Work Text:
The New York public library is bustling. It always is. In fact, everything in New York City bustles. It blusters, too, and blisters, sometimes, and Peter is running out of ways to describe his favorite city in the world without sounding like a maniac, so he sits down in a wooden chair towards the back of the room and decides to stop thinking.
It's Tuesday. He only knows that because there's a sign on the door behind him (the glass door, the one he entered through to get in here) that says Children's Tuesday Reading Circle!, and that must mean that of all the days in the week, today must be the one called Tuesday.
There's a middle-aged woman with buzzed hair and a strong Jamaican accent sitting in an armchair, surrounded by children of all ages (and, in the toddler's cases, their accompanying parents) reading The Gruffalo. Peter remembers the book from his childhood. He remembers Aunt May reading it with a loud, booming voice for the Gruffalo and a squeaky yet stubborn, voice for the mouse. Remembering it sends a pang of melancholy through his chest.
It's warm in the library, but his skin is still cold. He sinks into the woman's voice and tries to remind himself that he can be sad all he likes, that grief is natural, but it shouldn't break him. Aunt May would be so sad if his grief over her broke him.
The Jamaican woman in the armchair (and she'd introduced herself, but Peter's so tired that he's forgotten her name) is nearing the end of the story.
"There's no such thing as a Gruffalo!" she reads, and then a page or so later, the kids erupt into squeals as the Gruffalo himself emerges from the woods.
How did I get here? Peter thinks to himself, and then the memories flash through his head like soundbytes—an attempted robbery on a pawn shop, a fist fight (where the assailant was swinging fists and Peter was slinging webs), slipping on an icy terrace and only barely managing to catch himself before slamming into concrete, the NYPD making an arrest, and then…
Here. The open doors of the library. The centralized heating. The water fountain. The voices of children. Happy children.
The woman moves on to the sequel (and Peter doesn't remember there being a sequel to The Gruffalo, but he has had a lot to catch up on, hasn't he? With the whole radioactive spider bite in lieu of an actual teenage experience, then the Blip, then… well…) and some of the parents with young children dig through their tote bags for snacks. Packets rustle and snack bags open. The smell of salty pretzels fills the air. Peter's stomach grumbles. When was the last time he ate? He can't remember.
He stays for the whole children's hour.
He's hungry. He's tired. He thinks he nods off during The Gruffalo's Child and wakes up halfway through another Julia Donaldson story but he can't really be sure. He tries to cling to the words. The woman's voice is so soothing, so familiar, he could've sworn he heard a woman that sounds just like her reading when he was a child, small as the children that sit gathered around her feet now.
He must have fallen asleep again, because one second he's listening to the story, and the next, a hand lands on his shoulder and nearly scares him out of his skin.
A library worker says kindly, "Children's hour is over, sir. We have to clear this room in preparation for teen workshop."
"Sorry, sorry," Peter gasps, shaking out his limbs and standing up on shaking legs. "Sorry, sorry, I'll get out of your hair now. I'm not a creep, I promise— I know I'm not really a kid anymore, but I loved The Gruffalo, and the woman's voice was really soothing, and—"
"No need to panic," the worker says before Peter can completely lose his mind. Peter gets a good look at him and sees that he's a Latino man, an inch or so taller than Peter, with curly gray hair, stubble, and a kind smile. Santiago, his name tag reads. "Story time is open to everyone. You're welcome to come back, I just ask that you give our workers time to prepare for teen workshop."
"Of course, of course," Peter stutters, and stumbles over his own feet getting out of the room.
"Have a good rest of your day, sir," Santiago the library worker calls as Peter is dashing away.
"You too!" Peter shouts over his shoulder, loathe to be rude, and decides it's been way too long since he had decent protein, so finds the nearest burger joint and spends the next twenty minutes inhaling a double cheeseburger and trying to soothe the shaking in his bones.
Winter's not fun in the city. At least for him. Crime spikes in the summer, sure, but it's a pain in the butt doing his job in a windbreaker and a beanie. His carefully calculated agility takes a stumble, and worse, frozen pipes and icicles on fire escapes make for tricky navigating when it comes to his web-slinging.
He's in battle with the Scorpion most days. And most nights.
"Come on, man, do we really have to keep doing this?" he pleads on a particularly difficult day, the day after a crazy snowstorm, if it matters at all.
"Think again, Spider-Man!" the Scorpion cackles, and Peter's left dodging his mech tail.
He collapses in his apartment later, the Scorpion still not caught, but closer to caught, closer to dealt with. He peels his suit off and his ribs are bruised. Of course they're bruised. He tilts his head back against the cold wall and lets himself be scared. He knows he'll be alright, he knows none of his current injuries are life-threatening, but he aches, and somewhere in his heart he's stuck at fourteen, when he first got bit, when the world was so much smaller and he had Aunt May to lean into, and he's still scared sometimes, remembering that she's not there anymore, remembering that he's all on his own.
He can feel his body stitching itself back together—that strange feeling where, if he focuses, he can actually sense the bones in his ribs shaking a little bit, getting used to shifting back to where they were supposed to be. It's not a feeling he likes. Most days, he can ignore it. Today he can't. His skin itches, he screws his eyes shut, and takes multiple deep breaths in as E.V. tells him to focus on breathing. He's trying. He really is. But sometimes he feels more like his body is a curse and less of something that belongs to him.
He needs a distraction, so he opens his laptop and decides today's a perfect day to lie on the couch and binge a mind-numbing TV show, just so he can think about anything else except the blossoming blue and purple on his side.
Plans collapse quickly, though.
"I thought I'd paid my internet already for the month," Peter whispers to himself, clicking through a bunch of things and opening his phone. "E.V., haven't I paid the internet bill?"
"The account which you have connected to automatic monthly payments has insufficient funds. Would you like to open your banking and move money from your savings?" E.V. replies robotically.
Peter closes his eyes and lets his head thump back against the couch. "No, E.V., it's okay. I should probably take a nap anyway. I'll deal with that when I wake up."
But he can't fall asleep, not really. His eyes close and his arms and legs feel fuzzy, but he's still conscious. He still feels itchy in his skin and he still feels his blood vessels putting themselves back together after being momentarily burst, can feel the bruising dissipating, can feel his awful, awful mutated body spinning itself back into shape.
He can't ever seem to let anything go, even if he knows it's not good for him. Ned has posted to his Instagram story again. Peter hates how he doesn't even think about it before clicking through and opening it up.
Ned is sitting at some coffee shop outside, laughing about a snowman that someone had built on the street. He flips the camera to show the snowman (which is pretty damn funny, Peter can't lie), then it flips back and MJ is leaning over his shoulder, telling him to stop being weird in public.
Her chin is resting on Ned's shoulder, and Peter feels a spike of jealousy course through him.
He pictures what it would be like for her chin to be resting on his shoulder instead, to feel the warm weight of her leaning against him, for her hand to brush his, for her to lean down and maybe kiss his cheek.
The video ends soon after. Peter's skin is itching something awful.
He remembers saying goodbye to them. He remembers their last group hug—the three of them, him, Ned, and MJ, and he has to take a deep breath in to avoid falling over.
When's the last time somebody touched me? he thinks, and then shuts down that train of thought before things can get more depressing than they already are.
And so he's back at the library. Tuesday. Children's Tuesday Reading Circle. A different woman is reading today. She's younger, with bright red hair and a bubbly, high-pitched lilt to her voice. He plays a game where he tries to guess at her life story.
Freshly graduated, he thinks, watching her read The Rainbow Fish and tapping her finger on the pages to indicate what pictures her words connect to. She went to a private school—probably religious, if the cross around her neck is any indication. She… was bumped up a grade. She looks like she's used to being the smartest kid in the room. She's got life in her eyes. Her voice is practiced, trained. Maybe she works in childcare. Maybe she's a young mother.
It's snowing outside. Lightly snowing, but still—snowing. The snow messes with his senses. He doesn't much like it. He doesn't much like the winter at all, actually. This winter in specific, it's been harder and harder to keep himself warm.
E.V. told him this morning, out of the blue, that spiders are ectothermic. Cold-blooded. Peter doesn't know why that should be affecting him. He's been half-spider since he was fourteen, and so far, his mammalian endothermic inclinations have always won out. He doesn't know what's happening to him. But he doesn't have anyone to talk about it with, does he? So he keeps his head down. He drinks a lot of hot chocolate. He makes sure his heating bill is always paid. He spends time in the library.
The Rainbow Fish gives away all its scales. The story ends. The chipper red-head, who Peter has guessed is something of a prodigy or child-whisperer at the least, moves onto a Shel Silverstein poetry collection. Peter's eyes close without him noticing it.
"Hey, there," says a kind voice, and Peter's whole body flinches.
He's fallen asleep again. The room is empty. He looks up and there's the same worker from the week before, Santiago, hand on Peter's shoulder, an understanding smile on his face.
"I'm so sorry, I really didn't mean to fall asleep," Peter rushes, scrambling to his feet.
"It's all good, man," Santiago says, still smiling. "You know, if you're gonna be here every week, you're welcome to volunteer to read."
Peter pauses. "I can do that?" he asks, and his voice comes out a lot smaller than he intended.
"Sure. I mean, you'd have to give proof of identity to the library so we know who you are, and you'll have to be entered into the library system so that we can schedule you through the library website, but it's relatively simple. What's your name?"
Peter hesitates a lot longer than he should.
"Peter," he replies, once he's found his words. "P- Peter Parker, sir, Santiago, I mean, and, um, I'm not sure— I'm not sure if I could. My schedule is, um… Well, not always the most consistent. I wouldn't want to let the kids down."
Santiago shrugs. "We usually have different volunteers for each week anyway, we like to shake it up, and there are other read-a-loud opportunities. This is the Children's Reading Hour for all ages, we mostly get kids under ten years old, but you must've noticed that there's a whole lotta other ages here." He winks. "Like yourself."
Peter flushes. "Not a kid," he mutters. "Haven't been for a long time."
"How old are you, then, not-a-kid?"
"Twenty-two," Peter replies immediately, and then pauses. "No. Wait. I'm… Yeah. I'm twenty-two."
Santiago raises his eyebrows. "You had to think about it?"
"Sorry, it's just…" Peter winces. "The Blip, y'know? I was born in 2001, but I was gone for four years, so when I do the math I always… I always mess it up."
Santiago hums understandingly. "Well, Peter, think about it," he offers. "If I see you back here next week, I'll bring it up again, alright? You seem like a pretty chill guy. There are other times where we need volunteers for read-a-louds, it's not just Tuesday at 10am. Monday mornings we have an 8am mother-baby reading circle. It's difficult to get people for that one. Not sure what you're schedule is like, but…"
"I'll think about it," Peter promises, already feeling guilty because he knows his schedule (his non-linear schedule, determined entirely by NYC's criminal activity) won't allow it.
He leaves the library and goes straight to a chain coffee shop, trying to shake the itching of his skin.
"Could you put, like, ten shots of espresso in a cup," he asks the barista, fingers twitching. "Just. Just ten shots. That's it."
"Sure," the barista shrugs, and Peter sits cradling that ten-shot espresso for the next hour, until E.V. sends a crime alert, and he's off, swinging away.
Puncture wounds are his least favorite. There'd been a scuffle on Staten Island, with the ever-grisly unmasked vigilante The Punisher, and the bullet Peter took long preceded the bullet he dragged Frank Castle out of the way of, but being yelled at afterwards doesn't exactly help his mood.
"You would've been dead if I didn't drag you out of the way!" Peter had eventually snapped, shoving Frank Castle in the chest in a way that's entirely uncharacteristic of him. "You owe me, man. Maybe try being less trigger happy and more aware of your surroundings, huh?"
He'd hopped onto a railing, ready to swing away, and then paused. "I'm sorry I pushed you, that wasn't nice. Have a good rest of your day, sir."
So. Not his first run-in with The Punisher, not by a long-shot, but the first one that might have an actual consequence on their working relationship. Insofar as NYC based vigilantes go, Peter gets along better with Daredevil, since they share common ground on their whole non-lethal force thing and their heightened senses. Daredevil isn't much for talking, but he seems pretty chill with Peter. Peter's not sure if the same can be said for The Punisher after today.
Anyway. Enough of his work-place relationships.
Peter tugs his suit off and picks the bullet out of his leg with tweezers. He lets it land in a petri dish, where he'll leave it until he has energy to analyze it and make sure that he hadn't been shot with some bullet laced with a chemical agent or something.
"I hate bullets," he sighs, and closes his eyes for a second.
He has to clean the wound. Make sure he doesn't lose more blood than he already has. Then he'll lie down on the couch, watch some stupid TV (he's fixed his internet payment issues, with a lot of help from E.V. in the form of consistent reminders), and shut his brain off.
He looks down at his leg, at his calf, where the bullet had lodged, and shakes his head.
"Won't even scar," he mumbles to himself, and wonders what would be worse. Being covered in scars and having physical reminders of all the awful things that have happened to him, or being completely clear skinned, like he is now.
His accelerated healing is a godsend and he knows it, but it's so weird, sometimes, to look down at his body and remember all the hits its taken, but not see physical evidence. It's like his flesh has forgotten him, just like the rest of the world has.
Tuesday morning, and he's back at the library. It's been a long week. He needs something familiar, and this routine with Children's Hour is the most consistent thing Peter's had in his life ever since… Well. Ever since four years ago, when he lost everything consistent in favor of keeping everyone he loved safe. Jesus Christ. He is one sad, sad spider.
The Giving Tree is the book of the day.
Peter falls asleep before the story can even finish. It's something about the reader's voice that lulls him to sleep, her soothing voice that wraps so nicely around the words, and the quiet thrum of constant babbling from the babies, the soft chatter of parents, it's just enough sound to reassure him that everything's okay and not enough that it keeps him awake.
"Hey, Peter," says a voice at his right, and Peter once again jumps out his skin before he sees who it is. Santiago, with his kind smile. Santiago, with his mouth open to say something else, probably to ask him to volunteer, to help out, all things Peter can't do.
It's been a long week. He still hasn't caught the Scorpion, and an officer was injured on duty yesterday—an officer that he was supposed to be protecting. She's in the hospital with three broken ribs and a concussion. He'd brought her flowers but it wasn't enough. Nothing he's doing is enough.
"You okay?" Santiago asks, but Peter is already on his feet.
"I'm sorry," Peter blurts, before Santiago can even get another word in. "I'm sorry, I can't stay. I have to go."
He doesn't, not really. He has no where to be. But his legs are moving, his feet are flying, and he only stops when he has a slice of scalding hot New York pizza in his hands, scarfing it down, feeling cold down to his bones.
In the middle of the night, sometime during the haze of the week, Peter can't remember days anymore, facial recognition lets him know that the Scorpion is on the prowl, and therefore, so is Peter.
He suits up and swings himself through the city, finding a rooftop close to where the Scorpion is, close enough that he can watch him, far enough away that the Scorpion won't notice he's being watched, and waits for him to spring into action so he can justify getting involved. It's a cold night. He's in a puffer jacket and has a bobble hat with I ♡ NYC printed on it covering his head. It's still not enough to keep him warm.
"Hey, dickwad," growls a voice from his right. Peter doesn't flinch. He knew The Punisher was here before he even landed on the roof. "This is my lookout. Find another."
Peter smiles underneath the suit. "Hi, Frank."
"Don't call me that."
"It's your name, isn't it?"
"Makes my skin itch when someone calls me my name and I don't know theirs."
There's a pause. The wind whistles. Snow drifts across the roof, powdery and fine. Peter represses a shiver.
"That was your cue to tell me your name, weirdo."
Peter laughs. He can't help it. "Not really something I do," he tells him, then finally takes stock of the massive gun Frank Castle has set up. "You are not shooting the Scorpion," he says seriously.
"Yeah? And why the fuck not?"
"That's not justice, that's just playing judge, jury, and executioner."
Frank Castle makes a bemused noise, and gestures to the skull on his bullet-proof vest. "I don't know how long you've been swinging around, but you do know who I am, right? It's in the name, asshole. Punisher. I serve my own justice."
"Not sure I can agree with that, sir."
"You sound just like Red," The Punisher grumbles. "Next thing I know, you'll be quoting Thurgood Marshall at me."
Peter frowns. "Who?"
The Punisher doesn't really get a chance to explain. The next second, the Scorpion is whipping his tail out, and it's all action after that. Peter manages to keep the Punisher from dealing any lethal blows. The Scorpion gets away. The Punisher screams curses at him that ring in Peter's ears long after he gets back to his apartment.
He's still cold.
Today's flowers are roses. Peter had only gotten to the bodega right before closing, with his hectic work schedule and his even worse sleep schedule nearly stopping him from getting around to it at all. But he'd managed, and now he's at Aunt May's grave, already wilting roses in hand, not knowing what to say.
"I think I'm gonna buy a rotisserie chicken," he says dumbly, on his knees in the cold dirt, feeling like crying. "I gotta eat more protein. You'd be mad at me for my diet. It's awful, really. Mostly takeout pizza and coffee."
Peter imagines Aunt May shaking her head fondly and telling him to work in some fiber.
"You're right," he says quietly. "I'll, um… I'll check out a smoothie place nearby. See if they can put some extra fiber in a berry smoothie or something. That should do the trick, right?"
Aunt May's grave is a slab of stone in a quiet cemetery, and Peter is alone.
"Right," he whispers, closing his eyes and allowing himself a moment of grief. "I love you. I'll see you soon."
He kisses her gravestone. His hands are shaking. His whole body is cold. He has a headache.
The smoothie was an awful idea. Drinking it just makes him colder. He struggles to get warm the whole rest of the day, even piled under blankets on his couch, even while cradling a hot water bottle and drinking hot soup and pumping the heater as high as it will go.
E.V. tells him that his arachnid hormones are elevated. He ignores her.
He catches the Scorpion. It's cold and his bones ache and he's already taken four Advils today for a headache, but he manages it. He catches the Scorpion.
"Good work, Spider-Man," says Officer DeWolff, who he's been working with for a couple months now.
"I should've pinned him down sooner," is all Peter can think to say back.
"Hey," DeWolff says firmly. "Don't be so tough on yourself. We got him in custody now, with everything we need to lock him up, and between the two of us, we've managed to minimize his damages to both people's lives and their property. Take some time to rest now. Don't think I haven't noticed how often you're on patrol. You know, I think I take more time off than you do, which if you ask my husband, you'll know that's pretty hard to beat."
Peter allows himself a small laugh. "I'll be alright, Officer," he assures her, and swings away.
He does rest. He cuddles a hot water bottle, drinks some chicken noodle soup, and even nods off for a few hours of sleep before E.V. alerts him to an armed robbery in a residential area, and then he's off swinging again.
"Hi, Frank," Peter greets, grinning under the mask as The Punisher flinches.
"Jesus Christ, Spidey, you gotta stop sneaking up on people like that. And I told you. It's Punisher, unless you're gonna tell me your name."
"Can't do that, Frank," Peter chirps, somersaulting onto the ground. "Not breaking policy for you, even if I did save your life in Staten Island."
There's a lot less talking after that, as both of them focus their attention on the off-the-rails construction worker that they're both trying to nail down before he causes real damage. A few minutes into the struggle, though, The Punisher finds a moment to keep prodding Peter for information.
"You're telling me no one knows your name?" Frank Castle asks in between dodging projectiles.
"Nobody!" Peter shouts back, and springs to his right to avoid getting clobbered by a slab of concrete. "Hey, buddy, slow down with the heavy machinery! I just wanna talk!"
The man (somewhere in his 40s, stocky build, seems to be a construction worker who got in over his head) just screams something incoherent and continues using what looks like enhanced mech gloves to throw rubble at Peter and Frank. Tonight's flavor of crime has already managed to do some serious damage to a parking garage, and is moving closer to new apartment complexes, which Peter wants to avoid.
"Speak for yourself," grumbles The Punisher, and before Peter can even blink, Frank Castle has his rifle pointed at the construction worker's head and fires.
His brains paint the wall behind him bright red. Peter groans.
"Seriously, man?" he exclaims, hopping off the wall he was perched on to get in The Punisher's face. "He's a first-time offender, doesn't have a record or a history of violence, he probably just got carried away with machinery he doesn't know the first thing about handling, we could've talked to him!"
"Aw, bullshit, twinkle toes," Frank Castle grumbles, setting down his heavy gun and walking closer to the now-dead criminal. "I've been following this guy for a few weeks. He's been hanging around all the wrong types, small scale dealers and whatnot, never really doing more than toeing the line out in the big wide world, but he sure doesn't have a problem getting violent at home."
"What do you mean?"
The Punisher reaches the man's body, and removes the mech gloves from his hands, tossing them aside.
"Thought he was just a regular old wife beater," The Punisher says darkly. "Then I started paying closer attention to what he was buying off the streets. High-grade sedatives. Knocks you out physically, keeps you aware mentally. Did some online digging and I found a bunch of videos of him drugging his old lady up doing whatever the fuck he wants to her. Sick fuck has a bit of a following. I was gonna pop him off tonight anyway. Can't deal with his type. I already made quick work of the shitfuckers he was getting the drugs from, so he hasn't had his supply for a while. But I suppose he'd had enough of feeling like a small man, needed something else do to make himself feel big now he can't rape his wife the way he likes, wanted to throw his weight around, and decided to get ahold of some tech he shouldn't be touching, and now we're here. Christ."
Peter feels woozy. "Woah," he says stupidly. "I… I didn't know any of that. Still, I mean… Even rapists deserve a fair trial. And from what you said, there was a bunch of incriminating stuff online, for those who knew where to look, so why—"
"Don't ask me why I do what I do," The Punisher interrupts, hauling the now-dead assailant over his shoulder like he weighs nothing. "I make my own goddamn decisions. Not gonna have you nit-picking my process. Now do you wanna help me clean some of this up, or are we just gonna leave it to the poor fucks who get paid less than nothing to keep everything tidy around here?"
"Sure," Peter says, and spends the rest of the night tidying up the parking garage with The Punisher.
"Alien shit," Frank Castle mutters as they put the enhanced mech gloves back where they should have been.
"You have no idea," Peter says offhandedly, and then laughs at The Punisher's quizzical look, saluting him as he jumps off a ledge and swings back to his apartment.
He uses E.V.'s facial recognition tech to scan the internet for the man The Punisher shot—the rapist with the out-of-control violent tendances, who apparently had flown under Peter's own radar for ages. E.V. comes up with nothing besides all the regular stuff (name, driver's license, work address, home address), and for a second Peter thinks that The Punisher might've been making it all up, but then it occurs to him.
"E.V., just hold for a second, okay?" Peter says, scrambling for his closet, where he keeps clunky old computers, laptops with keys missing and phones without SIM cards for this exact purpose. "I'm gonna copy you and then download you onto the dark web to do some looking. Don't worry, it won't be permanent, I just gotta check something."
The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes—ten minutes to get onto the dark web on a different computer, half a second to plug E.V. in, another two for her to sweep the whole thing, and then three minutes for Peter to click through all the damning evidence, the exact videos that The Punisher had been referencing in the parking garage.
"P̶̣̈́̔͑͒͛̐e̴̯̞̠̻̗̥̯̦̤̥̙̓̀͂͛̽̉͊̈́͝t̸̡̨͔̩̖͎̼́͊̿̆̕ȩ̶͉͚͓̬̩̳̻̔͒̃̃ŗ̵̢̮͇̙̝̞͑͊̕͝,̸̲̠͍͈͙̒̃̌̀̋͂̑̉̈́̽̕͘͜ ̵̹͕́̈́̊̒͠I̵̪̦̬̲͒̈́͋̀͐͂͠—" E.V. says, her voice garbled, and Peter quickly yanks the USB out of the computer just as she's getting corrupted, and melts it down as well as the computer he'd used to get onto the dark web in the first place.
"Oh, God," Peter whispers, covers his face with his hands, and has to watch hours of cat videos to calm his nervous system enough to get on with the rest of his day.
He ends up getting The Punisher a thank you card from the bodega, and scribbles a note in it.
I double-checked your intel on our perp from the other night. Nasty stuff. He was an awful dude, still don't think you should've killed him, but I understand why you did it. Here's some ramen to make up for all the times I've been a pain in your butt. Xoxo Spider-Man
Thanks to E.V. being live in all the security cameras in the city, it's easy for Peter to find The Punisher's boat hideout and web his way to it the next night to drop off the note and deluxe pack of ramen. He leaves it on The Punisher's doorstep and giggles to himself as he swings away.
And if he spends the next three nights perched on the rooftop of the woman who was the victim of all that man's awfulness, listening for sounds of disturbance, keeping watch over her while she slept, well, there's no one to tell him that he's being paranoid or overprotective, and there's no one to tell him that he could've just knocked on her door and asked her how she's doing either.
Time flies past. He doesn't realize that it's Tuesday and he'd missed Children's Hour until he's walking down the street (as Peter Parker—his suit is in the washing machine back at his apartment) and Santiago stops him.
"Hey, Peter," he says, lifting a hand in greeting. "I was looking out for you today at story time. Was sad to see you couldn't make it. Everything okay?"
Peter looks around, half expecting Santiago to be speaking to a different Peter, still not used to anyone knowing his name or recognizing him enough to start a conversation with him.
"I, uh, just got behind on some chores," Peter stutters, and it's half true.
He'd deep cleaned the apartment today. It had started to smell overwhelmingly like blood and aged food and socks, and it's not like Peter needs to keep the place clean for visitors, but E.V. had been making quite a few pointed comments about the mental health effects of living in a dirty space, so, with crime quiet, he took the day to dust and mop and bleach and vacuum and even put in an air freshener that smells like lavender.
He had also been so tired that even if he had remembered it was Tuesday, it wouldn't have mattered, because he'd only woken up at noon after stumbling into bed somewhere around five in the morning.
"Well, I hope to see you next week," Santiago says kindly. "Have you given any more thought to volunteering at the library?"
Peter has not. If he's honest, he'd completely forgotten about it. There's not a lot of room in his life for thinking about anything beyond keeping himself alive and keeping other people alive.
"I don't know if I'd be able to," he admits. "I'm really sorry."
"Hey, it's all good, just thought you'd be the sort of guy to go for it, that's all."
Peter looks down at his feet. For some reason, he hasn't dashed away yet. It's strange, seeing Santiago outside of work like this. It's even stranger that Peter's outside of his apartment for non-crime fighting related reasons. He thinks, vaguely, that he'd been meaning to do a bit of clothes shopping. He needs to get some better sweaters. The ones he has now aren't holding heat well enough.
"Hey, you doing anything?" Santiago asks suddenly.
"Uh…" Peter looks up sharply. "Like… right now?"
"Yeah, man, like right now. I'm walking to the bar to meet some old friends for a drink. You wanna tag along?"
"I'm… I mean, I'm grateful for the offer, but I don't want to impose."
Santiago shrugs. "Wouldn't be an imposition. We usually just play trivia and shoot the shit. We've known each other since high school, all of us are in different places in life, we just like to keep the connection alive, y'know? It would be nice to have a newbie. It would stop us all from rehashing the same old bullshit we've been stuck on since the 80s."
He laughs, and Peter feels a pit forming in his stomach.
I had friends in high school, he thinks. Well. Two friends. Two really good friends. But they don't remember me. No one remembers me.
He thinks of spending a night around Santiago and his high school buddies, thinks of a whole night being reminded of everything he lost, and has to stop himself from turning and vomiting into a nearby trash can.
"I can't come, I'm sorry, but I'll see you around," Peter says with a forced smile, and walks as fast as he can away from Santiago and his kind smile and free invitations.
There's a shoot out in front of the Department of Damage Control building. Peter's here to mitigate damages and casualties, and be support for the NYPD, who'd known there was going to be a disturbance here and had been planning out their defense for a few days.
"Hey, Spider-Nuts!" a voice shouts.
Peter glances to the side and sees Frank Castle reloading his gun. He smiles at the sight of him, not knowing why he's here, but happy to see him. The Punisher always seems to be on some sort of solo mission. Maybe he's got a personal vendetta against somebody here.
"Hi, Frank!" Peter calls back.
"Listen, I don't need you nannying me, okay? Your little present scared the shit out of me. How the fuck do you know where I live anyway?"
"I got eyes everywhere," Peter teases, and laughs his way away as he slings webs down the barrel of someone's semi-automatic.
"I don't even like ramen!" The Punisher shouts, and that's the end of their conversation, as both of them get too wrapped up in the action to do anything else.
"Everyone okay?" Peter asks Officer DeWolff once the smoke has cleared.
She nods, wiping sweat off of her brow. "Minimal casualties, thanks to your help. We've rounded up the perps. A few got away, but we have officers tailing them now, and enough information to make an arrest the minute they pop up somewhere they shouldn't be. Hey, let me ask you something. You buddy-buddy with The Punisher now?"
"I don't think he'd agree with us being called buddies," Peter quips, laughing a little in that tired way he always does after a fight. "I saved his butt in Staten Island a little while ago. We were both there breaking up a drug ring, and he nearly got shot between the eyes. I pulled him out of the way, we've ran into each other a few more times on the job, and now he finds fun little pet names to call me in the field and I've made a game of sending him presents."
DeWolff sighs. "Careful who you mess around with, Spider-Man. The feds cleared him years ago for some work he did with them, so he's not technically on our radar, but I don't think you and I agree with his methods. Far from it for me to tell you what to do, but just be careful, alright?"
"You got it, Officer."
"Oh, and Spider-Man?" DeWolff levels a serious look at him. "How are those headaches of yours?"
"You know me, Officer. My best friend is a bottle of Advil."
"You need to rest, Spider-Man."
"Yes, Officer," he dutifully replies, but isn't back an his apartment until the rest of the perps are caught and turned over into NYPD custody.
Nothing bad happens to the woman whose husband had been so awful to her. She gets nightmares, and doesn't sleep through the night most nights, but she's safe. She calls her sister when she gets so anxious she can't fall asleep. Peter listens to their conversations and hears her saying something about going to group counseling. The woman's sister tells her it's not her fault that she didn't leave her husband, it's not her fault that it went on so long, and it doesn't make her an awful person to be glad he's dead.
"The only thing that man ever gave you was trauma and a couple extra bucks a month for groceries," he overhears her sister say one night. "So what he got shot in the head busting up some shit at work? You don't have to mourn him just because you were married to him. Piss on his grave for all I care."
The woman laughs—a tearful laugh, but a laugh nonetheless, and for an awful moment, Peter's jealous of her.
She has someone to talk to. Someone who knows her, loves her, who can comfort her when the whole world feels like it's falling apart.
Peter has no one.
But it's so outrageously unfair of him to think that, even for a second, and that's the night when he puts an end to it. He scuttles down the fire escape, knocks on her window when he hears she's gotten off of the phone, and admits to her that he's been keeping an eye on her for the last few nights, that he was there when her husband died, that he feels awful about monitoring her like this but he just wanted to make sure she was okay.
And, to his surprise, she drags him in for a hug.
"Thank you, Spider-Man," she whispers into his neck, and he hugs her back, thinking to himself that it had been literal months since he'd been hugged, and how messed up is it that it's her comforting him, after all the awful things she's just been through.
"Just doing my job, ma'am," he says awkwardly, and wishes her well before swinging away.
It's impossible to find sleep after that. He lies in bed twitching, feeling the ghost of her hug across his arms and back, remembering all the times MJ had hugged him, Aunt May had hugged him, Ned had hugged him, heck, all the times Mr Stark had ruffled his hair, all the times one of the Avengers had looked at him with a fond grin and called him kiddo, all the tiny moments of affection that he'd taken for granted when he had them, but would do anything to get back now.
It's daisies today. Simple flowers, but Peter knows Aunt May would have appreciated them. She appreciated everything he did for her, no matter how small. He closes his eyes, kneels at her grave, and remembers her hugging him tight and kissing his forehead, calling him her special boy.
"I'm so lonely, Aunt May," he lets himself admit to the cold air. "I can't fix it, though. I can't let anyone in. I can't hurt anyone else. I can't. It's because of me that you died. I won't have anyone else get hurt like that. I won't."
He kisses her grave.
"I love you," he says to a slab of concrete that can't respond, and leaves.
He spends the rest of the evening eating grilled cheese and tomato soup, watching a shitty reality TV show and focusing on his breathing. E.V. tells him that recent body scans have shown an uptick in lower back muscle strain, and he should incorporate more stretches into his pre-work routine. He falls asleep for about half an hour and is woken up by the crime alert telling him there's something hectic going down in the financial district. He barely takes a second to think before suiting up and swinging away.
Later that evening, he's perched on a roof and his phone buzzes with an Instagram notification. If he cries watching Ned and MJ fool around in a lab after-hours, well, he's all alone at the top of a building, and no one else can see him break down.
I want a hug, he thinks, desperately, before the crime alert goes off again and he's back to work.
Peter might just be a weirdo. That might just be the reality of his life now.
Sure, he didn't accept Santiago's offer to join him at the bar with his friends, but he did ask E.V. to track where Santiago had gone to, and so he knew which bar it was that he might find him at, even though he hadn't gone when he'd been invited.
"This is the sort of thing stalkers do," Peter whispers to himself as he stuffs his hands deeper into the pockets of his winter jacket, hood over his head, earmuffs over his ears. "I'm a stalker. I'm a weirdo stalker with no friends, no life, nothing, and I'm so lonely that I'm—"
He stops himself. Half because he's entered the bar now, and half because he doesn't really know how to finish that sentence. What exactly is he doing?
He doesn't even know what he'd do if he found Santiago here. Would he go up to him? Talk?
"Hey, man," he says to the bartender, trying for a smile. "Can I just… Can I just get a glass of hot cider? And… maybe some breadsticks?"
The bartender raises his eyebrows. "What sorta place do you think we are?" he mutters. "Breadsticks, for fuck's sake..."
But ten minutes later, Peter is sitting at the bar counter, cradling his hot apple cider (correction: his hot spiked apple cider) and chewing on some stale breadsticks.
His eyes scan the bar. It's packed, shoulder to shoulder with people who are laughing and talking and arguing like regular people do. There's a pool table in the back. A group of people his age are playing. Does he know them? Did he go to high school with them? He doesn't know. Even if he did know, they wouldn't remember. He sips the hot cider and eats his breadsticks and tries to keep his breaths even. Santiago isn't here. For some reason, Peter doesn't leave.
He stays longer than he means to. There's a baseball game on the TV, and Peter doesn't really follow baseball, but there's a group of guys in their mid-30s cheering the game on, and the sound of their voices is comforting, in a way that mid-sized, happy crowds are soothing. He orders another hot cider. The bartender passes him a packet of potato chips as well, which Peter munches on automatically.
The night ticks on. He keeps an ear out for a crime alert, but there is none. Outside, the wind is blowing, but there's no new snow flurries. It's a nice night, for New York standards.
"Wanna close your tab?" asks the bartender. "We close in half an hour."
"Uh, yeah," Peter stutters, and takes out the necessary cash to settle up.
Most other people are doing the same. Peter is about to get up and go back to his apartment for what might be his first full night of sleep in a while, and then he notices something.
A hunched figure at the end of the bar, previously obscured by the people, but now visible as everyone else is filtering out. Peter pauses and squints, then it clicks. That's Frank Castle, four empty bottles in front of him, his head nestled in the crook of his arm, his face turned towards the wall.
"This is so dumb," Peter whispers to himself, then bites the bullet and walks up.
He nudges The Punisher on the shoulder, hoping that would do the trick and wake him up. He's talking to himself, Peter realizes. The words are spoken so softly that no one else can hear, but being closer than he was before, and being lucky enough to have enhanced hearing, Peter catches what he's saying.
"Lisa, Lisa, Lisa," The Punisher whispers. "C'mon, baby, don't leave me. Don't go, not now. Please. Lisa, please. Just a little longer."
"Hey," Peter says as gently as he can, feeling awkward as all hell, and also very much like a creep. He nudges The Punisher on the shoulder again, and this time the man startles. "Hey, hey, you're okay," Peter says, hands in the air to show he's unarmed. "The bar's closing soon. I just thought I'd tell you before the staff kick you out."
The Punisher squints at him. "Who the fuck are you?" he asks in a voice that's ten times as hoarse as it usually is, which is a feat Peter is honestly impressed by.
"Peter," he replies, and boy, the cider must've done a number on him if he's letting his name slip so easily like that.
He almost flinches before he remembers—he's out of the suit. Of course he knows who The Punisher is, but The Punisher has no idea that Peter (the regular dude standing in front of him) is the same guy as Spider-Man (the masked vigilante who saved his butt in Staten Island).
"Who's Lisa?" Peter asks, then immediately regrets it as Frank Castle gets to his feet, glaring.
"Where'd you get that name?" he demands, crowding Peter against the bar counter.
Peter meets his gaze and replies as simply as possible. "I heard you talking to yourself. I was just wondering if you could call her, maybe she can help you get home safe?"
The Punisher has him very firmly backed into a corner. Of course, it's a corner Peter could get out of in a heartbeat if he wanted to, but not without risking exposing his identity, and truth be told, he's not feeling very threatened right now. The Punisher's breath smells heavily of whatever beer he was drinking, and his eyes are bloodshot. He looks tired. Boy, Peter sure can relate to that.
"Lisa's my kid," The Punisher answers eventually, and steps back. "Was. Was my kid. She's been dead a while." He pauses and then covers his face with his hands. "Shit. Gonna have to kill you now."
Peter laughs. "Why?"
"No one knows about her. No one's allowed to know." The Punisher's words are slurred, and his hands are still covering his face. "My business, ain't it? She's my girl. Was my girl. My baby."
"Hey, my lips are sealed," Peter promises, miming zipping his lips and throwing away the key. "Still wanna know if you have someone who can get you back home safe."
"Do I look like I can't take care of myself?" snaps The Punisher.
Peter flicks his eyes up and down The Punisher's figure, making it very obvious that he's looking, and grins when The Punisher rolls his eyes. It's fun teasing someone like this. He hasn't had this kind of fun in ages.
"I'm more worried about you being taken out by a nasty patch of black ice than a mugger," he quips.
"Yeah, yeah," The Punisher mumbles, grabbing some crumbled up cash out of his jean pocket and slamming it down on the counter. "Do yourself a favor and leave me alone. I don't need some kid following me home making sure I don't pull out my back or something."
"I'm twenty-two, I'm not a kid," Peter scoffs, but doesn't put up a fight when The Punisher pushes past him to the door.
"You're one ballsy motherfucker," says the bartender, watching The Punisher walk away. "You know who that guy is, right?"
Peter feigns ignorance. "He a regular or something?" he asks innocently, and leaves the bar with a smile still on his face.
God, he's such a weirdo. But he's a weirdo who manages to sleep a full five hours once he gets back to his apartment, and that's something he hasn't managed in months, so maybe this whole going out and being around people thing is worth it. Frank Castle doesn't know him when he's out of the suit. The bartender and the guys in their mid-30s there for the baseball game certainly don't know him. It's safe enough, he decides. Not that he's going to do it again. But if wouldn't be the worst thing if he did.
Driver's license, social security card, birth certificate, passport, metro card, library card… Peter shoves all of his papers into a Ziploc baggie and tucks them safely into the inside pocket of his jacket. He doesn't know how many of these he actually needs, but he hasn't applied for a job or even thought about applying for a job in years (the fund he got left behind from Mr Stark being more than enough to cover his every day needs for at least another five years before he has to start panicking), so sue him, he's nervous.
He takes a deep breath.
"I can do this," he tells himself, and begins the walk to the library.
There's an older lady at the circulation desk when he walks in.
"Can I help you, sweetheart?" she asks, and it takes him a moment to gather his words before he can answer her question.
"I'm looking to volunteer for the children's reading hours," he blurts. "I've— I've been going to the Tuesday ones, the ones at 10am, and I talked to one of the workers on shift then, Santiago, and he said that I might be able to… to maybe volunteer for others? He mentioned a mother-baby reading hour on Monday mornings, I don't know if that's something you guys need volunteers for, or—"
"Slow down, honey," chides the woman. "You know libraries, we're always looking for volunteers." She turns around in her swivel chair and points to a shorter, younger woman behind the desk. "That over there is Freida, she's gonna take you to our office and we'll do a quick interview and then see some I.D., okay? Very simple, just like Santiago said."
"Thank you, thank you," Peter chants, and follows Freida to the back.
An hour later, he has a job.
"Hey there, stranger!" Santiago says happily when Peter shows up for his first reading circle, half an hour early with his crime alert put on silent.
It's Tuesday morning. The time Peter's usually there anyway. He's so nervous his skin is itching, but he lifts his hand in greeting and smiles back at Santiago, glad to see him.
"Hi," he says sheepishly. "I, uh. I decided to give the whole volunteering thing a shot."
"Well, I'm glad you did! We've got a few books picked out for this morning already, but feel free to add a few to the pile if you've got some favorites."
"Is- Is it okay if I add ones that have been read before?" Peter asks hesitantly, his hands fidgeting in his pockets. "The Gruffalo is one of my favorites, but that's already been read recently, or, well, I remember it being read, so it must've been recent, I'm not really sure."
"The Gruffalo is a big hit with everyone," Santiago assures him, smiling, though there's some worry in his eyes now. Oh God. What has Peter done? Has he slipped up already on the first day? "I'll go ahead and find that for you. Oh, and Peter?"
Peter gulps. "Y- Yes, Santiago, sir?"
"You okay, son?"
Peter blinks a few times. "Uh, yes," he says awkwardly. "Why… Why wouldn't I be?"
Santiago reaches up and taps his own collarbone, right below his neck. Peter frowns, and reflects the motion on his own collarbone, and then realizes.
"Oh!" he exclaims, laughing a little. "Oh, yeah, I, uh, I took a tumble the other day, you know New York apartments and their shitty stairwells. I'm okay, just a bit banged up. I'll, uh. I'll tighten my hoodie so the kids don't see. Thanks for checking in, sir, I appreciate it."
"It's all good, Peter," Santiago replies, still looking a little worried. "And no need for all this sir business. It's just Santiago. We're colleagues now, aren't we?"
"Yes, sir. Santiago. Sorry."
Peter feels like an idiot.
He pulls the drawstring of his nondescript navy-blue hoodie tighter, so it's a bit snug around his throat but will definitely cover the bruising on his collarbone. Peter wracks his memory to think about where it might've come from, and then remembers. Earlier this morning, he'd been putting a stop to some small-time mugging near the train station. The perp had been dealt with relatively easily, but managed to grab hold of a stray metal pipe and swing it hard into Peter's neck.
The bruising would fade within the next few hours. Heck, if it was a skirmish he'd gotten into the night before, the bruising would be gone already. Peter should've been more careful when he was changing out of the suit and into his plain clothes. He'll do better next time.
"Hi, everyone," he says nervously when the clock strikes 10am, feeling out of place in the armchair at the center of the reading circle. "We're gonna start today with The Gruffalo. Anyone know this story?"
Little hands shoot up in the air and little voices chirp excitedly.
He begins to read.
The words come out of his mouth on autopilot. He's reading the pages, pointing to the pictures, engaging the crowd, doing things that he forgot he was good at doing, while his brain feels like it's full of static and his body is suddenly very cold.
Every time he looks out at the gathered kids, he sees mothers, fathers, nannies, babysitters, sitting close to their kids, kissing their foreheads, helping them get to snacks and water bottles, whispering in their ears. Peter trips over his words when someone who looks like Aunt May pulls her boy, a kid of at most six years old, down into her lap and tickles his tummy.
He tries to focus on the book and the book alone when he reads Knuffle Bunny, the last book of the hour. It goes reasonably well. Then it's 11 o'clock, everyone's packing up, and Santiago is back at his side.
"You did well, Peter," he praises, and apparently that's all it takes for Peter to break down.
He hides his face in his hands, shoulders shaking and lips pursed shut to try muffle the sound of his sobs.
"Hey, hey, none of that, come here," Santiago says kindly, and draws him into a hug, still standing while Peter is sitting, so Peter's face comes to rest against Santiago's middle. "What's up, Peter? What's going on?"
"My aunt died pretty recently," he hiccups, holding on tight to Santiago and feeling like a parasite. "Seeing the kids and their parents—I never really knew my parents. My aunt was all I had, and now she's gone, and I'm alone, and…"
"Peter, I'm so sorry."
"It's okay, I'm okay, I just— Seeing the kids, it just—"
"Let it out, Peter, I'm right here."
He cries into Santiago for way too long, and only stops because his phone buzzes in his pocket. He sniffs and reaches to see what it is. Armed robbery two miles away. Two injured already. Shit.
"I gotta go," Peter says quickly, detangling himself from Santiago and getting up. "Thank you, I really appreciate it, but I gotta go. I've been gone too long. I'll— I'll see you the next time I'm schedule to read."
"Peter, wait!" Santiago calls, but Peter's already out the door.
He can't get to sleep.
He's exhausted, and he knows he has to sleep, but he can't. He's so cold. He's hugging a hot water bottle, is covered in five blankets, is wearing multiple layers of clothes, and he's still so, so cold. He's asked E.V. to check the internal temperature of the apartment about twelve times since getting into bed. Every time, she replies that the temperature is normal, and asks if he wants to hear more about how spiders keep themselves warm in the winter. He declines. He's a human being, he's warm-blooded, this shouldn't be a problem, it really shouldn't.
He's about to finally drift off when he feels arms around him and flinches upright.
There's no one in his apartment except himself. But Peter closes his eyes and he can feel the memory of Santiago holding him, the kind library worker who has no idea what he was doing when he reached out to Peter and offered for him to read at Children's Hour.
How long has it been since he's been held?
Far too long, it seems.
"E.V., can you play some white noise?" Peter asks, and forces himself to lie still under the blankets, all his thoughts drowned out by white noise until he finally, finally gets to sleep, only to wake up four hours later as his crime alert goes ballistic.
"You're late, Spidey," says The Punisher as Peter swings onto the scene. The corporate asshole that Peter has been tracking down and meaning to put behind bars tonight is lying dead at his feet. "I would've thought this would be your idea of a good time, not mine, but here we are. What were you doing, grabbing a drink with your girlfriend and got too distracted to show up to a drug bust?"
"I don't have a girlfriend," Peter snarks back. "And I meant to be here a while ago, I just slipped."
Frank Castle raises his eyebrows. "Slipped?"
"Yeah. It's not as easy web-slinging around the city when everything is coated in ice."
"You poor little spider," The Punisher mocks, laughing. "You've been slinging around an icy NYC for years, what happened tonight? You sleep deprived or something?"
"Yeah," Peter sighs, sinking to his haunches as he watched Frank Castle do his usual post-killing spree clean up. "Haven't slept right in ages."
He thought it might be weird, seeing Frank Castle out in the field after running into him at the bar, and maybe it might've been, but Peter's too tired to feel anything except exhausted, and any awkwardness or weirdness that might have been there isn't. And besides. There's a mask separating him and The Punisher. Peter knows they met at the bar as civilians, not as crime-fighters, but The Punisher doesn't. Nothing's changed. They're still two guys trying to keep NYC crime free, albeit in two very different ways.
"Well, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, maybe you should invest in some melatonin," The Punisher says, with a sarcastic bite.
"Maybe you should invest in minding your own damn business," Peter bites right back.
Frank Castle laughs again. "Funny," he says, tucking his gun back into its holster. "You're funny, aren't you? See you around, Spidey."
"Bye, Frank," Peter chirps back, and ignores The Punisher when he flips him off, webbing away to where someone's cat is stuck in a tree.
"Hi, Peter," Santiago says as Peter walks into the reading room.
"Hi," Peter mumbles, hiding his face shamefully.
It's Monday morning. Just before 8am, to be specific. He's been scheduled for the mother-baby reading circle, and part of him hoped that Santiago wouldn't be here, just so that he wouldn't have to face him after his embarrassing breakdown last week.
"You, um. You've got something, right here."
Peter looks up, wide eyed, and sees Santiago gesturing to his cheekbone. Oh. Shit. He thought the bruising would have disappeared by now, but it seems not.
"It's nothing, I just walked into a wall," Peter is quick to reassure, and reaches into his coat pocket for concealer. He's started carrying it around on him. It's been a while since he's had a public facing job that didn't allow him to hide behind a mask. "I'll just go to the bathroom quickly and cover that up."
"Hey, Peter, before you do, can we talk for a sec?"
Peter fidgets, but nods. Santiago takes a step closer slowly, like he's worried Peter will bolt.
"I'm sure you're not feeling too good about breaking down last week," Santiago starts, practically reading Peter's mind, "but I just want you to know that you have nothing to be ashamed of. Grief is grief, no matter how much time has passed."
Peter meets Santiago's brown eyes, sees the gray in Santiago's hair and stubble, and nods.
"Thanks," he whispers, then gestures to the bathroom. "I'll be right back."
He decides he likes reading to the very tiny children more than he likes reading to the older kids. They probably don't grasp most of the stories he reads, but they babble to themselves and chew on their own clothes and look at him with big eyes that know nothing about the cruelties of the world. The mothers are tired and too focused on their babies to look at him. It feels like he's having a little conversation with every little baby bundle in the room.
He reads The Gruffalo twice. Santiago watches him from the back of the room and smiles. Knowing how much he's hiding from the man, Peter can't manage to smile back.
Marigolds in hand, Peter approaches Aunt May's grave.
"Hi," he says, kneeling on the ground. He sets the flowers down and kisses her gravestone. "I've got a job now. Kinda. It's a volunteer thing, at the library. It's got me thinking. What was I like as a baby?"
Aunt May's grave offers nothing. Peter smiles to himself, already emotional.
"I don't remember where you put my baby photos," he admits, wrapping his arms around himself. "I don't even know if you had any baby photos of me, or if those were all lost with Mom and Dad. But there are some adorable babies at reading circle. Some of them have little Spider-Man onesies on. It's pretty cute."
He breathes out, and watches his breath cloud in the cold air.
"I miss you," he whispers to the grave, and leaves the cemetery.
Peter's not that familiar with the NYC night scene. Well, the night scene that most people think of. His night scene is in dark alleyways and parking garages and hideouts and lookout spots. Tonight, he's trying to cosplay as an actual person, and looking for somewhere to go where, y'know, regular people in their early 20s might be.
He's looking for a club.
He has absolutely no idea where to start.
He's just gotten off the job. He'd stopped an attempted assault, delivered the perp to the station, and got the victim to the hospital for a routine check just to make sure nothing had happened before he got there. After the job was done, he'd slung back to his apartment, shed his suit, and tried to go to sleep, but. Well. That clearly hadn't happened.
So here he is, walking the streets, wrapped tight in his winter jacket, hands shoved into his pockets and eyes darting everywhere, nervous and paranoid and not really knowing what he's doing.
He walks into a place with strobing lights and loud music and immediately walks out, too frightened to know what to do with himself. Seeing the people dancing and talking and flirting, pressed up so close together, so friendly, so familiar—it just reminds him how alone he is.
"This is a stupid idea," Peter whispers to himself as he keeps walking, but what's the other option? Going back to his apartment, trying to fall asleep, only to end up laying awake staring at the ceiling for far too long, until the crime alert goes off and Officer DeWolff is chiding him about his poor sleeping habits again?
Just a few more bars. Just to see if he really hates it. Then he'll go back to his place and try to sleep.
He tries another place, again with bright lights and thumping music, and even gets so far as ordering a drink, but has to leave as soon as he gets a whiff of a woman's perfume, and it smells so much like something Aunt May used to wear that he has to leave before he throws up.
There are too many memories. Far, far too many, and Peter is so alone, but he knows if he goes back to his place now, he won't sleep and he'll just be miserable, so he pushes on.
He ends up at some place where classic rock is blaring from the speakers, the crowd is older, and though it's packed shoulder to shoulder, no one there is overly touchy and no one smells like someone he once knew, so he goes up to the counter and asks for hot cider and a bag of chips, and finds a spot towards the end of the counter to sit and sip away.
The bell over the door rings, and Peter only hears it because he's still a paranoid little spider who has to keep an eye on the exits and entryways at all times, but he's pleasantly surprised when he sees who walks in.
"Hey," he says, leaning over to the bartender. "See that guy over there? Whatever he orders, put it on my tab."
"You're one crazy motherfucker," the bartender sighs, but walks over to where The Punisher has sat himself down anyway, and seems to do what Peter asked.
It takes a moment for Frank Castle to realize what's going on, and when he does, he lifts his gaze, finds Peter amongst the crowd, and narrows his eyes. Peter lifts a hand in an awkward greeting. The Punisher gets up from his seat at the counter and begins to walk Peter's way.
Peter feels the barrel of The Punisher's gun against his back before he hears his voice.
"Who the fuck are you, and why are you following me?" The Punisher growls in his ear.
"Hi," Peter says, trying not to squirm. "I'm Peter, from the bar the other day, remember? Just wanted to extend some goodwill. Buy you a drink as a congratulations for getting home without slipping on black ice. Um, could you please put your gun away? I'm pretty attached to my kidneys and you're dangerously close to blowing them out of my body."
The Punisher grunts, but the gun goes away, which Peter is grateful for. It doesn't mean he goes away. Far from it, he actually sits down right next to Peter, his thigh pressed up against Peter's, his elbows on the bar as he gestures for the bartender to bring him his drink.
"So," The Punisher says, slow and drawn out, raking his eyes over Peter's body in a way that makes him shiver. "You've got my attention. Now what?"
"Literally just wanted to do a nice thing for a guy I thought was gonna break his neck on the way home, but sure, okay, let's make it a whole thing," Peter mutters into his own drink, sipping the hot cider and hoping his awkwardness isn't too obvious.
It's been so long since he talked to a person as himself. Sure, there's Santiago, and the guy at the bodega he buys most of his food and flowers from, but that's… transactional. Mostly. This is Frank Castle, in a bar, his thigh pressed up against Peter's, his leg hot through the denim, and wow, okay, Peter really must be touch-starved if he's noticing that.
"You're fucking weird, kid," Frank says bluntly.
Peter barks out a laugh. "People have said that, yeah. Look, I mean it, I just wanted to do a nice thing. If you're meeting people here or just want some alone time, I won't keep you."
Frank narrows his eyes, then looks somewhere over his shoulder. "You said you were twenty-two the other night," he recalls, and Peter's honestly surprised that he's able to remember, given how much he'd drank. "Are twenty-two year olds old enough to know how to play pool, or do you young people just… play Candy Crush or some shit?"
"Oh my god, I'm not a baby, of course I know how to play pool," Peter scoffs. "What, you challenging me?"
"I could use the ego boost," Frank says, getting up from the bar counter. "Best outta three. I'll give you a fighting chance."
Peter rolls his eyes, following him. "I'm gonna kick your butt so bad, you have no idea."
"We'll see, kid, we'll see."
Peter does kick his butt. It really does help that pool is basically just trigonometry, and the spidey senses are a wonder at helping him know how much pressure he's gotta put on the 8-ball to make some magic happen.
"Filthy cheat," Frank says, shaking his head and walking away, but Peter knows he's smiling, and, by some miracle, Peter finds himself smiling too.
Peter is sitting on a park bench, suited up, taking a break from patrol to… Well, to scroll through Ned's Instagram. And to rewatch his latest story about a million times. Official Spider-Man business, of course.
Ned and MJ are at a small bakery in Massachusetts. They're laughing, and MJ has frosting all over her face. There's no words, just laughing, and the chatter of the people in the bakery, and the soft piano music in the background. Peter can almost smell the sugar of the buttercream frosting, feel MJ's hair bushing against his face and Ned's hand clapping him on the back. He aches for their touch so badly he feels like he's going to crawl out of his skin. It hurts him every time he replays it, but he can't stop. He keeps watching their smiling faces, their bodies leaning into each other, their easy friendliness.
Voices interrupt his doomscrolling.
"Just leave me alone!" he hears someone say.
"Babe, please, just hear me out!" shouts someone else.
"No! I've said no, just let me go!"
Peter pulls the mask secure over his head and tucks his phone away. "Hey!" he calls, approaching the two. "Hey, what's going on?"
"Oh, hi Spider-Man!" says the guy who'd been told to go away. "I didn't realize you hung out here."
"Well, I was in the neighborhood," Peter jokes half-heartedly, then looks at the lady that this guy had been talking to, sees her arms are crossed over her body and she's shying away, and realizes he's got to get a handle on this. "Hey, how about you and I just talk for a bit? I think she wants to get home."
"No, no, we're all good, we were just talking," the guy says with a forced laugh.
"No, seriously, you and I can chat, and she can go home," Peter says again, a little more forcefully, stepping towards the guy and putting a hand on his shoulder. He looks back at the lady and gives her a thumbs up. She gives him a thumbs up back and quickly walks away. "Here, let's sit down, alright? Let's talk."
The guy sits down heavily, and Peter sits down next to him. As soon as they're sitting, the guy buries his head in his hands and lets out a sob.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," he gasps. "She's the first person I ever really loved, and now she's saying that she wants to break up, but I don't understand! We're in love, we've been in love!" He takes in a deep breath. "I love her, Spider-Man."
Oh, boy.
"I get it, I get it," Peter tries, patting the guy on the back. "Sometimes… Sometimes the people we love don't love us back, though. Sometimes the direction their lives are going is different from the direction our lives are going, you know?"
The guy shakes his head. "It doesn't make sense," he says sadly. "This just came out of nowhere, we were so happy, and now she… I don't know. There's another guy, there has to be another guy. She's been hanging out with this friend of hers a lot recently—hey, have you seen them together?"
"Dude, I'm gonna be real with you, I don't think it matters why she wants to break up," Peter says honestly. "She's choosing to end the relationship, and if you love her, you've gotta respect that choice. I know it hurts." He takes a deep breath. "Trust me," he continues, "I know how much it hurts to lose someone you love. It hurts a lot right now, I know it does. But the best thing you can do is let her go."
The guy doesn't seem to get it. He's shaking his head, looking up to the night sky, still crying. "We loved each other," he keeps saying. "We loved each other. How can this happen when you love each other?"
Peter sighs. "I don't know, man. I really don't know. Let me walk you home, okay? Have you had something to eat? Want to stop somewhere and get some fried rice or something?"
"She broke up with me over dinner," the guy says miserably. Oh, shit.
"Come on, dude," Peter says as gently as possible. "Let's get you home."
He walks the guy three blocks to his apartment, even goes up the elevator with him just to make sure he actually goes back home and doesn't end up chasing his ex down or something crazy.
The guy has photos of his ex all over his apartment. Peter asks for permission, and once he has it, starts taking them all down. He puts them in a pile on the guy's desk, not throwing them out, but at least saving him the heartbreak of having to tear them off the walls himself.
"Are you ever lonely?" the guy asks after Peter's peeled the last of their beach trip photos off the cabinets.
"Yeah," Peter answers honestly. "A lot of the time."
"Do you have a girlfriend?"
Why do people always want to ask me that? Peter thinks, and then replies, in as steady a voice as he can manage, "No. I did, but we're not together anymore. We, um… Our relationship ended four years ago."
"Oh."
The guy is sitting on his couch now, beer in hand, watching Peter as he moves around his apartment. This is so stupid. Why is Peter still here? Somewhere in his brain he's telling himself all he's doing is preventing a future tragedy—the guy seems normal, but hey, normal looking guys do crazy things like show up to their ex's house with a gun all the time, for all Peter knows this guy could be one bad day from doing something drastic.
But if he's being honest with himself, he's here for selfish reasons. He wants this guy to be okay. This… mildly messed up, probably a little bit clingy and toxic guy. Shit. He really is lonely.
"Did she break up with you too?" the guy asks after a long pause.
Peter decides this is a good place to end the interaction. "No, it was out of our control, the way it ended," he says vaguely, then winces, because the end of his relationship with MJ had definitely been within his control at least. "Listen, drink lots of water, get a good night's rest, and don't beat yourself up, okay man?"
"Spider-Man, am I a bad person?" the guy asks.
Peter throws his hands in the air. "Heck if I know," he says bluntly, then feels like a jerk, so smooths it over with, "Being a good person is a decision you make every day. Just keep trying, every day, and you'll be alright."
The guy, who Peter really should know the name of by now, after taking down most of the pictures on his walls, sighs and collapses further into the couch.
"Thanks, Spider-Man," he says morosely.
"Anytime, dude," Peter says, and jumps out the guy's window.
He can't really sleep that night. He keeps thinking about MJ, about her asking him to tell her he loves her the next time he sees her, how he wrote a whole letter that he keeps in a goddamn coffee cup in his desk explaining everything, but has never given it to her. He keeps thinking about how she had no choice in how things ended. He keeps thinking about it, the guilt and shame swirling around in his brain, until he tires himself out enough to catch a few hours of rest before the next crime alert goes off.
"Hey, Peter," Santiago says when he shows up to Children's Hour on Tuesday. "We've had a request from some regulars to read some Eric Carle today, so I've picked out a bunch of his classics and put them on the table for you. Oh, and thanks for filling in for Jess. I know it's short notice, but it's flu season, what can we say?"
"No problem," Peter says with a smile.
He's more relaxed today. He hasn't gotten shot at in a while, no one's slipped through his fingers while he's been on the job, and for once he doesn't have bruises blooming on his skin in obvious places. It's a good day. Or, well, it is so far.
The reading itself goes smoothly. After the Eric Carle selection, Peter moves to reading Puff the Magic Dragon. He remembers the song from when Aunt May sang it to him. He finds the rhythm and sings to the children, feeling flustered as some of them hum along.
"You've got a good voice," Santiago says after the hour's over.
"Thanks," Peter says bashfully. "Hey, why don't you ever do the reading?"
"I read chapter books to my kids at home all the time," Santiago says dryly. "I've gotta save my voice. My daughter has fallen head-first into those Warrior Cats books, and I swear, she has me reading ten chapters per night. If I read all the time at home and all the time at work, I'd have no voice left."
Peter laughs, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. He doesn't really know what to do now that the books have been put away and it's time to get ready for teen workshop.
Something occurs to him that hadn't before, something that he feels stupid for not noticing.
"Hey, it's a school day, right?" he asks, and Santiago nods. "Aren't most teens in school right now?"
"Teen workshop is for the kids in juvie," Santiago explains. "We set it up with the nearby criminal detention center a few years back. The kids, if they're good, get once a week field trips to the library for arts and crafts, reading, all that. Most of them are in there for petty things—things that they wouldn't be in for if their family situations were a little bit better, you get me? It's nice to see them just get to be kids for a while, instead of convicts. Some of them come back and volunteer for the library after their sentence is up. It's good to see."
"Yeah," Peter breathes, in awe, a bit, at the world around him. "Yeah, that's really awesome."
"Hey, Peter," Santiago starts, stepping a bit closer. "I never asked. You got anyone at home? It's me, my wife, and my two kids back at my place. My wife works crazy hours. I'm the one on kid duty most of the time. But you?"
And, that's his cue to go.
"I, uh, I just remembered, I have to go, uh, take the laundry out of the washing machine," Peter stutters, already backing up, headed for the door. "I'll see you on Monday!" he calls as he dashes away, leaving Santiago calling his name and wondering where he's off to.
Peter is gasping in an alleyway, his mask pushed up to his nose so he can chug some water that he'd snatched from a nearby bodega (and promised to pay for once he was bleeding a little less), his other hand holding tight to his belly, where he is bleeding a little more than he would like to be.
"Hey! Hey, where the fuck did you go, fruit loop?" calls The Punisher, because he'd been there when Peter caught the business end of The Hand's weapons, and for some reason he won't just let Peter crawl away to a dark corner to lick his wounds on his own, he has to chase him down.
"Fruit loop?" Peter coughs, unable to help himself. "C'mon, man, even Spider-Nuts is better than that one."
He just manages to pull the mask fully over his face by the time The Punisher comes skidding around the corner, zeroing in on where he is.
"Jesus Christ, you can't just take a katana to the gut and then swing away, you psycho," he mutters as he approaches Peter, sinking to the ground next to him, his hands immediately searching for the place where Peter's suit had tore.
"I'll be alright, I'll be alright," Peter's quick to say, shying away from The Punisher's grasp. "It grazed me, it didn't actually tear through muscle or anything. I just had to stop to drink some water before I went back to my apartment, it's nothing, really."
"It looks like a whole lotta something, I'll tell you that much. Just let me mop you up, okay?"
And now The Punisher has a wet wipe and disinfectant spray in his hands (where the heck did he get those from?) and Peter yelps as they make contact to the wound in his side.
"Ow, ow, ow!" he cries. "Christ, man, you maybe wanna warn a guy next time?"
"I did warn you. I said I was gonna mop you up, didn't I?"
"Oh, c'mon, Frank, don't be like that," Peter whines.
The Punisher raises his eyebrows and meets Peter's gaze. "What did I say about using my name when I don't know yours?" he reminds him.
"Not gonna call you Punisher, that's just weird, sounds like we're in a porno or something," Peter grumbles, and that gets a laugh out of Frank.
"You know, there are low-budget pornos of me and Daredevil?" Frank says, still chuckling to himself. "I got really drunk on Christmas one year and I watched all of them. They're so fucking awful, it's amazing. I sent them over to Red as a present, but I don't think he liked it much."
"I cannot believe I'm about to ask this," Peter sighs, "but who topped?"
Frank cackles. "Me, dickwad. You think Mister Catholic Guilt could unrepress himself long enough to top?"
"Yeah, but like, some straight guys think it's less gay to top than to bottom. Y'know. Because they're the ones doing the penetrating." Peter wrinkles his nose. "Okay, wow. Maybe I have lost a lot of blood. Why am I sitting in an alleyway talking to you about gay sex?"
"Beats me," Frank laughs, apparently done with his shoddy first aid job now, moving his hands away. "But I have to correct you. There is not a single universe, not one, where Daredevil is straight."
Peter frowns, sitting upright. "Really? But he's always so…"
"Stoic? Classic macho guy? Yeah. You should see that guy without the mask, fucking hell, it just gets so obvious when you can see his little facial tics. There's a specific crease in his eyebrows for when he's checking out a guy's ass, it's so perfect."
Frank stands, and offers Peter a hand. Peter takes it, and with Frank's help, pulls himself to his feet. He feels a bit better. The cut has already started to patch itself together—the blood vessels have clotted, the bleeding has stopped, and in an hour or so, it will have scabbed over.
"Thanks," Peter says awkwardly. "For, um. For the wet wipes. And for making sure I wasn't dead." His awkwardness abates in a split second, though, and he finds himself grinning. "You do still owe me from Staten Island," he teases, and laughs when Frank grunts.
"I don't owe you shit, Spider-Nuts," Frank grumbles, and turns away.
Peter's still laughing about it when he reaches his apartment.
The next day, he goes to the bodega and buys a thank you card and a box of chocolates.
Thanks for taking the tine to check on me the other day. I'm alright now, don't worry about little old me. Not that I'm entirely sure you'd worry anyway. Hey, if I'd died in that alleyway, would you have dumped my body into a trash compactor or something to protect my identity? Just asking! Xoxo Spider-Man
Peter swings by The Punisher's boat hideout and deposits his most recent gifts on the man's doorstep, giggling to himself as he swings away.
It'll be spring soon. Peter deeply, deeply hopes that it will be spring soon, because he can't take much more of the cold. It's seeped all the way into his bones, and he can't shake it, not when he's at the apartment, not when he's at the library, not when he's on patrol, not even when he's at some bar, hoping to see Frank and feeling stupid for hoping to run into a guy who would probably shoot him if given a good enough reason.
"Hey, E.V.?" he asks reluctantly.
"Yes, Peter?" she replies.
"Can you tell me about how spiders keep themselves warm in the winter?"
"Of course. Most spiders go dormant during the winter, reducing metabolism and movement, though not fully hibernating. Elevated levels of glycerol is present in hemolymph during colder months, but this only accounts for maintaining a degree worth of body temperature. Mostly, spiders will gain heat from the sun, basking in sun rays when possible. Would you like more information on specific species of spider, depending on region and size?"
"No, thanks," Peter sighs, rolling over and smushing his face into his pillow. "I just gotta get more hot water bottles and drink more hot chocolate, it seems."
"Would you like me to place an online order for more hot water bottles?"
"Yeah, thanks, that would be great. Oh, and more hot chocolate powder."
"Your checkings account currently has a balance of $104.96. Would you like to move money from your savings before completing this transaction?"
Peter groans. So much for a lazy day inside. It seems he has to attend to some banking.
Once he's on his computer, though, it's hard to stay focused. He finishes up his banking, and then finds himself navigating to LinkedIn, which is the only social media site that MJ actively keeps updated. She doesn't have an Instagram. It's smart of her not to put everything online. But it does mean he can't keep tabs on her as closely as he does on Ned.
He sounds like such a weirdo. He takes a deep breath and navigates to her profile. Michelle Jones, MIT Class of 2027. God, he misses her.
She's doing an internship with NASA this semester—he knows that already from snooping through her account a few days ago. But he clicks on the announcement anyway, reading what she'd written, looking at who else is taking the internship with her. He imagines a world where she still remembered him, where they might have celebrated her internship together, and gets so sad he has to close his computer screen.
He boils the kettle for more hot chocolate, still so cold it hurts.
"E.V., play some music, anything," he chokes out, and soft sounds of classic jazz fill the apartment.
He somehow manages to get a few hours of sleep on the couch. He wakes up to a sore neck, a sore back, and a sore heart, and decides that he should invest in a heated blanket.
It's a strange night on the job. Peter gets stabbed, for one, but not with a knife or anything, with a needle. He hates that. He rips the needle out quick enough, and manages to web the guy who stabbed him with it to a nearby wall, safe for the cops to collect later, but he still feels so weird.
"What the hell did he hit me with?" Peter mutters to himself.
He tries to swing back to his apartment, but the whole world spins and he decides that's not a great idea. So, he steps onto the bus instead, waving at the bus driver and the few others that are riding home so late at night, and lets the trip take twenty minutes longer than it usually would so he doesn't have to risk falling from a hundred feet up and snapping his own neck.
Once he gets a block away from his place, he's able to step out and websling up to his window, where he rolls onto the floor and peels off the suit.
His skin feels tingly. There's a dry feeling in his mouth. They probably hit him with a sedative or something, trying to knock him out. Ha. His super-powered metabolism will make quick work of whatever it is, he just needs to get some other things in his system to speed it up.
"E.V., where's The Punisher?" he asks between gasps for air, somehow managing to wriggle into some black jeans and an MIT sweatshirt.
After a quick sweep of surveillance cameras, E.V. reads off his location. Frank Castle is at a bar Peter hasn't been to yet, but not too far from here. It's a ten minute walk. Peter makes up his mind in an instant.
He's not gonna want to see you, idiot! screams the rational part of his brain, but something about whatever the guy stabbed him with is making the rational part of his brain pretty goddamn quiet, and he starts the walk anyway.
When he stumbles into the bar, he can't see Frank, not through the crowd of people, so he finds the tiniest sliver of empty space at the bar counter and sits down, trusting that Frank will find him. And it doesn't take long, if the sudden raising of hair along the back of his neck is anything to go by.
"How the fuck do we end up in the same bars so often?" Frank says from behind him, his breath hot against Peter's neck. "I mean, seriously, it's a pretty damn big city, and it's not like I'm picking the same spots every time. If I didn't know better, I'd—"
Whatever he was going to say is swallowed as Peter turns around to look at him.
"Shit," Frank whispers, suddenly very serious. "What the fuck happened to you?"
Peter blinks. "Hmm?"
"Your pupils are, like, taking up your entire eyeball right now, it's really freaking me out."
Peter opens his mouth to reply, and then quickly closes it. "I, uh," he manages, "I don't feel so good."
"Okay, yup, here we go, bathroom time," Frank mutters, practically lifting Peter up, hands under his armpits, and marches him off to the men's room, where Peter barely manages to find the toilet bowl before throwing up everything in his stomach.
"Shit," Peter gasps in between hurls. "Oh, God."
"Less talking, more vomitting. You gotta get whatever was in your system out of it, Peter."
Hearing his name out of Frank's mouth does something to his insides, but Peter doesn't have time to think about it very long before the next wave of nausea seizes him and he's vomiting even more, chunks of his chicken noodle soup swirling around in the toilet bowl.
"Okay, let's see," Frank mutters, patting down the pockets of his jacket while Peter lingers over the toilet bowl, waiting for more puke to come. "You're gonna pee on a stick, okay?"
"I'm not pregnant," Peter says hoarsely, then throws up again.
"Yeah, I kinda guessed as much, but you've definitely been drugged. C'mon, just humor me. Pee on the goddamn stick."
So Peter gets up, flushes the toilet, closes the door to stall, sits down, and pees on the stick.
"Yeah, you were roofied," Frank says in a strange voice while Peter is washing his hands. "GHB, it looks like. Fucking hell. Where were you before this?"
"Does it matter?" Peter asks, knowing how pathetic he sounds, even to his own ears. "Besides, why the hell do you walk around with drug kits in your pockets?"
"You have no idea how many times people try to slip things into my drinks," Frank grumbles, putting a firm hand on Peter's shoulder and steering him towards the door. "I've gotten used to just being prepared. C'mon, let's get you something to eat. They've actually got food here, can you believe that? Well, I say food, it's just some greasy grilled cheese, but it's good shit, I'll tell you. Here. Let's sit."
There's a baseball game on. Peter follows it while Frank goes off to get him some food, his head resting on his folded arms, his body slumped into the booth Frank had manhandled him into.
"Here, Peter," Frank says gruffly, sitting down right next to Peter, so close that their legs and arms are pressed up against each other. "Eat. And then when you finish that, I'll get you whatever shit they have on tap. We'll get you a good buzz to even out the bad one, alright?"
Peter hums, scarfing down his deliciously greasy grilled cheese. He feels Frank's hand come to rest on the back of his neck, heavy and comforting, and he leans into it.
When the food is gone, and he's drank his beer, Peter finds himself bending in Frank's direction. Before he knows it, his head is on Frank's shoulder and his body is turned in towards his, both arms slung around his middle, breathing in the smell of him. And he would feel awkward and strange about it, except Frank has an arm slung around him too, is muttering stuff about the baseball game under his breath while he keeps drinking his beer, and doesn't seem to want Peter to move, so he thinks it might be fine.
It takes him a while to realize what's making him feel so at ease. He isn't cold. The awful, awful coldness which has clung to his bones for so long has lifted just enough for him to relax.
"Thanks, Frank," Peter whispers into Frank's neck, his mouth close enough that when he moves his lips to speak, he makes contact with his skin.
He realizes a little too late that Frank hasn't given Peter his name, not when he's Peter Parker and not Spider-Man. Well. Not that Frank had given Spider-Man his name either, Peter just knew it, because anyone who's anyone in the vigilante scene in New York City knows The Punisher. And, well, the bartenders at the last few bars seem to have known who Frank is, so maybe he's well known amongst civilians as well. Maybe Frank won't notice anything.
It sure does take him a while to respond. When he does, it's with a heavy sigh and a kiss to Peter's hair.
"Not doing anything with you when you're like this," he mutters, and Peter doesn't really know what he means. "Next time. If the world's crazy enough and I see you again, next time."
"Next time what?" Peter asks, frowning, but Frank is already getting up, settling his tab with the bartender and walking out.
Locking up The Hand is just the cherry on top for the good week that follows. Peter sleeps well for a few nights in a row, and doesn't struggle as much with his headaches. Even Officer DeWolff comments that he seems a little better rested, which is a massive compliment from her. Sure, he still gets knocked around on patrol, sure, his upper body looks more like a Jackson Pollock painting than actual human skin, but he's feeling better. Much better.
The library schedules him for Wednesday story time, at 2pm. It's a new group of people, new group of kids, but he adjusts well enough. He smiles when he reads. He even stays to make small talk with parents afterwards.
"Hey, Peter," Santiago calls when the last person has left. "Come over here a sec, would you?"
"Sure," Peter says, and practically skips over, smiling. "What's up?"
"I was about to ask you that," Santiago says, with a pointed look to Peter's wrist.
Peter frowns, and then realizes that as he was reading he'd rolled up his long sleeves, and the bruising from this morning's skirmish are visible. He tugs his sleeve down and laughs awkwardly.
"Can't keep a good enough eye on where I'm going," he jokes, but he can tell the joke lands flat.
"Peter, I just want to say something, and I want you to know that I say this from a position of someone who's been where you are right now, and knows how difficult it is to leave," Santiago says, suddenly all up in Peter's space, putting a hand on his shoulder. "You're not alone, son. If you need somewhere to go, if home isn't safe, you can always come to the library. Heck, I'll give you my personal number if you're comfortable with that."
"What?" Peter laughs nervously. "I, uh, Santiago, this is really kind of you, but I don't really know what you're talking about."
"You fell going down the stairs?" Santiago asks, his tone grave. "Your face hit the wall? You couldn't keep a good enough eye on where you were going? Peter, I can see that you're being hurt, I can see that you feel like you're trapped, and I want you to know, no—I need you to know that you are not alone. There is help, if you're ready to seek it."
"Okay, um, I'm starting to get an idea of what you're alluding to, and I promise, it's not what you think it is," Peter rushes to explain. "It's just my work. I, um. I have a pretty physically intense job."
"Peter, I know you're unemployed," Santiago says bluntly. "When we set you up in the library's system, we did a background check—we have to, if someone's going to be working with kids. I know you feel like you have to protect yourself, you have to lie, and I won't force the truth from you if you're not ready to share it. I know that if you leave, it has to be because you chose it and not because someone else forced you to. Believe me, I know. I had a lot of good people begging me to leave my first wife when they saw the bruises on me, the same bruises I see you walking around with, but I couldn't hear what they were saying, not really, not until I had come to grips with what was happening on my own and made the decision to walk away. There are people here to help you when you make that decision, Peter. I promise you that."
"I'm not being abused," Peter says, though even he can admit he sounds desperate. "Really, Santiago, I know how this looks, but I am not being abused."
"Okay," Santiago replies, letting go of Peter's shoulder and taking a step back, clearly not believing him. "Okay, Peter. Whatever you say. But just think about what I said, alright? If you need anything, anything at all, everyone here at the library has your back. We're a team. We help each other out in times of need."
"Th- Thank you," Peter stutters, then, because he feels the need to put his foot in his mouth, says, "I'm sorry about your situation, by the way. That… That must've been awful."
Santiago nods. "It was. I married her fresh outta high school and I didn't know anything else. I thought that was love, and it wasn't. I'm with a different woman now, a woman whose life is full of stress but doesn't take it out on me, because that's not what you do to people you love, is it?"
"No, it's not," Peter agrees hoarsely. "Um, what's… What's your wife's name?"
"She's a police officer," Santiago answers. "Jean DeWolff."
Peter can't help it. He lets out a strangled laugh, then covers his mouth. "Oh! Oh, um. I actually know her. She, uh… She helped me out a few times."
And then, because he can't bear any more of this, he waves goodbye to Santiago and bolts out of the library.
He brings petunias to Aunt May's grave and sits on the cold dirt in front of it.
He's troubled by his conversation with Santiago, more troubled than he should be, since there's no truth in it. He doesn't have an abusive girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever Santiago was alluding to. He's not being beaten up at home. All of his bruises come from his job that's not really a job. Sure, he's not living a life of zero risk, but he's putting himself out there to protect other people. There's nobility in that, right?
"Can you be in an abusive relationship with yourself?" he wonders aloud.
The grave has no answers for him.
The next time he sees Frank Castle, they're both chasing one of the last members of The Hand, who has made a mess of downtown Queens and is making this whole process of locking him up a lot more difficult than it has to be. Everything goes smoothly enough. Frank shoots the guy in the shoulder, Peter wraps him up in webs, then hands him off to Officer DeWolff.
"Oh, Officer!" he calls, as she's about to walk away. "I, uh, I wanted to talk to you, actually."
DeWolff turns around, worry in her brow. "What's going on, Spider-Man?"
"Nothing, nothing much, just, um—" Peter coughs, and steps closer. "I, uh, checked in on a guy last night who's been having a hard time. He's doing alright now, and when I talked to him, he, uh… Well, he said that he'd already talked to your husband about it, and what he said had really helped him, so I just wanted to say thank you. Um. The next time you see your husband, tell him… Tell him he's doing a good job."
DeWolff's features soften. "Thanks, Spider-Man," she says. "He has been worried about this new guy volunteering at the library. He'll be glad to know you checked in on him and that he's doing better. You have a good day, now."
"Yeah, you too."
He's about to swing away when he notices that Frank is still there. Lingering. Oh God.
"What's up, Frank?" Peter asks with forced calm.
"You seem to be feeling better," Frank says with an eyebrow raised, and for a second, Peter is terrified, thinking that somehow Frank had figured out that Peter from the bar is the same as Spider-Man, but then he adds, "Didn't even slip on any ice this time around, or fall into a katana."
Peter laughs, relieved. "You know, I have been sleeping better," he says.
"Glad to hear it." Frank holsters his gun and gestures around. "Still don't get why you don't just kill these fuckers. There's rumblings of the Scorpion already trying to make a prison break. You do know that if you lock them up, they're only gonna bide their time and keep causing problems, right?"
"Agree to disagree," Peter replies, smiling under the mask. "I think people can change. I think people shouldn't be defined by their worst moments. A lot of members of The Hand are pretty young. Who knows, after some time in jail, they might come out a bit different."
Frank snorts. "I'll tell you one thing about prison, kid. It's never made anyone a better person."
Peter takes a rest day. He tells himself that he's not going out crime fighting until every visible bruise on his body has healed. He catalogues them all in the mirror at the start of the day, and every time he feels the impulse to jump out a window and start swinging, he takes his shirt off and checks the bruising, telling himself not now, not yet, he has to wait until he's all better.
This'll prove Santiago wrong. He can't be an abusive relationship with himself if he can tell himself to stop, right? Yeah, definitely.
He gets bored quickly. But he forces himself to stay at the apartment, making endless cups of hot chocolate and watching endless episodes of reality TV. He watches couples snuggle up to each other on his computer screen and feels a deep longing in his gut for someone to snuggle up with, to chase the cold away, but there's no one for that, and he's not going to go chase physical connection outside, where the only place he'll find it is on the other end of a fist, so he stays on his couch, keeps drinking hot chocolate, and tells himself to stop yearning.
There's one pesky bruise on his hip that won't go away. Everything else on his body has cleared, but this damned hip bruise—it's the size of his hand and nasty. The skin is raised and tender. It's not going away as fast as it should. He definitely broke a lot of blood vessels beneath the skin there, and he can feel his poor body trying to patch himself together.
Peter stands in his kitchen, biting his lip, cold and hungry and itchy all over.
"Screw it," he mutters, shoves his feet into his shoes, and starts walking to the nearest sports bar.
This place actually has food, and Peter orders a large burger with all the toppings and extra fries, finds a booth in a corner where no one else is, and begins to inhale his food.
When the door swings open and someone else starts to walk his way, Peter doesn't think for a second that it might be Frank, because what the hell would Frank even be doing at a random, half-empty sports bar at 3 o'clock on a Saturday? But there he is: standing over Peter's table with a smug look on his face.
"You got ketchup everywhere," he says, and laughs when Peter mumbles something back. "Hungry, much?"
Peter swallows down his mouthful and glares at Frank. "Stop bullying me. It's a damn good burger."
"Well, I'll have to find out for myself, won't I?" Frank teases, walks away, and is back twenty minutes later with a burger of his own.
Peter expects him to sit on the other side of the booth. Frank doesn't. He slides in on the same side as Peter, his body pressed up against Peter's, his shoulders and elbows all up in Peter's space.
"There's a whole other side of the booth, you know," Peter points out.
Frank meets his gaze, something heavy in his eyes. "You want me to move?" he asks, though the asking sounds like a challenge. Peter shakes his head mutely. "Good. Now shut up and let me enjoy my burger. If it's as good as you say it is, I'm gonna want a moment of silence to appreciate it."
Peter nearly squirms out of his seat when Frank takes his first bite and lets out an exaggerated moan.
"Oh, yeah, this is good," Frank says, with a cheeky look in Peter's direction that tells him he's doing this on purpose.
"Jerk," Peter grumbles half-heartedly, stealing some of Frank's fries. Frank just laughs.
He keeps up the performance the whole way through. Peter starts blushing soon into it, and can't shake the redness off his cheeks as Frank keeps going, moaning around every bite, playing everything up to make Peter squirm. The more he continues, the more Peter's pants start to get tighter around his crotch, his heart starts to beat faster, and, oh God, Jesus Christ, this cannot be happening.
"All done?" Peter croaks when Frank finally swallows his last bite.
"Mmm hmm," Frank affirms, wiping ketchup off his chin with his fingers, then using those same fingers to cradle Peter's chin. "You roofied again?"
Peter laughs, incredulous. "What kind of question is that?" he asks, feeling hot all over as Frank just keeps looking at him, his fingers, sticky with ketchup, making a mess of his chin.
"A necessary one, apparently," Frank quips, leans in, and kisses him.
He tastes like ketchup and onions and salt. Peter opens his mouth and licks into Frank's almost immediately, chasing the flavor, hooking a hand behind Frank's head at the same time as Frank takes his hand and slips it under Peter's thigh, dragging him closer. The booth is too small for this. The table is digging awkwardly into Peter's side. He doesn't care. He breathes through his nose and tilts his head and does his best to swallow Frank whole.
The hand that was holding Peter's chin slides back to grip the hair at the base of his skull and tug, just enough for Peter to gasp and Frank to find a bit of leverage. God, Peter's gonna be cleaning ketchup out of his hair for ages in the shower later. Frank pushes himself further forward, further on top of Peter, until he's damn near lying on his back, his hard-on pressed into Frank's stomach, his legs doing their best to wrap around Frank's sides.
A polite cough interrupts them.
"Listen, uh, love is love and everything," says the bartender. "But you two can't fuck in the booth. Take it somewhere else. Please."
Frank's mouth slips away from his own as he stifles a laugh in Peter's neck. Peter's laughing too, body shaking, that awful coldness slipping further and further away with every second that he and Frank are pushed close together like this.
"You know," Frank says as he detangles himself from Peter, "I have tattoos older than you."
Peter's throat goes dry. He looks at Frank with wide eyes and asks, "Can you choke me?" before he even knows what he's saying.
Frank laughs again. Peter likes how his face looks when he laughs. He's sliding sideways out of the booth, offering Peter his hand, and Peter takes it. It's nice, feeling the roughness of Frank's hand against his own.
"Not here, I won't," he says, then jerks a thumb behind him to point to the bartender. "This homophobe doesn't want us fucking in his bar."
"Not a homophobe, just don't want to have to clean cum off my booths," says the bartender, and Peter and Frank dissolve into more laughter.
Outside the bar, Frank kisses him again, hands tight in Peter's hair, tugging his head back so hard that Peter sees black dots in his vision when Frank lets go.
"Much as I'd like to get my hands around your throat, I do have to go," Frank says with a grin. "People still exchange phone numbers, right? It's not all… InstaSnapGramTok or whatever?"
Peter laughs deliriously and nods, pulling out his phone (his personal phone, not his work phone) out of his pocket and handing it to Frank, who types away for a few seconds before passing it back. Peter looks down and sees that Frank has sent a message to himself. A message that, of course, reads I'm pregnant.
"Still think it's weird that you carry drug tests in your pocket," Peter teases.
Frank shrugs. "Think what you like, it sure got your ass out of a bit of trouble, didn't it?" And, for good measure, he pinches Peter's ass, making him yelp. "Listen," he says, suddenly serious. "I'm going underground for a while. A month or so, I mean. I've got some things to take care of, and I'm not gonna be in the area or responding to my phone or anything for that time. I'll send you a message when I'm back, okay?"
Peter nods, feeling like a small, ridiculous puppy. "Okay," he says, then, "Be safe."
Frank's eyes soften. "Don't need you worrying about me," he chides, but kisses Peter one last time before walking away, which tells Peter that he doesn't actually mind all that much.
Monday morning finds him with Puff the Magic Dragon in his hand, sitting in an armchair surrounded by a circle of mothers and their babies. He sings the song as gently as possible, as there are a few little ones who are crying this morning and he doesn't want to upset them further. Santiago is standing in the back, as he usually is, smiling at Peter fondly. In the moments between books, Peter smiles back.
"Hey," asks a short woman after reading hour, walking up to him with a smile and a baby on her hip. "Peter, right?"
Peter sets down the book he's reading, wide eyed. "Uh, yeah," he says stupidly. He's wearing a name tag. Of course the woman knows his name is Peter.
"Hi, I'm Madeline," the woman introduces, and holds out her hand. Peter shakes it. "This is Joey, he's seven months," she says, and waves her little boy's hand.
"Nice to meet you, Joey," Peter says shyly, waving at the little baby, who scrunches his face up and yawns. "How can I help you?"
Madeline smiles widely. "I usually don't do this, but my husband and I are going out for our anniversary tonight, and our usual babysitter broke her leg last night and we need someone to fill in. Do you babysit? It's just you're the only reader that Joey listens to without crying, so I think your energies have connected."
Energies connected? Huh?
"Uh, that's very flattering," Peter stutters, "but, uh, I haven't babysat before."
"Oh, it's a breeze," Madeline brushes off, "we'd just need you from 7-10pm tonight, we'd pay you, of course. How does $20 an hour sound?"
I can't take that much time away from my job, Peter thinks desperately, but then looks at baby Joey, all squishy and curled up in his mother's arms, and thinks that maybe babysitting is also small scale city defending, right?
"Um, yeah, sure," he stutters. "I, uh, I'll be by your place this evening then."
"Awesome!" Madeline cheers. "Here, let's swap phone numbers. Do you do Venmo?"
"I'm more of a cash person," Peter admits, watching Madeline put her number into his phone and feeling delirious that, of his contacts, he's got Frank Castle and now Madeline Smith. What sort of combination is that?
She lives in Brooklyn, in a really nice brownstone, and greets him with a smile at the door when he arrives at 6:50, ten minutes before she asked him to be there, just in case.
"Feel free to eat anything from the fridge, or order in," she says as she shows him in. "Joey's had his bottle, there's breast milk in the fridge, and he should be going down in about half an hour, but he's been off a bit lately, so if it takes longer than that, don't stress. Brendan! Brendan, come meet Peter, he's the library volunteer I was telling you about!"
And this is how Peter ends up spending his Monday night with a seven month old baby named Joey, who cries for the first hour, sleeps for the second, and then is frustratingly awake for the next half hour, babbling and drooling into Peter's neck, using his tiny baby fingers to grasp at Peter's hair. When he gets hungry, Peter fills a bottle and hooks Joey in his arm, staring into his baby brown eyes while Joey suckles away, content and warm and small.
"Hi, Joey," Peter whispers to the little human in his arms. "Hi there. Aren't you just the cutest thing in the world?"
Joey has no words for him, but he lets himself be held, so trusting and so small, and Peter loses himself in his eyes, mystified by his warmth, holding him tight.
He realizes, with a start, that he might be holding Joey too tightly, if Joey's fussing is anything to go by. Peter chants apologies and stumbles over himself getting Joey to his crib, where he lays him down and sings to him until Joey falls asleep.
I really need a hug, Peter thinks, and then his mind goes to Frank, pushing him rough against the booth in the bar and kissing him, and shivers run through his body.
Interim Mayor Sheila Rivera gives him the key to the city. Isn't that insane?
There's a whole media campaign about it—about his efficiency, his positive impact on the city, how crime rates have lowered and quality of life has been raised and how everyone is happier now that their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is doing his job.
February creeps by into March. The snow starts to thaw. The library doesn't need him as much.
"Hey, Officer," Peter says one day, as he's assisting the NYPD in making an arrest on some corporate criminals.
"Yes, Spider-Man?" DeWolff responds through the radio.
"What's your favorite color?"
She snorts. "These days, it's red and blue," she says, and there's not much time for talking after that.
Madeline asks him to babysit again. Her husband is away on a work trip and she has a brunch with the girls planned. Their regular babysitter is in class and can't make it. Peter accepts happily, and spends a few blissful hours on a Wednesday afternoon playing with baby Joey.
"I think you might be my best friend," he tells the little baby, as they're busy building a block tower.
"Ba," Joey babbles, and Peter laughs.
Ned is posting on his Instagram more often. It's approaching crunch time for him and MJ, and he says as much in his stories. Finals are creeping closer every day. They're getting closer to graduating. Ned is equal parts ecstatic and terrified. Peter wishes desperately that he could be there to be a part of it all.
He checks his phone for a message from Frank every morning, and doesn't get one. Some nights, he dreams about Frank making good on his promise and wrapping his hands tight around Peter's neck and squeezing, squeezing until he can't breathe, can't move, can't see, and he just floats. He jerks off a lot in the shower. It's such a weird thing to notice, but his semen is stickier than usual. E.V. keeps telling him his arachnid hormones are elevated. Peter doesn't think too much about it.
He thinks maybe he should get laid, like normal people in their 20s do, so goes to a club one night with noise canceling headphones on and wearing jeans that are just a little too tight. He dances with a girl with bright pink lipstick and even gets up the nerve to kiss her, but when she pulls back all he sees is MJ, and he can't go any further.
"What's wrong, handsome?" she shouts in his ear over the thud of the bass.
"Not really over my last girlfriend," he shouts back, and she laughs.
"Cute and honest, I like it. Hey, you should go talk to my friend! She's got the same sort of sensory issues you do. She's over there in the corner, playing Pokemon Go of all things."
"Thanks!" Peter says, and migrates over to the friend, who is indeed wearing the same brand of noise cancelling headphones as him. "Hi!" he says when he finally gets close enough.
"Hi!" the girl shouts back, then leans in closer and says, "I don't care what Shelly told you, I'm not having sex with you."
Peter laughs. "I'm Peter," he introduces. "And I don't really wanna have sex with you either. Pokemon Go?"
Her eyes light up and they spend the rest of the night gaming. The girl with pink lipstick (Shelly, apparently) makes her way over to them and starts talking with headphones girl, her hand on Peter's shoulder, touchy in an easy way. Peter likes her hand on his shoulder, but her touch is too light. He wishes she'd dig her nails in and really grab him. He wishes she'd yank his head back and make his vision spin.
"I'm so messed up," he whispers to his ceiling when he gets back to his apartment.
The ceiling, of course, doesn't have a response for him, and Peter curls up in his heated blanket, still so cold, even as the temperatures outside are rising, bit by bit.
Spider-Man gets into a bit of trouble at the start of April. It's all over the news, to the point where even after the actual disaster is over, Peter can't avoid images of himself being run through by a metal pole, skewered like a kebab and thrown off the Empire State building.
The stupid thing is, it was totally avoidable. Some Scorpion wanna-be was causing a fuss, and Peter swung himself over to calm him down. Routine stuff, really, except somehow this Scorpion wanna-be had something the actual Scorpion didn't—a jet pack.
"This is so ridiculous," Peter remembers saying as he was grabbed by the ankle and tugged into the sky. The whole thing is crazy. There's this raving lunatic swinging him around the New York City skyline, his jet pack sputtering fumes and his mech tail (much less effective than the actual Scorpion's) hitting Peter in the head every few seconds.
Scorpion wanna-be landed them on top of the Empire State Building, pinned Peter to the ground, and then started talking. Because of course he had things to say.
The guy was monologuing about something when it happened. Something about taking back the city from assholes in masks like Spider-Man, yada yada, nothing Peter hasn't heard before.
Peter wasn't really paying attention. He was too busy discretely dismantling this guy's mech tail, with the hope that once the asshole shut up and tried to clobber him again, he'd realize his main weapon was out of order and Peter could get the upper hand again.
But, whoopsie daisy, Peter hadn't exactly timed things right, and this Scorpion wanna-be caught on to what he was doing and lashed his half-dismantled tail out at Peter, and the stupid thing splintered apart mid-swing, leaving Peter skewered through the gut with part of it and tumbling off the Empire State Building in shock.
He'd caught himself before he could hit the ground, and webbed away easily enough, but Jesus Christ that metal rod had been nasty to deal with.
"Hey, Spider-Man," DeWolff says over the phone as he's in his apartment, stitching himself up. "That was some hit you took today. Please tell me you're in a hospital right now getting your internal organs tended to."
Peter laughs through the pain, busy changing his bandages, the wound already piecing itself together. "Nah, I'll be fine," he chuckles. "I'm just sorry I didn't catch the guy. I was being stupid, really. I should've seen it coming."
"We all have our off days. But seriously, Spider-Man, you don't just get back up after a hit like that. Check yourself into urgent care."
Peter pokes the puncture wound, which is ridiculously tender, but not all that bad. He can't even see straight through himself anymore. And he'd had E.V. run a diagnostic check just to make sure everything was intact, and his internal organs were going to be fine. He just needs to drink a lot of fluids and eat some soup and lay low for a few days.
"I'll be okay," he promises. "Hey, tell your husband I said hi, alright?"
DeWolff sighs. "Will do. See you out there, Spider-Man."
"See ya!"
He's scheduled to read at the library tomorrow, and he has to send a message to his supervisor through the library website to them tell he won't be there. His whole attempt at convincing Santiago that he's not in an abusive relationship will kinda fall apart if he shows up to work with half his guts falling out.
There's a patch of sunlight in his apartment that has become Peter's favorite naptime spot. He curls up in it and tells E.V. to silence the crime alert for 24 hours. He's no good to the city all banged up.
The next day, Frank texts him saying he's back in town.
Peter had been freezing in the apartment, but now that he's out in the sun, he's feeling warmer, so he takes off his hoodie and wraps it around his waist, arms bare in the early spring sunlight. It's been a few months since he last cut his hair. Brown curls tickle his forehead and he brushes them aside.
It's carnations today. Red carnations. He holds them in his hand and lets the breeze blow through his hair. His midriff is still wrapped up in bandages, but he'd knocked back a few Advils earlier today and light exercise is key to recovery, so taking the walk to Aunt May's grave is an excellent idea, actually, and not at all risky or irresponsible to his health.
He almost can't believe who he sees when he turns the corner.
"Frank!" he calls, waving his free hand, and Frank Castle stops in his tracks, turning around with his hand already going to his back pocket (probably for his weapon) before he meets Peter's gaze and is at ease.
"Nearly shot you," Frank grumbles once he's close enough to knock Peter's head with his hand. "Can't just yell my name like that, I'm old and twitchy."
"Whatever you say," Peter says with a cheeky grin.
Frank gestures to the flowers. "Who you bringing those to? Your girlfriend?" he asks.
Peter levels an unimpressed look Frank's way. "I'm visiting my aunt's grave," he says, deadpan.
"Fucking hell, I really am an awful person," Frank mutters, looking anywhere except Peter, probably scanning the surroundings for someone actually dangerous. Does he ever lower his guard? Probably not. "Alright, I'll let you get to it."
"Wait!" Peter says suddenly, and Frank raises his eyebrows. "Um, sorry, you've probably got a million things going on, but…" He bites his lip nervously. "Would you come with me?"
Frank studies him for a while, eyes searching Peter's face in a way that makes him blush. He's got a bit of a heavy stubble situation going on. There's a new scar on his chin. His hair is shorter than it was when Peter saw him last. Did he shave the sides of his head? Peter can't really tell. Frank lifts a hand and grabs Peter's chin, and Peter forgets to breathe for a minute.
"Okay, kid," Frank says eventually. "I'll come with you."
His hand drops to his side, and the skin where Frank had touched him tingles.
They start to walk to the cemetery.
"How was whatever you were doing?" Peter asks, resisting the urge to skip and swing his arms.
Frank shoots him a weird look. "It went fine," he says slowly. "I'm still alive, ain't I?"
"Why do you sound kinda upset about that?" Peter prods.
Frank shoves him hard on the shoulder, and Peter laughs. It's a pretty hefty shove, but it's not nearly enough to knock Peter off of his feet. It's like Frank knows, somehow, that he can rough him up a lot more than a regular dude, and is pushing him firmer because of it. It makes something in Peter's stomach flutter.
"You're smiling real big. The fuck are you smiling for?" Frank demands.
"Just happy to see you," Peter answers honestly.
"Jesus Christ. Your life must be pretty sad if my ugly mug gets you this chipper."
Peter shrugs, doesn't answer with words, and just keeps on smiling, carnations clutched in one hand, the other swinging at his side, his knuckles brushing up against Frank's every now and then. He sneaks looks at the older man, and Frank is always looking back at him. The walk to the cemetery feels like it goes by in seconds. Peter finds Aunt May's grave easily, sets the flowers down, and kneels in front of her gravestone.
"Hi, Aunt May," he says, and then, feeling bold, says, "I brought a friend this time."
A hand lands rough on his head, shoving him forward. "Who said anything about us being friends?" Frank grumbles, but Peter just laughs.
"He's just such a ray of sunshine," he continues to tease, and laughs harder when he feels Frank kick him in the back—on his upper spine, far enough from his puncture wound that it doesn't burn, just hurts enough to make the hair on his arms stand up.
"I miss you," he says to Aunt May's grave, more serious now. "I, um… Well, it's Mother's Day soon, and I know you always made a fuss about me getting you something, but I've got something big planned. It's gonna be great."
He leans forward and kisses her gravestone.
"I love you," he says in parting, and then hauls himself up to his feet.
Frank has an odd look in his eyes when Peter meets his gaze. Peter cocks his head to the side, asking without words, and Frank just shakes his head, reaching both his hands to cradle Peter's hips. His thumbs dig into Peter's skin, just a little too close to his still-healing wound, and Peter purses his lips, trying not to flinch away. Something like understanding flickers across Frank's face. He knows, Peter thinks, scared, but then Frank just squeezes him once more and lets go.
"You like Indian?" Frank asks roughly. Peter nods. "Alright. There's a spot close to here. Let's go eat. You're too skinny. I'm paying."
"I can pay for my own food!" Peter objects, but lets Frank grab him by the neck and drag him along anyway.
Peter eats his weight in samosas and talks Frank's ear off about things he can't even remember. They're crammed tight into a booth in a small Indian place that looks like it's built more for takeout than eating in. Frank still refuses to sit opposite Peter like a normal person. Instead, he presses every inch of his body up against Peter's, his arms and shoulders too close, his leg hot against Peter's, and it's so good Peter feels like he might just pass out.
"You ever stop to breathe?" Frank asks with a half-smile as Peter finally pauses his ramble.
Peter shrugs. "Sometimes. I've stopped to chew and swallow, haven't I?"
Mistake. Mentioning swallowing was a mistake. A hungry sort of something flickers over Frank's face and he reaches a hand over to close around Peter's neck, a light touch, barely even there, but his thumb presses against Peter's throat and holds tight there as Peter… swallows.
Holy shit. Yeah, Peter's hard. He's so hard.
"So this… meteor shower you're talking about," Frank says slowly, removing his hand from Peter's neck so he can shovel more curry into his mouth. "Is it gonna be visible from here?"
"Well, with the light pollution in the city, probably not," Peter admits. "But upstate it might be. It's gonna be a two day event, the 23rd and the 24th. The library is doing a space-themed week in preparation for it. The kiddos have been so hyped up, some of them are asking me to read space books already."
"Kiddos?" Frank asks fondly.
Peter blushes. "Ah, yeah. I volunteer. I do Children's Reading Hour a lot. It's, ah… Well, it's nice. There's a guy there, Santiago, he's married to this cop I know, and he's the one who got me into it—he's convinced that I'm being abused because I come to work with bruises all the time, but I'm not, I just… I'm just clumsy, y'know?"
Frank shakes his head, muttering something that Peter can't hear.
"You all done with your samosas, kid?" he asks. Peter nods, eyes wide. "Okay. Let's get out of here."
Frank pays the bill and Peter just stands by the booth, shifting in his jeans, praying that his bulge isn't too obvious. Frank sweeps his eyes over him as he's walking back his way, with the sort of smirk on his face that tells Peter he's not fooling anyone. His skin is itching, but not with that familiar coldness and hollowness—no, with anticipation.
"C'mon, daffodil," Frank says, grabbing him by the back of the neck and steering him outside.
Daffodil is a new one, Peter thinks faintly, and lets Frank manhandle him.
It's dark outside, the city lit by amber street lights and the LED headlights that Peter hates. Frank whistles as he walks, his hand not moving from Peter's neck. He steers Peter where he wants him and doesn't look at him as they weave through the streets. They walk the same way they came—to the cemetery and then turning, into a park that's mostly empty. Peter keeps his eyes forward and can't keep the smile off his face.
"C'mere, you," Frank mutters as they find a patch of darkness that no one else has laid claim to, and shoves Peter against a tree.
Peter's injury screams in protest, but he lets it scream, focusing on nothing besides Frank's mouth crashing over his, hot and heavy and forceful and so, so good.
Frank's hands find Peter's hips. Peter's hands find the back of Frank's head, his hair, pulling him closer, tilting his head so he can lick his tongue all the way into his mouth, taste his molars, taste the curry on the back of his throat. Frank makes a sound that could have been a moan, could have been a grunt, Peter's not really sure, and then he's pushing Peter back firmer against the tree, his knee bullying its way in between Peter's legs, pressing up, and, oh—
"You cold?" Frank asks against Peter's lips, saliva dripping between them.
Peter gasps, shivering a bit. "Yeah," he admits. "Sorry, I'll be okay, I just—"
"Shut your mug, kid," Frank interrupts, drops his hands from Peter's hips, and makes quick work of untying his hoodie from his waist, tugging it over Peter's head and ruffling his hair when his head pokes out.
"Thought you'd be taking my clothes off, not putting them back on," Peter says cheekily, and Frank rolls his eyes.
"Less talking," he says, and Peter can work with that.
Frank's mouth is back on his and his hands slide up Peter's waist, underneath the hoodie but above his shirt. Peter's grateful for that. Not because he doesn't want Frank touching his skin, but because his entire middle is currently wrapped in a million layers of bandages, and he doesn't want to have to stop to explain to Frank why it looks like someone tried to saw him in half. He tangles his hands back in Frank's hair and keeps going with his previous mission of getting his tongue as far into the other man's mouth as possible.
Frank's doing that thing with his knee again. His body pushes Peter firm against the tree trunk and his knee slides in between Peter's legs, pushing roughly against Peter's crotch. It's not exactly comfortable—being hard in jeans is never fun, and the unforgiving grind of denim on denim is a little more than a little bit rough—but Peter doesn't really want comfortable. He grinds himself down onto Frank's leg and does his best to get as much friction as possible, hearing his own gasps ringing in his ears and unable to quiet himself down.
He tries to slip his hands down, down to where he knows Frank is hard too, can feel his dick pressing up against his belly, but then Frank's mouth is off of his and his hand is around his throat and Peter stops.
"Hands where I can see them," Frank says in a low voice that nearly tips Peter over the edge right then and there. "I'm not that easy."
Peter blinks a few times, his eyes wide, and he lifts his hands slowly, above his head and flush to the rough bark of the tree. Frank's right hand comes up to cover Peter's wrists, keeping his hands pinned where they are. His left hand tightens around Peter's throat.
"Good boy," he says with a crooked grin, and dives back in to kiss him again.
Peter's going to die against this tree. He's going to combust, right here—it's too much, the press of Frank's knee on his crotch, the unrelenting squeeze of his hand around Peter's throat, his mouth, wet and hot and hungry, and Peter has to remind himself to breathe, breathe in through his nose, even as it gets more difficult as Frank's grip tightens.
He's gonna have a ring of blue around his neck, Peter realizes. Frank's squeezing him so hard it's gonna bruise, and the thought should make him want to slow down, but if anything, he just leans further into it.
"Frank," Peter gasps, his voice strangled. "Frank, please."
"Please what?" Frank asks cruelly, pushing his knee up further between Peter's legs, making Peter whine. "C'mon, use your words. Please what?"
"Please, I—"
Peter manages to roll his hips downwards, the friction so good, the burn just intense enough to make his whole body buzz, and with Frank's hand around his throat his vision is blurring, he's seeing black spots, and then Frank's mouth is at a spot behind his ear, sucking away at the skin like he wants to eat Peter alive, and Peter's so gone. His vision blacks out and he comes so hard that he's half convinced the meteor shower came early.
"Fucking hell, kid," Frank gasps, easing up on the pressure of his knee between Peter's legs, letting him steady himself on the ground. "Jesus Christ."
"Yeah," Peter gasps, head tilted back, eyes closed, and when he opens them, he sees Frank looking at him with something like awe.
Frank's hand doesn't move from Peter's neck. Instead, keeping firm eye contact with Peter the whole time, Frank slowly starts to tighten his grip. Peter breathes through his nose and holds Frank's gaze, his body trembling, stinging from overstimulation. It gets to the point where he can't breathe anymore, and then he just stares at Frank, lips parted, hands still pinned above him, limp and strung out and not resisting at all.
And then Frank lets go.
"Fucking damn," Frank whistles, and pulls Peter down to the ground, gathering him in his lap and tugging his head to rest on Frank's chest as he remembers how to breathe. "You're a freak of nature, kid."
"You have no idea," Peter chokes, and coughs.
He keeps coughing, the unfortunate consequence of being choked out for an extended period of time, and when he can finally breathe regularly again, he lifts his eyes, meets Frank's gaze, and slowly moves his hand between Frank's legs, pressing against the obvious bulge. Frank bats his hand aside.
"Told you, I'm not that easy," Frank grunts. "It takes more than a few meals to butter me up."
"You saying I'm easy?" Peter asks, grinning.
Frank flicks his forehead. "You're so damn easy, it's not even funny," Frank says. "You're just hurtling through life, ain't you? Goddamn rocket. You're lucky it's me you hurtled into. Someone else might've actually done a number on you."
And then Frank's fingers find Peter's chin, tilting his head up, and the cool night air caresses the ring of bruises around Peter's neck, and the breath is stolen out of his lungs again.
"Still cold?" Frank asks.
Peter shakes his head, his whole life contained in the spot on his chin where Frank has his fingers. "No," he says quietly, and feels his eyes get hot, so he ducks his head down and wipes them before he can actually start crying.
"Stupid kid," Frank grumbles, and pulls Peter's head close, tucking him underneath his chin. "C'mere. Goddamn. Falling apart, aren't you? Stupid thing."
Peter is embarrassed at how much he shakes in Frank's arms, not crying, not cold, but needing a minute to just be held. The jumpiness stirring in his chest has settled. His throat is so sore, but it's worth it. He'll rub bruise cream on it when he gets back to his apartment, and change the bandages around his middle.
"C'mon, up you go," Frank says roughly after what could've been an eternity but really was only just fifteen minutes.
Peter stands, his legs wobbly, and shifts around in his pants, trying to make things a little more comfortable. He can already feel his cum drying inside his underwear. By the time he gets back to his apartment, he's gonna feel like someone tried to paper mache him into his jeans. But it was worth it.
"I'll see you around, kid," Frank says, and ruffles his hair before disappearing into the night.
Peter sleeps a solid eight hours that night.
"The Punisher has been awful quiet recently," DeWolff says the next time he sees her. It's a week after… whatever it was he and Frank had done against that tree. The bruises around his neck are gone. His puncture wound through the middle is nothing but a puckered scar which will fade even more throughout the month. "Do you know anything about that?"
Peter shrugs, unable to stop himself from grinning under the mask. "I heard he went underground for most of February and March," he offers. "Personal business. He wouldn't say much. He's back now, though."
"Yeah. I've seen him around in plain clothes. Just… around. It's eerie."
Peter laughs. "He's a citizen same as the rest of us, huh?"
DeWolff sighs. "I suppose he is. Sometimes I wish he'd wear a mask like you and Daredevil. Sometimes keeping work life and personal life separate is good like that, y'know?"
"Shouldn't we be focusing more on that shady guy leaving the building over there?" Peter asks, and laughs as DeWolff curses.
He and E.V. are working together on how to improve his suit design. Peter's really trying to avoid being skewered again, and he wonders if there's some way he can tweak the fabric to stretch rather than snap when pressure is applied. He's got music on, something with a soft synth beat and words that he can't hear. He hums along and works the design with quick fingers, this sort of thing second nature to him now.
His phone buzzes. Ned's posted to his Instagram story. Peter's a weak man. He stops what he's doing and immediately opens it up.
Ned's hooked on some new energy drink. The story is just a video of Ned rifling through his dorm trash can and showing the millions of bottles of the stuff he has in there. Peter laughs, impossibly fond, and feels that ache again in his chest, that lonely ache.
Thank God it's warm again, and he isn't fighting every minute to chase away the cold.
"E.V., let's pause this, okay?" he asks, already knowing that he won't be able to get anymore work done after seeing Ned and being reminded of everything he doesn't have. "We can pick it up tomorrow. I'm just gonna… I'm gonna go run a few errands."
By errands, he means he walks to the nearest store that sells LEGOs and buys the most complicated set he can find. He spends the rest of the day crouched in his apartment working away at the pieces, thinking of Ned and trying to fend off the awful, ripping feeling in his chest. Dinner is a takeout pizza and a protein shake. Peter finishes his evening off watching the sunset from the top of his building.
He thinks about the letter he wrote to MJ that's still in his desk drawer. He thinks about whether or not he should ever give it to her.
Peter needs new shirts. He doesn't like spending money on clothes, but the unfortunate reality is that with the life he lives, most of his clothing ends up being used to mop up blood at the end of a long day of work, and he likes to think he's pretty good at doing his own laundry, but some stains just won't come out.
"Babe, definitely," a retail worker says as he holds up a black tank top to himself, wondering if it will work. "Your tits would look great in that."
Peter, not really sure how to take that, just smiles and says thanks and puts it in his cart. After second thought, he adds another four of the same color and make. It's always good to be prepared for anything.
He's halfway done, just perusing through the sweatpants and contemplating if it would be an awful idea to get a pair with NEW YORK written across the ass, when he hears shouting.
"Danny, fucking hell, I've told you to leave me alone!"
It's none of his business. He's Peter Parker, clothes shopping, not Spider-Man on patrol. But he follows the sounds of the shouting anyway, apparently unable to keep to himself.
He nearly starts cursing once he sees who it is. It's the same couple he'd ran into at the park a few months ago—the lady who wants to break up, the guy who doesn't know why the relationship is over. Shit.
"You're not responding to my texts," the guy, Danny, apparently, says, stepping closer. The lady is dressed in uniform. She most likely works at this clothing store. Jesus, that means the guy has ambushed her while she's on shift. That's not cool.
"I don't need to reply! We broke up!"
"But did we? You just decided we were done, and that isn't fair—we never got to talk about it!"
"Hey, hey!" Peter says, jogging up to them, putting himself between them. "Hey, dude? Danny, right? She doesn't want to talk. She's working, man, just leave her be."
The lady shakes her head. "Don't get involved," she snaps, and tries to walk away, but Danny grabs her arm. "Let go of me, you fuck!"
"Nora, please!"
Peter wrestles Danny off of Nora, and sets down his bag of clothes. So much for an uneventful shopping day.
"How about we all just take a deep breath," he suggests, already seeing security walking towards them, but then Danny pulls something out of his pocket, and everything goes downhill from there.
Is that a—
Okay, yeah, that's a souped up lithium battery. Wowza.
Peter manages to throw himself at Nora before Danny tosses the damn thing in the air, it hits the ceiling and explodes, and suddenly it's raining debris and concrete and clothing racks and Peter just holds still, covering Nora's body with his and internally taking a deep breath.
Right. So this is how it's going to be.
An hour later, and Danny has the entire sixth floor of this shopping complex held hostage. Some people were crushed by rubble. Some manage to make a run for the stairs. Nora seems largely uninjured, but she can't go anywhere, not with Danny brandishing what looks like another one of those DIY lithium battery bombs in his hand. He's determined to say his part. Peter just wonders why the guy couldn't have eaten some ice cream and cried about it like normal people do after a breakup.
"And you never took me seriously," Danny is saying, while Nora sobs and Peter looks for something he can use.
This would be much easier if he was in the suit. So, so much easier. But he can't blow his cover, can't reveal his identity, and can't do anything rash that would make Danny set off the other bomb (who knows how many of those suckers he has), so he's just crouched behind a rack of clothes, scanning his surroundings and trying to see how he can get everyone out of this okay.
Outside the window, he can see there's a news crew below. The police have already tried to get a walkie talkie through to Danny, but he's inconsolable, and the attempt had failed. Peter guesses they'll be treating this like a hostage situation. His phone has been buzzing like crazy in his pocket, but every time he moves his hand to check it, Danny gets a wild look in his eyes and Peter has to stop the movement before he gets his head blown off.
"Why didn't you tell me you were feeling trapped earlier?" Danny is pleading with Nora, stepping closer while still waving his bomb around. "We were so in love, Nora, we can fix this!"
Jesus Christ, let it go, Peter wants to scream, but he values his life and the lives of everyone else stuck up here a little too much to actually say it out loud.
The air around him buzzes. Someone new is here. Who?
Peter feels his senses stir before the bullet whistles past. If Danny had stayed like he was, crouched on the ground, up in Nora's face, it would have hit him directly in the head. Instead, he stands up, and it catches him just shy of his spine.
Danny howls and reflexively throws the bomb up. Peter's eyes fly wildly around the area, only catching a brief glimpse of Frank coming up the stairwell before the second bomb goes off.
"Frank, duck!" he yells, uselessly, as more of the ceiling comes crashing down.
Peter feels something sharp slam into his shoulder. He yelps and hits the ground, scraping his face on some debris from earlier. A few paces to the left of him, Nora is crying. Danny is cursing, probably still feeling the sting of the bullet lodged in his side.
"Frank?" Peter calls, and then panics as he sees the place where Frank was standing now covered in massive slabs of concrete. "Frank hold on!" he shouts, scrambling to his feet, running over to where he suspects Frank is buried.
His hands shake as he pulls rubble to the side, something that an ordinary person wouldn't be able to do, but he's a bit too scared to think of hiding his strength. He uncovers Frank's head, which is somehow unharmed, and is halfway to freeing his arms, when he hears Danny yell,
"Stop!"
Frank's eyes are wide. He has a cut on his temple. He shakes his head, but Peter turns around anyway, seeing Danny standing twenty feet away with Frank's gun in his hand.
"Danny, you don't know how to use that," Peter says, as calmly as possible, and then flinches as Danny fires off a warning shot. It lands very wide of where Peter is, but he's not gonna mess around with fate. "Danny, come on, this has gotten way out of hand," he says, stepping away from Frank with his hands up.
"Kid, stop, just stop," Frank pleads from behind him, but Peter keeps taking slow steps forward.
"All you wanted to do was talk to Nora, okay?" he says, and Danny nods, blood streaming from the wound in his side. "You never wanted any of this. You're hurt, I can see that. Can I take a look? I'm pretty good at patching people up."
He could do a lot more than patch people up if he was in the suit. If he was in the suit, this whole thing would be a breeze to sort out. He'd web Danny to the wall somewhere, take his weapons away, and leave him for the NYPD to cart off. But he's just Peter Parker right now. He's got a nasty wound on his right shoulder, his face is bleeding, and he can't do anything except talk as calmly as possible and try to mitigate damages.
"Everything's gone wrong," Danny says miserably, the gun still pointed at Peter, but his hand is shaking. "We were so good together. Everyone in my family said so, and then she just decided it was over, without even talking about it! Who does that?"
"Danny, let me look at your side," Peter coaxes, ten feet away now. "That's gotta hurt. I can help stop the bleeding. Okay?"
"Why would she end it?"
"I don't know, Danny," Peter says calmly, and looks to where Nora is hiding. With Danny focused on him, she's shuffled to the side, closer to where the emergency exit is. He gives her a small nod and keeps talking. "Let me check that bullet wound out, okay? You've gotta be careful with these things. Blood loss will really catch up with you."
He's close enough now that the barrel of the gun (Frank's gun, but in Danny's hands) is pressed to his chest. He reaches up slowly and lowers it. It slips out of Danny's hand and onto the ground.
"Let me help you," he says as steadily as possible, and lets Danny collapse into him.
He eases Danny onto the floor, his heart thundering between his ribs as he keeps talking, saying things that don't really matter, just trying to keep him calm. He can see that Nora made it to the exit. Any minute now, the NYPD will be bursting down the door to take care of Danny. In the meantime, Peter just has to make sure he doesn't do any more damage.
"I know it hurts," Peter says, packing the wound with some stray clothes on the floor. His right shoulder screams with pain from whatever had hit him earlier, and blood dribbles down his face from the cut he got on the debris, but he ignores all of it. "It hurts to be alone, I know that. Breathe in for me, okay? Deep breath."
Danny breaths shakily, and then sobs. "I love her," he whispers.
"I know you do," Peter says, not really believing him, because what sort of love would lead to something like this, but just saying what he has to to keep Danny calm. "Just breathe, Danny, okay? I've got you. I'm right here. Keep breathing."
His eyes find Frank's. Frank is trying to free himself from the rubble as quietly as possible, his face white as a sheet. It's okay, Peter mouths in Frank's direction, with as much of a smile as he can manage, and Frank shakes his head. Some blood drips from Peter's head down into his eye. He blinks it away, his eyelashes sticky.
"I'm so scared," Danny sobs, and inside, Peter thinks no shit, genius, but on the outside, he takes Danny's head in his hand and tucks him close to his chest, brushing his hair back from his face with his bloody hand and shushing him like he's a baby who really needs to go down for his nap.
"NYPD, hands where I can see them!" comes a shout from the stairwell, and Peter has to forcefully hold Danny down to stop him from bolting or, God forbid, reaching into his pocket.
Then there are officers cuffing Danny up, reading him his Miranda rights, and taking him away, and Peter can finally let out a heavy sigh and wipe the blood out of his eyes, letting himself actually feel the pain of his injuries.
"Sir? Sir, can you hear me?" asks a paramedic, rushing up to him and waving a flashlight in his eyes.
"Uh, yeah, I'm good, I can hear you," Peter says awkwardly, still scrubbing at his face with his sleeve, uncomfortable with the feeling of crusting blood on his cheeks. "Did everyone get out okay?"
"Mostly, yeah. You look like you got beat up pretty bad. Let's go, okay? We'll get you to a hospital, and then our friends at the NYPD are gonna take your statement at the station."
Peter shakes his head. "It looks worse than it is," he says, because it does, truly. With some water and something to eat, he'll be fine in a few hours. "I'll just go down to the station now, speed things up a bit."
"Sir, I wouldn't recommend—"
"Peter!"
Peter looks up and there's Frank, stumbling towards him. His left leg is definitely broken. He crashes into Peter anyway, hugging him so tight Peter feels like his ribs will crack.
"Um, Mister Punisher, sir, we've got to get Peter here to the station for his statement," says a police officer awkwardly.
Frank mutters a curse under his breath and takes Peter's face in his hands. "You good?" he asks roughly.
"Yeah," Peter says, with a goofy smile on his face. "I'm good."
Frank kisses him on the forehead and shoves him in the direction of the cop. Peter is given some bandages for his bleeding wounds, put in the back of a cop car, and taken to the nearest police station, where he relays all important details and sips at the bottle of water they offered him.
He's relieved when he stumbles back to his apartment and can finally take off his bloody clothes. He gets in the shower immediately, washing all the blood off, cleaning the grime from his wounds, inspecting them, satisfied when he sees that they've already started to scab over. He bandages the cut on his face, gets dressed in some comfy sweatpants and an MIT t-shirt, and collapses on his couch with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his banged up shoulder.
His phone buzzes. He opens it.
There are million panicked messages from Frank, who had apparently been the one texting him so much earlier. Texts like why am i looking at your face on the news in an active hostage situation? and answer me and what's going on? and peter i'm really fucking worried about you what the fuck does this psycho want and fuck it i'll be there in five.
The latest message is a photo of Frank's leg in a cast. Peter laughs, even though it isn't funny, and sends a photo back of the bag of peas pressed against his shoulder.
That fucking shitbag psycho really did a number on us, Frank texts him.
There's another text, from Santiago. Peter, I just saw the news, are you okay? Peter types a response to Santiago, saying that he's fine, just a little banged up and gonna need to spend a few days on the mend.
Another text from Frank. Two words, and they send a shiver down Peter's spine.
Come over.
Peter's up and out of the apartment in seconds.
Frank opens the door of his boat hideout a millisecond after Peter knocks, tugging him inside by the front of his shirt and enveloping him in his arms immediately.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," Frank chants into Peter's hair, pressing kisses all over his face. "You really are a loose cannon, aren't you? What the fuck were you thinking, walking directly into the barrel of a gun like that? He could've shot your guts out!"
"But he didn't," Peter argues, his nose buried in Frank's shoulder, standing on his tip-toes to be as close to him as possible.
Frank mutters something into his shoulder and kisses his hair again. He lets go of Peter, just enough so he can hold his shoulders in his hands and look him in the eyes. "You ever been fucked?" he asks bluntly.
Peter blushes. "No," he answers, feeling shy and awkward.
Frank nods, then grabs him by the neck and drags him towards his bedroom. "First time for everything," he says, and then starts kissing Peter like he's gonna disappear if he takes his mouth off of him.
Peter lets himself be pushed onto the bed, his knees bending and his body collapsing into the mattress, Frank following soon after. It's a bit awkward, with Frank's broken leg and Peter's busted up shoulder, but they make it work. Frank has him pressed against the wall, a tender hand looped around the back of his neck, his tongue sliding over his teeth and his lips moving wet and sure against Peter's.
"Lie back," he commands, and Peter is quick to obey, shuffling backwards on the bed, his hair messy and his eyes wide as Frank reaches to his waistband, raising his eyebrows, waiting for Peter to nod, and then pulling down his sweatpants and boxer briefs at the same time.
Peter shivers under Frank's sweeping gaze, and shivers even more when Frank's large, calloused hand slides up his left leg, starting at Peter's ankle and then ending around the meat of his thigh. Frank looks Peter in the eye, his face unreadable as he squeezes the flesh there. Peter moans. Frank leans down to swallow the sound, mouth open against Peter's.
"Fucking hell, kid," Frank says as he situates himself between Peter's legs, knees on the bed, careful of his leg in the cast. His hand works up, sliding underneath Peter's shirt, pinching his nipple and then sliding back down to take his dick in hand, swiping pre-cum from the tip. Peter feels like he's about to explode.
"Frank?" Peter gasps, not really having room in his brain for much else than simple syllable words.
"Yeah, kid?"
"It's really sweet that you came to rescue me."
Frank huffs. "Sweet? I'd call it stupid. You had things handled, all I managed to do was make everything worse and break my leg. You know I've gotta keep this cast on for six weeks? Fucking bullshit." The hand around Peter's dick tugs down sharply, Frank twisting his wrist as he does, and Peter yowls, squeezing his eyes shut. "Hey, no. None of that. Eyes up here. Come on."
Peter meets Frank's gaze and feels hot all over. Frank raises his eyebrows, a smug look on his face for all of two seconds, before he loses his balance and nearly falls flat on his face. Peter laughs hysterically, hands on Frank's shoulders, bracing him so he doesn't fall completely.
"Shut up," Frank grumbles, but Peter can hear the smile in his voice. "You wanna come before I fuck you, or with me inside you?"
"Up to you," Peter says breathlessly, and means it.
Frank tugs his shirt over his head and Peter lets himself rake his eyes over Frank's upper body—the scars, the tattoos, the muscle, the slight pudge around his belly, the tantalizing v-shape leading down to his crotch. He licks his lips. Frank gets up and works at getting his pants off, something that's clearly more difficult than it usually is with the cast getting in the way. After a lot of cursing, Frank is down to his boxers, at the end of the bed, tugging Peter's legs over his shoulders and bending forward.
"What—" Peter gasps, but has his question answered pretty quickly as Frank starts to lick up his ass crack, pulling his cheeks further apart so he can tongue at his hole. "Oh, fuck," Peter curses, tightening his thighs around Frank's head as he continues to eat him out.
His hands fist at Frank's bed sheets. His eyes squeeze shut. He can feel Frank's nose pressing up against his ballsack, his forehead pressing against the underside of his dick, and that tongue of his, licking rough at his hole, pushing past the tight ring of muscle and feeling its way inside.
Frank taps Peter's leg and Peter loosens up his grip, letting his thighs open a bit so Frank can rearrange himself between his legs. "Slut," Frank says affectionately, biting the inside of Peter's thigh before swallowing his dick whole.
"Oh, fuck," Peter moans, head back against the pillows, hand feeling around until he finds the top of Frank's head, pulling at his hair, tugging him closer. "Oh, fuck, shit, fuck—"
Frank's tongue moves up and down the underside, his hand cradles his balls, and then a finger teases his asshole, pushing, gently at first, and then firmer, until Frank has the entire length of Peter in his mouth and his index finger up to the knuckle in his ass. He looks up at Peter with cheeky brown eyes and then does something with his throat, hollowing out his cheeks and fucking hell, Peter is not gonna last.
"Frank, I'm so close," he gasps in warning, but Frank doesn't go anyway, just pulls back enough to lick at the tip and then swallow him back down again.
The whole world feels like it tilts on its axis as Frank wrings Peter's orgasm out of him. Peter's a little bit worried that his extra-sticky spider semen will somehow clog up Frank's throat, but he seems to swallow just fine, and crawls up Peter's body to flop on top of his chest, kissing his shoulder.
"I'd fuck you from behind, but I don't think my knees can take the strain with my leg all fucked," Frank whispers into his ear, and Peter might just die, right there on the bed. "Wanna ride me?"
"Christ, give a guy a second to recover," Peter pleads, curving his body into Frank's, smiling in between gasps of breath as Frank laughs.
"Stupid slut," he says, digging his fingers into Peter's scalp, tugging roughly on his hair in a way that just makes Peter moan again. "You're just hurtling towards danger, aren't you? Christ, you're too good for me. You're too good. Fucking hell, look at you, all fucked out and I've hardly touched you."
Peter squirms, his heart beating fast in his chest. He knows he's blushing all over his body. His brain feels like it's full of cotton balls, in the best way possible. He tugs Frank closer to him so he can kiss him again, tasting himself in Frank's mouth.
"Lube on the bedside table," Frank says against his lips, and Peter fumbles around until he finds it. "Good boy. Take your shirt off—just throw it wherever, it's fine. God, look at you. Now lie back for me and don't move. Keep those legs open. Just like that, Christ. You're such a vision. Fucking hell, you're gorgeous."
Frank squeezes lube onto his fingers and kisses Peter again, distracting him with his mouth while he presses two fingers into Peter's hole. Peter breathes in deep through his nose and tells himself to relax. That's what people do, right? He's gotta relax everything down there so it hurts less, so Frank doesn't accidentally tear some skin or something. He breathes and he lets Frank's mouth distract him from everything except the feel of his back against the bed and Frank's fingers in his ass.
Two fingers becomes three becomes four, and soon Peter is a puddle on the bed, whining and moaning and completely liquid.
"What'd you think, princess?" Frank asks, moving his mouth off of Peter's, looking him in the eyes as he crooks his fingers to find that one perfect spot inside of him. Peter whimpers. "Yeah, I think you're ready. Help me sit up, alright? I'm not as young as I used to be."
Jesus Christ, that goes straight to Peter's dick. He does what's asked of him, shuffling aside so he can help Frank position himself with his back against the headboard, his broken leg carefully laid out on the bed. Frank raises his eyebrows and Peter blushes bright red, hooking his fingers in the waistband of Frank's boxers and pulling them down. His dick springs free and it's red and leaking and that's gonna be inside him, holy shit.
"C'mere," Frank encourages, and Peter crawls forward on his hands and knees, his own dick bobbing helplessly somewhere against his belly. "Condoms in the bedside table too, mind helping me out?"
So Peter reaches for a condom, passes it to Frank, because Peter's never opened a condom and doesn't really know how, and thank God, Frank rips the packaging off with his teeth, rolls it over his dick, and then takes Peter's hips in his hands, firm but gentle.
"Slowly," Frank coaches, and Peter forces himself to breathe as Frank lowers him onto his dick.
"Fuck," Peter gasps, because that's really the only word for it. He's been stretched, stretched enough that it burns, but he breathes and forces himself to relax, not to tense up, ducking his head forward and resting his forehead on Frank's shoulder. "Frank, fuck, Christ—"
"I got you, Peter, I got you," Frank purrs, kissing his neck. "Nearly there, nearly there. You're taking me so well."
When Peter eventually sinks all the way down, he feels like all of his organs have been rearranged just to accommodate Frank—Frank, whose thumbs are pressing firm into Peter's hips, pressing firm enough to bruise; Frank, whose mouth is hot on his neck, kissing, licking, sucking; Frank, who's inside him, all the way inside him, fuck, fuck fuck—
"Move whenever you're ready," Frank says, words hot against his neck, and Peter nods.
It's a few moments before that feeling of readiness washes over him. He raises himself up an experimental inch, and then lets himself drop down, gasping. Frank's hands are still so tight on his hips. Peter lifts himself up again, and this time Frank raises his hips to meet him when he sinks back down. Oh, fuck. Jesus fucking Christ.
"You're a natural, Christ, keep going," Frank breathes into his neck, and Peter obeys, his whole body fuzzy and his brain blessedly silent. "Fucking hell, Peter. Fucking hell."
With Frank's hands guiding his hips, it's easy to find a rhythm. Peter breathes heavily, head bowed into Frank's shoulder, holding onto him for dear life as Frank picks up his pace, snapping his hips up to meet Peter's every time he sinks them down. Peter hopes the bruises on his hips stays for days. He hopes he has imprints of Frank lingering on his body for days, days, days, and then maybe Frank can grab hold of him again and make new ones.
"Peter, Jesus Christ, fuck, fuck, Peter," Frank groans, and bites down on Peter's shoulder. "Fuck, I'm coming, Peter, I'm coming, Jesus fucking Christ."
Frank's thrusts become erratic, then he seizes, holding tight onto Peter's back, breathing in deep. Peter whines and spills over Frank's chest, a second orgasm strung out of him.
They're both still, breathing against each other. Peter can feel Frank softening inside of him. It's so weird and it's so good, and Peter can't help it. He hides his face in Frank's shoulder and giggles, feeling all floaty and bubbly and just good.
"What you laughing about, huh?" Frank asks, but he huffs a laugh too, kissing all along from Peter's neck across to his shoulder. "Okay, you gotta move, kid. Stay here any longer and your cum's gonna dry into glue and we'll be stuck like this."
"Would that be such a bad thing?" Peter asks, only half joking, but raises himself off of Frank (fuck, the feel of him sliding out of him is so weird) and collapses next to the wall, groaning. "My legs don't work. You've broken me."
"Eh, don't sell yourself short," Frank says, slapping him on the ass as he gets up, laughing as Peter yelps. "I think it takes a little more than that to break you. Stay here, princess. I'm gonna get us a wet wipe."
And he does. When Frank returns, he rolls Peter over so he can wipe the cum off his abdomen, kissing his belly button for some absurd reason. He peels the condom off, ties it, and tosses it in the trash can next to his bed, then flops back down, half on top of Peter.
"You've got fifteen minutes, and then you gotta go," Frank says, tugging Peter close to his chest, kissing his hair.
"Okay," Peter says agreeably, eyes closed, pressed as close to Frank as he can get without actually sinking into his skin. "Hey, Frank?"
"Yeah, kid?"
"Thanks. For… y'know."
Frank kisses his forehead. "Sure, Peter," he says, his voice far more gentle than Peter expected.
He doesn't hear from Frank for a while. He's not dumb enough to think that he can reach out, initiate, text and ask to hang out or anything. Frank was very clear at the beginning—he'll reach out to Peter when he has time. He's been pretty good about that so far. Peter just tells himself that Frank is busy licking his wounds and letting his leg heal, and doesn't have time to be out and about. He makes himself busy with his Spider-Man business. He tries not to think about the itch in his skin and the headaches gnawing at his skull.
He and DeWolff are exchanging intel about a new crime gang—Foswell is the name of their ringleader, it seems. Peter has his ears tuned to any rumbles related to him. DeWolff is scanning through criminal records and trying to pin down as many of his associates as possible.
"Hey, Spider-Man," she says one day, while they're sitting on the edge of a water fountain, mid debrief. "We arrested a guy a week or so ago. Daniel Holding, held the sixth floor of a Macy's hostage because his girlfriend worked there, ended up injuring twelve people, including The Punisher, who was there trying to stop him, for some reason."
"Yeah, I saw that," Peter says, his heart jumping a bit at the mention of Frank. "What's up?"
"He goes to trial soon," DeWolff continues, "and he's saying something about how he talked to Spider-Man, talked to you, right after this girl had broken up with him. That true?"
Peter nods. "I was on patrol in a park and I heard them arguing," he says. "He seemed like he was giving her a hard time, so I stepped in, tried to talk him off a ledge, and made sure he got back to his apartment alright without harassing her even more. I thought he was gonna be fine, but, well, that clearly didn't happen."
"Tell me about it," DeWolff sighs, taking a sip of her coffee. "He wants you to step in as a character reference. I had the DA's office tell him that's a shit stupid idea."
"How would that even work?" Peter asks, frowning. "I'd have to be sworn in, get on the stand, but… can you swear someone in under an alias? I'm not taking the mask off for this guy's trial."
"That's exactly what I said," DeWolff grumbles, her gaze following a flock of pigeons that an old woman is feeding. "Just wanted to give you a heads up so if anyone corners you about it, it's not a surprise."
"Who would corner me about it?"
"Don't know. Thought I'd warn you anyway."
DeWolff takes another slow sip of her coffee. The fountain behind them hums steadily. It's a nice day. Families are walking around. Peter can see couples walking hand in hand. If MJ remembered him, he might be walking hand in hand with her, back on spring break, walking slow through the peaceful city. His heart aches. God, it never gets better, it only ever gets worse.
"Hey, Spider-Man?" DeWolff asks.
"Yeah, Officer?"
"You know that guy you checked in on a while ago, the guy who volunteers at the library, Peter Parker?"
Of course I know him, Peter thinks hysterically. He's me!
"Uh, yeah, I do," he says instead, getting the feeling that DeWolff wouldn't appreciate the Star Wars reference, especially since his objectively funny reference would result in him unmasking himself. "Why, what's up?"
"He got banged up pretty bad in that hostage situation. My husband hasn't heard from him in a while, and he's worried. He asked me to do a welfare check, but to be frank, I really don't have enough time on my hands, and, well, you mentioned you'd talked to him once, so…" She shrugs. "Just was wondering if you could swing by."
"Ha ha," Peter says as she snorts a laughs at her own joke. "Very funny. And, uh, I have actually checked in on him."
"Oh, yeah?" She raises her eyebrows, a little surprised. "How is he?"
Peter thinks about how to respond. "He's eating a lot of pizza and hiding in his apartment," he answers honestly. "But he seems okay. I, uh… I checked in on the lady as well, Daniel Holding's ex, Nora Sheffield. She's more than a little spooked, but her roommates are being really great about everything, and she's got a bunch of time off work, which is more than I expected from a retail job."
"That's good. I'm glad to hear it." DeWolff sighs and downs the rest of her coffee. "The poor girl's gonna have to testify at Holding's trial. I always feel bad for the women in situations like this. You have no idea how much of it I see—guys going ballistic because they can't take no for an answer."
"Loneliness does awful things to people," Peter says.
DeWolff hums. "You're damn right it does. Hey, let me ask you something. How much human interaction are you getting? Even when you were skewered and thrown off the Empire State building, it didn't seem like you took much more than a few days off. When does Spider-Man rest?"
Peter laughs dryly. "Uh, yeah, no, I get out sometimes," he says awkwardly. "I, um… I have friends. I see them. Sometimes."
Does he have friends?
He has Santiago, DeWolff's husband who seems to care about him as a person, but who Peter doesn't know, not really. He's got Madeline and baby Joey… who be babysits for, shit, those aren't really friends, are they? He has Frank. And Frank… Well. Peter might know what it's like to have Frank's dick halfway up his colon, but he's not sure he can call them friends.
"Well, I still think you should find a better work life balance," DeWolff remarks, and gets up. "Alright. Good talk. I've gotta get back on patrol, and you've probably got some whack jobs to talk off ledges. I'll see you, Spider-Man."
"Stay safe out there, Officer!" Peter calls back, sends a web up to the nearest building, and swings away.
Ned and MJ graduate from MIT. Peter spends hours staring at his phone, scrolling through their grad photos, taking deep breaths and crying, re-reading the letter he'd written to MJ years ago, thinking maybe, maybe, maybe— but doesn't do anything about it.
He's removed himself from their lives because they'd be in danger if they knew him. Peter Parker's life and Spider-Man's life need to be completely separate. He looks after them as Spider-Man. He stays away from them as Peter Parker. That's how it has to be.
But they're moving back to Queens. They're renting an apartment (goddamn Ned and his internet addiction, he'd posted the address already, he's gonna get in real trouble one day) that's not too far away from where Peter lives, they're going to be roommates, probably get jobs in the city and make a life right here in his neighborhood, and he'll go his whole life protecting them but never truly being with them, always watching from the outside.
"I miss you guys," he says to his phone screen, tears running down his cheeks. "I miss you so much."
Children's Hour at the library gets less busy the nicer the weather is. More families, especially families with older kids, hang out outside, at playgrounds and parks, instead of inside at the library. Peter gets assigned to read on Tuesday at 10am, the first time he's been back since the hostage situation he was unfortunately roped into.
Santiago gives him a big hug, which Peter returns. He reads The Gruffalo for what must be the millionth time, but he doesn't let himself feel self-conscious about the repetition. He really, really loves that story. One of the older kids asks him to read Pete the Cat, and so he finds one of the books and tells an animated story about Pete the Cat and his groovy shoes.
"It's good to see you back," Santiago says after the hour is done. "I was worried about you, man."
Peter flushes, not used to having people worry about Peter Parker, the regular guy, instead of Spider-Man, the beloved masked vigilante.
"Well, I'm feeling better now," Peter says sheepishly, "so you should see me around more often."
It's not quite the truth. Peter makes time for a read-a-loud once a week or so, but the job becomes busier as the weather gets warmer. Summer time means a spike in crime. Peter's web slinging around NYC more often than not, catching a few hours of sleep when he can, and living mostly off of take out pizza and protein shakes.
Frank texts him around the middle of June, the first time Peter's heard from him since he went over to his boat hideout. Peter smiles when he opens the text, seeing it's a photo of Frank's bare leg, freed from its cast.
Doc says I should take it easy, whatever that means, Frank texts. Wanna accompany an old man on a stroll around Central Park?
Peter's heart flutters. Can't, he texts back, even though that sounds like the best thing ever. Work has been kinda crazy.
Frank takes a while to respond to that one. Kiddos at the library keeping you busy? he asks, and Peter feels shame spike through him. Keep your head up, kid. Don't let those scrawny fuckers run you down.
Peter sends back a frowny face emoji and closes his phone.
"Fuck," he says to the empty air around him, and then gets on with paying his bills.
A few days later, there's a run-away tank screaming through the streets of NYC, and Peter is in hot pursuit. He has Ned's voice floating through his head, the video he posted as he and MJ have moved into their new place. He breathes in deep and focuses on the task ahead of him.
He rips the gun off the top of the tank, slings away, drags a kid on his scooter out of the way before he can get run over, makes sure he's okay, pats him on the head and swings back into action, barely managing to drag the tank clear of a tour bus, then slamming into the tour bus itself, the wind knocked out of his lungs.
Peter has just managed to sling himself back onto the tank when he hears a whistling sound in the air, and barely has a moment to brace himself before a mini explosive slams into the tank. Head spinning, he stands up, only to get hit by a van.
Frank's van.
"What the hell, Frank!" he exclaims, crawling up the front of it to see Frank steering with one hand and wielding a gun with the other. "You just hit me with your van!"
"Quit your whimpering!" Frank shouts back, frowning as he tries to kep his van steady while also keeping his aim steady. Peter laughs, feeling like he's going crazy.
"You can't just shoot yourself out of every situation!" Peter protests as Frank still tries to find a clear line of fire around him. "Innocent people get hurt!"
"Who do you think is down range of that tank, dumb dumb?" Frank fires back, cocking his gun.
Peter shoots a web down the barrel of it before Frank can fire off another round. A crazy look appears in Frank's eye.
"Suit yourself," he says with a shrug, and shoots Peter in the chest with his own web.
Peter flies backwards, landing on the top of the tank again, and does something he know will piss Frank off—he draws himself taut between two webs, increase the tension, and then kicks through the windshield, sending Frank (and his gun, and his seat) tumbling through the van and onto the ground.
"Mother—" he hears Frank start, and Peter, feeling mischievous, slings a web to cover his mouth before he can finish the curse.
"Go home, Frank!" Peter calls as he swings back to the tank, and the chase is back on.
Things don't go well with the tank chase. There's some sort of thing jumping from person to person, possessing them, making them do and say things completely out of character, and then jumping on to the next person. He debriefs with DeWolff, and then decides this might be more than what he's equipped to deal with, and pays Black Widow a visit.
She has ideas, and likes his possession theory, but insists that this is small potato stuff, not her area to take care of, so he's back to the drawing board. He leaves with smoother skin and no idea where to start with the attacks on Damage Control. He has a lead, though. V-Max, whatever that is.
He meets with Metzger, who is all together pretty unhelpful, but does make it clear that he expects Spider-Man to deal with this body-hopping possession ghost thingy. Metzger also has no idea what V-Max is, which shuts down that lead. After changing out of his suit, Peter gives DeWolff a call and updates her on his meeting with Metzger, walking to the bodega to pick up flowers for Aunt May as well. He could have kept talking with her for hours about possible ideas, but just then the door opens, and he hears a familiar voice.
"Do you have any mini-kegs?" the voice asks, and fuck, it's Ned.
"I'll call you back," Peter says to DeWolff, and, practically vibrating in his seat, listens in to Ned's conversation with the shopkeep about Sharkfire Energy drinks.
Ned leaves the shop, and following him is an awful idea, a terrible idea, but somehow that's exactly what Peter does. The sunlight fades, the amber streetlights turn on, and Peter keeps following him, even as he knows this is so, so, so weird and wrong and bad and—
He's in Ned's apartment.
He's in Ned's apartment, there's music playing, there's so many people, he's in Ned's apartment, and there's… a Spider-Man wall.
"I see you've stumbled across my board," Ned says from behind him, and fuck, Ned's talking to him, it's been four years, Ned has no idea who he is, and he's talking to him. "I’m not one of those weirdos, I swear. He actually saved me and my friends’ lives a few times in high school. And ever since, I’ve just been trying to figure out who he is. Not to unmask him to the world or anything, just to know, you know? And to, hopefully, thank him face to face."
If only you knew, Peter thinks, light-headed, watching as Ned pulls out his phone from his pocket.
"I actually created this app that monitors his sightings," Ned says, and Peter's eyes go wide.
"Wait, you created Spidey Tracker?" he blurts, and suddenly he and Ned are talking about Spider-Man, standing in Ned's apartment, talking for the first time in four years, and talking about Spider-Man of all things.
And then—
"God, there’s, like, 50 people in our apartment," says MJ, stepping out of the crowd, so close Peter can smell the tequila shots on her breath. Fuck. "Statistically speaking, that means at least two of them are sociopaths… which is kind of cool." She notices him, and nods. "Nice flowers."
"They're a housewarming gift," Peter blurts, feeling stupid.
And then it all starts falling apart. He's in Ned and MJ's apartment, talking to them, to them, not just watching them through a phone screen, and the reality of it all comes crashing down on him.
He's been so lonely, so alone for all these years, and they've been here. Sure, not in New York, but Massachusets isn't that far away. He could have told them. He could have let them live their lives, given them time to process, and maybe become friends with them again, if only he'd just told them.
Everything falls apart. MJ has a boyfriend, and he watches her kiss him, feeling like his stomach is going to fall out onto the floor. He barely manages to get back to his place, but when he does, he doesn't get much peace before pain whistles through his head and—
He hits the ground.
When he wakes up, he's in a cocoon, a literal cocoon, dangling upside down over an alleyway, several stories up.
What the fuck is happening to him?
Okay, so. Recap.
He has organic spinnerets now, which is freaky as fuck, but sure. Fine. Peter 2 had them, and he managed well enough. E.V. tells him his arachnid hormones are off the charts, and that the balance in his body is probably a result of trauma. "Have you experienced any recent traumatic events, Peter?" E.V. asks, and Peter thinks about being in Ned and MJ's apartment, being reminded of all the good things he's purposefully kept from himself, and feels like vomitting.
He steps outside and it feels like the world is crashing all around his ears. Everything is too loud. A dripping pipe sounds like a waterfall. A rustling chip packet sounds like a trash compactor. Everything is happening too suddenly, too fast, and then, as if his rapid mutations aren't a problem enough, the crime alert starts going crazy, and there's shots fired at the Department of Defense.
He swings to Manhattan. He beats the ever-living shit out of the Scorpion, who turns out to not be the Scorpion, but rather that presence. He went too crazy. He couldn't get a hold of himself. He injured a police officer. DeWolff gets all up in his face, demanding to know what's going on. Peter is terrified. He doesn't know what's going on.
Sweating, shaking, with a headache pounding behind his eyes, he sneaks into ESU to speak to Dr Banner. They brainstorm about an inhibitor. Banner warns him about the dangers of selectively repressing parts of his DNA. Peter brushes him off, and gets to his apartment so he can start piecing things together. He creates a few prototypes, tests them out, and thinks he might have luck on the seventh, but it overheats before he can get anywhere.
And then that presence is back again, hopping from person to person, goading him into a reaction, and then somehow in his apartment, rifling through his stuff, saying they're going to go after MJ, and everything is very very real and very very scary. It feels like Mysterio all over again, fighting something that he can't see, questioning what's real and what's not.
He beats the presence, whoever it is, to MJ, and after some convincing, manages to get her to come with him safety.
Except.
Except it hadn't been MJ, and he doesn't realize it until after he's kissed her, after he's collapsed in her arms, crying, relieved she remembers him, only for it to be that presence again, that person, goading him on, walking MJ's body backwards off the building and dropping her. Peter catches her, and then the presence is there, talking to him through the body of a man, while there's a black car in the back. He gets a glance of a girl in the backseat, thinks, that's her, and then is too focused keeping MJ safe to think about it much more.
There's only one place he can think to go. And so he's stumbling into Frank's boat hideout, setting off all the booby traps that he's previously been able to dodge like it's second nature.
"You're losing it, kid," Frank says from above them, elbows on the railing of the boat, frowning. "Thought you'd be able to see all of those a mile away."
"Yeah, well, I'm a little off my game, a lot has been happening," Peter sighs. "Just let us in, okay?"
Frank puts his hands on his hips. "Yeah? And who the hell is us, huh?"
"Well, who the hell are you, jackass?" MJ snaps.
"Yeah, who the hell is she?" Frank snaps right back.
"Guys, guys!" Peter says, then trails off. "She's… Y'know."
"No, I don't know," Frank sasses. "That's why I just asked you."
"She's in danger," Peter pleads. "Look, Frank, I just need your help. You owe me."
"Oh, I owe you, huh?" Frank scoffs. "For what, Staten Island? Aren't you just a little tired of this story?"
And then they're arguing, voices overlapping, and thank God MJ interrupts, gets them to stop yelling, and Frank lets them in. They huddle around his banged up laptop, where Peter manages to identify the girl he saw in the black car as Jean Grey, and now they have a lead, an actual lead.
"Okay, so what's the plan?" Frank prods. "Just gonna hope that your facial tracking program works? And you get yourself killed, I gotta watch your girlfriend the rest of my life?"
There's an edge to Frank's voice, a look in his eye when he says get yourself killed, and Peter doesn't know how to feel about it. Is it a worried look? Is it an angry one?
The last time Peter was in this boat, Frank was kissing him and spreading him open on his fingers, but Frank doesn't know that. Frank remembers fucking Peter Parker in his bed, not Spider-Man. Peter's stomach twists. The headache pounds louder behind his eyes.
They keep arguing. Peter eventually gets Frank to accept the plan, and spends the rest of the evening holed up in Frank's workshop slash second bedroom, talking with MJ about them both being withholding while he makes tweaks to the inhibitor. MJ manages to do in seconds what Peter had been struggling to do the whole day, identifying the problem with the inhibitor's design, and suddenly everything is working, and Peter nearly forgets that it's been four years and MJ doesn't know him, not at all. He falls asleep in a chair and wakes up with a sore back.
"You get your shit fixed?" Frank asks when he stumbles into the main room.
"Yeah," Peter answers, reaching up to rub his neck. "I’ve been wearing it all night. So far, so good. I made this other one universal, so if I could get it on Jean, it should completely shut down her powers."
"You know what else would work?" Frank asks, then answers his own question. "You just shoot her."
Peter sighs. "Nice."
He sinks down into the chair opposite Frank, and accepts the cup of coffee that Frank offers him. He lifts the bottom part of his mask up to take a sip, exhaling slow as the warm fluid curls in his stomach. Across from him, Frank barks out a laugh—not a happy laugh, not a sad laugh, kind of a mean laugh.
"Jesus Christ," he says, shaking his head. "That has gotta be the goofiest shit I ever seen in my life. What, you can’t even take the mask off to drink a cup of coffee?"
"Don’t take it personally, Frank," Peter says, trying to wrack his brain for the last interaction Spider-Man had with The Punisher, for any indication of what might have brought on this attitude. "It stays on for everybody."
"Even her?" Frank asks, and when Peter doesn't answer, he pushes on. "Who is she, kid?"
"I don’t know her," Peter lies.
Frank sees through it immediately, scoffing. "That’s horseshit. Who is she?"
Peter doubles down. "I’m telling you, I don’t know who she is."
"What are you doing?" Frank asks, frowning a bit, confusion overtaking his blunt interrogation. "You care about her, but you’re pretending not to. Why?" He pauses, and then says, a little gentler, "Look, if it's me you're worried about, you don't have to be. I don’t give a single shit about that girl, I just wanna know what's got your panties in a twist."
"I don’t know who she is, Frank," Peter says, exasperated. "I don’t have anybody. I’m like you. I just keep to myself."
What he thought would be a surefire way to end the line of investigation just seems to make Frank upset.
"You’re like me?" Frank asks rhetorically, huffing another mean laugh. "What do you know about me, kid? You think this is a choice? Living like this, it’s a lifestyle? Is that what you think? Kid, this is a sentence. You know something, if I had one second, one second where the people I love were still breathing, you think I’d be hiding behind a mask? You think I’d pretend to be something that I’m not… acting like a goddamn coward?"
Peter winces and turns his head away. Frank gets up from the table and busies himself with something else.
He's scared and confused and doesn't know what's happening to his body or to the people around him, so he pulls out the note he wrote MJ and reads it over and over, trying to steady his breathing, keeping half an eye on Frank's laptop the whole time.
Facial recognition tech lights up a match for Jean Grey at the Damage Control HQ in Manhattan. Peter jumps out of his seat, scrambling to get going, and then pauses. He meets Frank's gaze, and sees the older man looking at him with something like pity.
"I got it," he says, his voice much softer than before. "She's gonna be okay."
Peter could cry. "Thanks, Frank," he says, and slings away.
Things go horribly. Frank ends up catching up to him, and they fight the Hulk together, until Frank gets possessed, Peter's on his own trying to stop Bruce Banner from killing himself and the rest of Manhattan, he finally deals with the Hulk, launches himself at Jean Grey, and manages to get the inhibitor on her before any other massive damage can be done.
Jean Grey passes out in his arms, whispering, "Sara," before her head lolls to the side and Metzger takes her away.
Threat neutralized, he webslings back to Frank's boat, and stops in his tracks when he finds MJ standing in the kitchen, his letter to her held in her hands.
"Did you want me to find it?" she asks, and four years worth of lies come crashing down around him.
She asks him to bring her home, and he does. Of course he does. She could ask him to stand in the middle of Times Square and rip his own heart out and he would. And then, inexplicably, she turns to him and asks if he wants to come up, just to say hi to Ned.
Then he's sitting on the floor of their apartment, joking around with Ned, building LEGOs while MJ sketches on the couch, and it's so domestic, so normal, that he feels like he could cry. He missed this. God, he missed this so much.
But it all collapses around his ears before he can even enjoy it. Of course it does.
Metzger had lied to him. Jean Grey was just a teenager looking for her sister, and Metzger had lied to Peter, convinced him to turn Jean over to him, the very person who had abducted Sara and had been doing God knows what to her for years.
Frank calls him as he's swinging to the Department of Defense.
"Damage Control kidnapped Jean's sister," Peter says before Frank can chew him out over being reckless. "Jean was just trying to find her. We were wrong about everything."
"Sentimental horseshit," Frank bites back over the line. "You’ve seen what she can do and what she’s capable of. What, you’re gonna let her loose? Is that what you’re gonna do? I’ll tell you right now, you do that, I handle it my way."
"Frank?" Peter calls, then hears the disconnect call sound. "Dammit, Frank!"
All things considered, everything doesn't go as badly as it could have.
Peter takes off his inhibitor. He lets himself go full Spidey—or whatever it is he's going to call it when he lets his arachnid DNA go haywire without regulating it. He strings up The Hand, fights his way through the DODC agents, and breaks into where they had been holding Jean Grey, where Jean Grey is now holding Metzger to a chair, shards of glass floating near his face.
"You're not a killer, Jean," he says as calmly as he can, hands up as he inches forward.
"You don't know who I am," Jean says through gritted teeth.
"I know that you loved your sister. And I know that losing her felt like you’d lost everything."
"Come any closer, and he dies!" Jean screams, wild, unrestrained pain in her eyes.
Peter gets close enough to touch her, though he doesn't dare cross that line yet. She threatens to dig inside his mind again, warning him that she's a lot more powerful than she was the last time she tried. Peter has nothing left to try. He feels her pain, and he decides to just let her in.
In his memories, Aunt May is sitting next to him, holding him, telling him that she loves him.
"You're beautiful," Aunt May says, and now she's saying it to Jean, holding her as Jean cries into her hair, Peter standing and watching. "And the people who love you… We love you not because you’re special, we love you because you’re you. I want you to remember that. Even when it feels like you’re totally alone."
Aunt May melts away and it's just him and Jean sitting on the bed.
"I have no one," Jean whispers.
Peter shares a sad smile with her. "You have me," he says, the moment sweet and tender, until—
His spidey senses tingle.
There's a bullet flying in Jean's direction, and he barely manages to shield her body with his own before it makes impact.
Oh, Frank, Peter thinks faintly as he collapses onto the ground, Jean crying over him, pleading for him to be okay while he tries to tell her to run. There's a lot of blood pooling on the ground. All of it is his. He tries to smile at her, tell her everything is okay, but his words aren't doing a good job of reassuring her. She holds him tight and begs for him to stay awake.
Everything fades away after that.
He supposes the poets were right. Death really is just like falling asleep.
When he starts to become conscious of his surroundings, the first thing he notices is the beating of a heart monitor. The second thing he notices is the oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. He flails, panicking for a moment, until a heavy, calloused hand settles on his shoulder, he looks over, and there he is—Frank.
"Hey, hey, breathe," Frank coaxes as Peter yanks the oxygen mask off.
"Where's my mask?" he asks desperately, head swiveling side to side, like if he can get it back on in the next few seconds, Frank will forget ever seeing his face, forget finding out that Peter Parker and Spider-Man are the same person.
"Don't worry about it, I got you covered," Frank soothes. "You just breathe, okay? Just breathe."
"Where's Jean?" Peter asks, because asking anything else, anything about Frank or his reaction to finding out who's beneath the mask would just be too much.
"I think she just left," Frank says with a shrug. "She was using her magic voodoo shit to keep you alive." A dark look crosses over Frank's face. "Kid, I'm sorry," he says, his eyes falling, unable to look at Peter. "I'm so fucking sorry."
"Frank, it's okay," Peter tries.
"No, no, it's a lot of things, but it's sure as shit not okay," Frank insists, eyes jumping back up to meet Peter's. "Look, I've seen real bravery in my day, okay? But you… What you did? That was something else."
Peter watches as something slips down Frank's cheek, following its motion, frowning, taking entirely too long to realize that—
"Frank, are you crying?" he asks in a small voice.
"Shut up," Frank says tearfully, scrubbing at his face. "I ain't crying. You're just seeing things. I damn near killed you, okay? You're all messed up in the head. Actually, I think you did die for a moment there. Flatlined, or whatever it is. Fucking hell, kid, I killed you. Jesus Christ."
"Kill me again," Peter says without really thinking about it. "Show me the only way you know how to love."
Frank's eyes dart to his, gobsmacked, and Peter groans, hiding his face in his hands.
"It's a reference to a show," he says, feeling like an awful person. "Interview with the Vampire, there are these two vampires, Lestat and Louis, and they're in love, but they're also both absolutely insane, because of the whole vampire thing, and Louis kills Lestat at the end of the first season, but he actually doesn't, because Lestat is super powerful and he lives, and Louis hallucinates him for most of the second season before Lestat shows up again, and— Jesus, I'm not making any sense."
"No, you're not," Frank agrees, but he's smiling, smiling with tears streaming down his cheeks, and Peter wants to feel elated at seeing him smile again, but all he feels is guilty.
"Aren't you mad?" he asks nervously.
Frank shrugs. "About what?"
Peter gestures to himself. "About me hiding who I was from you!" he exclaims. "Goddammit, Frank, you fucked me on your boat when you only knew me as Peter, then I showed up as Spider-Man asking all this stuff from you, asking to keep MJ safe, and now, whoopsie daisy, that guy whose virginity you took is the same guy as the pajama spider ninja swinging around being a pain in your ass and kicking you through your van!"
Frank's eyebrows raise, and then laughs. Really laughs, all the way from his belly.
"Kid, I've known who you are since that time at the bar when you got roofied," he says, wiping his eyes. "Also, by the way, when I invited you over to the boat after that fuck up of a hostage situation? I just said come over, didn't give you an address. Didn't you think that was maybe a little bit strange? Peter, come on, I knew you were Spider-Man, I knew Spider-Man already figured out where I lived, and I thought you'd connect the dots too. Turns out I overestimated you. Y'know, for a supposed genius, you are pretty dumb."
"Shut up," Peter says, feeling like crying a bit himself. "You knew all the way back then, and you never said anything?"
"I figured it was a game," Frank admits, shrugging. "Stress relief, y'know? You get to pretend to be just a normal guy blowing off some steam, get to mess around with someone who actually knows how much of a punch you can take, and you keep work out of it too. Identity porn, man. It's one hell of a drug."
"So… you thought that I knew that you knew?"
"Yup," Frank says, with a wry grin. "Gotta admit, I was a little ticked off when I reached out after I got the cast off and you just brushed me off with that work excuse. I thought, surely after I invited him over, didn't tell him an address, and he showed up at the right place anyway, surely he'd know I knew."
"Oh my god," Peter groans. "Did you hit me with your van because you were pissy over a misunderstanding?"
"Hey, I'd hit you with my van any day," Frank defends, hands in the air. "I know you can take it."
Peter goes red. Frank laughs again.
"Really, kid, listen to me," he says, leaning in closer, elbows on Peter's hospital bed. Peter meets his eyes awkwardly. "I wouldn't have done half the things I did to you if I didn't know you had some spider shit coursing through your veins. Peter, I once held you up against a tree and choked you for over a minute. You think I would've done that if I didn't know who you were?"
"I feel so dumb," Peter groans, wanting to melt through the bed.
"Don't beat yourself up," Frank says, ruffling his hair. "You're entitled to a bit of dumbness. Hey, you're sitting next to the guy who decided that firing a lethal round into a mile of suspended air was a good idea, so there's plenty of dumb to go around in this room."
Peter laughs, just a little bit, and then casts his gaze to the mountain of get-well cards next to his bed. His eyes find MJ's sketch and his heart clenches. Frank follows his eye line and sighs.
"Okay, confession time number two, I read the letter you wrote her," Frank admits.
"What!" Peter exclaims. "Jesus, the both of you, snooping around in my stuff!"
"Hey, you leave your shit in my place, you better bet I'm snooping," Frank snaps. "So, yeah. I know about the… the forgetting spell, or whatever. I'm sorry about MJ and Ned and the rest of your little buddies. And, uh, just… just for my own peace of mind… Did I know you? Before the spell?"
Peter shakes his head, looking at his bandaged hands and not at Frank. "No. I've, um… I've always been a bit of an outcast. Didn't have a lot of friends even before everyone forgot me. It was MJ, Ned, Aunt May, and, well…" He lets out a deep breath. "The Avengers. The first ones, at least, but they only knew me as Spider-Man. Mr Stark knew me as both, as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, but he was… Well, I went away during the Blip, and he died fighting Thanos pretty soon after, so I… I never really got to say goodbye to him. I'm living off of the money he left me, actually. I, uh… I haven't really been all that connected to the real world ever since everyone forgot me. The volunteer thing at the library is new. Really new. And, um…"
His eyes dart to Frank, suddenly very shy.
"Whatever's going on here is pretty new too," he says quietly.
Frank's whole face goes soft. Peter doesn't really know what to do with that.
"They had to cut through your suit when they brought you in," Frank starts, changing the subject, not slick at all, "but when you're ready to split, I've got a plan."
Peter grins, feeling a little bit like everything's going to be okay. "Oh, yeah?" he teases, and Frank grins right back.
Days after he's discharged from the hospital, MJ sends him a cryptic text and he swings himself over to her apartment, heart in his throat.
"I need you to tell me everything I forgot," she says, her voice stern. "I need to know… Well, how many of my life decisions were impacted by knowing you. By knowing… Peter Parker, and knowing he was Spider-Man, and being with Spider-Man. Would I still be the person I am today, have made the choices I did, if I didn't know you? I… I need to know. Please."
So Peter spends hours, many emotional hours, talking and crying and remembering, and by the end of it, MJ gives him a hug, Peter lets himself mourn the past he remembers but she doesn't, and leaves feeling lighter.
Frank is waiting for him when he gets back to his apartment.
"Your cutlery is abysmal," is the first thing Frank says to him. "And I know I'm not the picture of perfection myself, but come on, man, all your forks are plastic, you've got no table knives, and is this a spork? Is your only spoon a spork?"
Peter grins ear to ear, walks past him and lets Frank hit him over the head.
"I made lasagna, and you're gonna eat it," Frank continues. "You take too many things for granted in life, kid. Do you understand how nice your oven is? It's got convection baking. Convection fucking baking. This is the good shit."
"I don't cook that often," Peter admits. "Never really learned how."
Frank brandishes a spatula at him. "Well, that's gonna change," he threatens. "You're gonna learn to— to fucking dice vegetables, and sear a steak, and make a proper fucking tomato sauce from scratch, you hear me? Christ. Kids these days."
Peter laughs and wraps his arms around Frank from behind, burying his nose in his neck.
"You're such a softy," he teases, and dances away before Frank can throw food at him.
"Watch who you're calling a softy," Frank says roughly, but there's a smile on his face and fondness in his eyes and Peter never really feels threatened anyway, not when he knows that Frank cares.
Frank serves up two massive slices of homemade lasagna, and brings them to Peter's small table. He grunts when Peter tries to start eating, batting his hands away, and only lets him dig in once he comes back with cups of water for both of them.
"Thank you, Frank," Peter says through a mouthful of the best lasagna he's had in his life, smiling even as he knows he's got marinara sauce dribbling down his chin.
Frank rakes his eyes over him. "Fucking obscene," he mutters, wiping the sauce off Peter's face.
They eat their food in companionable silence, focused on watching the replay of last night's Yankees game, because, according to Frank, it's a goddamn crime that Peter's lived in New York his whole life and doesn't have an obsessive parasocial relationship to the goddamn Yankees. When they finish eating, Frank clears their plates and does the dishes. Peter squirms in his seat, not used to someone else in his apartment, not used to someone else just… moving through his space, cleaning things up, helping him out.
When Frank sits back down, it's with a heavy exhale. He closes Peter's laptop, shutting off the sounds of the game highlights, and levels a serious look in Peter's direction.
"I gotta talk to you about something you said the other day," Frank says.
Peter swallows nervously. "Uh… What is it?"
"You said you were like me, back on the boat. That you just keep to yourself." Frank narrows his eyes. "I think I said enough to set you straight in the moment, but given our whole talk in the hospital, I'm not so sure that you and I were speaking the same language then. Now, I don't know what I gotta say to get it through your thick skull, but I gotta make this clear—the way I live? It's not a lifestyle. It's not something I'm proud of. I don't just keep to myself. Understand?"
Peter purses his lips. "So what's stopping you from getting an apartment of your own, living an actual life, not just hiding in your boat all the time?" he asks, with a little bit of heat, because goddammit, Frank is twice his age, definitely old enough to make decisions for himself, so if he doesn't like the life he's living, why does he keep living it?
"It's not that simple," Frank insists. "People close to me get hurt. And I'm not just saying that because I'm paranoid—my whole family was gunned down in Central Park eleven years ago because some psychopathic dickwad I served with in the army knew I didn't agree with some of the stuff we did back then, and wanted to take me out. Do you understand that?"
Peter goes silent. Frank's looking at him intensely, his hand in the air for emphasis, his fingers shaking.
"I was married," Frank continues, voice cracking in the middle of his words. "My wife, Maria? She was a good woman. My kids—Lisa and Frankie Junior—they didn't deserve those bullets. They died anyway. And shit, kid, it's been eleven years since they died, eleven goddamn years, and things keep cropping up. I thought I'd done away with all the fuckers who killed my family, thought I'd settled my score, the feds had cleared me for everything, and then, boom, I'm back in the city, protecting this little girl from the same fuckers who killed my little girl and my little boy, my family, and it's never over. It's never done. So I keep going. I do my job. The media called me The Punisher, and fine, that's who I am. But you?"
Frank jabs his index finger into Peter's chest.
"You have your whole life ahead of you," he says. "You're not like me. I'm damned, that's what I am. There's an ugly punishment waiting for me at the end of my ugly life, but you're a kid. You're a good kid. You flourish, can't you see that? You make the world better by being in it. I just run around trying to settle scores."
Peter sits still, watching as Frank fumbles for his words, trying to figure out what else to say.
"I don't want you to live my life," he eventually settles on. "That's it. That's what I need you to understand."
"You done?" Peter asks dryly.
Frank glares at him. "You need to take this seriously, Peter."
"I'm listening, I hear you, I just think that what you just said is stupid. I mean— the stuff about your family, about losing them like that, about the people who killed them?" Peter leans in, forcing Frank to look him in the eyes. "That's just twisted and awful and I'm so, so sorry that happened to you. But if I deserve a better life, a less lonely life, then so do you, Frank!"
Frank brushes him off. "You're a good kid, Peter, you're such a good kid that you can't see the truth of things. I'm on a fast track to hell, but that doesn't have to be your path. You deserve better."
"Then why kiss me, Frank?" Peter exclaims, getting up from his chair and pacing. "Why push me up against that tree and invite me to your boat and let me— let me break down in front of you, multiple times? Why hold me? Why cook for me? Why, if I'm so much better than you, if you're going to hell and I'm apparently prancing a straight line to the pearly gates?"
"Because I'm an sick old fuck who can't help himself," Frank says bluntly, eyes narrowed. "Huh? Is that what you wanna hear? Yeah, Peter, I fucked you because I could see that edge in you, that temptation to just hurl yourself in front of danger to feel something, and I'm selfish, so I wanted to be the danger you threw yourself in front of. I wanted a taste of you for myself. But that don't mean I'm good like you— that don't mean I deserve even a sliver of the goodness you do. You get it, Peter. Deep down, you get it. That's why you swing around with an inhibitor on your neck, ain't it? You know that in order to keep the people around you safe, you gotta quiet some of the ugly parts of yourself."
Peter laughs cynically. "Oh, God, Frank, you don't know half of it."
"Yeah?" Frank pushes, getting to his feet now, properly mad. "And what don't I know?"
"I was only wearing the inhibitor because a few days ago, I started rapidly mutating at a rate that I haven't since I was bit for the first time, back when I was fourteen, because I'd been isolating myself so much from other people that my body actually started to forget I was human!"
Frank's eyes are wide, and Peter is scrambling back to his work station, pulling up all the metrics on his arachnid versus human hormone levels.
"See this?" he exclaims, gesturing to the screen. "Right now, I'm… Let's see, at least 5% more spider than I am human. Do you know spiders are cold-blooded? They need external heat to warm them internally. This winter was real bad for me, Frank, real bad, and I didn't understand why I was so cold all the time, why I wasn't regulating my body temperature right, and wham bam, would you look at that? Turns out I'd been starving myself of human connection so much that my body started flipping the switch on me. Guess who's ectothermic now! Oh, here's another good one— Every time I step outside, it's sensory overload. I have organic webshooters now, Frank. My webs come out of my goddamn body! For the last however many years, I've been synthesizing my webs, but now, there are these spinnerets on my wrists and I just shoot them out myself!"
Peter is gasping for air, overwhelmed and a little bit disoriented, but he keeps going, stepping closer to Frank and jabbing a finger in his direction.
"I've done a real number on myself, Frank," he says with another crazed laugh. Frank's eyes are wide and scared. "I have literally hurt myself so much over the last four years of self isolation that my body has changed in irreversible ways, and I'll never get back the person I used to be. I destroyed the inhibitor. I've learned my lesson. I can't be alone, Frank, I know that now, and yeah, what I said back on the boat was pretty stupid, but you know what? You can't be alone either. If I deserve at least a shred of goodness for all the pain I've gone through, then so do you."
Peter sags, all his energy gone, feeling miserable and pathetic.
"I'm sorry for yelling," he says with a sigh, stepping back, putting space between him and Frank. "That wasn't very nice of me. You're just trying to be honest with me, be vulnerable, and here I am getting all up in your face—"
He's cut off as Frank tugs him forward and hugs him tight.
"Shit, kid," Frank mutters, one arm around Peter's waist, another one higher up on his body, his hand cupping the back of Peter's head and pulling him close, close, close. "Jesus Christ. I think we both went a bit too far. Breathe, I got you."
And so Peter breathes, hugging the life out of Frank, warm and scared and shaking in his apartment.
"Talking to you is like a breath of fresh air," Frank mutters into Peter's hair, kissing his forehead. "You know I've been stuck with Red chewing me out over morals for the last decade? All this stuff about moral uprightness, justice for the innocent, blah, blah, blah, when we both know that's not who he is. He's just as sick as I am. Craves violence just as much. I've never been a good person, Peter. I probably kicked puppies as a kid or something."
"Somehow I don't believe that," Peter says with a deep, long exhale. "You and Daredevil sure seem like buddies. We should all go on patrol together, the three of us."
"What, so the two of you can gang up on me about the importance of human life? Nah, I'm good."
Peter laughs—a small laugh. A tired laugh.
"You and MJ gonna get back together?" Frank asks after they've been standing there, hugging the life out of each other for what feels like eons.
"She's got a boyfriend," Peter answers, not even trying to hide the heartbreak in his voice. "And even if she didn't… She doesn't know me, Frank. I love her so much, but she doesn't know me. She's lived a whole life without me, and this memory wipe thing is pretty freaking weird for her. So, no. I don't think so."
Frank sighs. "Real mature of you."
"Yeah."
"Sucks shit, though."
"Yeah."
"If Maria forgot me, and I had to walk around seeing her with some other asshole…" Frank hesitates. "Fuck it," he whispers, with a broken little laugh of his own. "I'd be so happy she was still alive I probably wouldn't give a shit. Is that how it is for you and this girl? You're just happy she's alive?"
"Pretty much," Peter says, sniffs, and presses his forehead firmer into Frank's shoulder.
"When did you start this Spidey business?" Frank asks out of nowhere.
Peter frowns. "I told you. I got bit when I was fourteen."
"Yeah, but—" Frank pauses. "Oh. You mean you… Ever since you got bit you've been swinging around, getting roughed up by the whack jobs in New York?"
"And in space," Peter adds. "I was in space for a hot minute. Space sucks, by the way. Really cool to look at, way too complicated to deal with. Haven't you been around the whole time I've been doing this Spidey business? Is your memory failing you, old man?"
Frank scoffs, and pushes Peter off of him. "No," he insists, and Peter laughs at the way Frank's face contorts itself. "I know Spider-Man's been around for a while, I just thought there might have been different people underneath the mask. There was someone else running around under Daredevil's mask for a while, y'know."
Peter shivers. "Ugh, that's so weird. But, ah, no, it's just me. I'm the one and only Spider-Man." He pauses, then corrects himself. "In this dimension, at least. Through the inter-dimensional rift I caused which started the whole need for the forgetting Peter Parker thing, I met two other Spider-Mans. They're pretty cool. But they're not in this dimension anymore. They, uh… They went home."
Frank scrubs his face with his hands. "Jesus Christ, enough with the inter-dimensional space stuff," he mutters. "I just can't believe your aunt let you fly around in spandex fighting crime when you were fourteen. I mean, shit, kid, you should've been worried about taking girls out to the movies and getting caught day drinking behind the bleachers, not defending New York from the forces of evil or whatever."
"See, that's funny, actually, because for the longest time, Aunt May didn't know," Peter says with an awkward laugh. "Mr Stark was the only one who knew for a few years. He, uh, supplied me with my suit and the tech and just let me run wild."
Frank's eyebrows raise as he shakes his head in bemusement. "You really are a walking disaster, aren't you?" he says, but there's an impossible fondness in his voice, a fondness that makes Peter feel reckless and crazy and a little bit brave.
He steps forward and keeps his eyes on Frank, wetting his lips, waiting for Frank to say no. But Frank just stands there, watching him, eyes hot and heavy, until Peter reaches up, takes Frank's face in his hands, and kisses him.
It's a softer kiss than the ones they've shared before. Frank's hands loop behind his back, connecting them together but not tugging, not grabbing, just holding. Peter tilts his head and licks his tongue against the seam of Frank's lips, and Frank sighs them open, such a small, quiet sound that's so gentle and so new that it sends goosebumps down Peter's arms. He moves one hand back, slowly, to caress the back of Frank's head, where his hair is buzzed and he can feel his scarred skin and press tenderly at the start of his spine.
"Okay, kid," Frank whispers as Peter lets their lips part. "You convinced me."
"Hmm?" Peter hums, feigning innocence. "Convinced you of what?"
Frank chuckles. "Brat," he says fondly, knocking his forehead against Peter's. "But I've got conditions. Me personally, I still think it's an awful idea for you to want me around, but I suppose you're right, we're both lonely sons of bitches who could do with a little socialization. If I'm gonna hang around you, I'm gonna at least make it worth your while. We're gonna go to the Salvation Army and get you a decent fucking carpet to go in this room. You need better cutlery, actual dishware and not just repurposed takeout containers, and for Christ's sake, the state of your fridge is just downright pathetic. By the time you're done with me, I will have taught you how to properly cook some goddamn vegetables at the very least, you hear me?"
Peter laughs. "Loud and clear," he says, and kisses him again, just because he can.
As it happens, Peter does end up having to testify as a character witness at Daniel Holding's trial. Not, thankfully, as Spider-Man, but rather as himself.
It's pretty funny, in a morbid way. When MJ finds out what's going on, she's furious.
"Who does that prick think he is?" she exploded once she'd read the court summons and watched the footage of the incident back again. "He had a gun to your chest and he wants you to testify for his character? How sad do you have to be for the random guy that talked you off a ledge in a half-destroyed department store is your only character reference? Get a therapist, jackass! Find some friends your own age! God!"
So now in the back of the courtroom is a very concerned Santiago, a very angry MJ, a blissful Ned (who's just happy to be here), a slightly amused Frank, and Nora Sheffield, who'd felt safer attending the trial and sitting next to The Punisher than attending and sitting with the rest of the witnesses.
"Please state your name for the record," the judge says.
"Peter Benjamin Parker," Peter says into the microphone, feeling strange saying his own name out loud.
He shoots a look to his gathered supporters. Ned offers him a double thumbs up. MJ has her arms crossed and is glaring at Daniel Holding. Nora has her head down, wearing a cap that says I ♡ BREAKING MEN'S HEARTS. Santiago has his lips pursed. Frank seems to be doing his best at stifling a laugh.
Daniel's lawyer approaches the stand, his hands behind his back. He was state-assigned and is doing his best, but the prosecution, who's representing the department store that Daniel blew up, is clearly running away with the whole thing.
"Mr Parker, how would you describe the accused?"
"Uh, I only talked to him briefly," Peter says, as clear as possible, shooting a look to Daniel, who is meeting his eyes with a desperate look, "but the impression I got of him was that he was very lost, and very shaken up after Nora Sheffield ended their relationship. He was, uh, reluctant to accept that it ended, and very insistent on sharing his side of the story."
"Mr Parker, from your perspective, did it appear that the accused had malicious intent upon entering the department store where Ms Sheffield works?"
"I can't really speak to his intent," Peter says honestly, focusing his attention on the lawyer, instead of Daniel.
"But, to your best knowledge, did it appear he intended to cause structural damage to the department store, or was the structural damage an afterthought to his main focus, which was speaking to Ms Sheffield?"
"Objection, Your Honor," the prosecution says. "Leading question."
"Sustained," the judge says. "Defense, please rephrase."
"Mr Parker, is there anything else, to your memory, that's important when understanding the accused's intent upon entering the department store?"
"Not to my memory," Peter says into the microphone.
The lawyer sighs. "No further questions, your honor."
Cross examination is deliriously fun for the prosecution and Peter can tell. The trial has stretched onto two days, just because the defense is doing their best to make it very difficult to prove intent for the damage Daniel Holding caused, and that's the main premise of the prosecution's argument. Peter isn't paying that much attention to the actual legal details. He was summoned to be a character witness, he figured it couldn't hurt, so here he is.
It takes another three hours for court to be adjourned, at which point everyone who doesn't have to be there for the rest of the hearing (Peter and his posse included) leave.
They all walk three blocks to a diner, where they pile into seats around two pushed together tables. Santiago, Peter, and Frank slide into seats on one side of the table; MJ, Nora, and Ned slide into the ones on the other side. They're talking, voices overlapping, and the poor waitress who takes their order seems completely overwhelmed. Peter is smiling ear to ear. It's been a long time since he's felt this happy.
Frank slings an arm over the back of Peter's chair and leans in to say in his ear, "Aren't we a funny bunch?"
Peter laughs, looking around the table, where MJ and Santiago are talking about prison reform, Ned and Nora are debating over the superior Star Trek series, and they're here for him, to support him, just because they like him.
Peter eats his body weight in chocolate chip pancakes and laughs with his friends, happy and safe and loved and warm for the first time in ages.
It's a Tuesday morning in July. It's a monkey's wedding outside—at least that's what Frank called it when he dropped Peter off at the library, and then whacked Peter upside the head when he laughed at him for it.
"That's what you call it when it's raining and the sun's out, dammit!" Frank exclaims.
"You're so old and weird," Peter laughs, but kisses him on the cheek when he hops out the van and waves goodbye, blowing kisses and laughing even more when Frank flips him off in the rearview mirror.
Kids ages zero to twelve are piled into the reading room, chatting happily with their parents and with each other. Santiago lifts a hand in greeting as Peter walks in the room. Peter smiles and nods back.
He starts today with a collection of Shel Silverstein poems called Where the Sidewalk Ends. He's feeling sappy and sentimental, so when the clock strikes ten, he opens the book up to the titular poem and starts to read.
"There is a place where the sidewalk ends, and before the street begins," he reads, and the children hush themselves with every word that comes out of his mouth. "And there the grass grows soft and white, and there the sun burns crimson bright, and there the moon-bird rests from his flight, to cool in the peppermint wind."
"Shut up, he's reading!" hisses a little girl to her brother, and Peter can't resist a smile.
He keeps going, feeling warm and tingly down to his bones.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends
The children let out a collective exhale. Peter feels something settle in his soul.
"Now, let's read a funny one," he says, and turns the page to "Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too," and has the children roaring with laughter after the first stanza.
He brings gardenias to Aunt May's grave later that day and kneels in the mud in front of her gravestone. He tells her about his budding new friendships with MJ and Ned, about maybe going to school for library sciences, about how Frank has finally succeeded in teaching him how to make a decent homemade pizza, about how he's holding himself to two days off a week now so he doesn't strain himself.
"It's an odd life," he admits to Aunt May's grave, which can't speak for her and isn't really her but is as much as he has left of her and so he loves it all the same, "but it's my life, and I think it's a good one."
He kisses her gravestone and rises to his feet.
That night, Frank makes him baked ziti and spends a solid hour lecturing him on the importance of using homemade tomato sauce, how that store bought shit will never taste right, not for his grandmother's ziti. Peter laughs and teases him over how Frank's becoming a bit of a grandma himself, and Frank rolls his eyes and flicks some of that tomato sauce right across Peter's face. Then he takes Peter's face in his hands and licks that tomato sauce off of him, washes the dishes, and together they curl up in bed, Peter's cold feet pressed up against Frank's warm thighs, his head nestled in Frank's warm chest.