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Peter doesn’t really get The Punisher.
The anger, the shooting, the ‘fuck you’ attitude - sure. Peter cut his teeth at the Avengers Tower. He’s known men like that. He gets that, even if he doesn’t agree with it. He understands the killing even if it goes against everything he believes in. He even gets the crappy hideouts he crawls into whenever he’s not gunning people down.
He’s only met the guy a few times, but he already knows that on his best day, he should be someone Peter stays far away from. On his worst? Peter should be hunting him down off the city streets for the safety of the New York City public. For some reason, he doesn’t do either.
In return for this oversight, Frank Castle seems to make a habit of showing up at the absolute worst possible moment, purely to make Peter’s life a million times harder.
“Are you out of your mind!” Peter yells as he’s flung across the Brooklyn Bridge, his voice cutting off with an abrupt thunk as he slams into the brick tower that held the suspension cables. Castle isn’t paying attention, round after round of ammunition firing from his assault rifle as he sprays bullets across the bridge, more interested in putting one in the skull of the strange, electrically charged bank robber making his final stand on the bridge than in listening to Peter’s complaints.
The air smells like burnt hair, and Peter’s bones ache from the shock, but there is no time to feel it. There are people still running to get off the bridge. The Punisher is still on a warpath. He flings himself forward.
“Stop. Shooting. Him.” He punctuates each word with a web to the mouth of The Punisher’s gun as he flips over top of the man, landing in a crouch behind him. “I’m serious!”
“Noted,” He says and fires the gun anyway. The bank robber laughs from where he’s standing threateningly on top of an empty school bus - never a good sign. The electricity crackling around him glows brighter.
By the time the police get there, Peter is pretty sure he doesn’t have any eyebrows left, but the robber is webbed down and still breathing against all odds. Castle has long since disappeared and Peter leaves the criminal in DeWolff’s hands, swinging across the East River and into the first deserted alley he spots. He lands hard on the cement, chest heaving as he lets his back hit the brick wall, desperate for just a few seconds to get his head on straight. He’s been patrolling nonstop for two days and he’s really starting to feel it -
“You good?”
Peter jumps, exhaustion making his senses dull because how else did he miss The Punisher crouched down a foot away from him, tucking his rifle back into the case. He’s staring at him, and Peter realizes he was asked a question. “What?” He asks back.
Castle's eyes narrow. “How old are you?”
Why does everyone ask him that? “Old enough,” he says, dropping his voice just a little. It still sounds natural. Probably.
Castle snorts, “Old enough to drink?”
Peter’s hesitation is apparently the only answer he needs because he laughs, shouldering his gun case onto his back.
“Why does it matter to you?” Peter grumbles, pushing himself away from the wall. “It’s illegal to kill people no matter how old you are, did you know that Punisher?… Mr. Castle?” He considers for a moment, “Mr. Punisher?”
“Frank. And it doesn’t,” He says, pushing past Peter’s shoulder and heading for the street. “You hungry?”
Peter stares at the back of his body armor, convinced he heard that wrong.
“Food,” Frank repeats like he’s stupid, glancing behind him. “You, Spider-Man. Are you hungry?”
“Um,” Peter says. He’s always hungry, his metabolism a never ending pit that doesn’t match up with his very… meager finances. His stomach chooses that moment to growl.
Frank rolls his eyes. Then he buys Peter three hot dogs from a stand across the street. They eat them together in silence. The Mets are losing to the Phillies on a tiny electric radio stashed somewhere on the cart, and Frank disappears sometime before the end of the top half.
As he said, Peter doesn’t really get The Punisher.
…
Months later, Easter Weekend, Peter watches Frank blow an armored semi truck twenty feet into the air. He nearly dislocates both of his shoulders trying to slow it down from taking out the coffee shop on the corner block, but he can admit it was pretty bad ass. The guy the cops pull out of the truck is cloaked in some sort of burlap cape that makes him look like old Ben Kenobi from the original Star Wars movies. Peter suddenly misses Ned so much he thinks he’s going to throw up in the middle of the street.
“You forget how to walk, kid?” Frank says, and he must be wobbling bad if it caught his attention.
“No, sorry,” Peter laughs it off quickly. “That guy just looks like Obi Wan.”
“Who the fuck is Obie One?”
Well. Peter can’t take a question like that sitting down, and somehow they end up on the roof of the cafe that was nearly flattened by Frank’s truck.
“So wait, the baby is Yoda?” Frank asks, looking disturbed by the idea. He’s sitting on the floor with his back to the roof access door, field stripping his gun - which looks more a canon than a gun, but Peter has never been into that kind of thing.
“No, no - he’s just called that because he looks like Yoda, but they’re just the same species.” Peter is pacing the length of the rooftop, his mask folded up just under his nose so he can freely sip the frappuccino Frank handed him on the way up. He thinks maybe he should be more conflicted about letting The Punisher pay for his food when it didn’t take a genius to guess the cash he was handing over was dirty money from whoever Frank had taken out. He’s too hungry to worry about it for long.
“And they made a whole movie about a baby?”
“Yeah, it’s crazy how popular Grogu is-“
“People are fucking stupid,” Frank scoffs.
Peter scowls. “What do you like then? Movies about blowing people up?”
“Something like that,” Frank twists a piece of his gun back into place and sets it in his carrier. He glances at his watch before zipping up the bag. “Time for me to head.”
Peter blinks, realizing at some point in their conversation the sun had started to set and he’d been talking for at least an hour. He tries to remember the last time he talked to someone about something that wasn’t Spider-Man related or his overdue rent. He comes up short.
“You, uh, doing something? For Easter?” Peter asks curiously.
Frank looks at him like he just asked if he was heading off to paint eggs. “No, dumbass. Work.”
Peter nods, rocking on his heels, “Me too.”
Frank eyes him before standing up and swinging his bag onto his shoulder. He holds a scrape of something out toward Peter. “Here.”
Peter takes it and smooths it out. It’s a receipt for Chinese food. He squints at it, trying to decipher if it’s some sort of lead Frank’s trying to tip him off with. “Uh, thanks?”
“Don’t kill yourself with it,” Frank snorts and disappears down the rooftop stairs.
Peter looks back down at the receipt, turning it curiously before flipping it over - oh. A phone number is written in a sharp scrawl of black Sharpie.
Huh. Peter pulls out his phone and carefully taps in the number. He goes back and forth on what he should name the contact, slowly deleting ‘The Punisher’ before settling on ‘Frank’. He doesn’t hesitate to add a skull emoji.
...
What can I do to make you watch a Star Wars movie? 🙏
Stay out of my fucking way.
Besides that ❌ 🙅♂️
…
You know you might actually learn something if you watch one 🫢
Stop texting me.
…
Okay, what if I watch something you like and you watch Star Wars? 🤝 That’s a great deal!
I don’t give a fuck what you watch.
…
If you watch Star Wars then I’ll stop texting you about Star Wars 😈
…
Do you know who Ken Burns is?
...
That whole summer, Peter works on his new suit and watches documentaries on war and jazz and baseball. He feels like he’s in his high school history class for most of it, but it’s well worth it when Frank texts him a picture of an Ewok with the message “I didn’t know you were in this movie?” Peter is already scheming ways to get him to watch all three trilogies by August.
Then Frank tries to assassinate a Senator.
Peter almost doesn’t catch him. He’s patrolling the parade route, swinging between buildings and scanning the ever-growing crowd for anything out of the ordinary. Bad guys loved opportunity, and there was nothing like a giant, televised parade to make a statement. He’s passing an apartment building when he senses something’s wrong, catching just the barest gleam of a sniper rifle barrel in a window. Bad guy found.
Except when he bursts feet first into the abandoned apartment, it’s not some masked gunman - but Frank. The bad guy is Frank.
“What are you doing!” Peter webs Frank’s hand to the gun, keeping him from pulling the trigger.
“What does it look like?” Frank spits, ripping his hand through the webbing - how did he do that so easily? “Stay out of my fucking way, kid.”
They fight for the gun and The Punisher punches hard, slamming Peter into the musty carpet as he tries to get back to his gun before the parade float passes. “This guy is a real piece of shit, kid. Trust me, I’m doing the world a favor-“
Peter webs the gun and pulls it off the stand and away from the window, sending it flying over the carpet.
The float is gone, disappearing between skyscrapers. Frank stares at the sniper rifle lying on its side across the room. “You know you could have shot us both with that move?”
Peter nods once, still lying in a pile on the floor.
“And this isn’t going to stop me from killing him.”
“You can try,” Peter says. “But I’m not going to let you.”
“Even though you know he’s a piece of shit? If I told you half of the misery he’s caused, you’d want to go down there and put a bullet in his head yourself.”
“I’m not going to just sit here and do nothing while you pull a JFK!”
“A JFK- Jesus fucking Christ, really?” Frank squints at him. “Are you stupid? Do you have brain damage from swinging into too many buildings?”
Peter lets his head fall back into the musty carpet. The apartment smells like cats, and there’s enough dust in the air to choke. “You’d be run out of New York.”
“What?”
“If you killed a senator,” Peter says, staring at the thick cobwebs strung over the ceiling. “You’d be hunted to your hideout. You couldn’t stay here, or you’d be shipped off to Rykers.”
Frank rolls his eyes. “Who gives a fuck?”
Peter’s jaw twitches. He can still hear the brass band of the parade a block over. People are cheering and singing in the sweltering heat of the summer. Parents and children and teenagers and friends and couples, all together for a morning parade, and by evening they’ll do it all over again to watch the fireworks.
“Don’t try it again,” Peter says and gets to his feet.
Frank stares at him. “Kid - “
Peter doesn’t stay, launching himself out the broken window and into the air. He swings away from the parade, the distant music quickly eaten up by the police sirens and screams of the city.
…
Ken Burns once said that baseball is a haunted game. A game in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before.
“ - and if you think your city wide web swinging privileges can’t be revoked, then think again! Three, THREE entire subway lines collapsed when you brought down that helicopter. It is an absolute miracle no one died - yet - and if that changes, not even I’m going to be able to save your ass from the government agency that’s going to come down on you. The Avengers took down an entire alien race three weeks ago and didn’t even disrupt bus service”
Peter thinks Ken might have been onto something.
DeWolff yells and Peter lets her because she’s right. He was sloppy when fighting The Hand. He let them get under his skin today, let them overwhelm him, let them push him into a corner until it was too late for anything other than dirty fighting. That’s not him. That’s not how Mr. Stark taught him. That’s not what Spider-Man represents.
Peter is aimless when he leaves the crime scene. He doesn’t want to go back to his empty apartment. He doesn’t want to be Peter Parker. He doesn’t feel worthy of being Spider-Man. He finds himself swinging toward the old docks before his mind can register where he’s going.
If Frank is surprised he knows one of his hideouts, he doesn’t show it. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asks from the top deck, his gun pointed in Peter’s general direction. A lazy threat.
Peter stands outside the houseboat and stares back at Frank, not really knowing the answer to that. “I messed up,” he blurts out.
Frank looks down at him from the railing for a long moment, then up at the sky with a long suffering sigh. “Whatever.”
The boat smells weird and is full of weapons and contraband that Frank definitely shouldn’t have. Peter ignores all of that and sits down on the tiny kitchenette booth Frank points at.
“So,” he says, leaning against the counter with a scowl. “What happened?”
Peter doesn’t resent his responsibility. He loves this city, and he prides himself on being its protector. These days it’s the only thing getting him out of bed in the morning, and that makes failure hard. No - it makes failure absolute. The only thing Peter has is Spider-Man, and today the only thing he did was fail. He can’t think about Mr. Stark, or May, or MJ, or Ned, or Bruce, or Dr. Strange. He can’t think about the New Avengers Team. He can’t think about DeWolff. He can’t face their disappointment.
Frank… isn’t quite so noble. Frank is publicly a pretty big scourge on the city. Peter watches Frank stir instant coffee into a tiny Captain America plastic cup with a permanent snarl on his face, and the crushing weight of disappointing yet another person just… isn’t there.
“A lot of people got hurt today, because of me,” Peter says softly. It feels like confession.
Frank sets the cup of lukewarm coffee down in front of Peter with a heavy hand. “Lot of people lived ‘cause of you.”
Peter rolls up his mask and takes a sip, and it tastes awful, like Frank got the water straight from the Hudson. He drinks it anyway. “I shouldn’t have been fighting at all. I started the day with a robbery in Queens, and the guy was such a - he was a jerk! I was pissed off when I got the call, and The Hand is just the worst to fight in the city. They’re slippery and they always use people as shields and it’s so hard to keep eyes on all of them -“ Once Peter starts, he can’t stop, everything rushing out of him like he has to try and get it out before Frank tells him to shut up. He doesn’t.
Peter talks and Frank makes more coffee. Then he washes the dishes. Peter keeps talking while Frank messes around with some sort of backpack explosive that cannot be for anything good. Peter talks so much about Spider-Man that he circles back around to baseball.
“-and I like that one the best. I liked the jazz one more than the civil war one, but the baseball documentary is the best one,” Peter says. It’s dark outside now and he can hear sirens but he can’t bring himself to move. He’s muted the HUD display on his suit.
“I thought you might, you seem like a big Mets guy,” Frank says. He’s pressing homemade ammunition rounds on the kitchenette table, and every time he forces the level down on the frame, the boat and Peter rock with the force.
“That part at the end? Where he said baseball is full of, um, - mythic contradictions? Because it’s a game played on a giant field but famous in New York City?” Peter says softly, staring at the dark windows. “I… I really liked that.”
“He says that?”
Peter blinks and sits up from where he’s been lounging on the booth. “Yeah, at the end. It’s the whole final monologue.”
“Huh,” Frank says and presses another round, his arm flexing down with the force. “Never heard that. Kind of dumb, most sports are played on fields.”
“It’s not dumb - what do you mean you’ve never heard it? You told me to watch them!”
Frank shrugs, “They’re good; always put me right to sleep.”
Peter gaps at him, “Did you even finish any of the Star Wars movies?”
“Why does it matter if I finish them? I put them on, that’s watching a fucking movie.”
“No it’s - oh my God!” Peter pulls his mask down tight on his face, unable to even fathom that. “I think it’s worse to have watched Star Wars but never seen the end - the end is the best part!”
Frank eyes him before reaching a giant hand over and pressing it against Peter’s face, pushing him back down into the booth, “You’re a fucking nerd, kid. Spider-Man is a nerd.”
Peter should be offended because he knows Frank does not mean it in any way that’s kind, but he’s a little too busy being hyper aware of the warmth of Frank’s skin seeping through the mask. It’s been a long time since anyone touched him without the intention to hurt.
“Kid?” Frank moves his hand off him.
Peter clears his throat and sits up, “You owe me a Star Wars rewatch.”
“For fucks sake,” Frank mutters. “Get the fuck out of here.”
…
The next time Peter sees Frank, they’re on a rooftop, scouting out a stash house for possible connection to The Kingpin. Peter is crouched down, peering through the sniper scope to try and see where the contact Frank spotted had gone in the house.
“Kid, you need to relax.”
“I am relaxed,” Peter grumbles. He doesn’t like guns, and he hates the Kingpin. He has a feeling his night isn’t going to end well.
A heavy hand drops onto his neck. He tenses, and Frank gives the muscle a squeeze to remind him to be as relaxed as he keeps claiming he is, and corrects his line of sight. His touch is surprisingly gentle despite the firm grip as he guides Peter’s head until he can see the shadow of their guy in the building.
“You see him?” Frank asks.
“Yeah,” Peter says softly. “Thanks.”
A shove to his back. A hand on his shoulder. A punch to the arm. Peter goes from hardly being touched to something much more dangerous - expecting it. At Christmas, when Peter webs down three sewer monsters who had been about to take out Frank’s van, he stands patiently at his side, waiting for -
A familiar heavy hand smacks down on his shoulder, “Thanks.”
Peter beams under his mask.
…
Peter is on Staten Island to buy ram sticks from a guy he found on Facebook Marketplace. It doesn’t go well, the guy definitely got them from robbing a tech store and Peter’s hesitation makes him jumpy, taking off with his stash before Peter can decide where his morals on buying stolen goods for the sake of a crime-alerting computer program fall. Probably for the best.
Peter decides to head to the Goodwill to see if he could find anything to make the trip not a total waste of time. He’s walking past the boardwalk when the ground starts to shake, the entire island trembling with the power of something definitely not good.
He’s dressed as a civilian and too exposed. He barely has time to find two houses with a dumpster big enough for him to duck behind for a quick change. He hears the gunfire before he gets his mask on. Frank.
“What are you doing here!” Peter yells as he swings onto the boardwalk. He hates moving around in the outer boroughs, there’s barely anything to grab onto.
“I was eating at the deli!” Frank shouts back. He’s not wearing his body armor, so that’s probably true - Peter doubts he ever leaves the house without a few guns. He probably shower with them.
The man Frank’s shooting at barely reacts. He’s dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and a giant sword that cannot be anything but trouble. He twirls it lightning fast, Frank’s bullets clanging off the mystery metal like paper.
“What the hell is that thing made of?” Frank says but doesn’t stop firing.
The man doesn’t seem phased by the appearance of either of them. In a blink, he’s crossed the boardwalk, an inch from Frank’s face as he brings his sword down and slices directly through the gun.
Frank punches him in the face.
The strange man stumbles back, and Frank grabs Peter’s arm, retreating them off the boardwalk and to the beach. “Alright, Spider-Man, I think this guy might be all yours.”
“A sword that can cut through bullets,” Peter says, glancing behind them. “Yeah, probably not the best match for you.”
“Oh, fuck you. I told you, I was at the deli - “
The sword master is suddenly in front of them - how did he do that? - and the strange sword crashes down in front of them, ending the conversation.
Peter tries to keep the guy’s hands occupied. He webs them, tries to tie him up, sends him swinging up a light pole - but the dude is slippery, and a sword that cuts through bullets can also cut through synthetic webbing. Which means this is a fight of endurance - whoever can outpace the other is going to be the winner. Frank shoots and Peter webs, and they’re wearing him down - right up until Frank’s gun jams.
The sword master has great instincts because he doesn’t hesitate. The second Peter’s senses register what’s happened, the man is in front of Frank, and his sword is lifted behind his back, preparing for a death strike. There is no time for Peter to web his hands. There’s no time for him to yell Frank’s name. The only thing he can do is move.
The sword master might have been quick, but Peter is faster. He slams into Frank’s chest and pushes him backward. The sword doesn’t touch him. The sword slices down, splitting the back of Peter’s suit and stinging his skin like a paper cut. He makes a soft sound, surprised.
Frank’s arm comes around him before quickly pulling away. Peter can see that his hand is red. That it’s probably his blood. A rough hand - much rougher than Frank has ever touched him is then grabbing at his throat, fingers digging under his jaw - oh, he’s looking for a pulse.
The sword master looks confused, like he doesn’t understand how his single target became two. Frank uses it to pull something from his pocket - it’s small and looks homemade, a bomb? Seriously? - and shoves it in the man’s open mouth.
Peter can’t even yell at him to stop because Frank is throwing them backward into the sand - trying to get out of range, Peter realizes. The sword master still looks confused, a hand coming up to touch his face when -
Frank is suddenly on top of Peter, his arms braced on either side of him and a hand tucking his neck into his chest when the world goes white, the force of the explosion knocking into him hard even with Frank taking the brunt of the blast.
...
-lease? Kid, Jesus, I need you to say something.”
Peter is lying on something warm. It moves up and down, and when Peter presses his face closer to the warmth, he can feel it pound against his chest. A heartbeat. Too fast.
“Hey! You fucking answer me when I’m talking to you!”
Peter’s world is tipped as he’s pulled away from the warmth and laid out on his back - that hurts. Something hard and painful rubs against his chest, clearing away the fog until - he gasps, opening his eyes.
“Thank Christ.”
Peter blinks, dazed. Frank is leaning over top of him, and he looks terrifying. Blood and pieces of something - no, someone - are smeared in his hair and his eyes are too big, his pupils blown wide.
“Frank?” Peter’s voice cracks.
Frank blinks, and his whole body shudders as the terror in his face is replaced with fury. “You little shit,” he sneers. “You take a hit for me again, and I’m going to beat your ass!”
Peter groans as he sits up, Frank’s hand on his shoulder doing some of the heavy lifting. “You can’t do that if you’re dead.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Frank stands and forces Peter to his feet. “Come on, we need to get to my van before the cops show up.”
“Your van? Where are we going?” Peter frowns but lets Frank toss one of his arms over his shoulder, taking most of his weight as they walk.
“My place.”
“Why?” Peter asks curiously.
“Why - Kid, you might not remember but you took a sword to your fucking spine and you’re bleeding out all over the place! So shut up and come on,” he seethes.
Peter does. He thinks about the Sword Master instead, who is currently lying in a thousand pieces on Staten Island beach because of Peter. He looks at the blood smeared on Frank’s body armor. He thinks of all the ways he should have been faster, kept Frank from danger, kept that man alive until he could have been brought in. What if he was working with a team? What if there’s more coming? What was the metal that sword was made of-?
“Kid, you need to relax,” Frank’s arm tightens around him. “I can feel your heartbeat jackhammering. You’re going to be okay. I’ve got you.”
“That guy - he’s dead -“
“-And I’d fucking kill him again.”
“- and it’s my fault! I should have stayed -”
Peter is suddenly lifted into the passenger seat of Frank’s van. He falls back into the leather, hyper aware he’s probably bleeding all over everything, but he doesn’t have time to think about it before Frank’s is shoving a finger into his chest, “Kid, you fucking listen to me,” he spits. “You’re going to fuck up. You’re going to lose. You’re going to be beaten so badly you’re going to think the only option is to pack your shit up and go. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when - but if you ever, ever think that your only option is to suck it up and die, then I’m going to break both your arms right now.”
Peter shakes his head, but Frank catches his chin, forcing him to make eye contact through his mask. “You get to have your morals, Spider-Man. You get to choose to take hits for The Punisher - and I get to choose to shove C4 down the gullets of assholes who try and kill us. Thems the breaks.”
Peter swallows, and Frank lets go, slamming Peter’s door before quickly climbing into the driver’s seat. They pass six cop cars, sirens blazing, on the drive out.
Frank pulls him past the kitchen and into the bedroom when they get back to the boat. Peter’s never been in here before and curiously looks at the old photos on the bedside table as Frank opens up a bag filled with army surplus medical supplies. Frank is smiling in the pictures, he looks happy.
“I hope you can sew,” Frank says, pushing Peter down to sit on the bed. He’s cleaned most of the sword master off of him, but there’s still a pink smear around his temple.
Peter reaches behind himself, feeling the split in his suit from the neck all the way down to the small of his back before Frank bats his hands away. They’re sticky with blood when he folds them back on his lap. “Is it bad?”
“If it was bad, you wouldn’t be up and moving,” Frank says. “You’re lucky it’s not deep. Gonna need stitches though.”
Instead of opening the back of his suit though, Frank grabs the edge of Peter’s ripped mask and yanks it off.
Peter’s jaw drops. “Frank - what the hell!” he grabs at his arm. “You can’t just unmask someone!”
“Oh my God, your secret identity is safe - I don’t know you, Kid,” Frank rolls his eyes, dropping Peter’s mask into his lap and grabbing his chin with both hands, gently tilting it back, “Quit whining.”
“Not cool, man,” Peter mutters. It wasn’t, but he doesn’t feel nearly as pissed as he should be.
Frank’s hands are even warmer on his bare skin. He can feel gun calluses and scars he wouldn’t have ever known were there through the suit.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you swear,” Frank says as he peels Peter out of the suit and nudges him to lie on his stomach.
“I swear,” Peter grumbles.
“Sure, kid.”
Frank is an efficient field medic, sopping up the blood and quick with a needle. “It’s not going to heal pretty,” He tells Peter as he ties off the last stitch, “But you’ll live.”
“And you’ll live,” Peter reminds him, slowly sitting up on the bed.
“Yeah,” Frank agrees, dropping his hand to Peter’s hair. He keeps it there for a moment, heavy and sunken into the curls. “I guess I will. Because of your stupid ass.”
…
When Peter’s water heater floods his apartment, his landlord is ‘on vacation’, or that’s what he assumes when all seven of his calls go straight to voicemail. That leaves him with two contacts in his phone, and he doesn’t think Dewolff is going to be very helpful talking Spider-Man through shitty apartment maintenance.
“This better be fucking important,” Frank spits. It’s noon, and he sounds tired, so Peter definitely woke him up. Not a great start to the conversation.
“Hey Frank!” Peter says brightly, trying to overcompensate as he stacks computer parts on his bookshelf. “Remember how you told me your boat had that leak in it you patched up?”
There’s a faint grunt of acknowledgment over the line.
“Great! Well, I’m having a similar issue, and I was hoping you could maybe give me some tips?”
“With your boat?”
“Uh, my apartment actually,” Peter says, staring down at ankle deep water that covered his floor.
Frank groans, “Just go shut off your water.”
Peter stares curiously around his apartment, “… how do I do that?”
Frank makes a long, irritated noise into what sounds like a pillow. “Don’t touch anything. Text me your address.”
When Frank arrives an hour later, he’s got a bag full of tools instead of guns. He stares down at the small wave of water that floods out of his apartment and into the hall when he opens the door.
“I haven’t touched anything!” Peter promises. He’s wearing sweatpants and his classic Avengers hoodie.
“I can see that,” Frank says, looking around the cramped apartment. “How old is this building, kid? Is this even legal to rent?”
“I mean, I think so?” Peter shrugs. “It’s a great spot for me - roof access.”
Frank rolls his eyes. “I cut the water and power off on the way up. Let’s take a look at your heater.”
Peter nods and gets out of the way.
“What the hell - I’m not your plumber, kid. Get over here.”
Peter spends the afternoon on his knees and back and anywhere else he can wiggle into with a wrench. Frank shows him how to patch a leak and check for rust in the tank before deciding the entire system has to go, and they head down to the appliance store on the corner to get a new one. It takes an hour just for them to maneuver the awkwardly large box up twenty flights of cramped, prewar stairs.
By the time the water heater is installed, the flooding is dried up, and his apartment only smells faintly like moldy wood, it’s almost midnight.
“You want pizza?” Peter asks Frank. “I owe you pizza. And the money for the new water heater - but that might need to be a payment plan.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Frank says. He looks over Peter’s desk, at the Spider-Man tech, at his picture of Aunt May. “We can get pizza.”
While they wait, Peter pulls down his laptop from where he tucked it into his bookshelf to protect it from the water. “Since you’re a captive audience…”
“Excuse me?” Frank’s eyes narrow.
“Wehavetowatchtheendofstarwars!”
“What?”
“The end! You have to see the end of Star Wars! At least the first one,” Peter says, kneeling down on the floor and quickly opening his laptop.
“No fucking- fine,” Frank lowers himself down onto the floor. “But just the end.”
“What did you see last? What were they doing?”
Frank squints, “I think they were in a bar?”
Peter’s jaw drops, “That’s the first ten minutes - Frank!”
“Jesus, just show me what you want to show me!”
Peter shakes his head, scrubbing through the movie on his laptop, “This feels so wrong. It’s sacrilegious.”
The pizza comes and they eat it on the floor with the laptop between them. Peter swears it’s the last twenty minutes, but with the amount of time he adds by repeatedly pausing to explain characters and plot details, they probably could have just rewatched the entire movie.
Frank doesn’t complain. He stays.
…
At a point between sleeping and waking, Peter hears Ken Burns.
“At the game's heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included…”
He’s hurt. He remembers pain. He remembers the fear of dying. He remembers wanting to protect someone. He remembers being scared for Frank.
He opens his eyes a pinprick. He’s somewhere strange. It smells like a hospital. He can’t move, his head feels foggy, a beeping sound somewhere distant starts to quicken. Where is he? What’s going on? He needs to get out of here, he needs to go, he needs to -
A large, warm hand on his arm gently squeezes down. It’s rough and callused. It’s Frank.
Peter knows it’s him even if his vision is swimming. He can just make him out, passed out in a chair next to the hospital bed, his head pressed into the blanket at Peter’s hip, his hand on his arm. It squeezes again. Relax.
Peter’s body loosens, the drugs taking back over his system. If Frank is here, it’s going to be okay. They’ll live.
Ken Burns continues on the TV, his voice softly pushing Peter back into sleep. Maybe he does understand Frank, just a little.
“…Most of all, baseball is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.”