★

That was the thing about the new edges of him. The mutation hadn't settled cleanly after everything. It had sharpened in odd places, overcorrected in others. Sound arrived layered now: the scrape of chalk, someone’s gum clicking against a molar three rows back, the pulse in the throat of the guy beside him who had definitely not done the reading. The city beyond the lecture hall kept pressing itself into his skull in a dozen distant frequencies, sirens and pipes and pigeons beating frantic wings beneath the eaves.

And then there was your pen.

Cheap black ballpoint. Cap chewed, not recently. A faint crescent of teeth marks near the clip.

Peter picked it up before he thought better of it.

You turned in your seat, a little embarrassed but not enough to make a performance of it, your brows rising when you realized someone had retrieved it. “Oh. Thank you.”

Your voice did not do anything impossible. It didn't rearrange him. It just sat warmly in the air between you, lower than he expected, slightly hoarse like you had been up too late or had laughed too much the night before.

Peter gave you the pen. “No problem.”

You smiled, quick and polite, and turned back around.

That should have been the end of it.

Peter knew that. He knew it with the same blunt clarity he knew not to crawl across ceilings in public or listen through apartment walls just because he could. Some lines were simple because crossing them made everything else complicated. You were a person in one of his classes. He had handed you a pen. That was all.

For nearly four minutes, he managed to leave it there.

Then you tapped the pen twice against your notebook, paused, and wrote something in the margin instead of on the lecture line where everyone else had written CRISPR and informed consent and somatic inheritance. Peter saw the movement from the corner of his eye. His vision caught too much when he let it. A tilt, a shadow, a word half-formed before your hand covered it.

He should not have looked.

He still looked.

You had written: who decides what counts as damage?

Peter stared at the back of your head for one second too long.

The question stayed with him after class, needling under his skin while students packed laptops and shoved water bottles into canvas bags. You stood slowly, stretching your fingers once before sliding your notebook away. Someone called your name from the aisle. You glanced over your shoulder and gave a tired little laugh when a girl with chipped blue nail polish asked if you were coming to the library later.

“Maybe,” you said after you gave a few experimental blinks.  “I have work first.”

Peter bent over his backpack, pretending he had not heard.

He had heard too much.

Your keys clinked inside the front pocket of your bag. Your phone buzzed twice. You smelled faintly of vanilla shampoo and rain-damp wool, though it had not rained since morning. Your heartbeat was steady, quicker when your friend mentioned a party, slower when you said, “I’ll see how dead I am after closing.”

Normal details. Human details. None of them belonged to him.

He walked out ten paces behind you anyway.

Only because the door was in that direction, he told himself. Only because everyone was leaving through the same narrow hall, shoulder to shoulder, voices bouncing off institutional beige walls. ESU’s biology building had bad ventilation and worse fluorescent lighting. It made everyone look slightly ill. You squinted against it, one eye narrowing more than the other.

Peter noticed that too.

He hated that he noticed that.

Outside, late autumn had made the campus restless. Leaves skittered over the pavement in dry little bursts, trapped briefly against bike racks before the wind worried them loose. The sky hung low and silver behind the brick buildings. You tucked your chin into your scarf and walked toward the Square with your friend still talking beside you, one hand moving as she described something, the other hooked around the strap of your bag.

Peter stopped at the stairs.

He could have gone the other way.

He had laundry. He had a chemistry problem set. He had a rent reminder folded under a magnet on his fridge and a suit stuffed behind a loose panel in his closet that still smelled faintly of smoke from a warehouse fire in Queens.

You crossed the quad and his senses followed before his body did.

Your laugh carried back once, loose and surprised, and Peter felt something in him lean toward it. Not physically. Worse than physically. Some quiet, starved part of him that had been living on memory and obligation and the bruised discipline of not needing anything.

He watched until the crowd took you.

Then he went home and searched your name.

He didn't call it that at first.

Peter called it checking. Curiosity. Normal curiosity. The kind people had when they met someone in class and wanted to know whether they had mutual friends or if they posted notes online or if maybe they were in a study group. He sat at his small desk with the radiator clanking beside him, his laptop open beneath the yellow cone of his lamp, and typed in the name he had heard your friend say.

The first result was an ESU page with your department listing: Undeclared concentration, biology track. A campus volunteer archive from last spring. A photo from a charity 5K where you stood at the edge of a group shot, squinting into the sun and holding a paper cup too tightly. Your social media accounts were not private enough.

Peter exhaled through his nose and sat back.

“No,” he spoke aloud to his empty apartment and the only response to his words was the radiator hissing. 

He closed the browser.

For about eighteen seconds.

Then he opened it again.

By midnight, Peter knew you worked three evenings a week at a bookstore café two neighborhoods over. He knew you liked old horror films but hated jump scares. He knew you reposted stray cat videos when you were stressed. He knew you had once written, in a post from two years ago that made his stomach pull tight with secondhand tenderness, that you hated how easy it was to become background noise in other people’s lives.

Peter shut the laptop so hard the sound cracked through the room.

He stood, paced three steps, turned, paced back. His hands flexed at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling with leftover strength he had nowhere to put. The window showed him his own reflection layered over the city: too thin, too tired, hair still damp from a shower he barely remembered taking.

“You’re not doing this,” he told himself with restriction, and even his reflection looked unconvincing.

You did not think about Peter Parker after class.

Not really.

You remembered the pen only because you found it later at work and noticed the cap had a little dent from where you always chewed it during exams. You remembered his face in the vague way you remembered classmates you saw twice a week: brown hair that looked like he had dragged a hand through it one too many times, gentle eyes, shoulders folded slightly inward like he was trying not to take up space.

Cute, maybe.

But cute in the background way. The kind of cute you acknowledged and then forgot because a customer had spilled oat milk on the pickup counter and your manager was muttering about inventory under her breath.

By eight-thirty, your feet hurt. The bookstore smelled of damp coats, burnt espresso, dust, and cinnamon syrup. Someone had abandoned a paperback facedown on the windowsill. Outside, people hurried past with collars lifted against the wind, their reflections smeared across the dark glass.

You were restocking the staff picks table when the bell above the door chimed.

You glanced up because it was habit and Peter stood just inside, shaking cold from his hair.

For a second, he looked as surprised to see you as you were to see him. Then his face softened into recognition, bashful and easy enough that you almost smiled before you realized you were already doing it.

“Hey,” he greeted and his voice hit your ears with a peaceful calm. “You’re in Menken’s class, right?”

You straightened, a book still in your hand. “Yeah. Peter, right?”

His smile widened a little, and it did something irritatingly pleasant to his whole face. “Yeah. And you’re…?”

You gave him your name and he repeated it, not too quickly, not too slowly. Like he cared about getting it right.

That was your first mistake, though you wouldn't know that for weeks. You noticed the care and mistook it for kindness. Maybe it was kindness, in part. That was the inconvenient thing about Peter. He wasn't lying every time he was gentle.

He bought a coffee he barely drank and a used copy of a short story collection you had placed on the staff picks table that morning. When you rang him up, he looked at the handwritten card tucked beneath the stack.

“Your pick?” he asked with his eyes moving over the loop of the script. 

A small puff of air left you as your mouth twitched. “Yeah. It’s weird.”

“I like weird.”

“You say that now.”

He glanced up through his lashes, and there was an awkwardness to it that made him seem younger, more human than he had been in your mind. “Is that a warning or a recommendation?”

You huffed a laugh more visibly this time. “Both.”

Peter nodded as if that settled something important. “Then I’ll take it seriously.”

You liked that he didn't try too hard to stretch the conversation. He thanked you, dropped his change into the tip jar, and moved to a table near the window with the book and untouched coffee. He read for almost an hour.

At least, you thought he read.

Peter had read the same paragraph six times.

The book sat open beneath his hands, but you kept shifting around the café in the warm spill of overhead lights, and his attention kept betraying him. You wiped down the counter with economical movements, pushed loose hair back from your face with your wrist, nodded when customers spoke but went distant the second they turned away. You had a habit of pressing your tongue to the inside of your cheek when you were trying not to react to something. You disliked the register drawer because it stuck and made you use more force than you wanted. You hummed under your breath when the espresso grinder drowned out the room.

None of this was information anyone needed.

Peter collected it anyway.

He had promised himself he would only look. In person, that sounded even worse. He knew how it sounded. He could hear a familiar voice in his head, dry and unimpressed, though any real familiarity was gone from his life in all the ways that mattered now. He could hear May too, not in words, just in the old shape of disappointment.

But it had been a bad week.

That wasn’t an excuse, he hated that his mind reached for one so quickly.

It had been a bad year, or rather, years.

Worse.

The world had forgotten him in pieces so cleanly it felt surgical. He still had photographs where people stood beside him with no memory of the moment. Peter still knew birthdays no one invited him to, inside jokes that died the second he tried to speak them aloud. He still woke up some mornings with his hand reaching across the bed toward nothing because loneliness had become muscle memory.

And then there was you, chewing on a pen in class and writing questions that made the room seem less airless.

Peter watched you laugh with your coworker behind the counter, your head tilting back for half a second before you caught yourself. Not loud or careless, but real.

Something in him ached with it.

Peter should have left.

Instead, when you came by with a rag and asked, “Everything okay over here?” he looked up too fast.

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m probably overstaying.”

You waved him off without much thought. “No, you’re fine. We don’t close for another hour.”

“I can go if you need the table.”

You glanced around the mostly empty café with a ghost of a smile on your lips. “Peter, there are seven tables.”

He laughed, a little embarrassed, but not nearly as much as he should've felt. “Right. Good point.”

You smiled at him fully now. This time it lingered. His pulse kicked hard enough that he felt ashamed of it.

The second time he came in, you were not surprised.

The third time, you teased him about the coffee.

“You know you don’t have to keep ordering it if you hate it.”

Peter looked down at the cup like it had betrayed him. “I don’t hate it.”

You looked up at him through the table unsure. “You’ve taken two sips in forty minutes.”

“I’m pacing myself.”

“You ordered an iced coffee in November.”

“I can contain multitudes.”

You snorted before you could stop yourself, and he looked so pleased by it that you looked away first.

It was not instant. That mattered, later. You didn't fall into it without thought. You were busy, and careful in the way people became careful when they had learned affection could come with hidden invoices. You had classes, work, rent, a roommate who left wet towels on the bathroom floor, and a mother who texted at odd hours asking if you were eating enough.

Peter became familiar gradually.

A chair near the window. A brown jacket with a frayed cuff. Fingers stained faintly with ink because he wrote equations on his hand when he ran out of paper. A voice that went soft when he asked questions and quicker when he forgot to be nervous. He seemed to know when not to interrupt you. He remembered that you disliked caramel syrup but liked cinnamon. He started bringing you the extra banana from the convenience store near campus because you once said your blood sugar crashed during evening shifts and you always forgot to pack food.

“That’s weirdly thoughtful,” you made a face and said the first time.

Peter shrugged with his eyes lowering when he spoke. “It was two for one.”

You knew that was not the whole truth, but it was close enough to something charming that you let it pass.

From Peter’s side, every small success made him feel worse.

He really hadn't meant to learn your schedule exactly. Not at first. But once he knew the bookstore shifts, his brain filled in the blanks with humiliating efficiency: Menken’s class Monday and Wednesday. Lab on Thursday. Café Tuesday, Friday, Sunday. Library most Wednesdays after six, second floor if you were alone, basement if your friend came with you because she liked the vending machine down there.

Peter didn't need to know that.

He especially did not need to know that you always took the longer route home when the weather was mild because you liked passing the laundromat with the orange cat in the window.

The first time Peter followed you all the way back to your building, he almost turned around six times.

Almost was becoming a dangerous word.

He stayed across the street, hood up, hands in his pockets, moving with the practiced absence Spider-Man had perfected. He told himself it was only because the neighborhood had been rough lately. Two muggings near the park. A stolen car three blocks away. He had reasons. Responsible reasons. Hero reasons.

Then you stopped beneath the awning of your building and turned suddenly, looking back down the sidewalk.

Peter froze behind the corner of a closed bodega.

For one wild second, he thought you had felt him there. Not heard, not seen. Felt. The way people sometimes sensed weather changing in their bones.

But you only searched your bag, found your keys, and went inside.

Peter waited until the lobby light swallowed you.

His hands were shaking when he got home.

He stripped off the mask he had not needed and sat on the floor beside his bed, suit half-unzipped, chest rising too fast. The room smelled of dust, old laundry, cold takeout. Somewhere upstairs, a couple argued about dishes and somewhere outside, a siren split the night and faded.

Peter pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, the pressure doing little to relieve him. 

“You’re scaring yourself,” he whispered and that should have helped.

It did not.

Because the next morning you came into class with tired eyes and a bandage wrapped around one finger, and Peter noticed before you even sat down.

Paper cut, he guessed.

No. Too clean. Knife slip. Cooking? No, the angle was wrong. Box cutter at work.

He started hating the part of him that solved you like a problem.

During lecture, Professor Menken asked a question no one wanted to answer. You lifted your hand after three seconds of silence.

Peter watched you speak with intent.

You were not perfectly confident. Your voice caught often and you glanced at your notes too often. But you had a way of thinking aloud that made uncertainty seem active instead of weak, like you were willing to stand inside the unfinished part of an idea and invite everyone else to look at it with you.

Peter stared at his notebook and wrote nothing. After class, he found you outside the building, wrestling with the zipper of your bag.

“Hey,” he said when you came into view casually enough for him to do the same. 

You looked up with no real hurry. “Hey, coffee multitudes.”

Peter laughed, surprised by the nickname. “That’s going to stick, huh?”

“It might.”

“Then I should probably earn it.”

You raised an eyebrow and looked him over. “By drinking coffee?”

“By asking if you want to get some. Somewhere I actually finish it.”

There it was. The moment Peter had arranged too carefully to pretend it was spontaneous. He had known your next class had been canceled because he had seen the department email reflected faintly on your laptop screen the day before. He had chosen this window. He had planned the route. He had checked the café he suggested to make sure it had the tea you liked, the kind you mentioned once in a post from eight months ago and again at work when you complained your roommate stole the last bag.

He was disgusting.

Peter smiled anyway, small and nervous because he was also still himself.

You hesitated, it wasn't long enough to be cruel, but it was long enough to be honest.

“Now?” you asked and your hand twitched to a still around your bag

“Only if you’re free.”

“I am.” You shifted your bag higher on your shoulder. A small twitch of your brows came and went when the familiar phantom of a smile touched your face. “Actually, yeah. That sounds nice.”

Nice.

The word landed in him with such undeserved warmth he nearly forgot to breathe.

The café was crowded, too narrow and overbright near the counter, with little tables pressed close enough that everyone became part of everyone else’s conversation. You ordered tea. Peter ordered coffee and drank half of it out of sheer determination.

You talked about class first because that was safe. Menken’s refusal to upload slides. The guy in the front row who treated lectures like a personal podcast interview. Your mutual dread of the upcoming exam.

Then, the conversation loosened.

You told him about the bookstore café and the regular who came in every Sunday to rearrange the mystery section “by vibes.” Peter told you about taking photos for the Bugle, then stumbled when you asked if he liked it.

“Sometimes,” he settled for after fumbling for his words. 

“Only sometimes?”

He turned the paper sleeve around his cup. “It’s hard to like something that mostly pays you to be hated.”

You frowned and it was so genuine it made Peter feel disgusting all over again. “That sounds miserable.”

“It builds character. Probably. Or joint pain.”

You laughed, but softer this time and he looked up for it.

You were watching him with a kind of attention he hadn't expected. Not the polite attention people gave when waiting for their turn to speak. You were actually looking, as if you had noticed some seam in him and were deciding whether to touch it.

Peter felt the old panic start. The instinct to deflect. To become funny, harmless, and too quick to pin down.

Instead, he took a breath and decided for, “It’s fine. I’m used to it.”

You didn’t ask what else he was used to.

He liked you more for that.

Your first date was not officially a date until halfway through, when your knees bumped beneath the table and neither of you moved immediately.

After that, things gathered speed without feeling rushed.

A walk through campus after class. His jacket over your shoulders when the wind turned sharp, even though you protested you were fine. A late-night diner where he stole fries from your plate only after asking and still looked guilty each time. A movie at your apartment with your roommate passing through twice and giving you looks so obvious you threatened to throw a pillow at her.

Peter was almost unbearable in his thoughtfulness.

Not grand, that would have made you suspicious sooner. He didn't flood you with flowers or declarations. He learned the small things and acted on them with quiet precision. He sent you a picture of the familiar street cat when you were stuck at work. He remembered which movie sequel you thought ruined the original. He ordered your food without onions after you mentioned once that you hated the texture, then looked genuinely confused when you stared at him.

“What?” Peter asked when you stared at him so openly in surprise. 

“You remembered.”

His fork paused halfway to his mouth. “Was I not supposed to?”

“No. It’s just…” You looked down, smiling despite yourself. The words came out quieter than, like they weren't for him. “Most people don’t.”

Peter smiled too, but something flickered beneath it. Not guilt, exactly. Not anything you knew how to name.

You reached for your drink and let the moment pass.

From his side, the flicker had been a wound reopening.

Most people don’t.

He should have been most people.

He should have learned you at the pace you gave yourself. Through conversations, through mistakes, through the natural awkwardness of two lives coming carefully closer. He should not have known about the onion thing because you had complained in a forgotten comment thread under a photo of takeout from last winter. He should not have known your favorite seat in the library because he had followed your location once after convincing himself it was only to make sure you got home. Peter should not have known your ex’s name, your rent split, the brand of melatonin in your bathroom cabinet because your roommate posted a mirror selfie with the bottle blurred but readable.

He was not always hacking.

That was another excuse, and he hated it because it was technically true. Most of the time, people gave themselves away without needing to be broken into. Public accounts, careless apps, tagged photos, reused usernames, browser autofill flashing in reflections, notifications blooming on lock screens. The city was full of open windows, and Peter had become very good at looking through them.

But sometimes, he did more.

The first time he accessed one of your accounts, he threw up afterward.

It was not dramatic. There was no thunder outside, no cinematic collapse. Just Peter hunched over the tiny sink in his bathroom, one hand braced against cracked porcelain, breathing through nausea while the laptop sat open in the other room.

He told himself he had only wanted to know why you had gone quiet.

That was how Peter framed it at first. You had canceled plans with a too-bright apology and then stopped answering texts for five hours. Five hours was nothing. People had lives. You had work. You had friends. You had the right to be unreachable.

His body did not understand that.

His senses had made emergencies out of smaller things. A skipped heartbeat, a distant scream, glass breaking four blocks away. Absence became data. Silence became threat. He tried cleaning. He tried going on patrol. He stopped a bike theft, webbed up a drunk man trying to punch a parking meter, helped a kid find her mother outside a pharmacy, and still your unread text sat in his head like a lit match.

So, he checked.

Not with tools he would ever have explained to you. Not in steps he let himself think about for long. A shortcut here, an old breach there, one soft digital door after another until the screen opened on enough of your life to make him feel both relieved and monstrous.

You were not ignoring him because of him.

You were in a group chat with your friend, talking about a fight with your mother. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing he needed to know. Your last message had been: I just don’t want to be a person today.

Peter read it three times.

Then he closed the laptop and hated himself with a clarity that should have changed him.

The next morning, he brought you soup from a place you liked but rarely ordered from because it was overpriced. He stood outside your building in a gray hoodie, hair damp from the rain, holding the paper bag awkwardly when you came downstairs.

“You said you didn’t feel great,” he greeted with that comfortable thread of familiar concern and composure. 

You hadn't said that to him.

Not exactly.

But you were tired, and the soup was warm against your hands, and Peter looked so quietly worried that the difference dissolved before your could examine any holes in his story accurately.

“You’re kind of insane,” you scoffed, but gently when your eyes softened at him. 

Peter cleared at his throat. “Bad insane?”

You looked at him for a moment. Rain gathered in the ends of his hair. A drop slipped down his temple, and he did not seem to notice.

“No,” you said after a moment,  and his mind latched into that with great energy. “Good insane.”

His smile hurt to look at.

Peter stayed in your life.

That was how it felt from your side. Not that he entered suddenly, but that he remained. Peter was there in the margins of your days until the margins felt less empty. You started expecting his texts. You started saving little stories for him because you liked the way his face changed when he listened. He had a habit of going very still when you spoke, like he was afraid to miss a word.

You had dated people who made you feel edited. Too loud here, too sensitive there, too difficult when you asked for basic decency. Peter made you feel observed, and at first you mistook that for being understood.

Maybe part of it was understanding.

He didn’t push when you were quiet. He made jokes when you needed room to laugh and went serious when the joke would have landed wrong. He was late sometimes, often with flimsy excuses and a bruise hidden badly beneath his collar, but he apologized like he meant it. He washed dishes at your apartment without making a performance of helping. He made friends with your roommate by fixing the kitchen cabinet hinge and pretending it had been easy.

Still, there were moments.

A book you never remembered mentioning appearing in his backpack.

A song you had listened to alone showing up in a playlist he sent you “randomly.”

His face changing before you told him bad news, as if he had sensed it through the phone.

Once, while walking back from dinner, you stopped outside a bodega because the smell of oranges by the door reminded you of your grandmother’s house. You hadn’t said that to him yet. You had barely said it to anyone.

Peter bought two oranges without asking and handed one to you.

“You looked like you wanted one,” he had told you. 

You held it in your palm, thumb brushing the textured peel. “You notice too much.”

He went quiet.

Only for a breath, but you felt it.

Then he smiled, crooked and a little sad. “Occupational hazard.”

You laughed because you thought he meant photography.

Peter loved that about you and hated himself for loving it. The way you filled in the blanks with something better than the truth.

By December, the city had gone hard with cold.

Snow came early in thin, dirty gusts that melted along curbs and froze again overnight. ESU students moved in bundled clusters across campus, hunched over coffee cups and exam notes. The bookstore café hung paper snowflakes in the window that curled at the edges from the heater. Your apartment radiator screamed every morning at six.

Peter spent more nights at your place, never officially staying over at first. He would fall asleep on the couch after a movie, wake at two, apologize, and kiss your forehead before leaving. You began telling him he could stay. He began pretending to refuse before giving in.

The first time he slept in your bed, you woke to him sitting upright in the dark.

You blinked at the shape of him, bare shoulders tense, head turned toward the window.

“Peter?”

He didn't answer immediately.

Outside, a truck rolled over a pothole and hit Peter's ear drum loudly. Somewhere down the block, glass clinked in a recycling bag. Your room was cold beyond the blanket, the air smelling faintly of your body wash and the laundry detergent your roommate bought in bulk.

“Sorry,” he rasped out finally. His voice was rough. “I heard something.”

You pushed yourself up on one elbow, still half asleep. You gave a few hard blinks to try and even out your blurry vision, your fingers moved without instruction to thee side of his bare arm. “In here?”

Peter's voice was still rough with sleep, and something else you couldn't grasp. “No. Outside.”

You listened in a pause, your fingers stilling on his forearm. 

Nothing.

Peter looked embarrassed, almost boyish in the dim light. “I’m a light sleeper.”

You believed him because there was no reason not to.

You tugged gently at his wrist, your skin meeting his. An exhale escaped you as the disruption did little to drain you off your drowsiness. “Come back.”

For a second, he didn't move. Then,  he let you pull him down beside you. His skin was cool where the air had touched it. You pressed your face against his shoulder and felt him go very still before he carefully settled his arm around you.

“You’re safe,” you murmured after a moments still, barely awake, because you decided it was needed. 

His hand tightened once at your back and you pressed into his side deeper at the action. 

The words should have comforted him.

Instead, they ruined him.

Because he knew exactly what kind of safety he had made. A curated one. A watched one. A version of closeness built from stolen context and real affection tangled so tightly he no longer knew where one ended and the other began. Peter knew the quickest route from your apartment to the hospital. He knew which neighbor left his door unlocked. He knew your roommate’s schedule, the building’s fire escape pattern, the loose latch on the roof door, and even the dead zone in the security camera by the mailboxes.

He knew too much.

You fell asleep against him after a few more breaths and smooths of his hand at your back and Peter stared into the dark until dawn diluted the room.

Later that week, you fought.

It was small at first, which immediately made it worse. He canceled on you again, this time fifteen minutes before you were supposed to meet. Something about work. Something about a last-minute assignment. The lie was poorly built because Peter was tired and bleeding under his shirt from a fight with a guy in a mechanized suit who had tried to rob an armored truck in Midtown.

You heard the strain in his voice and assumed the wrong thing.

“Do you actually want to see me tonight?” you asked into your phone and frowned so visibly you saw it in the mirror that reflected you all ready for your now cancelled evening. 

Silence.

Then, “Of course I do.”

Your voice felt smaller than it was. “Because it’s fine if you don’t.”

“It’s not that—”

“You keep saying that.”

Peter closed his eyes on the rooftop where he crouched behind a water tower, one hand pressed against his ribs. His spider-sense still fizzed faintly from leftover adrenaline. Snow blew sideways across the tar paper and some of it landed cooly on his shoulders

“I’m sorry,” he only apologized after a tired noise escaped him. 

You hated how sincere he sounded. It made anger harder to hold cleanly. “I’m not asking you to be available all the time. I just need you to stop disappearing and then acting like I’m supposed to understand without you telling me anything.”

Peter breathed in sharply, and for a moment you thought he might finally say something real. Instead, he said, “You’re right.”

The answer was too neat. Too controlled.

You laughed once, humorless. “That’s not a conversation, Peter.”

“I know.”

Your voice came more pointed now. “Then have one.”

He looked out over the city. A siren wailed far below. Three blocks away, someone screamed, but it was laughter. Six blocks away, not laughter. His body turned toward it before his mind caught up.

“I can’t right now,” he immediately winced at how it sounded coming out 

Your voice went immediately quiet. “Okay.”

That one word did more damage than shouting would have.

Peter heard you hang up.

He should have let you be angry. He should have shown up the next day with honesty or at least enough humility to deserve your attention.

Instead, fear did what fear had been doing to him for months. It found a door and opened it.

He checked your messages again.

You were texting your friend. Not cruelly or even dramatically, but so visibly tired. 

I like him, you had written. I really do. But sometimes it feels like he’s already decided what I need before I say it. I don't know how to feel about that. 

Peter sat on the edge of a rooftop while snow collected in his hair and read the sentence until the screen dimmed.

It was the closest you had come to seeing him.

Not the suit. Not the powers. Him. The shape of the thing he was doing.

He wanted, suddenly and violently, to confess. To climb through your window, kneel on your worn rug, and hand you every ugly piece. To say he had been lonely in a way that made him dangerous. To say he had turned care into surveillance and called it love when he was too ashamed to name it properly. To say you could hate him if you needed to, but please, please do it with your own voice.

Then, another message appeared.

He’s also really good to me though. Like scary good. He knows me better than anyone has in a long time.

Peter’s breath caught.

The city kept moving beneath him. Traffic lights changed. Steam rose from a manhole cover. A woman tugged a child across the street by one mittened hand. Somewhere, somebody needed him.

Peter put the phone away amd he went to help.

He came to your apartment the next night with a split lip and flowers from a deli bucket, the cheap kind wrapped in crinkly plastic with one stem already bent.

You opened the door and stared at him with the expectation of clear cut annoyance but it stuttered when you saw him. 

He looked awful. Pale beneath the bruising, hair flattened by weather, and eyes rimmed red from no sleep. The flowers trembled slightly in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” Peter only said what you needed to hear. 

You crossed your arms, the indentation of where you bit at the inside of your cheek had his eyes fluttering across your face. “For which part?”

He flinched, and you hated that it softened you.

“For making you feel like you were asking for too much.” He swallowed then went on. “You weren’t—you aren’t. I’m bad at explaining where I go. That’s on me. Not you.”

It was not enough, everything in you knew it was not enough.

But he didn't make excuses. He did not tell you that you were overreacting. He didn't punish you for being upset. He stood there in the hallway looking like someone who expected the door to close and thought he deserved it.

You sighed, and it sounded tired all the way through. “Come in before my neighbor starts listening.”

“She already is,” Peter said before he could stop himself.

Your eyes narrowed and he blinked at his abruptness. “I mean—the door across the hall. It opened earlier.”

You glanced past him. Mrs. Alvarez’s door was indeed cracked half an inch. Despite yourself, you laughed.

Peter smiled faintly, relieved and ashamed.

The flowers went into a chipped vase on your desk. You ordered takeout and ate sitting on the floor because your small table was buried under textbooks. The apology became a conversation, halting but real enough around the edges. He told you he had trouble letting people worry about him. You told him that was not noble, just annoying. He laughed into his noodles, then winced because of his lip.

You touched his chin lightly, your face softened by several degrees and you made sure to be careful with your pressure. “Who did that?”

The reply came instantaneous. “Work thing.”

“Peter.”

He looked at you and your frown made is way back to your face, doing that horrible thing to his heart. 

For one second, the room thinned around the truth. Then he exhaled, “I promise I’ll tell you someday.”

You should have pushed.

Instead, you let your thumb skim once beneath the bruise, gentler than either of you deserved.

“Someday better not be a scam,” you said and the frustration in your words were poorly hidden. 

“It isn’t.” Peter meant it, which was almost worse.

By Christmas break, you were not officially in love with him.

You avoided the word because it felt too large and too easy to misuse. But you missed him when he left. You saved the corner of your blanket for him without thinking. You caught yourself looking at his hands when he talked, the long nervous fingers, the faint scars, the way he touched things carefully despite being strong enough to break them.

Peter was strange. Sweet. Frighteningly perceptive. Too private. Too self-sacrificing in ways that made you want to shake him. He apologized too much and withheld too much and kissed you like he was grateful and guilty in the same breath.

On New Year’s Eve, you took him to a party he clearly did not want to attend.

It was in someone’s too-small apartment near campus, crowded with students wearing glitter and cheap cologne, the kitchen floor sticky with spilled drinks. Music pulsed through the walls. Someone had taped tinsel around a bookshelf. Someone else had brought a dog wearing a bow tie, and the dog looked more composed than anyone else there.

Peter stood close to you without crowding, his hand resting at your lower back only when you leaned into it first. He watched the room the way he watched everything: lightly, and constantly. You saw his eyes track exits, open windows, and even drunk strangers moving too quickly.

“You okay?” you asked with a small tilt of your head. 

He looked down at you, refocusing. “Yeah.”

You weren't easily convinced. “You look like you’re planning seventeen escape routes.”

“Only twelve.”

You smiled. “Progress.”

Peter leaned closer so you could hear him over the music. His voice didn't reach you louder, it came as soft as it always tried to land. “I’m not great at parties.”

“I noticed.”

“But you wanted to come.”

“I wanted you to come with me.”

That landed somewhere visible in his face. A small astonishment, gone quickly but not before you caught it.

“Well,” he paused, cleared his throat, and his voice softened, “then I’m good.”

You believed him.

At midnight, everyone shouted too early, then corrected themselves, then shouted again. The countdown dissolved into laughter. A stranger bumped your shoulder. Confetti popped weakly from a tube and scattered over the floor.

Peter kissed you at twelve.

Not like a movie. Someone’s elbow knocked his arm and you laughed into his mouth because the dog started barking. His nose was cold from where you had stood near the window. The kiss started awkward and turned warm, one of his hands lifting to your cheek, and his thumb careful near your jaw.

When he pulled back, you exhaled, “You know me so well it’s kind of unfair.”

You meant it lightly.

A little intoxicated by the room, by the year turning over, by his mouth and his attention and the fact that he had come even though crowds made him tense.

Peter went still.

Not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough for you to feel the pause beneath your palm where your hand rested against his chest.

Then he smiled, but it took work. “Is that a complaint?”

You shook your head. “No.”

“Good.” He kissed you again before you could see his face too clearly.

Later, walking you home through streets rinsed blue-black with cold, Peter listened to your steps beside his and tried not to come apart.

You know me so well.

The words looped, soft and damning.

Snow had begun to fall again, thin flakes catching in your eyelashes. You tucked your hands into your sleeves and complained about your toes going numb. Peter offered you his gloves. You refused. He only offered again. You took one glove and made him wear the other, which was impractical and ridiculous and somehow made his chest hurt more than anything else.

At your building, you lingered beneath the awning.

You looked tired, happy, and a little wind-burned. Real in a way his stolen images of you had never been. The glow from the lobby light turned one side of your face gold.

“Do you want to come up?” you asked and you smiled up at him with an expression that did little to help his constantly spiking pulse. 

He did.

God, he wanted to badly.

But Peter also knew what waited inside him if he did. The lie beneath every comfortable silence. The stolen knowledge under every thoughtful gesture. The way wanting had taught itself to wear the face of care.

“I should head home,” he forced the words out and they felt beyind wrong exiting him.  Your expression shifted, just a little.

Peter felt it like a physical blow.

“Okay,” you whispered in the night air, and even you seemed surprised at how small it seemed. 

He needed the clarification to stick desperately. “I had a good time.”

“Me too.”

Peter touched your hand, his own reddening fingertips grabbing your own cold ones. “Text me when you’re inside?”

You gave him a look that made him feel stupid and wanted all at once. “I’m literally going upstairs.”

“Humor me?”

“You’re ridiculous.”

The chuckle that escaped him camd freely at just how accurate you were. “Historically, yes.”

You smiled, leaned up, and kissed him once. You lingered there for a moment, suddenly turning to nervous to face him, then repeated the action once more and pulled away. “Goodnight, Peter.”

“Goodnight.”

He waited on the sidewalk until your apartment light came on.

Then he waited another minute.

Then, another.

His phone buzzed.

inside. still alive. tragically glove-deficient.

Peter laughed under his breath, alone in the snow. He typed: I’ll survive with one cold hand.

Your reply came quickly.

brave little toaster.

He stared at it until his fingers hurt from the cold. Then, the little typing bubble disappeared.

He should have gone home.

He didn't, that had become an unsavory pattern for him.

Peter climbed.

Not to your window, not this time. He told himself that mattered somehow. He went up the side of the building with practiced silence, fingers finding brick, and his shoes sticking lightly where they touched. The city dropped away beneath him in a wash of headlights and wet pavement. He reached the roof and crouched near the ledge, close enough for his senses to map your apartment in fragments.

Water running..Your shower. A cabinet opening. Your roommate not home. A towel drawer sticking. You humming the chorus of a song from the party, off-key and sleepy.

Peter closed his eyes and exhaled a cloud of air into the cold night. 

The right thing was to leave.

He stayed until the shower shut off.

He stayed while you moved through your room, while fabric whispered over skin, while your phone clicked against your nightstand. He didn't look through the window, he kept his eyes on the roof gravel beneath his hands. That restraint felt obscene because he wanted credit for not doing the worst thing while doing something terrible.

His breath fogged faintly in the cold.

“I’m done,” Peter whispered out loud and the city did not answer.

“I mean it.”

He didn't really know who he was promising. You. Himself. The ghost of every person who had loved him before the world forgot how.

Below, you laughed softly at something on your phone and Peter’s head lifted before he could stop it.

That sound.

It moved through him with humiliating force. Warm, private, and entirely unguarded. He thought of you in the café, in class, in his jacket, on your floor eating noodles, under party lights with confetti caught in your hair. He thought of all the ways he had already ruined the clean thing he wanted.

Peter stood abruptly.

He crossed the roof, dropped into the alley, and landed soundlessly beside a stack of abandoned boxes dusted with snow. His ribs ached. His hand throbbed from where he had split the knuckles earlier that week. He pulled his hood up and walked away without looking back.

For almost three blocks, Peter believed he could really stop.

Upstairs, you finished drying your hair with an old towel that had gone rough from too many washes.

Your apartment was quiet except for the radiator knocking beneath the window and the muffled bass of someone’s music two floors down. The party had left glitter along your collarbone, one stubborn fleck near your wrist, and a faint headache tucked behind your eyes. Your skin still held the clean heat of the shower. You wore an oversized shirt and sleep shorts, your damp hair brushed the back of your neck as you climbed onto your bed and tucked one leg beneath you.

You checked Peter’s text again.

I’ll survive with one cold hand.

You smiled to yourself, biting lazily at the edge of your thumbnail.

Sweet, impossible Peter.

He was always saying things like that. Small things. Harmless things. Little jokes that sounded clumsy enough to be real. You liked that about him, the way he made awkwardness feel almost deliberate, the way he carried tenderness like something he had stolen and still wasn’t sure he was allowed to keep.

You set your phone down, and then after a few paused moments, you picked it back up.

For a moment, you sat still, listening.

Not to anything specific. The building settling. Pipes clicking in the walls. A car passing below, tires hissing through dirty snow. The soft ordinary life of the city stacking itself around you. You could still feel the ghost of his glove on your hand, the warmth he had given up without making it a whole noble thing.

You opened your phone again.

The screen lit your face in the dark. Peter’s last message sat at the top of your conversation, sweet and plain, but you swiped away from it and opened the app folder buried between weather, notes, and a language app you hadn't used since September.

His location refreshed after half a second.

A small blue dot moved underground, following the subway line away from your neighborhood.

You watched it for longer than you needed to.

There you go, you thought, something soft and fond turning over in your chest. Going home like he'd promised.

Your thumb hovered near the map. The little dot stuttered once, then continued. Queens-bound. Alone. Probably standing instead of sitting because he always did that, always gave up seats without looking around to see if anyone noticed.

You smiled again.

Then you opened the second page.

Recent searches loaded beneath a synced browser tab.

Your name. Your bookstore café. Your old campus volunteer archive.

Your social media username with two letters transposed from the first time he had guessed wrong.

A search about whether ESU library study rooms had exterior cameras.

Another about the laundromat near your apartment.

Another about the orange cat in the window, which made you press your lips together to keep from laughing because that one was so painfully, pathetically cute you almost wanted to forgive him on the spot.

Almost.

You scrolled slowly, thumbnail caught between your teeth.

Peter had tried to be careful. That was the adorable part. He deleted things late, never immediately. He cleared histories in batches. He used different browsers for different kinds of guilt. But he was tired too often, distracted too easily by whatever terrible, secret life kept putting bruises beneath his clothes, and sometimes he left little openings behind him.

You'd only needed one.

After a minute, you reached for your laptop in your bedside table. 

The screen woke too bright in the dim room. You lowered the brightness, entered your password, and opened a folder hidden two layers beneath a boring label from last semester’s statistics course.

No full name sat at the top.

That had been one of the first strange things you had found out. 

There should have been more. A student record with a clean history. Tagged photos. Old classmates. Family posts. Some trail of a boy becoming himself in public, even if it was messy, even if it was private, even if most of it had been half-abandoned and badly archived.

Instead, there were gaps.

Not empty, exactly. Emptiness had a shape. This was far stranger, a life with the identifying edges rubbed raw. Campus systems recognized him enough to place him in classrooms, but old references thinned out when you pulled too hard. Public databases returned fragments. Security logs showed a face without a stable story attached. Search results curved away from certainty.

So you had named the folder yourself.

coffee boy.

You clicked it with familiarity and the profile unfolded across the screen with neat, patient organization: screenshots, timestamps, saved browser activity, transit pings, campus camera stills, bookstore security clips, location trails, and blurry street footage collected from public-facing feeds he probably assumed no one would bother checking. There were no tidy records calling him anything with a true name. No clean archive of a life before you. No easy explanation for why the boy in your biology class seemed to appear out of nowhere with old grief in his eyes and no one behind him looking for him.

But, there were patterns.

A brown jacket crossing ESU’s north quad at 8:12 a.m.

The same jacket outside your café at 6:47 p.m., eight minutes after your shift started.

A hooded figure lingering across the street from your apartment on the night you had closed alone.

A campus camera catching him turning his head before anyone else reacted to a car backfiring near the curb.

A security feed from three weeks ago, grainy with snow and bad lighting, showing someone dropping from a brick wall into an alley with impossible ease before pulling on that same brown jacket and walking into the street with his head down.

You dragged the timeline forward a few seconds.

There.

His face turned toward the camera.

Half-shadowed. Bruised. Undeniably him.

Your room reflected faintly in the laptop screen. You didn't look frightened in the reflection.

You looked tired. Curious, almost fond.

Because really, what were you supposed to do with him? 

Poor Peter, watching you from corners and rooftops and café tables, thinking his wanting made him monstrous because he had not yet understood that wanting was only ugly when it lacked imagination. He had searched your name like a confession. He had tracked your schedule like a prayer. He had learned your tea order, your walk home, even the little pauses in your texts.

He knew you so well.

It was sweet.

Not good, not harmless.

But sweet, in that sad, crooked way he was sweet when he brought soup and pretended it had been a normal thing to do.

Your phone buzzed.

Peter: Sleep well.

You glanced at it, and your smile came slowly, private enough that no one else would have known what to call it.

For a few seconds, you only sat there in the blue-white wash of the screen, hair damp against your shirt, thumbnail resting between your teeth.

Then, you looked back at the laptop.

His location dot kept moving. His searches waited beneath your cursor. And the paused footage held his face in the alley, caught between who he pretended to be and whatever he became when no one was meant to see remained awaiting you.

You kept scrolling.

Peter stammered to find his voice in that moment, “You think?” he blurted out, hoping his voice didn't come out too eager.

“Well it sounds like I spent a lot of time with you and that my dad really cared about you.” You summed up, looking to him with a smile.

“Y-yeah, it felt like that,” Peter nods, “We were really good friends,” he reiterated once more.

“Well since you know everything about me, tell me about you,” you reply. “But you can leave out the sad bits, I wouldn’t want to remember that.” you joked and Peter blinked, wondering if you were serious. “Tell me everything Peter,” you insisted with a laugh.

Peter was grateful to have this time with you. For you to get reacquainted with him. He talked about how he fought Thanos with your dad whilst in space. His Aunt May and how much she liked you. The botched spell and why everyone had to forget him. Everything about him was so complex. A pang of guilt hit you, feeling sorry for not being there for him when he needed someone. He had spent four years alone.

You excused yourself to get some water, and got up from your seat. You walked into the kitchenette and searched for a glass. Peter couldn’t contain his smile. The two of you slipped back into each others lives almost seamlessly. He was beyond grateful for your trust and understanding, a trait you got from your dad no doubt.

Suddenly, you lurched forward. Your body thrusting itself against the counter-top. Peter sensed it-the ominous presence had possessed you. He stepped forward as your head was thrown back by an invisible force. Peter called out your name, treading carefully. A sinister laugh left your throat, shoulders shaking with every breath.

“You’re trying really hard for her to like you again Peter,” you said, posture straightening slightly. You turned to him, "Because she does not have a single memory of you in here," you hummed.

"Leave her alone!" Peter demanded, charging forward and wrapping his hand around your throat. "She doesn't deserve whatever you're doing to her!"

He watched as your eyes wandered left then right, flipping through your mind like pages in a book. A mischievous grin dancing on your lips as Peter's grip had lifted you a foot off the ground.

“She does feel bad for you. But all she remembers is Spider-man and how he selfishly chose what was best for him.” You cooed, a rasp in your voice from the lack of oxygen.

"I gave up everything to save everyone," Peter spat back, his hands beginning to coil tighter around your throat. His eyes glazing over in rage.

"And what did you get for being the hero?" you asked. "Nothing."

"Leave. Her. Alone." Peter asserted.

"Okay." you beamed before your eyes rolled back.

You regained consciousness instantly. A gasp for air was stuck in your throat. Looking down, you saw Peter looking up at you with a murderous glint in his eyes, his hand wrapped around your throat. Instantly, you kicked both heels to his chest, sending him flying backwards. After knocking the wind out of him, Peter struggled to get back up.

"What the fuck, Peter?" you snapped as you raised your palm.

"I can e-explain," Peter pleaded, trying to catch his breath.

"Don't come any closer, I will shoot you." you warned, your repulsor activating with a loud whirring sound.

"Please don't," he panted, trudging towards you.

"I said stop!" you screamed before sending a charged particle beam his way.

Peter ducked out of the way just in time, his eyes darting to the irreparable damage you dealt to his couch. A clean and precise circular hole right through the middle. He looked back to see you missing from the kitchenette and saw you had fled through the fire escape.

"Come back! I'm sorry!" He shouted after he rushed to the window, watching you fly off without looking back.

"So then you woke up and he was choking you?" Yelena summarized.

She insisted that you get checked out in the med bay. But all they saw were bruised indentations that resembled Peter's hand around your neck.

"Yes but I don't remember anything, I just wanted some water." you shrugged, being actively swabbed by the nurse as you spoke.

"Maybe you attacked him," Yelena suggested.

"But why would I do that?" You retorted.

"Well you must've done something to piss him off," she replied as you sat there in silence.

"Maybe that possession thing happened and something took over me?" You wondered aloud.

Yelena shot up from her seat and stepped back. Her hand hovered over the pistol resting on her hip. Just then, Bucky walked in - confused by the scene unfolding in front of him.

"What's going on? Where have you been?" Bucky questioned like a worried mother, stepping in between the two of you.

"She could be possessed." Yelena explained, causing the Winter Soldier to look back at you. "You're grounded." she decides almost instantly.

"But-" you began.

"No buts. No missions. And no spider-man." Yelena pronounced, you looked to Bucky who just nodded at her decision.

"Yelena!" You scoffed, "You're making a big deal out of this," you insist, crossing your arms in annoyance.

"Quiet leshy," the blonde replied. "You are to stay in the tower til the doctors can prove you are not possessed by a ghost.".

You slumped back into the hospital bed, upset with their firmness to keep you under house arrest. But there was no use in changing their minds. And they were valid to be wary, seeing that you were mentally susceptible to whatever or whoever fondled your brain.

They even took your phone and other gadgets away in the meantime. Especially since you usually had access to some pretty dangerous equipment. The facial recognition system only allowed you to go to your room, the communal floor, and med bay.

So while most of the team was out on missions, you were stuck rotting in the tower. But you weren't entirely alone, Bob was there too. Since he was also a loose canon, you guys binge watched chick-flics with copious amounts of popcorn.

Peter was worried sick and felt terrible. He tried calling you non-stop that day. Until he decided to just give you your space. Hoping to be able to reconcile things with you and explain himself.