vicko

『••✎••』

Peter’s mind raced, trying to piece together the puzzle in front of him. You were a mess—a soaked, trembling, sobbing mess—and for a terrifying second, he thought someone had hurt you. His senses went into overdrive, cataloging every detail: the scent of rain and chemicals clinging to your clothes, the frantic, arrhythmic beat of your heart against his chest, the salt of your tears soaking into the collar of his shirt. He was ready to bolt, to hunt down whoever or whatever had caused this, to make them pay.

But then you pulled back, just enough to look at him, and what he saw in your eyes wasn’t fear or pain. It was recognition. A deep, soul-shattering understanding that made his blood run cold.

And he knew. He knew before you even said the words. You weren’t running from something. You were running to him because you finally, truly, understood. You believed him in the way he needed, the way he had never, ever expected anyone to.

You believed him and it was destroying you. The girl who had been so kind, so gentle, so quietly resilient, was breaking right in front of him, and it was all because of him. Because of the truth he had selfishly laid at your feet. He had thought giving you the truth would be a gift. A relief. But looking at you now, he saw it for what it was: a curse.

He didn’t know what to do. His entire life, people had relied on him for strength. May had relied on him to be responsible. MJ had relied on him to be honest. Ned had relied on him to be the hero. Spider-Man was supposed to have the answers. He was supposed to be the one who fixed things.

But what did you need him to be? Spider-Man couldn’t stop the storm outside. He couldn’t erase the grief etched onto your face. And Peter Parker… Peter Parker caused this. How could he comfort someone when he was the very source of their pain?

He made a decision. Not a hero decision. A Peter Parker decision. He guided you further into the apartment, his hands gentle but firm on your arms. He maneuvered you around a stack of textbooks and a precariously balanced pile of takeout containers, leading you to the one piece of furniture that wasn’t salvaged from a curb: the armchair. He gently pushed you down into it, then dropped to his knees in front of you, looking up at you with an expression of such raw, unguarded concern that it made your breath hitch.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, his voice soft but steady. “Don’t move.”

He was up and moving before you could respond, a blur of motion. He returned a moment later with the towel from the floor, now warm from being draped over a radiator, and a large, worn-out sweatshirt that smelled faintly of detergent and… him. He gently draped the towel over your shivering shoulders, then started unwrapping the wet lab coat from your body, his movements clumsy but careful, like he was defusing a bomb instead of taking off a piece of clothing.

You were too numb to protest, too overwhelmed to do anything but let him. He peeled the soaked fabric from your arms and tossed it aside, then held out the sweatshirt.

“Here,” he said. “Put this on. You’ll get sick.”

You nodded, your fingers fumbling with the damp hem of your own shirt. He waited patiently, his gaze fixed on a spot just over your shoulder, giving you a sliver of privacy in the small, cluttered room. You pulled the sweatshirt over your head, the soft, warm fabric enveloping you like a cocoon. It was too big, the sleeves swallowing your hands, the hem falling down to your mid-thigh. You were swimming in it, swimming in him. And for the first time since you’d run out of the lab, you felt a semblance of warmth return to your body.

He was still on his knees in front of you, looking up at you with those big, brown eyes that held a universe of pain. He reached out, not to touch you, but to peel away your set of safety goggles, which you’d forgotten you were still wearing. He set them aside on a nearby stack of books, then just… looked at you. He looked at you as if you were a piece of art in a museum, with a kind of reverence and a hint of sadness.

“You saw them, didn’t you?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. He knew. Of course he knew. He saw the truth in your eyes, the same way he’d seen the truth in your kindness in that cafe, the same way he saw the truth in that quote on your book.

You just nodded, a fresh wave of tears welling up in your eyes. You tried to speak, to tell him about Ned and MJ, about Mr. Harrington and the AV cart, but the words got stuck in your throat, coming out as a series of choked, incomprehensible sobs.

He didn’t need the words. He understood. He just gave a small, sad nod, a silent acknowledgment of your shared burden. Then, in a move that was both utterly heartbreaking and profoundly comforting, he leaned forward and rested his forehead on your lap. You felt the warmth of his skin through the thin fabric of the sweatshirt, the slight tremor in his body. You were reminded at that moment that he wasn’t just the boy who was erased, who had to live with being erased. He was also secretly the friendly-neighborhood hero, bearing the weight of two worlds.

You kept forgetting about that part.

You let your hand fall to his head, your fingers tangling in his damp, soft hair. You could feel the slight, rhythmic buzz of his senses working overtime, cataloging your every shudder, every hitched breath, every frantic beat of your heart. But it wasn’t invasive. It was… intimate. A quiet, unspoken conversation between two people who existed in a space no one else could see.

“Is this… is this what it feels like?” you managed to choke out, your voice hoarse. “All the time?”

He didn’t lift his head, but you felt him nod against your knee. “A little,” he whispered. “You get used to it.”

He was lying. You both knew he was lying. You don’t get used to being a ghost. You just learn how to haunt the living.

He finally pulled back, looking up at you with an intensity that made your heart ache. His hair was a mess from your fingers, so much so that you had to fight back the urge to smooth it down.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” you asked, your voice cracking with a mixture of anger and sorrow. “When you were at the cafe… you made it sound like a metaphor. With how you described it, I thought… I don’t know what I thought. But I didn’t think this. I didn’t think that I would ask about you and get blank stares. I didn’t think I had to convince my own mind that you were real.”

“What was I supposed to say?” he asked, his voice rising with a frustration that had been building for a year. “That I caused the multiverse to almost collapse, and to fix it, I had to make everyone I ever loved forget me? That my aunt’s last words were to a stranger? That I’ve been living in a glorified closet, eating expired microwave meals, talking to myself because the silence is so loud it feels like it’s going to crush me?!”

He was on his feet now, pacing the small length of the room, the frantic energy returning with a vengeance. “I barely know how to say it to myself without wanting to punch a hole through the wall! How was I supposed to say it to you? To the only person on the planet who doesn’t look through me? What was I supposed to do, scare you away? Have you look at me with the same… pity… that I see in my own reflection?!”

He stopped, his back to you, his shoulders slumping in defeat. You could see the tension in the lines of his back, the way his hands were clenched into fists at his sides.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice muffled. “I didn’t mean to yell. I just… what was I supposed to say?”

You watched him, your own tears momentarily forgotten. You saw the desperation in his posture, the raw, unfiltered pain. He wasn’t angry at you. He could never be angry at you. He was angry at the universe, at the cruel, cosmic joke that had become his life. And he was terrified. Terrified that you, the one miracle, the one anchor, would be snatched away just like everything else.

So you did the only thing you could think to do. You stood up, the sweatshirt—a tangible reminder of his care—hanging on your small frame like a shield. You walked over to him and, without a word, wrapped your arms around his waist from behind, pressing your cheek against the tense muscles of his back.

You didn’t say anything. You just held him. You let him feel the warmth of your body, the steady rhythm of your breathing. You let him know just how much strength he had. That he wasn’t alone.

He was tense for a long moment, a coiled spring of grief and anger. Then, slowly, incrementally, he began to relax. He leaned back into your embrace, the fight draining out of him, leaving behind a hollow ache. He brought one of his hands up, covering yours where they were clasped over his stomach, his fingers entwining with yours.

“You could have said that,” you whispered, your lips brushing against the fabric of his shirt. “I would have listened. I would have tried to understand.”

“You’re trying to understand now,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “And look what it’s doing to you.”

“Then let it,” you said, your voice firm with a conviction that surprised even you. “Don’t you get it, Peter? That’s what friends do. They carry the heavy stuff together. You don’t have to be strong for me. You don’t have to be a hero. You can just… be. Be Peter Parker. And I’ll be right here.”

He turned in your arms, slowly, until he was facing you. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face etched with a sorrow so profound it seemed to age him by years. He looked at you, and for the first time, you saw something other than pain in his eyes. You saw… hope—a fragile, flickering ember in the vast darkness of his loneliness.

“Friends?”

He said the word with a mixture of wonder and disbelief, like he was trying on a coat that hadn’t fit him in a year. Friends didn’t seem like a big enough word for what you were, for what he needed you to be. It was too small, too simple for the weight of this truth.

“Just friends?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

You looked at him—at the boy who could apparently lift a bus, who could swing between skyscrapers, who could face down aliens and monsters, but was terrified of being forgotten. You saw the vulnerability in his eyes, the desperate, hopeful plea for something more than just a shared burden.

And in that moment the past came into play, for both of you. For him, it was all those years in high school where you had been just a face in the crowd. All those missed opportunities, all those silent observations, all those what-ifs that had suddenly become painfully relevant when he found you. In a matter of days, those short conversations and your quiet presence had become more real to him than years of memories with people who no longer knew his name.

The cafe conversation, the hug, the sticky note—it all came rushing back to him, a kaleidoscope of moments that had led to this. You had been there, all along, a quiet observer in the background of his life, and he had been too preoccupied with his own world to see you. And now, here you were, as if the universe had given him a second chance, a do-over for all the times he had been too busy, too distracted, too Spider-Man to just be a teenager.

And for you, it was all those years of watching from the sidelines. All those times you played observer instead of participant. All those moments you chose your textbooks over a chance at a real connection. You saw him—the boy who was always running, the boy who was always kind, the boy who was always just out of reach. And you had done nothing. You had let him run right past you, too caught up in your own quiet world of grades and expectations to see that he might have needed another friend. The trip to Europe was proof of that. You had seen the grief on his face and you did nothing. Nothing.

A wave of guilt washed over you, so strong it almost brought you to your knees. You regretted everything. The silence. The lost years. You should’ve gone to those parties. You should’ve spoken up in class. You should’ve gone up to him in Venice and asked if he was okay, even if you had never spoken a word to him before. You should have said something. Anything.

You looked at him, at the hope in his eyes, and you knew, with a certainty that was both terrifying and exhilarating, that ‘friends’ was not enough. It was a start, a crucial and necessary start, but it wasn’t the end. It wasn’t what this was. This was bigger than friendship. This was… fated. A cosmic collision of two lonely souls who had been orbiting each other for years, never quite close enough to touch, until a cataclysmic event had finally forced them into each other’s gravitational pull.

You took a deep breath, the air catching in your lungs as you made a decision. A decision to stop watching. A decision to start living. A decision to finally, after all these years, take a risk.

“If not friends,” you whispered, your voice trembling with a mixture of fear and anticipation, “then what would you call this, Pete?”

You let the nickname slip, a casualty of the intimacy, a sign that the old rules no longer applied. You saw the way it made him flinch, not in a bad way, but in a way that suggested it was a long-forgotten word that suddenly held new meaning.

“What would you call us?” you pressed, your eyes locked on his, daring him to give you an answer.

And he didn’t know how to. Not in words, anyway. He’d spent the last year learning that words were flimsy, unreliable things that could be erased with a wave of a hand. They were promises that could be broken, memories that could be rewritten. But actions… actions had weight. They had consequences. They had a truth that couldn’t be denied.

So instead of answering, he did the only thing he could think to do. The only thing that felt right.

He leaned in and kissed you.

Slowly, making it known he was giving you all the power. If you were to pull away now, he’d let you. If you had even a spark of hesitation in your eyes, he would have stopped. One of his perks of being him was seeing it all before it even happened. Spider-sense aside, he’d learned how to read people. And what he was reading in you now was all about the courage to take a chance. So that’s what he did.

His lips were hesitant at first, a question rather than an answer, a gentle exploration of this new, uncharted territory. He tasted of rain and grief and a desperate, aching hope that made your heart ache with a sweetness you had never known before. You responded in kind, your lips parting slightly, a silent invitation.

He knew immediately this was your first kiss. It wasn’t hard to figure out. The slight tremble in your lips, the way your hands remained at your sides, unsure of what to do. He would’ve smiled if he wasn’t so busy. So he made it a point to show you what to do, to lead you in a dance as old as time itself. His hands found their way to your waist, pulling you closer, the space between you disappearing until there was nothing but the shared heat of your bodies and the frantic, synchronized beating of your hearts. Your own hands came up to rest on his chest, feeling the solid, reassuring thump of his heart beneath your palm, a steady rhythm against the chaos of your own.

This was it. This was the answer to your question. This was what you were. This was what this was. It wasn’t friendship. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t even a second chance. It was a beginning. A new beginning, born from the ashes of two lives that had been consumed by fire.

The kiss deepened, growing in confidence and intensity, a conversation without words. You weren’t the quiet girl in the front of the class anymore. He wasn’t the ghost haunted by a past that no one else could remember. You were just two people, two lost souls who had finally found their eye in the middle of a hurricane.

He was the one to pull away, not out of hesitation, but out of a need to breathe, to see, to process the monumental shift that had just occurred. He rested his forehead against yours, his breath coming in ragged gasps, his eyes closed, as if he was trying to burn this moment into his memory, to hold onto it with every fiber of his being. His hands were still on your waist, his thumbs tracing slow, deliberate circles on the fabric of the sweatshirt that now smelled like both of you.

You were breathless, your head spinning, your body humming with a new and unfamiliar energy. You felt… seen. Truly seen. Not for your grades or your quiet demeanor or your potential, but for you. For the girl who had watched and waited and regretted. For the girl who had finally found the courage to speak up, to reach out, to take a chance.

You opened your eyes, finding him already looking at you, a soft, wondrous smile playing on his lips. It wasn’t a sad smile. It wasn’t a tired smile. It was a real smile. A Peter Parker smile. And it was the most beautiful thing you had ever seen.

It took you a second to realize he was humming a song. It was soft, so quiet you almost thought you were imagining it. But you recognized it immediately. It was that one song you were always listening to in class, the one with the intricate guitar riff and the haunting lyrics. The one you’d been listening to on your headphones the day he ran into you, as well as the day in the cafe.

And ironically, thinking back, it had matched the situation more than you realized. The one about being lost and found, about being seen and unseen, about saving someone from the wreckage of a life they thought was over.

And he knew it, too. He heard it first through your headphones. And since then, he heard it everywhere he went, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was. He tried Shazaming it, he tried humming it to Siri, he tried searching the lyrics, but nothing.

Then, on a night he was feeling nostalgic and pulled out one of May’s old record players, he found it. Tucked away in a box of her old vinyls, a record by a band he’d remembered as her favorite. He played it, and he listened. And he understood.

He understood the lyrics, the melody, the ache behind it all. He understood why it had been playing on a loop in your head, why it had been following him around like a shadow. Because it was his song. It described his life to a tee. The feeling of being erased, of being a stranger in your own life, of knowing that the one person who saw you could be the one thing that could save you.

And when he looked at you now, he didn’t see the quiet girl from the back of the class. He saw the girl who had been listening to the soundtrack to his life, even before she knew she was in the movie. He saw the girl who had been singing the words he couldn’t say, feeling the pain he couldn’t show, holding the hope he couldn’t find.

He stopped humming, the last note hanging in the air between you, a fragile, ephemeral thing. You didn’t have to ask what it was because you were singing the same song. Always have been.

He didn’t know what tomorrow would look like. He didn’t know how you were going to help him, how you were going to navigate this strange new reality that only the two of you could see. He didn’t know how you were going to convince the world that a boy named Peter Parker existed, or if you even could.

But as he looked at you, as the lyrics said:

“…because maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me.”

He knew one thing for sure: that you would. And you did in more ways than you could possibly imagine. You saved him from the silence, from the loneliness, from the crushing weight of being the only one who remembered. You saved him from himself.

You were his wonderwall. And after today, he was starting to believe he might have been yours, too.

—Taglist—

@marcspectorondeeznuts , @fawnsoveru , @kuro-mimi , @jupiterandjunoandmars , @daniiibananiii, @jjxaya @superbpoisonpath , @lazy4teen, @sarkastic1515 , @finshythgurl , @madscamp02 , @miakxn , @angstylittleb1tch , @verco , @ornemagicwand, @obsessedromancereader, @nicolelikestoread , @overrated-romance, @sriracha, @mim16s, @intertwinedh3rts, @pahal16444, @lily-ann22, @rxeae, @yesshewrites1, @rurwu, @jamiesauruss , @Ivlyu , @gothamsbelfry , @baldwincaine , @viannasthings , @luckyarrow , @marlena-marlena , @thoughtdaughterxoxo , @lizzie1grant

Again, I love all of you. Thank you ❤️‍🩹