The Thief
He became Ben's shadow. Walked him to the car in the morning. Met him at the door when he came home. Sat in the kitchen while Ben ate dinner and in the living room while Ben watched television and found excuses to be near the front door when Ben went out for milk or the paper or whatever errand took him out of the house and into the street and into a world where people got mugged and shot and hit by cars and died for no reason other than bad timing.
Ben noticed. Of course he did. But he was Ben, so he didn't say anything about it for four days.
On Tuesday night Peter was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework he'd finished three days ago and Ben was washing dishes and the radio was playing something old and May was in bed early because she'd been fighting a cold. The house was quiet. The faucet ran. Ben hummed.
"Hey," Peter said.
Ben turned the water off. "Hey."
"I'm just-" Peter stopped. Looked at the table. At his homework. At Ben, standing at the sink with a dish towel over his shoulder and soap on his forearms and reading glasses pushed up. "I'm glad you're here."
Ben's hands stopped moving. The towel was wet and he was holding a plate and the water dripped from the plate to the floor and he looked at Peter and his mouth pressed into a tight line.
"Me too, bud."
"I mean it."
"I know."
Peter went back to his homework. Ben went back to the dishes. The radio played. Neither of them said anything else.
The web-shooters took a week.
Peter built them in the garage after midnight when Ben and May were asleep. The original Peter Parker's brain was smart. Actually smart. Peter hadn't been a genius before. But this body had instincts for chemistry and engineering, and once he stopped fighting it and let those instincts work, the web-fluid formula came together fast.
Two wrist-mounted units. Pressurized cartridges. Trigger pad against the double-tap of his middle and ring fingers. The fluid was his own recipe, a biopolymer adhesive that hardened on contact with air and dissolved after about an hour. He tested it on the garage wall at 2 AM and the web line stuck and held and he had to scrub the residue off the brick before morning.
Bulky. The casing was aluminum he'd bent with his hands and the trigger mechanism jammed on the third test. He fixed it with a paperclip and electrical tape. They looked like something a kid would build in a garage at 2 AM.
That was exactly what they were.
Thursday evening.
Peter was in his room. May was making dinner. Ben had gone to the corner store for bread because they were out and May needed it for meatloaf and he'd said he'd be ten minutes and it had been fifteen and Peter was sitting on his bed counting the seconds because he'd been counting Ben's absences since the day he arrived in this body.
Sixteen minutes.
Seventeen.
He was pulling on his shoes when he heard it from three blocks away. A gunshot. Sharp and flat. The corner store was three blocks east.
He was out the window. Down the side of the house, hands and feet sticking to the siding, the web-shooters on his wrists under his sleeves. He hit the sidewalk and ran. Spider-fast. The street blurred. He covered three blocks in seconds, his feet barely touching the pavement, and the corner store was ahead with the light on and the door propped open and a man was coming out.
The man had a gun. Ski mask. Moving fast. Behind him, through the glass, Peter saw the counter and the register and a body on the floor.
Ben was on the floor.
He raised his right hand and the web-shooter fired. The line hit the gun and stuck, wrapping around the barrel and the man's fingers, and Peter yanked. The gun came free. It clattered on the sidewalk and skidded into the gutter.
The man in the ski mask looked at Peter, at the web on his hand.
He ran.
Peter let him go. He let the thief run because Ben was on the floor of the corner store.
Ben was sitting up by the time Peter got inside. Sitting up. Alive. Peter's legs almost gave out. There was blood on Ben's forehead. A cut, not deep, where his head had hit the counter on the way down. The store owner was behind the register calling 911 and shaking and the candy display was knocked over and there was a broken jar of something on the floor.
"Ben."
Ben looked up. Confused. Blood running down the side of his face and his reading glasses knocked crooked and the dish towel still over his shoulder from the kitchen.
"Peter?" Ben blinked. "How- how did you get here so fast?"
Peter didn't have an answer. He grabbed the dish towel off Ben's shoulder and pressed it against the cut on his forehead and said "Hold this" and his voice was steady, which was a miracle, because his hands were shaking so hard that Ben probably couldn't tell the difference between the shaking and the pressing.
"I'm okay," Ben said.
"Hold the towel."
"Peter, I'm okay. He didn't shoot me. He fired at the ceiling. I just hit my head when I-"
"Hold the towel, Ben."
Ben held the towel. The sirens were coming. The store owner was still on the phone. Peter knelt on the floor next to his uncle and kept his hands on the towel and didn't let go and his heart was going so fast he could hear it in his own ears and Ben was alive. Ben was sitting on the floor of a corner store on a Thursday in Queens with a dish towel on his forehead and he was alive and Peter's hands were shaking and the meatloaf was probably burning at home.
The ambulance came. They said it was a minor cut, a possible concussion, keep him awake for four hours. The police took a statement. Peter didn't mention the web. The gun was in the gutter, covered in dissolved webbing that nobody would recognize. The thief was gone.
Home. May cried. Then she made tea. Then she cried more while the tea got cold and then she made more tea. Ben sat at the kitchen table with a bandage on his head and held her hand and said "I'm fine, sweetheart, I'm fine" in the voice he used when he was being patient about what mattered.
May went to bed around midnight. Ben stayed up because the EMTs said four hours. Peter stayed up because he couldn't close his eyes.
They sat at the kitchen table. Ben with his bandage and his reading glasses and his crossword. Peter across from him. The radio was off. The house was quiet.
"You got there fast," Ben said. Not accusing. Just noting.
"I was already on my way. You were taking too long."
"I was gone seventeen minutes."
"That's too long for bread."
Ben looked at him over his reading glasses. That look again. He didn't push it.
"Thank you," Ben said. "For the towel. And for getting there."
Peter nodded. His throat was tight.
They sat. The clock ticked. The bandage on Ben's head was white with a small red stain in the center where the cut was still seeping.
In the movies, Ben Parker died on a sidewalk. Said something about responsibility and then he was gone. This was a man with a cut on his head filling in a crossword.
Peter thought about the thief. He'd let him go. The thief was out there, somewhere in Queens, running. He'd try again. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. Some other store, some other register, some other person who wasn't fast enough.
What about everyone else?
He looked at Ben. Ben was filling in the crossword.
Peter went upstairs. He sat on his bed. The web-shooters were under the mattress. The garage still had web residue on the wall that he needed to scrub. The costume he'd been sketching in the margins of his notebook was terrible, lopsided eyes and bad proportions, the kind of thing you'd draw at 3 AM when you didn't know what you were doing.
But the web-shooters worked. He was fast. Ben was alive.
Somebody knocked on the window.
Cindy was on the fire escape. She was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants and she looked like she'd run here, hair messy, cheeks flushed, breathing hard. She was gripping the iron railing and her knuckles were white.
"I felt it," she said. "I was at home and I felt- I don't know. My chest. Like something was wrong. Like you were-" She stopped. "Are you okay?"
He opened the window. She climbed in. They were six inches apart and the hum was there, low, underneath.
"My uncle got hurt," he said. "He's okay. He's downstairs."
"Someone hurt him?"
"A thief. Corner store. I got there in time."
She looked at his hands. The web-shooters were off but his wrists had red marks from the casing. She took his right hand. The one with the fading bite mark. Her fingers laced through his and her palms were calloused and warm and their heartbeats were doing it again, syncing up, and he was too tired to wonder what it meant.
They sat on the edge of his bed. She didn't let go of his hand. The house was quiet underneath them. Ben's pen downstairs. The clock.
"You got there in time," Cindy said.
"Barely."
She leaned against his shoulder. Her hair smelled like clean shampoo. Her grip on his hand loosened but didn't release.
She fell asleep like that. Leaning on him. Holding his hand.
Peter sat in the dark and listened to the house and didn't sleep at all.