Chapter Text
Matt sat at his desk, hands on his face that skewed his glasses in the same way he’d seen Ryland do more than once all those years ago. He was nursing several fractures and bruises along his body, after a night of intense fighting with the criminal underbelly of the great city of New York, with plenty more scars hidden beneath his once new suit. He missed Ryland. He clicked his phone open and his text to speech read out the time in its robotic voice.
“3:35 AM, No Notifications.”
He sighed. He really shouldn’t be in the office, he really shouldn’t be out of bed. Foggy had been giving him shit for coming in so beat up all day, but they had 4 new cases, and court the next day, plus his apartment got to be suffocating after a while. He pulled out his burner phone and plugged it into his mobile screen reader bought specifically for this phone and this phone alone. He didn’t want his text to speech going off in the middle of battle because he landed on his ass or something. The older, more robotic voice read the few notifications he had.
“3:36 AM, text from SM: Hey man I’m just checking in to make sure your ok you took quite the ass kicking last night text me if your alive thanks.”
He sighed. This guy was the king of bad puns and run on sentences, so much so he had the voice repeat the text so he could ensure he heard it right. He typed a quick thumbs up, stolen from Ryland’s habit of working in complete and absolute dead silence, and only answering questions with a thumbs up or down while furiously writing out equations or lab reports or research papers. Eventually, he also started adding a hum or a groan to make sure Matt got the point, which made him laugh. Matt set his phone down again, but kept the burner attached to the reader and went back to work reviewing his clients’s cases. Eventually he got another notification, also from the burner and clicked the tactile button to have it read.
“4:01 AM, text from SM: Ok good do you mind if I stop by wherever you are I have something important to talk about”
He sighed, sent another emoji in response, still a thumbs up, and sent a pin to his location, grabbing a mask from his briefcase before walking to the roof as he heard Spiderman swing closer and closer. He reached the roof access door just as a telltale thump hit brick, the sound of Spider-man landing.
“Well look what the cat dragged in! Glad to see you’re alive and kicking, DD”
Matt chuckled idly and walked over to where he could sense the strongest, fastest and most hyper heartbeat he’d met in some time. It was so loud, the first time he heard it, he assumed it was a bomb implanted in a human being.
“Yeah, you know it takes more to put me down than that. Should we head inside?”
He heard a nod and Spider-man slipped on a t shirt and sweats over his suit quickly before heading into the stairwell and tearing his mask off his face, shoving it into the backpack that had previously held his clothing, along with his sleeves and gloves. Matt also took off his mask before they descended the stairs to Matt’s office. Spider-man, or Peter as Matt calls him when out of costume, sits across from Matt’s desk in the client chairs, laying across both of the admittedly cheap plush chairs.
“So, you had something to tell me, at 4 in the morning no less?”
Matt assumed Peter wouldn’t just call him for some trivial New York typical crime he’d encountered, especially because Peter was usually the vigilante with the most experience in any given room. He also didn’t usually call for help on anything less than a smuggling ring, or world ending wacko flooding the streets of midtown with more force than even the Avengers could handle. Peter took a deep breath, and his pulse got shaky in its thundering sound. Well, this would certainly be interesting.
“You know I work in labs across the country, right?”
Matt nods. He frequently covered for Peter on nights he was needed for scientific research and conferences in state of the art but remote areas. His specialty varied from biology to chemistry to engineering, but he had qualifications for all 3, making the most of his college scholarships and grad school programs that allowed him to triple major and get a masters degree with only one additional year in undergrad.
“Well…” He drummed his fingers against Matt’s fake plastic wood desk, and again his heart rate was off the charts, almost making Matt flinch at its intensity. “We have attorney client privilege, right? Anything I say stays here?”
Wow, what an oddly concerning thing to say all together in the span of 5 minutes. Matt tried to think, had Peter ever retained him or had it been Spider-man every time?
“Hand me a dollar.” Peter scrounged around his bag for truly too long before handing Matt 2 quarters, 3 dimes, 2 nickels and 11 pennies. Whatever works, he guesses. “Ok, you’ve officially retained my services. Attorney client privilege is active. Go ahead.”
Another beat. God, what was so horrible that he was this stressed?
“So… a couple months ago, my colleague, Irina Petrova discovered a little red line from Venus to the sun. She shared her findings with me over email and my lab and I requested to look at them in person. I had to travel out of country, that was when Frank covered Queens for the week.”
He physically shuddered, and Matt suppressed a giggle. It had taken a lot of convincing, arguing and even wrestling to get that to happen, and Matt had to do most of it because Peter was sequestered away near immediately after an “emergency work call out of country”. In the end, Karen threatened to withhold affection for a week, and that talked him down, thank God.
“Well, it all checked out, so NASA called me to their institute in New York, and they had me help build a probe to figure out what it was. There was some concern….”
He trailed off here and stood stock still, looking somewhere away from Matt. They sat in silence for a few more minutes before he continued.
“Well, we got back the samples, they had this guy test them, a Dr. Grey I think, and it was just him at first but eventually they called in me, and a bunch of other specialists all over to test it… and these things were so fucking weird, dude. They didn’t react to pretty much any of our tests but it was clear they were alive.”
Matt cut in here, well versed in the fact that if Peter wasn’t cut off, he could go on for days, though today it seemed there were some exceptions.
“So, is it another Venom? Alien life turned villainous?”
Peter shook his head.
“I’ve kinda… left something pretty important out.”
Matt looked at Peter suspiciously, eyebrow raised.
“Most of this is already public knowledge, but uh… the aliens, astrophage, they’re eating the sun. In 20 ish years, maybe 30 if we’re lucky we’ll all be dead. The secret part is… there is a task force intent on solving it.”
Wow, whiplash. Matt had a feeling that these aliens were something Foggy had ranted about to him in relation to climate change last month, but in Matt’s defense, he was freshly back from “the dead” (his Catholic Church basement where he’d been nursed back to health by his mother who was now a nun, and also had no idea where Ryland was.) and his hearing was still kinda recovering from his fight with the Kingpin.
“So, there’s a task force. What’s their plan?”
Peter relaxed at being asked a question he could answer normally.
“To send a manned crew into space, to a different star system. It’s the closest one not affected by these aliens, so they’re gonna figure out why.”
Ok, pretty self explanatory.
“But…. It’s 11.9 light years away. It would take 11 years and 11 months to get there, and more than likely the same amount of time to get back.”
So many thoughts flitted through Matt’s head, mostly just unintelligible screaming because, OH MY GOD. This is… insane.
“How would these astronauts survive?”
Dead silence. Peter put his head in his hands and teared up, Matt tasting the salt in the air.
“They… they woul- they won’t. It’s a one way ticket, volunteer only trip. But uh, the reason I came here is because… I think they might recruit me.”
Recruit him?! Recruit him to what?! Die in outer space? Suddenly Matt got very angry. Peter was only 28 years old, he was a child prodigy, a hero, a friend, a husband, a father and so much more. What would happen to the city without friendly neighborhood Spider-man to protect them?
“For fucking space?!”
Peter quickly shook his head.
“Oh, no, absolutely not. The actual mission is volunteer only, and they won’t need applicants for a while. No, I think I’m getting headhunted professionally to assist research. I submitted a design to better the ships equipment in zero gravity and I just got the notification that I have a meeting with the head of the task force tomorrow. I need a favor while I’m gone. Can you watch over the city?”
Matt nodded, speechless.
“How long will you be gone? Where are they taking you?”
Peter shook his head, ignored the questions, and grabbed his bag. He pulled out red converse and laced them up right over his suit with practiced ease. He pulled open the door to Matt’s office, stopping in the doorway.
“Matt? Be careful. There’s going to be a lot of unrest these next few years. This city will need you.”
And with that, he’s gone.