umbrellajackassery | What's up, Danger? (Ota via comms or come vigilante with him!)

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What's up, Danger? (Ota via comms or come vigilante with him!)

With Dad back, Peter didn't exactly feel like being home. Or at work. He called out with family issues, and Doctor Otto was good with it. He understood that the Hargreeves household could, at the best of times, be complete chaos. With dad back, that was exactly what it was. Chaos. Everyone was upset, to some degree or another, and Peter couldn't help but feel the weight of the situation and what it meant for others. For Vanya and Klaus. Even with the revelation that dad was intangible, it still sucked.

Everyone had been happy. Mom had been learning and changing. It had been great.

Now? Now, though...it felt like every step forward they'd all made had been negated and then some.

So Peter, in a red and black Spider-suit, black domino mask and small communications device in his ear, was swinging through the city. Sticking to low rooftops, swinging through alleyways. Getting into a few fights with muggers and having his pictures taken with a few adoring fans, but none of it was really helping him feel better. All of it just felt empty.

Still, he persisted. There had to be something in this City worth doing that'd help him get his head on straight.

It's when he's passing an abandoned warehouse that Peter possibly finds his Thing.

There are people inside the warehouse and, after sticking to the outside wall and peeking in through a broken window, they're people with guns.

He sends a Spy-der drone inside for a closer look and gets a good view of a stash of drugs and some men that he was sure his brother was looking for. Pinging Diego, he sends him video feed and location and waits.

Later on, Peter is sitting on top of another building, a sandwich from his favorite corner bodega in one hand and a soda in the other. Bored silly, he sends a message home to everyone.

"I'm still out, if anyone wants me to pick up anything. Groceries. Movies. A shitload of ice cream and junk food. The City is quiet, for once. Or, for the newbies in the house, I can give you a livestream birds-eye view of New York at night. From my vantage point."

Yep. He's bored. Even after helping Diego.

It may be a while until he's feeling 100 percent.

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"So this is where you two sneak out when you're bored." Getting a kit of her own together wasn't nearly as difficult as anticipated, flitching what she could from the old stores of uniforms and harnesses. While not the slick, beetle black and green number she wore overseas- it's stealthy enough for her sense of comfort and pragmatism as she hauls herself over the ledge. Diego she expected something like this from, though it's woefully small time. Still.

Some people don't look at the bigger picture in the same way that she does. Did. Whether or not she still gives a fuck is up in the air as of late.

"No, I sneak off to my lab when I'm bored. I sneak off to here when I'm stressed out," Peter replies, still peering down at the city with interest. It was beautiful up where they were, and out of the smog, so breathing cleanish air felt pretty amazing. But, yeah, he is kinda bored.

He moves his sandwich off the ledge, making a space for his sister to sit, and then kinda shrugs.

"Two muggings, one break in, one car theft and one cat up a tree. Slow night."

Please let it stay slow, God.

"Fair enough." She doesn't say he looks ridiculous- it's not a house where she can throw stones- for all that she would and has said the same of Diego. A whole city at their feet and the spider styling suites Peter, it always had- just as much as being someone that handles the smaller scale, the less world-shattering in the long term crimes suits him.

There's a kindness in Peter that even Reginald couldn't quite beat out.

"As opposed to two firebombings and a massacre?" Her metric for such things has been yanked horribly to one extreme thanks to her time overseas. "Wait, you literally climbed a tree to fetch a cat? In that. Really."

Peter's not made for the bigger scale things happening too often. That's not saying Peter hasn't thrown down with Bigger and Badder. The Vulture, for instance, selling advanced and stolen military grade weapons to local gangs. Green Goblin trying to destroy the City.

And let's not forget Murder Magician. He was a creeper and a half, holy shit. But he deeply prefers the smaller shit. It's more likely he'll come home from that.

"I literally climbed a tree, and the cat escaped down the other side while the old woman took photos." Ninety percent sure they're of either her finger or his backside.

"...I'm sorry to have missed that." to point and laugh if nothing else, though it seems like Peters dignity managed to survive all the same. She lists to the side slightly, long-limbed, lean and dangerous, bumping shoulders easily and gently with Peter with all the rough-shaped consideration of a panther nudging a kitten.

"And your goal is...nonviolent solutions, correct? Diego stabs, always, that's a given." She is not here to behave in a way that falls in line with how Diego does things- if only to avoid giving him the satisfaction.

"Yep. That hasn't changed since the early days. Both my preference for non-violent solutions and Diego's love of stabbing everything he can." How these two boys got along is anyone's guess, but they worked well together. Fitting in where the other person couldn't, keeping an eye on each other. And, of course, teasing the shit out of the other person.

"Now, if non-violence isn't a viable option, I'm well-equipped to kick people's asses if I have to." He has. Several times. And it's not that he hates the violence, it's that he hates it puts innocent people at risk. There's a moment when he's quiet, and then he smirks some, turning to look at Hela and removing the domino mask. It's sibling time. Not hero time.

"You remember the bank robbery we thwarted where Allison told that guy she heard a rumor he shot himself in the foot? And Diego came marching in all," And here's where Peter does his best impression of his brother, albeit not a very good one, but it does get the point across "Real men throw knives! I couldn't stop laughing later on when I replayed that moment. There was just something really ridiculous about a guy in his early teens and that comment."

"There's a reason I went overseas." Diego's violence is...smaller, tighter. Less likely to burn back on him and the family. Hela's skills, Hela's power and temperament and ambition? Fit better on a larger battlefield. Large scale slaughter, blood in the sand, tightly wound camaraderie that fit and held until it didn't.

Helping without hurting hasn't ever been something she could manage. She holds too tightly, angers too easily.

"You've always been good at hand to hand." Slippery and quick- casual but sincere pride warms her voice as much as it's ever warm. Any of them making good, being good? It's commendable. Peter's got a better chance of it than the rest of them. "He always took himself so seriously- still does."

As though she has room to talk.

"It's the Spider-sense," Peter says, making fun of his arachnid-like abilities all on his own. He's always had a fascination with spiders and as his abilities grew and changed, he named himself Spider-Man at age fourteen. And then summarily got teased for it, but kept it anyway. He was happy to be The Friendly Neighborhood Spider-man. It was a far better nickname than Number Nine or The Arachnid.

"The only person I've never been able to dodge, nine times out of ten, is Diego." He can admit where he's flawed. "I almost got run through the other day for asking if he was going on a date." With someone Not Eudora. "He's touchy about that, but hilarious when he squirms about it."

"I'm not going to be stupid enough to ask if everything's alright." That was Shuri's voice in his ear, quiet but clear enough for a remote, last-minute comm signal hack, she did worry about him, after all, and as she hadn't yet gotten actual permission to gift him with a kimoyo bracelet, she had to make due.

"What I will ask, is what can I do to help?" Even if the answer was 'nothing', she'd at least know, which was the important thing at the moment.

"No such thing as a stupid question," Peter says, a half-hearted reply from a guy who is very emotionally drained from everything going on. He's glad to hear from her, though, so maybe the fact that he's smiling a bit is coming through the comms.

"I don't know yet." Peter replies with a sigh, running a hand over his face in his typical frustrated gesture. It's one he's done a million times at work, for just as many reasons.

"My dad is back. Intangible, but he has everyone really shaken up. Badly, for a few of the Klaus', and mom's upset, too." There are a handful of people in PEter's life that he will protect to the end. The Klaus Brigade, Vanya, Shuri and Mom are all on that short list, and having most of them upset is not working for him.

"Mom's reverted back to old behaviors and patterns. She's not as...free as she was before The Monocle returned." He knows Shuri can't see it, but Peter shakes his head, a soft frown on his face.

"I can't let her do that. We were all so happy with how she was, and now..."

It's working towards Ruined.

She quietly and calmly cursed not just Reginald, but two or three generations of his ancestry as well, turning her head to spit, as one did when delivering a proper curse.

Of course, the fact that she knew Peter could probably understand her even when she was speaking Xhosa was hardly a deterrent, mostly because she knew that if things had been different she'd have been in the same situation, "I could always come visit, call my mother. She may be older but her laugh is still the same and it was enough to scare him off once."

There was only a brief hesitation before she added: "And if he's just a ghost, I can understand how that would be trouble for Klaus, but is there really anything he can do to the rest of you other than hover ominously?"

He understands every word of that curse, grinning and almost laughing but keeping his hand over his mouth so she doesn't hear it. And then, in Xhosa:

"And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I've vowed to never piss Shuri off. Ever."

There's an actual laugh from him at the comment about her mother, remembering her telling the story of how Reginald tried to buy Shuri and how even a younger T'Challa had told him he couldn't have his sister because she smiled and laughed and she was his to protect. He kinda wants to know what the Black Panther would do now in this situation, other than terrify Peter just by being his best friend's brother.

"I think mom is afraid he'll erase what she's become with him gone. She's been fighting his programming for weeks, and suddenly he's back."

For a brief, shining moment, Shuri had completely forgotten that Grace wasn't actually human, and the implications of that landed hard, and she was silent for a moment before she asked, "Peter, has anyone locked him out of admin privileges yet?"

Because if Peter was out and about, either he already had, or it hadn't yet occurred to him that doing so was even an option, and given the picture she'd put together about the house and everyone's upbringing in it from the bits and pieces Peter had told her as well as what she knew from other sources, she was guessing it was the latter, that he'd bolted to blow off some steam and hadn't really thought any further ahead than that yet.

"...uh."

Yeah, she has it right. He threw on his gear and bolted to blow off steam. He needs to do that so he can think properly and focus on the problem and Shuri has a way of getting him to solve issues even while he's upset. For that, he appreciates her.

"...um..."

This is embarrassing. He doesn't want to admit to this. But...

"No...? No...not yet. I have to steal dads coding, first, and look over it to make sure I can do this without hurting mom."

"Thought that might be the case. Go home, Peter. Once you have his codex in hand, let me know, you're going to need another pair of eyes if you want to get this done as quickly as possible."

Which she was fairly certain was the case, no one wanted to leave Grace at risk any longer than they had to.

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What's up, Danger? (Ota via comms or come vigilante with him!)

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