Hell's Kitchen breathed like a living thing—hot dog steam and taxi exhaust, the metallic rattle of a subway underfoot, pigeons holding city council on the awning across the street. Vendors sang their menus as if hunger answered to melody. A retired longshoreman in a Yankees cap heckled traffic for the crime of existing. Two dogs on opposite leashes decided that ancient grudges needed revisiting and had a full-throated exchange of opinions about it.
I leaned against my beat-to-hell sedan and let New York do its chorus. The paint on the hood had given up the fight with the sun; the roof wore its dents like old medals. The car smelled like old coffee and the ghost of someone's road trip. It fit the block; it fit me.
Alpha-01 stood beside me, six feet of posture and quiet geometry. He blended and didn't—civilian clothes couldn't hide a body that moved like it had read the manual on force and then annotated it. He never slouched, never fidgeted, never looked tired. He planted his weight fractionally more on his left heel than his right—the little tell I kept noticing—and tracked the street the way a radar dish listens to weather. People clocked him without meaning to. Heads tilted. A man two storefronts down did an instinctive pocket pat, as if he were checking whether an outstanding warrant had suddenly materialized.
"Relax, soldier," I said under my breath, still watching the crowd. "You're stressing out civilians. See that guy? He just remembered three unpaid parking tickets and a youthful indiscretion."
"I am monitoring," Alpha said, serene as a metronome.
"One day you'll understand sarcasm," I promised. "And I'll weep a single beautiful tear."
The fan noise of the city swelled, then parted. A figure down the sidewalk popped into frame like a character walking out of a splash page: a hoodie, a backpack, a silver shoulder bag, sneakers that had negotiated a treaty with their own laces. The haircut was self-inflicted or aunt-inflicted, the gait ninety percent long-limbed uncertainty and ten percent curiosity, trying to learn a rhythm it hadn't earned yet. The eyes did the rest—hungry, bright, taking a snapshot of everything because everything was interesting.
My pulse did the thing that comes before swearing.
Oh. No way.
Peter Parker. Not Spider-Man yet—too young for world-class banter, too unscarred for the weight that was coming. Fourteen, maybe. This put Uncle Ben on the right side of a calendar and Aunt May free of a particular grief, which made the kid right there just that: a kid. A Queens kid, out of his borough on a bright day in Hell's Kitchen, a handful of train stops and exactly one great power/great responsibility speech away from history.
"Well, would you look at that," I murmured. The HUD in my head didn't light up with fireworks; it just pulsed, like a heartbeat. "Talk about a named character walking out of a wiki."
Alpha-01 angled his head a degree. "The boy?"
"Peter Parker," I said softly. "Remember the name."
Alpha didn't nod. He didn't have to. His attention sharpened; the air around him changed a shade.
Two men, separated from the flow of pedestrians, stood a dozen yards behind Peter. Their clothing wanted to be work jackets and landed somewhere around plausible. Their eyes fixed and refixed on the backpack strap like it owed them money. They studied the way you study a doorknob you plan to own. Subtle, sure—until you knew what to watch for.
The teasing edge went away. I didn't raise my voice. "Alpha," I said, level enough to write with. "Behind the kid. Gentle. No broken bones, no headlines."
"Copy," he said, and vanished.
It wasn't speed so much as economy: he slipped into the crowd the way a knife slides between layers of fabric without snagging. Peter's attention was on a street artist chalking a dragon onto concrete. The first man's hand started to close on the backpack strap with the confidence of a habit.
Alpha's hand closed on the wrist first.
He redirected instead of resisting—palm-over-thumb, drop the elbow, roll the shoulder—spinning the man into the brick with precisely enough force to knock air out, not consciousness. The second man swore and swung a fist. Alpha met it at the wrist, rotated, and folded the elbow until the knees obeyed gravity and pride remembered physics—ten seconds from decision to pavement. No drama. No pain theater. Just a neat lesson in applied mechanics and the difference between violence and control.
It would have been a clean, forgettable intervention if this were a world without cameras. It wasn't. Three phones came out within the first two seconds—one sideways, one vertical, one with the kind of cracked protector that adds texture to footage—and caught the end of a moment the internet likes to chew.
Peter stumbled backward, then forward—indecision lit up in neon—and clutched his backpack like it contained the cure to embarrassment. He gaped at Alpha with the honest reverence of a kid who just watched a magic trick up close and couldn't find the trapdoor.
Ding.
Assistance: Peter Parker (+500)
Collateral Avoided: +2
Ethical Multiplier: +1 (force minimal, bystanders unharmed)
Attention (Local): +0.2
Five hundred points. A celebrity curve jackpot. The number flashed and meant less than the way my stomach went cold and hot in the same breath. I pushed off the car and crossed the distance, smiling with my face and serious with everything else.
"You good, kid?" I asked, crouching low enough to be at eye level, so I didn't feel like a threat with my shoulders.
He blinked hard, still watching Alpha pin two grown men with the indifference of a footnote. " I-I think so," he said. "He just—wow."
"Yeah." I kept the grin small. "He does that."
"Who is he?" Peter's words tumbled, trying to pass each other. "That was—he moved so fast I didn't—was that like krav maga? Or aikido? No, not aikido, the leverage looked different—wait, how did he—he didn't even look—did he like, see that coming?"
"Breathe," I advised, hands up in mock surrender. "Your aunt will be distraught if you pass out mid-sentence."
"Aunt May?" he said reflexively, which told me more about the household than any census could. "Sorry. It's just—he's amazing. Is he—like, is he Army? Or S.H.I.E.L.D.? Or—" He cut himself off because the man on the ground had tried a repeat of the bad idea, and Alpha increased the unpleasantness by five percent with a twitch.
"Not Army, not S.H.I.E.L.D.," I said. "He's Alpha-01. He works with me."
"You… own him?" Peter blurted, then went scarlet so fast it was almost talent. "No, I mean, I didn't—like a person—I meant—"
"Partner," I said, cutting him off gently, because embarrassment is a heavy backpack, and he didn't need more weight today. "Bodyguard, when I let him. He takes orders from me, and I take responsibility for him. He's his own man."
Peter's shoulders dropped a centimeter. His eyes tracked back to Alpha and took him in like data, not spectacle. The curiosity was already there—the one that would become a passion if a spider ever got ambitious. You didn't need spider-sense to have a brain that never stopped asking how.
"Where do you—" he started, then adjusted mid-air like a gymnast who refused to fall. "Did you train him? Are there others? Is this like a Spartan-II thing?" His voice took on a little lift on the last word, as if to say yes, he had indeed spent time on the internet, and yes, the word Spartan sounded like a myth made modern.
"Alpha's one of a kind," I said, which was true for every meaningful definition of one of a kind. "Prototype. Don't tell him I said that; he'll get cocky and start tapping knives into alignment with salt shakers."
Peter blinked. "He does that?"
"Three times so far," I said. "He thinks I don't notice."
"Does he… talk?"
"Sometimes," I said. "He saves words for when they matter. Which is rude, because I need someone to laugh at my jokes."
Peter risked a look up at Alpha. "You're awesome," he said, awkward in precisely the way that word deserved to be when it was true.
Alpha didn't blink. "You are unharmed," he said, which for him was practically a sonnet.
The men on the sidewalk shifted from bristling to inventorying their decisions. Being caught on camera committing a crime changes the math. Alpha let go first—an act of generosity that felt like a demonstration—and stepped back just enough to say you could try again, but why? They looked at our hands, at the phones, at each other, and chose to limp toward the corner with more dignity than they'd brought in. No speeches. No threats. Just the undertow of a larger organization's menu of consequences somewhere behind their eyes. Wilson Fisk's shadow didn't need to be named to be present.
"You want the police?" I asked Peter, because agency is a muscle kids need to see grown-ups respect.
He hesitated, honest. "I… should, right?" He glanced at where the men had been, then back at the crowd already swallowing them. "But I'm okay. And I—my aunt's waiting. And the last time I called, we waited forever. I don't want to get anyone in trouble if I don't have to."
"Then we don't," I said. "Today, we write it in chalk, not stone. If you change your mind, you can file an online report at a later time. Describe it, time, and place. That helps the next person."
He nodded, relief loosening his chest. Then—because it was Peter Parker under that hoodie—he launched back into questions like curiosity were oxygen and he'd been holding his breath. "What does he eat? Does he sleep? How fast can he run the hundred? Is the—uh—Spartan thing—does it mean like bone density changes? Does he wear armor? Not now—obviously not now—but—like—does he have a helmet? With HUD? Are you guys—are you with the Avengers?"
"Steel bolts and jet fuel," I said solemnly. "He naps when my jokes bore him. The hundred is classified, but if you blink, you'll miss the first half. The rest of those questions I'll answer in a peer-reviewed paper."
Peter exhaled a laugh that was half squeak. "Peer-reviewed. Right."
"You like science," I observed, because sometimes stating the obvious earns you trust.
His ears went pink. "I—yeah. It's—I mean—yeah. A lot."
"Good," I said simply. "Keep doing that."
His eyes flicked to my car, to my shoes, to my posture. He was learning things he didn't know he was learning—risk assessment that would one day save strangers on rooftops. He squinted. "Are you a hero?"
"Dangerous question," I said lightly. The system hummed in my head; the review I gave myself last night—don't farm people as points, don't flatten them into loot—flashed like a sign. "Today I am a guy with a car and rent to pay who got lucky enough to be standing in the right place."
"Luck," he repeated, tasting it like a hypothesis.
"Luck and lines," I said. "We make rules for ourselves so we don't become problems to solve."
He nodded like he'd tuck that in a pocket and find it again at three in the morning. "I'm Peter," he said then, suddenly shy like the realization had crashed late. "Uh—Peter Parker."
"Shane," I said, giving him the name the building knew. "And this is Alpha-01."
"Alpha-01 is such a cool name," he said, reverent. "Is there an Alpha-02?"
"Not yet," I said, which was true and also not the point. "Quality before quantity."
He opened his mouth—how do you make more?—and closed it because his phone buzzed angrily in his pocket. He fished it out, glanced at the screen, and executed the universal teenage uh-oh face. "I… should go. My aunt will—uh—she'll worry."
"Do not anger Aunt May," I intoned. "This is known."
He snorted. "Right."
"Walk two blocks that way and cross at the light," I added, because mentoring sometimes looks like mundane instructions. "Less traffic. Fewer cameras. And tighten your backpack strap. It's easier to grab when it's loose."
He obeyed without question, cinched the strap, then looked up again. "Thank you," he said, this time to Alpha too. "For… you know."
Alpha gave him a curt nod that managed to convey 'you're welcome' and 'be smarter next time' without moving any additional muscles.
"Anytime, kid," I said. "If you run into trouble again… maybe we'll be around."
He lifted a hand in a half-wave and disappeared into the flow, one ordinary boy in a city that turned ordinary into legends if you stayed alive long enough. I watched him until my brain unclenched.
"Not a bad morning walk," I said to Alpha. "One rescue, two bruised egos, five hundred points I intend not to build a personality around."
"Understood," Alpha said.
"You say that like a period," I told him. "One day we'll get you to an exclamation point."
He didn't smile. He did adjust the lay of his T-shirt so it fell dead even—micro-trait—and the corner of my mouth obliged me by being fond.
The system chimed again, less celebratory.
Advisory:S.H.I.E.L.D. correlation +0.05 (incidental).
Advisory:Local Org correlation +0.1 (incidental).
Note: Bystander footage uploaded (3). Visibility low, potential spread moderate.
"Phones," I said, sighing. "They're like eager archivists with ADD."
"Mitigation?" Alpha asked.
"We don't chase ghosts," I said. "We don't go hunting uploads. We vary patterns and buy you a hoodie so people stop thinking I stole you from a recruitment poster."
He glanced at his shoulders, then at the crowd. "A hoodie."
"Disguise 101," I said. "Less statue, more college kid who discovered laundry last week."
We stopped at a thrift store five doors down, which smelled like dust and new stories. Alpha chose a slate hoodie with a zipper and no logo. He tugged it on and stood there for half a second, like a war memorial trying on casual clothes, then pulled the hood up and tightened the drawstrings until the edge matched the line of his eyebrows. He aligned the zipper pull with the center seam, then tapped the drawstrings twice. It was ridiculous how much that helped: the silhouette softened, and the soldier turned into someone's tall friend, minding his business. The micro-traits didn't go away. They just had to work harder to be seen.
We stepped back into the morning. The city had already eaten our scene; you could barely tell anything had happened. The dogs had submitted their motions and moved on. The longshoreman had downgraded to muttering. A Daily Bugle box on the corner declared OPINION: "MASKS MAKE MESS, COPS CLEAN IT"—a headline that would age like milk; J. Jonah Jameson hadn't met his favorite obsession yet.
A coffee cart whispered to my better angels. I bought two cups and burned my tongue on the first sip because that is how you learn humility at 11 a.m. Alpha held his cup like a prop; I didn't bother him about it. You don't teach a man to appreciate diner coffee by force.
We took a short circuit, keeping to Tenth Avenue because Mae had said Eleventh had sirens, and Mae had the kind of face you believe when she talks about sirens. Hell's Kitchen moved through lunch with intent. A construction foreman cursed in fluent architecture. A woman in scrubs held a sandwich, the last good thing that would happen to her during the shift. Two kids skateboarded badly and found joy anyway. The block wrote itself into us.
"Intervention cost?" Alpha asked after two intersections of silence that wasn't.
"Heat plus a hair," I said. "S.H.I.E.L.D.'s big board knows a weirdo with a tall friend existed for ten minutes. Fisk's errand boys will tell someone their day had a wrinkle. The internet has three wobbly videos titled 'Dude yeets mugger (Hell's Kitchen)' and comments debating technique like a football forum." I took another sip and accepted the consequences. "We stick to invisible good ninety percent of the time. Save the public stuff for when it helps more than it hurts."
"Understood," he said. Then, after half a second—his version of a risk: "The boy recognized potential leverage."
"Peter?" I smiled despite myself. "He recognized the. It's glued to his brain. He'll either be a world-class scientist or a menace to bagels."
"A menace to—"
"Never mind," I said. "Point is, we don't farm him. We don't shadow him for points. We don't become the reason Uncle Ben gets somewhere late."
Alpha angled his head. He didn't ask why I said the name like a prayer.
We swung by Patel's bodega—not to go in, just to feel the temperature of the air—and kept walking because patterns are how intelligent predators eat. A patrol car rolled past at parade speed, the kind that says we exist, behave. The officers inside did the universal cop glance—one pass, one check, one mental note—and continued. I let them. There's a specific kind of relief in being nobody.
Back at the car, a parking enforcement officer blessed our windshield with a yellow rectangle that declared ALTERNATE SIDE had won again. I held the ticket up between two fingers. "We are being initiated into the mysteries of civic life."
"We will pay it," Alpha said, because he had learned my lines and respected them.
"We will," I said. "Because we pick our battles, and keeping the streets from smelling like a lost cause is not one of them."
The HUD hummed, pleased with me like a smug app.
Financial Penalty: −1
Compliance (Civic): +1 (multiplier retention)
I slid the ticket into the glove box and closed it on an avalanche of paper that wasn't mine and would become mine if I didn't develop a relationship with a file folder soon.
A few blocks later—because New York enjoys comedic timing—a delivery bike clipped my coffee and baptized my hoodie in caffeine. The biker yelled "SORRYBRO" without braking. I looked down at my shirt and decided embarrassment might be my new cologne. Alpha took two napkins from a street cart like a magician and handed them to me without comment. Micro-trait: he folded the used napkins into neat squares before we found a trash can. I decided that made him a gentleman and not a robot.
We sat on a stoop with steps that had considered hosting a million conversations and settled for ours. I pulled a crumpled pizza flyer out of my pocket and wrote LINES on the back of it, because repetition is how you make rules more than wishes.
We do not escalate when a flex will do.
We do not make messes that we expect other people to clean.
We do not turn people into point drops.
We do not show up where cameras want us; we show up where people need us.
We pick our battles, and sometimes the struggle is a parking ticket or a hoodie.
Alpha read them and repeated them back, as if committing them to a place deeper than memory. When he hit number three, his voice snagged by half a note. Good. Let it catch.
"Add number six," I said, because the system would keep handing me buttons, and I needed them labeled before my fingers got itchy. "We protect the timeline only insofar as it protects people. We don't worship canon. We worship outcomes."
"Understood," he said, and this time the word sounded like agreement, not compliance.
The Points tab hovered at 630—Patel, stroller, parking, and a named kid with a future that would chew glass and laugh. It was the kind of number that wants to be a drug. I let it be a gauge instead. Progression fantasy loves to make you think the scoreboard is the story. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the story is always about the people.
The afternoon tilting toward gold turned the city soft around the edges. We took Carmen's casserole dish back and earned two cookies and a "Don't be strangers," which in this building translated to you're in the network now. We bought a small bag of hinges and a handful of wood screws because repairs and kindness run on the same hardware. We found a flyer for a Legal Aid Clinic—open on Wednesday evenings, with a suggested donation—and I made a silent appointment for a room that sometimes had a man with a cane and a good smile.
On the way back to the car, a kid on a skateboard failed an ollie and popped up laughing. Alpha watched as if gravity had told a joke. He didn't know it yet, but he was going to learn to smile in this city. You can't help it. It wears you down with small mercies.
At the curb, I paused. Crowds broke and reformed; the city shuffled its cards. A teenage boy in a hoodie disappeared into it, carrying a backpack and a set of questions that would turn into equations or webs depending on which way the wind blew and which spiders felt like being godmothers.
"System," I said, not because I needed points translated but because I needed a stake in the ground. "Log: We helped a kid for the kid's sake."
The HUD obliged, cool and plain.
Log: Assistance rendered: Peter Parker (Minor). Intent recorded: altruistic.
Note: Future correlation possible. Maintain ethical posture.
"Maintain ethical posture," I repeated. "What are we, a yoga class?"
Sometimes.
I laughed—quiet, the kind that shakes out a ragged thread in your chest. "Fine. Downward dog of not being a jerk. I can live with that."
Alpha's hood shadowed his eyes. "The boy will be a target," he said, not a question, not prophecy, just a soldier looking at a kid and seeing the line of a future fight.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe he'll just be a kid with a brilliant mind and terrible luck with internships. Either way, if we're near when he needs us, we help. If not, we don't make ourselves the center of his story."
"Understood."
"And if Phil Coulson knocks and asks about a 'tall friend with quick hands' who did something tidy on Tenth Avenue?"
"I will say we are available for consultation," Alpha said, absolutely deadpan.
I stared. Then I grinned slowly," Was that—did you just—"
He looked at me from inside the hood, expression unchanged. "Consultation is an appropriate term."
"Alpha," I said, touched like an idiot, "that was almost a joke."
"Understood," he said, just this side of innocent.
We climbed into the sedan. The engine considered its options and chose to be optimistic. I checked the mirror and watched Hell's Kitchen recede in the glass.
"Back to the apartment," I said. "We owe a bodega a real camera, and I owe my tongue an apology for that coffee."
Alpha nodded. He aligned his cup with the edge of the holder, then tapped it twice.
Outside, the city continued to care little about who I was. Tony Stark did something with a model of a tower on the other side of town and called it progress. Nick Fury looked at a board where names were magnets and moved one an inch just to see if it changed the weather. Wilson Fisk signed a contract and thought about art. A man with a cane listened to the heartbeat of a block and smiled because someone had told it a new joke.
Me? I drove a car with a ticket in the glove box and a Spartan in a hoodie and promised myself—again—that I would not make the mistake this world begged me to make: confusing a scoreboard with a soul.
Peter Parker had looked at Alpha and seen a possibility. That was fair. He'd looked at me and asked, Are you a hero? That was dangerous.
Today, the answer was simple: we were neighbor kids with good timing and better rules. Tomorrow, the fight would be larger, the stakes meaner, the camera angles tighter. Avengers clouds were building on the horizon. Aliens would audition gravity. Gods would land. The Daily Bugle would discover a new favorite grammatical construction: MENACE.
Before all that, a kid had kept his backpack, a store owner would get a working camera, a playground ladder would be bolted tight, and a building would learn it could knock on our door.
That's what winning looked like today. Not fireworks—screws. Not epics—errands. Not destiny—discipline.
The system purred like an appliance doing its job. Points: 630. Heat: tolerable. Ethical multiplier: intact.
"Tomorrow," I said out loud to the dashboard, "we buy a fridge that doesn't declare war on milk."
Alpha considered this new mission parameter. "And more hoodies."
"And more hoodies," I agreed.
We drove east with the sun in the rearview and the day sitting right where it belonged: behind us, useful, done.