Chapter Text
“Aggressive?” Matt prompted once the door was shut and Peter shrugged.
“You knew that.”
“No. Aggressive implies something else,” the man pointed out quietly. “Is he hitting you?” Peter glanced up from the floor.
“No. No, he isn’t. Just…shouting, or weirdly not shouting.” But Matt wasn’t convinced; he scratched at the back of his neck and pulled a strange face. Peter shifted on his feet and said, “He isn’t.” His heart was racing.
“Are you even living there?”
“What?”
“Did something happen?” Matt asked and Peter suddenly understood his position as a lawyer. “Peter, I can tell when you’re lying.”
“It was years ago, I promise.” He squeezed his eyes shut at the thought of having to talk about it again.
“What happened?” Groaning at the amount of questions as he tried to lighten the mood for himself, Peter turned away to read the notices pinned to the wall. “I’m a lawyer, you know?” Laughing quietly, he shook his head.
“He hit me, right across the face. That’s why I’ve got that little scar.” He was blunt and straight to the point. The weight was off of his shoulders.
“Did you tell anyone?” Matt asked after a brief silence. Peter forced a curled smile out.
“Obviously I didn’t. No one would’ve believed me anyway because of my record, and there was nowhere else to go. I’d have lost my place at the school that I’d only gotten because I’d not punched anyone in like three weeks. No, obviously I lied,” Peter replied. He was surprised that Matt even thought he’d ever admitted it before, only MJ knew. Matt chewed at his bottom lip. “I’m not doing anything about it now. And no, I’m not living there. I left this morning.”
“Why?” Peter swore under his breath and scraped his curls out of his eyes. “What did you do?”
“C’mon man, that’s just rude,” he tried to laugh out, but Matt didn’t even smile. “Look, I wanted to figure out who’d beat you up, so-”
“Peter.”
“What? I wandered around a bit-”
“And missed your curfew.”
“You don’t know what my curfew is. Anyway, I went down to the docks not far from here, and got up really high. See, I was being safe, and then these people showed up. There were…three of them, yeah, three. One was much shorter so I figured it was the same ones, so I followed them onto the boat-”
“Onto the boat?”
“Yes. Anyway, they’d gone inside, and I got a photo of the smaller one and they had some weird shit on their face, I think. Hold on, I’ll find it.” Peter pulled his phone out of his pocket and found the photo. It was slightly blurry but the symbol, or half of it, was pretty clear. “Okay, so it’s like this square thing, and it looks like there’s some flower? I think it’s a flower but I can’t see the top. But it kind of looks like a brand..”
“You think?”
“I mean, the person’s wearing a beanie so…”
“It’s on their forehead?”
“Yes? I did say that,” Peter mumbled and Matt waved him off.
“Send me that photo.”
“Why? You’re literally blind.” He would’ve laughed at the man’s expression but something made him feel like he might be torn to pieces if he did.
“I’m going to show Jessica,” Matt explained after a moment of awkward silence. “I need to drop by her place anyway.”
“Why?”
“Nothing of your concern. And you’ve gone off track. So, what, you’d gone out chasing leads and trying to get yourself killed-”
“I didn’t even get hurt.”
“Peter. What happened when you got home?” Sighing, Peter finally replied,
“He was waiting for me and starting ranting about last year about how, apparently, I wasn’t thinking about anyone else, and that he was so worried about me last year and all that. And said I’d broken the rules enough. He gave me one more chance but I don’t want to deal with him at all. He’d have kicked me out at eighteen no matter my behaviour: I wanted to go out on my own terms.”
Matt tried to understand the teenager but the one thing he could never understand was why Peter was so adamant that he had to take part in vigilantism. Hearing hundreds laughing, Matt ignored the hypocrisy and tried to just listen. From his continuing relationship with Peter, he could smell the problems from a mile away, the same problems that he had.
“Where did you sleep?” he finally asked.
“I left in the morning,” Peter replied. “MJ was going to see if her grandma could do something but-”
“No. You’re eighteen in two weeks, I can break the law for that long,” Matt announced.
“Seems a bit…”
“But I have my own rules,” Matt continued before Peter could get too excited. “No going out unless it’s for school, and nothing at night until you’re eighteen and you don’t go anywhere near whoever was on that boat.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Peter muttered. “Are you still training me?”
“We can tonight.”
“Guns?”
“Don’t push your luck,” Matt added.
“What? If I’m not going to get killed out there-”
“I think you’re jumping too far ahead, Pete. I might call in a favour in a few weeks but Frank might turn down anyway.”
“Frank? Frank Castle? You’re joking. He’s going to teach me how to shoot?” Peter could forget about everything if he got a chance to do that.
“More like…he’s going to tell you the safety rules,” Matt replied. He smiled a little at the quickening heartbeat and could see the outline of Peter’s hair shifting in his mess of the world. The redness sometimes blinding him, but the boy’s laugh shone through. He was glad he could get the kid to smile after the mess of the last few days, and years. “C’mon, we’ve kept them waiting, and MJ-”
“We’re not dating, you know? I don’t want you to get it wrong.”
“Why would I think you were?” Peter spluttered a little before he followed Matt back inside. “Sorry about that,” Matt announced to the room with a faint smile as he knew Peter was blushing. “MJ, Peter mentioned that you’d offered to find him somewhere to sleep?”
“Yeah, we were going to go after this,” she replied, giving her friend a look.
“He’s gonna stay with me, so you don’t need to worry about it.” Karen stopped herself from laughing at the surprise on MJ’s face. “Do you have a curfew?”
“Um, kind of, it’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“Well, that makes sense. I assume you’ll be alright getting home?” MJ nodded, agreeing quietly and found her school bag that she’d shoved under the chair. “Peter-”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it. C’mon, I’ll show you downstairs.” Holding the door open, Peter pulled a face in Matt’s directions, and followed MJ to the ground floor. “You alright?”
“Yeah? Thanks for dinner.” With a smile, Peter said,
“No problem. If I hadn’t paid, Mr. Delmar would’ve had a stroke.”
“Ah.”
“Yes, he’s a bit…”
“Nah, he’s pretty cool, and he likes me more,” MJ pointed out with a laugh. “Whatever, I’ll tell you if Mark says anything, yeah?”
“Sure, and…call me if anything happens.” She scanned his face carefully, before nodding stiffly. “Promise.”
“Promise.”
And, a second before MJ stepped off the front step, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. Then, she raced down the sidewalk before Peter could say anything. For a minute, he stood there, face burning red and a gleeful smile on his face. He took a breather before racing back up the stairs but that smile wouldn’t be hidden.
Matt knew everything before Peter even got a chance to say a word.
They hung around the office for a few more hours so that Matt could write up some more notes on a case they had been slowly working through, and Foggy helped test Peter’s developing skills in Braille to calm him down from MJ. But it wasn’t too long before Matt was waving Foggy and Karen off to turn in the opposite direction with a new addition tucked in beside him.
“Thanks for this,” Peter said for the fifteenth time since they’d got home. Once again, Matt brushed him off to get some fresh bedding so that Peter could set up a small bed on the couch in Matt’s apartment after having been offered the bed, and refused. He had a clean set of clothes for the next day, and that was it as he’d left everything else in his locker at school. After a strange concoction of a meal for dinner, the exhaustion crept up on him, and he fell asleep with one thought on his mind: MJ.