Chapter Text
Frank knew the minute the bullet left its chamber that the sight of the kid’s body crashing to the floor would haunt him for nights on end.
Not once in his career had he ever missed a shot, but for the first time in his life, he wished this could’ve been the first.
He gave himself a single moment to freeze up on the rooftop, to reel back like a deer in headlights at what lay before him. Then, he was up and running.
Frank barely recognized what was happening in the moment. The world blurred into a cacophony of lights and sounds as he made a mad dash down the stairs and onto the streets. He paid no mind to the chaos and screaming of pedestrians surrounding him as people returned from whatever magic voodoo shit had been freezing them in place. The only thing on his mind right then and there was the damn kid bleeding out somewhere from his bullet.
At some point, Frank had made it into his van. He didn’t bother with a seatbelt, immediately putting the car in drive and slamming on the gas. The people around him would have to just deal with it, road laws be damned. He wasn’t planning on slowing down until he got that kid to a hospital somewhere.
Time warped from there, and the next thing he knew, he was pulling up in front of the remains of the Department of Damage Control building. Guards and people were streaming out from the front doors, some of them barking orders to passersby to clear the area. Glass and debris coated the entrance, alongside piles of crushed rubble. People were yelling to clear the area, some officials still trying to protect what was left inside. None of that could stop Frank from brute-forcing his way past them all.
It didn’t take long to find the room the kid was in. Between knowing the schematics of the building and following the remnants of webs and bloody trails, he found him quickly enough.
Reality harshly returned to Frank the minute he walked into the room. Immediately, his attention was drawn away from the surrounding destruction and to the sight lying a mere ways away from him on the floor. There was debris and blood everywhere, pooling over the white floors endlessly. His gaze trailed to the familiar red and blue spandex in the center of it all, covered mostly by that damn redhead hovering over him.
“Hey!” Frank shouted with a sudden blind rage, shards of glass crunching beneath his boots as he walked further in. His finger lay shakily on the trigger of his pistol, one he hadn’t remembered withdrawing from his belt.
“Get the hell away from him,” he growled, aiming the barrel of the gun right at the girl who should’ve been dead already minutes ago. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t being met with the quiet, pleading cries of a name—Peter, she repeated over and over—as she trembled like a leaf over his body. Crossing the line, he thought to himself.
“I said back the fuck away from him!” Frank barked out. He didn’t hesitate this time, knowing there was nothing to get in his way, lining up the shot and pulling down on the trigger—
Click!
His gun jammed. That never happened. Stupid fucking magic.
Frank let out a series of curses as he threw the pistol off to the side just as the girl finally looked up at him with a teary expression.
“You have to… take him,” she managed to grit out through heavy breaths. “I can’t hold him for long.”
Jean slowly moved back as she spoke, fully revealing the extent of the damage—his damage—along with Spider-Man’s unmasked face.
It felt like the world stopped for a moment as Frank blindly ran to his side, fingers instinctively going to his neck to check for a pulse. Somehow, it was there—thready and almost nonexistent, but there. His face was too pale, white as a sheet, eyes fully closed. And Frank had done it. Frank shot him. Frank shot this kid.
That’s all he really was, wasn’t he? Just a kid.
“Shit,” Frank murmured, hands immediately gathering him up in his arms without waiting for permission. He could feel warm blood soaking through to his skin, leaving his fingers and palms sticky with it.
“I’m breathing for him,” Jean wheezed out through shallow gasps of air. “You have to—”
“Shut the fuck up and give me his mask,” Frank snapped back furiously, grinding his teeth together. For a moment, the girl didn’t move, holding his steely gaze. Then, the mask slowly lifted off the ground and floated out in front of him, slipping itself securely over the boy’s head.
“How long can you keep that up?” He demanded, adjusting his grip on the kid with a renewed urgency.
“I don’t know, I’m—”
“Well don’t fucking stop, c’mon.” Frank had heard enough. He didn’t wait another second to pivot, holding Spider-Man tight against his chest as he started to run back out of the building with Jean hopefully on his tail. Luckily, she followed not too far behind him right to his van.
“Get in,” Frank barked out as he swung the side door open before turning to the girl. “Take him, cushion his head. Keep him alive.”
Jean nodded jerkily, taking a bloody Spider-Man out of his hands and holding him bridal style with the utmost care. Frank didn’t wait to make sure she was secure, trusting her freaky mind shit would keep it up as he slammed down on the gas and headed to the hospital.
From there, the streets blurred around him.
Frank veered to a stop outside the hospital without a care in the world for what surrounded him.
In the blink of an eye, he was jumping out of the van, grabbing the kid’s body, cradling him to his chest, and running through the hospital doors.
From there, the world swam around him in a hazy blend of muted sounds and colors. He distantly heard himself yelling out for help, alongside a swarm of doctors and medics rushing to his aid. One moment, the kid was in his arms. The next, he was taken away to a place he may never come back from.
Somebody, a younger-looking nurse, was asking him questions, things along the lines of what happened? Where is he hurt?
He doesn’t remember answering, but he remembered being ushered away elsewhere as the kid was placed on a gurney and wheeled away, out of Frank’s reach without him even getting the chance to apologize—
Frank came back to himself in a bathroom.
It was a dingy, cramped one. He was standing in front of the mirror, haunted eyes looking back at him. Staring down, Frank took in the sight of the sink below him. Rushing water filled his senses, much too hot to be reasonable. It was just as warm as the kid’s blood staining his hands—
The sink was red, he realized. His hands were red. Where the kid’s blood ended and his own raw flesh began, he had no idea. All he knew was that he should be with him right now, not here.
He continued to scrub.
—
Frank found himself sitting in an uncomfortable hospital chair out in the hallway an unspecified amount of time later.
He hadn’t moved after he sat down, elbows resting on his knees as he hung his head and impatiently waited for any sign of life from the kid in the room behind him. Time had become nonexistent since.
With the extra time he had, Frank thought back to Jean. She was likely hiding out somewhere now, hopefully keeping her word to keep the damn kid alive after running off.
Peter, she had called him.
He thought back to the kid in his house mere hours ago, fiddling with a nervous energy as he insisted he was a loner, kept to himself—that he didn’t have anybody else.
Peter.
Frank thought with a heart-clenchingly clear clarity that it suited him.
The kid flatlined an hour later.
The long, prolonged sound of the heart monitor stalling brought Frank right to his senses.
He sat up straight in his chair, eyes widening as the rustling noises of doctors inside increased tenfold. There was distant shouting, and then—
“Clear!”
A sudden fearful helplessness washed over him like never before.
The kid was dying.
Frank squeezed his eyes shut, keeping his head down in a desperate attempt to block out the sound of Spider-Man dying behind him.
C’mon, kid, he pleaded internally. Keep fighting. Whether he was begging Peter or Jean, he had no idea.
Don’t give up on us now.
Frank lost track of the minutes, of the attempts to resuscitate a heart that probably hadn’t been beating on its own for hours now, all while he sat there helplessly with no way of stopping it.
Right when he thought for sure it was over, that they’d given up, he heard the faint sound of beeping return on the monitor.
“We got him!”
Frank raised his head and let it fall back against the wall as he opened his eyes with a shaky breath. The damn kid was alive, that was all that mattered now.
Just hold on, he thought to himself. Hold on.
A few more hours passed before Frank was allowed inside the kid’s room.
He would never forget the sight of his face: unmoving and pale in complexion, bruises and blood staining his skin like a painted canvas. It would remain seared in his memory for years to come. Another picture in his mental cabinet— a scrapbook of memories and mistakes.
Beyond it all, Frank couldn’t shake the uneasiness that came with the kid’s stock-still figure. He could never seem to stop moving before, always a jumbled mess of energy that never seemed to be used up in the endless acrobatic circus tricks he pulled off dauntlessly. Through it all, he’d always be cracking jokes and smart quips that usually had Frank rolling his eyes and yelling at him to shut his sorry mouth up.
Now, for once, he was quiet.
Frank could say with near confidence that he didn’t prefer it.
With a sigh, he broke his unspoken vigil to approach Peter’s bedside, hands hesitating at the edge of the mattress with an unsure energy before returning to resting by his sides.
“Hey, kid,” Frank gruffed out, voice dry from lack of use.
He wasn’t expecting a reply, but the hollow silence in its wake unnerved him nonetheless.
“Y’know, you’ve never shut up for this long before,” he tried to joke, voice cracking shakily at the end. Frank swallowed at the prolonged lack of response, looking down as guilt unfurled in his gut. God, the kid had him going soft.
“You’re gonna have words for me when you wake up, I’m sure,” Frank chuckled out bitterly—a hollow, empty sound.
All he was met with was more silence.
“Jesus, kid.” Frank sighed, looking back up at his face. Each breath that left the boy’s mouth sounded mechanical, practiced. Shallow but steady. Given the lack of a plugged-in ventilator, it wasn’t hard to guess that the breaths weren’t his own.
“Still in there, huh?” Frank murmured softly, unsure whether or not the redhead in question could hear him. The sight of his lips parting ever so slightly seemed to be answer enough for him.
“You better keep him alive, Matilda,” he grumbled. “I’m serious.”
No response.
Frank let out a sigh, slinking away to sit in another tastefully uncomfortable chair up against the wall.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the kid’s words from earlier, still running through his head.
I keep to myself. I’m like you.
His grip on the arm of the chair tightened as he kept his eyes fixed on the kid, a renewed protective instinct tightening around his heart.
Not on my watch.
A little over a day had passed since Frank had first entered the kid’s room, and he hadn’t moved since.
Sleep and hunger tugged at the forefront of his mind, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave. It’s not like sleep would come easy anyway, not with the hundreds of Spider-Man fans crowded outside the hospital’s walls and the news reporters always trying to get in. He could’ve sworn there had to be some sort of rule against this level of noise pollution. At the least, they seemed to be kept very strictly on the outside.
Perhaps that’s why a sudden loud voice from down the hall broke him out of his thoughts. Initially, he paid no mind to it, not until the conversation seemed to escalate enough for him to pick up on the distinct sound of an almost familiar feminine tone, followed by a doctor fruitlessly trying to turn her away.
Without thinking twice about it, Frank was standing up and approaching the door. His knees creaked and protested at the sudden movement as he walked down the hallway, following the voices that only became closer and closer.
“I’m sorry, miss, but unless you’re directly related to the patient, we can’t let you see him.”
Frank turned the corner just in time to see exactly who he’d thought he’d heard earlier. It was the kid’s quote-unquote “girl he didn’t know,” her mouth now pressed into a firm line. She was clutching something tight against her chest, and looked a second away from snapping.
“She’s with me,” he found himself saying on instinct before she could spout something she’d regret. The doctor and girl’s head—MJ, he recalled distantly—turned to look at him with widened eyes.
“Mr. Castle, we can’t—” the doctor started.
“Nah, she’s good to go. The kid’ll want to see her,” he insisted with the fakest of sincere smiles he could manage. MJ caught his gaze at that, tilting her head with an unreadable expression.
After an awkward moment of looking between both him and the girl, the doctor reluctantly stepped back, motioning for her to enter. Frank didn’t hesitate to nod at her and begin to walk back to the room as she followed right behind.
“So,” he started gruffly, “finally stopped by to see your boyfriend, huh?”
MJ didn’t respond, biting her bottom lip like she was thinking something over in her head.
When he was met with silence, he finally turned to look at her, staring down at the paper she was still grasping onto tightly against her chest. “What’s that all about?”
MJ looked up at him suddenly, opening her mouth to likely retort before following his pointed glare. “It’s just something I needed to give him,” she responded, clipped.
Frank shrugged. “Alright, suit yourself,” he grumbled, opening the door and walking back inside the hospital room.
Peter hadn’t moved an inch from the last time he saw him, but it didn’t stop the guilt from overflowing yet again. MJ seemed to share a similar sentiment, freezing in place for a brief moment as she took it all in before cautiously approaching his bedside. Her expression was hard to read as she absorbed each detail of Peter’s wounded face, like she was trying to put a puzzle together in her mind. After a brief moment of tense silence, she finally spoke.
“What happened to him?” MJ asked softly, her eyes never leaving the injured boy in front of her.
Frank bit the inside of his cheek to prevent himself from retorting back something unwarranted, instead letting out a breath as he sank back down in his chair.
“Woulda thought the news had told you all of it by now,” Frank gritted out, fingers drumming alongside the arm of the chair. The memories of reporters swarming the halls hours ago already seemed distant, and he was met with another unignorable protective instinct in his chest at the thought of it.
“But you were there, weren’t you?” MJ pressed on, finally making eye contact with him.
Frank sighed, eyes trailing back to Peter’s own closed ones. “Yeah, enough.”
“So what really happened?”
He didn’t respond at first, MJ’s gaze unwielding as she continued to patiently wait for an answer out of him. It almost seemed probing.
With a reluctant sigh, Frank rubbed at his eyes. “He was shot. Bolt-action sniper rifle, right in the back. A few inches off from his spine. Almost paralyzed him.”
MJ hummed under her breath, silently placing the sketchpad down on his bedside table.
“And?” She asked after a moment.
Frank frowned, brow furrowing. “And? There’s no and, kid, that’s all there is to it,” he snapped back harshly.
“Clearly not,” she mumbled under her breath, glancing back down at Peter’s face.
Another moment of tense silence hung over them, MJ eventually moving closer to the boy’s bedside and folding her hands on the edge of the mattress.
“Well,” MJ started after a while, “who shot him?”
Frank felt his jaw tense, gaze trained on the floor. “I don’t have all the answers.” His voice came out clipped.
“But you know where the bullet entered,” MJ replied quickly. “And you know what gun was used to do it.”
“It comes with the job,” Frank protested, but his own voice sounded hollow in his ears. “Ya’ pick up on stuff like that.”
MJ just hummed and nodded again with a silent understanding, eyes straying to the limp body on the bed again. Almost dead because of him. He knew it was unforgivable, and he knew she knew that. She seemed to know everything unsaid. No wonder the kid admired her so much.
“I should, uh,“ she started suddenly, “probably go. My roommate is waiting for me.”
Frank just nodded in her direction in response.
“Will you make sure he gets that when he wakes up?” She asked in a smaller voice, pointing towards the sketchpad beside the bed.
“Sure, kid,” he grumbled tiredly.
MJ just nodded with a thankful look in her eyes. She gave one last glance down at Peter, another far-off, unreadable expression on her face. Her fingers clenched around the sheets, like she was deciding whether or not she should reach out, before she stepped back.
“Thanks, Frank,” she mumbled softly, before turning and leaving the room, returning Frank to the tense silence from before.
The second time Peter flatlined, Frank was in the room.
It stirred him back into consciousness, breaking him out of his light slumber. For a moment, he thought maybe he was still dreaming, but as the loud ringing sound persisted into the waking world, he knew it would’ve had to be a nightmare.
In a blink, the once silent room erupted into a cacophony of sound. Doctors and nurses rushed in, equipment rattled around him as people yelled out orders at each other. Someone’s hands were pressed up against his shoulders, shaking them and attempting to pull him somewhere. They were blocking the sight of the kid—
“—astle! Mr. Castle!” The doctor in front of him shouted. “You need to leave the room. Right now.”
Frank opened his mouth to protest, but found a force beyond his control pushing him from behind. Everything blurred around him until the only thing sticking out to him was the flatline—the kid’s flatline—
“No—” the gasp wrung its way out of his throat without his permission, stripped raw and broken. Unfiltered.
He turned around to face the arms restraining him, just to be met with another wave of force. Frank barely got a chance to fight back, feeling his body lock up as he was met with the fluorescent lights of the hallway overhead.
“We’re gonna try our best, Mr. Castle. Please just stay put,” someone was telling him, shoving him outside the room. There wasn’t any time to process the words before the door shut in his face. It did nothing to stop the sound of the stalling heart monitor beyond the door.
The kid was—
He was—
“Clear!”
His heart wasn’t supposed to—
“You better start fucking breathing again,” Frank growled to the door through the sob building in the back of his throat. He couldn’t have given up that easily. Jean wouldn’t let him. She couldn’t.
Breathe, kid, c’mon, he prayed. C’mon.
The echo of stagnant ringing was the only response he got.
Days seemed to pass in a warped sort of fashion within the hospital’s walls. Frank had lost track of the time between Peter’s second flatline, when he was eventually let back into the room, and now—now being approximately two days later.
The growing mass of fans outside never ceased. Through every heartbreak Frank faced inside, he was met with empathetic, hopeful support from the outside world. Small amounts of people turned into groups, turned into crowds, and eventually turned into a movement. In the few times when Frank would occasionally turn the TV on with a lack of anything better to do, he caught glimpses of it—the hope. The love. All for the kid.
Since then—for the last few days at least, give or take—gifts had been ushered inside the room in waves. Over time, the assortment of balloons and cards only grew, until there were piles of Spider-Man memorabilia cluttering the wall. In the middle of it all was MJ’s drawing, placed perfectly in a spot that Peter would see the second he would wake up.
Would, not might. Because the kid wasn’t going anywhere again if he could help it.
Despite it all, Frank still wrinkled his nose at the sight. It wasn’t fun when he was the one who always had to grab it from the hallway. That’s what he got for making an internal, one-way oath to the kid that he’d keep his identity as secret as possible, and damn it if he wasn’t going to stick with that, even for something as small as this.
Occasionally, in the silent moments when he’d get tired of his vigil, Frank would spare glances outside the shuttered windows, overlooking the amassing crowds.
“They love ya’, kid,” he had told him once, a sort of heartfelt honesty staining his words. “This is all for you.”
When he was met with silence, it was comfortable. He didn’t let it bother him as it had the past few times.
“I wonder if you can hear it up in there,” Frank mused, bringing a hand up to his temple and tapping it lightly. “Up in that head of yours.”
He let out a soft breath, resting his chin against his palm as he leaned on the arm of the chair.
“I hope you can,” Frank sighed. “I hope that sentimental, soft-serve bullshit warms your heart and gives you a reason to come back, or whatever. Sounds like some shit you’d believe in, huh?”
No answer.
“That’d be just fine with me, kid. Just fine.”
His only response was the humming of the air conditioner.
After over 72 hours, Frank Castle finally fell into a fitful sleep.
Calling it sleep was generous, he knew that, but his body could no longer obey his command to stay awake, no matter how hard he tried to convince it otherwise. He decided to settle for a light “resting of the eyes” instead.
The sleep itself was shallow, like his mind was floating right on the surface of an ocean of regret and nightmares. He knew the minute he sank into unconsciousness, he’d regret it. The last time he lost himself, well… Frank didn’t want to come back to a third flatlining, that was for sure.
Instead, his mind bounced around the same image of Peter, bloody and unmoving on the white floor. His unmasked face was still so vivid in his memories, the blood coating his skin a harsh contrast to how pale he had been. A selfish part of Frank was glad he got there when he did. He wasn’t sure if he could’ve stomached watching the light leave the kid’s eyes before Jean started her freaky voodoo shit to resuscitate him.
God, this kid was gonna be the death of him.
As he swam through the inky void of his subconscious, he could only pray that Jean’s abilities kept it up. He hadn’t the slightest clue how they worked, but he knew that a third time’s the charm. That had to count for something.
Somewhere, some place far away, Jean Grey took her last exhale.
In his same hospital bed, Peter Parker inhaled for the first time in four days. Alive.
Frank had only gotten to sleep for seven minutes.