Wings
The spider-sense screamed.
Not the hum he got from Norman Osborn, not the low itch of being watched. This was a white spike from the base of his skull through his teeth, and Peter threw himself sideways off the rooftop before his brain finished processing why.
The parapet exploded where he'd been standing. Brick and mortar spraying into the air, and through the dust came wings.
Mechanical. Articulated. Steel catching the streetlight as they banked. A jet engine mounted between the shoulder blades, the sound arriving a beat after the movement because the thing was that fast. And at the tips of each wing, talons. Curved metal claws with brick dust on them.
The man wearing the harness was old. Sixty. Bald head, goggles strapped tight, a flight suit that looked homemade and maintained by someone who cared about his work. Jaw set hard. He'd built a machine that could fly and strapped himself into it and he was using it to tear apart a rooftop.
The Vulture. Michael Keaton. Homecoming.
Except this wasn't the MCU version. Not the blue-collar guy salvaging Chitauri tech from cleanup sites. This man had built his wings from scratch, every rivet, every servo, and he was faster and angrier and Peter was already bleeding from the brick dust.
"Stay out of my way." His voice carried over the engine. "I have business tonight."
"Cool wings," Peter said. "Really. Did you make those or is there a catalog-"
The Vulture dove. Peter jumped and the talons missed him and caught his web-line instead and snapped it and he dropped two stories before he got another one off. The jolt went through his shoulder.
He couldn't web him. The Vulture was too fast, too high, and the jet wash was burning through the webs before they could stick. Peter tried from a rooftop on Ninth, got a line on the Vulture's boot, held it for one glorious second, and then the engine heat dissolved the silk and the Vulture banked upward and the line went limp in his hand. He tried again from the corner of Tenth and Forty-fourth, leading the shot, aiming where the Vulture would be. The web sailed past the left wing by three feet and hit a water tower that was just trying to mind its business.
The sky was the Vulture's. Peter couldn't touch him up there. Every time he got altitude with a web-swing, the Vulture dove from above and Peter had to drop or get hit. The talons missed his head by inches on the second pass. The third pass, a wing-edge caught his arm and the suit tore and the skin underneath opened in a line from his elbow to his wrist that started burning before the blood came.
He needed walls.
The construction site on Eleventh. Four blocks. Scaffolding, a crane, steel beams. Enclosed space where twelve-foot wingspans became a liability.
Peter dropped to street level and ran. The Vulture followed, diving between buildings, banking through gaps that weren't made for him. His left wing scraped brick and the sound of the engine in the canyon between two apartment buildings was a physical thing, a pressure in Peter's chest. A fire escape railing tore off the wall behind him and fell five stories onto a parked car.
He hit the construction site through the chain-link fence. Scaffolding and steel. Tight spaces.
The Vulture came in high and his left wing clipped a cross-beam. Sparks. But Peter was watching the right wing. The right wing wobbled on the recovery, a delay. Servo lag or a bad joint. The left one cut clean. The right one stuttered.
A talon closed on his ankle.
He went up. The ground shrank. Ten feet, twenty. The Vulture's grip was steel and the talon was cutting through his suit into the skin and the wind was wrong, he was not supposed to be up here without a web-line, and the city was tilting.
The Vulture let go.
Four stories. He tried to get a web off and his hand fired but the line hit scaffolding that was already behind him and the angle was wrong and the silk didn't catch and the cross-beam came up fast.
He hit it ribs-first. Left side. The sound he made was not a word. His hands grabbed the beam and his grip was the only thing keeping him from falling another four stories and the pain was a hot wire from his armpit to his hip. Two ribs, maybe three. They were separate objects inside him now, which was not a thought he wanted to be having.
He rolled off the beam and caught himself with a web and hung there in the scaffolding, breathing in small sips because full breaths were not available to him at this time.
The Vulture circled above. Patient. He had altitude and time and a working engine and Peter was hanging from a web-line with cracked ribs four stories below him. The math wasn't complicated.
Peter hung in the scaffolding with his ribs screaming at him. Scenarios. The chain hanging from the crane arm to his left. Heavy links. And the right wing wobbled.
He webbed the chain to the joint where the right wing met the harness. The web caught. The chain went taut and the weight pulled the right wing down and the Vulture had to bank hard to stay level.
Peter used the chain. Swung himself up and onto the wingsuit from underneath, hands on the harness straps. Wind like a wall. Ribs on fire. The Vulture spinning, trying to shake him, and Peter's fingers found the seam in the right wing panel where the servo was lagging and he pulled.
The panel came off. It sounded like a car door being ripped from its frame.
They went through the scaffolding together. Steel pipes bending and snapping. The Vulture hit concrete hard, rolled, stood up. His goggles were cracked. Blood on his lip. One wing dragging behind him on the ground, sparking on the concrete.
Peter landed on the scaffolding above. Breathing was a project. Standing was worse.
"Thirty years." The Vulture was standing in pieces of his own wing. "Thirty years building Toomes Electronics. Every patent. Every circuit. Gregory Bestman took it all." He spat blood onto the concrete. "You don't get to decide what I take back."
Peter watched him from the scaffolding. The old man was bleeding and his wing was in pieces and he was standing. Peter didn't have a quip for that.
"This isn't over, insect." Toomes fired the remaining engine. The harness lifted him, lopsided, one wing dragging, trailing sparks as he cleared the scaffolding and banked east toward the river. Low and uneven. The engine sound faded.
Peter sat on the cross-beam. His ribs pulsed. The ankle was bleeding into his boot and the arm cut had stopped but the suit was stuck to it.
He'd won. The wing panel was on the ground in three pieces and Toomes was gone and the construction site was wrecked. He was sitting on a beam four stories up with cracked ribs and a torn suit and blood in his boot.
It didn't feel like winning. It felt like getting hit by a bus and the bus drove away and you were still standing and people called that winning.
A pigeon landed on the beam next to him. Looked at him with one eye. Flew off. Fair enough.
Three blocks east, on a rooftop across the site, someone was watching. Blonde. Binoculars. Tactical vest over a dark shirt. She'd been there for the whole fight. The spider-sense read her the way it had read the surveillance in Chelsea: present, attentive, professional. Observer.
She lowered the binoculars. Nodded once. Spoke into an earpiece. Walked away from the roof edge.
The Vulture had a point about being robbed. That was going to sit with him.
He swung home slow. Every line pulled at his left side. Queens took forever.
Cindy was on the fire escape.
Not in the suit. Jeans, his sweatshirt, hair down. She was sitting with her knees up and her phone in her hands and the compass hit six before he got the window open.
"You're late," she said.
"I-"
"Shirt off."
He climbed through the window. Dark room. She followed him in and pulled the curtain shut and her hands went to the hem of his suit and started pulling it up. The fabric stuck to the cut on his ankle and he made a sound he didn't plan.
"Sit."
He sat on the bed. She peeled the suit top off. His skin was cold from the wind and her hands were warm and she stopped when she saw his ribs.
The bruise was forming. Dark across the left side, second rib to the fourth, and the shape of it was the I-beam he'd landed on. A straight line with the flange imprint at the edges. It looked like a wing.
Cindy knelt in front of him. Her fingers found the edge of the bruise. Light. He flinched.
"This is what you do when I'm not there?"
"He was fast. Sixty years old with a jet engine and I couldn't-"
"I don't care how old he was." Her voice was tight. Her jaw was tight. Her hands were gentle. "You have three cracked ribs."
"Two."
Her fingers pressed along the bone line. He sucked air through his teeth.
"Three," she said.
"You might be right."
"I'm always right." She was kneeling between his legs with her hands on his bare ribs and her eyes on the bruise and the compass was at four and her face was angry and her hands were careful.
She leaned forward and kissed the bruise. Her mouth was warm against the swollen skin. The pain flared and then went soft where her lips were.
"Ow."
"Good." She kissed a different spot. Lower. The rebar scrape across his stomach, a thin raw line. This one slower. Her mouth open, warm breath on the raw skin.
"And this?" She kissed his forearm where the brick had cut him. Gentle.
"That one's fine."
"Liar." She sat back on her heels and looked up at him. Dark eyes, wet at the edges. The compass at four. Her hands on his knees. "Nae geoya. You idiot."
She got the first aid kit from under his sink. Peroxide on the ankle cut, which stung worse than the actual cut. He told her that. She said "Good." She cleaned the arm with gauze and taped it. Wrapped his ribs with an ACE bandage, firm, even, the way someone wraps ribs who's looked up how to wrap ribs on her phone while sitting on a fire escape for forty minutes waiting for an idiot to come home.
She'd been waiting forty minutes. He knew because her phone screen was still on the search results page and the timestamp on the first article about rib wrapping was 10:47 and it was 11:30 now.
"Lie down."
"I'm fine."
"Lie down."
He lay down. She turned off the lamp and climbed in behind him. Pressed her front to his back, careful. Her arm went over his waist, below the ribs. Her forehead settled between his shoulder blades. The compass dropped to two.
"Next time I'm coming with you."
He didn't argue. His ribs ached and her arm was warm and the Vulture was somewhere over the East River with one wing and a grudge and Cindy was breathing against his back and her breath was warm through the bandage and the compass was at two and the room was dark and he was going to sleep now because everything else could wait until morning.
Outside, a garbage can lid scraped down the street. A dog barked twice. Stopped.
He slept.