MINORS DNI 18+ ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟ
WORD COUNT. about 2k or so.
INSPO. fic meets spider-man video game of him mentoring black cat and entering a romantic relationship + brand new day spider-man personality. no spoilers. nsfw link position inspo + nsfw link peter sound inspo.
✉️ | marvel comics.
WARNINGS. fem black!cat!reader, established relationship, explicit smut, p in v, dash of angst, intro contains allusions to sex, lowkey exhibitionist behavior but nothing too explicit, not proofread, mentor/mentee dynamics mentioned, peter grabbing your hair mentioned, choking (m receiving), light roleplay, web on pussy mentioned, squirt mention.
“oh. must be the doordash.” you note with a content lilt to your tone, swinging your leg from a straddling position off of PETER PARKER. he lifts his hips to pull the sheet out from under them, n you drink in the way the muscle of his abdomen ripples under his skin. “we worked up an appetite, didn’t we?” you taunt knowingly, flashing him that look between a flutter of your lashes n bending over to pluck a piece of clothing off the floor.
“we still could’ve gone somewhere.” peter begs to differ - the same guy who protested the total when you two had ordered together.
you shrug minutely, “s’my treat.” you flick on his black hoodie, shimmying it down your naked body, the hem brushing just above your mid-thigh. an expression passes over his face, the one he always gets when he’s reminded how you won’t be seen with him in public. it’s quickly replaced, gaze softening at the sight of you so casually striding around his place in his clothes. he picks himself up into a sit, the cords in his arms flexing as he props up on them. if you didn’t want to snack before the food gets cold, you’d take another ride right now.
“if we don’t get it, are they gonna leave with it?” he jokes, a classic deflection. you raise the end of the sleeve of the jacket to your lips to veil your smile.
“they should’ve left it at the—“ you swing the entrance open, your eyes glancing from the ground to the person standing in front of you. “—door.” a woman you don’t recognize who isn’t carrying any food. “hello.” you say politely, but you’re not sure what to say after. out of the two of you, however, she’s the only one at unease.
“oh, i’m sorry.” she seemingly dissolves, hunching her shoulders, mouth stretching into an embarrassed grimace with a dash of a strained smile. “i was looking for someone else, i didn’t mean to—“
just then, peter turns the corner to come to a stop at your side. “do you need help carry—oh.” he shifts to show less of his naked chest, the last thing he was expecting was company from a neighbor. “ohhh, hi.” he acts like he’s caught in the act, and you look to him coolly for an explanation. once again, out of the trio, you’re the only one that’s comfortable, regardless if you can feel a breeze from the fact you’re not wearing any bottoms. there was absolutely no question about what the two of you had just done. “um, this is…” a tense hand gestures to the blonde in the doorway. “this is - sabrina.” he glances at you. “she lives in my building.” a significant heat rises to his cheeks, humiliation written all over him. a grin creeps onto your lips, the kind that stems from the humor of the situation. the hem of the hoodie sleeve finds a way in between your teeth, toying with it as you exchange a silent conversation with him. after a silence, sabrina subtly inching away, you turn to her.
“we were too loud—“
you’re interrupted by a firm hand on your upper arm, hooking you and leading away from the entrance. “okay-thank you for stopping by-i’ll see you at the mailboxes-okay, goodbye.” smoothly, he pulls you in as he pushes the door shut, hanging his head as his splayed hand remains against the metal. you can’t help but scoff, slithering up from behind him to drape yourself on his back. a single nail digs into the plump skin of his rotator cuff, dragging down in a line through the flesh.
“you were a little nervous back there, tiger. is she one of your girls?”
he flashes you a resentful eye from over his shoulder. he turns, luring you further into the apartment when he walks back towards the bed. “no.” he responds promptly, and with an air of pretentious self-righteousness. it’d be insulting if you didn’t know him. “that’s not - no.” he shakes his head, coming to sit at the edge of his bed with a bounce to a stop. the heel of his hand digs into his eye to fidget. “she’s just… a girl in my building.” the hand comes down, and he picks at a callus on his palm.
“oh, c’mon.” you roll your eyes, lulling your body over to stand between his legs so he has to look up at you. habitually, your grip gravitates towards his curly flop of hair, grabbing hold of it. he blinks in an innocent peer up at you. “you don’t have to say anything to me, we’re adults.”
his shoulders tense, voice defensively heightening, “i’m not seeing anyone else.” somehow, he knows that’s a scarier confession to make, but he took the risk anyway. your smile falters.
“oh.” you release him. when you drop your arms, the sleeves fall past the tips of your fingers. suddenly, you feel like getting some air, but you conceal that vulnerability when you show him your back, walking towards the pile of your clothes. “at least her crush on you makes sense.” you pick out your pants, stepping into them n sliding them on, “it’s too bad though.”
he replies, a little too hopefully. “what is?”
you smirk at him from over your shoulder. “that you’re a nutcase.” he can’t help but wryly smile, dropping his head to shake it. folding your arms in front of you to pinch the hem, you lift to peel the hoodie up and off of you. he sneaks a glance at your naked back.
“you’re leaving now, aren’t you?”
you sigh. “now that i’ve marked my territory.” you find yourself talking to make him feel more comfortable - you don’t like it.
“what about the food?”
you pull on your top. “i’ll be back for it later.” he doesn’t believe you. for a final good-bye, you elegantly slide into a sit next to him, your body lounging n taking up the space. “you’ll be alright without me, spider.” a hand cups his cheek, guiding him into you to kiss his other one.
“are you?”
you sit back. you search his features. “am i what?”
your gazes meet. “seeing anyone else?” the idea of the question puts a twist in your stomach, and an instinct to hightail it out of here. if you are or aren’t, you don’t want to be asked about it.
“i’ll call you.” you promise - an empty sound to the both of you, and with it you depart. . . .
you don’t see him for a couple days, and you know for all of his virtues, he still can’t trust you. it’s why when you’re out as black cat without your hall monitor he shows up to make sure you haven’t relapsed.
“nice night, huh?” he comments, restrained. meeting you on a rooftop is nothing new, swaggering towards you like he’s about to catch you red-handed. he stops before his chest meets yours, but you side-step him like a dance.
“upset because i haven’t called?” you taunt, circling him like prey. “or am i not cleared for field work?”
“i’m not your keeper.” he says resentfully but without conviction.
“you’re out here because of me. afraid i’ll forget all your lessons? i heard there’s a new museum, why don’t i head there before opening and see if it gives me an itch?” through careful strain, your annoyance still seeps through, stepping up to him when he turns just to challenge him. he visibly deflates, letting go of whatever anger he thought he had.
maturely, he explains as he gestures, the visors glued to the ground, “i know that trying the whole good-guy act has been an… adjustment.”
“don’t act like you’re here because of that, spider. you’re too smart to play that card.”
“what do you want me to say?” another layer of his incredulousness wafts over you, you barrel on, talking over him.
“quit the mentor charade, it’s a bad look for you.” you say it to hurt him, to strike at what you dislike the most: being his pity case goodwill project. you might as call yourself a stray cat that’s been caged. if he didn’t know you, he’d think you’re being remarkably calm about all this - so he plays a different card.
“seemed to work on you before.” at the sudden and suggestive mention, you’re taken aback. indignant at first, you scramble for a comeback, but your rare surprise has left your mouth more agape than you’d like to admit. he challenges you this time, the corner of that visor tilting up to make sure you know he’s got his eye on your reaction.
like old times, the kind where you’d run and he’d chase you, and you’d let him get close as a trophy… you take just one more step, inches away from him. your gaze searches his emblem, the one you used to pour over before you knew what he looked like underneath. it’s a quiet moment shared under the moonlight, tempers cooling, and his head lulls in a mirror to yours, like he’s waiting to slot into a kiss that hasn’t been taken yet. your eyes meet the white tear-shapes of his visor. it’s your turn to speak without conviction, “you don’t wanna play that game with me, spider - not tonight.” the empty threat hangs in the air.
he’s too quick to snuff it out anyway. “it’s the only thing we can agree on.”
you shake your head with a sigh through your nose and a smile tugging at the corners of your lips. “i always end up back in your bed.”
“well, let’s go to your place this time.” . . .
somehow, you’re back in his atmosphere, intoxicated until you’re lulled into a domestic complacency you’ll feel nauseous about later. for now, you’ll enjoy pretending to be a trophy after playing hard-to-get. head falling back, your jaw slackens, seeping out moan after moan when spider-man’s got his hand in your hair, pulling you back like it’s a leash. neither of you undressed what you couldn’t afford to, staying in uniform is less complicated than fucking as people - as normal adults. straddling his lap, he’s sat up, an arm around your waist while the other reaches up from behind to wind in your hair. desperate to grasp something, your claws dig into the windpipe at his neck, but pain simply can’t be induced.
you move together as one, his arms flex n swell around you when they guide you down, and there’s a burn in your thighs when you fight against his strength and his weight to lift yourself up in a hover. “should i… should i call you something? other than your name?”
scoffing, you peel your heavy eyes open one by one. sometimes he has a way of endearing you. “what’re you talking about, spider-man? you don’t wanna play pretend with me?” you muse condescendingly, adjusting your grip against his throat so you can lure him closer to you. less than an inch away, you recycle hot breath with each other and his grasp on your hair softens.
“‘pretend?’” he questions naively.
“yeah, not to know each other.” times like this, you remember his intimidating, boyish inexperience. it’s not so bad now, even rewarding him with a peck against the felt of his mask. “asking me questions like that—about what to call me—ruins it. i just wanna have fun.”
“o- okay.” hastily he tacks on, “cat.”
again, it’s too sweet not to taunt, chuckling through your nose until you feel his pace shift. picking up speed, and adjusting the angle of your hips for you with the arm around your waist… it very quickly reminds you he’s not some kid anymore. his hand splays against your back, supporting you when you arch it, talking to the ceiling, “oh, that’s right, spider… that’s it - right there, oh, fuck. right there…” you exhale. the exposed cleavage in your suit swells, the dull moonlight casting through the window catches on your sheen of sweat, glistening your skin like jewelry. your colleague drinks it all in, holding you up by your waist like you’re nothing, spider-strength making a limp doll out of you when he bounces you on him. his tip hits that perfect spot inside of you, the one that makes you all hazy n hot.
he was afraid to say anything else, but when you keep talking him through it, encouraging him with all your pretty noises, it’s like he steps into his persona. “that’s it, right?” he regurgitates one of your phrases to dip his toe in the water. “right there? you sure it’s right there?” his tone’s shifted, evolving from tentative experimentation to blatant cockiness. you bite hard into your grinning lower lip, lulling forward to splay your hands on his cheeks, long nails casting shadows over his visor like you’re locking up some prey. “don’t tell me you’re about to cum already.”
“no.” you challenge. “been waiting for you to fuck me like a man, spider.”
“cat.” he growls. that super strength is so effortless, you squeal in thrill girlishly when he lifts you up off his lap—letting you clutch his face to your chest—only to land you on your back. “you know, this suit must be filthy.” it rakes a genuine open-mouthed laugh out of you, playfully hitting his emblem.
“are you stalling? afraid you can’t handle me?” you taunt, suspending your legs on either side of them, heavy heels weighing them down as they bob from the ebb n flow.
“well, in other circumstances i’d say i’ve handled you before just fine.” he rises to the opportunity, and uses the reminder of your legs to wedge his hands under your knees n hook your ankles over his shoulders one by one.
“we’ll see about that.” just as you finish the sentence, you trail off at the sight of him sitting on his haunches, the full suit on him with the waistband tucked under and out of the way. seated fully inside of you, he palms your hips firmly, jerking you n taking you with him when he leans back. it shoves a choked sound out of you, but nothing compared to the symphony that plays from the orchestra of your open mouth, his grunts, and the marriage of your sexes. his fingers dig into you, yanking you up n letting you drop down in a way that strokes your guts so good you don’t even possess the brain power to warn him you might squirt. “talk back one more time and i’ll stick a vibrator to your clit.” somehow, the idea of that webby mess around your sex wasn’t so revolting, but you know it was just another one of those empty promises.
@HANASNX 2026 | do not copy, plagiarize, or steal. do not take my formats without receiving explicit permission and writing @ credit where it is visible. do not use my writing to train ai models of any kind.
❤︎ . . . accidentally discovering one day that peter's wrists are (weirdly) sensitive after his enhancement, so you take it into consideration the next time you go down on him and his entire world shatters.
smut. dick sucking. organic web shooter sucking (ok guys don't make fun of the girl who put herself out there). cum licking.
you've got him on his back, sprawled across the bed, and you're kneeling between his thighs. his moans are growing louder. sharp and quick. the muscles in his thighs twitch with every inch your mouth takes him deeper, and his hands are tangled in your hair, pulling gently at the roots. he's close.
"i'm gonna—" he pants, throwing a forearm over his face.
you pull off with a pop, shaking your head. "don't. wanna try something."
peter sits up on his elbows, confusion settling over his face. "w-what? why?"
you don't answer him. take him into your hand instead and start rubbing him firmly from base to tip. he settles back against the bed and watches as you work him, waiting expectantly with his lip pulled between his teeth for whatever you're planning. then, you grab his arm and bring it to your face, twist it until the skin of his wrist makes contact with your lips.
peter's brows pull together, still unsure, and then he's throwing his head back in ecstasy, sputtering a string of 'baby's that echo off the walls. your mouth latches onto the flap of skin where his organic webs spurt from, and you watch him intently as he comes undone beneath you, a mischievous smile forming on your lips.
"that nice?" you ask, pulling away briefly, hand still tugging and squeezing.
then, a second later, breathless and strained, "god, this is so weird," he chokes out, gripping the sheet. "but 's g-good... sososo good. don't stop."
you giggle against him, and the vibration shoots up the length of his arm. your tongue dances across his skin, alternates between flicking and sucking the flap, and you can feel his forearm pulsing. throbbing. shifting under your tongue like it's preparing for release.
when you glance up at peter, he's already looking up at you, leaning back on his elbow. his jaw is slack, chest rising and falling in rapid succession, and his eyes flicker from white to black intermittently. you quicken your pace, sucking his wrist and stroking him in tandem, all while holding his gaze.
briefly, you pull off to encourage his release. "you're so close, baby. let go for me."
a few more licks and tugs later, peter comes violently. he releases all over your hand. wet and thick and warm. his wrist follows next, shoots out webbing in quick succession, and lands all over the room before covering you in one final spurt.
peter falls against the sheets with a huff, too far gone to be embarrassed by the state of the room. you pump him a few more times before you retract your hand, then settle on top of him, straddling his waist.
"how do you feel?" you ask, licking the spend off your hands.
he blinks an eye open, still panting. "used," is all he says.
you laugh, lean in close to his ear. "well, get ready to be 'used' again because i wanna try something else," you say, voice low and teasing, "and... i can already feel you getting harder. you liked that, admit it, pervert."
peter turns his head, rolls his eyes. "no comment."
Synopsis: A simple conversation in Peter’s apartment turns into a pivotal moment as he realizes the depth of what he has found in you: not just someone who remembers, but a piece of his own history that survived. [GIF Creds: milesgmorales]
PART THREE! I have no idea how many parts I’m actually going to make about this, so I’m kinda just winging it for now. Creativity hits when it hits lmaooo
『••✎••』
The hug in the cafe had ended too soon, but it lingered like static on Peter’s skin for the rest of the day. You hadn’t asked a hundred questions. You hadn’t pulled away or looked at him like he was broken. You’d just… held on. And when you finally stepped back, you’d said:
“Text me if you need another one. Or coffee. Or silence. Whatever.”
Then you’d packed up your books, shot him a last, small, reassuring smile, and walked out of the cafe, leaving Peter alone with the salt shaker and a warmth spreading through his chest that had nothing to do with the lukewarm coffee.
He did end up texting you that night. Once. Just an awkward “thanks again” at 7 p.m. before patrol. You’d replied with a simple thumbs-up emoji and a photo of your pet judging a half-eaten ramen bowl. It was normal. Stupidly, perfectly normal. And it kept him going through another night of swinging past the places that used to mean something—Ned’s old apartment building, the bodega where MJ used to steal his fries, the rooftop where he and May used to watch fireworks.
Little did he know that three days later, just as he was sulking about the past once again, he’d run into you again in his own apartment.
It wasn’t even a plan, and he hadn’t texted you first either. You had texted him—ranting, as if you had known him for years. You were near the library, and your laptop had died, and since you seemed so stressed about completing your upcoming paper that was due soon, he’d—with a surge of desperate impulsiveness—offered his outlet. He hadn’t invited anyone to this place, this tiny, subsidized room that was supposed to be for a student but was really just a place to sleep in between patrols. He hadn't thought it would ever happen.
So, in a panic, he’d spent the twenty minutes it took you to get there frantically tidying: shoving things into drawers, using his web shooters to clear the mess of dirty clothes piled by the dresser, and spritzing the room with a borrowed can of air freshener that now smelled like chemicals mixed with despair.
Now, currently, you were perched on the edge of his worn-out couch with your laptop open, murmuring to yourself about a dead hyperlink in your research paper. You weren’t intimidated by the starkness of the room. You hadn’t commented on the single mattress on the floor or the precarious stacks of old textbooks. You’d simply found the outlet, plugged in, and made yourself at home in the quiet space he’d carved out of the world.
Peter stood by the small kitchen counter, pretending to make tea he had no intention of drinking, just watching you. He was struck again by the sheer, profound normality of it. The domesticity. The way you tapped your computer with impatience, the soft sigh you gave when the link finally worked. It was like a scene from a life he’d only ever seen in movies—a life he could have had, maybe, if the world hadn’t erased him.
“Peter?”
He jumped. He still wasn’t used to hearing his name directed at him, especially not from you. He turned, the teabag in his hand dripping forgotten spots onto the counter.
“Yeah?”
You pretended not to notice the drips. “Could you pass me my book? Please? It’s the big blue one.” You gestured to your stack of books near the door.
He grabbed it, the heavy hardcover a familiar weight. Quantum Mechanics and Its Implications. He flipped it over, and a small, printed-out sticky note on the back cover caught his eye. It was a quote, typed in a neat serif font: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein.
Peter felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. He’d seen that quote before. He used that quote.
He remembered sitting in Mr. Harrison’s class, senior year. Flash was making some snide comment, and Peter, buried in a book, had muttered the quote under his breath—a silent mantra for himself. Of course, Mr. Harrison, a massive Einstein buff, had overheard. He’d made Peter write it on the board, a mortifying experience that had ended with him getting a rare, approving nod from the teacher and a week of dealing with Flash calling him “Little Einstein,” along with being sung the theme song of that stupid child’s TV show anytime he walked by in the hall. Man, was he glad he didn’t have to deal with him anymore.
Still, regardless of the memory, it wasn’t a famous Einstein quote. Not really. It was obscure, one Peter had found in a biography; However, the chances of you randomly printing it out and sticking it on your book…
The floor seemed to tilt beneath his feet. He walked back to the couch, movements slow and deliberate, and handed the book to you.
“Thanks,” you said, taking it without looking.
Peter sank into the rickety armchair opposite you, the teabag long forgotten. He watched you read, but in his mind he was back in that classroom. He saw you a few rows ahead, diligently taking notes. He saw you glance up when Mr. Harrison called him to the board. He saw the ghost of a smile on your face as you watched him write—not of mockery, but amusement? Appreciation?
A minor moment in his eyes, a forgettable blip in the chaos of high school. But this sticky note must have been printed later. After. The thought ricocheted around his skull with stunning clarity: you hadn’t just known him. You hadn’t just remembered him. You had proof of him. A piece of him that was now your proof, sitting right there in his apartment, surviving the spell.
And you didn’t even realize.
The room was quiet, save for the soft hum of your laptop fan and the distant wail of a siren. Peter stared at you—at the way the light from your screen illuminated the focused line of your jaw, the way your fingers curled around the spine of the book. He saw so much more now than the quiet girl from history class. He saw a person who had held onto a piece of him, however small, without even knowing its true value. A person who had been handed a cosmic puzzle piece and had simply stuck it on a book because it resonated.
He had been so focused on what he’d lost—Ned, MJ, May, the life that was stolen—that he’d never once considered what might have survived. Not in the world, but in other people. He’d assumed the spell was perfect, absolute. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was like a shattering mirror, and some people, like you, had picked up a shard and kept it?
What if that mirror could be mended? Reverted? The thought was so terrifying and brilliant it almost knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t have the sling ring. He had no idea where Strange was, or if he’d even help. But maybe… maybe he didn’t need the spell broken. Maybe he just needed to find the other pieces of the mirror. The other people who might have their own sticky notes, their own faded photographs, their own ghost of a memory.
He had a lead. A tiny, fragile, tangible lead. Sure, there was the chance that you could’ve just bought a bunch of inspirational sticky notes from the dollar store. But… he knew. He felt it, deep in his bones, in that same place where the tingling of his spider-sense lived.
And truthfully, even if you had just bought the sticky note, he still had you.
He had a friend. At least, he hoped he had a friend.
Peter stood up so abruptly that the legs of his armchair scraped against the cheap linoleum floor. You looked up, startled.
“Everything okay?”
He ignored the question and moved to your side of the coffee table. He didn’t touch the book again. He just sat close enough to draw your attention. Which, of course, worked. You looked at him—really looked at him. He must have looked like a wreck, with his sleep-deprived eyes and trembling hands.
“Did we ever talk? In high school?” Peter started, then stopped, licking his lips. He felt bad asking this, because he genuinely couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to hurt your feelings by not remembering something you might have. “I know we weren’t in the same friend group or anything, but…”
He trailed off, leaving the question hanging in the air.
You considered it, your head tilting to the side as you accessed your mental archives. It was a strange expression, one of genuine concentration, as if you were trying to recall a very specific, long-forgotten fact.
“Not really, no,” you said finally. A tiny pang of relief went through him, followed immediately by a wave of something that felt suspiciously like disappointment. “But… I was aware of you. You know how it is.”
But peter didn’t know how it was anymore. At least, not for the past year. He had spent so long being the only one who knew about himself.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.” He looked away, feeling the familiar sting of being a footnote in someone else’s story. It was an old feeling, one he’d had long before the spell, when he was just a scholarship kid with a secondhand backpack. But now, it was amplified a thousand times.
You must have seen something in his expression, because you elaborated, a small, self-deprecating smile on your lips. “I wasn’t exactly the queen of the social scene. I mostly kept to myself—my books, my music. But I saw people. I watched them. You were… a notable presence, Peter Parker.”
You said the name again, so casually. Every time you did, it felt like a tiny reset button for his soul.
“You were always running,” you continued, your gaze distant, lost in memory. “Literally always. Either to the library, or out of the cafeteria, or down the hall with your backpack half-unzipped. Nice to know why, now,” you added with a dry glance at him. “I always thought you just had terrible bladder control.”
A startled laugh escaped him, a raw, rusty sound he didn’t recognize as his own. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like that—genuinely, without an undercurrent of grief or exhaustion.
Your smile widened a little at his reaction. Encouraged, you kept going. “You were also one of the smartest kids in our year too, but you never flaunted it. You’d just… know the answer when nobody else did. I remember that day in Harrison’s class, when he made you write that quote on the board…”
Peter’s heart hammered against his ribs. Here it was.
“He was so thrilled to have a kindred spirit in the class,” you said, your voice soft. “And you looked so embarrassed, but you also… stood a little taller after that. I don’t know. It was just a small thing. But I remembered it.”
You paused, then looked down at the book in your lap. You ran your finger over the sticky note, a thoughtful caress.
“I found that quote later, when I was looking up stuff for another paper. It stuck with me. That idea that persistence matters more than genius. Felt… relevant, I guess.” You shrugged, a little self-conscious. “So I printed it out. It’s been on my notebooks ever since. I have a whole collection of them.”
Peter stared at you. At the casual, unthinking way you laid out the evidence. A small thing, you’d said. A memory. A quote that resonated. To you, it was just a personal quirk, a habit of collecting inspirational snippets. To him, it was a holy relic. A piece of a world he thought had been completely atomized.
You had no idea. You had absolutely no idea that your little habit, your quiet appreciation for a moment in a classroom, was the only thing anchoring his existence to the rest of humanity.
He felt a surge of something so powerful it almost bowled him over. It wasn’t just gratitude. It was… awe. For the small, unnoticed ripples a person leaves behind them, the ways in which they touch other lives without ever realizing it. He’d spent so much of his life trying to be significant, to make a big, loud difference as Spider-Man. He’d never once considered the quiet, enduring legacy of just… being Peter Parker.
A legacy you had somehow preserved without even trying.
“Peter?” Your voice pulled him back from the brink of that existential chasm. “You’re staring again. You okay?”
He blinked, focusing on your concerned face. He realized he was leaning forward, his hands gripping the edge of the coffee table so hard his knuckles were white.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. “You have no idea how okay I am.”
He pushed himself to his feet, the sudden movement full of nervous energy. He started pacing the small length of the room, from the counter to the window and back. The tiny apartment felt like a cage, and at the same time, like the entire universe was contained within its four walls—all centered around you and your sticky note.
“You know,” you said, watching him with a tolerant, slightly amused expression, “for a guy who can stick to walls, you’re surprisingly jittery.”
“I’m not jittery,” he retorted, a little too quickly. “I’m… processing. You’ve given me a lot to process.”
He stopped by the window, looking down at the street twelve floors below. The evening rush was starting, a river of red and white lights flowing through the concrete canyons. Down there, he was nothing more than a shadow. A rumor. Up here, with you, he was as solid and real as the scuffed floorboards beneath his feet.
He turned back to face you, that single thought crystallizing in his mind with blinding clarity.
“I wish things could’ve been different,” he said, the admission feeling heavier than any building he’d ever lifted. “I’m starting to think I really missed out.”
Your teasing expression softened into something more gentle. You leaned forward, propping your chin on your hand, your forgotten research paper glowing softly beside you.
“On what, a life of petty drama and crippling student loan debt?” you asked, your tone light but your eyes serious. “Trust me, you didn’t miss much.”
“No, not that,” he said, shaking his head. He took a hesitant step closer. “I mean… high school. Being friends with you. Not having my head so far up my own… you know… that I didn’t see the smart, funny girl sitting two rows ahead of me.”
The words hung in the air, surprisingly intimate. He saw the way your posture changed, the slight shift of your shoulders, the flicker of surprise in your eyes. You hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected to say it.
You looked down at your laptop for a second, a small, almost shy smile touching your lips before you looked back up at him.
“Peter Parker,” you said, and there it was again—that name, anchoring him. “Are you trying to tell me we could’ve been friends?”
“I’m trying to tell you we should have been,” he corrected, a quiet intensity in his voice. He took another step, now standing right in front of the coffee table. “You’re the only person in the entire world who knows my name. And I never even bothered to learn yours.”
A new silence settled, different from the others. This one wasn’t filled with grief or confusion, but with a budding, terrifying possibility. Peter’s gaze dropped from your eyes to your laptop, and then to the textbook on your lap. Your name was printed in neat block letters on the spine, next to your student ID.
He’d seen it a hundred times in the halls, on attendance sheets, on the spines of your notebooks. But he’d never really seen it.
Because he never really saw you.
But he did now, with a sudden, jarring clarity. He saw everything: the worn texture of your pants, the dent in your favorite water bottle you’d brought with you, the way you’d unconsciously started chewing on your pen cap. It was an overwhelming flood of sensory information, and he had to fight to keep from being swept away.
You didn’t seem to notice his sensory overload. Instead, you met his gaze, your own expression unwavering. “Well,” you said, closing your laptop with a soft click that echoed in the tiny room. “It’s a good thing we have all the time in the world to make up for it, then.”
It was a simple statement, but it felt like a promise. A vow. The words settled over Peter, warm and heavy, like a blanket he hadn’t realized he was shivering without.
All the time in the world. A world where he was real. A world where someone knew him.
Before he could stop himself, he took the final step around the coffee table. He didn’t think. He didn’t calculate. He just moved, closing the last few inches of space between you. He lowered himself onto the couch beside you—not too close, but close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from your arm, close enough to smell the faint scent of your shampoo.
“Is this code for you needing another hug?” you asked, your voice light, but he could hear the slight tremor beneath it.
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “This is…”
He trailed off, at a loss for words. He turned to face you, one arm resting along the back of the couch, his body angled toward yours. He could see every fleck of color in your irises, the way the light from the lamp caught the tiny hairs on your cheek. He’d never been this close to you before. Not in high school, not when he’d knocked your books over, not even when you’d hugged him in the cafe.
This was different. This was… deliberate.
“Peter?” Your voice was barely a breath now.
He could only stare at your lips, at the way they parted slightly as you said his name. He felt a pull, an undeniable force that had nothing to do with spider-powers and everything to do with the lonely, desperate yearning that had been clawing at him for a year.
But he knew. He knew that a year of solitude didn’t magically disappear because someone knew your name. He knew that the grief was still there, a raw, gaping wound that would take a long, long time to heal. He knew that you were still a virtual stranger, that he was still a basket case with more baggage than a cargo plane, and this was only the fourth time you had spoken more than two sentences to him.
He also knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his bones, that you were important. Not MJ important, not Ned important, but Peter important. A new kind of important, one that was still forming, still taking shape, but no less vital.
And he knew he couldn’t screw this up. So instead of closing the distance, instead of acting on the impulse that was screaming at him to just feel something real, he reached for the book with the quote on it. Because at the end of the day, it was the thread that connected you. A small thread that was holding him together.
Synopsis: After a chance encounter with the one girl who still knows his name, Peter decides to take a chance and reveal not only his identity, but the cosmic catastrophe that has left him utterly alone. [GIF Creds: linusbenjamin ]
CONGRATULATIONS, YALL, YOU OFFICALLY CONVINCED ME TO MAKE A PART 2!! As for a whole series with multiple chapters, that’s still up for debate because I’m currently just not that creative 💀
But, with that being said… enjoy the sequel (could also be read as a standalone) with a little bit more comfort and a lot more angst
『••✎••』
The small campus cafe was crowded as usual, the air thick with the scent of burnt espresso and toasted bagels. Peter sat across from you at the tiny corner table near the window, his hands wrapped around a paper cup that had gone lukewarm ten minutes ago.
He’d spent the last couple of days quietly memorizing your schedule—not in a creepy way, just careful observation from rooftops and hallway corners—until he found the perfect window: right after your morning lecture, before the lunch rush really hit. This was the moment.
You were exactly where he hoped you’d be, highlighter poised over notes, earbuds half in, that familiar stack of books balanced on the chair beside you. Sunlight filtered through the glass, catching the edges of your focused expression and making the whole scene feel strangely peaceful despite the storm raging inside his chest.
He’d barely slept since the sidewalk. Two nights of all-nighters—one spent swinging through the city in a blur of red and blue, the other hunched over his laptop and the single physical yearbook he still kept hidden in the back of his closet. The one that should have shown his photo, his name listed under the science club, the decathlon team, even a blurry candid from homecoming. But when he opened it under the harsh glow of his desk lamp, the pages were wrong. Clean. Empty of him.
Every reference to Peter Parker had been scrubbed. Group shots where he should have been standing between Ned and MJ now showed gaps or different faces. The honor roll list skipped his name entirely. Even the faded ink of teacher signatures in the margins seemed to skip over the kid who used to fix the AV equipment. It was like the universe had gone back with a giant eraser and redrawn the year without him in it.
And yet… you remembered.
You’d said his name like it was the most ordinary thing. Like he’d always existed in your world the same way he existed in his own memories. The contradiction had kept him awake, heart hammering with a hope so sharp it hurt. He couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let you go.
Now, sitting here in the noisy cafe, he could feel it through his spider-sense—the subtle tension in your shoulders, the way your pulse had picked up just a fraction when he approached. Confusion. Concern. A quiet wariness, like you were trying to figure out if the guy from your old high school was having some kind of breakdown.
You were kind-hearted; he could already tell from the soft way you’d checked on him yesterday. Introverted, too—preferring the quiet corner and your books over the louder tables full of laughing groups. And of course, if the organic chemistry textbook wasn’t already a sign in itself, you were intelligent but in a steady, thoughtful way that felt different from his own chaotic, hyper-focused genius.
It’s why he had to be strategic about this. He knew if he started rambling about spells and multiverses and everyone forgetting him, you’d politely nod and find an excuse to leave. He had to start with something he could prove. Something undeniable.
He took a steadying breath and leaned forward slightly so his voice wouldn’t carry.
“What if I told you… the world is different for me than it is for you?”
Your highlighter paused, leaving a small pink streak on the white page. You slid your earbuds out, giving him your full attention. The concern was back, knitting your brow. “Different how?”
Peter’s gaze darted around the cafe before landing back on you. He lowered his voice even more, a near-whisper. “You see that salt shaker over there? Next to the napkin dispenser?”
You glanced at it, then back at him, a little bemused. “Yeah…?”
He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he flicked his wrist in the smallest, subtlest motion. A thin strand of webbing shot out from the web-shooter hidden beneath his sleeve—fast, precise, and nearly invisible in the bright cafe light. The strand caught the salt shaker, lifted it smoothly into the air, and deposited it gently right in front of you on the table.
Your eyes widened. The highlighter slipped from your fingers and clattered onto your notebook.
Before you could speak—before you could laugh it off or call him crazy—Peter leaned in closer, his voice urgent but soft.
“I’m Spider-Man.”
The words hung between you for a heartbeat. Your lips parted, but no sound came out at first. Instead of the scoff or nervous laugh he’d half-expected, you stared at the salt shaker now sitting innocently in front of you, then back at his face. The wariness in your expression shifted—still concerned, still confused—but there was a spark of something else now. Openness. Curiosity winning out over disbelief, at least for the moment.
The noise of the cafe faded into a dull hum.
“Peter… what—” you whispered.
“No one else remembers me,” he cut in, the words tumbling out in a desperate, messy rush. It was the most important part, the core of everything. “No one. My best friend, Ned? He doesn’t know who I am. My… my girlfriend, MJ. She thinks I’m just a random, friendly neighbor. My aunt… May’s…” He choked on the name, the grief raw and fresh as the day it happened. “My aunt is gone, and it’s like… It’s like I was never her nephew.”
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, hot and stinging. He hadn’t let himself cry about it, not really. There hadn’t been time. There was always a car to stop, a cat to rescue—something to keep him moving, to keep the silence at bay. But now, sitting across from the only person on the planet who knew his name, the dam finally broke.
“I exist. I’m right here. But to everyone else, it’s like I was erased.”
He looked at you then—truly looked at you. Not as a clue or a potential solution, but as a person. A person he had sat behind in history class. A person he’d never bothered to know. A person whose quiet existence had somehow, miraculously, survived a cosmic rewrite.
“I’m sorry,” he added, his voice cracking. “I’m so sorry I’m unloading this on you. It’s just… it’s been a year. A year of… this. And then I randomly run into you, and you say my name like it’s nothing. I just… I have to know. Why you? Why is it you remember when the people who loved me most… don’t?”
Silence stretched for so long that Peter was sure you were going to get up and walk away. He braced for the polite rejection, the slow, careful retreat. He’d scared you. He was a freak.
But you didn’t move.
Instead, you reached across the table, your movements slow and deliberate, and gently picked up the salt shaker. You turned it over in your hands, fingers tracing its cool glass surface as if it held all the secrets of the universe. Your focus was absolute.
Then you looked up, eyes clear.
“Okay,” you said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t disbelief. It was acceptance. A starting point. “Okay. I believe you.”
Peter’s breath hitched. He stared, utterly poleaxed. That was it? After everything he’d just confessed, after the impossible demonstration… you just… believed him?
“You… you do?” he managed to croak out.
“Kinda, sorta,” you affirmed, setting the salt shaker down with a soft click. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m honestly still processing the fact that you snatched a salt shaker with a… spider-string thingy. But I believe that you believe it. And honestly?” You gestured vaguely between the two of you. “This entire situation is so far outside my understanding of the world that I’m more inclined to believe the weirdly intense guy from my high school is a forgotten superhero than I am to ever understand organic chemistry. So, yeah. I believe you.”
He didn’t realize you were being sarcastic, a little, until the ghost of a smile touched your lips. It was so genuine, so unforced, that it brought back a flood of memories of MJ—of the way she’d looked at the world, at him, with that same dry, sharp humor.
Your gaze softened as you took in his tear-streaked face, the raw grief etched around his eyes. Pity. He used to hate pity, but coming from you, it didn’t feel condescending. It felt like… empathy.
“Do you want a hug?” You asked softly, so quietly he almost didn’t hear it over the hiss of the espresso machine. “You look like you could really use one.”
Peter flinched. Physical contact. It had been so long. His last real hug had been May. Since then, any touch was accidental, fleeting—a bump on the subway, a handshake when re-introducing himself to his best friend. It all felt like being touched through a thick pane of glass.
But you were just… there. Offering. Like the kind of person who gives their umbrella to a stranger in a downpour. It made him wonder why he never really noticed you in high school, why he was always so wrapped up in his own drama that he missed the quiet kindness radiating from the girl two rows ahead.
“Yeah, actually,” he whispered, the words catching in his throat. “That… that would be nice.”
You stood up without a word, walked around the tiny table, and put your arms around him. It was awkward—you half-bent over him while he sat, your books and bag taking up the spare chair. It wasn’t a perfect embrace. But it was warm. And it was real.
He rested his forehead against your shoulder, the worn denim of your jacket scratchy against his skin, and for the first time in a year, the crushing weight of solitude didn’t feel like it was going to break him.
He felt your hand awkwardly pat his back in a gentle, rhythmic motion. He took a shaky breath, inhaling the faint scent of your laundry detergent and old paper from your books. It was grounding.
For the first time since the world forgot him, Peter Parker no longer had to carry it all alone.
Even if you only believed a sliver of the impossible truth right now, that sliver felt like the entire world.
Synopsis: He believed the entire world had forgotten Peter Parker, until the girl he never spoke to in class said his name. [Gif Creds: manny-jacinto].
First Peter Parker fic in celebration of the trailer drop ✨💃
(Edited 3/31: I officially made this into a small little series, so I DEEPLY apologize for the previous mess of formatting 😭🙏)
『••✎••』
His face changed in an instant.
The easy, half-apologetic smile Peter had been wearing—sorry, my bad, let me help—froze, then cracked. His brown eyes widened, pupils blowing out like he’d been hit with a flashbang. The color drained from his already pale cheeks, leaving the faint acne scars and the sheen of nervous sweat stark against his skin. His mouth parted, lips forming a silent what? before any sound could escape.
You blinked up at him, crouched on the grimy New York sidewalk, one hand steadying your precariously tall stack of books, the other hovering over the scattered ones at your feet. The world kept moving—the rumble of the subway beneath the pavement, the wail of a distant siren, the shuffle of pedestrians flowing around the two of you like water around stones. But in the sudden, suffocating vacuum between you and him, all of that noise simply dissolved.
"Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry," he’d been saying just a second ago, a familiar, breathless rush. He’d bumped into you—a classic traffic jam on the sidewalk—and your world had tipped sideways. Physics took over. Textbooks on organic chemistry and literary theory splayed out across the concrete like a fan.
He remembered you. He was sure of it. You sat two rows ahead and one to the left in Mr. Harrison’s history class. You never spoke, but he knew you were one of the smartest kids in the room, your hand perpetually in the air while he was usually trying to calculate if he had enough web fluid for patrol later that night. He’d seen you in the halls—a quiet, focused presence that never seemed to intersect with the chaotic orbit of himself, MJ, and Ned.
You smiled, a small, polite curve of your lips as you both reached for the same copy of The Great Gatsby. Your fingers had brushed.
"It’s okay, happens all the time." You had said, gathering the last book and tucking it into your stack. Then you looked him in the eye, a brief, friendly glance of acknowledgment, and said the words that had just short-circuited his entire nervous system.
"See you around, Peter."
And just like that, the universe tilted on its axis.
You’d pushed yourself to your feet, adjusting your bag, giving him another polite smile before turning to merge back into the river of people on the sidewalk. The moment was over—a simple, forgettable bump with a vague acquaintance from high school.
Except it wasn’t.
Wait.
His lungs seized. The name echoed in the hollow of his chest, a ghost of a sound, but it was the most real thing he’d heard in an eternity. Peter. Not "hey, kid" or "that guy" or the frustrated sigh of a landlord who never knew his renter’s name. Peter. Said with the casual familiarity of someone who had always known it.
A frantic, desperate energy seized him. He couldn’t let you go. He couldn’t let you walk away and vanish back into the faceless crowd, leaving him to wonder if he’d finally, truly lost it.
"Wait!"
He shot forward, a burst of speed that felt more like a spider’s leap than a human’s jog. He caught your arm just above the elbow. It was a gentle touch, barely any pressure, but you stopped instantly, turning back to him with a look of surprise, your brow furrowed. Your books wobbled in your arms.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in a silent room. He leaned in, not caring that he was blocking the flow of foot traffic, that a businessman had to sidestep him with an annoyed grunt. All that mattered was your face, your confused eyes, and the five letters he needed to hear again.
"Wait," he repeated, his voice raspy, thin. "What… what did you say?"
Your confusion deepened, a small line creasing between your brows. You glanced from his wild-eyed face down to where he was still touching your sleeve, then back up again.
"Uh…" you hesitated, clearly thrown by the intensity of his reaction. "I just said, ‘see you around’?"
"No, before that. The… the last part." He could barely breathe the words out. Please. Please say it again. Let him know he wasn’t hallucinating, that the loneliness hadn’t finally cracked him open.
You blinked, slow and deliberate, as if trying to decipher a foreign language. A flicker of something like concern crossed your features.
"Peter?" you said, his name a soft, questioning thing in the city noise. "Are you okay?"
The world shattered around him.
It wasn’t a question of how. He didn’t care how. Not yet. The sheer, overwhelming fact of it crashed over him like a tidal wave. The weight of a year’s worth of invisibility, of nonexistence, suddenly lifted. Air rushed into lungs that had been starved for so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to breathe. A tremor ran through his entire body—a violent, shuddering release of tension he hadn’t even realized he was holding.
He didn’t answer your question. He couldn’t. All he could do was stare, his grip on your sleeve slackening until his fingers just brushed the fabric of your jacket. He was looking at you, but he wasn’t seeing a college student with a stack of books anymore. He was seeing an anchor. A lighthouse in a fog that had swallowed him whole.
A shaky, disbelieving laugh escaped his lips—a broken sound that held the ghost of a sob. He stared at you as if you’d just handed him the entire universe, piece by precious piece.
You, completely unaware of the magnitude of the moment—of the dam you’d just broken—just stood there. You took in the dazed look, the trembling hands, the way he was looking at you like you were a miracle.
And you just looked… concerned. Worried for the weird guy from your old high school who was currently having some kind of meltdown on a public sidewalk.
"Peter," you said again, a little firmer this time, reaching out a hesitant hand. "Seriously. Are you alright?"
And he was. For the first time in what felt like forever, he was more than alright.
*inspired by the BND trailer because holy shit my baby’s going through it
Warnings: angst, hurt/comfort, light injury
He’s hurt again. Sitting against the washing machine in a hoodie and boxers, his knees drawn to his chest while his suit gets cleaned up from his latest fight.
He didn’t say much when you walked in. Didn’t move to get up while you settled on the floor by his side, facing him. He only looked at you with weary eyes, giving you the brief rundown you hear every time, with little to no variation. The bad guy lost. He’s fine. Just a little sore and tired. It’s only his thigh that took the brunt of it this time. You rest a gentle hand on his knee as you inspect the damage—a swollen, purple-ish patch of flesh the size of your palm.
You’ve seen worse on him. Uglier bruises, deeper cuts, a broken rib or two. All relatively superficial. A couple of days and he’s good as new, but it’s a double edged blade. Accelerated healing doesn’t mean his wounds don’t hurt when inflicted, and heightened senses aren’t all that helpful when the sense in question is pain. Sure, he can go on pushing his body with little to no lasting consequence, but at what cost—to his sanity and yours? You can’t not know he’s suffering, every single fucking day, even if he acts like it’s nothing. You have a sneaking, nausea-inducing suspicion that, on some level, he may think he deserves it.
That bad should happen to him for being so good that it got her killed.
And you want him to be happy again so badly it’s crushing you.
Slowly, you lean down. Press your lips to his outer thigh, an inch or so above his bruise. There’s a tremor in his breath. The touch of your lips is barely there, and you make it even lighter as you move a little further down, where you know it hurts. You mean to soothe the inflamed skin. Gently coat it with the affection he so desperately needs but never asks for.
He says your name. A quiet, tender little sound, always carrying an unmistakeable tinge of relief. He basks in it—the simple act of him speaking it out loud, and you looking at him with recognition. You’re alive and you know him. That alone is a blessing, but when you do things like this—coming to his side like you belong nowhere else, laying your eyes and hands on him with such pure affection, kissing where his body is most battered and sore—
He can deny himself all kinds of comforts. He can’t deny himself you. He’s tried, all right. Telling you you deserve someone who isn’t constantly worn down and banged up and broke and will show up on time—or at all—for something as simple as a date. You wouldn’t have it. He thinks, sometimes, he should keep trying. For your sake.
He’s both grateful and ashamed he doesn’t find the strength.
His head falls back against the washing machine with a small thud, swallowed by the sound of its mechanism and his drawn-out sigh. He cradles the back of your head, mirroring the gentle hold you have on his leg. You have lowered your hand to his midthigh, and the angle you’re bent at is awkward, but it’s more than worth it to keep brushing your lips over his abused flesh. It’s so unfair. So fucking unfair how the person least deserving of pain has to—chooses to endure it on a daily basis. So unfair that you can’t take it all away, even if it would mean you had to feel it for him.
His touch becomes the slightest bit more firm, guiding you to lift your head. Your eyes meet, briefly, as he takes your face with both hands and pulls you close. He wants your lips on his, all of you in his arms, and you give him both, melting into him completely.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs into your mouth, on each trembling breath in between kisses. “I love you. I love you. I’m sorry.”
You hear both so often, they’re starting to become one and the same. You only kiss him harder, press yourself further into him, bury your fingers in his hair. It’s dirty again. The floor is hard and cold. Your body aches too, even if its battles are only with sleep deprivation and the twist of worry for him between your ribs that flares and wanes, but never really leaves. It’s fine. It’s all fine, as long as he keeps letting himself have you. Few things terrify you more than the day he might decide you’re better off if he stops.
“It’s okay,” you whisper on his lips. Then again, as you tuck your head into his neck. “It’s okay.”
It’s not.
But it will be, one day.
It has to.
******
A/n: Thanks for reading! Comments, reblogs and asks are appreciated❤️
Synopsis: Your new neighbour and Spider-Man have the same unfortunate habit of saying just enough to make you suspicious, but never enough to explain why. Still, coincidence is not evidence. Similarities prove nothing. And two plus two only equals four when you can show your work.
Word Count: 11k+
Tropes: slow-burn, strangers to lovers, second-chance romance, secret identity, mutual(?) pining, hurt/comfort, protective Peter Parker (his methods are questionable but his heart is in the right place), neighbours
Warnings: mild bnd spoilers!, canon-typical violence and injuries, attempted kidnapping and assault, bruising and injury, stalking jokes, grief, eventual smut (probably in part four...)
Previous | Next (out now!) | Read on AO3
Every day at Empire State University feels exactly the same.
You drag your cursor across the screen and open a fresh notebook on your laptop, resisting the urge to close it again immediately. A lecture at eight in the morning should be considered a human rights violation. Especially when attendance counts toward your final grade.
From your usual seat in the last row, you watch the rest of the class trickle in.
There is the girl with the colour-coded notes. The guy who has mastered the art of sleeping with his eyes open. The couple in the second row who spends more time staring at each other than at the board.
And, of course, the guy three seats down who has been wearing the same grey hoodie for four lectures in a row. You are beginning to think it is no longer a hoodie and has simply become part of him.
Not that you can judge. The coursework at ESU is no joke. You are probably overdue for an everything shower yourself.
You have just started mentally rearranging your evening around it when Dr. Banner walks into the lecture hall.
He carries a coffee in one hand and a stack of papers tucked beneath his other arm, looking exactly as tired as a man teaching university students at what might as well be the crack of dawn has every right to look.
You have known him for years. Sort of.
Bruce Banner had been one of your father’s closest friends. At least, that is what everyone has always told you.
You met him a handful of times growing up, usually at some formal Stark event or during one of the rare stretches when your father remained in the same country for longer than a week.
Tony Stark loved you. You know that. He just had had a remarkably inconvenient way of showing it.
Most fathers worried about scraped knees and report cards. Yours worried about terrorist organizations, alien invasions, kidnappings, and whether someone might use you as leverage against him. His solution had been to keep you hidden, guarded, and, more often than not, somewhere far away from him.
He had called it protection. You thought it was something closer to parenting by wire transfer.
It is difficult to blame him completely. Protecting the world had left very little room in his schedule for school recitals or remembering to call his own daughter. Then he died saving it, which made staying angry with him significantly more complicated.
The Stark name comes with unwanted attention, several buildings you never ask to inherit, and enough public speculation about your life to keep Wikipedia editors employed for decades.
People have opinions about everything. Your clothes, your degree, your water bottle, whether Tony Stark’s daughter is doing enough to continue his legacy.
Apparently, choosing ESU over MIT is worthy of the front-page news, and attending university without inventing the next clean energy breakthrough on the side is considered wasted potential.
Still, you have never been ashamed to carry his name.
Dr. Banner is one of the few people at ESU who rarely treats you differently because of it. Which apparently means assigning enough reading to ruin your weekends.
“Morning,” he says.
A scattered chorus of greetings answers him in return, none particularly enthusiastic.
Bruce sets his coffee on the desk and begins connecting his laptop to the projector. The screen flashes blue, then black, then displays his desktop background for several long seconds before he manages to pull up the lecture slides.
“Today, we’re continuing our discussion on cellular responses to gamma radiation—”
The door at the front of the lecture hall creaks open.
Every head in the room turns.
A guy stands in the doorway, slightly out of breath.
Messy brown hair. Faded jacket. Beat-up backpack hanging from one shoulder. He looks around your age, although the dark circles under his eyes suggest he has not slept properly since middle school. You wonder if you’ve ever looked that exhausted.
“Sorry,” he says, slightly out of breath. “Am I late?”
Bruce glances at the clock. “By approximately seven minutes.”
The stranger nods as though this is better than he expected. “Okay. Not terrible.”
Bruce stares at him. The guy stares back. A few people begin to snicker.
Bruce reaches for the attendance sheet on his desk and skims down the page. He checks the second page. You already know everyone who should be present is here. You count the backs of everyone’s heads often enough that you’d notice if someone swapped places.
Bruce’s brow furrows. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”
The stranger’s hand tightens around the strap of his backpack. The movement is small, but it catches your eye.
There is a pause before he responds.
“Maynard.”
“Maynard,” Bruce repeats.
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a last name, Maynard?”
Another pause.
“Also Maynard?”
Someone near the front chokes on a laugh.
Bruce removes his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. “So your name is Maynard Maynard.”
The stranger gives him a small nod. “My parents were big on consistency.”
You press your lips together to suppress a laugh of your own. This guy had to be joking, right?
Bruce lowers his hand and looks at the attendance sheet again, as though Maynard Maynard might have appeared while he wasn’t looking.
“So you’re a new student?”
“I guess so.”
“You guess?” Bruce looks like he could use a second coffee. It’s not even 8:30.
The new guy just shrugs.
Bruce studies him for a moment. His eyes narrow behind his glasses.
“Huh,” he finally sighs. “Well, either the registrar forgot to update my attendance list or you wandered into the wrong classroom.”
Maynard glances at the lecture slide behind him. “Cellular responses to gamma radiation?”
“Yes.”
“No, this is the right one.”
Bruce gives a tired shrug, apparently deciding that the possibility of an unidentified student infiltrating his lecture is not worth delaying the class any further. “Alright, then. Take a seat.”
Maynard turns toward the rows of students. His eyes find yours almost immediately. They stare at you with a softness that disappears before you can decide what it is.
You glance behind you, half expecting to find someone standing against the wall. Obviously, no one is there.
When you look back, Maynard has lowered his eyes and started climbing the stairs.
He makes it three steps before walking directly into the corner of a desk.
“Sorry,” he mutters to the student sitting at it. Then, inexplicably, he looks at you again.
Your eyes narrow this time. The new guy is weird.
Maynard continues up the stairs, this time paying considerably more attention to the desks in his path. There are several empty seats scattered throughout the back rows, but he ignores all of them in favour of the one right beside you.
Of course he does.
He slides into the chair with practiced ease, shoulders relaxed, backpack tucked neatly between his feet. If not for his entrance, he might have disappeared into the room entirely.
You stare at the empty seat on his other side. Then at him. Then back at the empty chair.
He follows your gaze.
“Oh.” His hand starts reaching for his bag. “Did you want me to move?”
“No.” You’re not entirely sure, to be honest.
“Okay.”
“I’m just wondering why you sat here.”
His eyes flick briefly toward you before darting back to the ongoing lecture at the front of the room.
“It was empty,” he replies quickly.
“So are twelve other seats,” you point out, folding your arms across your chest.
“I like the back.”
“And how would you know that?” you ask. “You’ve never been here before.”
“Maybe I have a feeling about it.”
“A feeling,” you repeat.
“Good acoustics.”
You raise a skeptical brow, looking around the enormous lecture hall.
“I’m really passionate about sound distribution,” he says earnestly.
You hold his gaze for a moment. He gives you an awkward smile.
It is not a particularly convincing smile, but there is something unfairly disarming about it. Maybe it is the way one side of his mouth lifts slightly higher than the other. Maybe it is the faint crease that appears beside his eyes.
Or maybe you are more tired than you thought.
At the front of the room, Dr. Banner clears his throat. “Whenever the two of you are finished discussing the architectural merits of the lecture hall, I’d like to resume teaching.”
Several heads turn in your direction.
You blink. You hadn’t even noticed the lecture had stopped. That never happens.
“Sorry,” Maynard says, sinking lower in his chair.
Bruce’s eyes remain on him for a second longer than necessary. He clicks to the next slide. “Gamma radiation is most commonly associated with cellular damage,” he continues. “But under very specific conditions, exposure can trigger an adaptive response rather than cellular death.”
Beside you, Maynard pulls a notebook from his bag. Not a laptop. An actual notebook. The cover is bent, the corners are frayed, and more than half of the pages appear to be held together by hope. He flips it open and starts rummaging through his backpack for something to write with.
You return your attention to the front. That is, you try to.
Maynard checks one pocket. Then another. Then the front pouch. His movements become increasingly frantic.
You watch him turn his bag upside down beneath the desk. A charger, two granola-bar wrappers, a crumpled receipt, and what looks like a sewing kit tumble into his lap. No pencil though.
“Are you moving in?” you whisper.
“Not intentionally,” he groans.
You reach into your own bag and hold out a pencil. His eyes settle on it, then shift to you again. For some reason, the simple gesture seems to catch him off guard.
“It’s a pencil,” you say.
“I know,” he murmurs, staring down at it again.
“I promise it won’t bite. You don’t need to be so suspicious of it.”
Maynard glances up. "I'm not suspicious."
"Then what's with the hesitation?"
He smiles faintly. "I'm just not used to people giving me things."
He takes it carefully, making sure his fingers do not touch yours. “Thanks.”
“You can keep it.”
He raises his eyebrows. The response is so immediate that you almost laugh.
“It cost like eighty cents,” you add. “Try not to make it sentimental.”
“Right. Sorry.” He looks down at the pencil in his hand. His thumb brushes over the eraser at the end once before he begins writing.
You turn back to your laptop, although your attention keeps drifting sideways.
His notes are surprisingly neat. Not colour-coded or meticulously organized, but quick and precise, filled with abbreviations and tiny diagrams. He keeps up with Bruce easily, sometimes writing down the next point before it appears on the slide. It seems that Maynard Maynard is very passionate about gamma radiation.
Bruce reaches a slide covered in chemical equations and turns to face the class. “Can anyone explain why the altered cells remain stable despite the continued production of reactive oxygen species?”
Silence drapes over the room. The girl with the colour-coded notes suddenly finds her keyboard fascinating. The guy in the grey hoodie lowers his head as though hoping camouflage might activate.
Bruce waits. His eyes sweep across the lecture hall before landing, inevitably, on the unfamiliar face beside you. “Maynard.”
Maynard stops writing. “Yes?”
“You’re new.”
“That’s what people keep telling me.”
A few students laugh.
Banner crosses his arms. “Why don’t you take a guess?”
Maynard glances at the equation. For the first time since walking into the room, the uncertainty leaves his expression.
“The mitochondrial pathways are compensating,” he says. “The cells should be collapsing under oxidative stress, but they're redirecting the excess energy into tissue regeneration instead. It's not really stable.” He pauses. “It's more like… tearing a piece of paper while someone tapes it back together at the exact same speed. It never actually falls apart, but it never completely heals either.”
The room goes quiet.
“Theoretically,” Maynard adds quickly, as though remembering that he is supposed to be guessing.
Maynard nods and returns his focus to his notebook.
You lean slightly closer to him. “You sure you need the good acoustics back here? You obviously know your stuff.”
He keeps his eyes on the page. “I read ahead.”
“You walked in looking like you didn’t know what class this was less than an hour ago.”
“I read broadly.”
Bruce continues the lecture, but you stop pretending to take useful notes. The stranger beside you is either lying about nearly everything or is somehow the most accidentally suspicious person in New York. Possibly both.
For the remainder of class, you keep an eye on him. You notice a few things.
He writes with his left hand but catches the pencil with his right when it rolls toward the edge of the desk. He reacts before it actually falls, fingers closing around it without his gaze leaving the board.
When someone a few rows in front of you sneezes, Maynard flinches a full second before it happens.
When Banner mentions Stark Industries’ early research into clean-energy conversion, the pencil stops moving between his fingers.
And whenever he thinks you are not paying attention, he looks at you.
Not in the usual way though.
You know what it feels like to be stared at. Being Tony Stark’s daughter means strangers have spent most of your life trying to decide whether you resemble him, whether you deserve his money, or whether you possess any hidden trauma they can speculate about online.
Maynard does not look at you with curiosity. He looks at you with familiarity. It feels much more unsettling.
By the time Banner dismisses the class, you have learned precisely three things about cellular responses to gamma radiation and approximately seventeen things about the stranger sitting beside you. Most importantly, he is terrible at pretending not to watch you.
Students begin packing their things. Maynard closes his notebook and holds the borrowed pencil toward you.
“I told you to keep it,” you say, shaking your head to refuse it. “I have a lot more.”
“I don’t want to take it.”
You raise a brow. “You entered a class you may or may not be enrolled in under the name Maynard Maynard, but taking an eighty-cent pen is where you draw the line?”
“I have principles,” he murmurs.
“Do any of them involve using your real name?”
His fingers tighten around the pencil. The awkwardness in his demeanour fades, something guarded appearing in its place. “Maynard is my real name.”
“Sure.”
“It very well could be.”
“But it isn’t.”
He studies you. You study him back. Up close, you notice a faded bruise along his jaw, mostly concealed beneath the curve of his cheek. Another yellowing mark disappears beneath the collar of his shirt.
You glance at his knuckles.
Scraped. Fresh enough that the skin hasn't fully closed.
Maynard follows your gaze and quickly curls his fingers into his palm.
“Boxing,” he says.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were looking.”
“I look at everyone.”
“I know.” The words leave his mouth too easily.
You go still. He isn’t wrong. You do look at everyone. But the certainty in his voice catches you off guard, like he's stating a fact he's known for years instead of something he noticed over the past hour.
He seems to realize his mistake at the exact same moment.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” you ask, pushing your chair back as you pack your things.
“Nothing. I mean, you seem observant.”
“You met me fifty-five minutes ago.”
“Fifty-eight.”
You stare at him. He closes his eyes to avoid yours.
“Which is not helping,” he mutters.
“No,” you sigh. “It really isn’t.”
Your new classmate is saved by Dr. Banner before he has the chance to invent another terrible lie.
“Maynard.”
You both turn towards the front.
Bruce stands beside the desk with the attendance sheet in his hand. “Could you stay for a moment?”
Maynard glances at you. There it is again. That brief, instinctive look, as though he is checking whether you are safe before allowing you out of his sight.
You sling your bag over your shoulder. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re going to need it, Maynard Maynard.”
His mouth twitches. “You can just call me Maynard.”
“I would rather not call you anything.”
The smile disappears as quickly as it came. Something in his expression makes you feel unexpectedly cruel. You push the feeling aside and head toward the stairs.
You make it all the way to the door before slowing. Not stopping, exactly. The lecture hall has excellent acoustics, apparently. Or maybe you're simply making excuses to listen.
“You're not on my attendance list,” Bruce says.
“I know.”
“Are you enrolled at ESU?”
Maynard pauses before answering. He seems to do that often. “Technically?”
Your steps become impossibly slower.
Banner lets out a tired breath. “That is not generally a word people use before saying yes.”
“I’m sorting out the paperwork.”
“And in the meantime, you decided to attend my lecture.”
“I heard you were a good professor.”
You glance back. Maynard stands in front of Bruce’s desk with his shoulders slightly hunched, looking less like a mysterious criminal mastermind and more like a teenager who has been called into the principal’s office.
Bruce studies him with the same faint crease between his brows as before. “From whom?”
Maynard hesitates. “People.”
“What people?”
“Science people.”
Banner stares blankly at him.
Maynard shifts his weight. “And, you know. You’re famous.”
Banner glances down at his own hands, then back at Maynard.
“There it is,” he says. “That’s usually what appears first on my faculty evaluations.”
Maynard winces.
Banner studies him for a moment. “Most spend the semester waiting for me to turn green.”
Maynard gives a small shrug. “I’ve seen worse.”
At some point, you've stopped pretending you're on your way out. One hand rests on the door handle, but you make no attempt to open it.
Maynard quickly adds, “On the news. I’ve seen worse on the news.”
Bruce is still watching him with that same faint crease between his eyebrows. The expression isn’t unkind though. You decide that Bruce Banner truly has the patience of a saint. Or perhaps that is simply what happens when a person has spent enough years worrying about turning into a giant green rage monster. Eventually, an unidentified student wandering into your lecture becomes a comparatively minor inconvenience.
“Bring me proof of registration next class.”
“I will.”
“And identification.”
Maynard grimaces. “Is that mandatory?”
“It became mandatory when you told me your name was Maynard Maynard.”
You leave before your curiosity convinces you to linger for any longer.
—
By the time you step outside the building, the morning air has lost most of its chill. Students crowd the pathways between buildings, carrying coffees and complaining loudly about assignments they have known about for several weeks.
You check the time. Three hours until your next class.
Normally, you would head to the library. Today, the promise of the leftover takeout waiting in your refrigerator wins out.
Your apartment is only a few subway stops away from campus. It is smaller than anything most people expect a Stark to live in, which is part of why you chose it.
The building does not have a doorman, a private landing pad, or windows capable of withstanding a missile strike.
It does have rent that makes you question the economic stability of New York City, but that feels almost normal.
You cross the courtyard and pull out your phone.
Three missed emails. One reminder that your tuition payment is due. Four separate headlines containing the words STARK HEIRESS, all of which you ignore on principle.
You clear the notifications without opening them and continue toward the subway.
Maynard should leave your thoughts somewhere between campus and the station. He does not.
Instead, your mind keeps returning to the way he looked at you. Not interested. Not exactly.
People look at you with interest all the time. They look at your last name, your bank account, and whatever expression happens to be on your face when someone mentions Iron Man. You recognize curiosity. You recognize greed. You recognize the particular brand of badly concealed pity reserved for the daughter of a dead Avenger.
Maynard’s expression had been different.
He had looked relieved. That is what bothers you.
Relief implies expectation. Expectation implies he knew you would be there.
You nearly miss your train while thinking about it.
“Great,” you mutter, slipping through the closing doors at the last second. “Now I’m profiling strange men on public transportation.”
An elderly man glances at you from the nearest seat.
“Not you,” you assure him.
He moves his bag closer to his chest.
The ride home is uneventful, which in New York generally means no one starts a fight, releases a wild animal, or announces the impending end of the world.
You stop for coffee on the way to your building and manage to convince yourself that Maynard is probably just awkward. Very, suspiciously awkward, but awkward nonetheless.
When you arrive, you notice the elevator in your building is still out of service.
A handwritten sign has been taped over the doors.
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.
Someone has added NO YOU’RE NOT underneath it in red marker.
At least someone corrected the misinformation.
You make the trek up the stairs. By the fourth floor, the coffee no longer feels worth carrying. By the fifth, you have mentally composed an email to your landlord containing the words negligence, legal action and I know people, although the last one feels embarrassingly close to something your father would have said. You decide to scrap the unwritten email.
You push open the stairwell door with your shoulder.
The hallway is a mess.
Boxes cover more than half of it. Some are sealed neatly. Others are taped haphazardly. A rolled mattress leans against the wall beside a small wooden desk. There is a chair with only three visible legs and a cardboard box with several old labels aggressively scratched out. In one corner, someone has written MAYBE KITCHEN? in black marker.
The door to the apartment across from yours is wide open.
Someone is finally moving into 6B.
You have been enjoying the empty unit for the past three months. No neighbour means no complaints when you play music at questionable volumes, no awkward small talk while unlocking your door, and no one noticing how frequently you order enough takeout for a family of six during exam seasons.
You suppose it was too much to hope the vacancy would last forever.
A crash sounds from inside the apartment, followed almost immediately by a muffled, “I’m okay.”
You raise an eyebrow just as someone backs through the doorway carrying a stack of boxes high enough to hide most of his face. All you can see at first is a faded jacket, beat-up sneakers and a mess of brown hair above the cardboard.
Then he turns.
Your heart sinks to the soles of your feet.
Maynard’s eyes meet yours over the top box, and he freezes so suddenly that the stack shifts in his arms. One box slips sideways, but his hand shoots out before it can fall, catching it so quickly that, for a second, you wonder whether your eyes simply failed to keep up.
A second later, it is balanced securely against his hip as though nothing happened.
Neither of you speaks.
You look at the box, then at him, then past his shoulder into the open apartment across from yours. Maynard follows your gaze before his eyes drift to the small brass 6A fixed above your door. Something complicated passes over his face.
“Oh,” he says.
You stare blankly at him.
He attempts a smile. It is the same awkward smile from class, but somehow worse now. “Hi.”
“No.”
His smile disappears. “No?”
“No.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You do not get to say hi like this is a normal coincidence,” you say, fuming.
Maynard adjusts the boxes in his arms, shifting the weight against his chest. “People live across from other people all the time.”
“You appeared in my class this morning under a fake name.”
He furrows his brows. “It’s not fake.”
“Your name cannot be Maynard Maynard.”
“You don’t know that.”
You gesture between his open apartment and your own door. “And now you live across the hall from me.”
“I moved in yesterday.”
“You were not here yesterday.”
“I started moving in yesterday.” He tries to correct himself.
“There were no boxes yesterday,” you state firmly.
Maynard hesitates for half a second. “I moved the invisible ones first.”
You say nothing, momentarily too offended by his audacity to form a response.
He closes his eyes briefly, as though replaying the sentence and finding it just as bad the second time. “That sounded better in my head.”
“I doubt that,” you mutter, looking past him into the apartment.
It is mostly empty. A small couch sits on the floor beside the window, still wrapped in plastic. A half-built shelving unit leans crookedly against one wall. On the kitchen counter, there is a bag of white bread, a jar of peanut butter, and exactly one mug.
The place does not look staged. Honestly, it barely looks inhabited. You’re not sure whether or not that should make you feel better.
“When did you sign the lease?” you ask.
“A little while ago.”
“How long is a little while?”
“A few days.”
“In New York City?”
He shrugs. “I got lucky.”
“And it just so happens that your luck landed you across the hall from me?”
His grip tightens around the bottom box. “I didn’t know you lived here.”
You decide his answer came too quickly for your liking. You fold your arms across your chest. “Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“My name is on the buzzer downstairs.”
“I didn’t notice. I was distracted.”
“By what?”
“The stairs.”
“It looks like you’ve survived them several times already.” You gesture to the boxes scattered across the floor. The hallway was spotless when you left for class this morning. Now they’re everywhere, and he doesn’t look like he broke a sweat.
“They’re very distracting stairs.”
He has to be lying. People notice the name Stark. It’s almost impossible not to.
They notice it on credit cards, reservation lists, and packages left outside your door. They notice it even when you wish they wouldn’t, usually right before deciding they want an autograph, an investment, or access to something your father left behind.
And yet Maynard expects you to believe he signed a lease directly across the hall from Tony Stark’s daughter without so much as glancing at the buzzer.
You narrow your eyes at him. “Do you usually sign leases without checking the neighbours?”
“I was more focused on whether the ceiling leaked.”
“Does it?”
“Only in one corner.” Maynard shifts the boxes against his chest. “Look, I’m not after your money.”
You go still. “I didn’t say you were.”
“You were thinking it.”
He was right. You were.
“Well, I wasn’t,” you lie. “Besides, I think you’re out of luck.”
He blinks.
You shrug. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t keep stacks of cash hidden in my apartment.”
He looks offended. “I wasn't implying you did.”
“Good. Because that would be a terrible business plan.”
Up close, you can see the bruise along his jaw again. It looks darker in the hallway lighting. There is another faint mark near his temple, partly hidden by his hair.
Whatever he does in his spare time, you doubt it’s boxing. Not the type of boxing you’re familiar with anyway.
“Are you following me?” you ask.
Maynard nearly drops the boxes again. “What? No.”
“You showed up in my class, sat beside me, and moved across the hall all in one day.”
“I didn’t move here today,” Maynard says.
You rub your temples. “That is not a denial of the rest.”
His expression tightens. “I’m not following you.”
“Then why did you sit next to me?”
“I already told you. I like the back.”
“For the acoustics,” you quote, rolling your eyes.
“Exactly.”
You consider adding another bruise to his face. “That was a joke.”
“I thought we had established it was a deeply held academic preference.”
“And you kept staring at me.”
“I wasn’t staring,” he protests.
“You walked into a desk.”
“The desk came out of nowhere.”
“It was bolted to the floor.”
“They’re getting smarter.”
Despite yourself, a laugh slips out.
It is barely more than a breath, but you can tell Maynard hears it. The tension leaves his face so quickly that it catches you off guard. For one brief second, he looks at you with such open fondness that the laugh dies in your throat.
And there it is again. That look. As though your laugh is familiar. Like he has heard it a thousand times and spent far too long waiting to hear it again. Like it belongs to a memory you do not share.
His smile fades the moment he notices you are no longer smiling back.
You school your face. “You keep doing that.”
He frowns. “Doing what?”
“Looking at me like that.”
Maynard’s gaze drops to the floor between you. “I’m sorry.”
The apology is so quiet that it unsettles you more than any denial could.
You slowly uncross your arms. “Do we know each other?”
His head lifts. For the shortest moment, hope flashes across his face. Bright, immediate, and gone before you can make sense of it.
“No,” he says. The word lands too carefully.
You study him, waiting for the awkward smile or another ridiculous excuse, but this time he does not look away.
There are people who can lie without blinking. Your father had been one of them. Tony Stark could stand in front of a room full of reporters, tell them an airborne weapons platform was a weather-monitoring satellite and make half of them feel stupid for questioning him.
Maynard is not that kind of liar.
His shoulders are too stiff. His mouth presses into a thin line. His eyes hold yours with the intensity of someone trying very hard not to say anything else.
He is lying. You just do not know about what.
A door opens at the far end of the hallway.
Mrs. Wen steps out of 6D carrying a small bag of recycling. She pauses when she sees his open apartment door.
“Oh, good,” she says, facing Maynard. “You found your key.”
He glances at her. “Yeah. Thank you for your help. It’s been a long day.”
“It’s not even noon,” she points out.
“Long morning.” He corrects himself with a kind smile.
The older woman turns her attention to you. “Your new neighbour is very polite.”
You sigh. “Well, that’s reassuring.”
She nods, looking at Maynard approvingly. “He carried my groceries upstairs earlier today.”
You look at Maynard. He shrugs. “The elevator’s broken.”
“It has been broken for six days,” Mrs. Wen tells him. Then she turns back to you. “You never offered to carry my groceries.”
You swallow a groan and smile sweetly. “Mrs. Wen, I carried them upstairs on Tuesday.”
She squints at you. “Did you?”
“And last Friday.”
Mrs. Wen’s brow furrows.
Maynard clears his throat. “She probably helps so often it all blends together.”
You stare at him, momentarily stunned that he has chosen to back you up.
Mrs. Wen looks between the two of you with far too much interest. “You two know each other?”
“No,” you say.
“Yes,” Maynard says at the same time.
You shoot him a glare.
“From class,” he adds quickly. “We met in class.”
“This morning,” you clarify.
Mrs. Wen smiles. You know that smile. It’s the same one she gave you when the barista at the cafe across the street started making your order before you even reached the counter.
“Well,” she says, “now you can walk to school together.”
You wonder if you could get away with strangling a senior citizen. Probably not.
“We will not be doing that,” you say firmly. Maynard opens his mouth. You point a finger at him. “Do not agree with her.”
He closes it again.
Mrs. Wen’s smile deepens. “Very nice.”
She continues toward the stairwell, taking her recycling with her.
You pinch the bridge of your nose as her footsteps fade. So much for relying on Mrs. Wen as a credible witness when Maynard’s stalking inevitably ends you both up in court.
The faint rip of cardboard draws your attention back to him. The bottom of the lowest box is beginning to sag beneath its contents.
“You should put those down before the bottom gives out,” you say warily.
“It’s fine.”
The cardboard tears a little farther, allowing the end of a lamp cord to slip through the opening.
Maynard glances down at it. “Still fine.”
He turns toward his apartment, but the weakened cardboard gives way before he reaches the door.
A corner of the box splits open, spilling books and loose tools across the hallway. The lamp remains wedged inside for a fraction of a second before its weight tears through the remaining cardboard. It slips base-first toward the floor, the exposed bulb following behind it.
Maynard’s hand shoots out.
He catches the lamp by its metal stem just before the bulb strikes the hardwood.
The movement is almost too fast to follow. One moment, the lamp is falling among the scattered books. The next, it hangs securely from his hand, the glass suspended only inches above the floor.
A wrench skids toward you, and you step aside before it can strike your ankle.
For a moment, neither of you speaks.
Maynard slowly straightens, still holding the lamp.
You look at the mess scattered across the hallway, then at the unbroken glass in his hand. “How did you do that?”
His gaze follows yours. “Do what?”
“Catch that.”
“Reflexes.”
You shake your head. “That was not just reflexes.”
“It felt a lot like reflexes.”
“It looked like you knew the lamp was falling before the box even opened.”
“The cardboard was tearing,” he responds dismissively.
“So you caught a glass lamp without looking?”
“I looked,” he insists.
“For half a second.”
“Apparently, that was enough.” He places the lamp carefully on the small wooden desk beside the wall, giving you a small smile. “You’d be surprised what people can do under pressure.”
“I once watched my father redirect a nuclear missile through a portal into space,” you murmur. “My standards for surprising are unusually high.”
The amusement at your shock leaves Maynard’s face. Something quieter takes its place. It’s not pity. You have seen enough of that to recognize it immediately.
It’s grief.
Your fingers curl at your side.
Very few people have earned the right to look like that when you mention your father. Friends. Family. The people who fought beside him.
Not a man you met a few hours ago.
“What?” you ask.
Maynard blinks, and the expression disappears. “Nothing.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And that.”
He crouches beside the torn box and begins gathering the books scattered around his feet.
You glance down.
Most are science texts. Physics. Biochemistry. Electrical engineering. A battered GED preparation guide from a few years back sits among them, its spine cracked open to a page filled with pencilled calculations.
None of them has his name written inside.
You crouch before you can talk yourself out of helping him, picking up the nearest book. A photograph slips from between the pages.
You reach for it.
He gets there first.
His hand closes over the photograph before you can see more than a flash of red and gold.
Your eyes meet his. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
You huff. “You have got to learn another word.”
“It’s just a picture.”
“Of?”
His fingers curl around it. Something protective settles over his expression. “Someone I used to know.”
The answer is honest. You can tell because it sounds nothing like the others.
You look at his closed fist.
Red and gold could mean anything. An old Iron Man postcard. A newspaper clipping. Some cheap piece of Avengers merchandise. You wouldn’t be surprised if half the city owns something with your father’s face on it.
That does not explain why Maynard looks like the picture in his grip hurts.
“Your apartment is across the hall,” you say. “Your class schedule apparently matches mine, and you own mystery photographs you refuse to explain.”
He sighs. “I know how it looks.”
You raise an eyebrow. “Do you?”
“Bad,” he admits.
“Extremely.”
“I promise I’m not following you.”
“You already promised your name was Maynard.”
“I never promised that.”
You roll your eyes. “That is not the defence you think it is.”
He tucks the photograph into the back pocket of his jeans and gathers the remaining tools. You hand him the wrench that had almost taken you out earlier.
“I’m going inside,” you say, finally turning away from him.
“That’s probably good.”
“And I’m locking my door.”
His mouth twitches. “Also probably good.”
“If I see you lurking outside it, I’m calling the police,” you warn him.
“I won’t lurk.”
“And if for some reason, you decide to climb through my window to rob me, I’m calling the Avengers.”
The amusement leaves his face. Just for a second. You almost miss it.
“The Avengers?” he repeats lightly.
“I still have a few numbers,” you admit.
That is not entirely true.
You have Pepper’s number. Happy’s too, although your last conversation ended with him scolding you to stop sending suspicious packages to his office simply because his security team “needed the practice.”
Most of the Avengers are scattered now. Retired, missing, dead, or otherwise unavailable to handle your disputes with weird neighbours.
Maynard doesn’t need to know that though.
“I’ll make note of that,” he says.
You turn toward your apartment and slide the key into the lock. As usual, it refuses to turn. You jiggle it once, annoyed.
“Lift the handle first,” Maynard says behind you.
Your hand stills. Slowly, you look over your shoulder. He is crouched beside the ruined box, gathering the last of his books.
“What did you say?”
“The handle.” He keeps his eyes on the floor. “Lift it while you turn the key.”
“How do you know that?”
He glances up. “Old locks stick.”
You face the door again, lift the handle and turn the key twice.
The lock clicks open.
A prickle runs across your skin.
You look back at him. “You guessed the exact trick to my front door?”
Maynard rises, the remains of the torn box hanging from one hand. “Lucky guess.”
“You’re having an unusually lucky week.”
Maynard shrugs, the torn remains of the box still hanging from one hand. “I saw the superintendent do it yesterday.”
“Mr. Kowalski hasn’t been above the second floor since his hip surgery.”
You know no one else has touched the lock, either. The Stark security system monitors every attempted entry, and it would have alerted you if so much as an unfamiliar fingerprint brushed the handle.
Maynard is lying directly to your face. Every sensible instinct tells you to go inside, lock the door, and start hunting for a new apartment. You’ve been playing with danger for far too long.
But curiosity keeps you rooted to the spot. You have no idea why you are still humouring him, only that every terrible excuse makes you want to hear the next one.
Maybe curiosity really did kill the cat.
“Someone else, then,” he says.
“Who?” you demand.
“I don’t know.”
“You watched an unidentified person unlock my apartment?”
His eyes widen. “That sounded a lot worse than I meant it to.”
“You think?” You shake your head in exasperation.
Maynard presses his lips together. “I’m going to stop talking now.”
“That may be the smartest thing you’ve said all day.”
You step inside your apartment before turning around one last time to face him.
Maynard stands in the hallway amid his scattered belongings, looking as though there are a thousand things he wants to say and not one of them is safe.
You tighten your grip on the edge of the door. “Stay away from my apartment. I mean it.”
“I will.”
“And stop watching me.”
Something passes across his face. Pain, perhaps. It vanishes beneath a small nod. “I’ll try.”
You narrow your eyes. “That’s not the answer I was looking for.”
“I know.”
You finally close the door, lock it, and throw the deadbolt. After a moment’s hesitation, you slide the security chain into place too.
Silence settles over the apartment.
You remain there with your ear pressed to the door, listening as cardboard scrapes across the hallway. Something heavy, probably one of the books, hits the floor, followed by Maynard muttering under his breath.
Sounds normal enough.
You should walk away, heat up your lunch, and stop wasting what limited time you have before your next class. Instead, you turn and lean toward the peephole.
The fisheye lens warps the hallway beyond it.
Maynard is still standing outside his apartment. He has not returned to gathering his belongings. He is not even looking at the mess scattered around his feet.
He is staring directly at your door.
Your pulse quickens. Whether it is fear or curiosity, you cannot tell. Probably both. Either way, allowing the conversation to continue for as long as it did suddenly feels less amusing than it had in the hallway.
As though he can sense you watching, Maynard slowly lifts his gaze.
His eyes settle on the peephole.
You jerk backward.
“Absolutely not,” you mutter to yourself under your breath.
You retreat into the kitchen.
The apartment is secure. Far more secure than it appears, anyway. The locks are reinforced, the windows are alarmed, and the innocent-looking panel beside the thermostat contains enough Stark technology to alert three different emergency services if someone so much as breathes incorrectly near your front door.
Happy insisted on installing it after you moved out of the compound. You had called it excessive.
He reminded you that attempted kidnappings tend to alter a person’s definition of excessive.
Neither of you won the argument.
You carry your coffee to the counter and set it down. A thin stream has escaped beneath the lid, soaking through the cardboard sleeve.
With a sigh, you rub your temples.
Your new neighbour has a fake name, knows how to open your lock, and looks at you as though he has spent years missing you.
Weirdly, that last part bothers you most.
The sensible thing would be to call someone.
Happy, perhaps. Or Pepper.
Possibly the police, although explaining that your neighbour is suspicious because he has unusually fast reflexes and an unsettling amount of knowledge about faulty lock mechanisms may not inspire an immediate response.
You settle for something slightly less invasive.
Retrieving your laptop from your school bag, you open the ESU student directory. The search bar blinks expectantly.
You type MAYNARD MAYNARD.
No results.
“Shocking.”
You delete the second name and try again.
Three Maynards appear.
Maynard Ellis, a graduate student in economics.
Maynard Rivera, a retired faculty member.
Maynard Cook, whose profile picture suggests he graduated approximately twenty years before you were born.
None of them has messy brown hair, freckles, or an apparent allergy to telling the truth.
You search the course roster next.
Nothing.
You try every variation you can think of—MAYNARD M., M. MAYNARD, new transfers, exchange students—but there is no record of him anywhere.
You close the laptop.
Whatever his real name is, you will find it eventually.
After class, though. Unlike him, you are actually enrolled here.
—
By the time you leave campus that evening, the sun has already disappeared behind the skyline.
Your final lecture ends shortly after five, but an unexpected meeting with your academic adviser keeps you on campus longer than planned. Then your lab runs nearly two hours over because one of your partners insists on measuring everything in ounces.
You explain the metric system twice.
On the third attempt, you consider allowing natural selection to take its course.
It is nearly nine when you finally step outside.
The campus is quieter than usual. Most of the surrounding buildings have emptied, leaving only a handful of students crossing the courtyard beneath yellow pools of lamplight.
Your phone vibrates in your hand.
HAPPY: Dinner Sunday. Pepper and Morgan want to see you.
A second message arrives before you can answer.
HAPPY: That wasn’t a request btw.
You smile despite yourself.
YOU: I’ll check my schedule.
You put your phone away.
You will be there. You always are. Happy knows that too. He simply likes pretending your attendance requires negotiation.
As you approach it, you notice the subway entrance closest to the chemistry building has already been gated off for overnight maintenance. According to the sign zip-tied to the railing, it closed at eight.
Of course it did.
You decide to walk to the station you used that morning, even though it is several blocks farther away. It usually stays open later, and the route is your usual one despite the shuttered cafes and darkened storefronts lining the way.
You make it two blocks before noticing the footsteps behind you. Not because they are loud. Because they match yours.
You stop outside a closed bookstore and pretend to examine the display. The reflection in the glass shows two men about twenty feet behind you.
One of them is tall and broad beneath a dark coat. The shorter one wears a baseball cap pulled low over his face.
Neither appears particularly interested in the bookstore window.
You start walking again.
A few seconds later, footsteps resume behind you.
You try to calm yourself down. They could just be headed in the same direction. New York is crowded, even after rush hour.
Although, it doesn’t help that Maynard Maynard has already spent the day encouraging levels of paranoia you would normally consider unreasonable.
You pick up your pace toward the station. Hopefully if there are enough eye-witnesses around, they’ll back off.
The footsteps follow.
At the following intersection, you cross without waiting for the light. When you glance at the dark reflection of a parked car, both men are crossing behind you.
Your hand slips into your bag and closes around the compact security device clipped inside.
To anyone else, it looks like an ordinary key fob.
It is not.
One press alerts Happy’s security team. Two activates the emergency beacon sewn into the lining of your jacket. Three releases enough voltage to make whoever is touching you reconsider every choice that led them to that moment.
You have never needed to press it. You would prefer to keep it that way.
The street ahead narrows between two construction sites. Temporary fencing blocks the pavement on one side, while scaffolding casts the other into shadow.
You do not enter it. Instead, you stop beneath the brightest streetlight and turn around.
The two men stop too, a few feet behind you, but still too close for comfort.
“You’re really not being very subtle,” you call out, hoping your voice sounds steadier than you feel.
The taller man glances at his companion before looking back at you. “We just want to talk.”
“People who want to talk usually start with ‘hello.’” You tighten your grip around the fob. “They don’t follow someone for three blocks.”
“We know who you are,” the shorter man says, his voice thin and nasal.
“That makes one of us. I have no idea who either of you are.”
The taller man takes a step closer.
You raise the key fob between you. “Before you continue, this is a Stark Industries personal defence system.”
Technically, it was manufactured by a Stark subsidiary nearly five years ago and currently has fourteen percent battery life, but they do not need to know that.
The man stops, his gaze dropping to your hand.
“That what we’re looking for?” he asks his friend.
“No, you idiot,” the nasally one responds. “That’s the shit that electrocutes you.”
The taller one smiles. You dislike that immediately.
“We heard Stark left behind more than money,” he says.
“A billionaire with assets other than money? Incredible detective work. Did the internet tell you that?”
“He left systems,” the shorter one says, closing in behind his friend.
Your amusement fades. “What systems?”
“Systems you can access.”
You resist the urge to roll your eyes. People will believe anything if Tony Stark’s name is attached to it.
There are no more secret networks waiting for you to inherit, no hidden weapons vault only his daughter can open. Anything your father left behind has already been catalogued, dismantled, or locked down by Pepper, Happy, and enough lawyers to populate a small country.
These two are idiots. Unfortunately, idiots can still be dangerous.
You let out a short laugh, sharper than you intend. “My father has been dead for years. Whatever you think he left behind, you’re welcome to submit a request through Stark Industries’ legal department like everyone else.”
The shorter man in the baseball cap moves first.
You press the button on the fob.
Nothing happens.
You press it again. This time, the indicator flashes red: INSUFFICIENT CHARGE.
You stare at it. You had assumed fourteen percent would be enough to prevent at least one kidnapping.
Apparently not.
The man’s hand closes around your wrist.
You drive the heel of your shoe down onto his foot and slam your free palm into his nose.
He releases you with a shout.
The taller man lunges.
You duck beneath his arm and shove the useless security device into your pocket. Your elbow connects with his ribs, but he barely reacts. One hand catches the back of your jacket before you can get away.
The fabric jerks tight across your throat, cutting off your breath. You claw at the collar as it digs into your skin, but every attempt to pull free only makes it tighten further.
A strand of white webbing shoots down from somewhere above and splatters across the man’s face.
“What the—”
He is ripped backward so violently that both feet leave the pavement.
You stumble forward, bracing your hand against the nearest wall, and dragging in a breath as the fabric around your throat finally loosens.
The man in the baseball cap reaches inside his coat.
A second web catches his wrist and snaps his arm against the construction fence. A third seals over his mouth before he can shout.
Spider-Man drops from the scaffolding a heartbeat later, landing between you and the two men in a low crouch, one hand braced against the pavement.
You have seen him before. Everyone with an internet connection has seen Spider-Man.
Blurry phone footage. News reports. Edits of him fighting monsters from outer space. Entire conspiracy threads dedicated to determining whether there is more than one of him, whether he is secretly an alien, and whether the white lenses of his mask can actually blink.
They very much can.
The eye lenses narrow as he looks at the men.
“Following women at night?” he asks. “Really? That’s what we’re doing now?”
The taller man claws at the web covering his face.
Spider-Man rises. “You know, there are much easier ways to embarrass yourselves. Karaoke. Improvisational comedy. Cryptocurrency.”
The man in the baseball cap swings his free arm.
Spider-Man leans back. The fist passes an inch from his face.
“That was almost very threatening,” he quips before catching the man’s arm, turning, and webbing both of his wrists to the fence.
The taller one finally manages to pull the webbing away from his eyes. He charges at the vigilante.
Spider-Man does not even turn around.
His hand shoots backward, catches the man by the front of his coat, and uses his momentum to flip him onto the pavement.
The impact rattles the temporary fencing.
You wince.
Spider-Man glances over his shoulder at you. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Your hand is bleeding.”
You look down. A shallow cut crosses your palm, probably from catching yourself against the rough brick wall. You hadn’t noticed it. “It’s fine. Just a scratch.”
“You should clean it when you get home.”
“Thank you, WebMD.”
The white lenses widen slightly. Then he laughs.
The sound catches you off guard. He sounds much younger than you expected. Not like some gravel-voiced vigilante speaking through a modulator, but breathless and almost boyish behind the mask.
The man on the pavement groans.
Spider-Man turns back toward him. “Oh, good. You’re awake.”
“I’m going to kill you,” he grunts.
If you could see his face, you were sure the hero would be rolling his eyes. “See, that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes people not want to help you up.”
Sirens sound several streets away.
Spider-Man webs the taller man’s wrists together and secures him to the construction fence beside his companion. He gives each strand a sharp tug, apparently satisfied when neither of them moves more than a few inches.
Then he turns to you. “Besides the hand, are you sure you’re not hurt?”
The question is quieter than everything else he has said.
You touch the tender skin beneath your collar. Your throat aches, and your heart is still beating hard enough to make your hands tremble, but you are standing. Breathing. Neither of which had felt guaranteed a minute ago.
“I’m fine.” Your voice comes out rough. You clear your throat. “Thanks to you.”
His shoulders loosen slightly. “Okay. Good.”
For a moment, neither of you says anything. The two men struggle uselessly behind him while sirens wail somewhere in the distance, growing steadily louder.
Spider-Man glances toward the end of the street before looking back at you. “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
The offer is kind. Probably.
Still, your father spent years teaching you that colourful, high-tech masks did not automatically make someone trustworthy. According to Tony, even the best heroes could be reckless, secretive, and catastrophically bad at explaining themselves.
You knew he spoke from experience.
You lower your hand from your throat. “I appreciate the rescue, but I can manage from here.”
“You were almost kidnapped,” Spider-Man protests. “And whoever sent them might have sent someone else.”
The thought wipes away what little humour you had managed to find in the situation.
The vigilante seems to notice. His voice softens. “I’m not trying to scare you. I just don’t think you should finish your usual route alone.”
You look at him. “My usual route?”
He goes still.
The distant sirens continue to approach.
“I meant this route,” he says after a beat. “The route you’re currently on.”
“You said I usually take it.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.”
Your gratitude does not disappear, but caution settles beside it. You narrow your eyes slightly. “How would you know that?”
He shrugs a little too casually. “I just guessed.”
“You guessed that I regularly walk down this particular street?”
“It’s near the university.”
“There are at least a dozen streets near ESU.”
He shifts his weight. “This one seemed the most likely.”
“Based on?”
“General geography?” he offers, tilting his head to the side slightly.
You fold your arms, and his head tips back with what looks suspiciously like resignation.
“I promise I wasn’t following you,” he says. “I was just patrolling.”
“It’s convenient how you just happened to be passing by when I needed help.”
“Well, that is usually the point of patrolling.”
You stare at him.
He stares back. Or you assume he does. The mask makes it difficult to tell.
You try to hold onto your suspicion, but the breathless defensiveness in his voice makes it difficult. A reluctant smile pulls at your mouth. “You’re strange.”
“That’s harsh coming from someone who tried to bluff two kidnappers with a dead key fob.”
You glance down at the device still clenched in your hand. “How did you know it was dead?”
“You pressed it three times.”
“Well, it does have a three-button activation sequence.”
“Maybe. But I saw it flash red.”
You’re bewildered. “You could see that from the scaffolding?”
He pauses, as though he’s contemplating how much he should share with you. “Not to brag, but I do have excellent eyesight.”
“Even through the mask?”
“The lenses definitely help.”
You study the shifting white lenses more closely. “Who made them?”
“I did.”
“You built the suit yourself?”
“Mostly.”
Now that no one is actively trying to drag you into an unmarked vehicle, you allow yourself a proper look at him. The red and blue material hugs his body, patterned with white webbing that stretches across his chest and shoulders toward the black spider emblem at its centre.
It doesn’t look homemade. But then again, neither did your dad’s suits, which had definitely been manufactured with his own two hands. Every seam appears deliberate, and the lenses move with an expressiveness no store-bought mask should be capable of.
“You did a good job,” you say.
The lenses widen. “Oh.”
“Why do you sound surprised?” Your brows furrow with confusion. “It’s an honest comment.”
“I guess I just wasn’t expecting you to say that.”
“Why not?”
His posture changes almost imperceptibly. A slight tension in his shoulders. A careful pause before he answers. “No reason.”
That retreat is unnervingly familiar.
Maynard seems to do the same thing whenever he says more than he intended. The comparison sends a strange unease through you.
“Have we met before?” you ask.
Spider-Man becomes completely motionless.
For half a second, the street seems quieter. Even the men straining against the webbing fade into the background.
Then he tilts his head. “I think you’d remember meeting Spider-Man.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s adjacent to one.”
Red and blue light begins to flash against the buildings as the first police car turns onto the street.
Spider-Man looks toward it. “I should go.”
“You’re abandoning me now?”
“You told me not to walk you home.”
“I also don’t particularly want to explain how two criminals ended up webbed to a fence by myself.”
He gestures toward them. “Tell the police your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man handled it.”
You laugh. “That sounds rehearsed.”
“It’s branding,” he says, one of the lenses closing fully to shoot you a wink.
He fires a web towards the roof of the building adjacent to where you were standing. The strand catches somewhere above, and he bends his knees before springing into a powerful jump.
He disappears over the edge of the roof.
You stare after him while red and blue lights spill across the pavement.
Being rescued should not leave you with more questions than being kidnapped.
⸻
The police keep you for nearly forty minutes.
You answer questions, decline an ambulance, and make the mistake of mentioning that your father’s old technology may have motivated the attempted kidnapping.
That results in three additional officers arriving.
While one of the officers takes your statement, your attention keeps drifting toward the dark sedan parked a few feet from where the men cornered you. Its engine is still running, and the rear passenger door hangs slightly open.
You had not noticed it during the struggle. Now, it is quite obvious where they had intended to take you.
The windows are tinted deeply enough that you cannot see inside. You cannot stop imagining that door closing behind you.
By the time they allow you to leave, Happy has called six times.
You do not know who notified him. Possibly the Stark security system you had tried to activate earlier. Apparently fourteen percent was enough to alert Happy that something was wrong, but not enough to activate any of the protocols that might have actually helped. How convenient.
You answer as you walk. “I’m fine.”
“Where are you?” he demands through the phone.
“On my way home.”
“Stay where you are.”
“Happy, I’m five minutes away from the station. I’ll call you as soon as I get there,” you reassure him.
“I already sent a car,” Happy says. “It’ll be there soon.”
Your eyes drift back to the sedan at the curb. The open rear door. The dark windows.
Your stomach tightens. “No car.”
“What do you mean, no car?”
“I mean I’m not getting into one tonight.”
His voice softens immediately. “Kid—”
“I’ll take the subway. There are police everywhere, I’ll be alright,” you say. “I’ll call you when I get home.”
Happy is quiet for a moment. He understands before you have to explain it.
“Call me as soon as you get there,” he says at last.
“I will.” You hang up and make your way toward the station.
The subway ride is mercifully uneventful. You choose the busiest car, take a seat near the doors and spend most of the journey watching the dark windows for reflections that linger too long. No one pays you any attention. No one follows when you transfer lines, and by the time you emerge onto your street, your pulse has finally begun to settle.
The walk from the station is quiet. You keep one hand around your phone and the other tucked inside your coat, fingers resting against the security fob. It might have been useless tonight, but it still felt comforting against your fingers.
When you reach the entrance to your apartment building, you call Happy.
“I’m here,” you tell him as you unlock the outer door.
“At your apartment?”
“At the building.”
He sighs. “That isn’t the same thing.”
“It’s one broken elevator away.”
“Stay on the phone until you’re inside.”
You roll your eyes, although he cannot see it. “Yes, Happy.”
Movement above the building opposite yours catches your attention.
A red-and-blue figure crouches at the edge of the roof, nearly disappearing against the dark brick. Had he not shifted, you might never have noticed him.
You stop with one foot inside the doorway.
Spider-Man followed you home.
“Everything okay?” Happy asks.
Your gaze remains fixed on the rooftop. Spider-Man raises one hand in a tentative wave, as though being caught watching your building is only mildly embarrassing.
“Apparently, I had an escort.”
Happy falls silent for half a second. “What does that mean?”
“Spider-Man followed me home.”
“He did what?”
The volume of his voice forces you to pull the phone away from your ear. Across the street, Spider-Man points toward it and tilts his head, silently asking whether something is wrong.
You give him a flat look.
“Go home,” you call out.
Happy makes a strangled sound. “Are you talking to him?”
“You told me to stay on the phone.”
“That did not mean confront the masked vigilante who followed you to your apartment.”
“He also saved my life.”
“And then followed you home.”
“Yes, Happy. I’m aware of the mixed signals.” You rub your forehead. “I’ll call you once I’m upstairs.”
“Keep me on the—”
“I’ll be five minutes.”
“Three.”
“Goodbye, Happy.”
You end the call before he can renegotiate and send him a quick message promising that you are safely inside the building. Technically, half of you is.
When you look up again, Spider-Man is no longer on the opposite roof.
A flash of red and blue drops into view. Your hand tightens around the door as a web catches somewhere above the street, carrying him in a smooth arc toward your building. He lands several storeys above you, one hand and both feet fixed against the brick.
You stare up at him. “That is not going home.”
“I wanted to make sure you got inside safely.”
“I told you not to follow me.”
“I know.”
The easy admission catches you off guard.
He does not offer another questionable explanation about patrolling or advanced hearing. He remains where he is, keeping a comfortable distance between you.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “After what happened, I didn’t feel right leaving you alone.”
Some of your irritation slips away despite your best efforts. It would be much easier to remain suspicious if he sounded defensive. Instead, he sounds tired and painfully sincere.
Your father’s warnings remain in the back of your mind. Masks conceal more than faces. Good intentions do not automatically make someone harmless. Tony had known plenty of heroes who meant well and still left destruction behind them.
But without Spider-Man, those men would have forced you into the waiting car.
You release a slow breath. “Thank you for helping me. Truly. But you can’t make a habit of following me home.”
“I won’t.”
Despite yourself, you smile. “I’ll send you a gift basket as thanks, provided you leave me alone afterward.”
He waves his hand dismissively. “I don’t need a gift basket.”
“I guess that saves me a trip.”
He still does not move.
You tilt your head. “This is the part where you leave.”
His attention drops to your hand. “How badly are you hurt?”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“It’s still bleeding.”
He’s right. You tug your sleeve lower with your uninjured hand, hiding the blood and bruising. “I promise it looks worse than it feels.”
Spider-Man’s posture changes. The humour disappears from him so abruptly that you notice the difference even from the ground. His fingers press into the brick, and the white lenses narrow into sharp slits.
“They should’ve been webbed to something taller,” he mutters.
“It’s okay. The police have them now.”
“That doesn’t mean—” He stops and forces some of the tension from his shoulders. “Good. That’s good.”
You study him. “You seem awfully angry for someone who met me less than an hour ago.”
“I get angry when people are hurt.”
“People generally, or me specifically?”
His head turns toward the street.
“People generally,” he says after a moment.
You do not believe him. There is something far too personal in the way he keeps looking at your injured hand, as though seeing them hurts him more than it should.
He starts crawling higher.
“You keep trying to leave whenever I ask a reasonable question,” you call after him.
“I have somewhere to be.”
“Patrolling?”
“Yes.”
“Somewhere that isn’t directly above my head?”
He pauses. “I wasn’t stalking you.”
You roll your eyes. “That’s what the other one says.”
Spider-Man straightens against the wall. “What other one?”
“My other stalker.”
“I’m not your stalker.” He sounds genuinely offended.
“He would probably say that too.”
Instead of leaving, Spider-Man shoots another web above the entrance and lowers himself until he is hanging upside down a few feet from you.
“You actually have a stalker?”
“Apparently, I have two.”
“I’m not—” He stops, visibly reconsidering the argument. “Who is the first one?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because someone following you after what happened tonight seems worth caring about.”
The sincerity in his voice takes some of the edge from your response.
“My new neighbour,” you explain. “He showed up in one of my lectures this morning, used an obviously fake name, then somehow moved into the apartment across from mine before I got home.”
Spider-Man goes quiet.
“That does sound bad,” he says eventually.
A tired laugh escapes you. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. You just remind me of him.”
“I’m not sure whether I should be offended.”
“It’s nothing specific. You both have a habit of saying too much and then becoming noticeably worse at lying.”
He shifts slightly on the web but does not answer.
The amusement fades as you glance toward the glass door at your back. Saying everything aloud makes the day sound worse than it had in your head: Maynard in your lecture, Maynard across the hall, Maynard knowing how to open your lock.
Your fingers tighten around the edge of your sleeve with your good hand. Without noticing, you press your nails into the centre of your palm.
“Don’t do that.”
You look down.
Pale crescents have already formed beneath your nail.
“Do what?”
“That.” Spider-Man gestures toward your hand. “You do it when you’re scared.”
Your fingers slowly uncurl. “How do you know what I do when I’m scared?”
His head lifts sharply.
For a moment, neither of you speaks. Traffic hums at the far end of the street, and somewhere above you, an air-conditioning unit rattles in its frame.
“You were doing it earlier,” he says.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You might have been.”
You shake your head. “I wasn’t.”
His hand tightens around the web. “It’s a common stress response.”
“Did you also learn that from WebMD?”
He has no answer. Behind the mask, you can almost feel him searching for one.
The longer the silence lasts, the more the unease beneath your skin grows. Maynard had looked at you the same way that morning, as though he knew things he had no right to know and could not decide how much of himself to reveal.
“I should go,” Spider-Man says.
“Of course you should.”
He fires a web toward the roof but hesitates before allowing it to pull him away.
“Always double check that you’ve locked your doors.”
“I have a Stark security system.”
“You also had a Stark security key fob.”
Your eyes narrow. “Good night, Spider-Man.”
A quiet laugh comes from behind the mask. “Good night.”
He disappears over the roof.
You remain in the doorway for several seconds, staring at the empty brick where he had been. Then you step inside and allow the door to swing shut.
Your uninjured hand is still open at your side. The small crescents left by your nails remain visible in your palm.
You have done that for as long as you can remember. Pepper used to notice and gently uncurl your fingers without saying anything.
Tony noticed once too.
You had been fourteen, waiting backstage at a Stark Industries benefit while a security threat delayed the event. Your father had crouched in front of you, taken your hand, and tapped the marks in your palm with one finger.
You’re going to puncture your own hand doing that, kid.
No one else knows about it.
No one else should.
a/n: thank you so much for reading part one! this fic somehow grew far beyond what i originally planned, so i decided to split it into four parts!
comments, likes, and reblogs are always appreciated <3
pairing: peter parker x gf!reader
summary: you're determined to leave love bites all over peter's neck, but unfortunately for you, his accelerated healing has other plans. peter has a couple of suggestions to lift your spirits.
cw: attempts at giving hickeys, dry humping, kissing, allusions to sex, reader is kind of possessive but peter loves it
wc: 1k+
Peter sharply inhales, hands tightening on your hips as your teeth softly graze the soft skin of his neck. In the back of the room, Evie calls out “Senses are overriding”, but you couldn’t care less, gripping your boyfriend’s face in one hand and moving it away from you so more space on his neck becomes exposed to you. A pathetic noise leaves Peter’s mouth at the way you handle him, lips reconnecting with his neck to sharply begin sucking again.
A slick layer of sweat coats Peter’s skin for a few reasons. One, you’ve been kissing him for a while now, and not long ago you got the brilliant idea to start leaving love bites on his skin. Two, your hips began moving against his own from where you’ve perched yourself above him a little while ago, and he’s been putting a large effort into not rolling his growing erection into your core. And lastly, you’re growing frustrated, which frankly makes him a little nervous.
You pull back from Peter’s neck with a loud pop, wiping your saliva off his skin with your unoccupied hand, and the second you huff again, Peter swallows thickly. The hickeys you’ve been trying to decorate him with just aren’t settling. In the minutes they take to appear, they already begin healing, leaving his skin unmarked.
“It’s not fair.” You mumble, and Peter truly sympathises with you, taking in the soft pout on your lips as you let go of his face. “What does a girl have to do give her boyfriend a couple of hickeys?” Peter gives you a small smile despite himself, eyes fluttering shut when you lean in again to continue your assault on his neck. God, you’re like a vampire, he thinks, groaning quietly as you press your entire body harder against his, chest flat against his. The hand you had on his face now buries itself in his hair, and Peter’s lips part as you grind down onto his lap.
“Heart rate quickly accelerating.” The robotic voice announces again, and Peter feels heat instantly rush to his face as you hum against his skin, taking in Evie’s words. You move your lips closer to Peter’s jaw, right where his pulse point lies, and he whimpers when your lips stretch into a smile against his neck, feeling the heavy thump of his pulse fighting against his veins. You pucker your lips to kiss the spot, and Peter’s hands snake up from your hips to the curve of your waist, where his fingers can dig better into your plush fat.
You pull away from Peter, seemingly unbothered by the fact that none of his hickeys are appearing, too busy admiring the state you’ve left your boyfriend in this time. Peter risks letting go of your waist with one hand, using it to cradle your cheek and pull you into a kiss instead. Your lips are wet with your saliva, and Peter moans against them, relaxing back into his pillows when you press your hands to his chest. Peter tries breaking the kiss, parting his lips to tell you something, but you’re quick to follow his lips, his open mouth letting you glide your tongue against his with practiced ease.
Peter’s hips twitch below you, bucking up into you in a way that makes the both of you let out a pleasured sigh. You break the kiss as Peter had tried doing mere moments ago, but now you ask him “Pete, why won’t you let me leave hickeys on you?”
Your boyfriend’s face softens at your upset expression, and he tilts his head sympathetically, saying “Trust me baby, I want you to be able to mark me up as much as you do.” The words send a throb to your core, and you try squeezing your thighs together, blocked by Peter’s body between them, and he grins softly. “What if I leave a couple on you, mhm?” Peter asks, fingers brushing up against your neck. He doesn’t wait for your response before bringing his lips there, his nose tickling your neck as it brushes against your skin, even as you reject his offer.
“But I want people to know you’re taken.” You open your mouth to add to your sentence, but what comes out instead is a quiet moan as Peter creates suction on your skin, one of your hands gripping his shoulder harshly. “I have a solution for that.” Peter mumbles, separating from your neck and looking up at you. You lean forward a little, pressing your forehead against Peter’s as you hum inquisitively, and your boyfriend mimics the noise with a slight nod of his head. “All it takes is to have you by my side any time I leave the house, and I’m sure everyone in Manhattan will get the hint.”
You press a short kiss to Peter’s lips, and you pull away for him to find you with a smile on your face. “Like that idea?” He questions quietly, and you nod softly, playing with the hair that hangs in front of his face. He pecks your lips shortly before returning his attention to your neck, grazing his teeth against your skin before sucking harshly on the spot for a long moment. You gasp, arching your body into his, and Peter pulls away to observe his work.
Peter glances up to meet your eyes before his gaze is quickly dipping down to your neck, and he grins, adding “And this hickey on your neck may very well be a sign to everyone that we belong to each other.”
“Already!?” You gasp, fingers coming up to graze the love bite Peter has so easily left on you. He nods, bringing an annoyed groan out of you, and you slump on his chest as you mumble in annoyance “That’s so unfair, I wanted to leave my mark on you, but no, of course Mr. Spider-Man’s accelerated healing has to confiscate his girlfriend’s simple pleasures in life.”
Peter laughs loudly, securing an arm around your waist and carefully rolling you over on the bed so he can hover over you. “Okay Mrs. Spider-Man, since you’re so upset about the hickeys, we can see if something else like back scratches last any longer.”
And of course, it’s all worth it to see the way your eyes light up at his suggestion, even though you demand a couple more rounds when nothing appears on his back the first time around.
Some blurbs for a version of Peter Parker I’m writing a new x reader fanfic for. It’s still in the drafts but I’ve got a lot of brainstorming going on and I can’t help myself but share some details with the public
Check the notes at the end to hear more about the story
Post NWH!Peter... who’s lost everything; any and every last personality defining aspect of his life wiped from the memory of every one around him.
He’s utterly alone in this new version he must now call his life. Where most might call it quits here, what more can he do but continue forward? What drives the man behind the spider’s mask if not for that persistent, bone deep need for hope?
Post NWH!Peter... Who's finally old enough to be treated like an adult, only after losing everyone who ever loved him enough to see him as a kid. Yet, despite losing everything, has decided to rebuild his life from scratch.
And with this is a newfound freedom, no longer has to be looked down upon as too childish to participate in the adult conversations. No longer confined by the restraints of his old life, has turned himself into a more jagged-around-the-edges type of guy. The one who doesn’t stay until the morning, who keeps the inner workings of his personal life locked away.
Post NWH!Peter...Who turns his pain into music. Something that started out as a shitty attempt at starting a journal (one the girls he hooked up with from his psychology class once called him out on his baggage - more so the lack of unpacking it- and went on about the benefits of self-help therapy). But he can't journal because writing "Today hurt," doesn't make today hurt any less. So instead he starts writing songs.
Turns out that music theory class he took just for the arts and humanities credit ended up unraveling something deeper within him. An old side of his life that he no longer thought he could tangibly hold in his palm again put just within grasping distance.
Post NWH!Peter... Who after struggling from the first semester of his freshman year of college joins a fraternity because the scholarship covers tuition. He pays his dues, goes to the meetings, and learns everybody's names. He never tells anyone where he disappears to every night.
It’s easier if people think he’s just there for the parties, instead of correcting them when they assume he’s having fun.
Post NWH!Peter... who's mastered the art of being liked without ever being known.
If he does eventually give you the chance to stick around longer than a one night stand. He'll remember your birthday, your coffee order, even the name of your childhood bestfriend. But ask him where he grew up? Somehow the conversation ends with him asking about you again. Always the one to notice, never the one to be noticed.
And he isn’t upset by that fact, at least not inherently. It makes life a little more digestible, not being entangled in the thrawls of emotion that comes with meaningful relationships. He had a taste of that already, and the universe must have seen the way he sank his canines ravagedly into the flesh of the love given to him. Because the universe doomed him to be a hungry dog, one who clung nervously to the people around him, desperate not to let go, with the knowledge that once his grip loosened, that taste of love would be gone forever.
And with that
Post NWH!Peter... Who keeps everyone at arm's length despite every instinct telling him to follow. Because once you've taught a loyal dog that every hand it loves eventually lets go it learns to stop offering its belly first.
Basicallllyyyyy long story short…college au/post no way home au/ canon divergence: Peter’s in a band and falling in love with tattoo artist!reader who does the band’s social media/merch design but uh oh!! Problem!! Bc californ1asnow can never write some simple fluff, you’re in a relationship with his new best friend, Harry Osborn. Yeah more to come once I get the story finished :)
OMG TATTOO ARTIST READER IS SO FIRE OMGOMGOMG classic band drama plus peter's emo ass (its valid but insulting ppl is my love language) im ready for the miscommunication and the crying
Just wanna say how cool it is to grow up with Tom’s version of Peter Parker. It has made the immersion of being apart of the fandom so insanely deeper for me. Bc wdym I was 15 reading about homecoming fanfics and now I’m 22 reading about college!peter at the same time? Like, actively experiencing life the same way the character is and having that outlet to cope with it. Idk, good stuff
Rihanna “Kiss It Better” - Peter Parker x Empath!Reader || Oneshot PART FIVE - FINAL CHAPTER
finally after all that heartbreak we make it to the end
series masterlist
if you at any pointed wanted to play the song while reading this would be the chapter I suggest doing so
wc: 9.9k+
The journey home is quiet despite the endless bustle of New York continuing around you. People move in and out of your path as you walk, the occasional shoulder knocking into yours without so much as an apology while you keep your head down and focus on putting as much distance between yourself and that alley as physically possible.
More importantly, between yourself and Peter.
You spend most of the trip rebuilding every barrier you had willingly torn down earlier that night. Piece by piece you force the world back into the muffled little box it normally existed within until the hundreds of emotions surrounding you became nothing more than a distant hum.
You couldn’t feel another thing tonight.
You didn’t want to.
By the time you finally reach your apartment, exhaustion has seeped so deeply into your bones you feel like you could sleep for the next four years and still somehow wake up tired.
The photograph tucked inside your jacket feels heavier than it did before.
You try not to think about it as you climb the stairs.
Or Peter.
Especially Peter.
You fumble with your keys outside the door before finally managing to shove the right one into the lock, stumbling inside and immediately kicking the door closed behind you.
For a few seconds, you simply stand there in the darkness.
Home.
The first place all night that didn’t feel like it demanded something from you.
You let your bag slide from your shoulder and reach blindly along the wall for the light switch.
“You were right.”
You nearly jump out of your skin.
You fumbled with your keys outside the door before finally managing to shove the right one into the lock, stumbling inside and immediately kicking the door closed behind you.
For a few seconds, you simply stood there in the darkness.
Home.
The first place all night that didn’t feel like it demanded something from you.
You let your bag slide from your shoulder and reached blindly along the wall for the light switch.
“You were right.”
You nearly jumped out of your skin.
The lights flicked on underneath your palm as you whipped around, heart racing violently as your eyes landed on the figure sitting in the middle of your living room.
“What the fuck?”
Peter was on his feet almost before the words left your mouth, hands lifting halfway between surrender and the instinct to catch you if you somehow managed to trip over absolutely nothing.
“Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
You pressed a hand against your chest and bent forward slightly, waiting for your heart to realize that you were not, in fact, being murdered in your own apartment.
Peter remained several feet away.
“You okay?”
You looked up at him.
He seemed to reconsider the question almost immediately.
“Actually, never mind.”
“Good choice.”
For perhaps five full seconds you simply breathed, one hand still resting over your violently protesting heart while Peter stood awkwardly in the middle of your living room and tried very hard to occupy less space than a person his size realistically could.
Then your brain caught up with your eyes.
Something was wrong.
You straightened slowly.
Peter watched the realization arrive.
“You changed clothes.”
His gaze dropped towards the faded sweatshirt and jeans he was wearing as though this were a particularly strange thing for you to notice after everything else that had happened tonight.
“I—”
“You changed clothes.”
“You said that already.”
“Because I need you to understand that I left you in an alley wearing Spider-Man tights.”
“Suit.”
You stared at him.
Peter closed his mouth.
Somewhere in the exhausted ruins of your brain, a laugh threatened.
You refused to encourage it.
Instead you looked him over again, increasingly bothered by just how ordinary he appeared without the red and blue suit attached to him. His hair was still damp around the temples, curls drying in uneven directions as though water had been involved somewhere along the way, while the sleeves of his sweatshirt sat pushed haphazardly towards his elbows.
He looked like somebody who had come over to help you move a couch.
Which was considerably harder to reconcile with the fact that twenty minutes ago you had watched him stand beneath the mouth of an alleyway carrying four years of grief like somebody had cracked his ribs open and left everything inside exposed.
You gestured vaguely at all of him.
“When did this happen?”
Peter looked genuinely lost. “The sweatshirt?”
“The entire transformation, Peter.”
“Oh.”
His ears began turning pink.
That answered something you hadn’t even asked yet.
You narrowed your eyes. “Why are you doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“That.”
You pointed towards his ears.
Peter immediately reached towards one of them before apparently realizing that touching it would only make the situation worse.
“Nothing.”
“Oh my God.”
You abandoned the conversation halfway through and glanced around your apartment instead.
Nothing seemed broken.
Television still there. Laptop where you had left it. Plants undisturbed. Nothing particularly Spider-Man-shaped embedded in the drywall.
Your gaze eventually landed on the window.
The curtain shifted.
A thin stream of night air slipped through the gap beneath it.
You stared.
Ahead of you, Peter became very quiet.
You turned your head slowly.
He was suddenly extremely interested in the bookshelf.
“Peter.”
His lips disappeared between his teeth.
You looked at the window again, then at him, before returning to the window as though staring at it from another angle might somehow provide an explanation that didn’t involve a grown man scaling four stories rather than using the buzzer downstairs.
“Absolutely not.”
“It was already unlocked.”
You let your head fall backwards.
Somewhere above you, the ceiling provided no assistance whatsoever.
“That sentence is making me violent.”
“I’m just saying I didn’t break anything.”
“You climbed through my window.”
“It was faster.”
“I live on the fourth floor.”
“I know where you live.”
The room went abruptly still.
Peter’s expression changed at the same moment yours did, the humor draining away just enough for the accidental weight of those words to settle between you.
Of course he knew where you lived.
Maybe he always had.
Peter looked down first, regret flickering through him so quickly that you knew he was already reconsidering whether coming here had been another mistake.
You released a slow breath through your nose, deciding with considerable effort that this particular emotional landmine could remain untouched for at least another five minutes.
“Okay. New rule.”
His eyes lifted cautiously.
“My windows are not doors.”
“I can work with that.”
“I hate that you said it like we’re establishing boundaries for a raccoon.”
The laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
It wasn’t much, little more than a surprised breath at first, but once it was there Peter seemed unable to pull it back quickly enough. His head dipped slightly, smile appearing somewhere beneath all the exhaustion, and for one fleeting second the man standing in your living room looked startlingly younger.
Unfortunately, the sound did something to you too.
A laugh slipped out before you could decide whether you actually wanted to give him one.
Peter looked up.
Whatever amusement had been lingering in his expression softened almost immediately at the sight of yours, and the answering fondness made you suddenly aware of how easy that had been.
Too easy, maybe.
Neither of you said anything about it.
The laughter faded on its own, leaving behind a silence that somehow felt different from every silence you had shared in the alley. There was no demand inside of this one, no unanswered question sitting between you waiting to be dragged into the light. Peter simply stood there in your living room while you remained near the door, both of you seemingly trying to understand what came after learning the person you had spent four years mourning was still very much alive.
Your gaze drifted towards the couch he had been sitting on when you came in.
Then back towards him.
“You were saying something before you almost killed me.”
Peter’s mouth twitched faintly. “You were right.”
The words settled more seriously this time.
You remembered the alley almost immediately. The look on his face when you told him he had never given you a choice, how fear had rushed through him the second you stepped away and yet, despite all of that, he had done exactly what he had done four years earlier.
He had let you leave.
Peter seemed to follow the thought somewhere across your expression.
“I watched you walk away,” he said after a moment, the last traces of amusement leaving his voice. “And I realized I was doing it again.”
Your brows pulled together slightly.
“Doing what?”
“Deciding.”
The answer quieted you.
Peter glanced briefly towards the open window, and the sheer absurdity of the thing almost made you laugh again because apparently his grand realization about respecting your autonomy had somehow culminated in breaking into your apartment.
Judging by the embarrassment that flickered through him, he seemed to recognize the contradiction on his own.
“The window part was…” He rubbed his lips together. “Not my best execution.”
You gave him a look.
“I panicked.”
“That appears to be an ongoing condition.”
“Yeah.”
The fondness threatening at the edges of the moment disappeared when Peter looked at you again.
“I didn’t want the last thing I did tonight to be watching you walk away because I decided that was probably better for you.” His gaze stayed on yours now, even as uncertainty began working its way through everything else you could feel from him. “But coming here doesn’t mean you have to talk to me either.”
Your stomach tightened.
Peter noticed.
Of course he did.
For a moment his eyes moved towards the window again, and every muscle in your body seemed to recognize the implication before he ever put it into words.
“I can leave.”
The reaction inside of you happened so quickly you didn’t have the chance to bury it.
Something twisted sharply beneath your ribs, not quite panic but close enough that your expression must have changed because Peter stopped.
You watched the instinct war quietly across his face. Four years of teaching himself that loving you meant removing himself from the equation had apparently not disappeared because of one argument in an alley, and you could feel the old reflex sitting there inside him, ready to make the choice before either of you had to suffer through the uncertainty of asking.
This time he didn’t let it.
“Do you want me to?”
You stared at him.
Such a painfully simple question.
Under any other circumstances it might not have meant anything at all, but tonight it seemed to carry the entire weight of what had gone wrong between you.
Peter was asking.
Not deciding what would be safer for you. Not looking at the fear or confusion moving through you and turning it into evidence that he already knew what you needed. Not climbing back through the window because leaving first would save both of you the discomfort of figuring out what came next.
He was simply standing there and allowing the answer to belong to you.
And the irritating truth was that you didn’t have one.
You wanted him there with an intensity that frightened you if you looked at it too closely, some part of yourself already settling around his presence with the familiarity of something returning to an old habit. At the same time, you were exhausted and angry and still carrying more information than you had any idea how to fit inside your own life.
So, for once tonight, you gave him the answer exactly as it existed.
“I don’t know.”
Peter’s expression softened.
He nodded once, slowly, and the lack of disappointment in the gesture made it unexpectedly hard to look at him.
“Okay.”
You waited for him to do something with that uncertainty.
He didn’t.
Peter simply stayed where he was.
And maybe, for tonight, that was enough.
You weren’t entirely sure how long the two of you remained like that afterward.
The apartment had gone strangely quiet around you, filled only by the occasional rush of traffic several floors below and the soft movement of your curtains whenever the night breeze found its way through the window Peter had apparently decided qualified as an entrance. Under normal circumstances you would have crossed the room and shut it by now.
Neither of you seemed particularly eager to move.
Maybe because moving required deciding what happened next, and you had already admitted you didn’t know.
So Peter remained a few feet beyond the couch while you leaned back against the wall near the door, the distance between you no longer charged with quite the same hostility it had carried in the alley but not exactly comfortable either. There was too much sitting inside of it for that. Four years of things you couldn’t remember and things Peter apparently remembered too well, anger that hadn’t disappeared simply because you understood him better now, and an aching sympathy for him that you still weren’t entirely sure what to do with.
None of it had been solved.
You doubted any of it could be solved tonight.
Strangely enough, realizing that took some of the pressure off.
For the first time since Peter Parker had walked into that coffee shop, you didn’t feel like you needed to uncover something from him.
There was no question waiting urgently at the back of your throat. No photograph to shove between you or impossible piece of your life that needed explaining before you could breathe properly again.
There was only Peter.
The thought made your attention wander towards him.
Without the desperation of the alley pulling your focus in ten different directions, you found yourself actually looking at him for what felt like the first time.
Really looking.
The soft mess of brown curls falling over his forehead had begun drying into something even less organized than before, and exhaustion still sat visibly beneath his eyes, though it had softened now that he wasn’t actively crying or trying to defend the worst decision of his life. His sweatshirt hung a little loose around his frame, sleeves pushed carelessly towards his forearms, and there was something almost disorienting about seeing him like this after first learning him through Spider-Man.
He looked remarkably human.
Which was perhaps a stupid observation considering he was, in fact, a human being, but everything about Peter had felt so impossibly large until now. The grief. The history. The suit. The strange space he occupied in your life despite technically not existing anywhere inside your memory.
Standing in your living room wearing an old sweatshirt, he was just a man.
A man you had apparently once loved very much.
Your gaze lingered.
Peter noticed.
Not immediately, or at least he was polite enough to pretend he didn’t, but you caught the faint shift in his posture when your attention stayed on him longer than necessary. His shoulders drew a little tighter before he looked away, suddenly fascinated by some indistinct point near the floor.
And then you felt the shift.
It was subtle enough that under different circumstances you might have dismissed it as another piece of your own emotional confusion.
You knew better by now.
This belonged to Peter.
Want.
The realization made your heartbeat stumble.
For a moment you simply stood there, feeling the emotion take shape beneath all the other things he had been carrying. It wasn’t overwhelming like the love that had nearly brought you to your knees in the alley, nor did it arrive with the violence of his fear when he thought you were leaving.
This was quieter.
Embarrassingly human, really.
Peter Parker was standing in the living room of the woman who had forgotten being his girlfriend, less than an hour after crying in front of her for the first time in years, and apparently somewhere underneath all that emotional devastation he still found her attractive.
Something about the sheer inconvenience of it nearly made you smile.
Peter’s jaw shifted.
Then the feeling began disappearing.
Not naturally.
You watched him force it down with the same deliberate control you had spent your entire life recognizing in yourself, pushing the desire beneath grief and uncertainty as though the simple act of wanting you had become another thing he needed to protect you from.
Your amusement faded.
You should probably have let him.
There were several excellent reasons why adding attraction to the evening’s rapidly expanding list of problems was an objectively terrible idea, and even more reasons why kissing the man who had accidentally shattered your understanding of the last four years probably wouldn’t qualify as healthy emotional processing.
Unfortunately, knowing that did absolutely nothing to stop your own attention from returning to him.
Maybe it would have been easier if Peter had felt unfamiliar.
He should have.
You had only knowingly met him a few weeks ago and spent the majority of that time chasing him through New York, arguing with him in an alley or discovering increasingly concerning things about the extent to which he used rooftops in his daily life.
Your body seemed entirely uninterested in those technicalities.
The attraction answered slowly at first, gathering through you with an ease that felt almost insulting after everything else had been so difficult. You didn’t have to search for it the way you had searched for memories or dig through layers of grief trying to understand why they existed. This made perfect sense immediately.
You thought Peter was beautiful.
The realization should have felt new. Yet somehow it didn’t.
Your gaze travelled back over his face, catching on the tired curve beneath his eyes and the faint bruising still shadowing one side of his jaw. You wondered, suddenly and with far too much specificity, whether his curls had always fallen against his forehead like that when they got too long, and whether you had once known what they felt like underneath your fingers.
Heat moved lower through your stomach.
Peter’s eyes snapped towards yours.
Of course they did.
He might not have been able to feel your emotions the way you felt his, but apparently four years hadn’t erased his ability to recognize you entirely. Something in the way you were looking at him must have been familiar enough that his desire flared before he could stop it, bright and immediate and followed so quickly by alarm that you almost rolled your eyes.
There it was again.
Peter wanting something and immediately treating that want like evidence he had done something wrong.
“Stop.”
His brows drew together.
You watched the confusion cross his face before his attention seemed to turn inward, checking himself with the kind of nervousness that told you he had absolutely no idea what you were referring to.
Then understanding arrived.
His ears went pink again.
You almost smiled.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“That’s sort of the problem.”
Peter stared at you.
You pushed away from the wall.
The movement made his entire body subtly sharpen with attention, though he remained exactly where he was.
You appreciated that more than you wanted to admit.
“I can feel you trying to bury it,” you said, crossing only enough of the room to make the distance between you smaller without eliminating it completely.
Peter released a slow breath, gaze dropping for a moment before returning to yours. “I figured maybe you had enough to deal with tonight.”
“I do.”
That seemed to catch him off guard.
You stopped several feet away.
“I’m still angry with you.”
His expression sobered immediately. “You should be.”
“And I still have absolutely no idea what happens after tonight.”
Peter nodded faintly.
“And none of that magically disappeared because you climbed through my window looking annoyingly attractive in a sweatshirt.”
For perhaps the first time all evening, Peter Parker looked genuinely speechless.
A burst of embarrassment rushed through him so quickly that you almost laughed.
His mouth opened.
Closed.
You waited.
“That was…” He rubbed briefly at the edge of his eyebrow before giving up. “A lot of information at once.”
The laugh escaped you this time.
“Welcome to being an empath.”
Something soft moved through his expression.
Then Peter looked at you for a moment longer and the humor slowly gave way to something more careful.
“You don’t have to do anything with what I’m feeling.”
There was no retreat inside the statement this time.
That mattered.
He wasn’t telling you what was best. He wasn’t backing towards the window or beginning another speech about why wanting you was dangerous.
He was simply leaving the choice where it belonged.
With you.
“I know.”
The words felt strange coming from your own mouth after hearing Peter misuse them half the night, and the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth told you he noticed too.
You let the silence stretch.
Then your eyes fell briefly towards his mouth.
It happened without intention.
Peter noticed anyway.
The desire moving through him deepened so suddenly that the force of it swept over your skin, and this time he didn’t immediately crush it beneath everything else. His fingers flexed once at his side instead, the smallest physical betrayal of how much effort it was taking not to move towards you.
Your pulse quickened.
Peter swallowed.
You looked back into his eyes.
“What do you want?”
Something in his expression tightened.
For once, though, he didn’t pretend not to understand.
His gaze drifted towards your mouth and remained there long enough that you felt the answer before he gave it.
“You already know.”
You did.
That was the dangerous part.
Your own desire had stopped feeling like an echo of his somewhere along the way, warm and unmistakably yours now, threaded through all the anger and hurt without erasing a single bit of either.
You took another step.
Peter stayed where he was.
And this time, closing the distance was your decision.
The first step didn’t change much.
There were still several feet between you, enough room for Peter’s emotions to reach you without becoming anything you couldn’t comfortably sort through. You could feel the nervousness that had settled underneath his skin the moment you started moving, along with the desire he was making a very admirable effort not to feed, but they remained distinctly his. Separate from yourself in the same way another person’s voice remained separate even when you stood close enough to hear them clearly.
The second step made that separation a little less clean.
Peter drew in a breath.
You felt the nervous anticipation flicker through him at nearly the same moment your own stomach tightened in response, and for half a second the sensations overlapped closely enough that you had to actually think about which one had happened first.
That was the thing about proximity people never quite understood when you tried to explain your powers. Distance gave emotion edges. It allowed you to recognize where someone else ended before whatever they were feeling had the chance to wander too deeply into you.
The closer you got, the softer those edges became.
Another step.
Peter’s fingers flexed once at his sides.
Want brushed across you strongly enough to prickle along the back of your neck before traveling slowly beneath your clothes, and the sensation startled you more than you wanted to admit. Across the room, his attraction had felt almost amusing in its inconvenience, another complication arriving several hours too late on an already impossibly complicated night.
From here, it felt different.
Here, you could feel the way it changed when you moved towards him.
Every inch you took seemed to pull some involuntary response from Peter that his body betrayed long before his face ever would. Anticipation sharpened when your gaze lingered on his mouth. Nervousness fluttered through him whenever your attention dropped lower, followed by embarrassment when he realized exactly where you had been looking. Beneath both remained the aching pull of wanting to close whatever distance was left between you and refusing, with an almost absurd amount of discipline, to do anything about it.
You stopped just beyond arm’s reach.
Peter looked at you.
The emotion surrounding him had become dense enough now that you no longer had to reach for any of it. It seemed to settle against your awareness simply because you were close, brushing along your skin like heat coming off pavement in the middle of summer.
There was still guilt inside him, though it had changed from the crushing thing you had felt in the alley into something quieter and much more dangerous to the moment unfolding between you. Fear remained tangled alongside it, curling around the belief that one wrong movement could ruin whatever fragile thing had somehow survived the evening.
But the love overwhelmed nearly everything else.
You had already felt the sheer size of it tonight, had nearly collapsed beneath the force of four years of devotion rushing towards you without warning, yet experiencing it this close was something entirely different. There was no distance left for the feeling to thin itself across before reaching you. It arrived whole, unbearably warm and familiar, carrying so much affection that for a brief second you understood why your own powers had recognized him before you had.
And wound throughout that love was desire.
Not sitting beneath it like some separate, uglier thing Peter ought to feel ashamed of, but threaded naturally through the affection itself until you could barely find where tenderness ended and wanting began.
It made sense when you thought about it.
Peter did not want a stranger.
His desire carried memory.
You could feel that much even without having access to the memories themselves, impressions worn deeply enough into his emotions that they had become almost instinctual. The way his attention caught when you tilted your face towards him. The way it sharpened when your hand lifted slightly before falling back to your side. The way his body seemed to recognize the space you occupied as somewhere it had once been allowed to enter freely.
He knew what it was like to touch you.
To kiss you.
To have you reach for him first.
And somewhere inside yourself, beneath everything Strange’s spell had managed to tear away, your body appeared to know something too.
Your own attraction answered with frightening ease.
You felt it spread slowly at first, a pull gathering low inside your stomach before winding upward, catching beneath your ribs and making your next breath deeper than the one before it. Normally you would have reinforced your barriers the moment another person’s desire began interacting this strongly with your own, if only to make certain whatever you felt actually belonged to you.
You didn’t.
For once, you let yourself follow it.
Peter’s breathing changed.
So did yours.
By the time you took another step, the distinction between his anticipation and your own had begun to blur around the edges. Not enough that you lost yourself inside him—you had spent far too many years learning how to prevent that—but enough that emotions started reverberating between you.
His desire made yours flare.
He saw the change in your face, and his answered.
That answer moved through you again.
A feedback loop.
You had forgotten those could happen.
The realization sent another little thrill through you because apparently there were things your body remembered about intimacy even when your mind didn’t.
Peter swallowed.
“You love me,” you said quietly.
There was no accusation inside the words anymore.
His eyes held yours.
“Yes.”
The answer came without hesitation, and his emotions followed so openly that for a moment the force of them seemed to take up every available inch between your bodies.
“And you want me.”
Something shifted in Peter’s face.
His eyes closed briefly as though hearing you say it aloud made the whole thing significantly harder to manage.
“That wasn’t a question.”
The corner of your mouth lifted.
“No.”
Peter opened his eyes again.
He looked almost painfully unsure of what he was allowed to do with you standing this close, and after everything you had spent the night arguing about, there was something strangely tender in the uncertainty.
His gaze searched your face.
“You’re feeling a lot right now.”
Your faint smile disappeared.
There it was.
Not Peter deciding for you this time, exactly.
But doubt.
You could feel it gathering inside him as his desire immediately retreated beneath concern, his mind apparently racing ahead to every reason why this might not mean what it looked like it meant.
“You think I’m confused.”
“I think tonight has been…” Peter stopped and exhaled, searching for a word large enough to contain several hours of emotional devastation. “A lot.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“And you just found out we were together.”
“I’m aware.”
“You found out like an hour ago.”
“Peter.”
“I’m not saying you don’t know what you want.” His words came quicker now, frustration turning inward as he struggled to explain himself without stepping over the same line he had only just learned to stop crossing. “I just don’t know if what you’re feeling is because of me, or because you can feel what I’m feeling, or because everything tonight got mixed together and—”
He stopped.
You stared at him.
For once, his concern didn’t irritate you.
Because annoyingly enough, it was fair.
Your powers complicated things in ways most people never had to think about. Attraction could bleed between bodies just as easily as panic or anger if you weren’t paying attention, and with Peter standing close enough that every shift in his desire brushed immediately against your own, questioning what belonged to whom wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
Peter had apparently spent years knowing that too.
Which gave you an idea.
“Give me your hand.”
His expression went completely still.
“What?”
“Your hand.”
Peter’s gaze dropped briefly towards yours before returning to your face. Nervousness rippled through him so strongly that you almost laughed.
“You sure?”
You held your hand out between you.
“See, this is that asking thing we discussed. You’re getting much better at it.”
A tiny breath of amusement escaped him, though the nerves remained.
Then Peter slowly lifted his hand.
He didn’t touch you immediately.
His fingers hovered perhaps an inch from yours, close enough that the heat of his skin registered before actual contact ever came, and even that tiny distance made everything inside him sharpen.
You closed the rest yourself.
The second your palm met his, the world narrowed.
Peter’s emotions rushed through the contact so quickly that your breath caught.
Touch had always been different.
Every barrier you built depended in some small way upon distance, and skin against skin eliminated almost all of it at once. The love you had been sensing around Peter flooded into you with startling clarity, no longer something radiating across a room or brushing against the edges of your awareness but something immediate enough that your body reacted as though the emotion had originated beneath your own skin.
His thumb twitched against the side of your hand.
Peter’s desire followed.
Hotter now.
Closer.
Intimate in a way that made your stomach tighten because beneath the attraction existed something much softer: recognition attached to the simple act of holding your hand.
He had done this before.
Probably hundreds of times.
The thought threatened to drag grief back into the moment, but you refused to let it take everything else with it.
Instead you focused inward.
Finding your own emotions was easier than sensing anyone else’s had ever been. You knew the pathways intimately, knew how yearning had gathered inside you from the moment Peter’s gaze dropped towards your mouth and where the attraction had settled heavily enough that there could be no mistaking it for something borrowed.
You found it.
Then you opened the door.
Peter inhaled sharply.
You didn’t force anything into him.
That distinction mattered.
You weren’t reaching inside Peter and changing the shape of whatever already existed there. You weren’t increasing his desire or removing the doubts that kept circling through him.
You simply loosened your grip on your own emotion and allowed a piece of it to travel through the point where your palms met.
Yearning moved first.
Your yearning.
The aching curiosity of wanting to know what his mouth felt like against yours. The pull that had started when you looked at his face and realized attraction had survived in some wordless place your memories couldn’t reach. The almost painful pull you felt every time Peter stood perfectly still despite wanting nothing more than to close the distance himself.
You let him feel all of it.
Not enough to overwhelm.
Just enough to understand.
Peter’s entire body went rigid.
His eyes snapped towards yours.
For perhaps the first time tonight, there was no need for you to interpret his expression because absolute astonishment had wiped everything else away.
“What did you—”
“That’s me.”
His mouth closed.
You tightened your fingers gently around his.
The movement sent another current through the connection, your own desire blooming beneath it, and this time Peter felt the emotion at the same moment you did.
His breath left him shakily.
You watched understanding move across his face.
“That’s what I want,” you told him. “Not you leaking into me. Not some emotion I picked up because you’re standing too close. Mine.”
Peter stared at you.
His eyes had gone dark again, though uncertainty still held on somewhere beneath the desire.
“You can do that?”
A small smile tugged at your mouth. “Apparently you didn’t know I could.”
Something almost like wonder moved through him.
Then his thumb shifted against your palm.
Barely.
The touch sent a shiver climbing along your arm, and because your connection was still open Peter felt the immediate burst of wanting that followed it.
His eyes widened.
You smiled properly now.
“Oh, that seems useful.”
Peter actually looked offended through the blush climbing into his face. “That feels unfair.”
“You’ve had four years of knowing everything about me. I’m taking whatever advantages I can get.”
“That’s not—”
You sent another small pulse through the contact.
Peter stopped talking.
The effect was immediate enough that a laugh threatened somewhere inside your throat, but amusement quickly dissolved when his fingers finally curled properly around yours.
He was still careful.
Even now.
Peter looked down at your joined hands and then back towards you, something vulnerable returning beneath all that want.
“If you change your mind—”
“You’ll know.”
His brows drew together.
You lifted your joined hands slightly between you.
“I’m making that incredibly easy for you.”
That silenced him.
And for the first time since you had begun moving towards him, the fear inside Peter loosened.
Not disappeared.
You didn’t want it to.
Some small amount of uncertainty belonged here. Four years did not evaporate because the two of you wanted each other, and whatever came after tonight would still require conversations neither of you were ready to have.
But Peter finally allowed himself to believe the thing you had been trying to tell him.
You wanted him too.
The realization changed the emotional current running between you.
His desire stopped recoiling every time it grew too strong. Love rushed into the space left behind, warm and almost dizzyingly tender, while your own yearning continued flowing gently through your joined hands until the connection became less about sensing one another and more about allowing yourselves to be sensed.
You took the final step.
Peter didn’t back away.
There was barely any space left between you now, close enough that proximity rendered most of your usual defenses useless even without the contact between your hands. Every breath he took seemed to shift something inside you. His anticipation collected underneath your skin. Your own moved through his palm and came back reflected in the sudden tightening of his fingers around yours.
For once, neither of you had to guess.
Peter’s gaze dropped towards your mouth.
This time he let it stay there.
“You love me,” you whispered, despite the amount of times you’ve confirmed it tonight, you wanted to hear it from him again.
His throat worked beneath the swallow.
“Yes.”
No hesitation.
No hiding.
You let him feel the way the answer affected you instead of bothering to explain it, the reaction unfurling through the open connection until Peter’s eyes closed briefly beneath the force of receiving something he had spent four years believing he would never be allowed to feel from you again.
When he opened them, they were shining.
You tilt your face towards his.
“Then what are you willing to do about it?”
For one suspended second, Peter only stared at you.
His hand remained wrapped around yours, warm and almost painfully still, while his eyes searched your face one final time. Whatever he found there seemed to settle him, because you watched the tension that had kept his shoulders pulled tight all night finally give.
Then Peter moved.
So quickly that you barely had time to draw another breath before his hand slipped from yours and his arms were around you.
One caught firmly around your waist, pulling you forward with enough urgency that your body collided against his, while the other found the back of your neck with a familiarity that made your breath hitch before his mouth ever reached yours. His fingers spread beneath your hair, thumb settling just behind your ear as though his hand already knew exactly how it wanted to hold you.
Then he kissed you.
There was nothing tentative about the first press of his mouth against yours.
Peter kissed you like someone who had spent too long imagining something he no longer believed he would ever have again, all the restraint you had watched him exercise only seconds before disappearing beneath the first realization that you were kissing him back.
And you did.
Maybe there should have been some awkwardness to it. Some fumbling period where you had to learn the shape of a mouth that was, for all practical purposes, kissing you for the first time.
Instead your body followed him with an ease that caught you completely off guard.
You tilted your head just as Peter shifted his, avoiding the awkward bump of noses without thinking about it, and the small movement seemed to affect him more than it had any right to. His breath caught against your mouth before his arm tightened around your waist, drawing you closer until there was barely enough room left between you for either of you to breathe properly.
Peter made a quiet sound when your fingers caught in the front of his sweatshirt.
You felt it more than heard it.
The vibration disappeared somewhere between your mouths as you kissed him harder, and whatever little fragment of control had survived his initial rush seemed to unravel beneath it. His hand slid farther into your hair, fingers curling gently against your scalp while his thumb shifted along the soft place beneath your ear.
You wondered if he remembered that too.
The question barely had time to form before Peter angled your face and kissed you again, deeper this time, with enough practiced certainty that the thought scattered completely.
Jesus Christ.
He knew how to kiss you.
Not generally.
Not in the vague sense that Peter Parker had apparently spent four additional years gaining experience you knew nothing about.
You.
His mouth moved against yours with the unsettling ease of someone returning to something familiar, adjusting when you shifted before you even fully realized you had moved. When your chin tipped upward, his hand was already there to support the back of your neck. When you leaned more heavily into him, his arm accommodated the change without thought, palm spreading against the small of your back as he pulled you flush against him.
None of it felt rehearsed.
That almost made it worse.
There was no careful searching for what you liked because apparently Peter already knew, his body carrying information about yours that surfaced in tiny unconscious choices neither of you had to speak aloud.
Your fingers tightened in his sweatshirt.
That made him falter.
Only for half a second.
Peter’s mouth stilled against yours before he drew in a broken breath through his nose, and when you tugged him closer instead of loosening your grip, his forehead nearly knocked against yours in his hurry to kiss you again.
A startled laugh escaped against his mouth.
Peter froze.
Not completely, but enough that you felt the immediate hesitation in the arm around your waist.
You barely managed to pull away far enough to speak.
“What?”
His eyes opened.
The sight of him almost made you laugh again.
Peter looked completely wrecked.
His curls had fallen farther over his forehead where your hand had apparently found its way into them without you remembering making the decision, his lips already flushed from kissing you, and the expression on his face carried the dazed concentration of someone whose brain had stopped keeping pace with the rest of him several seconds ago.
“You laughed,” he murmured.
Your brows pulled together. “Was I not supposed to?”
“No.” His thumb shifted almost absentmindedly behind your ear. “You used to do that.”
The words softened something in you before you could stop them.
Peter seemed to realize what he had said a second too late, because his expression changed, the desperation in it giving way to something quieter as his eyes searched your face.
For once, you didn’t let the mention of before drag the moment somewhere painful.
Instead your fingers curled gently into the hair at the nape of his neck.
“Did I?”
Peter swallowed.
“Sometimes.”
“When?”
His mouth twitched faintly. “Usually when I got too excited and almost headbutted you.”
That pulled a real laugh from you.
Peter smiled against it.
And that was different too.
The next kiss didn’t crash into you nearly as hard. It arrived crooked because you were both still smiling, Peter missing the center of your mouth at first and catching the corner instead before correcting himself, the hand at your waist flexing when your laughter dissolved into another kiss.
For several seconds there was something almost unbearably ordinary about it.
Not Peter Parker, the missing piece of your life.
Not Spider-Man.
Not four stolen years or spells or grief that neither of you had deserved.
Just Peter, standing in your living room with his arm around you and smiling helplessly into your mouth because apparently he had always gotten a little overeager when kissing you.
The thought made you pull him closer.
Peter responded immediately.
His smile disappeared beneath a sharp inhale as your body pressed fully against his again, and this time when he kissed you the softness remained for only a moment before giving way to something hungrier.
His hand at your waist shifted.
Fingers spread wide against your back as though he couldn’t quite convince himself one point of contact was enough, while the hand in your hair loosened and slid forward until his palm cupped your jaw.
His thumb brushed your cheek.
The movement was so easy that something about it caught your attention even through the haze of being kissed senseless.
Peter didn’t seem to notice.
He did it again.
A small stroke across your cheekbone while his mouth moved against yours, absent and tender and entirely at odds with the urgency of everything else he was doing.
As though touching you there was simply where his hand went.
Your heart gave one strange, painful little squeeze.
Then your fingers tightened in his hair.
Peter sucked in a breath.
Whatever thought had threatened to surface disappeared immediately beneath the way his entire body reacted to the movement. His head tipped slightly into your hand before he seemed to catch himself, mouth breaking from yours just long enough for a shaky breath to escape between you.
You chased him without thinking.
Peter made it perhaps an inch.
That was all you allowed before your hand at the back of his neck pulled him towards you again.
His eyes widened.
Then his mouth was back on yours.
And this time Peter kissed you hard enough that the force of it sent you stumbling half a step backwards.
His arm locked immediately around your waist.
You never came close to falling.
Of course you didn’t.
Peter caught your weight so naturally that your feet had barely finished moving before he had already adjusted, one arm supporting you while his body followed until the backs of your legs bumped lightly against the couch.
He stopped.
The abruptness of it almost made you dizzy.
Peter remained pressed close enough that his breath warmed your swollen lips, but every other part of him had gone deliberately still. His hand stayed at your waist rather than moving any lower, the other still resting carefully against the side of your face.
He looked at you.
Actually looked.
You could see the question forming before he bothered putting words around it.
You answered by sliding your hand from his hair down along the back of his neck and pulling him towards you.
Peter’s eyes fluttered shut.
The sound he made when you kissed him again was quiet and helpless and so completely lacking in the careful restraint he had shown you all night that you kissed him harder.
This time he let himself follow.
His body settled more securely against yours, one knee nudging carefully between your legs only because there was nowhere else for either of you to stand comfortably with the couch directly behind you, and his hand slipped from your cheek to the side of your neck.
You could feel his pulse beneath your fingertips now.
It was racing.
That pleased you more than it probably should have.
Peter had spent the entire night carrying himself like someone who knew every version of you that had ever existed while you struggled to catch up.
Here, at least, he was every bit as affected as you were.
His breathing had gone uneven. His fingers kept flexing against your waist whenever you kissed him harder, tightening and relaxing as though he was continually remembering how much stronger than you he was. Every time you touched his hair his composure seemed to deteriorate another degree, until eventually he broke the kiss himself with a breath that sounded suspiciously close to your name.
You barely gave him enough room to say it.
Peter followed you for the smallest fraction of a second before catching himself, his mouth barely brushing yours again as your forehead fell against his.
Both of you breathed hard into the narrow space between you.
His arm was still wrapped around your waist. Your fingers were still tangled in his hair, and for the first time since Peter Parker had walked back into your life, neither of you seemed particularly interested in going anywhere.
Eventually Peter’s breathing began to slow.
Yours took considerably longer.
You became aware of everything gradually after that, pieces of the room returning around him as though you had somehow forgotten there was an apartment attached to the small patch of floor where the two of you stood. The couch remained pressed against the backs of your legs, your curtains were still moving gently beside the window he had broken into, and somewhere outside a car leaned obnoxiously on its horn before disappearing farther down the street.
Normal sounds.
The world continuing on despite the fact that Peter Parker had just kissed you like he had spent four years starving.
Your mouth felt warm and slightly swollen when you finally swallowed, and the movement brought Peter’s attention immediately back towards your face.
There it was.
That hesitation.
Small this time, barely more than the loosening of his fingers around your waist, but you felt it before he had the chance to disguise it. His body had begun preparing for distance almost automatically, like restraint had been trained into him so thoroughly that even now, with your hand still curled into his hair and the taste of him lingering against your mouth, some part of Peter believed the responsible thing to do was give you room before you had to ask for it.
Your fingers tightened.
He stopped.
“Peter.”
His eyes lifted towards yours.
You didn’t immediately know what you wanted to say. The anger you had carried home from the alley still existed, but it had changed beneath everything that happened afterward, no longer sharp enough to drown out the affection or attraction or that strange, aching tenderness you felt every time Peter forgot himself long enough to touch you the way he apparently used to.
None of it cancelled anything else out.
You could kiss him until neither of you could breathe and still be furious with him.
You could ache for the seventeen-year-old boy who had stood alone across the street from your graduation and still hate the man who had spent four years deciding that loneliness was somehow the safest thing he could give you.
Apparently this was what getting Peter Parker back looked like.
Complicated.
Your hand loosened in his hair and slid slowly towards the back of his neck, your thumb brushing along the warm skin beneath his ear.
“You’re doing it again.”
A faint line appeared between his brows. “Doing what?”
“Getting ready to leave before I’ve told you to.”
Peter went quiet.
His gaze dropped towards the small amount of space between you, and for once he didn’t rush to explain himself. You felt the truth move through him instead, embarrassment curling around an instinct so deeply embedded that he probably hadn’t even realized he was doing it.
“I don’t really know what happens now,” he admitted.
“Neither do I.”
The answer seemed to surprise him.
You shifted your hand from the back of his neck until your palm rested against his chest, feeling the frantic rhythm beneath his sweatshirt that had barely settled since you kissed him.
“I’m not taking everything back tonight.”
Peter looked at you carefully.
“I’m still angry with you. Tomorrow I’m probably going to wake up and think of another fifteen things I should’ve yelled at you about while I had you trapped in that alley.”
The smallest hint of amusement touched his face.
“Only fifteen?”
“Don’t push it.”
His mouth twitched, but the smile disappeared almost as soon as your thumb moved absently against his chest.
“And I don’t know what you are to me yet,” you continued. Saying it hurt, but you needed him to hear it. “You were my boyfriend. I understand that now. I know I loved you, and apparently every emotionally inconvenient part of my body has been trying to inform me of that for four years, but knowing those things isn’t the same as remembering them.”
Peter’s expression softened around the hurt.
You felt his hand shift against your waist, though he made no attempt to pull you closer.
“I can’t just become her again because you came back.”
“I don’t want you to.”
The answer came so quickly that you paused.
Peter swallowed, his eyes moving over your face before he continued. “I miss her. Of course I do. But I’m not here because I expect you to turn back into who you were when we were seventeen.”
Something inside you eased.
“I don’t even think I’m that person anymore,” he added, and the faint sadness in his voice told you he had accepted that long before tonight. “I wouldn’t know how to ask you to be.”
You looked at him for a while after that.
Maybe that was what frightened you most about all of this. There was no real way to take anything back, no matter how badly both of you might want to. Peter couldn’t walk back across the street and give that graduation speech. You couldn’t wake up tomorrow with four years of memories suddenly restored, every empty space inside your photographs filling itself neatly around him.
Whatever happened next would have to happen here.
With who you were now.
Your fingers curled slightly into the fabric over his chest.
“Then stop trying to take yourself away from me.”
Peter’s breath caught.
“I mean it.” Your gaze stayed on his. “You keep talking about what happened like you have to spend the rest of your life apologizing for wanting anything after it. Like if you punish yourself long enough, eventually it’ll make what you did noble.”
His expression tightened.
You could feel the familiar guilt beginning to stir again, and this time you refused to let him retreat into it.
“Fuck your pride, Peter.”
His eyebrows lifted.
A startled breath escaped him. You stepped closer.
“You don’t get to make yourself miserable forever and call it protecting people.”
Peter stared at you.
“That’s not making anything right.”
The words seemed to settle somewhere deeper than the anger had.
His hand moved slightly against your waist.
“What would?”
You breathed in.
There were probably hundreds of answers to that question, most of which you wouldn’t know until tomorrow or next week or whenever the enormity of tonight stopped making your head feel like it had been split open.
But there was one thing you knew.
“Take it back.”
Peter’s expression shifted. “Take what back?”
“The part where you decided loving me meant leaving me.”
His eyes went still.
“You can’t take back the spell. You can’t give me those four years, and I’m not asking you to stand here and promise me you’ll somehow find a way because I think we both know that would be bullshit.”
His mouth twitched faintly at that, though his eyes were already beginning to shine again.
“But that decision?” Your hand pressed more firmly over his heart. “Take that back.”
Peter looked down towards where you touched him.
For a long moment he said nothing, and you let him have the silence this time because you could feel that he wasn’t using it to hide. He was thinking.
When his eyes finally returned to yours, there was something almost painfully vulnerable in them.
“I don’t know how.”
The honesty of it warmed you more than any heroic answer could have.
“You could start by staying.”
His entire body went still.
There was no dramatic rush of emotion this time, none of the overwhelming force that had knocked the breath from you earlier in the evening. What moved through Peter now was quieter and somehow more intimate for it, hope arriving so cautiously that you wondered how long it had been since he had allowed himself to feel any without immediately preparing for the punishment afterward.
“Tonight?” he asked.
Your mouth softened.
“Tonight.”
Peter nodded.
Just once.
“Okay.”
And because apparently Peter Parker could not make anything easy, even the simplicity of that answer tightened your throat.
You looked at his mouth.
He noticed.
This time there was no immediate retreat in him, though you felt the question appear beneath the pull gathering between you.
You almost rolled your eyes.
“Do I really have to spell this one out?”
A little color climbed into his cheeks. “Considering tonight?”
“Fair.”
Your fingers slid upward, following the collar of his sweatshirt until they curled around the back of his neck again.
Peter waited.
You hated how much you loved that he waited.
“Kiss it better.”
Something in his face broke open.
Not grief.
Not quite.
It looked too much like relief for that.
Peter’s hand slid farther around your waist as you drew him down towards you, and this kiss began nothing like the first.
There was no desperate collision, no frantic rush to close four years of distance in a single breath. His mouth found yours slowly enough that you felt the moment his lips touched yours, the slight hesitation before you leaned into him and the way that hesitation disappeared immediately afterward.
Then you kissed him harder.
Peter made a quiet sound against your mouth and whatever careful pace he had intended to keep lasted approximately three seconds.
You smiled into the kiss.
His hand tightened at your waist.
There was something deeply satisfying about discovering that Peter could apparently be coaxed out of four years of self-imposed restraint with embarrassingly little effort once you had convinced him he was allowed.
Your fingers slipped into his hair again.
That did it.
Peter inhaled sharply against your mouth before kissing you with enough enthusiasm to send you backwards into the couch, though this time both of you were prepared for it. The backs of your knees met the cushions and you half sat, half fell onto them with Peter catching himself against the backrest before his weight could follow you completely.
For a second the two of you stared at each other.
Then you laughed.
Peter’s forehead dropped against yours.
“You don’t know how much I’ve missed hearing you laugh,” he murmured, breathless.
The words didn’t hurt nearly as much this time.
“Good.”
His eyes lifted.
“Maybe I’ll keep doing it.”
Hope crossed his face, so open it almost hurt to look at.
You didn’t give him enough time to ruin the moment by thinking too hard about it.
Your fingers tightened in his hair and pulled him back towards you.
Peter came willingly.
The kiss turned messy almost immediately, the kind that kept breaking apart because one of you smiled or needed air before finding the other again seconds later. Peter’s hand stayed firmly at your waist while yours wandered through his hair and along the back of his neck, learning things your body occasionally seemed to recognize a fraction of a second before your mind did.
For now, Peter was here.
His mouth was warm against yours, his breathing uneven whenever you pulled him closer, and every time the kiss naturally broke apart he remained exactly where you had left him rather than retreating to somewhere he decided would be safer.
Eventually your forehead settled against his again.
Peter’s nose brushed yours when he breathed.
Neither of you moved very far.
“This doesn’t fix it,” you murmured.
“I know.”
The familiar answer made your eyes open.
Peter apparently realized it too, because a sheepish smile slowly pulled at his mouth.
You stared at him.
He tried again.
“I don’t expect it to.”
“Better.”
His smile widened.
You traced your thumb slowly along the edge of his jaw, catching briefly over the fading bruise there.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
You studied him, looking for the old instinct to promise too much.
It never came.
Peter only leaned slightly into your hand.
You thought about the words that had brought the two of you here in the first place. Making it right sounded enormous when you considered everything waiting beyond tonight, too big for one conversation or one kiss or even the love that had somehow survived having its name stripped away.
Maybe making something right didn’t begin with fixing it.
Maybe sometimes it began with taking back the part that had broken it in the first place.
Peter had left.
Tonight, you asked him not to.
That was enough of a beginning.
Your hand slipped behind his neck again.
“Peter.”
“Hmm?”
You watched his eyes drop automatically towards your mouth.
A smile threatened.
“Again.”
This time he smiled too.
Then Peter kissed you.
And when your arms tightened around him, he didn’t hold you like someone trying to recover four lost years before morning came.
He simply stayed long enough to start giving you something new.
thank you all for reading! I hope this was enjoyable. let me know what you think in the comments! i already have some ideas brewing for some prequels/sequels type continuation. i had a lot of fun reading your opinions and seeing you all react to some of the scenes! thank you guys again for your support :)
author this was so so so well written TT its an enormous task to explain how emotions work and feel then explaining it through empath powers but you did it wonderfully!!! u wrote peter so well too this is exactly his issue and im glad we unpacked his decisions RAAAA cried so much i love this fic ☹️☹️☹️☹️💔💔💔💔💔💔
Rihanna “Kiss It Better” - Peter Parker x Empath!Reader || Oneshot PART FOUR
see the story masterlist here
pls let me know if you want to be added to the taglist!
wc: 5.6k
Peter Parker may have been the closest thing your powers had ever known to rest, but Spider-Man apparently came with an entirely different kind of noise.
The realization unfolded slowly as you looked at him, fitting itself around everything he had already told you. Peter had known how sensitive you were to changes in the people around you, how easily fear could become your own when it was strong enough and how much worse everything became when you touched somebody.
And Spider-Man spent his nights being afraid.
Maybe not constantly. Peter didn’t strike you as somebody who frightened easily, and judging by the bruises you had already seen healing across him, his definition of an acceptable level of danger was probably completely fucking deranged.
But there must have been moments.
Times when something went wrong badly enough that even he couldn’t convince himself he had everything under control.
Times when he came back to you carrying adrenaline beneath his skin and terror he hadn’t quite managed to shake, only for you to feel it the moment he walked through the door.
The thought made your anger hesitate.
“You couldn’t hide it from me,” you said.
Peter’s expression shifted.
You watched him carefully. “When something happened to you.”
He looked away.
That was answer enough.
A strange pressure gathered beneath your sternum as the shape of the relationship became clearer, beautiful and horrible in almost equal measure. Peter had apparently been the one person you could stop guarding yourself around, which meant he had also been the one person you had allowed close enough that there was almost nowhere for his emotions to hide.
“You’d come back from patrol and I could feel it, couldn’t I?”
Peter’s tongue pressed briefly against the inside of his cheek.
“Sometimes.”
“How bad?”
His eyes flickered towards you. “Depends on the night.”
“That’s conveniently vague. Stop doing that.”
“Because there isn’t really one answer.” Peter exhaled slowly, gaze dropping towards the pavement between you. “Sometimes I’d come back and everything was fine. You’d complain that I smelled like New York and make me shower before I got anywhere near your bed.”
Despite yourself, your mouth twitched.
“That sounds like something I’d say.”
“You were extremely dramatic about it.”
“You crawl around Manhattan in spandex. I don’t even want to imagine what you were bringing into my apartment.”
Amusement moved through him so naturally alongside the memory that for half a second the alley felt softer around the both of you.
Then Peter continued.
“And sometimes I’d come back after something went wrong.”
It disappeared just as quickly.
Your smile went with it.
“You always knew before I said anything,” he said. “Even when I thought I was doing a pretty good job acting normal.”
“You were probably terrible at acting normal.”
“I was.”
The admission came with enough ease that you suspected this was an argument the two of you had already settled years ago.
Peter shifted his weight before adding, “Sometimes you’d touch me before I could stop you.”
The words sent a small chill along your arms.
Considering what touch did to your powers, you could imagine the rest without much help.
All that fear with nowhere left to diffuse.
Adrenaline still burning through him after whatever fight he had barely walked away from. Anger, relief, pain that wasn’t technically an emotion but carried enough panic around its edges for your body to react as though the injury belonged to you anyway.
And beneath all of it, the horrible understanding that the person you loved had gone somewhere you couldn’t follow and spent the night gambling with whether he would make it back.
“You felt all of it,” Peter said quietly.
Your eyes lifted towards his.
“I’d come through your window and sometimes before I even got the mask off you were already asking what happened. If it was really bad…” His jaw shifted faintly. “You’d get sick.”
You recoiled at how casually he said it.
He didn’t sound dismissive, he sounded like somebody remembering something he had hated himself for.
“You blamed yourself.”
His face tightened.
“You’d spend all day dealing with everybody else’s emotions, and then I’d show up at midnight carrying around whatever happened to me and dump that on you too.”
“You weren’t dumping anything on me.”
“You couldn’t turn me off.”
The sharpness of his answer caught you.
Peter looked at you properly now.
“That was the problem.”
For a moment neither of you spoke.
“You told me yourself that I was different,” he continued, quieter again. “That you didn’t have to keep your walls up around me because you knew me too well. Which was great when everything was normal, but when it wasn’t…” He swallowed. “You felt that too.”
The realization sat uncomfortably beside everything you had discovered about him tonight.
Peter had been your quiet.
Spider-Man had been the thing capable of shattering it.
And because they existed inside the same person, apparently loving him meant never getting one without occasionally having to survive the other.
You hated how much sense that made.
You hated even more that Peter could feel your understanding beginning to creep in, because a small flicker of vindication appeared inside him before he managed to smother it.
Your anger immediately returned.
“So that’s what this is?” you asked.
Peter frowned. “What?”
“You decided losing you was healthier for me.”
His expression hardened around something defensive. “I decided you deserved a life where you didn’t have to wake up at two in the morning wondering whether the sirens outside had anything to do with me.”
“And you think I stopped being overwhelmed after you disappeared?”
Peter went still.
The words had come out sharper than you intended, but now that they existed between you, the last thing you wanted was to take them back.
“You’re standing there telling me how much being Spider-Man affected my powers like you somehow removed the problem when you removed yourself.” You shook your head, anger beginning to tremble through your voice. “You were also the person who helped me regulate them.”
His lips parted.
“You told me that five minutes ago.”
Peter said nothing.
“You were the person I could find in a crowd when everybody else became too much. You were the voice I listened to when I couldn’t separate myself from everyone around me. Apparently you were the one fucking person on the planet I trusted enough to stop listening altogether.” Your voice nearly broke, but you pushed through it. “So yeah, maybe loving Spider-Man scared the shit out of me. Maybe there were nights when you came home and I felt things I wished I hadn’t.”
You gestured helplessly between the two of you.
“But when you disappeared, all I lost was the part that made any of it easier.”
Something in Peter’s face broke.
You barely noticed.
Because suddenly the last four years of exhaustion were sitting alongside this new information in a way that made your anger feel almost too large for your body.
“You didn’t take my powers with you, Peter.”
His eyes closed briefly.
“The crowds were still there. The headaches were still there. Everyone else was still there.” Your voice dropped, quieter now beneath the weight of it. “I just didn’t have you anymore.”
Peter’s eyes opened.
And whatever argument he had spent four years teaching himself suddenly had nowhere quite as comfortable to stand.
“I saw you at graduation.”
Your breath caught.
Peter seemed to realize immediately that there was no gentle way to say the rest of it, because he looked away before continuing, gaze fixing somewhere beyond you as if the memory existed more clearly there than it did in the alley.
“You were complaining about the heat,” he said. “Your cap kept sliding off because you pinned it wrong, and MJ kept fixing it for you even though she was making fun of you the entire time. Ned’s family had like…half the sidewalk blocked off.”
The familiarity of the details hurt in a way you hadn’t expected.
You remembered all of that. You remembered the heat trapped beneath your graduation gown and the bobby pins MJ kept shoving painfully against your scalp every time the stupid cap slipped sideways. You remembered Ned disappearing into the crowd of his family only to reappear several minutes later looking mildly overwhelmed by the sheer number of people insisting on taking pictures with him.
It was a memory you had carried around for years without ever believing anything was missing from it.
And apparently, somewhere inside that same afternoon, Peter had been there too.
You just couldn’t see him.
“Where were you?”
Peter’s mouth tightened slightly. “I was across the street at first. Then everybody started coming outside, so I moved around a little whenever I thought you might notice me.”
You tried to picture it and hated how easily the memory accommodated him once you knew where to put him. Midtown had been surrounded by people that afternoon, families overflowing across the sidewalk while graduates drifted between clusters of relatives and friends, losing one another every few minutes only to be pulled back together for another photograph. Peter could have been standing anywhere amongst all of it, leaning against one of the buildings across the street or slipping around a corner whenever you wandered too close, deliberately keeping himself just far enough outside the edges of your life that you never thought to look twice.
And you would have walked right past him.
The thought left a sick, hollow feeling somewhere inside your stomach.
“So every time I got too close, you moved.”
Peter’s gaze found yours briefly before slipping away again. “I didn’t want you looking over and wondering why some stranger had been staring at you for twenty minutes.”
There was something painfully absurd about hearing him call himself a stranger when he could remember the shirt you hated and the way you apparently reached for him in crowded rooms, but the observation never quite made it to your mouth.
“You could’ve stopped being one.”
His face changed.
For a moment Peter only looked at you, and through the open connection between you came a sudden rush of longing so old and complicated that you knew, before he even answered, that this was not the first time he had asked himself the same question.
“I wasn’t going to stay.”
Your fingers curled tighter around the photograph.
Peter worried his lower lip briefly between his teeth before continuing. “I kept telling myself I was only staying long enough to see you get your diploma. Then I wanted to make sure I saw you afterward, and somehow that turned into…” His shoulders lifted slightly beneath a slow breath. “Most of the afternoon, I guess.”
“You stayed that long?”
His expression softened with something almost embarrassed. “I’d already missed everything else by then. I didn’t want to miss that too.”
The anger inside you faltered badly enough that you had to look down at the photograph.
Peter continued after a moment, voice quieter now. “I almost came over…I just wanted to see you graduate.”
Your eyes began burning.
You blinked quickly, but the tears came anyway, gathering heavily enough along your lashes that the photograph blurred between your fingers.
Of all the things Peter had told you tonight, somehow that simple admission managed to find a place none of the others had reached.
There was nothing grand about it. No impossible decisions large enough to hide behind. For one afternoon he had simply been a boy who loved you, standing across the street because he had once imagined himself beside you when you graduated and apparently couldn’t bear the idea of missing it completely.
You swallowed around the tightness closing your throat.
Peter noticed the tears almost immediately. His body shifted towards you on instinct before stopping, the movement so small you might not have caught it if his concern hadn’t reached you first.
“When you said you almost came over…” Your voice came out thinner than you wanted, forcing you to clear your throat before trying again. “How close did you get?”
Peter let out a slow breath.
“Close enough that I had a speech.”
That only made your eyes burn worse.
You looked at him through the wetness gathering there, trying unsuccessfully to reconcile the exhausted man standing in front of you with the seventeen-year-old boy lingering somewhere across the street from Midtown, silently rehearsing all the ways he might introduce himself to a girl who had once known him better than almost anyone.
“You wrote me a speech?”
The question broke slightly around the edges.
Peter’s expression softened.
“Not on paper.” He glanced down, and for the first time the embarrassment moving through him carried none of the easy humor it might have under different circumstances. “I just kept going through it in my head. What I should say first. How long I could wait before mentioning Doctor Strange without making the whole thing sound even more insane.”
A tear finally slipped free, warm against your cheek. You wiped it away almost impatiently.
“You really thought about coming over.”
“All afternoon.”
The answer hurt.
You lowered your gaze towards the photograph again, staring at the blank space where Peter had once been while another version of that graduation began forming alongside the one you remembered. One where Peter stopped pacing across the street. One where he crossed through traffic, waited until you were alone and said whatever terrible speech he had spent hours rehearsing.
Maybe you would have believed him.
Maybe you wouldn’t.
Maybe your powers would have recognized him long before your mind ever had the chance.
You would never know.
“Can you tell me what you were going to say?”
Peter’s jaw shifted faintly as he pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, thinking. “I was going to start with your name.”
Something about that nearly undid you.
His gaze lifted towards yours.
“Then I thought I’d tell you mine. Tell you that we went to school together, that you knew MJ and Ned because of me—or, I guess, that we all knew each other together.” His voice stumbled slightly over the distinction before he pressed on. “I figured I’d work my way up to the magic part after I had at least convinced you not to walk away.”
Your lips pressed together tightly as another tear threatened.
“And us?”
Peter went quiet.
You could feel the answer moving through him.
“I didn’t know when to tell you that.”
“Why?”
“Because everything else sounded crazy enough.” His mouth twisted faintly. “Telling you I used to be your boyfriend felt like the part most likely to get me punched.”
Despite the sadness sitting heavily inside you, the familiarity of his reasoning brought the smallest warmth with it. You could almost imagine the old you reacting exactly that way, and judging by the fondness that surfaced inside Peter at the thought, apparently he could too.
“But you were going to tell me?”
His eyes held yours.
“Eventually, yeah.”
You studied him for several seconds, feeling the tears cooling against your face.
“You had all of that ready.”
Peter nodded faintly.
“You spent the whole afternoon thinking about what you were going to say to me.”
“Pretty much.”
“And then you just…left.”
The last word came out painfully small.
Peter looked away.
You waited, but this time the silence between you didn’t feel like avoidance so much as the careful approach towards a memory he still didn’t particularly want to touch.
“You laughed.”
You blinked.
“I what?”
“You were standing with MJ and Ned and somebody said something—I couldn’t hear what from where I was—and you laughed.” Peter’s gaze drifted somewhere beyond you as he spoke, slipping so completely back into the memory that for a moment you wondered if he was even seeing the alley anymore. “Like really laughed. Your head went all the way back and you almost dropped whatever you were holding because you were trying to cover your mouth.”
There was something different in his voice now, a softness that had crept into it without his permission, and as you watched him you realized the fondness moving through him had become almost unbearably tangled with everything else.
Peter smiled.
It was barely there, just the faintest movement at the corner of his mouth brought on by remembering you happy, but his eyes had already begun shining.
“And then I kept noticing things,” he continued, though his voice had grown thinner around the edges. “You were taking pictures with everybody, and Ned kept doing something that made you shove him away every time he stood next to you. MJ fixed your cap again because you’d messed it up for like the fourth time.”
A tear gathered along his lower lashes.
Peter blinked quickly and looked down.
The sight of it landed harder than you expected.
He seemed almost irritated with himself when he dragged the heel of his hand beneath one eye, wiping the wetness away before it had the chance to fall, but whatever little wall had been holding him together all night had already started giving way. You felt it happening inside him as clearly as you saw it on his face, years of grief loosening beneath the memory until there was suddenly too much of it for him to keep pressed neatly behind his ribs.
“You don’t have to—” you started.
“No, I do.”
Peter’s answer came quickly, rough enough that he had to stop and swallow before trying again.
“I need you to understand.” He drew in a shaky breath, looking back towards you even as another tear slipped free. “You looked excited. Everybody kept hugging you and you kept pretending it was annoying even though it obviously wasn’t, and your gown was all messed up because you wouldn’t stop moving around.”
His mouth trembled around another small smile.
“You looked exactly like yourself.”
That was the sentence that seemed to break whatever remained.
Peter’s face crumpled before he could turn away, and suddenly he was crying in a way that felt almost painfully at odds with how hard he had spent the entire night trying to contain himself. There was nothing graceful about it. He pressed his lips together as though that might somehow steady them, scrubbing impatiently at his cheek only for another tear to follow the first, and the embarrassment that immediately flared through him made it obvious this hadn’t been something he intended to let you see.
But he kept talking anyway.
“I hadn’t seen you like that since everything happened.” His voice cracked badly enough that he stopped, breathing through it while his eyes dropped towards the mask hanging uselessly from his hand. “I hadn’t seen any of you like that.”
Your anger remained somewhere inside you, but it suddenly became much harder to hold in the same clean shape.
Because standing in front of you was no longer Spider-Man explaining the logic behind some impossible sacrifice. He was Peter, barely eighteen in the memory he was describing, standing alone across the street from his own graduation and watching the three people who used to make up most of his world celebrate without him.
Another tear rolled down his cheek.
“I kept thinking I should go over,” he admitted, the words beginning to tumble out with less care now. “I had the speech. I knew what I wanted to say, or at least I thought I did, and I kept telling myself I’d wait until you were alone and then I’d just…go.”
His breath shuddered.
“But every time I looked at you, you were smiling.”
Your eyes burned.
Peter finally lifted his gaze towards you again, and there was no hiding anything in his face anymore.
“You looked so fucking happy.”
The words broke in the middle.
He laughed once beneath his breath, though it came out wet and miserable as he wiped at his face again.
“And I missed you so much.”
There it was.
Nothing defended. Nothing carefully reasoned into something noble enough to survive four years of scrutiny.
Just the truth.
Peter looked back towards you through red-rimmed eyes, grief pouring from him so openly now that you wondered how he had ever managed to contain this much of it in the first place.
“I wanted to walk across that street so badly.”
Your fingers tightened around the photograph as another tear slipped down your own cheek.
For one terrible moment, you could almost see him there.
Seventeen years old. Alone on the wrong side of the street, rehearsing a speech for a girl who wouldn’t recognize him, watching her laugh with the people who used to know his name.
And staying exactly where he was.
For several seconds after Peter stopped speaking, neither of you moved.
He was still crying.
Quietly now, as though the worst of whatever had finally broken loose had exhausted itself, leaving behind tears he no longer seemed interested in wiping away. One tracked slowly along the curve of his cheek while he stood there staring at the pavement between you, mask hanging limply from one hand and shoulders bent beneath a grief you could feel almost as clearly as your own.
And God, you were still angry with him.
You wanted to remain angry with him.
It would have been so much easier if Peter had told you he stayed away because he stopped caring, or because the life he had built without you became easier than the one he remembered. Something selfish enough that you could hold it up between the two of you and point towards it whenever the love still buried inside you threatened to complicate things.
Instead you could feel exactly how much he had suffered.
That was the horrible thing about your powers. Peter could lie to you with words if he wanted, could tell himself whatever noble version of the last four years helped him get through another day, but there was no hiding the wreckage underneath it while he stood this close.
Your anger had nowhere clean to land anymore.
“You really thought you were doing this for me,” you said eventually.
Peter lifted his eyes.
There was no accusation in the sentence this time, only the exhausted disbelief of finally understanding something you wished made less sense.
His mouth trembled faintly before he answered. “I thought if I came back, I’d just be giving you all of it again.”
“All of what?”
He looked almost surprised by the question.
“Me.”
That single word hurt worse than the list that followed.
Peter looked away before continuing, the words coming unevenly now that the careful composure he had relied on all night was gone. “Spider-Man. Waiting for me to come home. People finding out who you were because of me. Every time I got hurt and you felt it before I could even pretend I was fine.” His fingers curled tightly around the mask. “You finally had a chance to have a life where none of that was your problem anymore.”
You watched him for a long moment before speaking. “And every time you saw me doing something normal, you told yourself that was proof.”
Peter’s expression tightened.
“Not proof,” he said after a moment. “More like…permission.”
The word landed strangely.
Your brows pulled together. “Permission for what?”
“To leave you alone.”
There was something about the quiet honesty of it that almost made you look away.
Instead you studied the red around his eyes and the damp tracks drying unevenly against his face, imagining how many times he must have stood half a block away from you and forced himself to turn in the opposite direction.
“You needed me to look okay.”
Peter swallowed. “I needed to believe you could be.”
A painful sort of tenderness pushed its way through your anger before you could stop it.
Because you understood him now, although it wasn’t enough to forgive him. But enough to see the frightened seventeen-year-old boy hidden inside the decision, stripped of everyone he loved within the span of a few days and apparently desperate to convince himself that losing him had at least bought them something worthwhile.
That understanding hurt almost worse than the anger.
You blinked hard.
“Peter…”
He looked at you.
“I wasn’t.”
His face folded immediately, and you hated the way your body reacted to it, hated the instinctive urge to cross the remaining distance and put your hands somewhere comforting because apparently some part of you still remembered exactly what to do when Peter Parker looked like this.
You kept your feet where they were.
“I wasn’t okay,” you repeated, softer this time. “I just didn’t understand why.”
Peter’s lips parted.
You shook your head before he could apologize, because an apology wasn’t what you needed yet.
“You got to miss me.”
The words seemed to catch him off guard.
“You got to wake up and know exactly why it hurt. You could hate it, or regret it, or tell yourself you’d done the right thing, but at least the pain had somewhere to go.” Your voice thinned despite your effort to keep it steady. “You knew my name. You knew what my laugh sounded like. You had memories you could torture yourself with whenever you missed me badly enough.”
Peter’s eyes filled again.
You pressed on, though the anger in your voice had softened into something much more wounded.
“I didn’t have any of that.”
His head dropped slightly.
“There were mornings I woke up already crying and had to lie there trying to figure out what the hell had happened while I was asleep. Sometimes I’d pass somewhere in Queens and grief would hit me so hard I’d have to stop walking, and there was never anything there. No person. No memory. Nothing I could point to and say, this is why I feel like this.”
Peter dragged the heel of his hand underneath one eye again, attempting to reign in control of the tears that kept spilling.
“I thought the spell would take that too,” he said hoarsely.
You stared at him.
The answer was so small that it took some of the breath out of you.
“You thought I wouldn’t feel anything.”
“I thought you’d forget me.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“I understand that now.”
The words weren’t defensive. If anything, Peter sounded sickened by the realization.
“I found grief inside myself that I couldn’t control,” you said, and this time the confession came slower, each word carrying the remembered fear of that night with it. “Do you understand how frightening that was for me? I have spent my entire life learning how emotions work. I know where they come from, how they move, how to pull them apart when I need to. Then suddenly there was this enormous thing inside me that didn’t obey any of the rules.”
Peter’s face had gone pale.
“You tried to manipulate it.”
It wasn’t quite a question.
Your gaze sharpened on him. “Of course I did.”
His eyes closed briefly.
The reaction made your anger flare again.
“What?”
Peter shook his head.
“No, don’t do that.” You took a small step closer, stopping before the distance between you became dangerous. “You just reacted to something. Tell me.”
His eyes opened.
“You used to do that when I got hurt.”
Your brows pulled together.
“Try to take it away,” he explained. “Not mine. Yours.”
The memory belonged entirely to him, and something about that sent another quiet ache through you.
Peter looked down towards the mask in his hand. “You hated feeling scared for me because you said it made you feel helpless, so sometimes you’d push it down until you could think straight again.”
“And after you were gone, I couldn’t even do that.”
His gaze lifted quickly.
“Because there was nothing to work with,” you continued. “I didn’t know what I was afraid of. I didn’t know who I missed. I couldn’t redirect it toward anything because there was no anything. It was just pain with all the identifying information ripped off.”
Peter flinched like the words had struck him physically.
“I never thought—”
“I know you didn’t.”
You stopped.
For a second, both of you seemed to hear the phrase for what it was, familiar and overused and suddenly insufficient.
So you tried again.
“I believe you didn’t.”
That seemed to hurt him more.
You breathed out slowly, wiping at your own cheek with the back of your hand before another tear could make it much farther.
“And I think that’s part of why I’m so angry.”
Peter’s brow furrowed.
“Because I can feel how much you loved me when you made that choice.” Your voice broke slightly around the admission. “I can feel how badly it hurt you to stay away, and somehow you still convinced yourself that loving me meant making the decision without me.”
Peter looked down, his grip on the mask loosening at his side.
You looked away before the sight of him could undo you completely.
“I’m hurt for you, Peter.”
The words left your mouth before you had time to reconsider them.
Silence fell between you.
When you finally looked up, he was staring at you like you had said something far crueler than anger ever could.
“I’m hurt that you stood across the street from your own graduation and watched everyone you loved celebrate without you. I’m hurt that you spent four years convincing yourself you had to be alone because that was the price of keeping everybody safe.” Your voice dropped until the next words came out barely above a whisper. “And I am still so fucking angry that you made me pay part of that price without ever giving me a choice.”
A tear slipped down Peter’s cheek.
This time he didn’t wipe it away.
“I’m sorry.”
You closed your eyes briefly.
“I believe that too.”
And maybe that was what made all of it so difficult.
There was no monster standing in front of you. No cruel version of Peter Parker who had thrown you away and never looked back.
There was only someone who had loved you enough to ruin himself over a decision he thought would save you.
And somehow, that still didn’t make the decision his to make.
Peter stared back at you helplessly, the tracks left by his tears still shining beneath the dim light spilling into the alley.
For all the explanations he had given you tonight, all the ways the two of you had pulled apart a decision made by a frightened seventeen-year-old until you could almost understand how he had gotten there, one truth remained painfully untouched beneath all of it.
Peter lowered his head, exhaustion finally beginning to show through everything else.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said one last time.
You believed that.
That was becoming the problem.
Peter exhaled shakily, dragging a hand over his face before letting it fall again. “Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing.”
The sentence sounded painfully rehearsed, worn smooth through years of repetition and pulled out whenever loneliness became too difficult to justify on its own.
You studied him for a long moment.
“And what about Peter?”
His eyes lifted slowly. “What about me?”
“What did you want?”
That stopped him.
Peter’s mouth parted, but whatever answer might have come never had the chance to reach you because his emotions were already there.
Love moved through him with such aching immediacy that your next breath hurt. Beneath it came all that familiar longing you had followed through New York to find him in the first place, stripped now of every excuse he had spent the night placing around it.
You.
For all the things Spider-Man had apparently decided were necessary, Peter Parker had wanted you.
His gaze fell away.
“It didn’t matter.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
Peter looked back at you.
“It mattered to me.” Your fingers curled around the photograph still resting inside your hand. “You were allowed to want me, Peter. You didn’t have to decide that wanting anything for yourself made you selfish.”
The words left you quieter than you expected, carrying none of the fury they might have an hour ago. You were simply tired now, worn thin from learning how much of your own life had existed somewhere outside the reach of your memory.
So you stepped backwards.
Peter reacted immediately.
His head lifted, body shifting towards you before he caught himself, and fear rushed through him so suddenly that for one awful second you were back in the coffee shop watching him realize you could still feel him.
Only this time you understood what it meant.
You were leaving.
The realization hurts you too, but there was no possible way you could stay here and continue tearing apart a life you couldn’t even remember living.
You tuck the photograph back inside your jacket.
Peter watches every movement but doesn’t try to stop you.
You make it almost to the entrance of the alley before one final question catches around your ankle and refuses to let you walk any farther.
Slowly, you turn back around.
Peter hadn’t moved from where you left him.
The mask remained hanging loosely from his hand as he stared at you with an expression that made your stomach churn.
“Do you still love me?”
His face crumbles.
Peter doesn’t answer.
Because he didn’t need to.
You feel it from across the alley before he even has the chance to open his mouth.
That same bone-deep love that brought you searching for him in the first place wraps itself around your body one last time.
You nod faintly, mostly to yourself.
Then you turn around and leave.
And just like he had four years ago, Peter lets you.
thank you guys so much for the support ive been getting for this fic!! it has been amazing to see how much you guys like it, im really in disbelief lol
Rihanna “Kiss It Better” - Peter Parker x Empath!Reader || Oneshot PART THREE
see the story masterlist here
pls let me know if you want to be added to the taglist!
wc: 5.4k
His fingers twitched again at his side.
“The mask,” you clarified. “Take it off.”
Fear stirred inside of him again.
“Please.”
His shoulders lifted beneath a heavy breath.
“You’ve already seen me,” he pointed out softly.
“That’s not the point. Look at me.”
His apprehension fills the air and dread follows quickly behind. “I am.”
“No.” You shook your head. “You look at me.”
For a moment, neither of you moved.
Then his hands finally lifted toward his neck.
He caught the edge of the mask and pulled it over his head.
Brown curls fell messily against his forehead, dampened from however long he’d spent beneath the fabric. But you hardly noticed anything beyond his eyes.
He looked exhausted.
More than that, he looked devastated.
Like standing across from you in this alleyway was something he’d imagined enough times to know exactly how badly it could end.
And then something inside of you settled.
Only slightly.
Barely enough to register before the grief swallowed it back up again, but you felt it.
The same strange sense that had followed you through dreams you couldn’t remember and mornings spent reaching toward an empty side of your bed.
Except there was nothing empty in front of you now.
There was Peter.
His lips parted when he noticed the way you were staring at him.
You spoke before he had the chance.
“I found something when I was looking through old boxes.”
His face paled, unsure of whatever you could have been referencing.
You reached into your jacket and pulled out the photograph you’d spent far too long staring at before coming here.
Peter’s eyes fell to it.
You didn’t even need to show him properly.
The second he saw what was in your hand, you knew.
Still, you unfolded it and held it between you.
Your younger self smiled back from the glossy surface beside MJ and Ned, one arm wrapped around someone who no longer existed within the picture.
Peter stared at the photograph for so long that eventually you stopped watching his face and watched his emotions instead.
Whatever he recognized there hurt.
The pain that moved through him was sharp enough that your fingers instinctively began curling around the edges of the photograph, almost folding it back towards yourself before you caught the movement. For a strange second, you had wanted to hide it from him.
Maybe because feeling somebody else hurt had always inspired that sort of reflex in you, some deeply ingrained instinct to dull whatever sharp thing you had accidentally pressed against. But Peter had already seen it, and judging by the way his attention remained fixed on the empty space beside you, hiding the photograph now wouldn’t make whatever memory it had dragged to the surface disappear with it.
So you kept it between you.
His gaze wandered slowly across the picture, lingering over MJ and Ned before settling back onto the place where somebody should have been standing beside you. For several seconds he said nothing, though you could feel memories moving through him in ways you had no hope of following, shifting affection and grief across his face until something almost unbearably fond managed to slip through.
“You hated that shirt.”
Your brows pulled together. “What?”
“The one you’re wearing.” Peter gestured vaguely towards the photograph, his hand lifting as though he intended to point before falling back against his side. “You complained about it all morning because you thought the collar looked weird.”
Your eyes dropped towards your younger self.
It was just a shirt. An entirely ordinary piece of clothing you had probably worn dozens of times and eventually lost somewhere between moving apartments and cleaning out old drawers, yet Peter remembered you complaining about it years later with enough clarity that you could almost imagine the conversation yourself.
“I don’t remember that.”
Peter glanced down at the photograph again, his mouth pulling faintly to one side. “I figured you probably wouldn’t.”
There was no accusation in his voice, nothing that suggested he expected you to, and somehow the simple acceptance of it settled strangely beneath your skin.
Peter looked back towards the photograph, and the faintest breath of amusement passed through him before you even saw the corner of his mouth move. “You made us take this three times.”
That caught your attention. “Why?”
“Ned kept blinking.”
You immediately looked towards Ned, whose eyes were very much open in the photograph.
“So this was the good one?”
Peter gave the smallest shrug. “According to you.”
Something dangerously close to a laugh caught in your throat.
It felt strange enough that you swallowed it almost immediately.
For the briefest moment the two of you had been looking at the photograph together like it was nothing more than an old memory somebody had pulled from the bottom of a drawer, Peter filling in details you had simply forgotten with time. If you ignored the impossible space beside you, you could almost pretend this was normal.
But the space remained.
Your eyes drifted back towards it, following the shape of your own arm where it disappeared around a person the photograph refused to show, and whatever fragile warmth had surfaced between you seemed to retreat with your attention.
“That’s you, isn’t it?”
Peter’s gaze followed yours.
His jaw tightened.
You waited for him to answer, but several seconds passed with nothing more than the uncomfortable weight of his emotions moving between you.
“Peter.”
“I’m trying.”
Your brows pinched together. “Trying to do what?”
“Figure out how to answer you without making this worse.”
“You could start by actually answering me.”
A small, humorless breath left him. “You always did that.”
Your grip tightened slightly. “Did what?”
“Made it really hard to avoid a question.”
The familiarity with which he said it silenced you for a moment.
There it was again—that effortless way Peter occasionally spoke about you as though there existed an entire version of yourself he still knew well enough to predict, habits and arguments and stupid complaints about shirt collars apparently preserved inside him while you stood across from him trying to collect them one piece at a time.
You lifted the photograph a little higher between you.
“Is that you?”
Peter looked at it one last time before meeting your eyes.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, but this time he didn’t leave you to pull the rest out of him. “You had your arm around me.”
Your breath caught.
Peter swallowed before continuing, his attention dropping briefly towards the photograph again. “Mine was around your waist.”
The glossy paper suddenly felt heavier between your fingers.
“You remember that?”
His expression changed, something soft giving way beneath the exhaustion already written across his face.
“I remember all of it.”
You looked back down at the photograph, at the version of yourself who had once stood beside him with your arm curled so naturally around his shoulders that the gesture must have felt ordinary at the time.
That was the part you couldn’t stop staring at.
Not the missing space itself, but the ease of it.
You had known this man well enough to lean into him without thinking, had apparently trusted the shape of his body beside yours so completely that even now, with the photograph hollowed out around him, your posture still remembered where he had once been.
For four years something had been missing from your life, and somehow you had never even known what you were supposed to be looking for.
Your eyes lifted slowly back towards him.
“What happened to me?”
Peter’s expression changed so quickly that regret immediately crawled up your throat.
His face seemed to fold in on itself around the question, grief tightening every soft edge of him until you wondered if you had phrased it wrong somehow.
“It wasn’t just you,” he said.
Your brows pulled together. “What does that mean?”
Peter looked down at the mask still caught between his hands, thumb dragging anxiously across the fabric while he searched for somewhere to begin.
“When it happened, it affected everyone.”
“Everyone who?”
He hesitated.
You could feel the answer before he gave it, fear and guilt stirring together hard enough to make the air between you feel suddenly heavier.
“Everyone who knew me.”
The words sat there for a second without making any sense at all.
You stared at him. “That somehow made things less clear.”
A faint, exhausted sound escaped him, not quite a laugh and not really anything close to amusement. “Yeah. I figured.”
Peter shifted his weight, glancing down the alley like the answer might be written somewhere along the brick beside you. “There was a spell.”
You blinked.
“A spell.”
“Yeah.”
“Like actual magic.”
His mouth twitched faintly. “Unfortunately.”
You stared at him for another second, trying to decide whether you had finally chased this man far enough across New York that he had decided lying outrageously was easier than continuing the conversation.
Peter must have seen something of that thought cross your face because he rushed on before you could say it.
“I’m serious. Doctor Strange did it.”
That stopped you.
Of all the possible directions you had imagined this conversation taking, Doctor Strange erased you from my memory with magic had not been particularly high on the list.
“You’re telling me Doctor Strange did something to my head?”
Peter winced. “Technically, he did something to everyone’s.”
“That is not better.”
“I wasn’t trying to make it better.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
His fingers tightened around the mask again, and whatever tiny bit of humor had surfaced disappeared.
“There were people who knew Spider-Man was Peter Parker,” he said more carefully this time. “Too many people. It got out, and everything got really bad really fast.”
You watched him as he spoke, the name Spider-Man settling strangely beside his own even though you had already put those pieces together.
“The spell was supposed to fix it,” Peter continued. “Make people forget.”
“Forget you were Spider-Man?”
His eyes met yours.
“No.”
Something cold moved through your stomach.
Peter swallowed before finishing.
“Forget Peter Parker existed.”
For a moment, the alley seemed to go strangely quiet around you.
Your fingers tightened around the photograph.
“Everyone?”
Peter’s gaze dropped briefly to the picture between your hands before returning to your face.
“Yes. But not Spider-Man. People still remembered him and everything that happened, just…” He struggles with his words for a few seconds, face pinching like there was no correct way to explain any of this. “Without me.”
Your thumb brushes along the worn edge of the photograph.
Without him.
Suddenly the strange empty space tucked beside your younger self made a horrifying amount of sense.
Your arm wasn’t wrapped around nothing.
It was wrapped around Peter.
There was something almost nauseating about trying to imagine a person being removed from your life like that. Not forgotten in the normal way where memories faded and faces became fuzzy around the edges after too many years apart.
He had simply been carved out.
Except whoever did it apparently hadn’t done a good enough job cleaning up all the scraps left behind.
Because the grief remained.
The love did too.
So did the photographs and strange empty spaces inside memories that should have felt complete.
You lifted your head again, though the question sitting on your tongue felt heavier now that you finally had enough pieces to understand what you were actually asking.
“Who was I to you?”
Peter’s eyes fell away from yours almost immediately.
You let the silence stretch for a few seconds, watching the way his jaw tightened as if the answer itself had lodged somewhere painful on the way up. When he still said nothing, impatience began working its way underneath your skin, sharp enough to cut through some of the grief threatening to swallow the conversation whole.
“Peter.”
His gaze flickered back towards you.
“You wanted to explain, I could feel it,” you reminded him. “So explain.”
He dragged in a breath through his nose, shoulders shifting slightly beneath the weight of it before he finally said, “You were my girlfriend.”
The words settled strangely inside your chest.
By all reasonable logic, they shouldn’t have surprised you. You had already pieced together enough to understand that whatever existed between the two of you had gone far beyond friendship, and there weren’t exactly many innocent explanations for carrying around enough love for one person that four years without a name had turned it into grief.
Still, hearing him say it out loud was different.
His girlfriend.
The phrase seemed to rearrange the photograph in your hands, suddenly lending meaning to the way your body leaned towards his missing shape and to the ease with which your arm had once curled around him.
“You were my boyfriend,” you said quietly, testing the sentence against yourself.
Peter’s expression softened in a way that almost hurt more than everything else had.
“Yeah.”
You looked back down at the photograph. “For how long?”
He gave you the answer, and whatever number he offered seemed to hang uselessly in the air between you while you tried to make room for it somewhere inside your own life.
You couldn’t.
Those months already existed in your memory. You could picture classrooms and birthdays and weekends spent wandering around Queens after school, could remember MJ sitting cross-legged on your bedroom floor complaining about something you were almost certain had involved your English teacher while Ned laughed hard enough to nearly fall off the desk chair.
There were memories there.
Whole ones, as far as you had ever known.
And yet apparently Peter had been woven through all of them so thoroughly that removing him hadn’t destroyed the fabric. It had simply pulled the pattern crooked and left the rest of you to assume it had always looked that way.
Your brows pulled together as another thought surfaced.
“Did they know?”
Peter blinked. “Who?”
“MJ and Ned.” Your eyes lifted towards him. “About us.”
“Oh.” Something complicated passed across his face. “Yeah. They knew.”
“How much?”
He hesitated for half a second. “Pretty much everything.”
You stared at him.
Peter rubbed the back of his neck, looking almost embarrassed despite everything. “Ned knew before we were officially together.”
“Of course he did.”
That earned the smallest twitch at the corner of Peter’s mouth.
“MJ figured it out before either of us admitted anything.”
“That also sounds right.”
The strange little moment of recognition almost made you smile until the weight of the conversation caught up with you again.
You glanced back towards the photograph.
“Were we all close?”
Peter’s expression shifted.
“Yeah.”
The answer came softer than the others.
You waited, sensing there was more behind it.
Peter looked down at the mask hanging between his hands. “It was usually the four of us.”
The answer landed harder than you expected.
Because you remembered MJ and Ned.
You remembered high school lunches and study sessions and long afternoons that somehow stretched themselves into evenings before any of you noticed. You remembered graduating beside them and promising, in that stupidly sincere way people did at eighteen, that nothing was going to change just because school was over.
Except it had. Just not all at once.
There had never been a fight or some terrible falling out you could point towards as the reason the three of you slowly began slipping out of each other’s lives. Ned went one direction, MJ another, and you followed your own life forward until group chats became occasional messages and occasional messages became birthday texts you sometimes remembered a day late.
You had always assumed that was simply adulthood.
People changed. Schedules stopped lining up. Friendships sometimes loosened without anyone doing anything wrong.
But standing across from Peter now, you suddenly wondered if the three of you had been trying to hold onto a shape that no longer had a center.
Your grip shifted around the photograph.
“We stopped talking.”
Peter’s head lifted.
“After high school,” you clarified. “Not completely, but… enough.”
His face fell with a quietness that made you wish, briefly, that you hadn’t told him.
“Ned and I still check in sometimes. MJ too. But we’re not…” You searched for the right word and found none that didn’t sound strangely childish. “We’re not us anymore.”
Peter stared at you for a long moment, his eyes glistening with a sad glow.
You glanced down again. “Maybe you were the reason.”
He didn’t answer, there wasn’t a need to now. The grief and guilt moving through him told you plenty.
You forced your attention back towards the conversation before the silence could turn into something neither of you knew how to climb out of.
“And my powers?”
Peter seemed grateful for the shift, even if only slightly.
“How much did you know?”
His brows pulled together.
“About your powers?”
You nod.
Something in his face changed.
It wasn’t dramatic, but you felt it almost immediately – fondness softening through everything else he carried with enough familiarity that your own body reacted before you could stop it.
Peter looked at you like the answer should have been obvious.
“A lot.”
You narrowed your eyes. “That sounds suspiciously vague, I need the whole story.”
A breath of laughter escaped him, quieter than you expected.
“You want the short version or the embarrassing version?” He asks.
“The embarrassing one, obviously.”
That earned you something dangerously close to a real smile.
Peter looked down briefly before continuing. “I knew when crowds were getting too loud for you before you usually said anything. I knew you hated people touching you when you were overwhelmed, but if it got bad enough you’d grab my hand anyway because apparently that was different.”
Your fingers curled instinctively against your palm.
Peter noticed.
His voice softened.
“I knew you got headaches after being around too many people for too long. I knew you pretended attraction was harder to read than it actually was because you liked making me nervous.”
Your eyebrows rose.
“I couldn’t ever see myself doing that.” You scoffed.
He gives you a look. “You absolutely did.”
There was enough amusement threaded through his answer that, despite everything, you almost believed you could hear the ghost of an argument the two of you had apparently had dozens of times before.
Then Peter’s expression softened again.
“And I knew how to help when you couldn’t tell where everybody else ended and you started.”
The humor disappeared from you.
For a moment, all you could do was look at him.
You knew that was not the kind of thing somebody learned casually. Not from a few conversations or even a few months spent standing near you. That took attention and deep trust from you.
Your voice came out a broken sound when you finally asked, “How did you learn all that?”
Peter held your gaze, his own softening once again.
“You let me.”
The answer left behind an ache that felt almost absurdly intimate, mourning a familiarity you didn’t have access to while Peter Parker continued carving out some new little pit inside of you.
You glanced down at his hands, hanging awkwardly by his sides like they had nowhere to go.
He hadn’t touched you once since you found him.
Even when you collapsed underneath the sheer weight of everything he felt, he had known to keep himself back. People you’d spent years around still forgot sometimes. They’d grab your arm when you were upset or pull you into a hug thinking it would help, only to make everything exponentially worse.
Peter hadn’t even tried.
Another question swirls in your mind, and you ask it with little hesitation this time. “Did you touch me? I know you said I- that version of me would grab your hand when I felt overwhelmed…but did you ever touch me?”
“Um,” words try to form but they die on his lips.
You can see in the way his eyes shift that he seems to be recalling a distant memory, and you can feel the fondness of it roll off him in sweeping waves.
“A lot actually.” He finally settles on.
The answer stood between you with enough quiet certainty that, for a moment, you weren’t entirely sure what to do with it.
Peter seemed to realize how the words sounded only after they had already left his mouth. His shoulders went rigid, nervous embarrassment immediately fluttering through everything else he was feeling while the tips of his ears slowly began turning pink.
You stared at him.
His eyes shifted somewhere over your shoulder.
Despite yourself, one eyebrow rose. “Really?”
“I didn’t mean—” He begins to stutter.
You interject with a dry, “Clearly.”
“I meant like, y’know, because of your powers and stuff.”
“I gathered that eventually.”
Peter dragged a hand over the back of his neck, and there was something so painfully ordinary about his embarrassment that under almost any other circumstances you probably would have laughed. Instead, you found yourself watching him with a strange sort of fascination, because apparently this was another thing your life had once contained: Peter Parker getting flustered by something stupid he had said to you, while you stood there knowing exactly how much worse you could make it if you wanted.
Judging by the reluctant amusement that moved through him when he finally glanced back at you, he seemed to remember that too.
“So what did that actually look like?” you asked, softer now. “Me letting you in.”
Peter thought about it for a while, his jaw shifting faintly as he pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, gaze fixed somewhere near your shoulder before he finally looked back at you.
“Most of the time it wasn’t really anything..profound?”
“That is an incredibly unhelpful answer.”
“No, I mean–” A faint laugh escaped him as he shook his head. “It stopped feeling like something we had to think about after a while.”
You went quiet.
Peter seemed to struggle with how to put something that had once been ordinary into words for somebody who could no longer remember living it.
“If we were somewhere crowded, you’d find me,” he said eventually. “I could be across the room talking to somebody else and I’d feel you grab the back of my shirt, or hook your fingers through my sleeve, and that was usually enough.”
Your gaze dropped involuntarily towards his hand.
“You didn’t always need me to do anything,” he continued. “Sometimes you just wanted to know where I was.”
Something about that landed more tenderly than you expected.
“And that helped?”
Peter nodded before correcting himself with a small tilt of his head. “You said it did. I think because you knew what you were getting from me. Everybody else could change too quickly, especially in crowds, but after a while you got so used to me that you didn’t have to figure me out every time.”
The image came strangely easily despite having no memory attached to it: a crowded room full of emotions pulling at you from every direction and your hand reaching blindly behind yourself until your fingers found a familiar sleeve.
You rubbed your thumb absently across the side of your index finger.
“So you were basically an emotional support boyfriend.”
That startled a laugh out of him.
A real one this time.
The sound was brief and a little rough from disuse, but it changed his whole face when it happened, pulling something younger through the exhaustion that had settled so permanently into him.
“I hated when you called me that.”
Your mouth twitched before you could stop it. “So I did call you that.”
Peter immediately realized his mistake.
“That’s unfortunate for you.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You walked directly into that one.”
“I’m starting to remember why talking to you was exhausting.”
There was no bite behind it. Quite the opposite, actually, and the fondness moving through him was warm enough that you could almost imagine how many conversations like this the two of you must have had before everything became whatever this was.
The thought sobered you before the smile could fully form.
Peter noticed, his own amusement fading with yours.
“What else?” you asked.
His expression softened.
“You used to make me talk.”
You frowned. “You seem capable of doing that without encouragement.”
“Not like this.” He shifted the mask between his hands. “If things got really bad and there were too many people around, you’d tell me to just keep talking about something stupid.”
“Why?”
“Because it gave you one thing to follow.” Peter’s eyes held yours. “One voice, one person, one set of emotions you already knew.”
You swallowed.
“What did you talk about?”
“Anything.” A little smile pulled at his mouth as the memories seemingly came easier now. “Whatever class you were complaining about. Movies. Ned doing something dumb. Sometimes I’d explain whatever I was working on until you told me I was making the headache worse.”
You laugh again. “That sounds believable.”
There was something unbearably sweet about that, though you couldn’t have explained exactly why. Maybe because none of it sounded particularly heroic or profound. Peter hadn’t possessed some magical solution to your powers that no one else had been clever enough to discover. He had simply learned the small things that helped, then done them often enough that eventually reaching for him became as thoughtless as reaching for a railing when the train lurched beneath your feet.
You looked at him for a long moment. Before pondering out loud.
“So when you said I was different around you…”
Peter’s brows pinched slightly. “I don’t think you were different.”
The distinction caught you.
He searched for the words, gaze briefly drifting down before returning to yours. “I think you just got to stop paying attention so much.”
For a second, you forgot the next question.
Peter continued more quietly, “You were always paying attention. To everybody. What they were feeling, whether it belonged to you, whether you needed to block it out. Even when you looked relaxed, part of you was still doing that.” His fingers loosened around the mask. “With me, sometimes you just…didn’t.”
For a moment, you couldn’t think of anything to say.
Because there was intimacy in being touched by someone when touch meant more to you than it did to most people, but somehow this felt even more exposing.
You had trusted Peter enough to stop listening.
And apparently, once upon a time, the silence that left behind had felt safe.
You barely let anyone past the walls you had spent years building. Even the people you trusted most were held carefully at arm’s length when it came to your powers because there was nothing particularly enjoyable about accidentally drowning inside somebody else.
Your eyes began burning before you could do much about it, though this time the emotion rising through you had enough anger tangled into it that the tears almost felt embarrassing.
Because Peter carried around knowledge of you that you didn’t even have access to anymore.
He knew what it had felt like when your hand searched blindly through a crowd and found the back of his shirt. He remembered conversations you had apparently asked him to fill simply because the sound of his voice gave you something steady to follow when everything else became too loud, and somewhere inside his memory existed a version of you who had once been able to stand beside another person and simply stop paying attention.
You couldn’t remember the last time you had done that.
For the past four years, being tired had become such an ordinary part of your life that you rarely bothered distinguishing it from anything else. Crowded trains left headaches sitting heavily behind your eyes. Busy grocery stores required a concentration you had never been able to explain without sounding dramatic, and you chose seats near exits or took the long way home when the subway platform looked particularly packed without ever thinking much about why. There had even been nights when you stood beneath the shower with the lights turned off because, after an entire day spent filtering through everyone else, one more sensation felt unbearable.
You had called all of that getting better at managing your powers. Your barriers were stronger than they had been when you were younger, your control more precise, and you had learned enough little tricks to make your life perfectly manageable. It had never occurred to you that somewhere in the life you could no longer remember, you hadn’t always been the only person responsible for making it manageable.
Peter had been there, and he had simply been familiar enough that you could rest.
Now that you knew that—or at least knew that you had once known it—the last four years rearranged themselves beneath a much crueler light. You hadn’t only forgotten Peter. You had forgotten what it felt like to find him somewhere across a crowded room and let the rest of the world become quieter simply because he was there.
Your free hand rose to your forehead as a dizzy sort of anger worked its way through you, and you pressed your fingers hard against your temple while trying to steady your breathing.
Peter remembered that version of you.
He knew what touching him had felt like when the whole point of touch was that you guarded it so carefully.
He remembered how easily you reached for him and what stupid things he could talk about when your head became too crowded. He knew what you sounded like when you were angry, what you were like when exhaustion made you too tired to keep your thoughts neatly contained, and probably dozens of other tiny pieces of yourself you hadn’t even realized were missing until he began casually handing them back.
Worst of all, he remembered what it felt like when you loved him.
You had only been left with the aftermath.
Your hand slowly fell away from your forehead as the thought settled into something heavier than anger.
“Four years.” You grit through bared teeth.
Peter’s expression tightened almost immediately at the change of your tone, you could tell he sensed the simmering anger that crackled at your finger tips.
You studied him for a moment, finding the answer somewhere in the sudden grief moving through him before you even had to ask.
“You remembered me this whole time?”
His lips parted, though nothing came out at first. Peter looked almost like he wanted to soften whatever answer he was about to give you and realized halfway through that there was no version of it capable of becoming anything other than what it was.
Finally, he nodded.
“Every day.”
The sadness sitting inside your chest begins to shift into something much hotter.
Peter notices before you even say anything.
You could tell by the way he straightens slightly, like some part of him had always known this moment would eventually come and spent four years preparing himself to be torn apart by it.
“Then where were you?”
His eyes drop.
“Peter.”
Nothing.
“If you remembered me this whole time, where were you?”
“I stayed away.”
The bluntness of it makes you stare.
Not I couldn’t find you, the spell wouldn’t let me.
He stayed away. Meaning he chose to.
“Why?”
Peter takes in another breath.
“I thought it was better.”
“For who?”
“For you.”
A bitter laugh crawls out of your throat.
Peter flinches.
“And MJ. Ned. Everybody.” His words begin moving faster like if he stops long enough you’ll have the chance to rip another hole into whatever reasoning he spent years building for himself. “After everything that happened, people got hurt because they knew me.”
Something particularly painful rolls through him at the thought, so sharp and sudden that you almost interrupt.
“You got hurt because you knew me.”
You stare at him for a moment, silently reflecting. “So you decided I shouldn’t.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“How was it different?”
Peter finally looks directly at you.
“I saw a chance for you to have something that didn’t involve any of this.”
His hand vaguely motions towards the suit still covering his body.
“You didn’t have to worry every time I left if I was going to come back,” Peter said, and something in his voice had changed now, growing steadier the longer he spoke as though he had finally reached the part of this conversation he understood how to defend. “Nobody could use you to get to me anymore, and you weren’t constantly getting dragged into something because of Spider-Man.”
There was so much conviction beneath the words that you could practically feel how deeply he had carved them into himself.
That, more than anything, pissed you off.
He believed it. Wholeheartedly.
And the worst part was that somewhere beneath your anger, you could almost understand how he had gotten there.
Rihanna “Kiss It Better” - Peter Parker x Empath!Reader || Oneshot PART TWO
masterlist here!
wc: 4.7k
It took another month to prove it. To which Spider-Man made that considerably more difficult than you’d expected.
To give you credit, he didn’t exactly publish his schedule. But New York published it for him.
Videos, photos, reddit threads. There was even grainy security footage. TikToks filmed from twelve blocks away with captions declaring things that definitely hadn’t happened. You developed the mildly concerning habit of comparing Spider-Man sightings to the increasingly small collection of things you knew about Peter Parker.
And the more you looked, the stranger it became. Both your new found hobby and the things you started to notice.
There were holes, sure Peter seemed to be working some suspicion up but not just with him, there were holes in you. Pictures you couldn’t explain and places that made you nauseous. Like a victim of PTSD experiencing vivid flashbacks, except you had no prior memory of the original encounter. You only experienced all of the physical and emotional sensations of it.
Like a bakery in Queens where the woman behind the counter greeted you like she’d known you for years before visibly confusing herself when you asked from where.
A scar on your palm that ached when Spider-Man appeared on television.
An old box shoved beneath your bed containing a MetroCard, two movie ticket stubs, a broken necklace and a photograph with a blank space where someone very obviously should have been standing.
You sat cross-legged on your bedroom floor holding the necklace between your palms and staring at that photograph for nearly an hour. Memories flooded through your mind, but all of them were hazy with gaps where there felt like another person should be.
You were seventeen in the photo.
You stood in front of the Midtown School of Science and Technology with one arm lifted strangely away from your body.
Not really strangely. But as if it were around someone. There was room for something.
With your fingers curling against the edge of the photo, you flipped it over and three names were written on the back.
MJ, Ned…
And beneath them, in your own handwriting:
P.
Your pulse thudded loudly inside your ears as you flipped the photograph back over, studying it again with a newfound scrutiny that made you wonder how you had ever managed to look at it before without noticing how blatantly wrong it was.
“No,” you whispered softly to yourself.
There was someone standing beside you.
There had to be, because unless your seventeen-year-old self had taken to throwing an arm around the open air for photographs, there was no other explanation for the strange way your shoulder lifted away from your body. Your elbow bent naturally around something that was no longer there, while the rest of you leaned ever so slightly towards the empty space as if your body had once expected something solid to meet it halfway.
You stared at it long enough that your eyes began finding all the little details that suddenly felt impossible to ignore.
The way your weight favored that side. The slight tilt of your head. Even the smile stretched across your face seemed aimed more towards whoever had been standing beside you than the person actually taking the picture.
You looked happy.
Painfully so.
There was something almost intimate about seeing yourself like that and having absolutely no memory of what had made you smile so widely. You knew every version of that face because it belonged to you, had watched it grow and change every morning in bathroom mirrors and poorly lit photographs throughout the years, and yet the girl staring back at you suddenly felt like somebody whose life you had only been given pieces of.
She knew something you didn’t.
Someone, apparently.
Your thumb slowly drifted across the glossy surface until it settled over the empty space beside you, tracing the outline of a person the photograph itself refused to give back.
And something inside of you hurt.
Pain tore through your chest with such little warning that you again folded forward underneath it, your free hand immediately clutching at your sternum while the photograph trembled dangerously between the fingers of the other.
“Fuck.”
Your breath came out thin and uneven as you sat hunched over yourself, waiting for the sensation to pass in the same way most sudden emotions eventually did. But it remained stubbornly lodged within you, growing more uncomfortable the longer your thumb stayed pressed against that empty patch of glossy paper.
Instinct eventually took over.
You had spent almost your entire life learning how to reach inside of yourself and untangle emotions before they could grow large enough to swallow you whole, so you closed your eyes and followed the pain inwards with the intention of doing exactly that.
Only the moment you found it, something about it made you pause.
Because this felt like all the other times those inexplicable feelings had come up.
There was a familiarity to the feeling that took you several seconds to place, like walking into a childhood home years after moving away and finding that your feet still somehow remembered which floorboards creaked beneath your weight.
You had been here before.
Lying awake in the dark with an inexplicable sadness keeping you company on the other side of the bed. You had reached for it then too, following it down until you discovered layer upon layer of grief that made absolutely no sense for someone who couldn’t remember losing anything worth mourning.
Eventually you had learned to leave it alone.
Apparently it had never learned to return the favor.
Your eyes slowly opened and dropped towards the photograph still held between your fingers.
The feeling shifted almost immediately.
Not enough that you could call it a memory, because there was still nothing waiting for you when you searched your mind for the person who should have been standing there. No forgotten face slowly coming back into focus or voice whispering from somewhere beyond the reach of whatever had happened to you.
But the grief reacted to the photograph with such certainty that it made your stomach turn.
For four years it had wandered around inside of you without a home, attaching itself to dreams you couldn’t remember and places that made you sad for reasons you could never explain. Now, with the photograph resting between your hands, like when seeing Peter, it seemed to finally have somewhere to return to.
Your eyes traced that empty space again and tears began gathering along your lashes before you even realized you were crying.
Whatever your mind had forgotten, some other part of you clearly hadn’t.
It seemed emotions were harder to fool.
The thought sent an uncomfortable chill crawling along your arms as you turned the photograph over again and stared at the names written across the back.
Your thumb settled over that final letter.
You had written it yourself. The slight slant of the handwriting was unmistakably yours. At some point you had known exactly whose name it represented without needing anything more than that single letter to identify them.
And apparently you had loved them.
That was the part that made your stomach twist hardest.
Because beneath all of that grief lived the same impossible warmth you had discovered years ago, threaded so intricately throughout the pain that trying to separate one from the other had always felt like pulling apart two vines that had spent years growing around each other.
Love.
Your love.
You looked back towards the photograph and tried desperately to remember.
The front of Midtown came easily enough. You remembered that entrance and the steps beneath your feet, could almost hear Ned laughing somewhere beside you while MJ complained about something you could no longer place. Pieces floated around inside your mind like scraps of an old film reel, damaged in places but still recognizable enough that you knew they belonged to you.
Until you tried to look towards the person beside you.
Then everything seemed to bend strangely around the absence.
Your memories didn’t stop there so much as they seemed to have learned how to continue without acknowledging the missing piece at all, stitching themselves neatly across the gap until you had spent four years never realizing there was a hole beneath the seam.
You pressed your fingertips against your temple as the effort sent a dull ache crawling behind your eyes.
“Who the fuck were you?” you murmured.
The photograph offered nothing.
But something else did.
A memory from only a few weeks ago surfaced so suddenly that your hand dropped away from your forehead.
Brown hair curling messily around someone’s ears. His old backpack.
A man standing frozen beside the entrance of a coffee shop while enough love poured out of him to make your own answer in return.
Your eyes slowly widened.
The warmth inside of you shifted at the thought of him, curling towards his memory with the same strange recognition it had shown the empty space in the photograph.
Peter Parker.
You stared down at the single P written across the back.
For the first time since learning his name, it didn’t feel like two meaningless words you were trying desperately to force some significance into.
Your phone sat abandoned somewhere beside your knee.
You reached for it.
You typed his name into the search bar.
Peter Parker.
The results were useless.
So you added another word.
Peter Parker Midtown.
Nothing.
Your fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment before trying again.
Peter Parker Spider-Man.
Still nothing worth a damn.
You stared at the screen, jaw tightening as one useless result bled into the next, and somewhere in the middle of all that frustration the pieces finally stopped feeling like separate coincidences.
The coffee shop. The photograph. The way your own emotions had reached towards him before you even knew his name.
Peter Parker knew you.
More importantly, some part of you knew him too.
That was enough.
You pushed yourself up from the floor, determination settling over you with a kind of clarity you hadn’t felt since this whole thing began.
Peter had made one mistake.
He had stayed in New York.
And New York was very, very difficult to disappear in when the person looking for you could feel you coming.
You returned to the spot you last saw him.
However this time you sit on the bus stop bench, instead of hiding behind it.
You stare into the endless crowd of New York’s streets. The many faces of strangers each hold their own story as you reflect back upon your own.
With a racing heart, you take a deep breath and do the one thing you swore off ever letting yourself do again.
You let go. Every wall, barrier, or block you have ever put up to distance yourself between the emotional floodgates of those around you crumble frighteningly fast as you breathe out.
Suddenly you could feel everything. People five blocks down the road felt like they were sitting five feet across from you. There was the grief of a newly widowed woman that carved a hole into your chest while the joy of a child reuniting in a hug with his father filled it back up.
It struck you so hard and fast that you nearly doubled over and choked on it. But people spared you nothing more than an odd glance, confusion murking over your skin as they passed.
Without realizing it, your powers had grown significantly stronger since when they first came on.
It took a few steady, deep breaths to right yourself. And even then, it took almost everything you had to just be.
But your body caught wind of that bone-deep familiar sense of longing. The one that could belong to the only person who’s ever been able to hold you in their heart like that.
And you followed it like a hound chasing a scent.
Through the twists and turns of unrecognizable streets and alleyways, focused so heavily you nearly knocked through a crowd of tourists. Too caught up in the way your heart clenched around its despair to murmur any form of apology.
Until finally the feeling became so overwhelmingly strong that you were nearly drowning in it.
He stood against the dead end of an empty alley. Not dressed as Peter, but in that red and blue suit that held so many unconscious emotions.
He doesn’t turn around immediately. There’s no surprise lingering around him. He knew you were hunting him, and you knew he was letting you catch him. If he really wanted to be left unfounded, he easily could have climbed up the nearest building and been halfway to Brooklyn by the time you caught up to him.
But instead he stood frozen in place the second he sensed someone poking around exactly where they shouldn’t be.
Because after four years of denial, avoidance, and running away from the truth…He had nothing left within him to fight it. Underneath all that apathy and fear swirled a ball of emotions so visceral you could nearly pluck them from his chest and present it to him in the palms of your hands.
Deep and utter appreciation and space held for someone who simultaneously took every breath away from his lungs before they could inflate and filled them back up with such a profound sense of acceptance.
A love so gut wrenchingly deep it fanned against your skin and absorbed itself through every open pore and crater.
All for you.
His emotions were so intense you buckled under the weight of them, dropping to your knees as he turned around to finally take sight of you.
He starts to utter out your name but you stop him before it can fully form.
“Who are you?” You beg, looking up at him with tears rolling down your cheeks as you stay hunched over your knees.
His heart clenched at the sight of you, and you felt the wave of sorrow unfurl in swift heaps with every step as he inched closer.
You shake your head as the emotions begin to bridge upwards so fast you can no longer tell what beats of your heart are controlled by his nervous system or your own.
“Stop!” You cry out, sounding so pained as if he were physically striking you down with his own fists.
“Please. Don’t come closer.”
Your voice was significantly quieter on the last words.
He stops.
Not another inch of space is closed between you after the words leave your mouth. No attempt to reach out or even crouch down to where you remained crumbled against the pavement. He simply freezes where he stands.
The relief it provides is immediate, but not nearly enough.
You squeeze your eyes shut and try to focus on the sound of your own breathing. The city continues somewhere outside of the alleyway, bustling with the same life you had just willingly opened yourself up to. Only now it felt impossibly far away compared to the man standing several feet in front of you.
There was too much of him.
Even after you desperately began building back up the barriers you had spent years perfecting, his emotions refused to dull alongside the rest. The thousands of people surrounding you slowly faded into nothing more than the usual distant hum, but that aching presence remained lodged so deeply inside of your chest you weren’t sure where to begin digging it out.
“Stop doing that.”
There was a beat of silence before he answered.
“Doing what?” Peter asked carefully.
The sound of his voice made your stomach twist.
You lifted your head enough to look at him. He hadn’t moved from where you told him to stay, arms hanging stiffly at his sides as if even the smallest twitch might somehow be enough to send you over the edge again.
There’s an ache that forms an impossible lump in your throat when you look at him.
“That,” you breathed out. “Whatever you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything.” He murmurs, folding inward on himself.
“I can feel you.”
His head dropped ever so slightly.
And just like that, something clicked.
“Yeah,” you laughed bitterly through the tears still drying against your cheeks. “You know that already, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer, but the flicker of fear that followed was all the confirmation you needed.
You stared up at him, suddenly taking notice of more than just the fact that he had listened when you told him to stay away.
He hadn’t tried to touch you.
He hadn’t bombarded you with questions or panicked over the fact that you’d dropped to your knees in front of him. He had done exactly what someone was supposed to do when you became overwhelmed by your abilities.
Someone who knew you, at least.
“How?” you asked, more so pleaded.
Peter remained quiet.
“How do you know?” This time it came out more like a demand.
Again, nothing.
You shifted onto your heels as your breathing finally began to even out. The pressure in your chest had started to loosen too, enough that you initially assumed you’d finally managed to push him back behind the walls with everyone else.
Until you realized you weren’t the one doing it.
He was.
You could feel him trying to pull everything inward, smoothing down the emotions that had been spilling out of him since the second you found him. It wasn’t perfect. The grief still seeped through in waves no matter how hard he tried to contain it, but he was consciously making an effort to keep it from reaching you.
Your stomach dropped. “How do you know what to do?”
His concentration slipped at the question and sorrow swept through you hard enough to make your shoulders curl inward.
Almost immediately, it disappeared again.
“Oh my God.”
“I’m sorry,” Peter whispered.
“Don’t.” You hiss.
“Okay.”
“Don’t say you’re sorry like—” Your voice broke before you could finish.
Something about how easily he listened made you want to scream.
You dragged yourself back onto your feet, using the brick wall beside you for support when your knees threatened to buckle underneath your weight.
You keep your gaze focused on the ground beside his feet, hoping it’ll be distracting enough from the emotional overload of being near him, “Who are you?”
He hesitated for so long that you almost thought he wouldn’t answer.
“Peter.”
You whip your head up, staring at him incredulously.
“No shit.”
He flinched.
“I know your name. Peter Parker. I know you go to that damn coffee shop, and I know that somehow Peter Parker can disappear into an alleyway and Spider-Man comes back out of it.” Your fingers dug into the brick beneath your palm. “I know you saw me and ran.”
Peter’s masked face lowered again.
“And I know you’re lying to me.”
“I haven’t lied to you,” he finally argued.
You glare at him, “You haven’t told me anything.”
“I know.”
“That’s lying but worse.”
The guilt that immediately radiated from him only pissed you off further.
You hated being able to feel it. Hated that underneath all the frustration bubbling in your chest there was some small, instinctive part of you that wanted to ease it for him despite having absolutely no reason to care that he was hurting.
“How do you know me?”
You could feel every push and pull that wagered a war deep within his soul. He was having an internal battle that you were privy to every excruciating feeling of.
“How do you know what my powers do?”
You pushed yourself away from the wall and his attention snapped back to you immediately.
“Why did you know my name?” you continued. “Why did you look at me like that?”
He breaks his vow of silence for the briefest moment. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to what?” You pushed back.
Peter’s mouth remained hidden beneath the mask, but you didn’t need to see it to know he had no intention of answering.
You swallowed around the growing lump in your throat.
“Why are you scared of me?”
“I’m not,” he answered quickly.
Too quickly for you to believe him, but the emotion underneath his words told a different story anyway.
He was afraid, just not of you.
For you.
A disbelieving breath left your nose as you shook your head. “You’re really bad at this.”
And then you felt it.
A flicker of fondness slipped beneath everything else, so brief you could have missed it had you not been paying such painfully close attention to every shift inside of him.
It curled around the edges of your anger with such unexpected familiarity that the heat inside of you faltered, leaving behind a strange, hollow stillness where fury had been only seconds before. There was nothing particularly dramatic about the feeling itself. Fondness usually passed through people without demanding much attention.
But this one made your body answer.
Somewhere deep inside of you, something loosened instinctively, responding to the shape of his affection before your mind had even begun to understand why.
Your fingers slowly went cold.
You knew this feeling.
And not from the coffee shop, where Peter’s emotions had crashed into you so violently that there had been no room to distinguish one from the next. Not from chasing him through the city or following the strange emotional trail he seemed incapable of hiding from you no matter how badly he tried.
This was older than that.
There was a familiarity to the way his fondness settled over you, something so strangely intimate that it felt less like discovering a new emotion and more like remembering the pressure of a hand you had once held so often that your palm still knew its shape.
Your anger disappeared completely.
“Peter.”
His head lifted at the sound of his name, and even through the mask you could feel the exact moment something inside of him pulled tight.
The reaction was immediate enough that your stomach dropped.
“You knew me.”
For the first time since finding him, Peter seemed to forget how to hide.
His entire body stiffened, shoulders drawing tight as whatever careful control he had managed to build around himself cracked just enough for the truth to spill through. Fear sharpened beneath the guilt already clinging to him, but underneath both remained that same terrible tenderness, warm and familiar and pointed so unmistakably towards you that denying it suddenly felt ridiculous.
“You knew me,” you repeated, and this time your voice shook around the words as the realization settled more heavily into place. “And I knew you.”
Peter turned his face away.
Something about that movement made anger flare through you again, not as violently as before, but enough to cut through the confusion twisting itself around your chest.
“No.” You stepped towards him before instinct caught up with you, stopping yourself almost immediately when you remembered what proximity did to the both of you. “Don’t do that. Don’t you dare shut down now like you can somehow hide this from me.”
His head lowered slightly.
“I can feel it,” you said, quieter now, though the words carried more weight than anything you had shouted at him. “Whatever this is, whatever I was to you… my body knows it.”
Peter inhaled sharply.
“I—”
“I knew you,” you interrupted, because suddenly you couldn’t bear to hear whatever excuse he had been preparing to offer. “I don’t know how. I don’t know what happened or why I can’t remember any of it, but I knew you.”
The words seemed to leave nowhere for either of you to run.
Peter stood completely still beneath the mask, whatever answer he had been reaching for dying somewhere before it ever reached his mouth.
You brought a hand to your chest when that familiar ache began to stir again. The same strange pit that had sat dormant inside of you for years, only ever making itself known in the dead of night or through dreams you could never remember by morning.
Only now it wasn’t dormant.
It was opening.
Your first instinct was to push it back down.
You knew how. You’d been doing it without thought for years, manipulating the uncomfortable pang into something duller whenever it became too difficult to ignore.
Except it wouldn’t go.
The harder you pushed, the more it seemed to fight against you until something warm began bleeding through the cracks.
You froze.
It wasn’t coming from him.
This belonged to you.
And with Peter standing in front of you, that feeling you’d never been able to place finally seemed to understand where it was supposed to go.
Your eyes burned as you stared at him.
“No.”
Peter shifted at the sound of your voice, his confusion timidly swirling around the emotional cocktail.
You shook your head and pressed your hand harder against your chest as if that could somehow keep everything contained inside of it.
“No, because I know what this is.”
Peter’s grief swelled.
“I know what love feels like.”
His shoulders dropped.
The words sounded ridiculous even to you. You didn’t know this man. You had spoken to him once, if the interaction at the coffee shop could even be considered a conversation, and yet your own heart was betraying everything you knew to be true.
You couldn’t make love from nothing.
You could encourage what was already there or smother it until it was barely recognizable, but emotion had to come from somewhere.
“I can’t make myself feel something that isn’t there,” you told him.
Peter let you continue working your way through the problem, knowing you’d always been able to find the solution on your own.
“I can’t create it.”
“I know,” he murmured.
Your breath caught.
For the first time, you wished you couldn’t feel him at all.
Because the second those words left his mouth, regret poured off him.
“You know.”
Peter seemed to realize his mistake too late.
“You know I can’t create emotions,” you said. “You know what happens when I’m overwhelmed. You knew not to touch me when I told you to stop.”
Your voice grew quieter as the realization settled deeper.
“How do you know that?”
“I can’t—”
“Why do I love you?”
Whatever answer had been sitting behind his teeth disappeared.
The control he’d managed to hold over himself went with it.
You felt his love before you saw his body react, spilling back into the space between you so suddenly that your breath caught somewhere inside your chest.
It was the same longing that had led you to him in the first place, only now there was nothing keeping it neatly contained behind whatever walls Peter had spent his years building around himself. Without them, the feeling seemed almost endless, stretching far beyond the few weeks you had known his name and carrying with it the unmistakable weight of something that had been lived with for a very long time.
There was no clock attached to emotion, no way to reach inside someone and count the years by touch alone, but old feelings had a different kind of gravity to them. They settled differently. Wore themselves smoother around the edges. This wasn’t some new affection that had sprung up after seeing you in a coffee shop or some strange fascination born from the last few weeks.
Peter had loved you long enough for the feeling to have changed shape around the absence of you.
The realization struck harder than you expected, and your knees threatened to buckle again beneath the weight of everything he was no longer successfully hiding.
Peter moved instinctively.
One step.
Barely even that.
His body leaned towards you before thought caught up with him, hands twitching at his sides with the unmistakable urge to reach out and catch you.
Then he stopped himself.
So quickly it was painfully obvious he remembered exactly what you had asked of him.
“Don’t,” you warned quietly.
“I know.”
“Then stop.”
“I’m trying,” Peter strained out.
“Try harder.”
His hands clenched at his sides, but slowly the weight pressing against your chest began to recede.
You wiped underneath your eyes with the heel of your hand and looked at him.
Really looked at him.
Covered from head to toe while you stood in front of him with every emotional defense you’d spent years building ripped wide open.
Rihanna “Kiss It Better” - Peter Parker x Empath!Reader || Oneshot PART ONE
What are you willing to do?
Four years after forgetting Peter Parker, your abilities leave you carrying all the love and hurt of losing him without knowing where either came from. But when an empath who knows emotions can't come from nothing finally finds the man her heart never forgot, there's only one question left between you: what are you willing to do to make it right?
🚨Brand new day spoilers!🚨
Tags: angst, slowburn emotional hurt/comfort, lovers to strangers to lovers again kind of? Make out sesh, reader has her own powers
so because tumblr sux (jk lv u tmblr) i cant post the entire work all at once, but it will be posted to my ao3!
ill make a masterlist here for the entire work, split up into, "chapters"
total story wc 30k+
ch. wc: 4.6k
People had a tendency to misunderstand what you meant when you told them you could feel things.
It wasn’t like mind reading how some people interpreted it.
You couldn’t look at someone and know what they were thinking, couldn’t dig through memories or pull secrets out of their head. If a man smiled at his wife while thinking about the woman he’d slept with the night before, you wouldn’t know he’d cheated.
You might, however, feel the guilt. That was the distinction.
Thought belonged to the mind. Emotion belonged to the body, and bodies were much harder to lie with. You’d learned that young.
Before you knew what you were doing, other people simply happened to you.
Your mother’s irritation became a headache behind your eyes. A classmate’s embarrassment burned hot across your own cheeks even though you had nothing to be embarrassed about. Arguments were unbearable because anger never stayed politely contained inside the people having them. It spread, finding its way underneath your skin until your muscles tightened and your own temper began to flare alongside theirs.
Crowds were so, so much worse.
There were too many people wanting too many things all at once, and as a child you had absolutely no idea how to separate any of them from yourself.
Eventually you learned for your own survival.
It took years of practice and more than a few public meltdowns before you figured out how to build some kind of barrier between yourself and everyone else. By the time you were a teenager, other people’s emotions became something closer to sound.
You could still hear everything. You’d just learned not to listen to all of it. Most people existed as background noise.
A stranger passing you on the sidewalk might leave behind a brief impression of annoyance. Someone sitting beside you on the train could make your stomach flutter with excitement over a text you hadn’t received. Sometimes sadness followed you for half a block before the person carrying it turned down another street and took the feeling with them.
Proximity mattered, but intensity mattered more. And touch was something else entirely.
You avoided that when you could.
Skin against skin stripped away most of the distance you’d spent years teaching yourself to maintain. A handshake could tell you more about somebody than ten minutes of conversation ever would, while a hug from someone grieving could leave you carrying around a sadness that had absolutely nothing to do with you for the rest of the day.
So you became particular about who you touched. And even more particular about who you allowed to touch you.
It worked both ways, too, but that had taken longer to discover.
Feeling was passive. Something your body did naturally whether you wanted it to or not.
You eventually realized through a lot of effort that changing those feelings was something you could manipulate yourself.
With enough concentration, you could reach into the panic twisting around someone’s ribs and slowly loosen it. Anger could be cooled down before it escaped as something much uglier. You could even take the sharpest edge off grief without actually removing the grief itself.
Attraction? Well…
There were certain things you decided very early on that you had absolutely no business encouraging.
Your own emotions were significantly easier to manipulate, which came in handy.
Fear before an exam could be dampened into something manageable. Anger could be pushed down before it escaped your mouth and became someone else’s problem. Embarrassment could be smothered almost as soon as it appeared.
For a time, you thought that meant there wasn’t much you couldn’t do. The cocky naivety that comes with being young.
Until you learned there were rules. The biggest one being that emotion had to come from somewhere.
You could manipulate what was already there. Pull at it until it becomes stronger, suppress it until it is barely noticeable or redirect it somewhere else entirely. Sometimes, if you were close enough, you could even push pieces of your own emotional state into somebody else.
But you couldn’t make a person love someone they didn’t.
You couldn’t manufacture grief over something that had never mattered to begin with.
And you couldn’t remove an emotion so completely that it stopped existing.
You could bury it, but that wasn’t the same thing.
You knew from experience that if you pushed something down far enough, eventually you stopped noticing it was there. Life continued piling new emotions on top of the old ones until whatever you didn’t want to feel became so deeply packed underneath everything else that you could almost convince yourself you had gotten rid of it completely.
Almost.
Because buried things had a nasty habit of finding their way back to the surface eventually.
You knew that better than most.
There has been something buried inside you for four years. You just didn’t know it yet.
Why would you?
There was no obvious absence to point toward or missing name sitting at the edge of your tongue with a face you couldn’t quite picture. Your life continued with the quiet confidence of something that had never been interrupted.
You graduated with a group of your friends from Midtown High, eventually getting into the same college together. Found an apartment cheap enough you could somehow manage to afford on your own.
And if there were certain things you couldn’t explain, you’d become very good at not thinking too hard about them.
Like the strange hollow ache that sometimes appeared when you passed through certain parts of Queens. It never lasted particularly long, usually disappearing by the time you were a few blocks away, so eventually you stopped questioning it.
There were strange dreams that were a little harder to ignore though. You couldn’t remember what happened by the time you woke up, you never did. But, you remembered how they made you feel.
Sometimes you woke up laughing, the remains of some forgotten joke still lingering warmly inside your chest despite having absolutely no idea what had been so funny in the first place, however that occurrence was rare.
More often, you woke with the unmistakable sensation that someone had just been beside you.
Warmth lingered along your back as if another body had been pressed against it only moments before. Sometimes your hand would be stretched towards the empty half of the bed, fingers curled loosely into the sheets, and for one disorienting second you’d lay there waiting for something, someone.
Then consciousness settled properly over you and the feeling became ridiculous. You lived alone, there was nobody there.
So you would pull your hand back, roll over and eventually fall asleep again. The sadness usually lasted until morning.
You tried manipulating it once. It was sometime around three in the morning when you woke up with that familiar ache lodged so deeply underneath your ribs that sleep became impossible. Irritated more than anything by that point, you rolled onto your back and decided you’d had enough.
Whatever it was, you could get rid of it.
Or at the very least shove it somewhere far enough away that it would leave you alone until morning.
So you reached inward and found the emotion easily enough.
It was…grief. An emotion that tangled itself in between your ribs and stubbornly refused to let itself simply be.
Which surprised you. You hadn’t lost anyone. Not recently, anyway.
Still, you pressed against it the same way you’d done a thousand times with emotions you didn’t want to feel. Trying to take the sharpest edges and smooth them down until whatever remained became quiet enough to ignore.
Except this grief didn’t disappear. Your eyes shot open.
You stared into the darkness of your bedroom for a few seconds before closing them and trying again.
It begrudgingly moved this time. Everything moved if you knew how to push hard enough.
But underneath whatever sadness you managed to suppress was more of it, packed so deeply inside of you that the further you followed it down, the more your chest began to hurt.
Which didn’t make any fucking sense.
You pushed deeper, past the layers of sadness, denial, and all the other emotions that come with it.
And found something else. Something warm had tangled itself through the grief so tightly that at first you couldn’t separate one emotion from the other.
Until you realized what it was, and it made you immediately stop. Because you knew that feeling.
Love had a particular shape to it.
Not literally. You couldn’t reach inside someone’s chest and identify affection by texture, but after spending your entire life feeling what other people felt there were certain emotions you recognized almost instinctively.
And this wasn’t familial love.
It wasn’t friendship either, or the vague affection people carried around for old classmates and childhood homes.
No.
You were in love. That deep, spiraling type of love that grasped onto your shoulders and refused to let go.
Apparently, at least. Because you had no idea who this love was directed towards.
Deeply, painfully in love with absolutely no one. Shining so strongly underneath the grief which let you learn one thing, that your grief was simply just love with no place to go. It had searched and searched within you, and when it found no one to attach itself to it morphed into the more formidable emotion.
Your eyes snapped open.
“What the fuck?”
You sat up in bed and stared blankly across your bedroom like somewhere between your dresser and the pile of clothes you had neglected to put away might sit some reasonable explanation for what you had just found buried inside yourself.
There wasn’t one.
So you searched inward again. More carefully this time.
The love was still there, tangled almost impossibly deep inside that same grief. You followed it for as long as you could before something tightened so painfully beneath your ribs that your body curled forward underneath the immediate distress of it.
Well. That was enough of that.
Afterwards, you left it alone.
Mostly.
There were perfectly reasonable explanations for strange emotional responses. Your abilities had never been an exact science, no matter how well you understood them by now.
Maybe you’d absorbed something particularly strong from someone else and never completely shaken it. Years of handling other people’s emotions could have left some kind of residue behind without you realizing it. Hell, maybe your brain had attached an emotion to something you’d forgotten for completely ordinary reasons.
None of those explanations were particularly convincing, because deep down you knew you were just coming up with excuses to avoid facing this particular problem.
But they were considerably easier to swallow than the alternative.
The thought lingered in the back of your mind like a thick fog, knowing emotions didn’t appear from nowhere. And you knew that better than anyone. There was always a source. You just…couldn’t find yours.
Four years passed before the source walked into a coffee shop.
The first time you met Peter Parker, you hated him.
Not personally, of course. That would have required actually knowing him.
You hated him in the same way you hated walking into a crowded subway car after a Knicks game, or standing in line behind a couple quietly fighting at the grocery store. It was the particular irritation you reserved for people whose emotions took up considerably more room than they did.
And Peter Parker took up the entire fucking room.
You noticed him before you even saw him.
The coffee shop was crowded enough that everyone had begun bleeding together around the edges, their emotions melting into one another until it became difficult to pinpoint exactly who was feeling what.
Nothing particularly interesting.
Just normal, everyday things you had gotten very good at ignoring.
You were sitting comfortably amongst the noise, nursing a coffee that had already gone lukewarm while attempting to get some work done, when the bell above the front door chimed.
And something struck you squarely in the chest.
Your hand slipped from around your cup, sending it crashing back against the table hard enough that coffee sloshed over the lid and splattered across the screen of your laptop.
“Shit.”
You grabbed for a stack of napkins and quickly began wiping at the mess while your heart inexplicably kicked into a sprint beneath your ribs.
It wasn’t yours. You knew that much immediately.
That was one of the first things you learned as an empath. The body was very easily confused when it came to emotions that didn’t belong to it. Spend too much time around someone who was afraid and eventually your own heart would start racing alongside theirs. Anger could settle underneath your tongue until you found yourself snapping at someone who hadn’t done anything wrong.
Attraction was particularly annoying.
Grief was so much worse.
The thought made your hand stop halfway across the keyboard.
Because that was what this was, grief.
Not fresh grief either.
Fresh grief was violent. You knew that from experience. It ripped its way through a person so aggressively that being too close sometimes felt like standing beside an open wound.
This was different, it was older.
Something that had been carried around for so long that whoever it belonged to had apparently learned how to function with it lodged permanently inside their chest.
And somehow you were feeling it from all the way across the room.
Your brows furrowed as you slowly lowered the napkin.
Then you felt what was buried underneath it.
Warm enough that for a brief second you almost mistook the sudden sensation as your own.
Love.
An experience that felt so similar to what has been keeping you up every night for the last four years.
Your attention snapped towards the entrance of the coffee shop.
The man standing beside the door couldn’t have been much older than you. Brown hair curled messily around his ears like he’d neglected to get it cut for a little too long, while an old backpack hung loosely from one shoulder.
He looked painfully normal.
Which only made the sheer amount of emotion pouring from him even stranger.
But he wasn’t looking towards the register or searching around for somewhere to sit.
He was staring directly at you.
His entire body had gone rigid with one hand still curled around the strap of his backpack, eyes wide enough that for a second you wondered if there was somebody standing behind you.
But there wasn’t, there couldn’t be. You picked the booth closest to the back that you could.
But this feeling was so intense it made you check anyway.
When you turned back around, he was still staring.
And then his emotions hit you properly.
Whatever control the stranger had over himself seemingly disappeared the moment your eyes met again.
The grief came first, swelling so violently inside your chest that your next breath caught somewhere halfway into your lungs. It was followed almost immediately by that same warmth you had felt buried underneath it, only now there was no mistaking where it came from.
There was no doubt that it was love.
So much of it that for one dizzying second you felt as though you had somehow reached too deeply into yourself again.
But you hadn’t, this belonged to him.
And strangely enough, all of it seemed to be pointed directly at you.
Your fingers tightened around the damp napkin still clutched inside your hand. Confusion ran rampant in your mind.
What the fuck?
You had felt love from strangers before. Passed couples on the street completely consumed by each other or accidentally brushed against someone thinking fondly about the person waiting for them at home.
This was nothing like that. There was recognition buried inside of it.
Relief so profound it almost made your own knees feel weak despite the fact that you were already sitting down.
You didn’t know this man, you were beyond confused why his emotions were so strongly pointed towards you.
But just when you thought that was the end of it, then came the longing.
That was the part that made something inside of you respond.
The ache you had spent four years finding in strange dreams and empty beds suddenly pulled tight underneath your sternum, reaching towards this complete stranger like it had finally found something familiar enough to recognize.
Your breath caught, and his expression changed.
Whatever relief had briefly existed inside of him vanished.
Fear ripped through the connection so violently that your entire body stiffened underneath the force of it.
The stranger went pale.
You stared back at him, your own confusion only growing as his eyes searched over your face.
Did he know…?
The realization came slowly at first before settling heavily into the pit of your stomach.
He had to have known you had felt him.
Not because he could sense your reaction the way you sensed his. There was nothing about him that felt remotely similar to yourself and you would have known almost immediately if another empath had somehow wandered into the same coffee shop.
No.
He knew because he had been watching you.
And whatever he saw happen across your face confirmed something he had apparently been terrified of finding out.
His hand tightened around the strap of his backpack.
Then his eyes dropped.
You sensed his decision to flee before he could even move a muscle.
“No, wait—” You called out.
He was already turning away.
The bell above the door chimed as he shoved his way back outside, disappearing into the afternoon crowd before you had even fully processed what happened.
You stared after him.
For a few seconds your brain seemingly refused to move forward with the rest of your body.
“What the fuck?” You muttered out loud this time.
Someone sitting nearby glanced towards you.
You barely noticed.
Because the second that stranger stepped outside, the crushing weight inside your chest began disappearing alongside him.
The distance. Of course. It dragged the emotional train wreck of whatever was just exchanged along with it.
You shoved the napkins onto the table and stood so quickly your knee smacked painfully against the underside of it.
“Fuck.” You muttered.
Your bag was thrown over your shoulder without much thought, coffee left completely abandoned beside your laptop as you hurriedly shoved it closed and tucked it underneath your arm.
There was no real decision involved in following him.
Maybe there should have been? Sure, but after years of questioning your sanity, you weren’t going to let this moment slip through your fingers so easily.
Running after emotionally unstable strangers through New York wasn’t exactly a habit you wanted to start building, but considering the grief you had spent four years trying to understand had just reached towards some random man like an excited dog spotting its owner across the street, you figured you were already well past making rational decisions.
By the time you pushed through the coffee shop door, he was already halfway down the block.
“Hey!”
He didn’t turn around.
If anything, he started walking faster.
You stepped into the crowd and tried following, narrowly avoiding someone coming from the opposite direction as your eyes remained locked on the back of his head.
Then somebody crossed directly in front of you. It was for the briefest moment.
But when they passed, he was gone.
You stopped.
People continued moving around you as if nothing had happened, shoulders knocking into yours while you searched between unfamiliar faces for any sign of him.
Nothing.
No faded jacket or stupidly messy brown hair.
Just the leftover remains of his fear growing weaker with every passing second until even that eventually disappeared into the emotional noise of the city.
Your brows pinched together.
Something about that bothered you.
Not necessarily the disappearing act.
Or even the fact that a complete stranger had apparently taken one look at you and decided fleeing the scene was his best possible option.
There had been something else.
Something underneath the love and grief that your own body had reacted to before you even understood what was happening.
Something akin to…familiarity.
The word came so naturally that it stopped you.
Familiar?
Your hand slowly pressed against your sternum.
Your heart was still racing.
And this time you weren’t entirely sure how much of it belonged to him.
It wasn’t only because of what you’d picked up from him. That much became obvious once you concentrated. You knew your own emotions from everyone else’s. You’d spent most of your life learning where the boundary was.
It was the way how something on your side of that boundary had responded.
The recognition of his grief to yours, his love to…yours.
You glanced down the street again. Despite the vast majority of people it felt incredibly empty.
There was nothing, no particular pull in any direction. The stranger had slipped into the bustling crowd with ease.
For the next three weeks, you told yourself that he was none of your business.
However the memory of his eyes boring into your soul and flooding it with an emotional tsunami haunted you. The feeling of him nipped at your heels like a herding dog to sheep.
You asked one day if the barista from your usual coffee shop knew him.
Apparently he came in sometimes, usually late, ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, tipped more than he should, and sat in the corner with either a laptop or a textbook until closing.
“Peter,” she’d said when you finally gave in and asked. “Peter Parker, I think.”
Unceremoniously, the name did nothing, and that only bothered you more.
You tried the name occasionally after that, waiting to see if some forgotten piece of yourself might stir at the sound of it.
Sometimes you whispered it into the darkness of your bedroom after waking from another restless sleep, staring towards the empty side of your bed while the strange remains of a dream slowly slipped through your fingers.
Peter Parker.
You rolled the syllables around inside your mouth like they might eventually begin to taste familiar.
Like if you said them softly enough, or enough times, something buried deep inside of you might finally hear them and answer back.
But nothing ever came.
No memory suddenly clawed its way to the surface. No face appeared behind your eyelids or long forgotten moment stitched itself back together inside your head.
Just a name.
Peter Parker.
Two words that should have meant absolutely nothing to you.
And maybe that wouldn’t have bothered you so much if everything else about him hadn’t felt like it meant something.
Names weren’t supposed to matter, obviously. You knew thousands of them belonging to people who had passed in and out of your life without leaving so much as a dent behind.
But those people didn’t look at you like they’d just watched someone rise from the dead.
They didn’t carry grief for you inside their chest like they had already lived through losing you once before.
And some deeply buried piece of yourself certainly didn’t reach towards them like it remembered something the rest of you had forgotten.
So you did what any reasonable person would do when faced with something they couldn’t possibly explain.
You let it go.
For approximately twenty-two days. Then you saw Peter Parker again.
But this time, Peter didn’t see you.
You were halfway across Eighth Avenue when something familiar pulled you from the current of the crowd.
It was faint at first.
New York was never quiet enough for an empath to experience anything alone. Hundreds of people moved around you in every direction, each carrying their own little weather system beneath their skin. Most passed through your awareness quickly enough to leave nothing more than a drizzle behind.
But something cut cleanly through all of it.
A frequency your body had apparently memorized after hearing it only once.
You stopped walking.
For the briefest second you forgot about the traffic moving around you and focused entirely on that strange little pull growing stronger somewhere beyond the crowd.
You knew this person.
Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true.
Your mind certainly didn’t.
But whatever part of you existed beneath conscious thought had already turned its head towards him.
Like hearing the first few notes of a song you couldn’t remember the name of and somehow knowing exactly what came next.
A horn screamed somewhere to your left.
“Move!”
You startled hard enough that the strange trance shattered.
“Yeah, fuck you too,” you shouted back, hurrying the rest of the way across the street before New York traffic decided to solve your Peter Parker problem for you.
The second your shoes met the sidewalk, you were already searching.
You didn’t have to look very far.
There.
Across the street.
Peter stood outside a deli with his phone loosely held inside one hand, completely unaware of the fact that you had just nearly gotten yourself flattened by a taxi because of him.
He looked different from the first time you’d seen him.
Or maybe it was simply because he wasn’t looking at you this time.
There was no shock twisting his features or fear pouring from him so violently that it swallowed everything else whole.
Without all of that, there was room for you to notice what remained underneath.
He was tired.
Not the kind of tired fixed by crawling into bed a little earlier or sleeping through an alarm the next morning.
This sat somewhere deeper.
An exhaustion that had seemingly worn itself smooth with time. No longer sharp enough to demand attention, simply worked so thoroughly into him that you wondered if Peter even noticed the weight of it anymore.
Like an old coat he had forgotten he was wearing.
You felt it before you noticed the bruising.
A dark mark disappeared beneath the edge of his jaw, ugly shades of purple and yellow blooming against the skin like whatever had happened was already a few days into healing.
Your stomach twisted.
Peter Parker looked like somebody had beaten the shit out of him.
And somehow that seemed to be the least interesting thing about his afternoon.
His thumb lazily moved across the screen of his phone.
Then without warning he looked up.
Your body reacted before you could think better of it. You stepped backwards.
He hadn’t seen you. At least you didn’t think he had.
Still, you quickly ducked behind the nearest bus shelter and pressed yourself against the glass like that was somehow less suspicious than simply standing on the sidewalk like a normal person.
For several seconds you stayed there, heart pounding harder than the situation reasonably called for while you stared straight ahead at an advertisement plastered across the opposite side.
Some painfully attractive cast from a new streaming series smiled brightly back at you.
You stared at them.
They stared at you.
Slowly, the ridiculousness of what you had just done began settling in.
You were hiding from a man you had followed out of a coffee shop three weeks ago. Behind a bus shelter.
Because apparently whispering his name into the darkness of your bedroom hadn’t been concerning enough behavior on its own.
“Jesus Christ,” you muttered underneath your breath.
And then Peter’s exhaustion vanished.
Not in a gradual way either.
One second it sat heavily against the edges of your awareness. The next, something inside of him snapped painfully alert.
Your amusement disappeared with it.
He’d sensed something. You can’t tell based on pure emotion whatever it was that caught his attention, but you know that it wasn’t because of your sudden appearance in the crowd. This was a much sharper focus than what you felt when he first walked through the door of the cafe all those weeks ago.
You watched through the glass as he shoved his phone into his pocket, crossed the street, and disappeared down an alley.
Honest to god you waited. Really, truly tried to hold yourself in the liminal space that had become this bus stop. You don’t typically make it a habit of stalking strangers, and this is definitely what has become of your situation.
“Don’t,” you whispered to yourself, fighting against the anticipation of his disappearance.
But you did it anyway, you leapt from your spot, abandoning the smiling advertisement in all its glory.
The alley was surprisingly empty when you caught up to it. Your feet skidded to halt at the sightlessness of it.
Confusion washed over you in waves. You scanned the area, trying to come to a conclusion, but there wasn’t anywhere he could have gone.
Brick wall, dumpster, fire escape, but no Peter.
“Okay.” You breathed out.
Walking further in, something caught your attention. The fire escape rattled gently overhead..
Narrowing your eyes, you muttered “that’s not weird at all.”
Something shifted several stories above you and you caught the briefest flash of red before it disappeared over the roof.
You stared for perhaps five seconds, your brain refusing to participate.
Then you laughed a dry huff.
“No fucking way.”
A slow realization formed in the pit of your stomach.
areudirty
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
gamechangershow
turnnoffyourmind
