willa hurts all her favs

(Hal is actually wrong since Damian is the current Robin by this point, but I guess the changes in Gotham are hard to keep up with. As for why everyone knows about Tim insisting Bruce is alive, I don’t have a real reason for you besides writers taking the simplest option. But I’m gonna theorize the most likely explanation is that Tim’s friends are blabbermouths and told their mentors, who told everyone else.)

[awkwardly collaged panels from Blackest Night: Batman #2. Tim grabs Dick, saying “[...] Don’t you see, Dick... Anything and everything is possible--That’s why I know that somewhere out there even Bruce is alive.” Dick puts his hands on Tim’s shoulders and responds, “You have to let them go. You have to keep moving forward. [...]” In another panel, Tim insists, “Sometimes they come back, Dick.” Dick responds, “And most of the time they don’t, Tim.”]

However, during Blackest Night, the big baddie makes Bruce’s “body” rise to provoke an emotional reaction from the surrounding heroes--but the puppet skeleton is very obviously different from the other, actually dead people who have risen, and so the hero community at large starts to believe in Bruce’s survival.

[panel from Blackest Night #8, which is a close-up of Bruce’s grave next to his parents’. Off-panel, Hal Jordan says to Barry Allen: “--except for him. That Black Lantern Batman didn’t recognize any of us. It wasn’t Bruce. Tim Drake is right. Bruce is alive.”]

When Tim returns to his search in Red Robin #6, he wonders “why didn’t I tell [Dick] what I found in Iraq? Why didn’t I tell him that I have evidence Bruce is alive?” As he keeps fighting Ra’s and various assassins through the next few issues, he sincerely worries that he’s going to die and no one will ever know what he found, and chides himself for not telling Dick. Tim mentally plans to recruit someone with a time machine in Red Robin #9. In Red Robin #12, when Ra’s is defeated, he finally shares what he’s learned.

[panels from Red Robin #12. Tim, sitting up from a medical cot, says, “Bruce is alive. He’s lost in Time, and I can prove it. I have evidence, and there’s something upstairs you need to see. Dick...Alfred...I’m not crazy. I know this is hard to hear, but please...believe in me.” Dick glances at Alfred and says, “...Okay. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”]

Tim’s explanation happens off-panel, presumably so people don’t have to read through a recap of the series they just read, but I assume that Dick is more receptive to the idea here because of that Black Lantern thing, and his “we’ve got a lot to talk about” is also referring to him sharing that info with Tim.

At this point, Tim settles into vigilante work that isn’t Bruce-focused, and a team dubbed the Time Masters--Superman, Hal Jordan, and time travelers Booster Gold and Rip Hunter--starts traveling through time to find Bruce in Time Masters: Vanishing Point. As far as I remember, Tim isn’t explicitly mentioned as providing the information for this jaunt, but considering no one else knew Bruce was lost in time (just that he was alive) and Tim thought about time travelers (and Booster Gold and Rip Hunter in particular) in his Red Robin narration, I assume that he did.

Meanwhile, Bruce’s side of the story is told in Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, which also shows his eventual return.

(Disclaimer: I half-skimmed both Time Masters and Return of Bruce Wayne. They are constructed out of comic book magic/science/nonsense, and the latter is written by my nemesis Gr*nt M*rrison, so I only understood or cared about half of it.)

As it turns out, Bruce is on a path back to the present without any intervention, and the real problem is that when he does, he’s gonna accidentally blow up the universe or idk something awful and comic-booky. A large group, including the Time Masters and the current Justice League, comes together to save the day. (see: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5-6)

Tim is not only present for all this, but doing a lot of the briefing and possibly leading the mission. And, when Bruce returns wrong, he gets to do the whole “I know the real you is in there somewhere!” thing. So, while he is not alone, he definitely gets acknowledgment both from the narrative and the characters around him for all the work he did tracking Bruce down.

His sneakers and jacket had still been dripping from the night before when he’d put them back on and any progress they’d made in drying undone the second he hit the pavement running. The articles hang heavily on him, the weight making his lungs protest the strain of pumping already leadened legs under the growing burden.

He wraps himself around each street corner like a mad man still, snagging the edges of store windows and street signs to control the way he would skid and slip whenever he turned and having to try doubly as hard not to topple down the slicked stairs of the station entrance in order to maintain his pace.

The surplus of ‘sorry’s and ‘scuse me’s ushered while bullying his way through the throng of slow-milling commuters were drowned out by both the noise of the raging downpour above and the rumbling of passing trains further down in the tunnels. He manages to get only a few colorful responses back before he spots the downtown Q sitting idle on the tracks, but the number definitely multiplied after squirming his way up to the front of the queue and vaulting himself over the turnstile, his prone legs nearly catching the metal sides.

It’s only after he lands in a practiced crouch and the muscles that were still knitting themselves back together relaxed from the stretch of the action that he remembers the ugly bruising that mottles his side.

The pain that follows ie sudden and bright and steals the very breath that had just been making its way down his throat, but he doesn’t have the luxury to stop and wait for the aftershocks to pass. Peter wades right through it instead, refusing to still or slow whenever it ratcheted up after twisting his torso too quickly because the doors have been open too long already and the sheer mass of people still filing out of the train and preventing the sliding doors from closing is the only reason he cleared them in time.

There’s hardly enough room to breathe in the subway car once the doors are allowed to close which makes it nearly impossible to find something to hold onto when there were hands on every visible glint of metal, but Peter fortunately didn’t think it too much of a tragedy and shuffled himself to a relatively vacant spot between the center poles and out of reach of the hanging hand holds, choosing to rely on the exceptional internal equilibrium that usually kept his footing sure when riding the subway sans support hold.

It’s not that it doesn’t now, he’s just slightly too exhausted to keep himself from leaning into the sway. He doesn’t lurch or falter but he can feel how his muscles want to, the full body ache he’d woken up with inching closer to a territory just shy of unbearable now that he’d finally stopped moving.

The pause dragged forgotten pains to the forefront of his attention until they twinged in time with the beat inflating his eardrums near decibel capacity with the too close, too loud sound of his heart. He knew it was s his own and that he had no reason to fear the steady thumping of the vital organ because it meant that he was alive, that he was still here.

But it had also eliminated all other sounds around him on the barreling train and Peter had been operating with his nerves on a hair trigger for so long that he didn’t think he’d mind too much now if it would just stop altogether, because fuck, listening to his amplified pulse was unsettling on a good day, it was absolutely insufferable for it to be further conducted amid an unnatural silence.

The breaths he manages then are sharp and short, and he thinks he might’ve been starting to get back to a stable rhythm until the train jerks so sharply around a bend that for a fleeting second he was certain he must’ve gotten his wish.

Whatever meager contents remained in his stomach surged up into his throat at the same time that his previously securely locked knees threatened to send him to the ground. He staggered in a sad sort of mock drunkenness instead while the roaring in his ears died down enough for the sound of the grating rasps tearing themselves from his chest cavity to certify that he hadn’t.

Peter couldn’t decide whether to be disappointed or relieved because he knows that’s not what’s happening, that he wasn’t actually dying, but it’s the only word he’s able to supply for the tingling sensation seeping into his fingertips like his hands had been dipped into ice water, phantom pins and needles sparking in places farther up his arms until he could hardly believe the things were still attached unless he was actually looking at them hanging slack at his sides.

He was too far gone with the fog dousing his brain in liquid nitrogen to crunch the numbers on which variable might be worse, dropping dead right then and there, or having to tolerate his bodily performing yet another dress rehearsal for a reprise of said event.

Though Peter isn’t afforded the chance to dwell on the dilemma for very long because a swell of nausea abruptly rips his focus back to his most pressing issue of keeping a lid on his shit until he was no longer trapped on public transportation.

It didn’t seem to matter that he knew that it wasn’t real nausea, that his body didn’t really need to throw up, but the dizzying malaise flipping his stomach inside out was very convincing when it decided to make itself known, rushing in and filling his mouth with saliva whenever the panic lulled to provide a new fear for him to manage in its absence. He sits with the gathering pool until his throat is bobbing with the urge to get rid of it, but his attempt to swallow the salty warning only makes him gag harshly.

Peter groans, shuddering hard and not caring to mitigate his volume when more mucus was welling up in his mouth. He chooses to spit it out into his soaking wet sleeve when it becomes too much again because, genuine or not, that was one battle Peter was not willing to lose.

He leans over himself as much as the bodies confining him on every side allowed, fingers curling into the stiff folds of his wet jeans while he attempted to curb the amount of acid singing the innermost lining of his throat.

In and out, he manually coaxed even breaths from his diaphragm, but where queasiness had sat heavily in his stomach was rapidly being replaced with an unyielding pit that clenched and twisted and was descending so fast.

“Come on,” he mouths, his words a wisp that was audible to no one but himself with all the other commotion going on around him. He tries once to drag a breath in deep, forcing the air past the band of resistance until he choked on it and when the coughing ended, tries again.

He could feel his lungs doing what they were supposed to. Expanding to let air in and deflating to let the waste it created out, and filthy and claustrophobic as the train car was, he knew there was still plenty of air in it. That no matter how vivid it felt that the walls of metal and glass were closing in on him, a part of him understood that it wasn’t actually happening, but his senses still felt the inclination to alert him that it was not enough anyway.

It must have been some kind of convoluted maintenance check from his enhanced biology, his body sounding every alarm just to make sure that they were still able to ring or maybe just to test for any faults in his system that might inhibit his performance.

And if that was the case, he supposes it would be all well and good if maybe he didn’t feel like a collection of raw, open wounds these days, new ones tacking themselves onto older bits of carnage every day he woke up and had to face the fact that the sun still rose and fell despite Peter’s entire world imploding in on itself.

That, and maybe if it didn’t keep happening when there was no legitimate danger, because yeah his healing factor might be royally fucked, but none of his injuries were serious. A dirty subway in Manhattan also wasn’t exactly the safest environment he could be in to lose himself to his anxiety, sure, but there were no immediate threats to his safety or anyone else’s. So there was no reason it should be happening again.

Not after one rough night Peter couldn't even measure on the scale of horrible things he’s brought onto himself in the past year alone it was so insignificant. Especially not when all he was starting to hear was the sound of his own bones crunching as malleable flesh met the front of a high speed train somewhere in Berlin, unforgiving metal shocking the air from his lungs upon impact over and over agin as his breathing quickly devolved into an erratic game of catch up.

His mind flitted between then and now until his reality merged with the images that burned themselves into the back of his eyelids every night and he could no longer differentiate the sea of bobbing heads as aimless commuters or figments of swarming attackers.

Real or imagined, he could feel himself recoiling whenever someone lilted too close, clamping down on his bottom lip with his teeth so hard he tasted copper to keep from lashing out when they did.

Realness had been relative ever since he’d been fooled by things that felt so true, since let himself be tricked by people that had never given any reason to doubt them. They had been there though, the clues, he was just too naive to see it back then, hadn’t known any better than to lend his trust so willingly.

No calculable time actually separates the Peter he was then from the Peter he is today except that maybe now he’s knows the consequence of ignorance, the imperceptible error in never pausing to think before he acts simply to have done something at all, and not ever stopping to consider whether that something was the right thing or not.

It didn’t matter whether or not he had the mask and all of the perks that came with his powers, he couldn’t up and abandon the oath he’d made when the city wouldn’t stop needing his help just because he could no longer give it. The last time he hadn’t had the means to do his job correctly he’d lost Aunt May.

Once was truly enough for the lesson to stick, he didn’t think he’d survive letting it happen on his watch again.

“Fuck,” his entire body trembles with reminders of his failures. The muscles in his back spasm under the pressure of a slab of concrete being dropped on top of him, tensing up to protect his abdomen against phantom blows from Stark Industry drones dressed up like his deepest fears and stuttering disjointedly when the sudden weight of his dying aunt fell into his arms all over again.

“S’not real,” Peter gasps brokenly, shaking his head and squeezing his eyelids together until he saw stars like the darkness might dilute all the red he saw when they were open.

“Come on, Peter,” he whispers to himself.

‘Come on, Spider-man’ he doesn’t let himself say out loud.

Peter Parker could fall apart however much he wanted, but Spider-man couldn’t afford to keep being this fucking useless. He need to come back to himself. He need to—

“Wake up.”

The words are out of his mouth before Peter can even wrap his mind around the implications of them, rattling around in his mind like an echo chamber, growing louder and more urgent until they sounded less like a plea and more like a warning.

Like something terrible would happen if he didn’t because it sounded like Mysterio was right there chanting with him.

He doesn’t know why that’s what finally does it for him, why it’s what finally severs the string tethering him to reality, only that the train continues to rattle along and the passengers surge with it but the vessels do so without Peter.

The hyper awareness of his every flinching breath had been all he could concentrate one not even a minute ago, pushing at his threshold until it had no other option but to snap, the input overwhelming him on every side fading out all at once like the dial had been set way past ten and then abruptly dialed back to zero.

The change happened so quickly the tears that had welled at the corners of his eyes didn’t even take the time to wet his cheeks before falling to the dirty floor.

He couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, when he’d stopped hyperventilating and every flaring hurt, every all-consuming worry had been demoted to background noise and the pleasant hum of the engines working beneath his feet as wheels glided along uneven tracking had lulled him into a sort of detached calm.

It was like his body had exhausted the energy required to withstand the overload but not extinguish it completely, and so his subconscious decided it would be easier to handle without Peter there.

If he remained present he would just feed into the spiral and make it worse but like this he was a passenger, a spectator. He didn’t have to smother his own anything anymore now that he was on autopilot because it held the panic at bay for him, packaged it into something small and kept it at a distance that he could actually handle, or at least live with long enough to get through the rest of this day.

He had no way of gauging how long he floated there like that, eyes wide and unseeing, but it must’ve been a decent while because the train eventually rolled to a stop, the crowd of bodies packing the train in losing some of its volume.

Peter was slow in turning his head to locate the map and willing his mind to clear so he could at least figure out if he’d missed his stop already or if he should be hurrying to get off before the doors closed. The blur made it hard to see the numbers but he thinks that there isn’t enough yellow on the panel for more than the Penn and Herald’s Square stops to be lit up, so he allows himself to go back to drifting.

There’s another undetermined stretch of time he couldn’t account for that lead him to then, to watching as his legs carried him off the platform and out of the station on their own accord, his hands pushing open a series of glass doors and flashing freshly manufactured identification cards at security guards without receiving any direction to do so.

Peter blinks slowly, opening his eyes up to a new place each time like his connection was simply lagging behind. He saw himself reaching for the right buttons in the elevator and taking all the correct turns to get to the lab without consciously commanding any of it.

He was some place very far from tactile perception then so he didn’t really feel his body doing any of it either. It should scare him. The threads of leftover panic should worsen tenfold, he knows that, but they don’t because if free will was the cost of silencing his mind, then he was more than willing to pay than have to relinquish this tentative peace quite yet.

And so the rest of the journey goes like that, Peter hardly registering a single thing while his body operated on muscle memory to get him to his classroom and sit him down at the right desk. Except when he makes it to his seat only the TA and about half of the students are there. His vision sharpening to the sight of a borderline empty classroom alone was sobering enough to bring him back to the surface just in time to hear the last half of a garbled statement about how tardies and absences will be temporarily excused.

Peter’s hands are making fingerprints of condensation on the black table top he’s using to brace himself as he took in harsh, panting breaths and he was suddenly very grateful that no one in his lab group was there yet because it meant that there was no one to gawk at his beaten face, or his genuine struggle to breathe.

He settles in his seat when a gnawing pang in his empty stomach reminds him that his metabolism doesn’t care how nauseated he still felt and keeps his head down anyway.

Stragglers were still filtering in up until the end of the first hour, each one properly soaked and in similar states of disarray. The professor ended up making a call to not bother touching their lab reports since an overwhelming number of students hadn’t been able to make it to class.

Peter thinks he remembers someone saying that he’d gotten stuck on the railroad somewhere between the city and Connecticut which is why he ultimately had his teaching assistant run through the powerpoint they hadn’t gotten to last week instead.

He sits through all two and a half hours of the lecture feeling like his skin would never thaw and the chill only gets worse once he’s back outside, wrapping his bones in ice and shooting tendrils through the marrow whenever the wind caught an unprotected portion of skin.

The storm had let up substantially while Peter was in class, the downpour having calmed back down to a light drizzle. Still he couldn't help the violent shivers racking his frame when he felt as stripped as the engines he used to take apart with Tony. Like someone had decided he wasn’t worth fixing and tried to gut him for parts too.

Peter doesn’t know how he manages to drag himself home without checking back in once on the way and the only reason he realizes that he’s finally made it is when he can’t go any further than the lobby door. No keys, right.

He finds himself slightly more present when circling back to the corner so he could get to the dumpster lot behind the strip of taxpayer units on his street and web himself up to the roof of his building without getting the cops called on him, though he’s sure they’ve got plenty of better things to do with all the storm damages and traffic jams they probably bringing the city to a halt. The exact kind of things that Spider-man was more than equipped to help with.

Their landlord had never bothered to fix the lock on the door that lead up to it so it was definitely open, but that didn’t change the fact that Peter still had no keys. And he lives on the fourth floor so it wasn’t like there was anyone to disturb by taking the fire escape except for the asshole that lived above him, he just also usually had the cover of night to shield him from wandering eyes when he did it.

His decent then is neither quick nor graceful with numb fingers slipping on freezing wet rungs and legs keen on threatening to buckle, but he does eventually manage to make it down the ladder without breaking an ankle. It’s just as he began to slot one deadened limb through the cracked window at a time when he sees that there is way too much water beneath the sill under him to have sloughed off only his person.

He was soaked from head to toe, but he definitely wasn’t responsible for what looked like close to an inch of water that was pooling in the corner of his bedroom.

“Fuck,” he huffs, breathless and without the slightest bite. He didn’t have the energy to sustain the rightful frustration that was washing over him, he was too cold, his exposed nerves too raw and close to the surface to handle this too.

To handle the fact that his ceiling had actually leaked because of course it did. And of course his building had a shitty foundation that warped the floors and made it all collect on one place, one that just happened to be where he kept the most valuable of the very few items he had to his name.

His desk was next to the window so he could use the street lamps outside when studying at night instead of the overhead lights to shave some decimal places off his monthly utility bill—but so was his sewing machine and his school work and all of the documents that made him a real person on paper.

”Oh fuck.” He’s moving quicker than the trembling he hasn’t been able to suppress for hours should allow, tossing secondhand textbooks that were falling apart anyway onto his mostly dry bed and bypassing the lego figurines completely so he could get to the manila folder he’d swiped from Matt on one of the thousands of trips he’d made down to the firm’s office—the very folder sitting directly below the gaping hole in his ceiling.

“No, no, no,” he moans, voice teetering on the cusp of giving out altogether when the cover of the thing tore off in soft pieces along with various bits of the dozens of legal papers it had been holding.

“This isn’t real. This isn’t happening,” he stuttered and choked. “It can’t be.” It had to be a trick, an illusion, something his eyes could be fooled into believing but not his senses.

He dug the palms of his hands into his eyes and willed the voice of Edith to tell him none of the last year had been real, that all of it was over. That everything had all been a horrible, elaborate ruse and he’d open them to Tony and Aunt May and his best friends back, to his old life back. But the programmed voice never filled the expectant silence and the manic laughter of a villain that wasn’t meant to terrorize Peter’s city was beginning to bleed into it instead.

Peter opened his eyes with a ragged gasp to flashes of white blocking his view of the ruined pile, but he’d already seen enough.

His chest was spasming like an engine turning over, pistons overheating and cylinders spluttering out as little violent full jerks sent his body crashing through the water and into the opposite wall. His hands found their way up into his hair and pulled hard, knotting the dripping strands around fingers that still hadn’t quite come back online yet like cutting off circulation to the frozen digits would force feeling back into them.

It didn’t work. He was too cold and the window had been left open so long that the air felt no different than outside.

Peter’s lifeless hands abandoned his curls in favor of feeling along the wall for the doorframe of the bathroom, the hot tears stinging his cheeks making it virtually impossible to see anything in the near darkness.

He doesn’t remember peeling the clothes from his body, or starting the shower, or scrubbing at scabbing wounds until only blood and freshly torn edges remained. And when there were no sore spots left to agitate his fingers dug into the grout lining the tiles, nails scraping for purchase, for something to damage and somewhere to concentrate the waves of agonizing defeat cleaving off of him.

His right hand was folding into a fist and winding back before he could process how easily the ceramic shattered beneath his knuckles. He doesn’t feel it until the second pass and doesn’t stop until bits of tile are falling at his feet.

The water was set to scalding, filling the room with steam and fogging up the mirror and probably burning his skin but he couldn’t find a reason to care when it chipped away at the relentless cold and made it marginally easier to breathe.

His breaths are still harsh and shake his whole body when his mind finally begins to clear, the steady stream above tempering the boil and allowing him to hear something other than a vacuum of white noise, but he doesn’t expect the first thing he that filters in to be someone talking low and urgent in the hallway.

He’s especially surprised to hear them start pounding on his apartment door.

It hurts with the migraine blooming behind his eyes, but he focuses on their voice still murmuring something, on the metal sliding against metal and prodding until there was a give and a click, each minuscule ding vibrating through his skull like a crowbar was coming down on it.

He’s still recovering from the stabbing pain lighting his brain on fire by the time he registers the footsteps approaching the bathroom door and the door knob being jostled once before twisting.

There’s a soft intake of breath and then, “Peter.”

Peter finally waved Harley off after the kid had wasted every roll of gauze he had and moved on to using tissues and purple athletic wrap. His socks and pants had been taken away at some point and replaced with a blanket, but not after an entire ace bandage was lost to a small group of jagged gouges above his knee. He thinks he remembers the kid pulling a nail out of one of them.

He keeps forgetting that he has a name now, that he’s no longer just some street kid he bailed out of trouble on a random week night. He’s Harley who sits back on his heels and glowers at Peter while wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist and says, “I’m not done yet.” And Peter doesn’t know why that makes it all different now.

“This,” he tries, gesturing to the vast assortment of bandages wrapped around most of his upper body and a good portion of his right leg, his tongue feeling heavy in his too dry mouth. “This was more than enough.”

Harley squints appraisingly, like he might be inclined to listen for a second, but then Peter was making like he was going to get up. “Yeah, about that.” It only took a firm hand on his bad shoulder to send him sinking back into the springing cushions of the pull out and everything for him to not cry out. “You’re staying here tonight.”

Talking around the growing lump in his throat was a considerable challenge. “No uhm, that’s really not necessary—”

“Are you serious?” Peter doesn’t know why that question seems to suck the air right out of his lungs. “I should’ve taken you to a hospital Peter, but I chose to do you a favor instead.”

“I never asked you to do that.”

The pair hadn’t properly looked at one another in what felt like a really long time with Harley’s attention focused solely on extracting bits of debris from gashes that should’ve gotten stitches, not slathered in glue and forced back together by tape while Peter was intent on simply enduring, only concerned in the matter of keeping one long inhale coming right after another. But they were looking now.

“Funny,” Harley’s smile is dark. “I don’t recall ever having asked you to save me from doucheface either.” The silence that stretches between the boys makes Peter’s skin prickle. “God, and you didn’t even let me use disinfectant,” he adds to further drive his point. “Please tell me you’ve had at least one tetanus shot in your life.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Peter had been sat in nothing but his underwear and only a ratty quilt for so long without feeling nearly as naked and vulnerable as he did right now. “Vaccines are notorious for not working on me. I couldn't get an infection even if I tried.”

“Right. Just like how you’re supposed to heal so fast the bruising would be gone before I’d be finished?” Harley’s hooded eyes bore into Peter’s with a sincerity that made them hard to maintain contact with. “Listen, I can’t just send you off to go spend the night alone in your apartment. If you end up dying of like sepsis it’s my ass they’ll fry not Spider-man’s, he’ll be too dead to stand trial.”

As much as Peter felt like crumpling under the other boy’s gaze, his chest seemed equally as adamant to swell with a determination that didn’t allow him to fold. Not when both boys were already in too deep and anything more would mean Peter wasn’t only taking advantage of the kid, he’d also be putting him danger.

“What if I give you my lawyer’s number?”

“You live in this shit hole but you can afford your own lawyer?”

“I—”Peter tries before shutting his mouth so quickly his teeth clacked audibly. It’s not like he could tell Harley that it wasn’t like that since his lawyer is also a vigilante with enhanced abilities.

“He’s pro bono and doesn’t ask questions I can’t answer,” somehow finds its way out of his mouth, and judging by the snarky huff that Harley lets out, it was apparently enough to get him to drop it. “I’ll be fine kid, seriously. I’ll—”

“Heal by morning. Yeah, you’ve mentioned it once or twice, but what about the fuck ton of complications that could kill you before your freaky spider shit comes back online?” Peter doesn’t so much as twitch. He doesn’t even fix the blanket where it fell to the floor after he tried to get up despite how violently his body shook without its cover.

“Like the fact that you could have been bleeding internally all this time and the lining between your organs can only house so much blood where it shouldn’t be before they—”

“Okay,” Peter almost pleads, wide eyes begging for a ceasefire. “I think you’ve made your point.” He doesn’t need every possible side effect of transitioning back into powerlessness spelled out for him so colorfully when his overactive and excessively informed brain was already running several programs on it as they spoke.

“Really?” the kid asks, squeezing a drop of bacitracin onto his finger tip before bringing it to the gash on his own lip. “Because I’m not sure you quite get it yet.”

Peter doesn’t catch whatever else Harley grumbles as he begins to reassemble what’s left of his first aid kit, the struggle to fill his lungs properly when every breath he took in seemed to go nowhere was about as decent a distraction as any.

It felt like his chest was moving only out of principle anymore, like that’s all it knew how to do. Like it had no obligation to care if the oxygen it was supposed to carry ever got where it needed to go, just to expand and relax. The muscles there were spasming under the strain, Peter’s growing desperation keeping his respiratory system in a vicious stalemate as it cloyed for more despite how the hollow void that had made a home for itself beneath his ribs seemed unable to fit another molecule.

Peter tried holding his breath through the fire licking all the moisture from the lining of his lungs and consuming every ounce of progress made in oxygenation faster than it could be replicated. He counted all the way up to ten before letting whatever remained out slowly, ignoring the burn that followed when he inhaled again and repeated the action, withholding breath after breath. Except he never felt any less like he was suffocating, just asphyxiating on his own terms now.

His exaggerated breathing only really worked to earn a tweaked eyebrow from Harley after a while, the thermometer between his teeth wobbling precariously when he looked up from his attempt at reorganizing what he’d ripped out of his tool box. He eyed Peter warily but didn't press, just went back to moving things around and making space so everything fit.

It was easier to focus on slowing his breathing like that, when he watched Harley’s hands work to rectify the clutter. So he let himself stare idly, eyes glazed and unblinking as he tracked the turn over of objects.

There were some things in there that make little sense to Peter, like all the different bottles of lube and absurd quantity of icy hot patches, others that he usually kept on his nightstand for the amount of use they get from him most nights like the cold packs and wound wash. Though Peter also has several sets of ear plugs and noise canceling headphones stationed there as well, so to each their own.

An undetermined period of time passes in the distant sort of peace he finds like that before Harley scoffs. “What. You’ve never met a gay guy before?” He must’ve caught Peter looking at the contents and assumed he was still gawking over the vast assortment of personal lubricants.

Peter is left sputtering from the abrupt admission, not because it’s particularly shocking—he couldn’t give less of shit about which way Harley swung and what he did for fun in his free time, or work for that matter. He is however caught off guard by the unspoken assumption there.

“It’s alright,” Harley assures before Peter has a chance to trip over his words trying to explain himself. “We don’t bite unless there’s consent.”

Staring at the bandaged hands laying in his lap is suddenly very captivating and kind of the only thing he can do to keep from laughing, or crying. He isn’t sure what might’ve erupted if he’d had to see the vindication on Harley’s face for much longer.

“And before I forget to ask,” Harley continues, effectively breaking Peter out of his mindless fixation on the spools of white that had been delicately twined around every bit of ripped skin on his fingers and palms and binded together thin strips of tape. “How long have you been sitting with that dislocation?”

Peter picks his head up much too fast and is only able to wheeze out a strangled ‘what?’ before his vision was clouding with colorful static.

“Your shoulder,” he hears through cotton again and watches Harley inching that much closer through half-lidded eyes before he finishes with, “it’s like very noticeably missing the head of your humerus.” The words hang in what little space remained between them, testing the tension and daring to make it tauter.

“I can set it for you,” he adds, cool as ever, but Peter doesn’t know what to do with that.

He was still trying to recover from glancing back up too quickly to make any sense of Harley’s proposition then, let alone the task of making as serious a medical decision as letting an untrained individual reduce an injury he didn’t even know he’d had a moment ago.

“I’ve done it before,” the kid offers, entirely unfazed, and Peter can’t stop the way his body is shaking because of course the kid has done something like that before, and of course Peter would have to deal with something like that right now on top of everything else.

His voice is small again when he declines. “No, I’ll do it.” And somehow even smaller when he speaks up next, “but—I might need some help.” The kid looks apprensive, like this might finally be something he’s willing to push Peter on but nods anyway.

It made sense now that he thought about it. He hadn’t been able to lift that arm very high without producing an awful ache that made him squirm as bone slid against bone and overstretched tendons pulled that much farther from their rightful places. If his senses were functioning correctly he would’ve been able to pinpoint the injury as soon as it had occurred, but they weren’t, so he had gone hours without knowing, hours probably spent making it that much worse.

Which is probably a large portion of why it took both of them raise to it then, and why Peter was unable to hide his grimace at the series of sickening clicks that followed. Harley was holding onto his wrist and pushing down on the opposite shoulder, keeping him from being able to pull away if he panicked or jerked and staying ready to guide the joint into its proper alignment when Peter was.

“Just—” he stops, breath hitching and preventing him from getting the rest out. Peter was trembling violently now and could say with fair certainty that it wasn’t just from the cold and his shitty inability to thermoregulate anymore, the one unique trait that had conveniently heightened when all the others seemed to dramatically fade. “On three. You—can you count?”

Harley agreed with an easy ‘uh huh’, his voice low and gentle again, leaving Peter torn between hating the pity and wanting to hear more of that tone, of anything remotely reminiscent of humanly comfort.

He didn’t hear the kid say ‘one’, but he did hear the ‘two’ because Harley hadn’t waited until he said ‘three’ to bring Peter’s arm the rest of the way up and even went as far as to jerk the limb towards himself, almost like he’d wanted to seal the promise of agony that came with the action, though logic told him it was probably to ensure the bone slid back into the correct alignment.

The pain blindsides him regardless of which and Peter doesn’t know how long he falls for after that, the pain dipping and lulling as he plummeted through miles of black like he did in the warehouse, though here there never seemed to be lack of room to fall further.

And so he tumbled, suspended in the air and spinning nauseatingly, the darkness around him so thick it had no other option but to consume him. It doesn’t change into nightmarish images that kept track of every one of his failures like the static behind his eyes did each night, just held him captive for the never ending decent, but Peter finds it hard to reconcile an issue with the peaceful nothing when it was insurmountably better this way, for him to float in a place far from people’s children and the city’s infrastructure, and where the Daily Bugle couldn’t find him.

Harley chalks up the fact that Peter wasn’t showing signs he’d be rejoining the land of the living anytime soon to the surplus of stress that healing was having on his body and throws a ratty quilt over the other blanket, like maybe then he’d stop shivering so damn much. He was partially sitting but mostly laying across the pillows that had been shoved to the corner, so Harley only picks up his feet and drops them at the other end of the couch, the opportunity to convert the thing into an actual bed having well since passed.

The rain beats on the loose window pane like a hammering fist, the bellowing storm outside muffled thanks to the building almost flush against the only window in Harley’s apartment. He turns all the lights off except for the one above the sink and finally begins to clean himself up. The relief of finally getting to shuck off his own wet clothes and scrub Peter’s blood from his arms as heavenly as the usual after care regimen that followed a night of working.

Harley slept facing the rest of the room instead of tucking himself into a ball in the corner just in case Peter decided to try and croak before morning, refusing to let the thought that he for some reason really wishes Peter wouldn’t stay long and thankfully is asleep before his masochistic mind can actually to attempt to dissect it.

Peter has never experienced a hangover, but he is willing to bet serious money that the debilitating ache preventing him from lifting his head off the mound of fabric presently suffocating him is akin to the same feeling, and groans at the thought that one of these days he might actually be able to find out.

It takes a long, agonizing moment to orient himself past the barrage of pain that welcomed him back into awareness. Opening his eyes would help, he knows that, but he can’t bring himself to face the overhead lights, or his current reality in general. He thinks for a moment that maybe if he wishes hard enough he might blink and be back in his own bed, the entire night a wild dream that he would have a much more pleasant time psychoanalyzing under the guise that it was just that, a deluded dream.

He makes the mistake of shifting underneath all the linen on account of his tucking his foot back into the cocoon of warmth, because then his eyes are shooting open on their own accord at the sound of someone clearing their throat. He sees the steaming coffee sitting in a cup on the table next to him before he smells it, which is a bad sign, but what’s worse was how he missed the other heartbeat in the room with him entirely.

“Finally,” Harley chuffs mildly, returning to whatever he was reading once he’d seen that Peter was actually awake this time and not still just tossing fitfully. He’s surrounded by books with titles that Peter can’t see, a pulsing headache rendering him unable to keep his eyes open and clear of blurriness long enough to read them, which was another horrible sign because Peter can’t remember the last time he’d had a headache.

“What time is it?” he croaks, voice hoarse and scratching his throat from recent disuse. He doesn’t try to get up yet in case he has time to continue laying there like a lump and save what will probably be a painful transition for the absolute last second. The pause between when Harley moves to find his phone and when he finally unlocks it has Peter almost regretting ever asking.

“It’s eight—”

“Fuck.” He was pushing himself off the couch before the pain had a chance to try and prevent him, any desire Peter had to let himself drift off again utterly gone. “Eight what?” he asks weakly once he’s relatively stable on his feet. His vision wavers, momentarily spotting but he keeps his knees locked and doesn’t allow himself to sway while it passes.

“8:13. Now lay back down before you rip all your scabs open, I’m not interested in going out in the rain to get bleach for my fucking floors.”

Peter is only aware that Harley continues by the dull murmur droning behind his own racing thoughts, too entranced in mentally mapping out the quickest route to campus to hear him while he runs through a list of which trains would take him the farthest in the least amount of time, knocking off any contenders that had a track history of making him late for his 9ams.

He was down to the 1, the N, and the Q, and in the middle of calculating how many city blocks he’d have to find a way to discreetly scale in broad daylight with his webs before he’d arrive at school when he felt Harley flick the side of his face that wasn’t mottled with ugly bruises.

“Shut up,” he finally hears, and it takes him a beat to figure out that the only reason he does is because Harley’s hand is clasped over his mouth with his thumb hooked under his chin to keep his jaw from moving. “You can’t use your webs when you only have one arm.”

Peter shakes his head from side to side trying to buck Harley’s hand off, but the kid holds firm in his determination to keep Peter from talking himself into a panic attack, and it takes a hand on the other boys wrist to free his mouth enough so he could protest.

“I can’t miss my classes today.” It sounds significantly more desperate out loud than he had intended, but he's unable to spare the energy to give a shit.

Harley adjusts his hand, lowering it to squeeze the notch where Peter’s neck meets the shoulder that was not currently hanging in a makeshift sling. “Take a cab.” Peter’s mind slows under Harley’s touch, and the longer they stay like that, the closer his breathing inches towards something reminiscent of normal.

“I don’t have money for a cab all the way to Brooklyn,” he finally says, calmer now, but eyes glassy and distant.

“Then skip class. One absence won’t tank your GPA,” and Harley's right, something like this shouldn’t mean the end of the world, especially when Peter’s actually seen what that looks like several times now. But then, spider-man or not, he’s still pretty far removed from the average college student about to enter their 20s.

Peter had no parents or guardians to do this with, and even if he’d miraculously managed to save his aunt May, he’s pretty sure she wouldn’t know who he was or why she’d squirreled away tens of thousands of dollars in a bank account with both of their names on it. The only saving grace this shit show had awarded him was his December birthday and the state of New York’s inclination to see that charity cases under the age of eighteen like him get free housing and tuition, but none of the perks that came with that mattered when there were no records mentioning anything of the twelve years he’d put in at public school in the borough of Queens.

He remembers how much money he had shelled out to take all of the standardized tests again to get proof of his perfect scores, how the administrators at the school that proctored his GED had never seen anyone answer every question correctly before, and the humiliating amount of pandering he had to do to secure a delayed enrollment application to the engineering program at NYU.

And those were just the things he was able to do on his own because then there were the multitude of documents he’d asked the Nelson and Murdock firm to dredge up for him and the countless others that they’d had to fill out and file because they simply didn’t exist.

“Yeah,” he finds himself agreeing hollowly. “But it’ll lose me my scholarship.” Well that, and a single absence was a fuck you the months of work he’d put in to get where he was as well as all of the people that had helped him get there, but he doesn’t say that.

Harley considers him for a long moment before the warmth leaves Peter’s neck because he’s moving to open a cabinet, the pill bottle he throws to him bouncing off his chest and rolling at his feet.

“I don’t need those.” Peter ignores them in favor of searching for his shoes and the rest of his clothes, or at least the ones that were still viable.

“Humor me,” Harley picks them up and hands them to him along with a t-shirt from his own closet, which Peter guesses is warranted considering he’d cut the one he came there with to shit. “I usually take three, so you can do the math on that.”

Peter wants to fight him on it, to tell him not to waste anymore of his supplies on him when he didn’t really need it. And he nearly does, but with his wounds not even a fifth as close to being healed as they would have normally been by now and his head pulsing in time with the swells of nausea that were making his stomach turn, he supposes that might not be so true anymore. It wasn’t like taking them would exactly hurt anything, and it was likely also the only condition under which Harley would let him leave.

Once Peter has the bottle in hand he gets the impulse to pour out a blind handful and toss whatever spills out back. He settles on roughly tripling Harley’s dosage and doesn’t wait for the glass of water he’s filling at the sink to swallow them.

“If you login and type in the right address,” Harley starts, nodding to the computer on his bed and handing Peter the water anyway. “I can email your professor that your train derailed or something.”

Peter laughs. And it hurts, but he doesn’t care. “I think saying that it’s running late should be fine,” but Harley shakes his head, already pulling up the sign in portal for his gmail account.

“Nah, creativity sells,” he explains. “Honesty comes with interest that you never get back.”

Peter’s jeans are as stiff from air drying all night and the challenge of trying to get himself fully dressed with only one hand has him dripping in sweat by the time he’s finished. He’s glad to see that the lining of his jacket is free of any ominous bloodstains once it’s time to shrug just the one arm in because he can't really get it to close with the other crossed over his chest.

“You were honest with me,” Peter notes as he hunts around the apartment for the rest of his stuff.

“That was a half truth,” the kid disputes pointedly. And it’s only when Peter locates his shoes that he realizes he doesn’t have any cash on him, just his backpack and shooters.

“What’s the interest like on one of those?” he asks despite the mini internal freak out he was having, silently reminding himself to breathe every thirty seconds. He’s sure there might be a few bills in a pocket somewhere but he doesn’t really have the time to check, he just has to hope there was no MTA office in front of the turnstile he’s going to have to jump.

“You’ll forever know that I have daddy issues, congratulations!” Harley cheers. “Now type your shit in before I stop feeling like being helpful,” which honestly Peter thinks was more than fair. The kid really didn’t owe him any of this, his debt had been paid over so many times before the sun had come up that Peter was sure he’d landed himself back in the negatives.

He’s tearing out of their apartment building before Harley sends the email and can only pray that he didn’t cook up some gruesome story about his more obvious injuries, or maybe that someone had fallen onto the tracks in the middle of his commute.

Hindsight tells him that he definitely should not have entrusted the kid with the only email account he currently had under the name Peter Parker, the dozens of dud accounts he’d made for video game and web-player trials over the years all having been wiped from the internet along with every other digital footprint that had made him who he was.

It’s as he steps back into the storm that Peter realizes he feels almost as stripped as his identity read on paper and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if he’s totally screwed his only chance to make it worth something again.

“Stop.” The person shielding his eyes from the lightbulb flickering above catches his wrists all too easily. “There’s still glass in there. Don’t touch it.”

Peter makes a point to look everywhere but at the kid once he realizes it’s him, wanting desperately to believe that he wasn’t stuck to a ceiling right then because his subconscious knew he wasn’t really a stranger, that he wouldn’t have hurt him. The darker corners of his mind happily tell him to add this piece of evidence to the mounting pile in the case against spider-man, that he should take this out the universe was giving him and go back to being Peter Parker for as long as he has the chance, and before he manages to hurt anyone else.

He lets the thought win because his healing factor should’ve kicked in by now. It’s forced three inch wooden splinters out of his skin before and was notoriously responsible for clotting and closing wounds that normally meant stitches for someone who hadn’t been bitten by a radioactive spider as quickly as a paper cut on Peter, yet it had been hours since he fell—there wasn’t supposed to be anymore blood.

And there was nothing else that would explain why he was still this hurt except that the best part of him was finally defunct, that the most useful accident happened upon the weakest host and was undoing itself out of cosmic spite.

“Hey. Where are you going?”

“My apartment.”

“You’re gonna try and patch this mess up yourself?”

“I’m going to go to fucking sleep. It’ll heal by the morning.”

“It is morning, dumbass. And not one of these injuries looks close to being healed.” The kid looked like he wanted to reach for him again but maybe thought of the multitude of other wounds likely hidden under the rest of his clothes and chose not to risk it.

Peter wagered a look at himself only because he doesn’t trust the kid not to touch him again to point them out, and he might as well inventory the kinds of wounds that took him longer to come back from now that his weakening powers were affecting the rate he healed.

“They are,” he assured unethusiastically. “The process just got—disrupted, I think,” because his hands were covered in scabbing scrapes that he could tell travelled up the rest of his arms from the way his jacket pulled on the mending skin, though it could also just be that it was stuck to drying blood from the dozens of deeper cuts that probably also still had bits of glass embedded in them. “As soon as I’m warm and not freaking out, it should be able to do what it’s supposed to.”

“It?”

“My enhanced healing ability.”

“Right. The same one that stops working at the first sign of inclement weather? Which—literally, how?”

If Peter had the energy to explain, he still wouldn’t. The kid hadn’t gone running to the media with his identity yet, sure, but he had also only met him with hostility until a sudden departure into wanting to return the favor he now owed Peter, which if anything, only gave him that much more reason to not blindly trust him or his intentions than he’d had before.

“How bout we make a deal. You let me get you up these stairs and at least try to remove the glass from your enhanced skin before it, I don’t know, absorbs it or some crap and we’ll call it even.” Peter actually looks at the kid then, as if to make certain the words had come from the same person.

“I thought you didn’t want my help back there.” He can’t tell if the boy’s hair is normally this dark, but it’s prominent against his reddened face, the patches of skin that weren’t blotchy from the cold paler than even Peter’s normal complexion. “So what’s there to call even?”

Peter gets several stoney blinks before the kid is reaching under his armpits and telling him to stand. “We can discuss the parameters of our deal once your ass is in front of a heater and I will only listen once you are no longer in danger of bleeding out.” He didn’t seem nearly as young in this lightning, nor so vulnerable as he did shaking and damp in the alley. “And until then, stop answering my questions with even more goddamned questions.”

Peter would’ve tried to argue for the integrity of his stability if he hadn’t been forced to reach for the kid’s jacket the moment he was fully upright and torn skin was further stretched around jagged edges. The kid laughs pitifully at the sight. “Case in point. Give me your arm.”

Peter doesn’t know why relinquishing his hand felt like such an adversity, like the mere act of extending it where the kid could reach and have his way with was a kind of betrayal to himself, an admission of a very human weakness that Peter hadn’t had the privilege of getting used to. The more rational side of his brain also knew that he would make it up the stairs several times faster with his help than he could have ever managed on his own in his current condition.

“I still don’t get why you want to help me,” he grinds out once he manages to put his pride to rest for the prospect of finally getting to go to bed.

The kid just scoffs at him and stays silent, and then somewhere between getting situated and tackling the first couple of steps the kid readjusts their tangle of limbs. The new angle at which his arm sits slung around the kid’s neck elicits a sharp gasp when tugged on next, his side pulsing with pain so bright Peter had to blink away his rapidly dotting vision.

“Sorry,” the kid rushes. “Grab the railing.” He loosens his grip on Peter and gives the arm still limp at his other side a little nudge, but Peter keeps his fingers hooked on the loop in his jeans at his hip to keep it from moving and making that horrible crackling sound again.

“Come on spidey, you’re literally sticky,” the kid presses again when Peter doesn’t make a single attempt to follow the order.

“Don’t call me that,” he hisses, eyes fluttering shut.

“Touchy,” the kid points out and resumes the arduous challenge of pulling Peter up the stairs since it was clear he had no intention to make his other arm at all useful. “But fine. What should I call you instead?”

This was the part where he was supposed to deflect and distract, anything to evade having to answer truthfully, but all he can do is laugh because if the boy could already point out the face behind the mask in a perp lineup than there would be little more harm in matching a name to it as well, especially one that was as unimportant as his.

Peter Parker didn’t have anything to lose anymore. There was no future to tarnish, no loved ones to get caught in the crossfire, and comforting as it was that he’d never hurt anyone like that again, the realization made his lungs burn.

It was a clenching, unending fire that seemed to squeeze every last ounce of oxygen from overworked capillaries as quickly as it was ushered in. The exhaustive effort of climbing a full flight of stairs while missing something close to a pint of blood that should’ve already replenished itself didn’t help either.

“You want me to let you help and then expect me to just hand over the last secret of my identity that’s still intact, but I don’t even get to know yours?”

It should’ve been an automatic answer. If the kid’s intentions were in the right place as he so vehemently claimed, it shouldn’t have made him freeze like he had to think about whether he wanted to answer him honestly or not. For a minute there Peter was sure that he wasn’t going to say a single thing for the rest of their journey.

“Harley,” he finally divulges, throat bobbing uneasily. “You can call me Harley.”

Peter tried to focus on the sound of his heart beating to gauge the validity of the admission only to find that he literally couldn’t. It felt as if there was a slab of cement between the two that he couldn’t penetrate no matter how much he compartmentalized to concentrate on it, though he knew it was just another side effect of losing his powers.

“Is that your legal name?” he asks to distract himself from the sinking pit in his stomach.

He expected another dismissal or non answer, so the clear cut ‘no’ that the kid utters instead catches him completely by surprise and so does the next sentence that comes out of his mouth.

“But I’d like it be to be.” The kid had given an inch that probably felt like a mile, but it softened the burden of doubt for Peter. It wasn’t the whole picture, but it was a piece and it was the truth, and that would have to do for now.

The lightbulb illuminating the next flight of stairs is dying as well, the insatiable buzz from the sputtering wick coating the heady silence like honey until Peter abruptly melts it with, “I’m Peter.”

There is a long breath and an even longer pause, and then. “Okay Peter.” They don’t look at each other because that is not something that strangers do much of unless they have to, but they settle a little more into themselves and into the closeness. It doesn’t feel all that strange after that. “Only nine more.”

The rest of the struggle is made much easier with each boy no longer on the defensive and poised to either put up an immediate fight or take off at the first sign of trouble. It’s still a struggle though, and Peter can’t stop the violent tremors racking his frame by the time Harley had all but carried him to the final landing.

He watches dazedly as they near his door and then completely walk past it. “Wait.” The protest is weak and ultimately futile. He doubts that his aching muscles would carry him very far on his own when he was relying on Harley’s support to simply remain upright, which meant he couldn’t force the kid to take him back either, but he was also rapidly loosing the ability to juggle vocalizing his discretions and concentrating on dragging one foot after the other.

Fortunately for them both, the kid had done his due diligence. “You don’t have any keys,” he reminds all too gently. Or maybe it just sounded gentle because his ears were stuffed with cotton, either way he preferred it over how loud the kid was without all the stuffing for cushion. “And I don’t trust you to be left alone right now.”

That first part made sense. Peter always left important things like his keys and phone and wallet at home when he went patrolling in the case that his backpack was stolen, because he could technically make do without whatever change of clothes he’d brought.

The cracked window posed a bit of an issue with how heavily it was raining outside, as did the task of getting himself up to the roof and scaling the side of their building to get back in through it, but he didn’t have long to dwell on that predicament because Harley was squeezing his arms to get his attention.

“Peter?”

It took a bit of looking around to find Russell and deliver his best frown of disapproval. “Ouch.” He sounded drunk.

“I need you to focus on not falling over for exactly one minute.” Harley sounded like he might be worried, though the cotton apparently mellowed that down too, so Peter couldn’t tell it apart from irritation. He thought it best to proceed with caution anyway and tried to focus like he’d been told.

“Can you do that for me?” he prompted again when Peter didn’t respond with any actual words, keeping the same clipped tone as before, but lowering his face to the level of Peter’s hanging head. His eyes were soft, the warm reddish brown too kind to be angry with him.

Peter isn’t sure when he decided to nod, but he felt the kid let go as soon as he did. And he wobbled in consequence, but the wall was conveniently right there and it held his weight about as well as Harley had, so he allowed it to keep him steady in his place. He watched the kid fumble with the lock and tried to figure out what all the other junk was on his key chain, but didn’t get very far at all before the jangling of keys made his head absolutely throb.

The world narrowed in his peripheries, the long hallway stretching out before him to give him the best view of his surroundings, but only really serving to make him feel that much more disconnected from his own body, like he was outside of it somewhere and couldn’t find his way back. He gasped around the millions of directions his instincts were pulling him again, his malfunctioning senses wanting to dial in on the obnoxious sound and make it target practice, but his pounding ears staunchly rejecting the request and flooding each canal with a piercing ring instead.

Peter doesn't know who had moved first, just that he finds himself back under the kid’s crushing grip once the assault finally decides to subside. “Please tell me whatever that was is over now.” Their bodies were very close again, enough for Peter to feel the warmth that radiated from his palms permeating the many layers of soaked through clothing that hung on him. “It’s really in both of our best interests that we do not let all of the heat in my apartment out.”

Peter swallows thickly. He doesn’t know how to respond because, well, it wasn’t exactly a question and he couldn’t really do what was requested of him when he could still feel the residue left from yet another misfiring of his erratic powers undulating beneath his skin, his whole body humming still with signals that screamed danger, and that something was wrong, and that none of it mattered anyway because he was useless without his powers.

He thinks he might have screamed out loud on his body’s behalf before. His throat definitely ached enough to have facilitated one, making any words he tried come out as nothing more than a series of harsh scratches, though Harley appears to surmise as much and doesn’t let Peter struggle to voice an answer where he apparently didn’t want one.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Ready?” He waits for a jittery nod and then he’s ushering Peter into a smothering wall of heat, leaving him to lilt in place with only a hand on his shirt collar to correct his swaying so he could close and lock the door behind them.

Moving together was hard with Peter’s energy flagging dangerously once more. The regenerative nature of his altered DNA meant he was usually able to muster a sort of fleeting burst to get him on the other side of a hairy situation, just enough of a kick to wrangle free of any binds, or maybe web to relative safety where he could rest and at least have a shot at healing himself some before he launched back into the fight.

Peter had pushed several tons of cleaved and cracked cement off himself after a building had been dropped on him. He had held two halves of a ferry together with knots of webbing and stubborn determination alone. It felt like Peter had been several lifetimes younger back then, but he’d managed the impossible with half of the strength he had now. And yet here he was after one lousy fall on an even lousier night, unable to summon anything from the usual reserves, and feeling almost as pathetic as he assumed he looked.

The only reason the pair managed to get him as far as Harley’s shredded pull out before he collapsed was from either boy anchoring themselves to the material of the other’s coat. Peter took in heaving breaths, each one feeling like it would never completely quench the need for more and leaving his battered body aching from the stress of expanding his rib cage so rapidly. Harley didn’t allow him to rest for very long.

“Yeah, yeah. I know I should probably buy a guy dinner first,” the kid semi-apologized as he yanked Peter forward so he could tug at his wet clothing, graciously saving any comments on how he didn’t make a single effort to try and fight the searching hands this time. Peter was more than game to let them have their way with him if it meant that he’d be allowed to lay back down sooner.

“But that’s not the sorta thing we can fit on the itinerary for tonight with such short notice—also, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you don’t particularly care for this shirt.”

“Hmn?”

“Your shirt,” Harley repeats. Peter hadn’t noticed that his jacket had even come off.

“Wha‘bout it?”

“I’m going to cut it off you.”

“Seems… excessive. But sure, I guess.” The words stick to one another as he says them, sloppy and sluggish.

Peter doesn’t know where Harley gets the utility knife from, doesn’t even realize he’s holding it until it’s glinting under his nose. He watches carefully as the kid brings it to the bloodier sleeve of his t-shirt and notes the utter silence from his enhanced senses, the absolute absence of any warning tingle, only the mundane uptick in breathing and heart rate from another human holding the tip of a blade underneath and item of your clothing.

Russell makes quick work of the dry-fit until it lays in sawed off strips on Peter’s lap. “Damn,” he huffs, eyes flitting back and forth across his chest too many times for Peter to keep track of. He breathes until it hurt to fit any more air into the delicate organ beneath his damaged everything before he could finally make himself look.

The right side of his rib cage is a colorful wash of various purples and reds. Some of the bruises have subtle rings yellow beneath them, while other darker spots were bursting with red where several blood vessels had been ruptured and some of the swelling skin had actually split.

“Who the hell did this to you?” The kid’s voice is background noise to the sound of his own heart beating in his ears.

A million knicks in varying shapes and sizes filled in the spots empty of the dramatic bruising, and even the more minor cuts and scrapes were still bleeding, all of them looking not a day old when the mess should have already started to fade by now, or would have if his healing factor hadn’t decided to quit on him.

“And what did they use?” With the way Harley looks at his collection of injuries it’s almost like he’s impressed, like he might have assumed the injury revel would be underwhelming, that Peter was too just too weak to help himself after a small dust up and decided he happened to have enough pity to spare that night.

Peter’s mouth is pinched in a tight line as he shakes his head because words were becoming hard and he didn’t know how else to divert Harley’s line of thinking that he’d fought an actual criminal that night, that someone out there looked worse than he did because it was so far from the truth. “No.” And Harley laughs when he whispers it, but it’s humorless, more of a choked off gasp than anything because he couldn’t recall asking Peter any ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions.

“Pardon?”

“No one hurt me, I—” Peter hadn’t fought anyone and still somehow managed to lose. “I fell.”

Harley sits stunned while his mind works. Fell. He muses on the word for all of five seconds. “Jesus christ—of course you fucking fell.” And then he’s digging blunt fingers with nails bitten down to stubs into darkened flesh that was too tender to be getting poked at, but Peter’s unwilling hands are easily folded back down to his sides where he can’t protect his ribs from further battery.

“What did you fall from? Do you know how far it was?” Peter closes eyes against the rolling waves of nausea from a spike in pain that had long since dulled instead of answering, and Harley is apparently having none of it. The taps on his cheek don’t hurt because they weren’t meant to, but they do succeed in annoying the hell out of him.

“I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me, idiot.” A bloodied hand stops him from turning away, exhaustion eventually winning out over the will to keep up his infuriating habit of insubordination, and he suddenly finds himself spewing every gory detail of his failure that night to a kid he’d properly met minutes ago, his mouth seeming to run without explicit permission.

Honesty only awards Peter several more agonizing moments of brutal prodding until the kid eventually leaves him, and when he opens his eyes again, Harley is back with a tool box. He hums questioningly, glaring at the abundance of noise created by whatever the hell was in the dented hunk of scrap metal.

“It’s not the most traditional first aid kit, I’m fully aware of that, but you don’t have to look so repulsed by it.” The groan Peter lets out at that angers the large welt that seemed to have become his entire right side.

“Yeesh. You really don’t want my help that badly?” Harley asks incredulously, like he’d truly never heard of anyone wanting to keep to themselves and hold a pity party for themselves in peace. “I’m pretty sure I like, legally, can’t fuck off after I’ve already started administering care—”

“I don’t need your stuff,” he strains through gritted teeth.

“Come again? You’re quite literally bleeding all over my couch buddy, you definitely need a fucking bandaid or two.”

Peter doesn’t have to look to see what Harley is talking about, he can feel the steady stream of blood rolling down his neck and chest. It almost felt like sweat, but Peter was still shivering, and even though removing his damp clothing was definitely the right call, so much exposed skin was making it hard to get his breathing back to normal.

Realistically he knows how bad this is, that nothing about any of it was in the realm of Peter’s wheel house. He’s never not healed before. He doesn’t have any data on a variable like this, on what to do when super healing stops being super because it’s never fucking happened. And he didn’t have May to watch over him, or a fancy lab with equipment to run tests on him, to figure out whatever the hell was going on and fix it. He had no one, just an empty apartment that was most definitely water logged by now, and some useless altered biology.

He might hate everything to do with this, but the kid is his only chance. All he theoretically had to do was ride out one night in this apartment and lay low a while after that. It was the kid’s word against his anyway if shit went south and he blabbed, Peter would just take up the defense that he was nowhere near cool enough to be a super hero, or a vigilante with blood on his hands, the distinction hardly meant anything to him anymore.

“I’ll still heal faster than a normal person would, delayed or not.” He finds Harley’s face and ignores how blurry it is. “Guess I wouldn’t want to ruin your couch in the meantime though.”

“Oh please,” Harley rolls his eyes. “Don’t be such a fucking martyr.”

Peter took a deep breath and stood from his crouch on the ledge, ignoring the way his legs shook when he did, and was hanging from a rope of synthetic webbing before he even remembered that he was supposed to let it out. He normally didn’t have to look where any of the webs he shot landed, a combination of his acuity for physics and overprotective sense organs working to make sure every swing was a secure one as subtly as his lungs remembered how to make his chest rise and fall, but this particular night seemed determined to prove itself as an exception.

The rain had stopped hours ago but the city was still damp from it—as was the metal siding on the disheveled warehouse in front of him, the sheets of rain water draining down it making the surface impossible to shoot webs onto. He must’ve emptied half of his clip trying to get something to stick but was hurtling at the lengthy loft windows much too fast, the breadth of opportunity he had to change the trajectory of his swing rapidly disappearing.

The search for anything else in the immediate vicinity to lever his body from its current flight path was frantic and ultimately useless because aside from the chain link fence lined with barbed wire surrounding the junk yard on the other end of the block, there was nothing but open air and churning river water. Peter instinctively brought his legs up to his chest, bracing himself.

“Fuck, fuck.” The initial crash didn’t hurt nearly as much as the three story fall that came after.

The warehouse must’ve been abandoned for a solid amount of time before Peter traipsed by because the plywood that had been draped over the support beams like patchwork were all rotted through and gave out as soon as his back hit them, swallowing him in splintering fibers that tore at his suit like metal talons, weightlessness stealing the breath from his lungs like the hands of a self-appointed false god wrapping around his throat.

He reached out, hands scrabbling for anything to stop or slow his descent, but all that he could manage to do with his webs was send loose boards flying at his face, the rest of his flailing only serving to hasten the drop. And the faster he plummeted, his body jerking around and flipping over, the farther he felt from it when the chips of wood and dust and nails that fell with him began to look a lot like what he’d watched his own flesh dematerialize into over five years ago.

“No,” he wheezed, back arching like he could somehow wriggle away from himself and the awful feeling of dissolving into nothing again, though this time felt remarkably different without his overexposed senses screaming at him that he was about to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it, burning his skin with every instinct urging him to act anyway. This time he felt absolutely nothing until the entire right side of his body erupted in white hot pain.

Peter isn’t sure how long he laid among the heap of scraps that more or less cushioned him from connecting with the cold hard slab of concrete that lay beneath, just that when he finally convinced himself he was in too much pain to be dead it had started raining again.

He listened to the wind as it picked up outside, pelting droplets at the structure’s flimsy siding and whipping debris around hard enough to knock shards of glass free from the Peter-sized hole he’d created in the window, and though there was already a fair amount of it stuck in his legs and back, he didn’t particularly care to add any more.

He was slow in plucking himself out of the carnage, and even slower in getting to his feet despite having all the proper motivations to get the hell out of dodge before the rest of the temporary flooring came down on top of him, or cops started poking around to investigate the property damage and book him for trespassing.

His body felt like one giant bruise, and though he was pretty sure he hadn’t accrued any outright breaks or fractures, whatever he had tweaked in his shoulder was amongst the worst all the other pain centers across his body. It made a sickening click whenever he tried rotating it, and he could feel the bones there grinding against each other unnaturally, sending sharp zaps of pain down his arm and back whenever they did.

It had been a mistake to come back to queens, he knew that much the moment he’d stepped onto an N train headed for Astoria, but he hadn’t known what else to do with himself, the feeling of wanting to go home too overwhelming to deny himself the small semblance of comfort—well that, and Peter’s self preservation skills always had been shoddy at best.

The sounds of the city slowly bypassed the waning ring left by several counts of blunt force trauma, replacing it with a confusing jumble of mundane racket instead. He told himself that the conflicted pull leading his ears in a million different directions was from the skull splitting headache and not the potential that the only good thing he had going for him anymore was undeniably broken.

He leaned into the clamor, willing his hearing to localize on just one thing at a time, to focus long enough to pick something out of the chaos and give it a name, a label, a distinction as something that was dangerous or not. He hones in on his immediate surroundings first, like the trash cans tipping over and rolling down the street, or the branches tearing their way from bristling trees just outside the warehouse walls.

The storm was raging again, the sound of rain and wind imposing its will on the natural world around it and drowning out all other sounds—wailing sirens, a barking dog chained up to a tree, an overloading transformer ready to blow—and muting them back to nothing.

And god, he hoped it was just shitty January weather fucking with his powers because then there’s the warning rumble of an impending clap of thunder and that’s as far as he gets before he’s forced back down to his knees. The transformer explodes and the sky opens up again, the torrent above raging like it was bleeding with him, like it was mourning right alongside him.

If there was anyone in queens that needed his help that night, he didn’t hear it over the layers of all his grief.

Picking himself up the second time was harder when his body ached in regions he didn't recall getting battered and the smell of iron and mildew bombarded his nose whenever he made any significant movements.

The darker thoughts he never let himself think whispering to him softly didn’t help either, but the warehouse had been quiet and they were so loud and it would be so easy to just never get back up, so simple to let himself rot, probably safer for the entire borough of queens too. He couldn’t hurt anyone that way and the news couldn’t twist his acts of vigilantism to their will if there was nothing to report on, if there was no more spider-man at all. He imagined how they would celebrate if it wouldn’t tank their ratings.

In the end he isn’t sure why he chooses to stand and sway with the subway car for all thirty of the minutes it took to get back to midtown instead, letting the duct over his head blast him with heat and soothe the sting from his warming skin that refused to subside even after shucking off the tatters of his new suit and changing into clothes that actually wicked.

The walk back to his apartment from the subway was the worst offender in abetting his chattering teeth. The sweatshirt hood of his flannel jacket was completely saturated the moment he got back above ground again and only partially protected him from the wind, though his main reason for keeping it up at all was to hide the cuts and bruises on his face, the practically didn’t much matter to him.

He didn’t mind the rain much aside from the cold accompanied it, especially not at night when the steady patter of it on glass windows made the kind of blessed ambient noise that concealed most others and gave his ears a break from straining to pay attention to every little thing that went bump in the night.

It hadn’t been so bad back in Astoria since their building wasn’t on a main road and everything else around it was residential, but it made falling asleep nearly impossible most nights now that he was shacking up in the heart of the city that never sleeps. Peter hardly does either now, though he thinks it might not be an issue for him tonight if the weather man on the tv in Ralph’s saying that the city’s in for a rough go of it over the next few days is correct about his predictions of record rainfall and unprecedented flooding.

“Jeez,” Raffi watches wide-eyed, his arms crossed over his chest in disbelief. “It took national grid six days to put the lights back on last summer after that hurricane in July.”

The reporter is in Times Square where the wind is apparently too strong to keep his umbrella open without it flipping inside out and every one of his attempts to wrangle it are unsuccessful. Another reporter has to talk about what precautions to take against flood damages and how to prepare for potential leaks while he struggles.

The agonized groan that Peter lets out at the mention is animalistic. “My ceiling leaks whenever the guy upstairs showers for longer than thirty minutes, Raf.” He doesn’t chance facing the clerk, so he puts his head in his freezing hands instead. The chill that was still ebbing from them felt nice on his swollen face anyway. “I’m going to have to swim to get out of my apartment and make it to class in the morning.”

“It’s a rite of passage for every new yorker in their first place,” Raffi snorts, eyeing where Peter is hunched over the counter and the small puddle forming underneath his dripping head despite the towel wrapped around his neck.

“No, there are several health code violations that are about to make it hazardous just for me to get to my learning environment is what it is,” Peter grumbles weakly, his throat too raw from all the dust he’d inhaled to support any emotion other than hoarse indifference.

The clerk huffs another amused snort and then, “you should really put something on that eye then.” Peter sips his tea experimentally and does his very best to avoid looking up at Raffi. It hasn’t cooled enough to drink yet, but he’d take a scorched tongue over sitting another minute shivering with his hands cupped around the cardboard and his face over the steam to cage in whatever he could of the warmth.

“The bruising will go away faster if you get a jump on icing it,” he continues, unbothered by Peter’s total lack of acknowledgment. “You can grab something from one of the freezers.”

Peter squeezes his tea a little too hard then, the still too hot liquid spilling over onto fingers so cold they looked bloodless. “Thanks Raf,” he chokes, “but I think I’m gonna head home now anyway—ya know, before it’s gets really bad out there.”

Raf pauses like he’s considering the odds of trying to reason with him, but the news station abruptly cuts to a commercial break when the field reporter’s visual wavers and then promptly flickers to static. He goes back to unpacking boxes of inventory for storm prep instead. Peter had offered to help carry the bags of salt out front but Raffi had taken one sideways glance at him and shook his head before turning the kettle back on and disappearing back into the storage room.

“Here.” Peter’s hand moved accordingly, shooting up to catch whatever had been tossed at him before his brain could even process the action. He didn’t pick his head up to look because he didn’t usually need to, but his hands were still numb and now slightly burnt, and the keychain flashlight skidded over the edge of the counter, rolling several more inches across the floor until it finally stopped.

“You don’t have to—”

“Take two,” Raf insists, sliding another his way.

“Raffi—”

“Get home safe kid.” The sound of tearing cardboard eliminates any room for protest, and Peter finally pockets the flashlights when he sees that Raf is intent on breaking down every single empty box in his wake. He works the to go lid on carefully and then pulls a handful of napkins free from the dispenser to soak up his mess but the thin paper dissolves immediately and there’s hardly anything left in the metal container.

“Don’t worry about that. It’s already late, just get yourself home in one piece for me and we’re square.” Peter feels like he can’t get any air past the ever expanding lump in his throat, his body trembling in time with the hammering in his chest as a mix of fond warmth and embarrassment prickles his steadily heating skin.

“Night Raffi,” he finally manages. “And thanks again.” He forces himself up from the stool and onto unsteady legs begrudgingly, willing his hands to be reliable for one goddamned minute, or at least until he could safely carry the tea out of Ralph’s without making more of a fool out of himself. “For everything.”

He doesn’t wait to hear if Raf has anything else to say to that and is grateful for the noise that greets him when he shoulders the door open with the side of his body that didn’t feel like it had broken the fall from a three story drop for the rest of him. The overlapping sheets of scrap wood flooring he fell through first had saved him from what would’ve probably meant several broken bones as opposed to what was now just severely bruised, but it had also torn his skin to shit in the process and hadn’t left much viable fabric to salvage from his suit.

A small part of him hoped that some street kid would stumble upon the remnants on top of a dumpster and think they’d won the lottery. The more rational part knew that might’ve been true about a month ago when the name Peter Parker meant nothing to the general public, and it wasn’t that it meant much to anyone now that he virtually didn’t exist, just that neither did the name spider-man.

The media had called his gradual disappearance an admission of guilt and a service to the city they spent hours debating if he'd ever truly managed to protect, and he didn’t find himself disagreeing with them much lately. It had been weeks and Peter still couldn’t make it through a single patrol without his powers fluctuating, if not giving out on him completely.

And if he couldn’t even save himself from harm anymore, how was he supposed to tell an entire city they could rely on him to protect them?

He barely succeeds in stifling the broken sob building in his chest and has to reach for the scaffold protecting the sidewalk from the downpour to keep his footing as inches of water streamed down the slanted pavement and into the street. His breaths suddenly come in shallow pants, the band around his lungs tightening with each strangled attempt to fill the aching organs while he watched the world in front of him shrink back until he was certain that he was too far away from himself then to feel so sick with unjustified panic.

Peter doesn’t register when the cup of tea slips from his hands and is taken away with the current because his senses are shrieking danger like it’s imminent and all around him. He scans each side of the street again and again like maybe by the time he swivels his head next something will have changed, but nothing ever does. The street is empty except for a handful of parked cars and piles of miscellaneous construction materials.

He strains his ears trying to filter out both the storm and the pounding of his own heartbeat knowing full well that his bodies’ perception of danger is wildly skewed and recently prone to overreacting at the slightest of disturbances like it needed to constantly make sure it still had to ability, but he concentrates on peeling away each sound anyway because he thinks he can actually hear someone and his mind hasn’t fabricated something so real like that yet.

The sirens wailing in the distance yawn into screams and make it difficult to figure out which direction it came from, but he hears the words uttered exactly one more time before he’s taking off at a dead sprint.

“Hold on.”

It hurts, stop.

“I’m—fuck, I’m coming.”

The plea echoes in his head like a taunt, daring him to pump his legs that much faster until he eventually skids to a sloshing halt at the entrance of the rat alley between the laundromat and smoke shop at the other end of the block.

The figures are a ways down and shrouded by the poor lighting, but they halt when Peter appears at the top of the small set of stairs all the same, and it’s in the anticipatory lull that comes after that he realizes the two very important ways in which he’s just fucked up by not attempting to approach with any kind of stealth while his face was uncovered.

What’s left of his suit lays on the trash in an identical spot in queens but his mask currently sits at the bottom of the jansport on his back. The larger shadow is moving again before he can even begin to worry over every implication of what he’s about to do.

There’s a muffled grunt and the sound of struggling, though the man’s hands can only make it so far up the body he’s pressing into the bricks before a series of webs are wrenching them above his head and securing them to the wall behind him, the second figure nearly crumpling at the loss of the weight. “Who the fuck do you—” is about all the asshole can spew before he’s spluttering against a generous coat of webbing.

Peter takes several careful steps forward with his back turned to the subdued man, the tension rolling off what he now could see was just a kid palpable as he fixed his pants around his hips. He has the chance to shoot one more web over the creep’s eyes before the kid is rounding on him.

“Why did you do that?” he spits viciously, his brow wrinkling as simultaneous recognition dawns on both boys. The part of his lip that was split wells with a new spurt of blood that he catches with the edge of his sleeve.

Peter must spend an inappropriate amount of time blinking at the kid he vaguely knew lived in an apartment across the hall from him because he’s somehow even angrier the next time he speaks.

“Do you know how much you just cost me?”

“Excuse me?” Peter feels like he’s missed something very important.

“Sure the guy was a prick for roughing me up, but I still need to fucking eat.” And then as if he’s just now realizing that the man isn’t unconscious with all of the muted shouting coming from behind him, he turns to see what could possibly be stopping him from continuing whatever it was that Peter had just broken up.

“Listen,” he tries, but the kid is already going for the guy’s pocket to fish out his wallet. “What are you—hey! Don’t do that.”

“Are you going to stop me spider-man?” the kid smirks knowingly and resumes his search, feeling for the seams on the man’s clothes of which Peter realizes then are just as curiously disheveled. “Because I’m almost certain that the headlines they come up with for this mess will put you in the ground for good.”

The kid is facing Peter again and from this close he knows that they’re pretty much the same height, but for all the confidence he exudes when he talks, he somehow looks so much smaller where the dimness is unable to hide the way his whole body shakes in a way that couldn’t just be from the cold. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“Think about it. ‘Spider-man: friendly to everyone in neighborhood except sex workers, he makes sure to hand deliver them directly to the police’.” The kid looks almost manic as he flits through each tab, removing all of the things he deems useless and tucking them into the guy’s waistband until he’s siphoned nearly everything but the wad of cash that was supposedly meant for him and a couple other utility cards. “Or maybe, ‘Web slinging vigilante caught using webs for kinky sex should no longer be idolized by your children—”

“That’s enough,” Peter levels simply. “I’m not going to call the cops on you.” It’s the kids turn to stare but his blank gaze is frozen in something other than disbelief and he waits exactly two seconds before stumbling backwards, like he was suddenly afraid of all the things Peter might possibly do to him instead—though in all fairness he had every right to worry when they both knew he’d already seen Peter’s face.

“Shit, kid.” He keeps his voice low and cool like he was trying to keep from spooking a cornered animal, because that’s exactly what he is. The end of the pathway leads to a gated courtyard, and both Peter and the sleezebag block the only exit that goes back up to street level. “I’m not going to hurt you either.”

The laugh he lets out then is hollow. “Why should I believe that?”

“I’m spider-man,” Peter leverages, raising his hands up where they’re visible without attempting to move any closer. “I turn in criminals.”

“And I stole what I was owed.”

“Yeah,” he agrees easily, “from someone who hurt you.”

“Well if that’s what he was paying me for, it’s technically a crime on my part to not follow through.”

Peter blinks at him for a moment, and then with all sincerity. “Not after you ask them to stop.”

“How—“ the kid blanches, eyes widening warily once he puts it together. “Pshh, of course you’re hearing is all suped up too,” and Peter actually laughs.

“I wish the spider crap was all just a gimmick, but—actually I’d rather not talk about the details in front of doucheface,” he says, nodding to the squirming man. The kid considers something for a long moment before closing the distance he’d put between them.

“And what about doucheface? You can’t get the five-o down here when you don’t have your fancy spandex on.”

“He’s warm enough,” Peter shrugs after studying the man’s winter coat and work boots, “and the webs will dissolve before hypothermia has a chance to set in.”

The kid hums approvingly, not looking any more convinced that he should trust Peter, but marginally less apprensive to share the same breathing room as him.

“Okay,” he concedes and tugs his sleeves down so he could remove the shooters clasped around each of his wrists, letting the backpack strap fall until he could get to the pockets and throw them in. “Better?” It’s only when faced with getting it back on that he remembers the vibrant pain pulsing in his other shoulder.

“Aren’t you still…” he trails off, his hands gesturing to the rest of Peter.

“Sticky?” He waits for a slight nod and then huffs an exasperated “yes.”

The kid grimaces. “Freaky.”

Peter doesn’t have to act wounded when he goes to raise his hands up in mock horror because something shifts horrifically near his collarbone, and he barely has time to mask the jagged grunt that leaves his mouth by swiveling around to start heading out of the alley.

“Wha—wait,” the kid calls after him, and Peter thinks he’d be properly surprised if he wasn’t trying so desperately to keep his shit together. The boy waits until they’ve made it onto the sidewalk to continue. “We’re going to the same place, idiot. And you’ve already seen my ass cheeks tonight, the least you could do is not be a tool about walking me home.”

Peter doesn’t try to swallow the hitching gasp that erupts in his chest, figuring it was an appropriate response to that kind of admonishment anyway. “I didn’t see anything,” he assures, seemingly untouched by the shock that statement was meant to have been for him.

“Sure you didn’t. You heard me from how far away?”

“It’s not the same for my vision. I can’t see through things, just better from farther away which still very much requires me to have actually looked.”

“Interesting.” Peter thought there were several other words that were better suited to describe the strangeness of his physical condition, but let the matter go easily, too tired to expend the mental energy on a conversation like that when he felt wrung completely dry of every ounce of energy he had, the last remaining vestiges evaporating into the ether with his drying sweat and making a cozy spot for themselves next to his hopes for the future along with far too many of the people he loved.

The walk is silent until they reach the first door and Peter pads his pockets for a lump of keys that isn’t there. “I got it,” the kid offers, gold metal ready and reaching. “What,” he starts once he’s got the door propped open, clearly amused by something. “No room for essential pockets in the wonder boy leotard?”

“Shut up. And it doesn’t matter when I—” Peter feels like his throat closes around the next words as he tries to get them out, like his own body doesn’t want him to say them, or maybe his subconscious just doesn’t want them to be true. “I won’t be spider-man for much longer anyway,” he clips and bristles past the kid without waiting for his smart retort. Peter was grateful that the door was being held because the strap of his bag was still in his hand and he couldn’t fathom how he’d have handled the pain that would come with having to sling it onto his back to free up his good arm.

“Woah,” he deadpans, stuck gaping in the doorway for a moment before bounding through the entranceway until he was right on Peter’s heels. “Hey. You can’t just leave me with that. And you already said you’re still sticky, so that’s not exactly true.”

Peter doesn’t know what to say to that when he could hardly put one foot in front of the other without considerable effort, being asked to boil every reason behind why he’s where he is right now down into a digestible little anecdote as well was simply impossible.

The kid calls after him again once he’s made it to the foot of the stairs, but he has no idea what is said because their building has no elevator and they live on the fifth floor, and Peter doesn’t know why he feels like he’s dying, just that the cord that’s held his chest in a vice all night is cinching again now that he’s facing the task of dragging himself up all ten flights.

Time melts into something meaningless and immeasurable while he attempts to stave off the impending breakdown, and he thinks he does a good job at it for a second, but then the kid grabs the shoulder that had been a nuisance since his fall and his world whites.

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

The walk back to his apartment from the subway was the worst offender in abetting his chattering teeth. The sweatshirt hood of his flannel jacket was completely saturated the moment he got back above ground again and only partially protected him from the wind, though his main reason for keeping it up at all was to hide the cuts and bruises on his face, the practically didn’t much matter to him.

He didn’t mind the rain much aside from the cold accompanied it, especially not at night when the steady patter of it on glass windows made the kind of blessed ambient noise that concealed most others and gave his ears a break from straining to pay attention to every little thing that went bump in the night.

It hadn’t been so bad back in Astoria since their building wasn’t on a main road and everything else around it was residential, but it made falling asleep nearly impossible most nights now that he was shacking up in the heart of the city that never sleeps. Peter hardly does either now, though he thinks it might not be an issue for him tonight if the weather man on the tv in Ralph’s saying that the city’s in for a rough go of it over the next few days is correct about his predictions of record rainfall and unprecedented flooding.

“Jeez,” Raffi watches wide-eyed, his arms crossed over his chest in disbelief. “It took national grid six days to put the lights back on last summer after that hurricane in July.”

The reporter is in Times Square where the wind is apparently too strong to keep his umbrella open without it flipping inside out and every one of his attempts to wrangle it are unsuccessful. Another reporter has to talk about what precautions to take against flood damages and how to prepare for potential leaks while he struggles.

The agonized groan that Peter lets out at the mention is animalistic. “My ceiling leaks whenever the guy upstairs showers for longer than thirty minutes, Raf.” He doesn’t chance facing the clerk, so he puts his head in his freezing hands instead. The chill that was still ebbing from them felt nice on his swollen face anyway. “I’m going to have to swim to get out of my apartment and make it to class in the morning.”

“It’s a rite of passage for every new yorker in their first place,” Raffi snorts, eyeing where Peter is hunched over the counter and the small puddle forming underneath his dripping head despite the towel wrapped around his neck.

“No, there are several health code violations that are about to make it hazardous just for me to get to my learning environment is what it is,” Peter grumbles weakly, his throat too raw from all the dust he’d inhaled to support any emotion other than hoarse indifference.

The clerk huffs another amused snort and then, “you should really put something on that eye then.” Peter sips his tea experimentally and does his very best to avoid looking up at Raffi. It hasn’t cooled enough to drink yet, but he’d take a scorched tongue over sitting another minute shivering with his hands cupped around the cardboard and his face over the steam to cage in whatever he could of the warmth.

“The bruising will go away faster if you get a jump on icing it,” he continues, unbothered by Peter’s total lack of acknowledgment. “You can grab something from one of the freezers.”

Peter squeezes his tea a little too hard then, the still too hot liquid spilling over onto fingers so cold they looked bloodless. “Thanks Raf,” he chokes, “but I think I’m gonna head home now anyway—ya know, before it’s gets really bad out there.”

Raf pauses like he’s considering the odds of trying to reason with him, but the news station abruptly cuts to a commercial break when the field reporter’s visual wavers and then promptly flickers to static. He goes back to unpacking boxes of inventory for storm prep instead. Peter had offered to help carry the bags of salt out front but Raffi had taken one sideways glance at him and shook his head before turning the kettle back on and disappearing back into the storage room.

“Here.” Peter’s hand moved accordingly, shooting up to catch whatever had been tossed at him before his brain could even process the action. He didn’t pick his head up to look because he didn’t usually need to, but his hands were still numb and now slightly burnt, and the keychain flashlight skidded over the edge of the counter, rolling several more inches across the floor until it finally stopped.

“You don’t have to—”

“Take two,” Raf insists, sliding another his way.

“Raffi—”

“Get home safe kid.” The sound of tearing cardboard eliminates any room for protest, and Peter finally pockets the flashlights when he sees that Raf is intent on breaking down every single empty box in his wake. He works the to go lid on carefully and then pulls a handful of napkins free from the dispenser to soak up his mess but the thin paper dissolves immediately and there’s hardly anything left in the metal container.

“Don’t worry about that. It’s already late, just get yourself home in one piece for me and we’re square.” Peter feels like he can’t get any air past the ever expanding lump in his throat, his body trembling in time with the hammering in his chest as a mix of fond warmth and embarrassment prickles his steadily heating skin.

“Night Raffi,” he finally manages. “And thanks again.” He forces himself up from the stool and onto unsteady legs begrudgingly, willing his hands to be reliable for one goddamned minute, or at least until he could safely carry the tea out of Ralph’s without making more of a fool out of himself. “For everything.”

He doesn’t wait to hear if Raf has anything else to say to that and is grateful for the noise that greets him when he shoulders the door open with the side of his body that didn’t feel like it had broken the fall from a three story drop for the rest of him. The overlapping sheets of scrap wood flooring he fell through first had saved him from what would’ve probably meant several broken bones as opposed to what was now just severely bruised, but it had also torn his skin to shit in the process and hadn’t left much viable fabric to salvage from his suit.

A small part of him hoped that some street kid would stumble upon the remnants on top of a dumpster and think they’d won the lottery. The more rational part knew that might’ve been true about a month ago when the name Peter Parker meant nothing to the general public, and it wasn’t that it meant much to anyone now that he virtually didn’t exist, just that neither did the name spider-man.

The media had called his gradual disappearance an admission of guilt and a service to the city they spent hours debating if he'd ever truly managed to protect, and he didn’t find himself disagreeing with them much lately. It had been weeks and Peter still couldn’t make it through a single patrol without his powers fluctuating, if not giving out on him completely.

And if he couldn’t even save himself from harm anymore, how was he supposed to tell an entire city they could rely on him to protect them?

He barely succeeds in stifling the broken sob building in his chest and has to reach for the scaffold protecting the sidewalk from the downpour to keep his footing as inches of water streamed down the slanted pavement and into the street. His breaths suddenly come in shallow pants, the band around his lungs tightening with each strangled attempt to fill the aching organs while he watched the world in front of him shrink back until he was certain that he was too far away from himself then to feel so sick with unjustified panic.

Peter doesn’t register when the cup of tea slips from his hands and is taken away with the current because his senses are shrieking danger like it’s imminent and all around him. He scans each side of the street again and again like maybe by the time he swivels his head next something will have changed, but nothing ever does. The street is empty except for a handful of parked cars and piles of miscellaneous construction materials.

He strains his ears trying to filter out both the storm and the pounding of his own heartbeat knowing full well that his bodies’ perception of danger is wildly skewed and recently prone to overreacting at the slightest of disturbances like it needed to constantly make sure it still had to ability, but he concentrates on peeling away each sound anyway because he thinks he can actually hear someone and his mind hasn’t fabricated something so real like that yet.

The sirens wailing in the distance yawn into screams and make it difficult to figure out which direction it came from, but he hears the words uttered exactly one more time before he’s taking off at a dead sprint.

“Hold on.”

It hurts, stop.

“I’m—fuck, I’m coming.”

The plea echoes in his head like a taunt, daring him to pump his legs that much faster until he eventually skids to a sloshing halt at the entrance of the rat alley between the laundromat and smoke shop at the other end of the block.

The figures are a ways down and shrouded by the poor lighting, but they halt when Peter appears at the top of the small set of stairs all the same, and it’s in the anticipatory lull that comes after that he realizes the two very important ways in which he’s just fucked up by not attempting to approach with any kind of stealth while his face was uncovered.

What’s left of his suit lays on the trash in an identical spot in queens but his mask currently sits at the bottom of the jansport on his back. The larger shadow is moving again before he can even begin to worry over every implication of what he’s about to do.

There’s a muffled grunt and the sound of struggling, though the man’s hands can only make it so far up the body he’s pressing into the bricks before a series of webs are wrenching them above his head and securing them to the wall behind him, the second figure nearly crumpling at the loss of the weight. “Who the fuck do you—” is about all the asshole can spew before he’s spluttering against a generous coat of webbing.

Peter takes several careful steps forward with his back turned to the subdued man, the tension rolling off what he now could see was just a kid palpable as he fixed his pants around his hips. He has the chance to shoot one more web over the creep’s eyes before the kid is rounding on him.

“Why did you do that?” he spits viciously, his brow wrinkling as simultaneous recognition dawns on both boys. The part of his lip that was split wells with a new spurt of blood that he catches with the edge of his sleeve.

Peter must spend an inappropriate amount of time blinking at the kid he vaguely knew lived in an apartment across the hall from him because he’s somehow even angrier the next time he speaks.

“Do you know how much you just cost me?”

“Excuse me?” Peter feels like he’s missed something very important.

“Sure the guy was a prick for roughing me up, but I still need to fucking eat.” And then as if he’s just now realizing that the man isn’t unconscious with all of the muted shouting coming from behind him, he turns to see what could possibly be stopping him from continuing whatever it was that Peter had just broken up.

“Listen,” he tries, but the kid is already going for the guy’s pocket to fish out his wallet. “What are you—hey! Don’t do that.”

“Are you going to stop me spider-man?” the kid smirks knowingly and resumes his search, feeling for the seams on the man’s clothes of which Peter realizes then are just as curiously disheveled. “Because I’m almost certain that the headlines they come up with for this mess will put you in the ground for good.”

The kid is facing Peter again and from this close he knows that they’re pretty much the same height, but for all the confidence he exudes when he talks, he somehow looks so much smaller where the dimness is unable to hide the way his whole body shakes in a way that couldn’t just be from the cold. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

“Think about it. ‘Spider-man: friendly to everyone in neighborhood except sex workers, he makes sure to hand deliver them directly to the police’.” The kid looks almost manic as he flits through each tab, removing all of the things he deems useless and tucking them into the guy’s waistband until he’s siphoned nearly everything but the wad of cash that was supposedly meant for him and a couple other utility cards. “Or maybe, ‘Web slinging vigilante caught using webs for kinky sex should no longer be idolized by your children—”

“That’s enough,” Peter levels simply. “I’m not going to call the cops on you.” It’s the kids turn to stare but his blank gaze is frozen in something other than disbelief and he waits exactly two seconds before stumbling backwards, like he was suddenly afraid of all the things Peter might possibly do to him instead—though in all fairness he had every right to worry when they both knew he’d already seen Peter’s face.

“Shit, kid.” He keeps his voice low and cool like he was trying to keep from spooking a cornered animal, because that’s exactly what he is. The end of the pathway leads to a gated courtyard, and both Peter and the sleezebag block the only exit that goes back up to street level. “I’m not going to hurt you either.”

The laugh he lets out then is hollow. “Why should I believe that?”

“I’m spider-man,” Peter leverages, raising his hands up where they’re visible without attempting to move any closer. “I turn in criminals.”

“And I stole what I was owed.”

“Yeah,” he agrees easily, “from someone who hurt you.”

“Well if that’s what he was paying me for, it’s technically a crime on my part to not follow through.”

Peter blinks at him for a moment, and then with all sincerity. “Not after you ask them to stop.”

“How—“ the kid blanches, eyes widening warily once he puts it together. “Pshh, of course you’re hearing is all suped up too,” and Peter actually laughs.

“I wish the spider crap was all just a gimmick, but—actually I’d rather not talk about the details in front of doucheface,” he says, nodding to the squirming man. The kid considers something for a long moment before closing the distance he’d put between them.

“And what about doucheface? You can’t get the five-o down here when you don’t have your fancy spandex on.”

“He’s warm enough,” Peter shrugs after studying the man’s winter coat and work boots, “and the webs will dissolve before hypothermia has a chance to set in.”

The kid hums approvingly, not looking any more convinced that he should trust Peter, but marginally less apprensive to share the same breathing room as him.

“Okay,” he concedes and tugs his sleeves down so he could remove the shooters clasped around each of his wrists, letting the backpack strap fall until he could get to the pockets and throw them in. “Better?” It’s only when faced with getting it back on that he remembers the vibrant pain pulsing in his other shoulder.

“Aren’t you still…” he trails off, his hands gesturing to the rest of Peter.

“Sticky?” He waits for a slight nod and then huffs an exasperated “yes.”

The kid grimaces. “Freaky.”

Peter doesn’t have to act wounded when he goes to raise his hands up in mock horror because something shifts horrifically near his collarbone, and he barely has time to mask the jagged grunt that leaves his mouth by swiveling around to start heading out of the alley.

“Wha—wait,” the kid calls after him, and Peter thinks he’d be properly surprised if he wasn’t trying so desperately to keep his shit together. The boy waits until they’ve made it onto the sidewalk to continue. “We’re going to the same place, idiot. And you’ve already seen my ass cheeks tonight, the least you could do is not be a tool about walking me home.”

Peter doesn’t try to swallow the hitching gasp that erupts in his chest, figuring it was an appropriate response to that kind of admonishment anyway. “I didn’t see anything,” he assures, seemingly untouched by the shock that statement was meant to have been for him.

“Sure you didn’t. You heard me from how far away?”

“It’s not the same for my vision. I can’t see through things, just better from farther away which still very much requires me to have actually looked.”

“Interesting.” Peter thought there were several other words that were better suited to describe the strangeness of his physical condition, but let the matter go easily, too tired to expend the mental energy on a conversation like that when he felt wrung completely dry of every ounce of energy he had, the last remaining vestiges evaporating into the ether with his drying sweat and making a cozy spot for themselves next to his hopes for the future along with far too many of the people he loved.

The walk is silent until they reach the first door and Peter pads his pockets for a lump of keys that isn’t there. “I got it,” the kid offers, gold metal ready and reaching. “What,” he starts once he’s got the door propped open, clearly amused by something. “No room for essential pockets in the wonder boy leotard?”

“Shut up. And it doesn’t matter when I—” Peter feels like his throat closes around the next words as he tries to get them out, like his own body doesn’t want him to say them, or maybe his subconscious just doesn’t want them to be true. “I won’t be spider-man for much longer anyway,” he clips and bristles past the kid without waiting for his smart retort. Peter was grateful that the door was being held because the strap of his bag was still in his hand and he couldn’t fathom how he’d have handled the pain that would come with having to sling it onto his back to free up his good arm.

“Woah,” he deadpans, stuck gaping in the doorway for a moment before bounding through the entranceway until he was right on Peter’s heels. “Hey. You can’t just leave me with that. And you already said you’re still sticky, so that’s not exactly true.”

Peter doesn’t know what to say to that when he could hardly put one foot in front of the other without considerable effort, being asked to boil every reason behind why he’s where he is right now down into a digestible little anecdote as well was simply impossible.

The kid calls after him again once he’s made it to the foot of the stairs, but he has no idea what is said because their building has no elevator and they live on the fifth floor, and Peter doesn’t know why he feels like he’s dying, just that the cord that’s held his chest in a vice all night is cinching again now that he’s facing the task of dragging himself up all ten flights.

Time melts into something meaningless and immeasurable while he attempts to stave off the impending breakdown, and he thinks he does a good job at it for a second, but then the kid grabs the shoulder that had been a nuisance since his fall and his world whites.

part 1 / part 2

Peter took a deep breath and stood from his crouch on the ledge, ignoring the way his legs shook when he did, and was hanging from a rope of synthetic webbing before he even remembered that he was supposed to let it out. He normally didn’t have to look where any of the webs he shot landed, a combination of his acuity for physics and overprotective sense organs working to make sure every swing was a secure one as subtly as his lungs remembered how to make his chest rise and fall, but this particular night seemed determined to prove itself as an exception.

The rain had stopped hours ago but the city was still damp from it—as was the metal siding on the disheveled warehouse in front of him, the sheets of rain water draining down it making the surface impossible to shoot webs onto. He must’ve emptied half of his clip trying to get something to stick but was hurtling at the lengthy loft windows much too fast, the breadth of opportunity he had to change the trajectory of his swing rapidly disappearing.

The search for anything else in the immediate vicinity to lever his body from its current flight path was frantic and ultimately useless because aside from the chain link fence lined with barbed wire surrounding the junk yard on the other end of the block, there was nothing but open air and churning river water. Peter instinctively brought his legs up to his chest, bracing himself.

“Fuck, fuck.” The initial crash didn’t hurt nearly as much as the three story fall that came after.

The warehouse must’ve been abandoned for a solid amount of time before Peter traipsed by because the plywood that had been draped over the support beams like patchwork were all rotted through and gave out as soon as his back hit them, swallowing him in splintering fibers that tore at his suit like metal talons, weightlessness stealing the breath from his lungs like the hands of a self-appointed false god wrapping around his throat.

He reached out, hands scrabbling for anything to stop or slow his descent, but all that he could manage to do with his webs was send loose boards flying at his face, the rest of his flailing only serving to hasten the drop. And the faster he plummeted, his body jerking around and flipping over, the farther he felt from it when the chips of wood and dust and nails that fell with him began to look a lot like what he’d watched his own flesh dematerialize into over five years ago.

“No,” he wheezed, back arching like he could somehow wriggle away from himself and the awful feeling of dissolving into nothing again, though this time felt remarkably different without his overexposed senses screaming at him that he was about to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it, burning his skin with every instinct urging him to act anyway. This time he felt absolutely nothing until the entire right side of his body erupted in white hot pain.

Peter isn’t sure how long he laid among the heap of scraps that more or less cushioned him from connecting with the cold hard slab of concrete that lay beneath, just that when he finally convinced himself he was in too much pain to be dead it had started raining again.

He listened to the wind as it picked up outside, pelting droplets at the structure’s flimsy siding and whipping debris around hard enough to knock shards of glass free from the Peter-sized hole he’d created in the window, and though there was already a fair amount of it stuck in his legs and back, he didn’t particularly care to add any more.

He was slow in plucking himself out of the carnage, and even slower in getting to his feet despite having all the proper motivations to get the hell out of dodge before the rest of the temporary flooring came down on top of him, or cops started poking around to investigate the property damage and book him for trespassing.

His body felt like one giant bruise, and though he was pretty sure he hadn’t accrued any outright breaks or fractures, whatever he had tweaked in his shoulder was amongst the worst all the other pain centers across his body. It made a sickening click whenever he tried rotating it, and he could feel the bones there grinding against each other unnaturally, sending sharp zaps of pain down his arm and back whenever they did.

It had been a mistake to come back to queens, he knew that much the moment he’d stepped onto an N train headed for Astoria, but he hadn’t known what else to do with himself, the feeling of wanting to go home too overwhelming to deny himself the small semblance of comfort—well that, and Peter’s self preservation skills always had been shoddy at best.

The sounds of the city slowly bypassed the waning ring left by several counts of blunt force trauma, replacing it with a confusing jumble of mundane racket instead. He told himself that the conflicted pull leading his ears in a million different directions was from the skull splitting headache and not the potential that the only good thing he had going for him anymore was undeniably broken.

He leaned into the clamor, willing his hearing to localize on just one thing at a time, to focus long enough to pick something out of the chaos and give it a name, a label, a distinction as something that was dangerous or not. He hones in on his immediate surroundings first, like the trash cans tipping over and rolling down the street, or the branches tearing their way from bristling trees just outside the warehouse walls.

The storm was raging again, the sound of rain and wind imposing its will on the natural world around it and drowning out all other sounds—wailing sirens, a barking dog chained up to a tree, an overloading transformer ready to blow—and muting them back to nothing.

And god, he hoped it was just the shitty November weather fucking with his powers because then there’s the warning rumble of an impending clap of thunder and that’s as far as he gets before he’s forced back down to his knees. The transformer explodes and the sky opens up again, the torrent above raging like it was bleeding with him, like it was mourning right alongside him.

If there was anyone in queens that needed his help that night, he didn’t hear it over the layers of all his grief.

part 1 / part 2