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There aren’t very many things that make Peter violent. Nazis, for one, but it’s thirty-three. There aren’t Nazis swarming New York. He doesn’t have any particular hatred of violence, nor even of death, but he isn’t inherently violent. He’s simply not afraid to use it.
However, when the man next to Hobie at the bar sneers and tosses out “punk,” Peter finds himself wanting to knock the egg out.
Hobie smiles. He doesn’t come by Peter’s universe very often, instead preferring dates on neutral territory. Hobie’s place is a dystopian hellscape, and he, in his words, “gotta dress down and I still get called slurs,” to fit into Peter’s dimension. Plus, it’s not like they can walk around holding hands.
“Thanks, luv,” he says. It’s reckless. It’s so very Hobie.
Hobie’s eyes flit to Peter’s. Peter raises an eyebrow. The question is clear: do something, or wait?
‘Wait,’ Hobie mouths with a wink.
There’s a beat of silence, and then the man next to Hobie opens his mouth again. This time, the drawling insult is starkly clear. Peter looks to Hobie eagerly. It’s Hobie’s call here, because it’s him the pill is insulting.
“That wasn’t very nice.” Hobie takes a sip of the bathtub gin they sell in sleazy little gin mills and speakeasies. Prohibition is due to be repealed in five months, Peter knows, but Hobie likes the gross booze. Says it makes him feel something.
“And what’s it to you? You some sort of gunsel?”
Hobie smiles, and then slams the glass of mule into the man’s head. It’s violent and bloody.
Other Spiders frown on violence. Other Spiders don’t have kill counts, and believe change can be made peacefully. Hobie’s a punk (in his way, not the way Peter’s heard his entire life), and Peter’s been on the wrong side of Nazis and their ilk in the States. They know better.
The man makes a grab for Hobie, who jumps off the barstool and kicks him away. “Little help here?” he asks, in a voice that makes the unspoken darling on the end clear as day.
It’s thirty-three, sodomy is illegal, and Peter punches someone in the face for daring to ever think they can talk down to his partner.
It’s thirty-three, Peter knows there’s a war coming, and he kicks the man trying to hold him back in the knee.
It’s thirty-three, in Germany people want him and Hobie dead for various reasons, and Hobie grabs a bottle of shit gin and slams it into someone’s head.
The song on the jukebox is something altogether too cheery for the all out bar brawl Hobie and Peter have started, but Hobie grins at him above the din and scent of blood. This, Peter thinks, is as good a date as any. After all, it’s what he and Hobie do so well.
They sneak off after, hoping to get away from any coppers or anything who might have a problem with such a big bar brawl. It could be the cops, sure, or gangsters, or even a particularly angry bartender.
“You’re peng when you fight, Benji,” Hobie says, lighting a cigarette and holding it up to Peter’s lips. Peter takes a drag, holds it, and blows it out into the dirty night air.
“Well, you’re a pip yourself, doll.”
Hobie moved the cigarette away from both of them, taking Peter’s jaw in his hand and pulling him into a kiss. Peter kissed back, hungry for the affection he’d been denying himself. He’d been pretending for so long to find the girls in dance halls pretty, and that he found Greta Garbo hot instead of Robert Taylor. Hobie had smashed in – quite literally – and ripped away his falsehoods with a smile.
“You’re a damn good kisser.”
“Not so bad yourself. You know, you don’t have to defend me.”
“But if I want to?”
“Well.” Hobie lifted the cigarette to his lips. Peter watched the way he inhaled the smoke, the way his throat moved, the way he breathed out in a gentle sigh. “Couldn’t say no to that.”