Spooktober 23: Freestyle

⚠️NWH spoilers, dark!peter, gore⚠️

a/n: I finally wrote it... the mercenary peter au

It starts here.

The base of the Statue of Liberty. The sun is gleaming over the water, the reflection of a blood-haze and his own suit has Peter seeing red. Rage is not a word to describe the seething hatred that causes him to shake, that causes his teeth to grit, that causes the steeliness of his glare. He is beyond rage. He is beyond everything. He is no longer human in this moment.

"Poor, Peter." The Green Goblin's voice is a saccharine poison, grinning glee as he spouts his venom. He tilts his head. "Too weak  to send me home to die."

Peter's gaze flickers.

"No," he rasps, his voice hoarse. He swallows. His world darkens. It turns. He says, "I just want to kill you myself."

Green Goblin's eyes dazzle brilliantly with his insanity. "Attaboy."

It starts here.

Blood dripping from his ice-cold blood-hot hands, his muscles trembling as he hits Goblin again, and again, and again. He does not know how many punches he's thrown. All he knows is that the Goblin is laughing at him, taunting him to continue, and the smile won't slip from his face no matter how hard Peter strikes—

He's had enough, his head is rushing so fast it makes him dizzy. His feet are heavy as he steps back, his eyes wildly searching the space for something he knows Goblin has dropped. He finds it, takes it into his hands— the glider, a sickly metallic green, all jagged edges and sharper than a knife.

He has never felt like this before.

He knows distantly he's on the precipice of something unseemly, a ledge he will fall from, impossible to pick himself back up. He also thinks distantly, there is nothing now keeping him from wanting to. That it isn't his fault. That justice must be served, it is his job, it is his mission... his responsibility.

The blades of the glider gleams with the rising sun as he lifts it over his head, his jaw clenched in a tight line and his eyes razor-focused on the gasping, spitting, grinning Goblin strewn out before him.

Within a blink, there is someone else between them. Himself. A different face. Something unexplainable written in his eyes.

Peter pauses.

It starts here.

Peter's fingers twitch around the glider. He lets out a charged breath.

"...Get out of my way," he says, his voice scraping against his teeth.

The much older Peter, the wiser one, slowly shakes his head. He looks too understanding for Peter's liking. "You know I can't do that."

"Get out of my way," Peter repeats. His glare eclipses, all hope leaving his eyes. "Or I'll kill you too."

Behind him, Goblin drags himself upright, a puppet on strings, the blood-hungry smile stretched unnaturally across his slender face. "She was there because of you!"

Peter looks above the older Spider-Man's shoulder, narrowing his eyes.

"I may have struck the blow, but—" the Goblin bursts into maniacal giggles, forced out from his chest in a wheezy breath. "You— You are the one that killed her!"

The Goblin shatters the air with his cackles, his head not moving as he stares directly at Peter. His chest heaving up and down, shoulders shaking violently as he laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

Peter's ears begin ringing.

He kicks Spider-Man out of the way, and with all his strength, shoves the piercing glider into Goblin's throat.

The laughter chokes into a helpless, gurgling noise.

The Green Goblin is dead.

It starts here.

Peter Parker has not been alive for a long, cold, twelve months.

He crosses his own space like a ghost. He wears clothes bought fourth-hand. He drinks straight black coffee every morning on his way to work and sugary coffee when he has the extra cash. He hardly speaks, his voice is eternally raspy— not from damage, but from disuse.

Nobody knows his name. Nobody remembers his face. He is a stranger to himself most days.

There is a suit hung up in his closet, stained with blood from a still-warm corpse that he cradled too long ago, and he keeps it hidden behind old unfitting sweaters and dress shirts that he took from his past life.

When he goes to sleep at night, he is cold.

When he wakes up, whether it be in panicked gasps while the moonlight shines across dusty, molded floorboards, or groggily too late in the afternoon, he is cold.

When a person lives like this, the world becomes dim. Peter swears the flowers outside in the spring look grey. He swears that the leaves in the fall look pale.

His strength is becoming useless. The muscles on his body have weakened over the last few months. He hardly finds the strength to get out of bed, he is often late to his job, and it shows with the increasingly lighter weight of every paycheck he stuffs into his pocket.

It can't go on like this.

He decides one morning, staring emptily at a bowl of soggy cereal, that there's one money-making path he hasn't decided yet. Something he swore to himself a long time ago that he would never do.

A long time ago, he was a very different person. Young and blind, a long time ago Peter hadn't known exactly how angry he could be, what he could do with that anger, he didn't know how it felt to finally have nothing left.

Which, he didn't. Peter had nothing left.

He remembered the horror on his friends' faces. Pallid. Devastated. Afraid. Ned had been wiping the back of his mouth, because he had just finished throwing up, and his face was wet with tears. There was still Goblin's blood dripping from his hands as he lifted them to hold MJ's face— but she flinched. She flinched because of him.

She was frowning after she had done so, apologetic and guilty, and she opened her mouth to say something, but Peter was already pulling away.

(And that's why he told Strange to continue with the spell. They shouldn't have to live with his mistakes, or the horror of what transpired from them. What was done was done. He wouldn't put anybody he had loved in danger ever again.)

The  Spider-Man never makes a return to the public.

That doesn't mean he's not around.

There are rumours in dark corners, hurried whispers behind cracked brick walls. They say those who meet him don't live to tell the tale. They say his mask only covers the bottom half of his face. They say this is because while he never speaks a word, he stares at his victims while he stalks them, his eyes never leaving, mimicking perfectly a spider with their prey.

Most criminals don't believe it.

"It's a different guy," they laugh. "Spider-Man is just some scrawny kid!"

"What, you think that's Spider-Man? The one who won't stop blabbering during a fight? C'mon, don't be stupid," another says.

Peter hears it all. He hides around scummy places more often than not, now. It helps him pick out the better jobs. People have stopped asking questions about two months into his newly formed career path, as he's learned to school his expression into nothing, and he's built a reputation of yanking people's arms back a little too hard whenever someone lays a hand on his shoulder. They leave him alone, now.

Tonight, he's in the back of a seedy bar. He's just barely legal, although bartenders in places as far backwoods as these don't ask for ID. Peter's sipping on a glass of water, because alcohol doesn't give him a buzz and he doesn't like the taste.

A desperate voice calls his attention from the fat end of the bar. He tilts his head only slightly to listen, but keeps his eyes trained in front of him.

"I just—" it's a young voice. Younger than him. "I know I don't have a lot of money. I know. I'm— Please. Please, I'll do anything."

"Kid, this isn't some place for you to complain about just any old guy for two bucks."

"I know," the voice pleads. "I know. But the cops won't do anything. But he said he would hurt my younger sister, and I— I'm— I don't know where else to go, I found this number on the wall of the subway, I thought—"

"You thought wrong. There's not a mercenary in here is gonna beat up your step-dad for your babysitting money, alright? Now get lost, or—"

Peter stands up and walks over. He stares at the bartender, who goes quiet. Peter slowly looks at the other person speaking. A teenage boy, dark black hair that's long over his ears. He has a bruise on his cheek and over his eye. In his hands, a wad of cash, probably not anything over $100.

"I'll do it," Peter says blankly. His voice croaks over the quiet air, like a boot stepping into gravel and broken glass.

The kid sighs with relief, his shoulders dipping down. He looks like he's about to cry. "You will? Really?"

Peter nods.

The kid shoves his hand out, holding the wad of cash for Peter to take, as well as a photo of the step-dad.

Peter takes the photo, pushes the money back. "Address?"

The kid blinks a few times. He looks far out of place to be somewhere like this. He widens his eyes with understanding. "Oh, you mean— Oh. I know he's going to be at a bar later tonight. It's in Sugar Hill, I— I'll write it down for you."

The kid scrambles for a pen and paper, which he kept in the pocket of his hoodie. He wrote out an address and handed it to Peter.

He looks over the address, then glances up. "Go home. Keep your sister safe."

He almost had a little sister, once.

The kid nods quickly, then mumbles a symphony of thank-yous before he's out the door.

The bartender clicks his tongue. "You're a real mystery, man."

Peter doesn't regard this. He pockets the slip of paper and then also makes his way out of the bar.

Later that night, he's perching on the roof of his hit's location, a black mask over his mouth and nose, sans webbing design. He doesn't wear red or blue anymore. Too friendly. Too close to what he was before.

The man from the photo steps out of the bar, swaying on his feet. His face is clearly seen in the lamplight. He treks down the sidewalk, mumbling and muttering drunkenly to himself.

Peter begins to move. He hops silently from the roof and lands in the alleyway beside it, then waits. The man's footsteps continue, and just as he passes the alleyway, Peter launches a web and yanks him in.

The man is shoved against the brick. Peter stalks forward and watches as he makes an alarmed sound, struggling against the web.

"Spider-Man?" He gasps. "Spider-Man? Is that you?"

Peter steps around the lit up spot of the alleyway. Not a word falls from his lips.

"I didn't— Listen, man! I didn't do anything!" He begins to say. He's lying. Peter can hear it not just by his tone, but by the way his heartbeat ticks up. "I'm innocent! I'm an innocent guy!"

He webs the man's mouth and nose. The man jerks, making more panicked noises as he struggles to breathe.

"Turn yourself in," Peter commands, his voice low.

The man makes a series of disgruntled, anxious noises.

Peter takes his first step then. His fists clench where they rest at his thighs. He narrows his eyes at the man in front of him, watching his face go red from lack of oxygen.

"Turn yourself in," he repeats, slowly tilting his head. "Before I make the decision of your justice for you."

The man, still twitching, his hands and arms struggling against the webs, begins to nod. He nods repeatedly, aggressively, his eyes wide with panic. Not an ounce of hesitation.

Peter takes another step forward and rips the web from the man's face. The man howls in pain, but immediately takes greedy gulps of air afterwards.

Then he looks down, his eyes rack over the exposed part of Peter's face, for just a second.

Peter reels his arm back and knocks him out. He leaves him like that, webbed to the wall, unconscious, and disappears. He gets changed behind a building a few blocks away, and then walks back to his apartment.

He falls asleep on his decades-old broken-springed mattress, and he wakes up cold. The case is on the news while he eats burnt scrambled eggs.

'Criminal turns himself into police station after being assaulted by masked vigilante'

He turns the television off.

The emptiness lingers. The cold lingers.

Just as it began.