Chapter 2: Building Tension
"You paused the clock," Silk said again, and her hand left his throat. "Thirteen years, Parker. I counted every one of them. I memorized every crack in that ceiling. I said goodbye to my whole life so the monster wouldn't find me, and you're telling me he came back anyway? That he died and came back and died again while I was doing puzzles in a box?"
"Cindy." Peter worked his jaw free of her grip and dropped to the rooftop proper, hands open, palms out. "Listen to me. The second time we made sure. There's nothing left of him. I watched him come apart at the molecular level. Nobody's coming for you."
"You don't know that." She was pacing now, a tight furious circuit, her white silk mask catching the glow of the city below. "You didn't live in that room. You didn't feel the walls get closer every year. Ezekiel told me he could smell me, that my only chance was to disappear. I disappeared, Spider-Man. I was a ghost for thirteen years. My parents thought I was at Oxford. My best friend thought I abandoned him. And it was all for nothing, because he just comes back. Death doesn't hold him, but a bunker held me."
"I know. I know what that cost you."
"You don't know anything!" The word cracked out of her like a whip. "You were out here. Swinging around, having adventures, kissing girls on rooftops while I was eating food passed through a slot in a door! Every day of my life since that spider bit me has been a prison, and you built the walls without even knowing I existed!"
Peter took a slow breath. Thirteen years of guilt sat in his chest like a stone, and every word she threw was a hammer against it. He deserved this, some part of him said. Let her say it. But her heartbeat, he could hear it even through the mask, was ratcheting up past anything sane, and her hands were shaking, and her weight kept shifting toward him the way a cat's shifts before it strikes.
"Cindy, I'm not your enemy," he said quietly. "I'm the only person on this planet who knows exactly what you went through. So take a breath. Sit down. We'll find your parents tomorrow. We'll find Hector. I'll help you rebuild every single thing you lost."
"You'll help me rebuild," she repeated, and there was something terrible in the flatness of her voice. "Like you helped me out of the bunker. By tearing the door open with your big stupid heroic hands while I screamed at you to stop."
"I saved your life."
"You ended mine."
She came at him before the sentence finished.
Peter's spider-sense screamed, a white-hot spike behind his eyes, and he threw himself sideways. Her webbing, that dense glossy silk, lashed past where his head had been and slapped across a rooftop vent, shearing the metal cap clean off. It hit the gravel with a clang that echoed across the block.
"Cindy, don't!"
"Shut up." She was already on him, no wasted motion, her body a white streak under the stars. A knee came at his ribs and he caught it on his forearm, the impact numbing his hand to the elbow. He rolled away, came up in a crouch near the roof's edge.
"Fine," he breathed. "Fine. If this is what you need."
It wasn't a spar. He realized that within the first ten seconds. There was no testing, no rhythm, none of the almost playful geometry of two spiders feeling each other out. She was trying to hurt him, every strike committed, every line of her body aimed at breaking something. And she was faster. God, she was faster. Thirteen years of nothing to do but train, a style refined in a six-by-six cell until every movement was pure efficiency, and she'd been rationing it in the bunker. Here, with the whole sky above her, she was beautiful and lethal and completely beyond his reach.
He gave it everything. He did. He led with webbing and she cut it out of the air with a flick of her wrist. He feinted left and she read the feint through the soles of her feet, the way he did, the way they all did, and was already somewhere else. He tried to grapple, got a hand on her shoulder, and she folded around his arm like water, took his wrist, and used his own momentum to slam him into the rooftop door hard enough to dent the steel.
His vision starred. He shook it off and swung at her, full power, the blow that had cracked Doc Ock's armor, and she caught it on her open palm. Caught it. The shockwave of the impact shivered up both their arms, and then her fingers closed around his fist and she twisted, and something in his hand went crunch.
Peter heard himself scream.
"That's for the door," she said, and threw him.
He flew across the rooftop, hit the parapet chest-first, and went over the edge. Webs, his own, snap of instinct, a line to a flagpole that hauled his fall into a swinging arc that should have carried him to safety. She was waiting at the bottom of the arc. Her foot caught him in the sternum and the flagpole bent, the line parted, and he dropped the last two stories into the alley behind the diner, bouncing off a dumpster lid and skidding across wet asphalt into darkness that smelled of grease and old rain.
He lay there for a second, gasping, broken hand cradled against his chest. The broken one. Get up, Parker. His ribs ached in a way that suggested at least two were cracked. He rolled to his side and looked up.
She dropped into the alley mouth like a falling star, landed without a sound, and straightened. The white silk costume glowed faintly in the spill of the diner's back light. She tipped her head, and those dark eye-holes fixed on him.
"Get up," she said.
"Cindy." His voice came out wet. He spat pink. "This isn't going to fix anything. Beating me to death isn't going to give you those years back."
"No," she agreed, walking toward him, unhurried. "But it might make me feel better for about four minutes. Four minutes is more than I've gotten in thirteen years."
She was on him before he finished rising. Her knee drove into his wounded hand, pinning it to the asphalt, and the crunch of small bones this time, carpals, metacarpals, the delicate architecture of a pianist's hand, was the loudest sound in the alley. He howled. She let him. She stood over him and waited, patient as winter, while he gasped it out.
"Your other one," she said.
"Silk. Silk, listen. Morlun is dead. I swear to you, dead, gone, and I will spend every day I'm alive making this up to you, I will find your parents, I'll testify against Ezekiel's estate, I'll do anything, but you don't have to do this, you don't have to become this."
"Become what?"
She crouched over him, and for a moment he thought he saw something flicker behind the mask, some deep and wounded tenderness, the girl who'd cried at hockey games and kept a six-month anniversary gift she'd never gotten to give. Then it closed over, like ice forming on water.
"The thing you made me," she said.
Her fist came down on his cheekbone and the world went white. He felt the bone shift under his skin, felt his eye socket cave a fraction of an inch, felt blood fill his mouth from somewhere deep in his sinuses. He swung his good hand on pure reflex and she caught that too, caught it and bent it back, and his radius snapped with a sound like a green branch.
Spider-sense was useless now, or maybe it wasn't, maybe it was screaming exactly what it always screamed when he was outmatched and too stubborn to admit it. Every escape route he calculated, she'd already closed. Every counter he knew, she'd learned a harder version of, alone, in the dark, with nothing but time. She wasn't fighting him. She was grading him, and the grade was terrible.
"Get up," she said again, and hauled him upright by the collar, and Peter Parker, who could lift a train car, who had held the ferry to Staten Island together with his bare hands, hung in her grip like laundry. She threw him into the dumpster and the steel shrieked and folded around him. He clawed free and stood, swaying, and his legs almost held.
"Every bone," she said softly. Almost to herself. "That's what it felt like, you know. Day four hundred. Day two thousand. Like my whole skeleton was breaking, one invisible bone at a time, in a room nobody could see. So it's only fair."
"Cindy, please."
"Don't call me that." Her voice broke on it, just a hairline fracture, grief showing through the rage like bone through skin. "That girl doesn't exist anymore. She died in there. You're talking to what's left."
She hit him in the solar plexus and the air left him in a strangled wheeze. Then the ribs, the cracked ones, and he felt one of them punch inward, a hot needle of pressure under his sternum that made his vision swim. He went down to one knee. She kicked him onto his back.
He didn't fight anymore. Not because he couldn't; his healing body still had plenty of anger left in it, adrenaline enough to stand and swing and maybe break something of hers. But he watched her through his swelling eye, this frightened brilliant girl he'd condemned to a coffin with a spider bite he never even knew he'd shared, and he understood that if he fought back hard enough to win, he'd be taking the last thing she had. This was hers. This ugly, awful, deserved thing. He'd let her have it, and then he'd keep breathing, because he always did, because with great power and all its stupid unbearable consequences.
She read the surrender in his body and it seemed to enrage her more.
"No," she snarled, dropping onto him, straddling his chest, her fists raining down. "No, you don't get to just take it. Fight me! FIGHT ME!" A blow to his jaw, and he heard rather than felt the mandible crack, a bright ceramic pop. "You don't get to lie there and absolve yourself! You want to be the martyr? You want me to be the villain so you can forgive me later, is that it? I've read your file, Parker, I know exactly how you think!"
Blood was in his throat now, making every breath a bubbling whistle. His left collarbone went under her fist, then his right elbow, the funny bone shearing with a shock of electricity and static up his arm. His nose, already broken, was flattened by the heel of her palm. He felt his kneecap shift, then dislocate, a white blaze of agony up his thigh. She was crying, he realized dimly. He couldn't see it through his ruined eye, but he could hear it, hear the sobs caught between the blows, and somehow that was worse than all of it.
"Every bone," she whispered, hoarse, hitting him in the forehead now, the sternum, the already-shattered hand, methodical, terrible. "Every single one. I have an eidetic memory, did you know that? I'll remember the sound of every one. You'll heal. You always heal. That's the whole point of you. But I'll remember it forever, and that's the closest thing to justice this universe is going to give me."
Peter's world had contracted to pain and the grey light at the top of the alley and her voice. He thought, distantly, absurdly, of Aunt May's pot roast. Of Gwen's laugh. Of all the years he'd spent on rooftops deciding who deserved saving, and how he'd never once thought to ask who was saving the people he'd never meet.
The blows stopped.
He hung in the grey for a while, half conscious, listening to her breathe. Her weight was still on him, her fist still resting against his sternum, and her breathing was the ragged, hiccupping breathing of someone who has finally stopped running from something and doesn't know where to put herself down.
When he opened his good eye, she was sitting back on her heels, looking at her hands. They were slicked dark with his blood, and she held them up in the diner's back light like artifacts from a dig site, turning them slowly.
"I broke your clavicle," she said. Her voice was very small. "Both of them, actually. Your elbow. Your knee. Seven ribs, I think. I was counting."
"I know," Peter rasped. "I was counting too."
Something went out of her then, some terrible structural tension, and she folded forward, forehead nearly touching his bloody chest, her shoulders shaking. The alley was quiet except for the hum of the diner's compressor and the far-off hiss of traffic.
"He came back once," she said into the silence, and it wasn't an accusation anymore. It was just a frightened girl doing arithmetic. "So he can come back again."
"Yeah," Peter whispered, around the wreckage of his jaw. "So can we. Apparently that's the whole job."
She sat up. Looked at him, at the ruin of him, and her hand rose, and Peter braced for the last blow, the skull, the end of it.
Instead her fingers, gentle now, gentle in a way that broke him almost worse than the bones had, brushed a smear of blood off his cheek. Then she stood, shot a webline to the top of the alley wall, and paused at the lip of the roofline, a white silhouette against the city.
"Get yourself to a hospital," Silk said. "I'll find my parents myself. And Parker."
He waited.
"Don't follow me. If he comes back, you're not fast enough to help."
Then she was gone, and Peter Parker lay in the dark behind a diner in Queens, every bone he owned screaming, and laughed, wetly, horribly, because she was right. He'd have to heal first.
Cindy went down instead of up.
Her body knew the way before her mind did, muscle memory threading the rooftops above Flushing until she was crouched on the fire escape of apartment 4C, the one with the window she'd climbed through as a kid. The windows were dark. Different curtains. A stranger's bicycle chained to the railing below.
She dropped to the hallway through the roof door and stood in front of her own door for a long time. The number plate was new. The name on the mailbox read Okafor.
She knocked anyway, knowing.
A woman in a headwrap opened the chain, wary. "Can I help you?"
"I used to live here. The Moons. Do you know where they went?"
The woman's face changed, softened into that terrible pre-grief gentleness. "Oh, sweetheart. You didn't know?"
Cindy's hand found the doorframe. "Know what?"
"There was an accident. On the parkway. It was in the paper, maybe a year ago now. Both of them. I'm so sorry, honey."
The hallway tilted. Cindy said thank you, or maybe she only moved her mouth, and then she was on the roof, knees in the gravel, eidetic memory unspooling every dinner, every argument, every I hate you, and the last words she'd ever given them were a lie about Oxford.
She screamed into her mask until her voice gave out, and the city didn't even slow down.
The scream burned itself out and left her hollow, kneeling in gravel that belonged to strangers. She stayed there for one full minute, counting the seconds out of habit, and somewhere around the forty-second mark a single thought assembled itself out of the wreckage of her head.
He did this.
He opened the door. He broke the seal. He ended the only version of her life that had still made sense, the bunker with its humming walls and its terrible safety, and now her parents were a paragraph in a newspaper she'd never get to read. Not Morlun. Not Ezekiel. Him, with his big stupid heroic hands.
She was moving before the thought finished.
Peter hadn't gotten ten feet toward the street. He was still in the alley mouth, one arm braced against the diner's brick wall, dragging himself upright with the grim patience of a man who had done this before. He heard her land behind him and didn't even flinch. His ruined face turned, and through the swelling he found her white silhouette against the sky, and he knew.
"Cindy."
"They're dead." Her voice came out flat and strange, scraped raw. "Both of them. Car accident. A year ago. I was in the box, Parker. I was doing my hair in the box while they were dying on the parkway."
"Cindy, God, I'm so-"
"Don't." She crossed the alley in two strides and took him by the collar, and his feet left the asphalt. "Don't say sorry. Sorry is what you say when you didn't mean it. You meant it. You heard me begging and you opened it anyway."
"They would have died either way," he said, and hated himself for the arithmetic of it.
The punch took him across the temple and put him through the alley's shadow into the spill of the diner's light. He rolled and came up on his knees, and she was already there, and this time his spider-sense sang and it didn't matter, because there was nowhere his sense could send him that she couldn't follow.
The second beating was not like the first. The first had been an argument, a court proceeding, a justice with a verdict at the end. This was weather. This was a thing that simply happened to him, in the manner of rain, for a very long time.
She worked without hurry. His shoulder first, the good one, driving him back down whenever he gathered his legs under him. His sternum again, over the cracks she'd already laid down, deepening them. She broke his fingers one at a time, and she didn't watch his face while she did it, she watched her own hands, because looking at his face made something in her chest hitch and she couldn't afford that, not yet.
"Stop counting," Peter wheezed, at some point deep in the first twenty minutes. His voice was almost gone. "I can hear you counting."
"Then it's working."
He tried to crawl. She put a webline across his back and pinned him to the asphalt like a specimen, and knelt beside him, and kept going. His healing was already fighting, knitting the jaw she'd shattered, and she felt that, felt the bones shifting under her fists as fast as she could break them, and something about it made her hit harder. He gets to fix himself, she thought. Nobody fixes me. Nobody even knows where I am to fix me.
Around the forty-minute mark he stopped trying to speak. His body had dropped into the flat animal endurance of a man being worn away, breath in short whistles through a nose that was no longer a nose, eyes closed or swollen shut. She sat back on his thighs, gasping, her mask soaked dark where the tears and blood had met, and stared at the brick wall above his head as if the mortar held instructions.
The rage ran out of fuel all at once, and what replaced it was heat.
It started in her gut, a low pull like the first tremor before a quake, and spread outward through her blood in widening rings. She'd felt this once before, thirteen years ago in a lab in her leotard, the spider's venom doing something chemical and irreversible to her nervous system. Only now it had a direction. She could smell him. Not blood, not the copper reek of the beating. Him. Underneath it, some molecule her body had been waiting thirteen years to catch, and every cell in her announced that it had caught it.
Peter felt it too. His broken ribs stopped mattering. His ruined hand stopped mattering. Something in him rose up, hard and demanding, an animal wiring buried under the guilt and the humor and the with-great-power, and it answered hers across the wet asphalt like a struck tuning fork.
"What is this," she said. Her voice cracked. "What is this, Parker. What did that spider do to us."
"I don't know." His good hand found her wrist. Not pushing her off. Holding on. "Cindy, I don't know, but I can't think. I can't think past..."
"Past me. Yeah." Her mask was gone, torn off without her deciding to, and his followed, ripped away by her fingers, and there they were in the diner's back light, his face a wreck of swelling and blood, her face wet and furious and flushed dark. His lenses. His eyes behind them, wide and drugged. She looked at his mouth and her mouth ached.
"This is insane," he said.
"Shut up."
She kissed him and tasted his own blood in it and it didn't matter, it was fuel. Her tongue shoved past his teeth. His good hand came up and fisted into her hair and pulled, and she growled into him, a sound with no words in it, and ground her hips down against the hardness she could feel straining his suit. That one point of contact undid the last of her. She was soaked. She'd been soaked since the rage collapsed, and her body, the silk itself, seemed to know it, the white fabric of her costume tightening over her like a second skin with opinions.
"Off," she ordered, and her hands went to his chest, and instead of breaking ribs she tore. The fabric parted under her fingers like paper, down the sternum, over his stomach, and she shoved it aside and put her mouth on his skin, biting at his throat, his jaw, marking him, and he hissed and bucked under her and tore her costume the same way, one long rip from collar to hip.
The cool air hit her bare breasts and her nipples went hard and aching in a breath. He stared up at her. Broken face, broken hands, and his eyes were pure hunger.
"Cindy."
"I said shut up." She caught his good wrist and dragged it down her body, pressed his palm flat against her, between her legs, into the wet heat of her. "Feel that. That's what you did to me. Thirteen years, Parker. My whole body's been waiting for this and I didn't even know."
His fingers moved. Even shattered, two of them crooked wrong, they found her and pushed in, and her head went back and a sound came out of her that she'd never made in her life, low and shameless. He curled them against the front wall of her and her thighs clamped around his hand.
"More," she demanded. "Harder. I break you, you break me, that's fair, right?"
He laughed, wet and awful, and worked a third finger into her, and she rode his hand, filthy and open, her hips rolling, the alley echoing with the slick sound of it and her breathing gone ragged. The pressure built fast, too fast, coiled in her belly like the webbing she couldn't control at sixteen. She came around his fingers with a choked cry, grinding down on him, her whole body seizing, silk-sharp, and through it she kept her eyes open and watched his ruined face and hated him and wanted him in the same breath, the two feelings fused into one unbearable thing.
"Inside me," she said. "Now. I need your cock inside me right now or I'm going to lose my mind."
She didn't wait. She wrenched his suit down past his hips and he sprang free, hard and flushed, and she took him in her fist, felt him pulse, guided him to her entrance and sank down in one slow, ruthless stroke.
They both made sounds. Hers was a moan that broke in the middle. His was a groan ground out through his shattered jaw. He filled her, deep, deeper than anything in thirteen empty years, and her body clamped around him like it was made to.
"Oh my God," he managed. "Oh my God, Cindy."
"Move." She planted her hands on his chest, right on the cracked ribs, and started to ride him. "Move or I'll move for you."
He moved. His hips drove up to meet hers, off rhythm at first, then synced, spider to spider, some shared cadence in the blood, and the alley filled with the slap of skin and her voice, climbing. She rode him hard, punishing, using him exactly the way she'd just used her fists, and he let her, and gave more, and met every drop of her hips with an upward snap that drove the breath out of her. Sweat ran down the valley of her bare chest. Her nipples dragged the air. The white silk lay shredded around them both, their old costumes ruined together on the wet asphalt.
"Look at me," she gasped, and his eyes came up, and she held them while she ground down on his cock, circling her hips, taking him to the root. "You feel that? You're the first thing my body's ever wanted. First thing. You don't get to disappear after this."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I know." Her voice went strange, almost tender, almost cruel. "You heal. I remember. We're stuck with each other, Parker. Forever, probably. Some kind of spider thing."
His thrusts turned ragged. She felt him swelling inside her, felt the tremor start in his thighs, and she leaned down, her forehead against his broken one, her mouth at his ear.
"Come in me," she whispered. "I want to feel it. I want to carry it around. Give me something, Parker. Give me something back."
He came with a strangled sound and his good hand crushing her hip, and the heat of it flooding her tipped her over with him, her second orgasm ripping through her harder than the first, milking him, her inner walls clenching around every pulse. She shouted something, she didn't know what, maybe his name, maybe just noise, and the sound ran up the alley walls and died in the dark over Queens.
They stayed locked together, shuddering, her collapsed on his chest, both of them heaving.
Below the collarbone, faint and temporary, a mark had surfaced on each of them. The same mark. A small pattern, like a spider's signature in skin. She felt hers cooling. She pressed her fingers to it and then, wordlessly, to his.
"What did we just do," she said. It wasn't really a question.
"I don't know," Peter said, staring up at her, and his voice was new somehow, steadier, like something in his blood had finally stopped rattling. "But I don't think it's done."