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Police, Matt tells him, ain’t shit.
That being said, Matt has quite a rapport established with Detective Brett Mahoney of the fifteenth precinct.
Peter notices said rapport when he’s working with Matt in Hell’s Kitchen one particular night. It’s a lot less of a student/teacher relationship nowadays; Matt trusts Peter to watch his back as well as any of the other people they work with. The first time Matt had called Peter up to help out with something, not because he wanted to teach Peter, but because he’d needed Peter’s abilities, is something that will stick with Peter forever.
This time, some big supplier in the area has dealers pushing tainted heroin, so Matt called Peter to ask if he’d like to come along; sort of like the vigilante equivalent of going to the movies with friends. Peter’s starting to notice this pattern in the other vigilantes he’s friends with. If they go a while without seeing each other, they’ll inevitably send Peter a text, or call and ask if he’d like to help them with a job. He’s asked Matt and Wade for actual assistance, but he’s never asked them along just to hang out. He’ll probably have to start doing that soon.
Anyway, with the dealers and their supplier all nicely concussed and/or webbed up in their gross warehouse, Matt and Peter are perched on top of a couple of wooden crates that are probably full of the heroin and bleach powder mixture these guys had been selling as they wait for the cops to show up.
If Matt has time he likes to stand around menacingly and just out of reach while the cops clean up whatever criminal activity he’s just stopped. He’s been trying to teach Peter how to do the menacing thing, and it isn’t working out very well.
Peter just can’t get the growling down, and that’s a key element of the whole act.
So they’re on top of a stack of crates, Matt standing, Peter sitting with his feet dangling off the edge, when one of the warehouse doors slams open loudly.
Peter glances up at Matt and sees the Cheshire cat grin on his face; before he can ask what has Matt so happy, he sees for himself.
“Oh hell, course it’d be you,” a man says, lowering his flashlight and holstering his gun.
With the blinding light no longer in his face, Peter notes that the man looks vaguely familiar.
“Detective Mahoney,” Matt greets cheerfully, his smile dialed back to an obnoxious smirk. “It’s good to see you again. What brings you out of the precinct?”
Mahoney—the cop that helped him and Jessica with Prija.
“Well, it ain’t good to see you again; I’m only here ‘cause we’re shorthanded down at the precinct. Stomach flu.” Peter watches him give Matt a once over, “Heard you got the horns back, and they look as stupid as they did the last time,” Mahoney says. The words are needle-sharp, but Peter can tell that the guy is at least begrudgingly fond of Matt.
“Oh, this old thing?” Matt says, running his hand down the side of his suit in a manner that’s maybe just the tiniest bit suggestive. “It’s a temporary solution. My guy’s working on something new.”
Detective Mahoney must have noticed Peter, since he groans and drags his hand down his face. “Spider-Man,” he says.
Peter perks up and tilts his head a little. “Yeah?”
“Stop working with this idiot before you end up half dead in a dumpster with him.”
“Been there, done that,” Peter replies, waving him off. “Well, not the dumpster part, just the half dead part.”
Detective Mahoney gives Matt a very harsh look that Matt somehow manages to register. Maybe the guy’s blood pressure got higher or something. “And when was this?”
“Same night he drove me to Avengers Tower,” Peter answers. “I got blown up a little bit before, so he had to get me there fast.”
Detective Mahoney shakes his head. “You never learn how to drive, Daredevil? I swear Murdock would be better behind the wheel than you are.”
Peter chokes on his spit a little at the mention of Matt’s identity, and Matt seems to have tensed up just slightly for a second.
“You try driving and keeping the superhero in your passenger seat from bleeding out at the same time,” Matt shoots back, and Peter nods along in support of the story.
“My heart stopped and he had to do compressions while he was driving.”
Detective Mahoney looks horrified. “Don’t you dare get Spider-Man killed— get Castle shot to shit all you want, but leave Spidey out of your shit. He’s cooperative. We like him.”
Peter preens a little under the praise for just a second, but he feels like he should also be offended that the police like him. “Hey! I don’t want you guys to like me—you’re corrupt and the reason I put on the mask in the first place is because you people are too power hungry to actually serve and protect.”
Detective Mahoney seems a bit shocked by Peter’s outburst, and Matt is just looking down at him like a proud parent.
“Fine; the cops don’t like Spider-Man. I like Spider-Man. That okay?” Mahoney tries again.
Peter looks up to Matt, who smiles and nods. “Brett’s good. For a cop.”
“That’s Detective Mahoney to you, Daredevil. Can’t be on a first name basis with the bane of my existence.”
Matt just smiles down at him.
“What’re these guys here for?” Brett, apparently, asks sounding a bit defeated.
“Selling tainted heroin,” Matt answers. “Some of them are dealers, one guy is the supplier, and there are a few of his people too. Would’ve taken the time to sort them if I knew you were coming.”
Detective Mahoney rolls his eyes at Matt and pulls his radio off from where it’s been clipped to his belt. “I got a bunch of unconscious and tied up drug dealers in a warehouse on Pier 90. Looks like it might be a Daredevil bust, but if it was him, he’s long gone.”
“Thanks, Mahoney,” Matt says sincerely.
Some garbled speech comes back through the radio, but it’s nothing that Peter can make out. Especially not with the echoing in the big, empty space.
“They probably wouldn’t even arrest you if you walked into the precinct now,” Mahoney replies, waving Matt off. “Now, get outta here. Both of you. Go on, scram.”
“I’ll see you around, Mahoney,” Matt says, hopping down from the crates.
“I better not see you, or I’m arresting your ass,” Mahoney shoots back.
“Um, bye Detective,” Peter says awkwardly, giving Mahoney a little wave.
“Bye, Spider-Man,” he says, turning to face the other direction as Matt and Peter finally leave.
They head out after that, and Peter waits until they’re a good three blocks away before speaking up about what’s been burning at the front of his mind.
“I thought you didn’t like cops,” Peter says as they come to a stop on a rooftop.
“I don’t,” Matt answers. “I like Brett. He also just so happens to be a cop.”
Peter considers the response for a moment, before shaking his head. “Not a good enough answer.”
Matt sighs just like the drama queen he is. “Fine, I don’t like cops, but sometimes I need them. Brett happened to be the only cop I knew I could trust when pretty much the rest of the precinct was in Fisk’s pocket. It was out of necessity.”
That’s a much better answer.
“Well, how’d you know you could trust him?”
This time, Matt just shrugs. “He was Foggy’s childhood best frenemy. He called us up with a case when it was in Fisk’s worst interest. Stuff like that made me think I could trust him, and he proved that he could be trusted. Now he’s everyone’s cop.” Matt adds on the last bit in a slightly huffy tone, like someone saying they liked Nutella or manbuns before they were mainstream.
“Everyone’s cop?”
“Jessica uses him too. And Frank, sometimes. At least Luke had the decency to find his own cop,” Matt explains.
“So does everyone have a cop?”
“Generally, yeah.”
Those words work their way into Peter’s brain, and they don’t leave. He finds himself thinking about it all the time in the back of his mind, and occasionally at the front of his mind too. ‘Everyone has a cop’. It’s a staple of being a vigilante apparently, and yet somehow Peter just missed the memo.
But Matt did say generally, so there’s the possibility that not everyone has a cop. Well, there’s only one way to find out.
Police, Mr. Castle says, get in the way.
“Hey, Mr. Castle?” Peter asks the next time he finds himself hanging from a web at the same crime scene as the Punisher.
“Call me Frank when you’re in the suit. It’ll help your cover,” Mr.—Frank coaches as he goes around the room, collecting various weapons so that if any of the unconscious perps wake up it won’t be a problem. They certainly learned their lesson about that.
“Frank?” Peter asks instead.
“Yeah, Spidey?”
“Do you have a cop?”
Mr. Castle gives him a funny look. “Like someone I work for?”
“No no no—just like, y’know, Daredevil has Detective Mahoney…” Peter lets himself trail off as he sees the recognition spark in Frank’s face.
“Sorta, yeah. Had a Homeland Agent—transferred to the CIA. She’s in some warzone now. Calls me up sometimes when she gets a line on someone in the states I might be interested in. But for taking perps to now? If I don’t kill ‘em, sure, I use Mahoney,” Frank answers, as he ejects the magazine from the last gun. “Why you askin’?”
“No reason,” Peter answers just a bit too quickly
Police, Jessica Jones has told him, are too wrapped up in bureaucracy to see the truth.
A couple days later he runs into Jessica while he’s leaving the Tower. Both Matt and Frank’s words are still on the back burner of his mind, so he asks her the same question.
“Do you have a cop?”
Jessica, unlike Frank, immediately understands the question and shrugs. “Sometimes. I go through ‘em like most people go through tissues. I’m between cops at the moment, so I’m just borrowing Mahoney when I need one.”
Wonderful.
Police, Wade announces, should stay in their fuckin’ lane.
“Deadpool?” Peter asks when he finds himself in a not unsimilar scenario to the one he’d been in with Mr. Castle when he’d asked the other man his question.
“Yeah, kiddo?” Wade asks, spinning the cylinder of the obnoxious ivory and gold revolver the gang leader had been flashing around before the meeting was busted up.
“Do you have a cop?”
Wade aims the gun at the gangster’s head. “Elaborate.”
The gangster whimpers.
“Someone you take bad guys to,” Peter says, watching Wade closely.
Wade pulls the trigger.
Click.
“I mean, not really. If I need someone with a stick up their ass about the law, then I just go get Colossus out of his hot yoga studio.”
“Ah,” Peter replies, trying, and failing, not to picture Colossus doing hot yoga. The X-Men are an official organization, like the Avengers, so they fall under the category of law enforcement at least for the sake of this survey.
Wade spins the cylinder again, pulls the trigger.
Click.
Peter counts the bullets Wade dumped in his hand to make sure that there are six.
Police, Luke Cage tells him, are part of a corrupt organization. Danny Rand nodded in agreement from where he was sitting nearby eating pork lo mein from a carton.
Shortly after that, Peter gets caught up in some shit in Harlem. Peter Parker, that is. Not Spider-Man.
He was just enjoying the nice weather and looking at the city from the street, rather than ten stories up like he normally does. Of course, of course he just had to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but at least the Spidey-sense clued him in, so that he could get out of the way of the stray bullet from a drive by shooting. The bullet ends up in a brick wall two inches from Peter’s head, which is fine, since the intended target ends up with at least two bullets in him.
Peter wishes he could say he ran to help or even after the culprit, but no, instead he had a panic attack there in the middle of the street while the civilian bystanders took down plate numbers, and called an ambulance, and put pressure on the wounds. At least it was nowhere near as bad as the Fourth of July panic attack.
Thankfully, it seems like the man will be okay, but Peter ends up at the police station to have his statement taken anyway.
Sitting in the interrogation room, waiting for whoever it’ll be to come question him, Peter finds himself thinking of the one time he was arrested. This time he sends a text to Matt to let him know what is going on, but makes sure to stress the fact that he doesn’t need legal counsel present. Especially since Matt is nursing what may or may not be a torn ACL. He’s refusing to go to the hospital and get it checked out, much to Karen and Foggy’s chagrin.
After an indeterminate number of minutes, the door to the interrogation room swings open, and Peter finds himself looking at yet another vaguely familiar cop.
She’s wearing a nice sweater with the sleeves rolled up enough to show that she has a right arm reminiscent of Sergeant Barnes’ left.
“Hi, Peter,” she says with a gentle smile. “I’m Detective Knight. My guys tell me you were lookin’ pretty rough at the crime scene when they picked you up, huh?”
Peter feels more than a little embarrassed and can tell his cheeks are getting redder by the second. Having panic attacks is bad enough; why does he have to deal with the humiliation of other people seeing him like that?
“I don’t like guns,” is all he manages to say, and Detective Knight gives him a sympathetic look.
“I can imagine. Your uncle was the cop over in Queens last year, wasn’t he?”
Peter nods and closes his eyes tightly the minute he feels them start to sting.
He hears the sound of the chair legs scraping on concrete, as Detective Knight takes a seat across from him and forces himself to open his eyes and look at her. If he couldn’t be any help during the crime, he can at least try and be some help when it comes to solving it.
“Can you tell me what you saw today?” she asks softly, and she’s giving him such an understanding, sympathetic look that makes him think it would be much easier to just curl up in a ball and cry.
“Um, there was a car and it rolled up next to the sidewalk. I saw someone stick their arm out the window and shoot their gun… four times?” He’s unsure. “Two bullets hit the guy it seemed like he was aiming for, one hit the wall right next to me, and I don’t know about the rest. Then he drove off,” Peter says quietly.
“Could you describe the car for me?”
“Oh, sorry.” Idiot. Why didn’t he just describe it in the first place. “It was a dark green sedan—kinda old.”
“That’s good,” she says, scratching something down on the notepad with her bionic hand. “Did you see who was in the car?”
Peter shakes his head. “The windows were tinted. But when the guy stuck his arm out to shoot the other guy, he had a tattoo on his wrist. It was black, and it was like barbed wire wrapping around his arm. There was an eagle too.” It takes him a second to realize that he was definitely too far away to have made out any details of the tattoo had he been a normal person with normal vision. “At least I think that’s what it was—I was kinda far away.”
Detective Knight gives him a slightly skeptical look but writes that down as well. “Alright, thank you for being so helpful. Do you have someone you can call to pick you up?”
“My aunt,” Peter answers, and Detective Knight nods.
“You wanna come sit at my desk while you wait for her? It’s a lot nicer than this joint,” she offers, and Peter agrees.
Halfway between the interrogation room and Misty’s desk, Peter spots a familiar hulking shape in the precinct.
Detective Knight spots and, apparently, recognizes him too.
“Luke?” she asks. “What’re you doing here?”
Luke smiles at her and Peter alike.
“Hey, Misty. Just here to make sure Peter gets home safe,” Luke says, and Misty’s eyebrows raise up comically high on her forehead.
“You two know each other?”
Luke gives a vague shrug. “His lawyer asked me to make sure he got home safe.”
“His lawyer?” Detective Knight says, crossing her arms over her chest and cocking her hip slightly.
“Murdock,” Luke says, and that must be enough of an explanation because Detective Knight just sighs and nods.
“Alright, make sure he’s safe. And don’t cause any trouble.”
“I won’t. Thanks, Misty.”
“See you around, Luke.”
Peter walks out of the precinct alongside Luke, and wonders if this is going to be yet another person who knows about his newest shortcoming as a hero. Luke doesn’t mention anything, so Peter assumes his anxiety attacks are still a secret.
“So,” he says quietly, looking up at Luke, “you know Detective Knight?”
Luke nods. “Yeah—we go way back. She’s helped me a lot, well, I guess I’ve helped her. She’s the official law enforcer. You met her at the warehouse that one time.”
“So she’s your cop,” Peter says under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing— I’m just gonna take the subway home. You can go back to whatever it was you were doing. I told Matt it wasn’t a big deal—I don’t know why he sent you to babysit,” Peter says. He’s trying to sound more adult, but it ends up just making him sound more childish.
“Yeah, but you told him. And you know how he feels about cops,” Luke says, and Peter sighs.
“Yeah, I guess. Thanks for coming though…”
“Anytime, Peter. You sure you’re good to get home safe?”
The concern in Luke’s voice grates a little bit. Peter’s felt vulnerable enough already today; he doesn’t need to be treated like he actually is vulnerable.
“I’m sure.”
Peter gets home, but no sooner than he’s walking through the door is he suiting up. There’s going to be plenty of crime to stop, even in broad daylight, and he has a cop to find. Surely it can’t be too hard to find a cop willing to work with their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
The first crime he stops is a purse snatching, but once he gets the purse back to its rightful owner, calling the cops on the guy who took it seems excessive. He hadn’t done anything violent, and there’s always the possibility that the police will do something violent. Thankfully (or not, depending on how you look at it) enough, it doesn’t take him much longer to come across a violent crime—a mugging.
This guy actually pulled a knife on the civilian, so Peter isn’t willing to cut him any slack when it comes to calling the cops. With the victim successfully comforted and the perp successfully webbed to a streetlight, there’s really no reason for Peter to stick around and wait for the cops- apart from the fact that he needs to find the Commissioner Gordon to his Batman.
Matt, Luke, and Jessica all use detectives, but Peter would be just fine settling for a beat cop. No need for anyone too high up the food chain, but he also doesn’t want anyone green and eager enough to try arresting Spider-Man as a means of securing a promotion.
Peter’s sitting on top of the streetlight swinging his legs when the cops do finally show up. He’s been perched there for a while, and occasionally people passing by have shouted and hello up at him or taken a picture, but for the most part he’s just gotten glances. This is New York after all; superheroes are getting to the point of being almost commonplace.
“Hey officers!” Peter calls down, waving as the two officers climb out of their squad car.
“Hey,” one of them says a little awkwardly. “Mind telling us what’s going on here?”
“Citizen’s arrest,” Peter replies cheerfully. “One mugger, neatly wrapped up just for you, Officer… Harrison.” It takes a second for his eyes to focus on the name on the cop’s chest.
“Thanks…” There’s still a healthy dose of skepticism in the guy’s voice, and Peter sighs.
He doesn’t really feel like working with someone who seems so hesitant about his intentions.
“Welcome,” Peter says before swinging off.
Maybe the next cop will be more receptive.
Spoiler alert: they aren’t. After four more tries he heads home.
Part of him wants to text Matt or Luke and ask for advice on getting cops to trust him, but he doesn’t want either of them to think that he’s been working this long without already having someone he dumps his bad guys on.
He’s sitting in bed, trying to think up ways to get the cops to trust him, when an idea comes to him, courtesy of the cat rumbling contentedly on his chest. Despite the doctors’ best efforts, Angela Trenton wasn’t able to pull through, so Peter had nobody to return the cat to. May hasn’t brought up taking it to a shelter, so it seems like it’ll just be a new addition to the family. He still hasn’t gotten around to naming it though.
The idea sparked by the cat is a simple one though; build trust by bringing criminals to the same cop over and over, like how a cat brings dead animals to its owner. Yeah, technically cats bring their owners dead things because they think the owner is too stupid and inept to hunt for itself and they don’t want it to starve, but is that really so different from what Spider-Man does for the police?
So that’s the plan. Find a cop, bring them criminals.
That still doesn’t solve the issue of needing to find a cop in the first place though.
Peter sighs with a great enough volume of air that the cat feels the need to relocate to his feet.
The next day, Peter finds himself facing a similar problem as the one the day before: every cop seems a bit hesitant to talk to him. Sure, it’s better than them trying to arrest him like they do Daredevil, but it’s nowhere near the sort of warm welcome that heroes like Iron Man and Captain America get.
Criminal after criminal, cop after cop, Peter finds himself slowly losing hope that he’ll ever find his Commissioner Gordon.
It’s a bit past three PM, and he’s been out since nine AM, so rather than perching anywhere elaborate Peter just plunks himself down on the curb right beside the tightly webbed up armed robber. The guy’s gun is on the other side of Peter, and he’s webbed up tighter than Frodo was in The Two Towers. He’s even given up on fighting against the restraints and simply accepted his fate to be arrested.
A squad car pulls up just a few feet away from them, and Peter looks up once he hears the doors open.
“Afternoon, officers,” he greets with a half-hearted wave. “He tried to rob the bodega on the corner. Gun’s right there; I’d hand it to you, but I don’t want you to feel threatened.”
The female officer smiles at him and steps close enough to lean down and pick up the gun while her partner gets the criminal into the back of the car. “Thanks, Spider-Man,” she says before holding out her free hand.
It takes Peter a hot second to realize she’s offering the hand to help him up off the ground. He takes it and gets to his feet, offering a smile of his own that she definitely can’t see through the mask.
“Thank you, Officer Bridges,” he says, reading her name off of her uniform.
“You’re very welcome. I hope I’ll see you around,” she says before walking over to her partner to discuss something Peter doesn’t bother listening in on.
He’s found one.
Police, Mr. Stark tells him, are to be cooperated with. Cops are more often than not the good guys, and causing a fuss with them won’t lead to anything good.
Now that he finally has a potential cop, he needs to lay out a plan for turning this one friendly cop into someone he can rely on. That starts with a thorough vetting to make sure she isn’t dirty, and the best place to do that is Avengers Tower.
Peter’s gotten a new burst of energy from his finally successful venture, so rather than going home and take a nap like he wanted to just twenty minutes before, he heads home to change into civilian clothes and then into the city.
An hour later, Peter has a nice set up in one of the many nooks of the lab. He’s sitting in a comfy rolling chair with his a holograph display in front of him, as well as a massive soda that he’d picked up during his commute in his hand. He’s reading through every one of Officer Camila Bridges’ cases on one holographic display, while another has Friday scanning through every one of her social media pages looking for something possibly incriminating.
Peter’s eyes are starting to get a bit dry from the lack of blinking, and it’s definitely gotten dark outside by the time he hears someone clearing their throat behind him.
“Uh, hey, bud. Who ya stalking?” Tony asks, casting a bit of a nervous glance at the displays.
“No one!” Peter says, immediately sitting bolt upright and doing his best to hide the screens from view with his upper body.
“You sure about that?” Tony asks, and Peter sighs.
“I’m looking for a cop,” he says under his breath.
“What?”
“A cop. All the other vigilantes have someone in law enforcement that they can dump their big bad guys off on—someone they know they can trust even when there’s corruption in the system. I don’t have anyone like that,” Peter explains.
“And this Officer… Bridges? You think she could be your—what, your Commissioner Gordon?”
“Exactly!” Finally! Mr. Stark gets it! “She’s the only one who doesn’t seem hesitant to work with me, and it looks like she’s clean! She’s been on the force for a few years and IA has never investigated her, she doesn’t have any complaints against her, and the worst thing I can find on her is that she made a Facebook status update from a legal dispensary in Canada a couple months ago!”
“Well,” Tony says in a tone that has Peter bracing himself for a rant, “I am happy to see you working alongside law enforcement.”
“Wait—really?”
“Really,” Tony says. “Why don’t you head home? I’ll run a deeper background check on her, and if she really is clean then I’ll get Friday to send her patrol schedule to you, alright?”
“I—yeah, that sounds great. Thank you so much, Mr. Stark!”
“Anytime, kid,” Tony replies with a smile.
Before he leaves the Tower, Peter stops by the kitchen to steal some soda for his journey home. He finds Sergeant Barnes, Ms. Romanov, and Captain Rogers all hunched over a holographic map and chattering away in Russian. He wasn’t aware that Captain Rogers speaks Russian.
He decides to ask them their opinion on cops, just for the hell of it. Clearly none of them are going to have cops considering they are, technically, law enforcement.
Police, Natasha tells him, can be valuable assets, but are not to be trusted.
Police, Sergeant Barnes tells him, are shit. Peter thinks it’s interesting that at least, in this context, ‘are shit’ and ‘ain’t shit’ mean the same thing.
Police, Captain Rogers corrects, are a dilemma; without them there would be massive potential for crime and chaos, with them there is a dangerous potential for the death of people who don’t deserve it. Sergeant Barnes says that’s a politically correct way of saying that police are shit.
They go back to their Russian conversation, and Peter pretends he doesn’t hear it for the sake of national security.
The next morning, Peter finds a link to a document containing Officer Bridges’ patrol schedule in his email.
Stage one: mild stalking, is complete.
Stage two: build trust.
Now that Peter has the officer’s patrol schedule, he has a set route that he can find her on. He doesn’t want to be overbearing and bring her too many criminals too often, so he decides a good figure is to bring her one every other shift or so. She isn’t patrolling super bad areas, so it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be an overabundance of bad guys to bring to her.
Her schedule consists mostly of daytime shifts, and she just happens to be working that day, so Peter suits up and heads out to stop crime along her route.
It takes a couple of hours, but eventually he stops a bicycle theft. Again, this guy didn’t cause any harm, so Peter doesn’t take him to Officer Bridges; he takes the bike to her. And if the most efficient method of getting the bike to her is to ride it along her patrol route, then that’s just that. And he may or may not have to lower the seat slightly in order to be able to reach the pedals.
After twenty minutes of riding around, he spots the squad car that he knows Officer Bridges drives- thanks to his mild/extremely in depth stalking and rides up beside it, ringing the rubber duck print bell on the handlebars to get her attention.
It seems to work, and the police car rolls down the window.
“Hey again, Spider-Man,” she says with a smile. “Can I help you?”
“Uh, yeah. This bike was stolen and I don’t know what to do with it since the owner wasn’t there, and the last time I just left a rescued bike it got stolen again so—” Peter stops talking when he feels the spidey-sense trip out and lets out a very heroic squeak as he just barely manages to avoid a massive pothole.
He’s insanely glad that Officer Bridges can’t see that under the mask he’s just as red as it is.
“If it fits in the back of the car I can take it back to the precinct and see if anyone reports it stolen,” she offers, rolling to a stop where there aren’t any cars. “Where’d you find it?”
“Across from Delmar’s,” Peter says as he gets off the bike.
“Alright,” she replies, getting out of the car and opening up the back door. “Think it’ll fit?”
“Totally!” Peter says, because how awkward would it be if it doesn’t?
A bit of shoving and some maybe slightly bent handlebars later, the bike is successfully jammed into the back of the police car.
Officer Bridges leaves with a wave as well as an extremely confused and amused partner.
The next time Peter sets out to bring Officer Bridges a bad guy, it’s a mugger. She comments on what a coincidence it is that they keep seeing each other.
The time after that, it’s another armed robber.
Then it’s a man who followed a teenage girl into an alley. Peter wants to get the girl away from her would-be attacker, but the way the guy is wheezing makes Peter not want to leave him alone either. He ends up using the girl’s phone to call the police, who dispatch Officer Bridges’ car since it’s closest. When she and her partner, a man by the name of Officer Hall, pull up, they radio for an ambulance for the man after getting the girl into the car. Officer Bridges notes the escalating severity of the criminals he brings to her.
After two weeks of dedicated criminal fetching for Officer Bridges, it all comes to a head when a man shoots someone dead. The cops are out in droves searching for the man considered to be armed and highly dangerous, and Peter is out looking as well. He may not like cops, but he’d rather himself get shot instead of one of them if it comes to it. His suit is somewhat bulletproof, and even if a bullet does manage to get through, he’s a lot better at bouncing back from severe injuries than a standard-model human.
He doesn’t even know if Officer Bridges is on duty or not, and he doesn’t even really think about it. Being able to swing around gives him the advantage of covering a greater area more quickly, as well as lending him to an angle nobody else can see from. He assumes this is why he spots the man crouching behind a dumpster before the officer heading down the alleyway does.
Peter can see the man with his gun aimed at the officer’s head, and shoots a web at the gun the second that he’s in range, yanking the gun away just as the man pulls the trigger so he doesn’t make the head shot he was aiming for.
Peter has the guy out cold with a punch a second later and does a quick job of webbing him up before running for the police officer.
“Spider-Man?” she says, and Peter finally recognizes who it is in the dark.
“Officer Bridges? Are you alright?” he asks a little frantically, coming to her side to offer whatever help he can.
She has one hand pressed firmly to her shoulder, and Peter can see the blood covering her palm.
“I’ll be fine.” She seems to steel herself for just a moment before picking the radio up off her belt with her free hand. “This is Officer Bridges, suspect apprehended by Spider-Man in the alley off of 35th near 48th. I’ve been shot, requesting paramedics on scene.”
After she stops talking to the radio, she bites out a harsh “Fuck,” and presses her hand to the wound even harder.
“What’s wrong?” Peter asks nervously, hovering by her side in case she needs some sort of help that he can offer.
“It burns,” she says through gritted teeth and eyes squeezed shut tightly.
“Help is on the way,” he says, and Jesus, if that isn’t lame reassurance, he doesn’t know what is.
She lets out a slightly forced laugh. “Here I am, complaining about this- I’m sure you’ve had worse.”
“I don’t know about that; I’ve never been shot before,” Peter replies honestly.
“Mind telling me what you have been? It’ll get my mind off the pain.”
“Um, I got a building dropped on me one time—that was more scary than painful, though. I did get exploded once. That was the time when Daredevil drove me to Avengers Tower—that one hurt so bad.”
She smiles a little at the mention of Daredevil driving. “Mind telling Daredevil he’s a horrible driver for me the next time you see him?”
“Trust me; he knows.”
Finally, flashing lights accompanied by voices start filtering into the alley, and Peter starts gently guiding Officer Bridges toward where the ambulance is going to be on the street. A quick glance over his shoulder shows that the man is no longer unconscious, but he isn’t going to be able to escape his webby prison before the other cops get to him.
“He’s beside the dumpster—gun’s stuck to the wall,” Peter says to the first officer he sees before continuing to walk alongside Officer Bridges to where the ambulance has just pulled up.
As she’s being loaded into it, and Peter is pacing nervously nearby, she smiles at him.
“Thanks, Spider-Man,” she says.
“For what? You still got shot.”
“For keeping me from getting killed. For bringing me bad guys. For the fireworks—take your pick,” she replies.
Wait, what?
“Fireworks?” Peter says, and she smiles a little brighter.
“Yeah! On the Fourth of July? You brought me like ten bags of ‘em. Everyone back at the precinct loved that.”
So that’s why she was so friendly with him the first time she picked up one of his bad guys.
“Oh, um, you’re welcome, I guess. I hope you get better fast!”
“I’ll try my best. Try not to get ‘exploded’ again,” she replies.
“I’ll try my best not to!”
Peter sticks around until the ambulance drives off, and when he leaves it’s with a smile on his face. Sure, he could get worked up about not getting to the guy before he shot anyone, but he did keep his cop from being shot dead. And that’s what Officer Bridges is now: his cop.