AU where Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, and Frank Castle all lived in the same apartment building together because it was cheap on rent and none of them are rolling in dough exactly.
Peter grew up there because Aunt May and Uncle Ben moved in when he was still young enough to race down the hallway an get yelled at by the downstairs neighbors for shaking their ceiling.
Matt moved into one of the apartments while he was going through law school, permanently exhausted, perpetually broke, and always carrying textbooks under one arm.
Frank technically lived there for years tho his apartment was more accurately the place he returned to whenever the military gave him leave. So like few and far between. Sometimes he was there for weeks. Sometimes months passed with nothing behind his door but dust and unopened mail which May collected for him and kept off to the side for when he returned.
Matt helping Peter with homework once or twice and immediately regretting it because Peter discovered that asking increasingly complicated hypothetical legal questions was an excellent way to keep Matt trapped at the kitchen table for three hours.
Frank fixing May’s sink because the their shitty landlord aleays promised to send somebody and never did. Ben helping Frank drag an old couch up four flights of stairs.
Peter watering Frank’s plants while he was deployed until Frank gently informed him that the very dead fern had, in fact, already been dead before he left.
And over the course of years, completely independently of one another, all three of them become progressively more unhinged New York City vigilantes while desperately attempting to hide this fact from the people living like approximately twenty feet away.
Like imagine Peter attempting to climb up to his bedroom window at two in the morning with half his suit underneath his clothes when he hears Matt coming up the stairs and immediately throws himself behind the fire escape railing.
Matt, who can hear Peter’s heartbeat hammering directly outside the window, pauses for the longest time before he continues walking while telling himself that Peter’s a teen now and teens sneak out at night to go party or meet up with girls, is all. As long as the kids not getting into trouble and just doing normal, dumb, teenage boy things…
Or, Matt regularly returning home bleeding and telling everyone he “fell” and Peter accepts this explanation because Peter has personally arrived downstairs with three cracked ribs and explained that he “fell off his skateboard.”
(Neither of them owns a skateboard.)
Frank watches this happen for approximately six months and becomes increasingly convinced that the building he grew up returning to has somehow become populated exclusively by idiots.
Except Frank isn’t exactly subtle either because he develops new injuries and scars and tell them he got them on a mission despite the fact that Matt knows Frank has been on leave for three months now.
Sometimes men Peter has never seen before sit in cars across the street watching the building. Matt hears Frank cleaning weapons through two walls at three in the morning and decides that whatever Castle does for the military is absolutely none of his business. Peter once accidentally opens Frank’s duffel bag looking for something and immediately closes it again after seeing enough ammunition to invade a small country.
I just want an au where all three of them developing increasingly elaborate excuses and it leads to Matt thinking Peter is involved with something dangerous, Peter thinking Matt is involved with something dangerous, and both of them thinking Frank is involved with something dangerous.
Frank knows both Peter and Matt are involved with something dangerous but cannot figure out what because, somehow, his two civilian neighbors have become incredibly good at disappearing the instant he tries to follow them.
But like imagine Aunt May knows the entire time.
Like you can’t tell me she didn’t know something happened to Peter almost immediately because she raised him and suddenly her nephew could catch a falling glass without looking and started eating enough food for a football team. Even if he was going through puberty, that’s a little much.
But she also knew something was up with Matt because no normal lawyer has that many stitches, and there are only so many times a blind man can claim he tripped down the stairs before May starts wondering why every staircase in New York apparently has a personal vendetta against one Matthew Murdock.
To be fair, it did take longer for May to figure Frank out, not because he was better at hiding it but because May genuinely thought he was doing something classified for the government until she saw the Punisher on television, watched him tilt his head in that particular deeply unimpressed Frank Castle way, and went, “oh for heaven’s sake!”
Like do you see the vision I need this, okay.