Chapter Text
No. 1 - “You have to let go” | barbed wire | bound
Nicky tries her best not to freak out when she wakes up in the back of some van, arms and legs bound with enough rope to put a spider to shame, which is ironic all things considered. The van is moving, rumbling down a street so filled with potholes that for a moment she’s sure it’s one of the three cobbled streets left in Brooklyn.
After a few moments to panic Nicky takes a deep breath and takes stock. She’s in a van and she can’t do more than writhe like a worm, there’s cloth in her mouth, tied behind her head in a gag. There’s a pounding in her head, though she can’t tell if it’s from drugs or a concussion, and it throbs with every bump in the road. When she looks around the van, things get even more bleak. It’s almost completely baren save for the noisy tarp she’s laying on and a bag by her feet filled with more lengths of cord.
Nicky’s arms are bound behind her back, arms straight and secured with zip ties at her wrists. She can hardly move at all and trying does nothing but give her rope burn. The farthest she gets is laying on her back, hands pinned beneath her. It’s not much, but it’s more defensible than lying on her stomach. At least now she can have a good shot at the face of whoever kidnapped her. She hopes they like the taste of vinyl heels.
Nicky’s pretty bad at guessing time, but she thinks the van drives for another ten minutes in complete silence. She has no idea if there’s anyone in the passenger seat. Eventually, though, the van slows to a stop.
Only the driver’s door opens, but that doesn’t mean much in respect to accomplices. There are heavy footsteps on gravel before the back of the van slams open. Nicky strikes out with her feet, but it doesn’t get very far. The man effortlessly grabs her by the ankles with a grin. He’s not incredibly large, but she’s not in any condition or position to put up a fight. She squirms and screams through the gag, but he pulls her out easily, dragging her by the ropes between her shoulder blades. Nicky’s legs drag in the dirt, rubbing them raw.
The man drags her through the back door of some commercial building. The floors are linoleum, old and yellowed like everything else. It smells like iron, like blood, but not rotten like a corpse. It smells like a butcher shop. Nicky wants to congratulate herself for figuring that out, but she knows she can’t do anything with that information. She’s just trying to stay calm; she’s gotten good at staying calm in scary situations since dating Frankie, but this is a little different. This isn’t staying up late pacing because there was a Super fight downtown and Frankie was on scene. Now it’s her own life in danger and she doesn’t know what to do.
The man drags her past a walk-in freezer. The door is open and there’s another man in there. He greets the man dragging Nicky without so much as a glance in her direction, and when she looks past him… No, no, no, no, nonononono!
There are bodies in the freezer, human bodies, hanging from the meat hooks in the freezer, right alongside the slabs of pork and beef. Nicky thrashes harder in the restraints, screams against the gag and fights. She gets what she wants. The man drops her, and she smashes her chin against the ground, rattling her teeth. The man cusses and grabs her again, shaking her for good measure. Tears are dripping down her face and she’s scared.
The man hauls her past the freezer to a room that might have once had its uses for the butchering profession. It has a tile floor with a drain in the middle, but both are flawlessly clean and the room reeks of bleach. The walls are covered in foam sound proofing panels and there is a set of tracks on the ceiling lined with hooks. There are other miscellaneous things that are equally terrifying, at least in this context. There’s a chair in the corner, and a camera pointed at the center of the room.
The man drags her in front of the camera and drops her on the floor, rolling her over onto her back. She gets a better look at him now, crouching above her. He has a symmetric face, with blonde shaggy hair and a porno ‘stache. He’s like a textbook serial killer. Nicky fights the urge to vomit.
“Good morning, sweetheart.” He says, giving her a smile that’s closer to a leer. “I never introduced myself. Rude, I know. My name is Ethan, and my twin brother in the freezer is Todd.”
Ethan stands, raising his arms and grabbing something from the ceiling before kneeling by Nicky’s feet. The chain rattles as he latches the large hook around the rope on her ankles. She tries to keep out of his reach but it’s no use. In just a couple of seconds he’s fastened it. Nicky doesn’t like where this is going, and she feels like she’s choking on the gag.
“None of that, now. We’re just getting started.” He says, “I’m going to take good care of you.”
Ethan presses a button on the wall and a motor hums to life, pulling the chain taught. Then it doesn’t stop. It keeps retracting the chain, lifting Nicky’s feet off the ground, then her hips, her shoulders. Then, she’s hanging completely upside down from the ceiling, a full foot from the floor. The ropes dig into her legs, and her knees pull uncomfortably from her own weight.
The blood rushes to her head immediately, making her face feel hot and tight. Nicky’s hair brushes the floor, and she thinks, a little hysterical, that she’s glad she wore compression shorts under her dress today.
Ethan circles around her, eyeing her up like one of those slabs of meat in the freezer down the hall. He seems pleased with his handiwork, and the thought makes Nicky’s stomach churn. She’s already dizzy from being upside down, and the way she’s swinging back and forth isn’t helping.
“Squirm all you want. We’ve strung up people much heavier than you, and no one has ever managed to get down. You’re going to make such a lovely sacrifice.” Ethan says, before he turns on the camera and heads for the door.
He turns to face them one last time. “I can’t wait to see what pretty colors you turn.”
The door shuts with a loud click of finality. Nicky thrashes as hard as she can in the ropes, but all it does is dig the ropes further into her skin and send her swinging even more wildly. Her toes are already starting to go numb from the lack of blood flow and her hands are prickling with static. Her hands… Her hands!
Her phone had been lost, taken most likely, but Ethan hadn’t removed her smart watch. Her smart watch with a GPS tracker linked directly to Frankie’s AI. All she has to do is turn the damned thing on, and to do that… Hysterically, she’s a little grateful that Ethan didn’t decide to watch from the chair.
Nicky waits until she swings to face the camera, hiding her arms from view, before she contorts her wrists in their bindings in an effort to reach the watch. She can’t quite reach before she runs out of time and her hands are in view of the camera again. She tries not to move in hopes that slowing the spin of the chain will give her more time to work, but it takes a long couple of minutes for her body to spin to face the camera again.
She tries again, twisting her arms and trying not to be suspicious. Her wrist cramps from the awkward position but she doesn’t stop to stretch it out, not when the watch is barely in reach. Just a little bit farther and she manages to brush the button on the side of the watch face.
Three short presses. Three long presses. Three short presses.
The watch buzzes in response. Once long, a pause, short, long, short. TR. Transmission Received.
Nicky tries not to let the relief show on her face as she stretches her hands to relieve the tension. All she has to do know is stay alive until Frankie finds her and sends these psycho creeps to the hospital.
The gag is cutting into the corners of Nicky’s mouth, and it tastes like rot, sickening and sweet. Tears haven’t stopped flowing, despite everything. They drip over her eyebrows and into her hairline. She sniffs and relaxes into the ropes. It hurts, but it’s not doing her any good to hold her body so tense. The cord digs into her calves with a burn like fire, and her old knee injury makes itself known.
Five minutes pass before Nicky’s stressed mind starts to conjure up thoughts that threaten to swallow her whole.
Her face is at perfect kicking distance from the ground, and if her nose gets broken, she’ll choke on her own blood. Ethan hasn’t come back, and she hasn’t seen Todd since she was dragged in, but she knows they’re both watching through the camera. They want to see Nicky panic and struggle, but she won’t give them the satisfaction.
Another ten minutes pass and the thoughts of boots smashing into her face fade in favor of worse. She’d read a story some time ago about a caver in Utah who had gotten trapped upside down in a small crevasse. He’d suffocated as his own organs compressed his lungs. Not to mention the numerous cases of Harness Hanging Syndrome her grandfather had told her about when they visited him for deer season one year.
“I can’t wait to see what pretty colors you turn.”
That’s what Ethan had said. They weren’t going to kick her face in or cut her to ribbons. The twins are going to watch her asphyxiate in open air, hung upside down like a spider’s prey in the back of some butcher shop. He called her a ‘sacrifice,’ and Nicky isn’t liking her odds.
She doesn’t know a lot about the causes of reverse suspension fatalities, but she knows she has to buy as much time as she can. Every few minutes she takes a deliberately deep breath even though it makes the paracord wrap tighter, gouging welts into her skin.
Her vision is getting blurry, and her head is throbbing. She doesn’t know how long it is that she spins slowly in the ropes. The pressure in her head is borderline excruciating so she squeezes her eyes shut and wishes Frankie would get here sooner, or at the very least that Ethan would shut off the lights. It’s been almost an hour now, since she woke up in the van, at least as far as she can tell. It’s been almost an hour and Nicky’s still alone, hanging by her ankles trying not to choke on her own saliva.
A traitorous part of her mind whispers that Frankie won’t get here in time, that Aurachnid is going to fail and she’s going to die slowly, scared and alone. Even as she shoves the thoughts from her head, the tears come back with a vengeance.
~*~
Frankie feels like a gods damned idiot when they get out of the shower and JUDOS is obnoxiously setting off their phone on the bedroom nightstand. They’d left it there to charge while they took a long hot shower to relax, and only registered the noise of the alarm a couple minutes ago.
They grumble as they pick up the device, clicking on the notification and finally getting the phone to shut up. They get a couple seconds of frustration before the blood drains from their face. Twenty minutes ago, the AI had gotten an SOS signal from Nicky’s smart watch.
Frankie can’t put on the suit fast enough. They don’t even take the usual precautions to make sure they aren’t seen as they leap from the balcony into the sky, swinging as fast they can towards Nicky’s GPS ping. Every fumble in their course makes them curse, fear filling their chest like ice. They can’t lose Nicky, not like this, not because of something stupid like missing an alarm.
Even with the most efficient route at their most frantic pace, it still takes them fifteen minutes to get to the building where Nicky’s watch was last pinged. The GPS had drained the battery, and the last ping was ten minutes ago. Frankie prays to every god they know, even the ones they don’t believe in, that they’re not too late.
“Frankie, barging in would be ill advised, given the amount of information available.”
They nearly dislocate their shoulder with how quickly they wrench to a stop two buildings down from where Nicky is, where she has to be. Frankie never should have programmed emotional monitoring into the suit. It’s like having a baby sitter who’s really bad at their job.
“What the fuck would you have me do?” Frankie snaps. “Nicky’s in there. I can’t just sit back and wait for backup.”
“Just take a moment to clear your head. Be cautious.”
Frankie sighs, shaking out their hands and heaving a couple of slow breaths. “Fine. Fine. My head is as clear as it’s going to get. Just give me all the information you can.”
In less than a minute, Aurachnid’s standing out back of some hole in the wall butcher shop with drag marks in the parking bay. The door is locked but it’s no match for their superstrength, unregulated as it is at the moment. The lights inside cast an eerie yellow glow over everything as Aurachnid creeps silently inside.
The first door they pass is a walk-in freezer, and Hades below… There must be a dozen of them, hung upside down from the ropes wrapped around their entire bodies and attached to the meat hooks on the ceiling.
“Fuck, are those…?”
Those are human bodies. None of them are Nicky, thank the gods.
Frankie shakes their head, breath shuddering in their chest. They pause long enough to clasp their hands and mumble a short prayer. “Hades, please bless these unfortunate souls and give them safe passage to the afterlife.”
The next room is a normal butchering station, set up with saws and plastic sheets and huge slabs. Thankfully all the meat seems to be of the usual non-human variety. Frankie doesn’t think they could handle that without vomiting inside their mask.
The suit gives them thermal imaging of the next room. It’s just two men, sitting in front of a TV. Frankie opens the door slowly, slipping inside and crawling onto the ceiling. Villain’s almost never look up, and it gives them time to look around.
The first thing they notice is the shrine, for lack of a better word. It’s in the corner closest to the door, a small table and the surrounding table decorated in Aurachnid and Spider-Man paraphernalia. There are pictures and articles cut out from newspapers, scraps of web suspended in vials of clear fluid, and pieces of rubble stained in rusty black blood. There’s cheap statues and copies of the vigilantes’ masks. White and red chime candles drip wax and flicker orange light on the words spray painted on the wall, dripping black.
New gods, see us now
Aurachnid finally shifts their focus to the men, and what’s on the TV. It’s a live feed that takes them a few seconds to make sense of, but when they do, their heart drops. It’s Nicky, upside down, camera zoomed in on her face. She’s moving, thank the gods, but her face is too red to be healthy and Aurachnid doesn’t want to think about how long she’s been hanging from her ankles, just like those people in the freezer.
“What the fuck have you done?” Aurachnid snaps, dropping down from the ceiling to stand behind them, fists clenched. They’ll be thankful later that they semi-permanently disabled the instant-kill mode on the suit because their self-control is at an all time low.
The men startle, turning around with a bastardized version of a look they’re so very familiar with. They’ve seen a kinder, innocent version of that look on every child that sees them swing across the sky, on the faces of young men and women they’ve saved from dark alleys. Raw and unfiltered awe is written across these men’s faces.
“Aurachnid!” One of them gasps.
“They have seen our sacrifices, brother.” Says the other.
The sacrifices… The men and women wrapped in ropes like spider silk and left to die. Tucked into the freezer alongside the meats they use to make sandwiches during the day.
Frankie’s vision goes red. “What have you done?”
“We did it for you, my lord.”
Aurachnid snaps, curling a fist into one man’s jacket and throwing him into the wall with enough force to crumple the drywall. They cover him in half a canister of webbing for good measure before grabbing the second and slamming him into the wall, holding him there by his collar.
“I am not your god.” They growl, holding the man high enough his feet are off the ground. “You disgust me, and I hate you. There is a horrific place in the afterlife waiting for you two.”
Confused devastation paints the man’s expression before they punch him out cold and web him up next to the other. The TV has gone dark in the commotion, tipped over on the floor. Aurachnid doesn’t give the room a second glance before they storm out.
There’s only one more room other than the one to the now closed storefront, one with tracks in the ceiling that lead directly to the freezer. They pull the steel door off its hinges in their haste to get to Nicky, hanging from her feet in the center of the room.
~*~
“Nicky!”
The relief in that voice is a perfect match for the relief that Nicky feels hearing it. When she opens her eyes and sees that black mask and its big lenses, her throat swells with emotion.
Aurachnid kneels in front of her, carefully tearing the gag and pulling it out of her mouth.
“You came…” Nicky says, barely more than a disbelieving whisper. It’s getting hard to breathe and she can hardly feel anything below her waist.
“Of course, I came, darling. You mean everything to me.” They answer, gently cradling the back of her neck, taking some of the stress off her muscles. “Let’s get you down from there.”
Nicky just nods, blinking away tears.
It takes some maneuvering, but minutes later she’s lying on the cold tile floor, legs propped up on the chair that used to be in the corner to prevent her internal organs from collapsing under the strain of renewed blood flow.
She lies there while Aurachnid carefully cuts away the ropes, listens to them chattering in low worried tones with their AI. It takes Nicky a moment to convince her body to work, reaching out a hand to Frankie.
They take her hand between one blink and the next, holding it against their mouth through the mask. Their other hand cradles the side of her face, brushing baby hairs away from her forehead. Aurachnid’s mask is emotionless, but Nicky knows the tender, worried look on their face even without being able to see it.
“Hey there, dollface.” They say, voice tight.
“It’ll be alright.” Nicky says, because Frankie needs to know. She can hear the sirens, summoned to the scene when Aurachnid first arrived. “Go. You can meet me in the hospital, preferably in sweats.”
She can tell from the set of their shoulders that they’d rather do anything else than leave Nicky lying on this floor alone, but it’s the smart thing to do if they want to avoid getting arrested for vigilantism.
Aurachnid sucks in a breath, pulling the mask up over their nose so they can press their lips to Nicky’s forehead. The gesture makes her chest feel warm with affection. “I’ll see you at the hospital.”
Aurachnid steps out of the room just seconds before police and EMTs storm the place, a crowd of paramedics swarming around Nicky still lying on the floor. They lift her onto a gurney and wheel her out of the building into open air. It’s nighttime now, and there’s a spandex clad figure crouched on the roof across the alley, keeping watch.