2013.04.27 - Judge and Jury

The sun is setting over Hell's Kitchen, casting a hazy orange glow over the rooftops and plunging the narrow streets into premature evening. Down on the corner, arrayed across the stoop of a grimy apartment building, are five young men all sporting the same red bandana. Some wear it around their heads, others have it tied about their arm and one has it hanging from his back pocket. Nevertheless, gang colors are pretty obvious when you see them.

Just down the block, another group sits on the hood of a beaten up old car. They could almost be mistaken for the same gang if they weren't wearing blue where their nearby neighbors wear red. It's been tense for the last half an hour, the two groups eying each other off over the distance of half a block and muttering vague threats to each other. It hasn't boiled over yet, but both groups are only getting angrier and neither seems to have any intention of leaving.

Not far away, Spider-Man hangs upside-down from a fire escape by a strand of webbing. With one hand he holds on, the other holding a cell phone which he has pressed to the side of his head. A sigh of exasperation escapes him.

“Yes ... Yes. Meat loaf? ... I don't think they sell those anymore ... Alright, Aunt May, I'll look ... No, no, I'm just at the library. I've got a paper due on hydrodynamics ... yeah, it does, doesn't it?”

As the sun is going down, the devils always seem to show up to play. In this case, it is a man in a red costume with small horns sitting on a window ledge just over the local boxing gym. He remains still as he listens to what is going on in the neighborhood. He can make out the mutterings between the two groups of Young Turks and frowns behind the mask. That doesn't sound good. He then turns his head again. There is a new heart beat he hadn't heard before in the Kitchen. His voice seems to be coming from under his heartbeat? Okay, that is odd to say the least. He stands up on the window ledge and jumps, feet first. He hits the yawning over the entrance and bounces outward. As he goes up, he summersaults in the air to give him a little bit more momentum and then fires off the grappling hook on his billy club. He swings to land on the fire escape a landing above where Spider-Man is located.

"I would say 'come here often', but I don't want you to think I'm trying to pick you up," he says to the upside down heart beat with a wye tone in his voice.

Spidey looks up from where he's dangling, eyes widening a little at the sudden appearance of Daredevil. He locks his ankles around the thread of webbing, allowing him to have both hands free so he can hold up a finger to signify 'one moment' to the Man Without Fear.

“Uh-huh ... who's who? ... Oh! That's, uh, Flash Thompson ... yeah ... “ He holds the phone away from his head and raises his voice, “Hey Flash! Put those books down! I need those!” Then, returning it to his ear, “Gotta go! Talk to you later!”

Hanging the phone up, he grabs onto the line to push himself off the wall with his feat. Momentum gained, he gracefully launches himself backwards through the air to land in a crouch on the railing next to Daredevil.

“Yeah, and I don't go in for the devilish types.”

"Flash Thompson?" Daredevil asks again with the joking tone in his voice as Spider-man lands next to him. "Not telling little white lies are we?" Now that the man is closer, his senses give him a bit more of a look over. "I'm going to go out on a limb on a limb here and assume you are Spider-Man unless we are being invaded by Tarzan of the Jungle." He gets down from the railing to stand up on the fire escape landing properly. "Daredevil." He offers a hand towards the web head. "Heard about you. Been wanting to meet you."

As the heroes talk, a car goes down the street between the two group of hoods. As fate would have it, the car tries to accelerate as the occupants notice the area they are in, and the car ends up backfiring. Both groups thinks shots have been fired and quickly get to their feet.

“You mean you're not Flash? Wow, you look just like him. He's got the little horns as well.”

That said, Spidey reaches out to shake Daredevil's offered hand and cannot resist another quip.

“Actually, I'm Superman,” he answers matter-of-factly, “My capes at the dry cleaner's so I thought I'd wear last year's Halloween costume. Nice to meet you, Mr. Devil.”

The sudden sound of the car backfiring, followed by the gangsters getting to their feet, stops him and prompts him to look off in the direction of the street. Down at ground level, the muttering has turned to all-out shouting of threats and insults.

“That doesn't sound good.”

"Not a bit. Been paying attention to these gangs as of late as the one has been trying to move in recently. Only a matter of time." Daredevil grabs the steps of the fire escape above him and swings around to land on the steps properly. He leaps out from the steps into space. He twists so that his feet come around in front of him so he lands on a window ledge, runs a couple steps, and then flips out of the alley to land on the city bus that he heard coming down the street.

"You going to shoot at me?" comes the biligernt voice of the men in the red. They have a distinctly Bronx accent flavored with a bit of Italian. "Reason the Bombers are from the Bronx, muther f***." A gun is pulled and aimed across the street for a moment before shots go off.

"Get back to the Bronx then," comes the retort with just enough of an Irish lilt to betray perhaps first or second generation Irish to the country. "Don't need you here in the Kitchen." From back in the Irish crowd something is thrown. Something with a lit rag shoved into a bottle.

It seems as though Spider-Man may be left behind, still crouched on the railing as he is when Daredevil takes off to handle the quarrelsome gang members. But as the Man Without Fear lands on the bus, Spidey is swinging at speed right behind him.

“The Bronx Bombers? Oh wow! I've got all your albums! Can I get a picture after we beat you up?”

He lets go of his web line, flipping through the air as a familiar tingling at the back of his skull warns him of an imminent danger. One hand darts out to the side, a line of webbing snagging the flaming bottle and pulling it into his hand.

“Look out,” Spidey warns, landing with a light thud behind DD on the bus, “Hot potato.”

The Webslinger holds the bottle out far enough so he can aim a web-shooter at it, firing a burst of the stuff with the intent of smothering the flame before it catches the fuel.

"Nice catch," Daredevil says to the Web Slinger as he pulls in the make shift bomb. "You take the Bronx. I've got the Bowery." He runs along the bus towards the front and does a front hand spring so that he rotates around to land his feet on the windshield of the bus. Surprising bus drivers aside, he pushes off backwards towards the car in front of the bus, and then spings back towards the gang off the car. "Hello, gents. Tax collector. All those rumors you heard about the IRS making deals with Devils? It's true."

One Irish is struck by the bullet fired from the Italians and drops as blood hits the street. The Italians are starting to weave among the parked cars, spreading out, as they try to avoid being an easy target. Shotguns and baseball bats are coming out now. They wait for the bus to go by before trying to dart forward in and around traffic getting towards the Irish.

The flame in the Molotov cocktail now extinguished, Spidey tosses it over his shoulder where it shatters on the street. The fuel sloshes away down the gutter, harmless as he silently hopes nobody saw him do that. He can see the headlines right now - Spider-Man: Litter Bug!

No time to worry about that now, though. He nods his head to DD, leaping off the bus and sidestepping just in time to avoid it hitting him. The gun that just fired is quickly yanked free from it's wielder's hand by a strand of webbing, landing in Spidey's palm where it is quite promptly crushed.

The Bombers glower at the Wallcrawler, various weapons leveled at him.

"Seriously?" Spidey asks, dropping the now-destroyed pistol to the pavement, "You're gonna shoot me? Don't you think if that worked, Doc Ock or the Shocker would've tried it by now? Okay, maybe not the Shocker. He's a little ... you know ... "

As the Bombers open fire, Spidey is already launching himself into the air and out of the way. First thing's first - the guns. Only a sawn-off shotgun and a pistol left, both of which he launches a web at to try and disarm their owners.

"My nose," cries out Shotgun Guy or Former Shotgun Guy now to be christained Flat Nose. Hands go to his face as his eyes water and he staggers backwards, tripping over another of his compatriots. He falls to the ground with a loud thump and cry out. Teddy Bear is thrown off of Spidey and crashes back into the side of a parked car. Two more pull out butterfly knives and attempt to attack Spidey from either side now as they try to split his attention.

Daredevil is favoring his side as he gets out of the made rush, but then continues to dish out the punishment. Not having fabulous sticky webbing, he just punches and ducks his way through the attacking thugs with a grin of satisfaction. "You guys have been begging for a beat down for too long. Just finally gave me a good enough reason to do it."

“Knives! Now, that's a much better idea than a gun. Guns are so commonplace. You can just get 'em any old where. But a tiny knife? The rarest and most elusive element of the super villain's arsenal!”

Spidey reaches out to grab the wrist of the nearest guy with a knife, squeezing his wrist just tight enough to suggest dropping the weapon may be the painless way to go. The other knife-wielder, too far away to grab, gets a burst of webbing to the eyes and then the feet.

“Hey DD,” he calls out over the din, “Are your guys as stupid as mine are?”

"I like to think the Irish thugs are smarter than the Italian thugs," Daredevil calls back towards Spider-Man, "But that might be a home field bias, of course." He catches a punch coming towards his head, using the man's momentum, to pull him forward and land an elbow on the base of the neck. He is too close for his goons to use guns as they may hurt their own men, but punching and kicking seem to bother Hornhead nary a bit.

The Knife Twins are grabbed and webbed with cries of shock and dismay. The one that was webbed drops his knife and tries to pull the webbing off of him to no avail. The Bombers seem to be pulling back. "We'll be back. Get something to deal with you costumed do gooders," comes the thick accented voice.

“You'll get us? And our little dogs, too?”

Spidey watches the suitably-disarmed thugs flee, making sure to take care of Flat Nose and the other gun-wielder. The knife guy with the web on his face is given a kick in the butt as he runs past. There's only so many of these guys he can catch right now, and there's not exactly a great deal of evidence against the ones without guns.

It doesn't take him long to handle the Bombers still nearby to him. They're strung up from a nearby lamp post, upside-down and cocooned in webbing. That done, Spidey calls over towards Daredevil.

“You have, like, mini-handcuffs or something? Or are you going to trust those guys to turn themselves in?”

"One thing you can trust about Hell's Kitchen," Daredevil says as he finishes leaving many of the Irish groaning on the ground, "that you either have a cop around soon enough or that these thugs will have long memories." He makes his way with a hop, skip, and a jump, almost literally, over to Spider-Man. "They will remember this is my neighborhood. They won't be so quick to start trouble again. Plus, now they have seen you too."

“Yeah, you're right,” Spidey replies, turning to Flat Nose dangling from the lamp post and prodding him in the chest, “I better not catch you in Queens, you yutz.”

That done, he turns back around to look Daredevil, “So, do you do what I usually do? That is, get the heck out of Dodge before the police turn up? Trust me, they're going to think I ambushed these upstanding young gents coming out of the 4-H Club and that you're my new, evil pal.”

Daredevil gives a nod to Spider-Man. "I don't get the bad press you seem to, but then the cops are not particularly thrilled with me either. Still, in this area of the city, they usually don't give me too much of a hassle. But," he says as he heads towards the alley, "can't hurt to not give them an excuse." He leaps towards one wall, uses it to bounce towards the other wall in the alley until he can reach the fire escape and then begins to haul himself up towards the roof.

Reaching the roof is only a matter of a vertical leap coupled by a quick tug on a line of webbing, resulting in Spidey being up there already when Daredevil arrives. He crouches down at the edge of the building to look over, whistling with appreciation as the cops roll up just in time to haul in the bad guys. Down below, the former wielder of the sawn-off shotgun shouts and argues with the police.

“Yep, just as I suspected. The guy with the flat nose doesn't like being arrested.”

"Not a race," Daredevil mumbles under his breath as he gets to the roof. He puts one foot up on the embankment around the roof as Spidey looks down at the scene. "And if he isn't careful with that language, the cops are going to 'accidently' take a corner too fast or the like," he says with a chuckle. "Problem is they will be out in an hour or two. Acting as human punching bags only gets them so long so we just go for the intimidation factor."

“I dunno, those guns looked pretty illegal to me,” Spidey begins, before burying his face in his palm and sighing, “Those guns that I, uh, broke. Great.”

He moves back and away from the edge, standing up as he folds his arms across his chest, “Well, still, they looked pretty spooked. Even if they do come back, they don't seem that bright. One of them tried to hug me, can you believe that?”

"Maybe he was trying to overcome his fear of spiders by embracing it?" Daredevil asks with a dry tone to his voice. "And yeah, the broken guns won't really help keep them any longer. We can go down there and give testimony that the guns were not broken first after all. Right now," he says as he moves to sit on the embankment now, "all they can hold them for will be public disturbance. Maybe if we are lucky, one of them has something illegal in his pocket."

“If this was the Shield or something,” Spidey begins, sitting down alongside DD to watch the show, “Someone would plant something in their pockets to make sure they go to jail. You don't do that, do you? Because while I'll admit these guys are jerks, they should probably get locked up for something they actually did.”

Daredevil shakes his head. "We can't circumvent the law. If we start doing that, we set ourselves up as judge and jury. Me? I know I'm not that smart to be able to handle that kind of responsibility." He pauses as he listens once more. "That one is slurring his words a little bit and probably not just from webbing. Might have a shot on getting something on him."

“Oh, my webbing is all loaded up with crack,” Spidey says in a matter-of-fact tone, shrugging his shoulders, “I've been watching the Wire a lot lately.”

Pre-emptively, he holds up both hands and says, “Kidding.”

Daredevil gives Spider-Man a look for a long pause and then nods with a half smirk on his face. "I've been tempted in the past. It is hard watching those thugs just walk out of jail time and time again. But if we bend the law for us, who is to say that someone else won't bend it against us at some point? I know you are Mr. Popularity in the city, but not every one has your kind of fan club."

“I'm with you, trust me,” Spidey replies, nodding emphatically and resting back on the palms of his hands, “I'm all for due process.”

The notion of being Mr. Popularity seems to make him laugh, albeit in a slightly embittered way, “Let me guess, you don't read the Daily Bugle? Last week, they had a poll to try and decide if I was a threat or a menace.”

"More of a news radio man myself," Daredevil says with a nod. "And I won't listen to Jameson's broadcasts. That man's voice could curdle milk." He gives a small laugh. "I mostly stick to NPR. After being out here all night, a little soft jazz once in and a while is pure bliss."

“You're telling me,” Spidey laughs, liking this Daredevil guy already, “Why anybody would call him Jolly Jonah is beyond me. Unless it's irony. It's probably irony.”

The Wallcrawler shrugs his shoulders again, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and his chin in the palms of his hands, “So, do you just stick to Hell's Kitchen or do you go all over the place?”

"The Kitchen is home, but I do branch out on occasion. Don't want to be accused of being stuck in a rut after all," he says with a laugh. He turns his head as the police cars finally begin to make their ways towards the local precient. The people down below actually begin to go about their lives again with little fan fare now that the fun and excitement seem to be over. "The people here are resilent. It can be amazing to see just how much they can deal with and still not miss a beat. It is inspiring."

“We had a rat in the basement once and we almost moved to Rockaway Beach. But I can see what you mean.”

Spidey watches the people below with a hint of admiration, though the impassive face of his mask makes it difficult to tell outright. He's silent for a moment before he speaks up again to talk shop.

“So, you ever thought of getting something to swing on? Makes getting around a lot easier than climbing a fire escape.”