summary: dennis whitaker was a pro at looking the other way. he ignores his teleporting roommate, their static-charged laundry, and their mysterious night-shift "rotations." he was happy to stay in the dark—until the dark breaks into his room at 2am. he's unconventionally armed and ready to square up, but he finds something else no amount of ED shifts could've prepared him for; or, dennis whitaker gwen stacy au
pairing: dennis whitaker x spider-man!reader
word count: 4075 words
tags and warnings: gn!reader kinda, marvel!au, spider-man!au but in pittsburgh..., slow-burn&roommates-to-lovers (not yet really but like i'm tryna build up tension), kindaa graphic depiction of injuries (blood and claw marks), slight hurt/comfort, no use of y/n, reader is in veterinary med school and is from new york. bc spider-man is from new york, dennis whitaker is stupid but what’s new, there’s also kinda no action at all bc it’s 95% dennis’s thoughts n pov…… and also yearning
Dennis Whitaker didn't ask for much out of life: snagging a residency at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, a local Runza that won't taste like cardboard for once, and a roommate who didn't come home smelling like ozone and burnt Kevlar at three in the morning.
He really wanted to mind his own business. In fact, it was the only thing Dennis knew to a tee. Growing up with three older brothers, it was always in his best interest to keep his head down when the situation didn’t concern him, or he would have to endure an abominable afternoon of extra teasing and roughhousing. He had always liked peace, and additionally, it wasn't in his guts to confront you when it was your grant paying for your shared flat. Dennis wasn't ready to pass up a free room to go back to being "between houses" over something that could be an entirely simple misunderstanding that he inflated to be a huge problem.
But it gets to a point.
The point being the plethora of your various oddities that included, but was not limited to: (1) your baffling relationship with the floor plan. Dennis had lost count of how many times he’d heard the attic—which was both your super-secret veterinary science lab/bedroom—door shut, only to see you walking down the street thirty seconds later from the living room window; (2) the fact that you could never use the furniture correctly. Dennis could walk into the living room and find you perched on the very edge of the window sill or squatting on the back of the sofa like a gargoyle, an “exercise” you would claim was for your sciatica. But he’d seen you balance a textbook on your knees when you studied while your heels were barely on the couch's two-inch-wide armrest. He wasn't a real doctor yet, but comfortable habits like that were definitely not to be diagnosed with sciatica; (3) your clothes always seemed to be static-charged to a murderous degree. Dennis had once reached into the dryer to kindly help you move a load once and got a shock that travelled all the way to his shoulders, which you had laughed off as coming from the “synthetic fur” from a husky you had treated at class that day.
Months ago, when you’d first found him dozing off in a UPMC study lounge and offered him the spare room, Dennis had assumed you were just a typical NYC transplant. A high-strung and over-caffeinated kid with deep empathy for pathetic, farm-boy medical students like him.
And he was right, because you were a bit of a stereotype.
Getting to know you was like trying to drink from a fire hose, which, for a guy who spent the first twenty-something years of his life watching corn grow, was enough of a change to make him feel like his world had turned upside-down, ten times more intensely than the first time he had left home. But as much as your anarchy gave Dennis an, admittedly, painfully-sharp comparison from Nebraska, as much as it pushed him to be homesick for the vast plains of home, the many, messy months of sharing a cramped flat with you—mornings spent with your backs together, him on the toaster and you on your morning tea, and your free afternoons spent quizzing each other on human anatomy and veterinary jargon—have conditioned Dennis to feel a deeper, more specific sense of anticipation for you during the many nights you would leave home for your mystifying, night-shift "rotations".
Dennis didn't know much about the responsibilities of veterinary students. He always assumed you were just as busy as him, with schedules just as unforgiving and frenzied. Any variation of medical school could kill. Dennis himself would come home reeking of a mix of blood, sweat, and tears that weren't his own, and limping from a cumulation of exhaustion and feisty patients that wouldn't let him make them take something as simple as a pill, so he had a basis of what your own fatigue could be like. But you, for far too many times, and getting more frequent lately, would come home so tired that you would be lurching and flying off the walls just to get to your room, whimpering in pain, and oddly stained in mysterious, black goo. If Dennis could stretch his stupid, far-fetched thoughts a bit more, maybe what you really spent your time on was a... part-time job being a goddamn mechanic, but even that wouldn't constitute such fatigue.
On those nights, he would meet you at the end of the tiny foyer, leaning against the wall waiting for you to come to him, with his hands behind his back as he clutched a first aid kit, but just before Dennis could grab onto your shoulders to get you to stop, to slow down to his pace, you scrape up enough strength to rush past him, muttering a "good night" with your ever-sprightly tone, and up the set of stairs to slam your door shut. It was like you sensed what he was wanting to do. Though he understood that both of you weren't that close, and imagined that it wasn't right to cross this particular boundary, he couldn't imagine you cleaning yourself up, alone, in your room, breaking down from whatever burnout your "rotation" had forced on you. He knew what it was like, and he hoped he could help you with it.
All Dennis wanted to do was take care of you. Like you had taken care of him by inviting him into your home, and by extension, your life.
He couldn't help but think that he had begun irritating you with his presence. Your days spent complaining about your shifts from hell and giggling through movie nights were slipping from his grasp, and it was coming clearer to him, now that you had begun shying away from doing grocery errands together, telling him "next time" and that you'd pick up the next list alone so you wouldn't bother him. Like you could ever do that. There was so much pain and death to handle at the ED, and the one, warm, friendly thing that used to wait for him at home wouldn't even look at him anymore, much less touch him, not even with a thirty-foot pole.
Dennis Whitaker was reaching the point where he couldn't just "mind his business" when your “business” was clearly trying to kill you. The way you’d go bone-still at the dinner table, your fork halfway to your mouth, eyes darting to the window five seconds before a police siren even turned the corner onto the avenue, disconcerted him. You brushed it off as intuition, a personal sixth sense for worrying about the stray dogs caught in distress of a crime, but Dennis had spent enough time in the ER to know something was off when he saw it. You were listening for some... thing that was bound to leave you withered by the next day, and it was wearing you thin.
He was reaching the point where he wanted to lock you up in the flat until you tell him why a vet student had a resting heart rate that shouldn't be biologically possible for a girl of your health. The one time you both practiced taking each other's vitals for a practical exam, he had noticed how high the beating of your heart had been, but you had pulled away his hand holding the diaphragm on your chest swiftly and roughly, with a look on your face so... ashamed, and whispered a quick "sorry", before he had the chance to question you about it. Dennis certainly didn’t underestimate the difficulty of veterinary med school, but your stress surely must have to come from something else entirely. A deep trauma he wanted to know and help you with.
And it leads to the stark of it all. Dennis wasn't a jealous man, not by any means, and not when you two were nothing more than friends. He was careful to never cross the line of being roommates, but he was reaching the point of genuine concern regarding your benefactor. He had seen the way you clutch your phone when blocked numbers called, and the way you’d whisper-argue with some guy named “Happy” about "suit diagnostics" and "containment protocols." In Dennis’s world, tech billionaires didn't just give out academic grants to pretty students from Queens out of the goodness of their hearts. They always wanted something more. And every time you came home with a fresh purple bloom of a bruise on your jaw, Dennis’s mind went to the darkest place any sane person’s mind could go. This guy even let you "borrow" his plane to fly home to your aunt. Dennis wondered what this benefactor had you do for him in exchange for something like that.
And did Dennis mention that some nights, you wouldn't even come home at all? He would wake up the next morning to a drafty, empty house, and suddenly missing the view of his kind-eyed roommate perched on the tiny counter and peering into the high cupboards in nothing but an old, oversized band t-shirt running down to above your knees. Dennis would spend breakfast all twitchy and nervous and stumbling around you, avoiding the shape of you in the tight space. Though he always felt as if his heart would drive up to its peak to a cardiac arrest, he would do anything to get that feeling back, just to see you like that again. Now, Dennis eats his toast all by himself like a sad, damp cat, wishing he could still feel your legs unwittingly brushing against his under the table, as he sighed and watched over the empty kitchen where the only thing left of you was the lingering smell of metal and the shadow of the leftover container in the microwave. Not to overreact, but it felt like grieving someone who was still alive.
But Dennis surely wouldn’t survive an emergency medicine residency if he was lax enough to accept a patient’s sad excuse of “tripping over the curb” when he could see the obvious scarlet bleeding through the shoulder of your coat. Dennis would be crazy not to snoop into this "business" of yours, and he was set on making sure you fess up tonight.
The analogue clock in the corner of the living room read 2:47 AM. It'll be only a bit from now, and you would come whining down the hallway from the front door. Normally, he would have been in bed for hours after coming home from his shift to get ready for the next one, and only waking up when he hears the front door swing to announce you've arrived home, and falling again to sleep, with a bit of difficulty, trying to relax and get you off his mind. Fortunately, his attending had offered that he take a leave tomorrow, freeing up time for his momentous confrontation.
He was sitting on the cold floorboards of the living room, silence misting its way around the entire flat, leaning his back against the foot of the blue-velvet couch you both had curb-recycled just two months ago. On his side of the coffee table are his Chinese takeaways—a sad lump of fried rice and four measly dumplings—and on the other end was yours, stacked with an unhealthy amount of chili packets he knew you liked and saved for you. It was going to get cold and soggy soon. The steam had begun condensing on the ceiling of the plastic container. His back ached from his shift. Then Dennis felt guilty, again, about thinking of his own weariness when he knew you were dealing with something much more difficult.
During his speedy lunch breaks, he half-expected you to come rushing into the ED on a gurney, and though he quickly fell into a guilt of thinking something so morbid, it could lend him the chance to save you for once, and trap you into explaining what the hell is happening. He’d wiped his palms on his scrubs, trying to wash away the thought that he almost wanted you to get hurt just so he could be the one to fix you.
But he wouldn't let himself become so passive. When investigating your class schedules the other week, Dennis had found out that all of your shifts ended at the same time as him, and because your clinic wasn't all that far from your flat, you should always get home before Dennis did. It made him even more nervous, more needy about confronting you about it, and as the clock ticked on, he felt that it began beating with the pulse of his worried heart in pursuit of you, wanting to know where you were and what you were doing, if you were alright and if he could fix you up if you weren't, if he could come with you during your night-outs, wait around for you just to be sure that you could come home to him in one piece, just to be sure that the only person keeping him grounded in this whole city wasn't-
Thump.
Dennis stiffened at the sound. It came from upstairs, soft yet striking his attention, from his... bedroom. He didn't move until there came another sound, another thump.
He leaped to his feet as his shin hit the coffee table, letting his takeaway container to fall and spill its contents.
Shit, Dennis thought. I'll clean that up later.
He crept towards the stairs, but lingered before the first step. This was supposed to be a safe neighbourhood. It was the kind of place where people actually trimmed their hedges, maintained the white of their picket fences, and left their porch lights on—it was a far cry from the gravel pits Dennis had survived before. Where he had stayed before he moved in with you, there were pushers and bottom-feeders at every corner, biding for a piece of meat to shake down. Before that, he'd slept around in on-call rooms and gym lounges just to get through the night and...
Oh, fuck. Did Dennis owe anyone any money? He wasn't completely certain that he didn't make any, er, "enemies" when contending with the twitchy, super-pilled debt collectors of Pittsburgh. Perhaps they had tracked him down and finally decided to collect. Dennis's stomach turned and twisted into tight knots, roaming to his throat until he felt he would burst out choking if he opened his mouth. He couldn't believe that he had brought home his messy past when this was supposed to be your safe space, that he had compromised the sanctuary you had so graciously shared with him.
But Dennis was going to fix this. He wasn't going to let you come home to more perils when you're already dealing with your own shit. He palmed the stair railing with a clenched jaw, feeling for some stability, and despite his nervousness, forged ahead. One foot in front of the other, up the carpeted treads, but slowly, wanting to delay his great showdown with planning how to take on this intruder. He's got a baseball bat in his room, but it was hidden in the far corner, away from the door. He's got a vase on the shelf by the doorframe, but it would make for a one-time hit before he's left weaponless. Providentially, as the outside of his bedroom door came into view, the accent lamp set on the tiny table by the other side of the doorframe twinkled happily like a lone firefly in a dim field.
Perfect.
He inched closer to the door on his hands and knees, cautious not to step on the floorboards where they usually creak, and let his fingers snake around the plug of the atrociously-neon green lamp to pull it off the table. Then, Dennis is squatting by the door, wincing shakily when he remembers the day you had bought it together at a nearby flea market, and now he was going to scuff it up by using it to knock a burglar over the head. A shark that he basically invited into your home. This would have all been avoided if he never accepted your offer, and you would've been safe, save for your nightly exploits.
He placed his right ear on the wood of the door, listening for anything. But everything was still. Dennis pressed against the door even closer, wanting to catch any auditory hint on what he would be dealing with on the other side. He expected to hear someone rifling through his drawers for cash, their heavy boots dragging across his carpets and muttering murder in a gruff voice. A typical criminal. But what he heard wasn't what he expected at all.
A weak, ragged cough, followed by heavy breathing.
Then, the faint sound of a zipper running, stalling, until a soft, pained sob cut through the air, piercing into his heart through the door, so familiar that he could swear...
Dennis didn't think.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
His window was slid open, an indistinct handprint on the lower-left corner, a chill coming through and infringing the comfort of the space. He could hear only his heavy breath in the silence, and his heart hammering in his chest as he struggled to quiet himself. There was only darkness as far as Dennis could see outdoors, except for the amber lights of the neighbors' houses and their beeping, red security sensors. I should've bought a couple of those when I moved in, Dennis thinks.
But that was unimportant. He couldn’t dwell on it. Past his bed, right below his window, was you.
Propped up on the leg of his desk with your head down, clutching at your abdomen in agony as a thick, maroon liquid filtered itself through your fingers and dripped down your hands to stain the cuffs of your worn, grey jacket, coming to pool in little puddles on his bedroom floor. It was an unspeakable sight, seeing you covered in your own blood, but it disconcerted Dennis even more when he noticed you sobbing. You were naturally indisposed and distressed due to your condition, but you were stifling your little whimpers and sniffles. A little wince, and there comes a sharp inhale to choke it down. A slight shiver and a shaky swallow to mask it up.
The lamp slipped from his numb fingers, thudding onto the carpet.
"Dennis-"
"Shut up," he breathed, losing his wits at every second passing. Dennis was across the room in two strides, falling to his knees beside you. "Shut up and let me see. Put down your hands, honey, and let me see. Move your hands."
You purse your lips in defiance, heels digging into the floor as you try to kick away desperately and farther away from your roommate, and pressing tighter on your torso, like you wanted to hide it—the several, steady streams of blood pouring down on his carpets—from him. But every inch you tried to move back left a smeared trail of crimson on the floorboards, a grisly map of your stubbornness. You panted through your nose uncontrollably, and gulping anxiously as you pressed your forearms tighter against your torso. In his head, he was already thinking of all the different injuries you could possibly have this time, and trying to remember how much he had reloaded the first aid kits the last time he did so he could work on easing your pain properly with the right materials. Dennis was only inches away from you, his shadow looming over you and his arms outstretched to you, but not touching. Not yet. Only when you'll let him.
"No," you wheezed, wet and broken. "It's okay, Dennis. I'm okay. This isn't anything to be afraid of."
Afraid? You're bleeding your ribs out, looking like a cough away from death, and you were mistaking Dennis to be afraid? He’d seen worse in the trauma bay. Maybe he was afraid, for the sole reason that he didn't want his best friend to die out on him, but he wasn't afraid of how big of a mess you were in. Whether it was physically, with your weak, contorting body repelling his help and drowning in your own gore, or whatever circumstances you had landed yourself into to come home to Dennis like this.
"Move your hands," he repeated, his voice dropping an octave, settling into the familiar steadiness he used when handling combative patients at work. He wasn't letting anyone push him over right now, even if it was you, and he normally would never even think of defying you. He leaned in, the warmth between your proximity cutting through the chill of the night, invading your personal space until you had no choice but to surrender. "I’m not asking as your roommate right now, I’m asking as your doctor. Move."
The doctor card obviously worked. Your resistance flickered, and finally, your shoulders dropped. Your red-slicked fingers loosened their grip on your stomach, and Dennis didn't waste a single second. He reached out, his warm hands finally making contact, steady against your shivering frame. It was crucial that he worked slow, because slow is steady, and steady is fast, as he had learned from the ED, and it was crucial that he wouldn't scare you off with moving too brisk when you were this vulnerable. He could feel the heat radiating off you—a feverish warmth that, from a touch of his hand on your clothed body, he could already tell was an unhealthy temperature. Carefully, Dennis moved the zipper down completely and peeled back the grey fabric, the right of your jacket where the red bled bigger, expecting to find a jagged laceration or a puncture wound from a cheap knife of a fight you had probably gotten into in the streets. But it wasn't anything like that at all.
As that side of your jacket slid off, his fingers brushed against a texture that made his skin crawl. It was cold, with a microscopic weave that caught on his fingertips like those itchy, microfiber cloths he used to wipe down the windows when cleaning, but stronger. This familiar fabric was completely shredded, a vibrant red mesh torn into ribbons that couldn't possibly be tattered by anything other than... claws. A stupid thought. What animal with claws so huge did Pittsburgh even have that were common enough to be able to attack someone in the middle of the night? But Dennis couldn't think about it for too long. Not when the fabric hummed underneath his palms with a faint vibration. It was buzzing from his fingertips straight to his chest, mimicking the frantic thrum of your heart, and bringing him back to that moment in the laundry room so long ago in a familiar surge of murderous electricity.
He pushed open the left of your jacket slowly, his knuckles grazing the soft skin of your ribs just above the wound, and that was when he saw it. The edge of a black, serrated leg. Then another. He followed the lines with his eyes, breathless, as he opened up your jacket completely and uncovered the centered, obsidian logo of a spider splayed across your chest, a certain pattern he only ever saw on the news and in red and blue flashes when they literally swung by to quickly drop battered civilians to the trauma bay during Dennis’s mass casualty shifts. Suddenly, all of his moments with you came rushing back to him, the gargoyle-squats, the teleportation, the dryer shocks. Every single one of them turned insignificant in an instant, a thousand scattered puzzle pieces finally slamming into place to form an impossibility that he couldn't fathom. This couldn't be real. Stuff like this doesn't happen to frumpy farm boys like Dennis.
His hands stuck where he stopped moving last, pinned to yours sides and grasping on the zippered hem of your jacket, his thumbs resting right against the edge of your suit's chest. Despite your blood now catching against his knuckles, he was looking at you—really looking, peering at you—now that his life had once again tilted on its axis, the second time after you had first taken him in, all of his stupid points cumulating to a different direction after all.
Holy fucking shit balls of crap.
His roommate is Spider-Man.
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author's note: the party ended on 16 april 2026 but i’m still here…… aaaand no one cares anymore for my boy dennis but wtv let’s get da hype up again. i never check tags as a reader but on this side of a fic i thought i really needed to scrape up the wits to write the warnings BUT IT'S NOT LIKE THERE'S A LOT it's just that they're badly written. also i did an insanely insufficient amount of marvel research for this (which is 0 research) so there are inconsistencies concerning the suit fabric i think (x-men supremacist through and through) so pls don’t mind it lol. also this is uhhh specifically s1 dennis whitaker or whatever like. idk if i'm gonna write a part two maybe when the party starts again
summary: dennis whitaker was a pro at looking the other way. he ignores his teleporting roommate, their static-charged laundry, and their mysterious night-shift "rotations." he was happy to stay in the dark—until the dark breaks into his room at 2am. he's unconventionally armed and ready to square up, but he finds something else no amount of ED shifts could've prepared him for; or, dennis whitaker gwen stacy au
pairing: dennis whitaker x spider-man!reader
word count: 4075 words
tags and warnings: gn!reader kinda, marvel!au, spider-man!au but in pittsburgh..., slow-burn&roommates-to-lovers (not yet really but like i'm tryna build up tension), kindaa graphic depiction of injuries (blood and claw marks), slight hurt/comfort, no use of y/n, reader is in veterinary med school and is from new york. bc spider-man is from new york, dennis whitaker is stupid but what’s new, there’s also kinda no action at all bc it’s 95% dennis’s thoughts n pov…… and also yearning
Dennis Whitaker didn't ask for much out of life: snagging a residency at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, a local Runza that won't taste like cardboard for once, and a roommate who didn't come home smelling like ozone and burnt Kevlar at three in the morning.
He really wanted to mind his own business. In fact, it was the only thing Dennis knew to a tee. Growing up with three older brothers, it was always in his best interest to keep his head down when the situation didn’t concern him, or he would have to endure an abominable afternoon of extra teasing and roughhousing. He had always liked peace, and additionally, it wasn't in his guts to confront you when it was your grant paying for your shared flat. Dennis wasn't ready to pass up a free room to go back to being "between houses" over something that could be an entirely simple misunderstanding that he inflated to be a huge problem.
But it gets to a point.
The point being the plethora of your various oddities that included, but was not limited to: (1) your baffling relationship with the floor plan. Dennis had lost count of how many times he’d heard the attic—which was both your super-secret veterinary science lab/bedroom—door shut, only to see you walking down the street thirty seconds later from the living room window; (2) the fact that you could never use the furniture correctly. Dennis could walk into the living room and find you perched on the very edge of the window sill or squatting on the back of the sofa like a gargoyle, an “exercise” you would claim was for your sciatica. But he’d seen you balance a textbook on your knees when you studied while your heels were barely on the couch's two-inch-wide armrest. He wasn't a real doctor yet, but comfortable habits like that were definitely not to be diagnosed with sciatica; (3) your clothes always seemed to be static-charged to a murderous degree. Dennis had once reached into the dryer to kindly help you move a load once and got a shock that travelled all the way to his shoulders, which you had laughed off as coming from the “synthetic fur” from a husky you had treated at class that day.
Months ago, when you’d first found him dozing off in a UPMC study lounge and offered him the spare room, Dennis had assumed you were just a typical NYC transplant. A high-strung and over-caffeinated kid with deep empathy for pathetic, farm-boy medical students like him.
And he was right, because you were a bit of a stereotype.
Getting to know you was like trying to drink from a fire hose, which, for a guy who spent the first twenty-something years of his life watching corn grow, was enough of a change to make him feel like his world had turned upside-down, ten times more intensely than the first time he had left home. But as much as your anarchy gave Dennis an, admittedly, painfully-sharp comparison from Nebraska, as much as it pushed him to be homesick for the vast plains of home, the many, messy months of sharing a cramped flat with you—mornings spent with your backs together, him on the toaster and you on your morning tea, and your free afternoons spent quizzing each other on human anatomy and veterinary jargon—have conditioned Dennis to feel a deeper, more specific sense of anticipation for you during the many nights you would leave home for your mystifying, night-shift "rotations".
Dennis didn't know much about the responsibilities of veterinary students. He always assumed you were just as busy as him, with schedules just as unforgiving and frenzied. Any variation of medical school could kill. Dennis himself would come home reeking of a mix of blood, sweat, and tears that weren't his own, and limping from a cumulation of exhaustion and feisty patients that wouldn't let him make them take something as simple as a pill, so he had a basis of what your own fatigue could be like. But you, for far too many times, and getting more frequent lately, would come home so tired that you would be lurching and flying off the walls just to get to your room, whimpering in pain, and oddly stained in mysterious, black goo. If Dennis could stretch his stupid, far-fetched thoughts a bit more, maybe what you really spent your time on was a... part-time job being a goddamn mechanic, but even that wouldn't constitute such fatigue.
On those nights, he would meet you at the end of the tiny foyer, leaning against the wall waiting for you to come to him, with his hands behind his back as he clutched a first aid kit, but just before Dennis could grab onto your shoulders to get you to stop, to slow down to his pace, you scrape up enough strength to rush past him, muttering a "good night" with your ever-sprightly tone, and up the set of stairs to slam your door shut. It was like you sensed what he was wanting to do. Though he understood that both of you weren't that close, and imagined that it wasn't right to cross this particular boundary, he couldn't imagine you cleaning yourself up, alone, in your room, breaking down from whatever burnout your "rotation" had forced on you. He knew what it was like, and he hoped he could help you with it.
All Dennis wanted to do was take care of you. Like you had taken care of him by inviting him into your home, and by extension, your life.
He couldn't help but think that he had begun irritating you with his presence. Your days spent complaining about your shifts from hell and giggling through movie nights were slipping from his grasp, and it was coming clearer to him, now that you had begun shying away from doing grocery errands together, telling him "next time" and that you'd pick up the next list alone so you wouldn't bother him. Like you could ever do that. There was so much pain and death to handle at the ED, and the one, warm, friendly thing that used to wait for him at home wouldn't even look at him anymore, much less touch him, not even with a thirty-foot pole.
Dennis Whitaker was reaching the point where he couldn't just "mind his business" when your “business” was clearly trying to kill you. The way you’d go bone-still at the dinner table, your fork halfway to your mouth, eyes darting to the window five seconds before a police siren even turned the corner onto the avenue, disconcerted him. You brushed it off as intuition, a personal sixth sense for worrying about the stray dogs caught in distress of a crime, but Dennis had spent enough time in the ER to know something was off when he saw it. You were listening for some... thing that was bound to leave you withered by the next day, and it was wearing you thin.
He was reaching the point where he wanted to lock you up in the flat until you tell him why a vet student had a resting heart rate that shouldn't be biologically possible for a girl of your health. The one time you both practiced taking each other's vitals for a practical exam, he had noticed how high the beating of your heart had been, but you had pulled away his hand holding the diaphragm on your chest swiftly and roughly, with a look on your face so... ashamed, and whispered a quick "sorry", before he had the chance to question you about it. Dennis certainly didn’t underestimate the difficulty of veterinary med school, but your stress surely must have to come from something else entirely. A deep trauma he wanted to know and help you with.
And it leads to the stark of it all. Dennis wasn't a jealous man, not by any means, and not when you two were nothing more than friends. He was careful to never cross the line of being roommates, but he was reaching the point of genuine concern regarding your benefactor. He had seen the way you clutch your phone when blocked numbers called, and the way you’d whisper-argue with some guy named “Happy” about "suit diagnostics" and "containment protocols." In Dennis’s world, tech billionaires didn't just give out academic grants to pretty students from Queens out of the goodness of their hearts. They always wanted something more. And every time you came home with a fresh purple bloom of a bruise on your jaw, Dennis’s mind went to the darkest place any sane person’s mind could go. This guy even let you "borrow" his plane to fly home to your aunt. Dennis wondered what this benefactor had you do for him in exchange for something like that.
And did Dennis mention that some nights, you wouldn't even come home at all? He would wake up the next morning to a drafty, empty house, and suddenly missing the view of his kind-eyed roommate perched on the tiny counter and peering into the high cupboards in nothing but an old, oversized band t-shirt running down to above your knees. Dennis would spend breakfast all twitchy and nervous and stumbling around you, avoiding the shape of you in the tight space. Though he always felt as if his heart would drive up to its peak to a cardiac arrest, he would do anything to get that feeling back, just to see you like that again. Now, Dennis eats his toast all by himself like a sad, damp cat, wishing he could still feel your legs unwittingly brushing against his under the table, as he sighed and watched over the empty kitchen where the only thing left of you was the lingering smell of metal and the shadow of the leftover container in the microwave. Not to overreact, but it felt like grieving someone who was still alive.
But Dennis surely wouldn’t survive an emergency medicine residency if he was lax enough to accept a patient’s sad excuse of “tripping over the curb” when he could see the obvious scarlet bleeding through the shoulder of your coat. Dennis would be crazy not to snoop into this "business" of yours, and he was set on making sure you fess up tonight.
The analogue clock in the corner of the living room read 2:47 AM. It'll be only a bit from now, and you would come whining down the hallway from the front door. Normally, he would have been in bed for hours after coming home from his shift to get ready for the next one, and only waking up when he hears the front door swing to announce you've arrived home, and falling again to sleep, with a bit of difficulty, trying to relax and get you off his mind. Fortunately, his attending had offered that he take a leave tomorrow, freeing up time for his momentous confrontation.
He was sitting on the cold floorboards of the living room, silence misting its way around the entire flat, leaning his back against the foot of the blue-velvet couch you both had curb-recycled just two months ago. On his side of the coffee table are his Chinese takeaways—a sad lump of fried rice and four measly dumplings—and on the other end was yours, stacked with an unhealthy amount of chili packets he knew you liked and saved for you. It was going to get cold and soggy soon. The steam had begun condensing on the ceiling of the plastic container. His back ached from his shift. Then Dennis felt guilty, again, about thinking of his own weariness when he knew you were dealing with something much more difficult.
During his speedy lunch breaks, he half-expected you to come rushing into the ED on a gurney, and though he quickly fell into a guilt of thinking something so morbid, it could lend him the chance to save you for once, and trap you into explaining what the hell is happening. He’d wiped his palms on his scrubs, trying to wash away the thought that he almost wanted you to get hurt just so he could be the one to fix you.
But he wouldn't let himself become so passive. When investigating your class schedules the other week, Dennis had found out that all of your shifts ended at the same time as him, and because your clinic wasn't all that far from your flat, you should always get home before Dennis did. It made him even more nervous, more needy about confronting you about it, and as the clock ticked on, he felt that it began beating with the pulse of his worried heart in pursuit of you, wanting to know where you were and what you were doing, if you were alright and if he could fix you up if you weren't, if he could come with you during your night-outs, wait around for you just to be sure that you could come home to him in one piece, just to be sure that the only person keeping him grounded in this whole city wasn't-
Thump.
Dennis stiffened at the sound. It came from upstairs, soft yet striking his attention, from his... bedroom. He didn't move until there came another sound, another thump.
He leaped to his feet as his shin hit the coffee table, letting his takeaway container to fall and spill its contents.
Shit, Dennis thought. I'll clean that up later.
He crept towards the stairs, but lingered before the first step. This was supposed to be a safe neighbourhood. It was the kind of place where people actually trimmed their hedges, maintained the white of their picket fences, and left their porch lights on—it was a far cry from the gravel pits Dennis had survived before. Where he had stayed before he moved in with you, there were pushers and bottom-feeders at every corner, biding for a piece of meat to shake down. Before that, he'd slept around in on-call rooms and gym lounges just to get through the night and...
Oh, fuck. Did Dennis owe anyone any money? He wasn't completely certain that he didn't make any, er, "enemies" when contending with the twitchy, super-pilled debt collectors of Pittsburgh. Perhaps they had tracked him down and finally decided to collect. Dennis's stomach turned and twisted into tight knots, roaming to his throat until he felt he would burst out choking if he opened his mouth. He couldn't believe that he had brought home his messy past when this was supposed to be your safe space, that he had compromised the sanctuary you had so graciously shared with him.
But Dennis was going to fix this. He wasn't going to let you come home to more perils when you're already dealing with your own shit. He palmed the stair railing with a clenched jaw, feeling for some stability, and despite his nervousness, forged ahead. One foot in front of the other, up the carpeted treads, but slowly, wanting to delay his great showdown with planning how to take on this intruder. He's got a baseball bat in his room, but it was hidden in the far corner, away from the door. He's got a vase on the shelf by the doorframe, but it would make for a one-time hit before he's left weaponless. Providentially, as the outside of his bedroom door came into view, the accent lamp set on the tiny table by the other side of the doorframe twinkled happily like a lone firefly in a dim field.
Perfect.
He inched closer to the door on his hands and knees, cautious not to step on the floorboards where they usually creak, and let his fingers snake around the plug of the atrociously-neon green lamp to pull it off the table. Then, Dennis is squatting by the door, wincing shakily when he remembers the day you had bought it together at a nearby flea market, and now he was going to scuff it up by using it to knock a burglar over the head. A shark that he basically invited into your home. This would have all been avoided if he never accepted your offer, and you would've been safe, save for your nightly exploits.
He placed his right ear on the wood of the door, listening for anything. But everything was still. Dennis pressed against the door even closer, wanting to catch any auditory hint on what he would be dealing with on the other side. He expected to hear someone rifling through his drawers for cash, their heavy boots dragging across his carpets and muttering murder in a gruff voice. A typical criminal. But what he heard wasn't what he expected at all.
A weak, ragged cough, followed by heavy breathing.
Then, the faint sound of a zipper running, stalling, until a soft, pained sob cut through the air, piercing into his heart through the door, so familiar that he could swear...
Dennis didn't think.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
His window was slid open, an indistinct handprint on the lower-left corner, a chill coming through and infringing the comfort of the space. He could hear only his heavy breath in the silence, and his heart hammering in his chest as he struggled to quiet himself. There was only darkness as far as Dennis could see outdoors, except for the amber lights of the neighbors' houses and their beeping, red security sensors. I should've bought a couple of those when I moved in, Dennis thinks.
But that was unimportant. He couldn’t dwell on it. Past his bed, right below his window, was you.
Propped up on the leg of his desk with your head down, clutching at your abdomen in agony as a thick, maroon liquid filtered itself through your fingers and dripped down your hands to stain the cuffs of your worn, grey jacket, coming to pool in little puddles on his bedroom floor. It was an unspeakable sight, seeing you covered in your own blood, but it disconcerted Dennis even more when he noticed you sobbing. You were naturally indisposed and distressed due to your condition, but you were stifling your little whimpers and sniffles. A little wince, and there comes a sharp inhale to choke it down. A slight shiver and a shaky swallow to mask it up.
The lamp slipped from his numb fingers, thudding onto the carpet.
"Dennis-"
"Shut up," he breathed, losing his wits at every second passing. Dennis was across the room in two strides, falling to his knees beside you. "Shut up and let me see. Put down your hands, honey, and let me see. Move your hands."
You purse your lips in defiance, heels digging into the floor as you try to kick away desperately and farther away from your roommate, and pressing tighter on your torso, like you wanted to hide it—the several, steady streams of blood pouring down on his carpets—from him. But every inch you tried to move back left a smeared trail of crimson on the floorboards, a grisly map of your stubbornness. You panted through your nose uncontrollably, and gulping anxiously as you pressed your forearms tighter against your torso. In his head, he was already thinking of all the different injuries you could possibly have this time, and trying to remember how much he had reloaded the first aid kits the last time he did so he could work on easing your pain properly with the right materials. Dennis was only inches away from you, his shadow looming over you and his arms outstretched to you, but not touching. Not yet. Only when you'll let him.
"No," you wheezed, wet and broken. "It's okay, Dennis. I'm okay. This isn't anything to be afraid of."
Afraid? You're bleeding your ribs out, looking like a cough away from death, and you were mistaking Dennis to be afraid? He’d seen worse in the trauma bay. Maybe he was afraid, for the sole reason that he didn't want his best friend to die out on him, but he wasn't afraid of how big of a mess you were in. Whether it was physically, with your weak, contorting body repelling his help and drowning in your own gore, or whatever circumstances you had landed yourself into to come home to Dennis like this.
"Move your hands," he repeated, his voice dropping an octave, settling into the familiar steadiness he used when handling combative patients at work. He wasn't letting anyone push him over right now, even if it was you, and he normally would never even think of defying you. He leaned in, the warmth between your proximity cutting through the chill of the night, invading your personal space until you had no choice but to surrender. "I’m not asking as your roommate right now, I’m asking as your doctor. Move."
The doctor card obviously worked. Your resistance flickered, and finally, your shoulders dropped. Your red-slicked fingers loosened their grip on your stomach, and Dennis didn't waste a single second. He reached out, his warm hands finally making contact, steady against your shivering frame. It was crucial that he worked slow, because slow is steady, and steady is fast, as he had learned from the ED, and it was crucial that he wouldn't scare you off with moving too brisk when you were this vulnerable. He could feel the heat radiating off you—a feverish warmth that, from a touch of his hand on your clothed body, he could already tell was an unhealthy temperature. Carefully, Dennis moved the zipper down completely and peeled back the grey fabric, the right of your jacket where the red bled bigger, expecting to find a jagged laceration or a puncture wound from a cheap knife of a fight you had probably gotten into in the streets. But it wasn't anything like that at all.
As that side of your jacket slid off, his fingers brushed against a texture that made his skin crawl. It was cold, with a microscopic weave that caught on his fingertips like those itchy, microfiber cloths he used to wipe down the windows when cleaning, but stronger. This familiar fabric was completely shredded, a vibrant red mesh torn into ribbons that couldn't possibly be tattered by anything other than... claws. A stupid thought. What animal with claws so huge did Pittsburgh even have that were common enough to be able to attack someone in the middle of the night? But Dennis couldn't think about it for too long. Not when the fabric hummed underneath his palms with a faint vibration. It was buzzing from his fingertips straight to his chest, mimicking the frantic thrum of your heart, and bringing him back to that moment in the laundry room so long ago in a familiar surge of murderous electricity.
He pushed open the left of your jacket slowly, his knuckles grazing the soft skin of your ribs just above the wound, and that was when he saw it. The edge of a black, serrated leg. Then another. He followed the lines with his eyes, breathless, as he opened up your jacket completely and uncovered the centered, obsidian logo of a spider splayed across your chest, a certain pattern he only ever saw on the news and in red and blue flashes when they literally swung by to quickly drop battered civilians to the trauma bay during Dennis’s mass casualty shifts. Suddenly, all of his moments with you came rushing back to him, the gargoyle-squats, the teleportation, the dryer shocks. Every single one of them turned insignificant in an instant, a thousand scattered puzzle pieces finally slamming into place to form an impossibility that he couldn't fathom. This couldn't be real. Stuff like this doesn't happen to frumpy farm boys like Dennis.
His hands stuck where he stopped moving last, pinned to yours sides and grasping on the zippered hem of your jacket, his thumbs resting right against the edge of your suit's chest. Despite your blood now catching against his knuckles, he was looking at you—really looking, peering at you—now that his life had once again tilted on its axis, the second time after you had first taken him in, all of his stupid points cumulating to a different direction after all.
Holy fucking shit balls of crap.
His roommate is Spider-Man.
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author's note: the party ended on 16 april 2026 but i’m still here…… aaaand no one cares anymore for my boy dennis but wtv let’s get da hype up again. i never check tags as a reader but on this side of a fic i thought i really needed to scrape up the wits to write the warnings BUT IT'S NOT LIKE THERE'S A LOT it's just that they're badly written. also i did an insanely insufficient amount of marvel research for this (which is 0 research) so there are inconsistencies concerning the suit fabric i think (x-men supremacist through and through) so pls don’t mind it lol. also this is uhhh specifically s1 dennis whitaker or whatever like. idk if i'm gonna write a part two maybe when the party starts again
i wanna write for jjk sooo bad but i've only just started (literally on ep6 right now ugh)........ but satoru gojo cecilia tallis atonement au is calling to me
summary: dennis whitaker was a pro at looking the other way. he ignores his teleporting roommate, their static-charged laundry, and their mysterious night-shift "rotations." he was happy to stay in the dark—until the dark breaks into his room at 2am. he's unconventionally armed and ready to square up, but he finds something else no amount of ED shifts could've prepared him for; or, dennis whitaker gwen stacy au
pairing: dennis whitaker x spider-man!reader
word count: 4075 words
tags and warnings: gn!reader kinda, marvel!au, spider-man!au but in pittsburgh..., slow-burn&roommates-to-lovers (not yet really but like i'm tryna build up tension), kindaa graphic depiction of injuries (blood and claw marks), slight hurt/comfort, no use of y/n, reader is in veterinary med school and is from new york. bc spider-man is from new york, dennis whitaker is stupid but what’s new, there’s also kinda no action at all bc it’s 95% dennis’s thoughts n pov…… and also yearning
Dennis Whitaker didn't ask for much out of life: snagging a residency at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, a local Runza that won't taste like cardboard for once, and a roommate who didn't come home smelling like ozone and burnt Kevlar at three in the morning.
He really wanted to mind his own business. In fact, it was the only thing Dennis knew to a tee. Growing up with three older brothers, it was always in his best interest to keep his head down when the situation didn’t concern him, or he would have to endure an abominable afternoon of extra teasing and roughhousing. He had always liked peace, and additionally, it wasn't in his guts to confront you when it was your grant paying for your shared flat. Dennis wasn't ready to pass up a free room to go back to being "between houses" over something that could be an entirely simple misunderstanding that he inflated to be a huge problem.
But it gets to a point.
The point being the plethora of your various oddities that included, but was not limited to: (1) your baffling relationship with the floor plan. Dennis had lost count of how many times he’d heard the attic—which was both your super-secret veterinary science lab/bedroom—door shut, only to see you walking down the street thirty seconds later from the living room window; (2) the fact that you could never use the furniture correctly. Dennis could walk into the living room and find you perched on the very edge of the window sill or squatting on the back of the sofa like a gargoyle, an “exercise” you would claim was for your sciatica. But he’d seen you balance a textbook on your knees when you studied while your heels were barely on the couch's two-inch-wide armrest. He wasn't a real doctor yet, but comfortable habits like that were definitely not to be diagnosed with sciatica; (3) your clothes always seemed to be static-charged to a murderous degree. Dennis had once reached into the dryer to kindly help you move a load once and got a shock that travelled all the way to his shoulders, which you had laughed off as coming from the “synthetic fur” from a husky you had treated at class that day.
Months ago, when you’d first found him dozing off in a UPMC study lounge and offered him the spare room, Dennis had assumed you were just a typical NYC transplant. A high-strung and over-caffeinated kid with deep empathy for pathetic, farm-boy medical students like him.
And he was right, because you were a bit of a stereotype.
Getting to know you was like trying to drink from a fire hose, which, for a guy who spent the first twenty-something years of his life watching corn grow, was enough of a change to make him feel like his world had turned upside-down, ten times more intensely than the first time he had left home. But as much as your anarchy gave Dennis an, admittedly, painfully-sharp comparison from Nebraska, as much as it pushed him to be homesick for the vast plains of home, the many, messy months of sharing a cramped flat with you—mornings spent with your backs together, him on the toaster and you on your morning tea, and your free afternoons spent quizzing each other on human anatomy and veterinary jargon—have conditioned Dennis to feel a deeper, more specific sense of anticipation for you during the many nights you would leave home for your mystifying, night-shift "rotations".
Dennis didn't know much about the responsibilities of veterinary students. He always assumed you were just as busy as him, with schedules just as unforgiving and frenzied. Any variation of medical school could kill. Dennis himself would come home reeking of a mix of blood, sweat, and tears that weren't his own, and limping from a cumulation of exhaustion and feisty patients that wouldn't let him make them take something as simple as a pill, so he had a basis of what your own fatigue could be like. But you, for far too many times, and getting more frequent lately, would come home so tired that you would be lurching and flying off the walls just to get to your room, whimpering in pain, and oddly stained in mysterious, black goo. If Dennis could stretch his stupid, far-fetched thoughts a bit more, maybe what you really spent your time on was a... part-time job being a goddamn mechanic, but even that wouldn't constitute such fatigue.
On those nights, he would meet you at the end of the tiny foyer, leaning against the wall waiting for you to come to him, with his hands behind his back as he clutched a first aid kit, but just before Dennis could grab onto your shoulders to get you to stop, to slow down to his pace, you scrape up enough strength to rush past him, muttering a "good night" with your ever-sprightly tone, and up the set of stairs to slam your door shut. It was like you sensed what he was wanting to do. Though he understood that both of you weren't that close, and imagined that it wasn't right to cross this particular boundary, he couldn't imagine you cleaning yourself up, alone, in your room, breaking down from whatever burnout your "rotation" had forced on you. He knew what it was like, and he hoped he could help you with it.
All Dennis wanted to do was take care of you. Like you had taken care of him by inviting him into your home, and by extension, your life.
He couldn't help but think that he had begun irritating you with his presence. Your days spent complaining about your shifts from hell and giggling through movie nights were slipping from his grasp, and it was coming clearer to him, now that you had begun shying away from doing grocery errands together, telling him "next time" and that you'd pick up the next list alone so you wouldn't bother him. Like you could ever do that. There was so much pain and death to handle at the ED, and the one, warm, friendly thing that used to wait for him at home wouldn't even look at him anymore, much less touch him, not even with a thirty-foot pole.
Dennis Whitaker was reaching the point where he couldn't just "mind his business" when your “business” was clearly trying to kill you. The way you’d go bone-still at the dinner table, your fork halfway to your mouth, eyes darting to the window five seconds before a police siren even turned the corner onto the avenue, disconcerted him. You brushed it off as intuition, a personal sixth sense for worrying about the stray dogs caught in distress of a crime, but Dennis had spent enough time in the ER to know something was off when he saw it. You were listening for some... thing that was bound to leave you withered by the next day, and it was wearing you thin.
He was reaching the point where he wanted to lock you up in the flat until you tell him why a vet student had a resting heart rate that shouldn't be biologically possible for a girl of your health. The one time you both practiced taking each other's vitals for a practical exam, he had noticed how high the beating of your heart had been, but you had pulled away his hand holding the diaphragm on your chest swiftly and roughly, with a look on your face so... ashamed, and whispered a quick "sorry", before he had the chance to question you about it. Dennis certainly didn’t underestimate the difficulty of veterinary med school, but your stress surely must have to come from something else entirely. A deep trauma he wanted to know and help you with.
And it leads to the stark of it all. Dennis wasn't a jealous man, not by any means, and not when you two were nothing more than friends. He was careful to never cross the line of being roommates, but he was reaching the point of genuine concern regarding your benefactor. He had seen the way you clutch your phone when blocked numbers called, and the way you’d whisper-argue with some guy named “Happy” about "suit diagnostics" and "containment protocols." In Dennis’s world, tech billionaires didn't just give out academic grants to pretty students from Queens out of the goodness of their hearts. They always wanted something more. And every time you came home with a fresh purple bloom of a bruise on your jaw, Dennis’s mind went to the darkest place any sane person’s mind could go. This guy even let you "borrow" his plane to fly home to your aunt. Dennis wondered what this benefactor had you do for him in exchange for something like that.
And did Dennis mention that some nights, you wouldn't even come home at all? He would wake up the next morning to a drafty, empty house, and suddenly missing the view of his kind-eyed roommate perched on the tiny counter and peering into the high cupboards in nothing but an old, oversized band t-shirt running down to above your knees. Dennis would spend breakfast all twitchy and nervous and stumbling around you, avoiding the shape of you in the tight space. Though he always felt as if his heart would drive up to its peak to a cardiac arrest, he would do anything to get that feeling back, just to see you like that again. Now, Dennis eats his toast all by himself like a sad, damp cat, wishing he could still feel your legs unwittingly brushing against his under the table, as he sighed and watched over the empty kitchen where the only thing left of you was the lingering smell of metal and the shadow of the leftover container in the microwave. Not to overreact, but it felt like grieving someone who was still alive.
But Dennis surely wouldn’t survive an emergency medicine residency if he was lax enough to accept a patient’s sad excuse of “tripping over the curb” when he could see the obvious scarlet bleeding through the shoulder of your coat. Dennis would be crazy not to snoop into this "business" of yours, and he was set on making sure you fess up tonight.
The analogue clock in the corner of the living room read 2:47 AM. It'll be only a bit from now, and you would come whining down the hallway from the front door. Normally, he would have been in bed for hours after coming home from his shift to get ready for the next one, and only waking up when he hears the front door swing to announce you've arrived home, and falling again to sleep, with a bit of difficulty, trying to relax and get you off his mind. Fortunately, his attending had offered that he take a leave tomorrow, freeing up time for his momentous confrontation.
He was sitting on the cold floorboards of the living room, silence misting its way around the entire flat, leaning his back against the foot of the blue-velvet couch you both had curb-recycled just two months ago. On his side of the coffee table are his Chinese takeaways—a sad lump of fried rice and four measly dumplings—and on the other end was yours, stacked with an unhealthy amount of chili packets he knew you liked and saved for you. It was going to get cold and soggy soon. The steam had begun condensing on the ceiling of the plastic container. His back ached from his shift. Then Dennis felt guilty, again, about thinking of his own weariness when he knew you were dealing with something much more difficult.
During his speedy lunch breaks, he half-expected you to come rushing into the ED on a gurney, and though he quickly fell into a guilt of thinking something so morbid, it could lend him the chance to save you for once, and trap you into explaining what the hell is happening. He’d wiped his palms on his scrubs, trying to wash away the thought that he almost wanted you to get hurt just so he could be the one to fix you.
But he wouldn't let himself become so passive. When investigating your class schedules the other week, Dennis had found out that all of your shifts ended at the same time as him, and because your clinic wasn't all that far from your flat, you should always get home before Dennis did. It made him even more nervous, more needy about confronting you about it, and as the clock ticked on, he felt that it began beating with the pulse of his worried heart in pursuit of you, wanting to know where you were and what you were doing, if you were alright and if he could fix you up if you weren't, if he could come with you during your night-outs, wait around for you just to be sure that you could come home to him in one piece, just to be sure that the only person keeping him grounded in this whole city wasn't-
Thump.
Dennis stiffened at the sound. It came from upstairs, soft yet striking his attention, from his... bedroom. He didn't move until there came another sound, another thump.
He leaped to his feet as his shin hit the coffee table, letting his takeaway container to fall and spill its contents.
Shit, Dennis thought. I'll clean that up later.
He crept towards the stairs, but lingered before the first step. This was supposed to be a safe neighbourhood. It was the kind of place where people actually trimmed their hedges, maintained the white of their picket fences, and left their porch lights on—it was a far cry from the gravel pits Dennis had survived before. Where he had stayed before he moved in with you, there were pushers and bottom-feeders at every corner, biding for a piece of meat to shake down. Before that, he'd slept around in on-call rooms and gym lounges just to get through the night and...
Oh, fuck. Did Dennis owe anyone any money? He wasn't completely certain that he didn't make any, er, "enemies" when contending with the twitchy, super-pilled debt collectors of Pittsburgh. Perhaps they had tracked him down and finally decided to collect. Dennis's stomach turned and twisted into tight knots, roaming to his throat until he felt he would burst out choking if he opened his mouth. He couldn't believe that he had brought home his messy past when this was supposed to be your safe space, that he had compromised the sanctuary you had so graciously shared with him.
But Dennis was going to fix this. He wasn't going to let you come home to more perils when you're already dealing with your own shit. He palmed the stair railing with a clenched jaw, feeling for some stability, and despite his nervousness, forged ahead. One foot in front of the other, up the carpeted treads, but slowly, wanting to delay his great showdown with planning how to take on this intruder. He's got a baseball bat in his room, but it was hidden in the far corner, away from the door. He's got a vase on the shelf by the doorframe, but it would make for a one-time hit before he's left weaponless. Providentially, as the outside of his bedroom door came into view, the accent lamp set on the tiny table by the other side of the doorframe twinkled happily like a lone firefly in a dim field.
Perfect.
He inched closer to the door on his hands and knees, cautious not to step on the floorboards where they usually creak, and let his fingers snake around the plug of the atrociously-neon green lamp to pull it off the table. Then, Dennis is squatting by the door, wincing shakily when he remembers the day you had bought it together at a nearby flea market, and now he was going to scuff it up by using it to knock a burglar over the head. A shark that he basically invited into your home. This would have all been avoided if he never accepted your offer, and you would've been safe, save for your nightly exploits.
He placed his right ear on the wood of the door, listening for anything. But everything was still. Dennis pressed against the door even closer, wanting to catch any auditory hint on what he would be dealing with on the other side. He expected to hear someone rifling through his drawers for cash, their heavy boots dragging across his carpets and muttering murder in a gruff voice. A typical criminal. But what he heard wasn't what he expected at all.
A weak, ragged cough, followed by heavy breathing.
Then, the faint sound of a zipper running, stalling, until a soft, pained sob cut through the air, piercing into his heart through the door, so familiar that he could swear...
Dennis didn't think.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
His window was slid open, an indistinct handprint on the lower-left corner, a chill coming through and infringing the comfort of the space. He could hear only his heavy breath in the silence, and his heart hammering in his chest as he struggled to quiet himself. There was only darkness as far as Dennis could see outdoors, except for the amber lights of the neighbors' houses and their beeping, red security sensors. I should've bought a couple of those when I moved in, Dennis thinks.
But that was unimportant. He couldn’t dwell on it. Past his bed, right below his window, was you.
Propped up on the leg of his desk with your head down, clutching at your abdomen in agony as a thick, maroon liquid filtered itself through your fingers and dripped down your hands to stain the cuffs of your worn, grey jacket, coming to pool in little puddles on his bedroom floor. It was an unspeakable sight, seeing you covered in your own blood, but it disconcerted Dennis even more when he noticed you sobbing. You were naturally indisposed and distressed due to your condition, but you were stifling your little whimpers and sniffles. A little wince, and there comes a sharp inhale to choke it down. A slight shiver and a shaky swallow to mask it up.
The lamp slipped from his numb fingers, thudding onto the carpet.
"Dennis-"
"Shut up," he breathed, losing his wits at every second passing. Dennis was across the room in two strides, falling to his knees beside you. "Shut up and let me see. Put down your hands, honey, and let me see. Move your hands."
You purse your lips in defiance, heels digging into the floor as you try to kick away desperately and farther away from your roommate, and pressing tighter on your torso, like you wanted to hide it—the several, steady streams of blood pouring down on his carpets—from him. But every inch you tried to move back left a smeared trail of crimson on the floorboards, a grisly map of your stubbornness. You panted through your nose uncontrollably, and gulping anxiously as you pressed your forearms tighter against your torso. In his head, he was already thinking of all the different injuries you could possibly have this time, and trying to remember how much he had reloaded the first aid kits the last time he did so he could work on easing your pain properly with the right materials. Dennis was only inches away from you, his shadow looming over you and his arms outstretched to you, but not touching. Not yet. Only when you'll let him.
"No," you wheezed, wet and broken. "It's okay, Dennis. I'm okay. This isn't anything to be afraid of."
Afraid? You're bleeding your ribs out, looking like a cough away from death, and you were mistaking Dennis to be afraid? He’d seen worse in the trauma bay. Maybe he was afraid, for the sole reason that he didn't want his best friend to die out on him, but he wasn't afraid of how big of a mess you were in. Whether it was physically, with your weak, contorting body repelling his help and drowning in your own gore, or whatever circumstances you had landed yourself into to come home to Dennis like this.
"Move your hands," he repeated, his voice dropping an octave, settling into the familiar steadiness he used when handling combative patients at work. He wasn't letting anyone push him over right now, even if it was you, and he normally would never even think of defying you. He leaned in, the warmth between your proximity cutting through the chill of the night, invading your personal space until you had no choice but to surrender. "I’m not asking as your roommate right now, I’m asking as your doctor. Move."
The doctor card obviously worked. Your resistance flickered, and finally, your shoulders dropped. Your red-slicked fingers loosened their grip on your stomach, and Dennis didn't waste a single second. He reached out, his warm hands finally making contact, steady against your shivering frame. It was crucial that he worked slow, because slow is steady, and steady is fast, as he had learned from the ED, and it was crucial that he wouldn't scare you off with moving too brisk when you were this vulnerable. He could feel the heat radiating off you—a feverish warmth that, from a touch of his hand on your clothed body, he could already tell was an unhealthy temperature. Carefully, Dennis moved the zipper down completely and peeled back the grey fabric, the right of your jacket where the red bled bigger, expecting to find a jagged laceration or a puncture wound from a cheap knife of a fight you had probably gotten into in the streets. But it wasn't anything like that at all.
As that side of your jacket slid off, his fingers brushed against a texture that made his skin crawl. It was cold, with a microscopic weave that caught on his fingertips like those itchy, microfiber cloths he used to wipe down the windows when cleaning, but stronger. This familiar fabric was completely shredded, a vibrant red mesh torn into ribbons that couldn't possibly be tattered by anything other than... claws. A stupid thought. What animal with claws so huge did Pittsburgh even have that were common enough to be able to attack someone in the middle of the night? But Dennis couldn't think about it for too long. Not when the fabric hummed underneath his palms with a faint vibration. It was buzzing from his fingertips straight to his chest, mimicking the frantic thrum of your heart, and bringing him back to that moment in the laundry room so long ago in a familiar surge of murderous electricity.
He pushed open the left of your jacket slowly, his knuckles grazing the soft skin of your ribs just above the wound, and that was when he saw it. The edge of a black, serrated leg. Then another. He followed the lines with his eyes, breathless, as he opened up your jacket completely and uncovered the centered, obsidian logo of a spider splayed across your chest, a certain pattern he only ever saw on the news and in red and blue flashes when they literally swung by to quickly drop battered civilians to the trauma bay during Dennis’s mass casualty shifts. Suddenly, all of his moments with you came rushing back to him, the gargoyle-squats, the teleportation, the dryer shocks. Every single one of them turned insignificant in an instant, a thousand scattered puzzle pieces finally slamming into place to form an impossibility that he couldn't fathom. This couldn't be real. Stuff like this doesn't happen to frumpy farm boys like Dennis.
His hands stuck where he stopped moving last, pinned to your sides and grasping on the zippered hem of your jacket, his thumbs resting right against the edge of your suit's chest. Despite your blood now catching against his knuckles, he was looking at you—really looking, peering at you—now that his life had once again tilted on its axis, the second time after you had first taken him in, all of his stupid points cumulating to a different direction after all.
Holy fucking shit balls of crap.
His roommate is Spider-Man.
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author's note: the party ended on 16 april 2026 but i’m still here…… aaaand no one cares anymore for my boy dennis but wtv let’s get da hype up again. i never check tags as a reader but on this side of a fic i thought i really needed to scrape up the wits to write the warnings BUT IT'S NOT LIKE THERE'S A LOT it's just that they're badly written. also i did an insanely insufficient amount of marvel research for this (which is 0 research) so there are inconsistencies concerning the suit fabric i think (x-men supremacist through and through) so pls don’t mind it lol. also this is uhhh specifically s1 dennis whitaker or whatever like. idk if i'm gonna write a part two maybe when the party starts again
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