your power to save him. Did he ask you to do that?”

“No—”

“Did you tell him?”

“I already fucking told you—"

"So, for the record,” Matt's smile was sharp, “This kid tells you you're capable of good. You reject it. Then you immediately act in accordance with it. That’s what some would call an interesting contradiction."

"I'm not seeking anything—"

"Then what are you doing?" Matt asked, cutting him off. "Why you specifically? Why not let someone else handle it?"

Deadpool's breathing quickened. "Because I'm the one who—" He fell quiet.

"Shot him," Matt finished. His head tilted, predatory. "Do you feel remorse for that?"

The silence stretched.

"If you want my help, answer the question," Matt demanded. "Yes or no, do you feel remorse?"

"That's not—" Deadpool's voice was strained. "That doesn't matter."

"Do you feel remorse?"

But Matt already knew the answer; he could hear Deadpool's jaw clenching, the way his breathing had gone shallow. His breaths were tinted with the sour scent of bile, indicating nausea. The intensity of Deadpool’s regret was a siege upon Matt’s sense, a corporal wildfire that Deadpool was trying his best to suppress.

"Yes," Deadpool finally spat, the word punched out as though between bloody teeth. “Yes. Happy, Lucifer? There it is. I feel like shit about it. Fucking thrilled we could have this moment of emotional vulnerability together.”

It was a start; Matt could work with remorse. That meant Deadpool wasn’t a pure psychopath, that there was some capacity for change. Whether it would be successful… Matt couldn’t say.

However, remorse paired with ongoing murder was meaningless.

Matt completely ignored the threat in Deadpool’s voice, and spoke patronizingly, “And, you did… what exactly, when you realized how young he was?”

Matt paused, and observed with glee how Deadpool tensed. “What does that have to do with—”

Matt pivoted, taking advantage of Deadpool’s disorientation. “You said, and I quote, that you’ve been ‘scaring the living shit out of serious players.’”

“Yeah, chasing people with garrotes while singing Tiptoe Through the Tulips, stuffing people in trunks and putting black hoods over their heads alphabet agency style, snapping femurs—"

“The living shit,” Matt interrupted. “Tell me, how many people have you killed since you figured out who Spider-Man was?”

This shocked Deadpool more than anything else Matt had said thus far. The question bludgeoned into him, knocking the air clean from his lungs.  His whole body jerked, and he snarled viciously as he sat up. “That doesn’t matter.”

This was clearly the right line of questioning; Matt didn’t move an inch. He was used to hostile witnesses. “How many people have you killed since you figured this all out? How many contracts have you taken?”

Deadpool’s fiery figure burned brighter as blood coursed through him, anger truly heating him from within. Matt’s vision swam as Deadpool furiously locked eyes with him; it was like seeing a large skull made of hellfire.

One who desired to burn him alive.

“I’m in-between jobs,” Deadpool hissed. His resentment pressed heavier, nearly suffocating. “I’m being selective. Market’s slow.”

Matt started to turn, slow and dramatic, pretending he was about to leave.

The threat had its desired effect. “None!” Deadpool spat back, and Matt could tell he was restraining himself from violence. Under the mask, the remnants of his heat-distorted lip curled. His hands closed into tight fists, balled up. Tension crackled along his muscles, his body. Coiled spring. Ready to leap—

But Deadpool mastered himself: “I’m on sabbatical. Happy?”

Matt hummed, pleased with how this examination of conscience was going, at being able to extract the raw, unwilling acknowledgement of change. “And the contracts you had already accepted?”

“Fucking Spanish Inquisition. I told them I fucked off to Cancun because I needed a siesta.”

“Do you even realize you’re confessing to abstaining from murder with the same reluctance most people have when actually confessing to murder?”

Wade was acknowledging the complete overhaul of his value system and alteration of behavior like doing so was a painful, shameful redirection of his life.

Matt deeply wanted to see Deadpool locked away for his crimes, but the odds of actually imprisoning him and forcing him to face justice were bleak. Besides the disturbing thought that Deadpool was unable to die, he’d notoriously escaped from every facility he’d ever been held in.

Even if Matt dragged him to the authorities, there’d be no trial: no surviving witnesses, no admissible evidence, no court willing to claim jurisdiction over a violent and incredibly lethal man who, apparently couldn’t die, and would inevitably come for them when he broke out again.

The only thing worse than letting Deadpool walk free was losing sight of him entirely. If Matt tried and failed to hold Deadpool, the man would vanish and Matt would lose any visibility into his movements, as well as any influence he had over his behavior.

Filled with grim purpose, he decided that for now, it was better to keep him close, however reluctantly, to keep the body count down; to keep the monster leashed where Matt could see him rather than let Deadpool disappear into the dark.  

“Don’t make this into something it’s not.”

"You're doing one small thing to beat back the dark," said Matt, fully aware but also thrown by the fact that he was now navigating them into a pedagogical discussion of theology. He couldn’t stop himself from this line of thinking though. He’d always been drawn to moral paradox.

"You know there's a right way and wrong way,” Matt insisted, “and you're self-aware enough to know you might choose wrong. That's someone trying very hard not to corrupt something good. That is goodness. That’s grace working in you, even if you’re fighting it.”

“Pal, there’s nothing good about me.”

Matt wasn’t shocked by this statement, but more so by the small, barely audible tremor of dejection beneath Deadpool’s scoff. It was a real emotion that Matt caught only due to his extreme senses, one that virtually no one else would have been able to hear. He’d never anticipated to hear that misery from a murderer.

Don’t, Matt warned himself. He’s killed for money. He’s done terrible things.

But the wave of sympathy came anyway, unwelcome and unwanted, dousing the heat of his words despite his resistance.

"Then why are you here?" Matt asked carefully, nudging Deadpool to the answer he refused to acknowledge. "Why come to me? Why spend weeks protecting someone from a distance? You’re operating under the assumption that redemption is binary: saved or damned. Have you considered that it’s just…choices? One good one after another, not erasing the bad, but they still count. Remorse is the first step toward making better choices."

Despite the gentling of his words, Matt felt acute discomfort. This wasn’t confessional, Deadpool wasn’t seeking absolution, and if it were up to Matt, he wouldn’t give it to him. But Deadpool was seeking help for someone else, not for himself, which made all the difference.

If Matt could ensure Deadpool didn’t go around assassinating more people though, the uneasiness would be worth it. 

He resolved to keep better hold of his temper.

Deadpool was unnervingly silent.

"You said you can’t die," Matt continued. "You talk like you're not meant for life or death, that you're suspended between them."

"That's..." Deadpool's voice was less antagonistic despite the resentment he attempted to project, "That's a very poetic fucking way of saying I think I’m in goddamn purgatory.”

Matt sighed. "The point is that you’re not,” he said tiredly. “You are aware that purgatory is inherently a place of shared suffering, shared purification? I’d say you’re more like someone in a liminal space.”

He paused, letting that sink in.

“They’re places robbed of purpose. Swimming pools without water, empty hallways, classrooms silent at midnight when they should be full of students. Unsettling because they exist in a state they're not meant to stay in."

"If you want me to miss the point," said Deadpool flatly, "speaking to me in metaphors is a great way to do that."

Matt barely restrained himself from rolling his eyes, annoyance now returning and threatening to overpower his forced calm.

"You referenced the Geefs brothers and fractionating DNA in the same breath,” Matt deadpanned. “There's no use trying to convince me you don't understand that I'm criticizing you for wallowing in a state of purposelessness you believe no one else has felt before."

Deadpool leapt at the opening, desperately seizing the chance to gain control of the conversation. “That’s just an appreciation for artists making statues that invoke the thirst of parishioners, and keeping tabs on bullshit Neo-Nazi rhetoric—"

Matt didn’t let him escape, easily wrangling Deadpool back into the sphere of unwanted spiritual discussion with both vicious glee and genuine determination.

"But here's the thing about liminal spaces," Matt continued loftily, aware that he was unintentionally lecturing now. "They don't stay that way. The pool gets refilled, people walk through the hallways again. The classroom fills with students in the morning. They return to their purpose." He tilted his head. "Deadpool, you’re alive and apparently can't die, which to me, suggests that you're firmly on the side of life, not suspended between it and death. You're refusing to move, stuck at midnight in a room that should be full."

Matt couldn’t help the poetry. He spoke grandly and painted vivid pictures with his words for a living. He would invite any critics to sue him where he’d thrash them in court.

Deadpool's breathing had gone shallow.

“You came here because a kid told you that you had potential to do good, and some part of you wants to prove him right.” Matt felt a flash of disgust at himself for giving what was amounting to be a pep-talk to a murderer. He sharpened his tone now to compensate. “Or you could keep wallowing and living a despicable life. Your choice.”

"I came here because that kid is going to get himself killed if someone doesn't watch his back!" Deadpool snapped. Then he stopped, running a hand over his mask. "Look, can we not do this? Can we not psychoanalyze the mercenary? I came here to ask for help, not for your opinion on the state of my soul."

Matt smirked, knowing it would incite Deadpool further. "Didn’t you?”

Another frustrated growl from Deadpool, though it sounded half-hearted. "Are you always this insufferable or am I special?"

Matt thought of Foggy, who would have answered absolutely always, and felt a trace of genuine amusement. "I'm told I have a gift for it."

Deadpool made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I hate you.” He paused, struggling. “Daredevil, goddammit, will you help him? This is the only good thing I've tried to do in years. Maybe ever.”

Then very quietly, so quiet that it would have been inaudible to an unenhanced person, Deadpool said, voice hoarse,  “…please.”

Of course, Matt would help Spider-Man. As much as Matt didn’t feel qualified to be a mentor, he was a better option than Deadpool, and the fact that a kid had been doing vigilante work in New York for years was completely unacceptable.

Besides, Matt was unbearably curious about Spider-Man. From Deadpool’s words, they were kindred spirits sharing a belief system.

"You're not going to give me his identity," said Matt.

"Or where he lives,” agreed Deadpool. “Not mine to share."

The problem was that Matt couldn’t see the costume everyone else would recognize. He’d have to track him via word of mouth, police scanners, get creative… He grimaced. "That's going to make finding him difficult."

"You'll be looking for the version everyone else sees, which is the point. His real identity stays protected until he chooses to share it himself. Besides, you're Daredevil.” Deadpool’s voice became annoyingly sarcastic, “I have faith in you, Satan.”

Matt decided to put Deadpool out of his misery; not because he deserved it, but because there was a kid out there somewhere who needed protection, and Matt couldn’t ignore that.

He almost hated himself for saying it, but Spider-Man was too young to bear the consequences of Deadpool’s sins. "I'll look for him," said Matt. Then his voice became more stony, absolutely serious. “I’ll help, but it’s for the kid, not you.”

Deadpool’s relief was such that he hit his head back down on the ground as his shoulders sagged. He exhaled in a loud whoosh of breath.

But Matt wasn’t done. “And if I find out you lied to me about not killing anymore,” he threatened, putting every ounce of violent intent he could into his voice, “if there’s even one more body, I will find a way to hold you, even if I have to kidnap Tony Stark and lock him in another cave until he builds me a cell capable of it. You’ll rot there while I spend every waking moment figuring out how to end your immortality. And when I do, you’ll face exactly what you’ve earned.”

Resolve simmered in Matt’s soul; he’d ensure that if Deadpool turned away from his path toward redemption, he’d fall down into the fiery maw of damnation, suffer in the canyons of endless pain and never recover—

Matt leaned forward. “I don’t kill, but I’ll make sure you can die. Don’t confuse granting you death for mercy. You’ll burn, and you’ll do it knowing you had a chance to change. That’s my promise to you.”

Deadpool appeared genuinely taken aback, and for once, he offered no quip. After a pause, he offered agreement. “Permanently retired.”

Matt would show no mercy on that subject. “Don’t mistake this for forgiveness. We are not allies. I’m doing this despite you.”

“Fair enough.” Then Deadpool rose to his feet and moved toward the edge of the roof. He paused, looking back toward Matt. “When you do find him, don't tell him I sent you. He can't know I'm involved. He needs to think that you noticed him on your own."

"You're very concerned about maintaining distance."

"He might have saved my life, but the kid hates me. Said I make him sick, which, fair.”

To Matt, that was another point in Spider-Man’s favor.

Deadpool reached the edge.

Matt couldn’t resist having the last word. "For someone who doesn't believe in redemption…” he paused ominously, enjoying how Deadpool’s shoulders tensed, "you're working very hard at it."

Deadpool angrily muttered something under his breath that sounded like “—just you wait—” and “chapter five—"

Then Matt saw a flare of heat on Deadpool’s hands—ah, he was flipping Matt off with both fingers— before he jumped. He listened as Deadpool ran off, his heartbeat fading into the night.

In his solitude, Matt resolved to start looking for this kid tomorrow. Daredevil would find Spider-Man and offer guidance. He briefly considered following Deadpool. He’d certainly be within range of Spider-Man if he cared this much about his safety, but that felt like a betrayal of the agreement they’d just made.

Too risky.

Still, the discomfort would not leave Matt, agonizing him, the conversation not sitting well in his chest.

He’d engaged Deadpool with far more empathy than he’d intended. The man was a murderer, and Matt had offered him philosophical reassurance for his change of heart. Even though he’d intentionally drawn out Deadpool’s confession as painfully as he could manage, Matt wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing in holding the discussion at all.

He grimaced. Self-recrimination and doubt burned through his veins like molten metal. But he tried to take some solace from the fact that he hadn’t forgiven Deadpool, just forced him to acknowledge that change was possible. Deadpool was trying, but it didn’t erase the bodies, and it certainly did not make them friends.

He’d keep an eye on Deadpool to ensure that his “retirement” was real, keep an eye on that flicker of goodness that lit him from within. A sharp tongue of flame—stubborn, small—one that was painful for him to admit existed but Matt knew was there, burning clear as every other flame in his world.

A spark, struggling, but already ignited and alive; and where there was fire, there was life. There was hope.

However, there was always a risk of that spark vanishing, or worse, reigniting into a destructive force; especially when one considered that Deadpool’s path was already soaked in blood…

(there was something about roads to hell and good intentions—)