Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alex took a deep breath, adjusting his vision to the early morning sun. He felt an ache slowly climb his chest and land on his throat, visions from the previous day filling his brain and flooding his ideas. A strange feeling of was that real…? sunk into him. He wanted to wake Henry up and ask him — hey, just so we’re on the same page, you agreed to kiss me multiple times yesterday, right? I wasn’t hallucinating? — but he didn’t need to. Someone rang the doorbell first.

“June,” Alex mumbled unconsciously, as Henry, unconscious, still lay on the bed. “June!” he repeated louder, which finally seemed to make Henry’s eyes pop open.

“What?” asked the journalist. 

“June is here,” Alex told him. “At the door. She wants to come in!”

He waited for Henry to move quickly, think of something, have a reaction to it, but all he did was blink slowly, like a cat, rub his eyes and comment: “I’m having déjà-vu.”

With no time to lose, Alex jumped out of the bed and started collecting his things — the suit, the backpack, his super secret new USB drive on a string — calculating the best escape route. “C’mon, you can’t let her wait for too long otherwise she’ll be suspicious.” He looked down at his things, then grabbed the collar of the t-shirt he’d stolen from Henry, taking it off in one swift motion. “I’ll exit by the window as Spider-Man; I’ll be out in half a second.” He started to look for the zipper on the suit while Henry was looking for his glasses, making grumpy morning noises of Trying to Get Your Brain to Function. “You open the door and tell her…”

“Wait,” Henry interrupted. With one hand, he stopped Alex from putting on the suit — the touch of the journalist’s fingers over his warm skin making him flinch. “What are you doing?”

“June’s at the door,” Alex repeated, like it was a question of Henry not understanding the situation. 

“So?” Henry frowned, like Alex was the one to not understand the situation. “You don’t need to hide. We’re not fugitives.”

Henry then stood up, trying not to disturb his freshly injured ankle, and proceeded towards the door. Alex held him back by the wrist. “Don’t. You’re only going to hurt yourself even more. Go brush your teeth, I’ll answer the door.”

Henry thanked him in a small, shy voice, disproportionate to his body. Alex ran a hand through his hair as he walked towards the front door, swinging it open to reveal his sister, completely shocked at the sight of him topless answering the door at Henry’s place. “Oh my God!” she shouted, not even a millisecond in, and immediately stormed into the living room. “It worked!”

“Shh! Don’t yell at this time in the morning.”

“It’s eleven thirty,” she quickly corrected before continuing, “oh my God, you slept here! How’d it go with Henry? Did you two make up? Are you a thing now?”

“Eleven thirty already?” Alex frowned, but there was no clock nearby for him to check the time. It was only then he realized he hadn’t put on his stolen t-shirt again. “It went… fine, I guess,” he tried to explain, still a bit lost. “We’re not a thing, I think. Yet. But we did make up.” And out. “And out.”

June’s knowing smile grew as Alex’s face got redder. “I knew it! I called it from the beginning!”

“Why are you here, though?”

“I went to your apartment to… chat,” she said, awkwardly, looking around and contemplating if it wouldn’t be better to make herself more comfortable on Henry’s sofa — but at the same time she didn’t want to extend her visit or disturb the newly born lovebirds too much. “I thought maybe I was too dismissive in our last conversation. You weren’t there, though, so I instinctively came here.”

“What do you mean?” Alex blinked, his memory from before he kissed Henry totally wiped out; he could no longer remember anything that preceded it. 

“When you told me you were Spider-Man,” she reminded him, a serious tone to her voice — but her words were still colored by her sisterly love and aggression. “Don’t get me wrong; it still sounds stupid to me, but if Henry’s in this then I believe it a little bit more.”

Alex chuckled. “Can’t go wrong with Henry.”

“You’re one to say.”

“It’s— Whatever, June. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I do worry about it, Alex. If you’re Spider-Man, I wanna know what the fuck is going on!”

“Good morning,” Henry said, appearing at the end of the corridor, looking into the living room. “Bad moment?”

“No, not at all,” June responded. “Just sorting some things out.”

“Let me know if you need help,” Henry told Alex playfully.

“Get well soon!” June shouted before Henry disappeared. She turned to look at Alex with a much more generous look after that. “I’m proud of you, Alex. Genuinely. Proud of what you’ve become.” She grabbed one of his hands and held it tightly. “You can count on me. I might not be Spider-Woman, but you’re still my little shitty brother, and I’ll bend this earth for you if I need to.” He pulled her into a warm hug and tried to fight the tears. He was never strong when it came to June. “Now tell me: how the fuck did you get these powers?”

Alex snorted as they let go. “I accidentally ate a spider in a lab once.”

“What?”

“True story.”

Qualitative data analysis, or QDA, aims to extract the common themes and patterns of a body of text, or non-numerical data. It involves a constant effort of categorizing important information in order to answer a research question, requiring a lot of patience and a lot of time. Henry and Alex didn’t have one single research question as they approached the blue USB drive, delivered to Alex’s mail in the form of a suspicious package containing a note written in his deceased ex-boss’ calligraphy, but they were willing to try nevertheless.

They armed themselves with a cup of tea and one of coffee and got to work. Well, kind of.

Steps to Qualitative Data Analysis

Step 1: Date the data.

That is, familiarize yourself with the source material. Read it, reread it, then read it again; get to know every corner of it before ever dreaming of crafting a category.

They each grabbed a massive file containing Delgato’s emails from relevant periods of time, aiming at a simple divide and conquer method that couldn’t go wrong.

Henry may have got his share of the data mistaken for a man, however, because he seemed to be dating something — one — else entirely. Albeit limited by his sprained ankle, having the indication to rest in a comfortable position with his foot elevated, he wasn’t following that to the beat, exactly; and even the person who gave him such indication didn’t seem to remember it as well, since Alex had climbed the couch to lay on top of Henry and wasn’t planning on leaving very soon.

In between his legs and over his torso, a tongue traveling the seas between Henry’s chin and collarbone — with the kindness of remembering to pull his hair and suck his earlobes —, Alex made himself at home. The laptop laid over the coffee table, asleep, long forgotten, as if Spider-Man and everything he encompassed had suddenly vanished from the world. At that moment, Alex dedicated his efforts exclusively to reap out of Henry those little sounds and whimpers and sighs and heavy breathing he’d just found out he was obsessed with. It could’ve continued like that throughout the whole day, had he not felt an intense and sudden wave of adrenaline — his senses overwhelmed as a sign of danger, fear.  

Alex pulled away, his ears drowning in tinnitus. He examined Henry briefly before closing his eyes — Henry’s red and swollen lips, ever-reddening pale skin inked with moles Alex was yet to discover, blue and hazy eyes looking up at him with expectation — the feeling of their skin touching being the only thing grounding him to earth.

“Is everything alright?” asked Henry, gentle hands grabbing Alex’s face and hair.

“No,” replied Alex as he stood up, the feeling exponentially increasing in size and mass. He blinked twice, trying to remember his name, trying to think of something. Alex started to look for the suit.

“Did… did I do something?” Henry asked, uncertain, discomposed by Alex’s actions.

“No, it’s not that, it’s— uh— something  else,” the vigilante tried to explain, but he didn’t have the words. As quickly as he could, he dressed himself as Spider-Man. “I have to go.”

“It’s dangerous to leave already dressed,” Henry warned. “You told me that.”

“I know, I know! But this can’t wait!”

“What is ‘this’?” Henry wanted to know, but it was too late — Alex had already jumped out of the window. He sighed, upset and all fuzzy inside, like he was melting. He was mad at Alex, yes he was, he just couldn’t feel any anger or displeasement whatsoever, too busy being enamored with his figure and reminiscent of his touch. “Asshole,” he cursed as he let his head fall back down onto the couch, thoughts racing.

Alex’s mind, on the other hand, was clear. As soon as he covered his face with the mask, it was over for Alex; he was now Spider-Man, chasing the fear in order to get to the source of the trouble — a hostage situation in a nearby building.

Henry watched it unravel from the sofa; the TV on at the lowest volume he could afford, keeping an eye on Spider-Man on the news and the other on Spider-Man on the internet. Occurrences of violent crimes doubled in the last month despite the action of vigilante Spider-Man — easy, Henry thought to himself: Spider-Man is not a preventive measure, he’s not bringing violence down, he’s just containing it — Allusion to a new strategy in the police’s spider-hunt — Henry laughed at that one, because it was Jameson’s, and he knew it was meant to be as ironic as it sounded — Alchemax retrieves accusation of plagiarism by Spider-Man and deems closed the case on the mysterious web filament: “We’ve investigated it ourselves”.

Henry let the cursor hover a bit longer over that one. On the TV, Spider-Man was still at the scene of the crime, negotiating with the abductors. Henry sighed, adjusting his glasses and feeling useless — Alex was there, on the field, doing something, and all Henry could do was write words in a Word document.

He pasted the link to the news in a new page, then went back to a specific email he remembered having read the night before. A question of sorts, the subject read, sent by the head of the R&D department, Tyler Stone.

After the events that took place this past week — Alchemax attempting to sue Spider-Man; Henry got it by matching the dates and by basic human logic — I can’t help but wonder if you would be so kind as to lend me your access to the files on the elastic filament. I know you supervised that field of research before it got archived, and I don’t have access to the details that would be of so much help in understanding the situation.

That, Henry concluded, was a threat. Though it sounded inconspicuous — for it was an email and, therefore, a documented form of communication that could be used as evidence at any point — Henry could still hear the underlying dangers of Stone’s prose. It was a suggestion of guilt, like he was saying I know you have something to do with this. The fact is, however, that Delgato didn’t, but it was too late now.

Henry wrote his ideas down the best he could, sipping anxiously on another Earl Grey since the last one had run cold, waiting for his spider-boyfriend to return home — hopefully alive.

i’ll be back soon!!, texted Pez, even though Henry had told him that the emails could wait; they weren’t in a rush of publishing anything, and they didn’t want to risk the quality of their analysis over a fast one. but i’m not eager to help with reading a bunch of stuff, Pez explained, i want to know all about your reconciliation! Henry smiled shyly, though he was alone. It was dark already and Alex still hadn’t returned.

He had already skimmed through a lot of emails, his Word document filled to the brim with annotations and theories, new evidence, a ray of light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel. He wanted to share it with Alex, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Are you sure he’s safe?” June had said when she called earlier, worried about her brother as she watched the news.

“Please, June, this is not something to talk about over the phone,” he tried to dissuade her, when he himself used to discuss a lot of riskier things with Pez via text. He just didn’t want her to speak about Alex and Spider-Man in the same phrase while out near other people.

“For fuck’s sake, Henry, I know what’s appropriate and what’s not,” she retorted, and he fell silent, ashamed. “I’m not outing anyone’s business; I’m not that stupid.”

“You’re right. You’re right, I’m sorry.”

The hours were starting to get to him. He did as much as he could with his ankle a mess and his head a total chaos — and he wanted to convince himself so badly that he was only a dick to June because he was too used to being the voice of reason of a Claremont-Diaz. He didn’t want to belittle her; he just didn’t remember that she didn’t need to be reminded of things. She knew not to say the wrong thing; she knew how to work sneakily. He felt awful.

With a hand over his chest, gripping his cell phone tightly, he waited for Alex to be back. 

Alex made the mistake of, after that horrendously long day, going back to his apartment alone. He wanted to fetch some of his things, having promised Henry they’d work on the emails together, but the loneliness gave him time to think — and the thinking gave him the space to doubt. As he showered and dressed and packed a bag of essentials, he looked at himself in the mirror and wondered how things would go from now on. Now that he and Henry were back into their shared shenanigans, now that he had told the journalist he loved him. Christ, he really did tell Henry he loved him.

Was it selfish for Alex to have wanted Henry to say it back, right that moment? Was it completely out of this world, uncalled for, that he was slightly wary of hurting his own feelings because of that? They’d be back to their old dynamic — the late nights, the early mornings — and then what? What would they be, now?

No longer in the hopes of magically finding a way of putting Spider-Man in handcuffs, the police department seems to be retreating on their quest to arrest the man of the moment, Alex read as he brushed his teeth, hair dripping water even though he had scrubbed it with a towel a dozen times. J. Jonah Jameson’s words never failed to strike a nerve with him — even when he knew the man was right. They no longer camp outside of whatever place Spider-Man was two minutes ago, nor do they persecute the skies with their guns, prepared to open fire as soon as they spot the red-and-blue dot they’ve been yearning for, like a video game. After all, that’s what cops do — they mentalize a specific set of colors and dream of shooting at it.

Alex snorted and almost choked on toothpaste, saliva and the karmatic weight of his own words. Maybe JJJ wasn’t so bad, after all.

He scrolled back to the start of the essay — Allusion to a new strategy in the police’s spider-hunt — illustrated with a long, distant shot of Spider-Man flying, then went all the way down. His eyes lingered on an ad of sorts, placed right at the bottom; it was more of a proposal from JJJ, really. Now Magazine is looking for good pictures of Spider-Man, taken as close as possible, by professionals or amateurs, to be compensated accordingly. Submit yours for evaluation at [email protected]. Alex had a sudden burst of ideas. 

Step 2: Categorize and look out for recurring themes.

Henry dragged himself out of his apartment and into the subway on Monday morning, yawning all the way to the office. He hadn’t slept at all, up all night being consumed by his worries and the emails. The fucking emails.

Alex hadn’t shown up, nor did he have the courage to text or call. Henry was seething in anger and resentment; so much so that, when he found June, the first thing he did was tell her how much of an asshole her brother was.

She frowned. “That’s fucked up.”

“And now I have a bunch of work on my shoulders and…” he stopped, realizing mid sentence that it wasn’t wise to let June know about the Delgato files. So he just shrugged and pretended he was talking about the magazine type of work the whole time. “Jameson knows I have nothing else to spit out about Spider-Man. I hope he doesn’t forget it.”

June bit the inside of her cheek. “I mean, you could continue writing about him. Wouldn’t it be better, also? Like… like nothing’s changed. If you get what I’m saying.”

Henry did. Keep on writing like he hadn’t gotten heavily emotionally and almost sexually involved with the vigilante in between writing his essays dissing the guy to the bone. To avoid suspicion. 

“Ooh, speaking of him,” June commented as she locked eyes with someone behind Henry — Jameson arriving for the day, followed by a familiar figure carrying a lunch bag. “Is that Nora?”

“Good morning,” greeted Jameson. “This young lady was looking for a June Claremont-Diaz.” Jameson said playfully, then looked at June. “Is that you?”

“You forgot your lunch,” Nora explained, handing her girlfriend the lunch bag. 

“Thanks,” June replied, blushing. “You didn’t have to bring it to me, though.”

“I had the day off so I figured I’d do my good deed of the week.” Nora smiled, then pointed at Jameson. “I arrived almost at the same time as your boss and he was showing me around the place here. It looks comfortable.”

“Oh, it is. When we’re not fighting for our lives over the specifics of a headline, of course.” June shot a glance towards Jameson, who laughed. 

“That’s right. The work here is a bit consuming, but we do it with love. And lots of caffeine.” He entertained, and Nora chuckled. “You said you were a graphic designer?”

“Yes, sir.”

June put the lunch bag to rest on top of her table as they continued chatting, and exchanged a quick look with Henry. She’s trying to get a new job, she mouthed and rolled her eyes, to which Henry giggled. He listened quietly as Nora listed, very smoothly, her experience with the craft, how she had a knack for layout design and made a ton of magazine projects in college because of that, but ended up working in social media, which made her want to kill herself.

I hope she gets it, Henry mouthed back to June, who shook her head sideways, denying the idea of working with her girlfriend. What if they got tired of each other? Henry was about to take his glasses off and make a comment — something about them really needing help in the design department — when he heard screaming and gasping. Déjà-vu struck him like a bullet when he saw who was creeping around the windows.

“What the actual fuck?”

Alex stopped for a moment to appreciate the view from the top of a building. The city looked almost docile — a sleeping giant — and he closed his eyes as he breathed in the morning air. He noticed people starting to notice him, like they usually did. Alex knew the police weren't going to hunt him down anymore, but he still held a string of hope that he would see the face of a blue pig that day; so he didn’t rush to his destination, though he still arrived a little early.

“Hello, miss,” he said, hanging upside down in front of the Now Magazine building, scaring a poor woman. “Do you work here?”

She didn’t reply; just ran away. He looked around, and without an option to get in traditionally — as in through the doors — he did what he liked the most: climbed a building, searching for a good window.

Looking through one of them, he saw an ordinary employee pouring himself coffee with earbuds on. He tapped the window, scaring the guy with his extremely recognizable silhouette. Then, like a cartoon character, Alex waved a paper in front of him that read: JJJ? The employee got confused for a second, but understood the vigilante’s wish and, reluctantly, but very helpfully, pointed up and mouthed fourth floor. Alex gave him a thumbs up and proceeded to the fourth floor, which was a mistake. The first person to lock eyes with him immediately made it known by screaming.

Hell broke loose on the fourth floor. Alex fidgeted outside the building, moving horizontally to try and maybe catch an opening that would get him straight to Jameson’s office. While he did that, on the inside, Nora was on the phone with the police.

“Are you mad? Don’t call the cops!” Henry protested as June tried to convince her girlfriend to hand her phone away. Jameson observed it with shock and a little satisfaction; Spider-Man hadn’t noticed him there yet.

“Are you not seeing Spider-Man crawling over the windows?” Nora responded, puzzled. “Am I dreaming?” she asked June, who shook her head no. “Oh, thank God. Ok, I’ll hang up,” Nora gave up, then turned to Henry again: “But what the hell, man! You should be the first one to be scared; you’re the one who publicly drags his name through the mud and shit.”

“If he wanted to kill me he'd have done it already,” Henry argued. They all shared a curious look at the windows as people alternated between freaking out and recording the occurrence on their phones. It didn’t take long before Spider-Man finally spotted Jameson and started signaling aggressively to get his attention. “It doesn’t look like he’s after me either,” Henry commented, the words leaving a sour taste in his mouth. 

“Does he want to speak to me?” the editor-in-chief said, half surprised and half amused. “What a ridiculous situation. How can we let this man in?”

Henry held his phone tightly, but didn’t reply to the text. He looked up at June, who faced him with concern. He didn’t have anything to say.

An intern helped Jameson figure the windows out and, before he could even process it, there he was — standing in front of them in all his glory. Spider-Man carried himself with ease and little pride, though Henry knew that, under that ridiculous outfit, there was a cocky smile.

Next to Henry, June was tense — but, like everyone else, also silent and immobile. Next to her, Nora excitedly and not very discreetly took a bunch of pictures of Spider-Man while muttering “Alex will be so jealous when I show him this” under her breath.

Henry’s heart skipped a beat as Spider-Man, not looking in his direction once, peacefully followed Jameson into his office — and there he stayed for around six minutes while the newsroom sulked in apprehension and terror. When the meeting was over, the vigilante took a dive into the air directly out of the EIC’s window, and J. Jonah Jameson was left behind with a folder on his computer and a simple message to remember.

You’re a menace. Keep it up.

Step 3: Rename, review, redefine categories and themes.

Under the light of his laptop, Henry organized the files by date and theme while Pez reviewed the information they’ve gathered. It was dark and late, and they were tired.

“Alchemax sues Spider-Man in the hopes of getting him off the streets, but they also bribe the government to drop the arrest warrant?” Pez spoke, fiddling with the files from the Luchadores case.

“It’s in the Chandler bunch,” Henry replied. “Spider-Man is collateral damage from their genetics experiments; they wanted to contain him but not so much that they wouldn’t be able to reach him.”

“Oh. Chandler the genetics guy,” Pez muttered as he remembered Alex mentioning the name.

“And they dropped the plagiarism claims because carrying on would eventually entail describing the filament, how they got it and what they wanted it for,” continued Henry, his head hurting. He pointed to a file on Pez’s screen. “It’s in the Stone bunch.”

“It sounds like a good enough narrative,” his best friend commented, a slight pinch of hesitation in his voice. Pez talked about the case, but Henry could smell he was thinking of something else.

“What?”

“Is everything alright between you and Alex?”

Henry let his head drop, crashing against the table with a loud bang. “No.”

“Why?”

Henry took a while to answer, his mind previously full of racing thoughts now empty. “I could tell you a hundred different things about it and I’d still have no clue.”

“What did he say about your weird interaction on Friday?”

Henry furrowed his brows, trying to remember what Pez was referencing. “Oh. Yeah, he didn’t say much, but he did mention me being an asshole. I apologized, but I don’t know… I’m not sure it stuck.” He sighed. Percy was about to elaborate; interpret, shoot a question, or any other psychological stratagem he had up his sleeve, when Henry lifted a finger and stopped him. “Please, no more enlightening conversations. I want to dwell on this on my own.”

Pez chuckled. “Excuse me? Are you refusing my services?”

“Yes, very much. I don’t want to figure me and Alex out; I want to figure this out,” he said, enthusiastically pointing at their computers and papers and the deep, pitch black dark circles under their eyes. 

Pez shrugged, but his curiosity was bigger. He also kind of liked to spark a reaction from Henry from time to time. “What do you mean by your apology didn’t stick? Was he not convinced?”

“Probably not, since he left and stopped speaking to me.” Henry wheezed. “Left me on read and everything. But, you know, I—” he stopped, frustrated. “I don’t have enough brainpower to compute this, Pez. I can’t pick up where it went wrong this time. What did I do?”

“Why should this be about something you did?” Pez put a hand over his face, like the smug know-it-all he was. 

Henry stopped to think. “What else would it be?”

“I don’t know.” Pez shrugged. “Did you try talking to him?”

“Yes, and he didn’t reply to my texts. Have you not been listening?” Henry retorted, the lack of sleep getting to his nerves quicker than anything else. Pez knew him and his mannerisms, his angered, tired state being usually a consequence of his stubbornness.

“You want to be right,” Pez shoved the truth in his best friend’s face.

“I told you I didn’t want to be lectured, Pez.”

“Oh, you want to be right so bad, Hazza!” Pez smacked the table with an energetic hand. “Ha! You told me yourself; something along the lines of — Alex will carry on and I’ll be right. Right, as in correct?” He tsked. “Stop throwing yourself under the bus!”

“Actually, now you gave me an idea,” Henry said as he closed the laptop, “throwing myself under a bus. It’ll be good to get a vacation from life.”

“Why would you want to go to hell sooner? You’ll die eventually.”

Henry couldn’t contain his laughter after that one, even if he wanted to show Pez he was tough and angry. “Shut up.”

After Percy left and he was left alone, only the darkness and the ever declining pain on his ankle kept him company. As he sat on his bed, not really intending on sleeping, Henry tried to think of every single possible reason why Alex might hate him. He gathered plenty, to be honest, but none really answered his question. He didn’t know shit, and it drove him mad. Were they not good on Sunday morning? Were they not fine?

He wanted to bang his head against a wall continuously. Instead, he thought back to Alex approaching Jameson in the most expansive way possible, and it annoyed him deeply. So much so that he forgot all his inhibitions and limitations and, without thinking too much, but expecting it to work, he called Alex’s phone.

When he picked up, the first thing Henry said was: “Can you please come back home?”

“What do you mean?” Alex sounded genuinely confused. Henry rolled his eyes.

“Come back home or I’ll kill myself,” he threatened, with no actual threat underlining his proposition. “Throw myself out of the window. Drink a bunch of… of what? Soap. I’ll drink a whole gallon of soap.”

He could hear Alex chuckling on the other side.

“No, seriously,” continued the journalist. “What’s going on?” No reply. Henry grabbed his hair and pulled it out like he wanted to tear his scalp apart, break his cranium with his nails and grab his brain with his own fingers. “I’m not actually killing myself, just so you know. I’m too much of a coward to do that.”

More silence. Henry couldn’t hear a thing anymore, and he had to check if Alex hadn’t hung up on him. He hadn’t — yet.

“Do you love me?” Alex's voice was small, inquisitive, curious; and a bit broken.

“More than myself,” Henry didn’t hesitate, “but that’s the lowest bar. More than David, more than June, and more than several members of my family. More than my job and more than Spider-Man as well; and that one you should be proud of. I had a pretty big crush on him before meeting you.” He paused his rambling, hoping to have lifted the spirits of that conversation to some degree — but his true intention was to divert the attention from his own shaky hands and heart, his red cheeks. Then he said out loud what Alex truly wanted to hear: “I love you, Alex. I really do.” He heard Alex sigh and tried not to think too much about what that meant. The silence stung, however. “I take it back — I will end my life right now. Though I still love you, stupidly.”

“Shut up,” Alex returned with a pleased tone. “I love you, Henry. Though you drive me crazy.”

“You drive me crazy.”

“I do? I’m honored. I love to be a pain in the ass.”

“I love you,” Henry repeated, liking the taste of the words in his mouth. He had been so scared of voicing it, and now he feels like he was missing out big time — but he also knew he should be wise with it. “You absolutely destroyed me, Alex, when you left and didn’t come back. I thought you hated me. I thought I had done something again, like, I don’t know…”

“You did, kinda,” Alex replied and Henry felt his blood run cold. “You stole my heart.”

“What?”

“I panicked,” Alex elaborated. “I didn’t know what we were. Boyfriends? Partners in crime? Friends?” All of the above, Henry wanted to say. “And also, I’ve been trying so hard to show you that I’m not doing this — us — for Spider-Man, but you’re never over him. You’re always neck deep in some Word document, typing away…”

“Are you jealous?”

Henry smiled as Alex choked on his words. “Immensely. So fucking jealous. I just wanted you to look away from Spider-Man for a second and see me.”

That broke Henry beyond repair. “I see,” he responded, grabbing his chest and drowning in guilt. He didn’t know what to say.

“Can you open the door for me?”

“What?”

“I’m at your door.”

“Seriously?”

Henry hung up and walked up to the door as quickly as he could, being greeted by the sight of Alex, cozy and comfortable and so kissable — but he controlled his impulses. He didn’t want to tear the thin fabric of their newly, just barely restored trust. 

“I’m starting to suspect you get into my building via alternative means,” Henry teased, and Alex’s crooked smile was a good enough answer. When he closed the door behind Alex, waiting for him to put his bag on the couch, he picked up the conversation from where they dropped it: “Was that why you freaked out when June knocked on the door? Because you didn’t know what we were?”

Alex’s silence looked a lot more like shyness and a lot less like anger in person. Henry thought that maybe he could’ve been working under biased assumptions for quite a while.

“When you say it like that,” Alex responded, taking his shoes off, “it sounds way more pathetic than it was.”

“It wasn’t pathetic.” Henry sits down next to Alex, not looking at anything else but his deep brown eyes. “Don’t say that ever again. If anyone’s pathetic here, it has to be me, okay? I said horrible things to you and I broke your heart and I’m sure I don’t deserve half of your time right now.”

“Henry,” Alex interrupted, “respectfully: shut up. You’re not awful. You’re you. And I love you. And I happened to make a lot of stupid decisions myself.”

“Yes, you did,” Henry agreed immediately; Alex took offense to that, but didn’t elaborate. “Please, don’t ever leave me like this again. If you want to piss off, at least tell me beforehand. I can survive the distance, I can survive a million heartbreaks, Alex, but I am very, very, very bad with uncertainty.”

Alex cupped Henry’s face with both hands and placed a kiss on his lips. “I’m not pissing off so soon. I don’t like the distance and I don’t ever want us to be weird around each other again. I will tell you everything, every little thing.”

Henry accepted another kiss with relief and a deep feeling of having missed Alex more than what his heart could handle; he held a deep breath and a tight grasp on his wrists, like he was afraid Spider-Man would come swinging from the nearest window to snatch Alex from him again.

“Let’s go to bed,” Henry announced. “I couldn’t sleep at all last night because I was worried about you. And also I was kind of a dick to your sister. I want to forget so many things.”

Alex leaned in for another kiss, but they parted as Henry pulled Alex up and towards his room. “I thought I was sleeping on the couch this time? In honor of the old times.”

Henry snorted. “Like hell I’m letting my boyfriend sleep on the couch.”

Alex smiled, his insides twisting in satisfaction.

Step 4: Write.

“Now that thee Henry Fox is officially my significant other,” Alex started — first thing in the morning — as he brewed coffee and tea at the same time, “can I say to his face that he should totally stop working before work like a maniac?”

“Hm, not sure,” Henry replied as he rummaged through his notes once again. “He’s too autistic to comply.”

“Is he?”

“Pseudo diagnosed by his unlicensed best friend at age nineteen.”

“Then I shall take your word at face value.” Alex mock-bowed. “Nothing more trustworthy than a psych student with ideas.”

Henry laughed, the conversation distracting him from the words in the document. He tapped his fingers on the table, then, reflecting on a question that bothered him. “What did you say to Jameson yesterday?”

“He didn’t tell you?” Alex looked up at Henry from the kitchen counter.

“No. He isolated himself in his office for the rest of the day and I had to eat lunch with a side of fatal curiosity. Can you believe it?”

Alex snorted, entertained. “I didn’t speak, actually,” he corrected. “I know he’s slick; giving my voice to him would be dangerous. But I did worse. I gave him pictures of me.”

Henry frowned. “You did?”

Alex chuckled. “Yes. It was just some silly pictures; I wanted to see how he’d handle it, and by the looks of it, he’s probably racking his brain trying to understand what I meant by that.”

“I was worried for a moment that you had given him the emails.” 

“I would never. Not before reading them myself.”

Henry nodded, abandoning his computer in order to get ready for the day. 

“You could’ve told me you needed good pictures of me, you know,” Alex commented suddenly. Henry scratched his head. 

“Why would I tell you?”

“So I could get you some.”

Henry laughed. “No, are you mental? These pictures are to be used in work that very much disapproves of you. Why would I  ever ask you for help ruining yourself?”

“Because it’s fun.” Alex shrugged. “And because you have to entertain the haters if you want to still be famous. They’re as important for the ecosystem as the die-hard fans.”

“That’s debatable.” Henry approached slowly. Alex put his arms around his waist and buried his face on the crook of Henry’s neck, the smell of his perfume being enough to soothe him into a sleepy state. “You should rest,” Henry told him as his fingers caressed Alex’s hair and the vibrations from his chest lulled him deeper into slumber. 

“You should stay and be my pillow.”

Henry laughed at that, for Alex’s great satisfaction. “I would like to, but it’s not possible. Rest today, and if possible, read what I wrote.” Alex hummed in response, only half awake. “Do you think there’s anything else you’d want Jameson to publish?”

The suggestion made Alex jump out, suddenly vigil and paying attention. His eyes were inquisitive. “What do you mean? You want him to publish the emails?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Henry replied, biting his lower lip. “I… Do you think it would be wise for us to publish it on Spider-Man’s socials? Be honest.”

“I don’t even know what’s there to publish,” Alex responded. “I didn’t have the chance to really… read it.” He sighed. “I’ll do it today.”

“Don’t worry too much. I know I am a little, like, obsessed with this, but don’t overwork yourself because of that. I also didn’t read it in full, obviously. Just a stack from the most relevant dates.”

Alex smiled gracefully. “I know you’re the most obsessed man on earth. I get it.”

Henry looked away, redder and redder by the second. “I tend to be, yeah.”

“And I am obsessed with you,” Alex replied before a kiss. “Watch out for me. If you feel a pair of eyes following you at night, it’s probably me stalking you.”

Henry laughed and, with his palms open over Alex’s chest, he pushed his boyfriend away. An eye roll and a kiss on the cheek later, he announced: “I have places to be, Alexander.”