🕸️ Scrubs and Webs
Roof
4:03 AM.
The rain starts the way all bad things start — quietly, almost gently, like it's apologizing for what it's about to become.
At first it's just a whisper against the glass, a hesitant tapping that could almost be mistaken for someone knocking. But then it gets serious, gets mean, and suddenly the whole city beyond the hospital windows is just a watercolor smear bleeding into itself, all the sharp edges of skyscrapers and streetlights dissolving into one wet, messy blur.
Robby watches it happen without really seeing it. He's still in his scrubs — the black ones, because the blue ones make him look like a tired smurf, according to one of the nurses — and there's someone else's blood dried into the cuff of his left sleeve. He doesn't remember whose. Doesn't remember when he last changed. Doesn't remember a lot of things these days, honestly.
Nobody noticed him leave. That's the thing about hospitals — everyone's too busy with their own emergencies to track yours.
***
The roof door says AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in bold, unforgiving letters that are supposed to keep people out.
Robby broke the lock three weeks ago with a screwdriver and a bad attitude. Told the maintenance guy it was just jammed, nothing to worry about, he'd handle it. The maintenance guy shrugged and walked away. Nobody fixed it. Nobody ever does. People in this building have learned not to ask Robby too many questions.
***
He sits on the edge now, legs swinging over the void like a kid on a pier, except there's no water down there — just asphalt and ambulances and the kind of finality that doesn't give second chances.
He takes off his glasses because the world is easier to handle when it's soft around the edges. When you can't count the floors between you and the ground, can't see the exact distance your body would have to travel before it stops being yours. It's easier to pretend you're somewhere else entirely when everything is just a warm, fuzzy suggestion of itself.
***
He doesn't hear the footsteps.
Doesn't hear anything except the rain hammering the concrete like it's trying to break through.
Then —
Cable whistle. A hand around his wrist. Steel. Bone. Yank.
He's on his back before he even processes what's happening, pressed against a chest that feels like armor, like something built specifically to withstand impacts that would shatter normal people. He can hear the suit straining with the effort, the low hydraulic hiss that sounds almost alive — a mechanical exhale, like the building itself is breathing through metal lungs. Like something that hunts in the dark, something that's been watching him from the shadows all this time
***
Robby's heart is somewhere in his throat, not because he's scared — he's too tired for fear — but because he's angry. Furious at himself. At the fact that he needed saving. That someone saw him, caught him, and now there's a witness to the worst moment of his life.
He doesn't turn around. Can't bring himself to look at the face behind the mask. He just stares down into the blurry abyss below and waits for whatever comes next.
"You cracked my rib," he says, and his voice comes out cracked too, hoarse and broken and full of something that's trying really hard to be anger. "Gave me a hematoma on my wrist. I can't work for a week."
A pause, heavy and wet.
"Thanks, hero."
***
Silence stretches between them like a wire, thin and taut.
The rain keeps falling. Far below, an ambulance screams its way through the night, the sound distorted and distant, like it's coming from another world entirely. Another life Robby probably won't be able to save.
***
When Spider speaks, his voice is modulated and flat and metallic — the kind of voice that's supposed to sound inhuman, untouchable. But Robby has been a doctor for twenty-five years, has heard people fall apart in a thousand different ways, and he knows what a breaking voice sounds like even through all the filters and distortion.
The hands on his shoulders are shaking.
Just a little. Just barely.
But Robby feels it. Feels it through his back, through his spine, through the cracks in his own carefully constructed armor.
***
"I'd rather your arm hurt," Spider says, and there's something young bleeding through the mechanical filter — something almost boyish, almost uncertain, like he's not sure he's allowed to say things like this. "Than watch you turn into pavement pizza down there.”
A pause.
"I'm here because —“
A longer pause.
Robby waits, still pressed against someone else's chest, still feeling rain stream down his temples and cold seep under his collar like a bad omen.
"— because when I see someone on the edge," Spider's voice drops lower, softer, barely audible over the rain, "I know that person is someone I need."
Another pause.
"Alive.”
***
Robby doesn't have an answer for that.
Doesn't have anything, really, except a throat full of all the words he's been swallowing for months and a complete inability to say any of them out loud.
***
Spider checks his wrist first, professional and automatic, fingers finding bones and pressing joints with the kind of practiced efficiency that comes from someone who's done this before. Someone who knows what broken looks like, what it feels like under the skin.
Medical habit. The kind you can't unlearn, even when you're wearing a mask and a suit and pretending to be something other than human.
Robby winces at the pressure but doesn't pull away. Doesn't want to admit it, but the contact is grounding in a way nothing has been in weeks.
***
Satisfied nothing's fractured, Spider steps back.
Then he sits down — not on the parapet, because he's not that stupid, but on the wet concrete next to Robby, right in a puddle, legs hanging off the edge but carefully, deliberately, not over the void.
Robby catches the movement from the corner of his eye: a red silhouette against a bruised night sky, huge white lenses that give absolutely nothing away. No face. No age. No name to put to the person who just stopped him from doing something unforgivable.
Just a body. Just presence.
Just someone who decided, for reasons Robby can't begin to understand, that he was worth the effort.
***
Twenty minutes pass in silence.
Neither of them says a word.
The rain slowly tapers off from a roar to a whisper, and the world below keeps screaming its endless city scream, but up here, on this rooftop, it's just the two of them and the wet concrete and the kind of quiet that feels almost sacred.
Robby realizes something, eventually: his heart has stopped pounding in his ears. For the first time in a week, the noise inside his head has gone quiet.
He doesn't know if it's the rain or the company or just the fact that he's still breathing, but he's not about to question it.
***
Spider doesn't lecture him. Doesn't ask what happened, why he was there, what he was planning to do. Doesn't offer solutions or sympathy or empty platitudes about how things get better.
He just sits there, a solid, unmoving presence at the edge of Robby's vision, and somehow — impossibly — that's enough.
***
After half an hour, he stands up.
Silent as a shadow, like he was never really there at all.
For just a moment, he puts a hand on Robby's shoulder — brief and dry and almost paternal, like a father checking on a son who's been through too much.
Then —
Whistle. A cable cutting through the night. And he's gone.
Robby is alone again.
***
He looks down at his wrist, at the bruise already blooming purple and angry against his pale skin. Touches his rib — not broken, he can tell, but there's going to be one hell of a mark tomorrow.
He gets up slowly, carefully, like he's testing whether his body still knows how to work properly.
Finds his glasses on the wet concrete. Puts them back on.
The world sharpens into focus — harsh and unforgiving and terribly, terribly real.
***
He walks back through the black door, down ten flights of stairs, through the residents' lounge where the interns are crashed on the couch like a pile of exhausted puppies. All of them in scrubs, all of them looking like they haven't slept in days.
One of them — Dennis Whitaker — is curled up in a tight ball on the end of the sofa, a thick medical handbook slipped from his hand onto the floor. His hair is dry, his scrubs are clean, and he smells like hospital soap and cheap coffee.
Robby stops and stares for a second.
Looks for something. Anything. A sign, a clue, a crack in the mask.
Nothing.
Just a tired kid with fast hands and an annoying habit of being too good at his job.
***
He shakes his head and walks to the coffee machine.
Paranoid, he tells himself, the thought bitter as old grounds. Old fool. You're looking for your savior in your own resident. That's how you know you're losing it.
He pours a cup. Sits down at the table. Stares at the wall and tries not to think about anything at all.
***
But his fingers keep tracing the bruise on his wrist.
And he can't stop thinking about those hands.
How they held him so carefully, so deliberately, like he was something precious. Like he was someone's reason to stay.
Like he was actually worth saving.
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