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It happened, ironically, at a moment when Johnny was feeling good. Everything was great at home at the Baxter Building. He had a big race that was coming up that he was excited about, and his people were in talks with Dolce about an ad campaign. The kids were putting together a production of Hamlet for their extracurriculars, and personally Johnny couldn’t wait to see Bentley play Claudius to Franklin’s Hamlet.
Life was good – no, life was better than good. Life was fantastic. Almost one month to the day, Johnny had found himself kissing Peter Parker at the very top of the Statue of Liberty. Their spot since they were sixteen, and Peter had finally kissed him at it, Johnny’s secret daydream since he’d been twenty-years-old and soaking wet, tied up in a water tower back-to-back with Spider-Man. Since Spider-Man had stayed under the water and wordlessly trusted Johnny to be smart enough to figure out his plan.
No, since before that. Since he’d been seventeen and wondering why pretty Doris Evans, the most popular girl in school, didn’t thrill him the way watching Spider-Man fight did. All that lean power on display in that tight costume – and that voice, the way Spider-Man never failed to have a comeback. Johnny remembered the one night Spider-Man had run out on a fight with the Green Goblin when Johnny had just known it wasn’t because Spider-Man had turned coward like everyone else said. He’d skywritten him a message, telling Spider-Man to meet him at the Statue of Liberty.
Spider-Man hadn’t come. Johnny had still waited all night.
Fast forward a dozen years and Johnny was getting kissed within an inch of his life by that very man, balanced precariously together on one of the crown’s spikes with New York’s lights shining all around them.
It had been perfect, and everything that came after it only seemed to get better.
Which was, of course, when a psychic vampire attacked Rockefeller Center, because that was what Johnny’s life was like.
It was supposed to be simple: Sue would erect a force field surrounding Johnny and the psychic vampire, who called himself Radricul and went on and on about the superior public transportation on his planet as if he’d gain any points with the New Yorkers’ whose emotions he was trying to drain by simultaneously knocking the subway. Johnny would go nova within it, burning off all the oxygen. From what Reed determined, Radricul still needed air. It was a move Johnny didn’t love – going nova in one of Sue’s force fields simultaneously denied him of oxygen and required her to drop the field fast even as she took the brunt of the explosion. It was a stressful situation for them both, and one that traditionally left Johnny weak and shaky, unprepared for a second attack.
But there didn’t seem to be a better alternative, and traditionally this one shot was all it took.
Before Johnny could gather all his fire and release it, pushing his powers to their limit and burning as hot as he could as fast as he could, Radricul’s seven-fingered hand shot out, wrapping around his throat. Johnny’s flames usually protected him from physical attacks, but every so often the Fantastic Four ran into someone who didn’t mind a little of bit fire. This, apparently, was one of those times.
Radricul’s fingers tightened. Johnny heard Sue shout his name. Something that felt a lot like panic flooded his veins.
Johnny’s flames sputtered and died without his command as he was forced to his knees, the grip on his throat tightening by the second. Radricul’s fingers were cold and hard as stone.
“Well, you’re a pleasant one, as far as your species goes,” Radricul said. His voice was strange; Johnny felt it as much as he heard it, buzzing over him like flies. There was something creeping through his veins, ice cold and poisonous, spreading out under his skin from the point where Radricul touched him. He scrabbled at Radricul’s thick grey wrist with both hands, but couldn’t get his grip to lessen.
Radricul’s other hand came up, stroking over his head – not touching his hair, just passing over it. His not-touch tingled, electric. Johnny’s skin crawled.
“Oh, you are delicious,” Radricul said, thin lips curling to reveal a row of pointed teeth. He glanced up towards Reed and Sue and Ben, who would be here any moment, Johnny knew, who would save him, just like they had again and again. The icy feeling crept to the tips of his fingers and down to his toes. “All this self-loathing. Self-pity. You really are quite caught up in your head, aren’t you? Selfish, spoiled boy. Do they know, the ones you love the most?”
Know what? Johnny didn’t know anything. He felt numb all the way through – until those fingers sank into his hair, nails scraping across his scalp, and then revulsion swept through him.
“Let’s show them.”
It rolled over him like a wave – every horrible thought, every horrible feeling. From when he was a kid knowing exactly why he had no friends, and then as a teenager, the newly minted Human Torch, knowing exactly why he did. When he hadn’t been worth enough for Crystal to come back to, for Frankie to stay for, unloved by the real Alicia, not that he’d been entirely faithful, his mind whispered, to the fake one, had he? And pining the whole time after Spider-Man, who would never love him, could never love him. The stupid member of the Fantastic Four. The dumb one, the loser, the showboat. The one who could never do anything right. It was because he was shallow – all surface glitter and flash, just like his powers.
No one ever knew the real him. He had nothing real to give them.
Taking his hand away from Ben’s on the shield and turning to face the oncoming wave in the Negative Zone, knowing it was better this way. It was best if it was him, and not Ben, or Sue, or Reed. Someone who was worth something. He couldn’t let it be Ben, dying for him. Not again.
The bugs all over him, horrible and crawling, thin tentacles wrapping around him and –
The hand released from his throat. Johnny fell backwards and immediately passed out.
The first thing he registered when he came to was Ben staring down at him. He had Johnny cradled in his huge lap, one big hand hovering protectively at the back of his head. The fight was apparently over. Johnny was going to go ahead and assume Sue was responsible for that.
He tried to smile up at Ben, opening his mouth to say, hey, big guy, but then he saw the horror in Ben’s blue eyes.
Something cold gripping Johnny, freezing him down to his soul.
Radricul had said let’s show them.
Ben wasn’t speaking by the time they got back to the Baxter Building, and Reed quickly escaped to his lab, guilt written all over his face and in his drooping shoulders. Johnny wished he had the luxury of a disappearing act.
Only Sue lingered in the hangar with him.
“Sue, please,” he said, his hand over his face. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t stand the pity. “He was just some bad guy, okay? He had mind powers, you know how that goes. All of that stuff – he just – he just made it up, okay?”
It wasn’t going to work. Sue’s hand tightened on his arm.
“Johnny, I felt that,” she said. “I felt you. Sweetheart, how long have you been feeling like this?”
Since you and Reed dragged me into space and ruined any chance of my having a normal life, Johnny almost snapped. It was a cruel lie that wouldn’t even make him feel better; it would only make Sue recoil and add to the grey in Reed’s hair. He swallowed it down. Since forever, he could have said, but that would be admitting it and he couldn’t do that. He knew Sue, and he knew she would blame herself if he said it.
Part of him wanted to tell her she’d already known how he felt. She had to. She’d seen it when he’d disappeared for five days after Frankie left, only to turn up looking half-dead on the doorstep of her old apartment. After a stop had been put to Reed’s invasion of Latveria, when he’d sat there on the ground next to Ben’s body, staring at the craterous hole in his rocky chest and crying miserably. When he’d disappeared again after that, running off to Connecticut and hiding out in a garage one of his mechanic friends – not that they were really his friends -- managed to get him a job at, when he’d been furious at everyone and heartsick and trying so hard to avoid any mention of his own name, daydreaming conversations with Ben just to get through the day. When he’d been separated from Crystal the first time. When Crystal had left him of her own free will, after that.
Sue knew. He’d told her. “Sometimes I feel like without my powers I’d be nothing.”
Anger surged in him like fire, sparking at his fingertips, and he spun on Sue, prepared to tell her that – until he saw her face. The line between her brows, the bloodless pallor in her cheeks, the tears in her eyes – he’d done that to her. The fire burning in his chest died as he pulled her into his arms, burying his nose in her hair. Sometimes he missed being a little kid and Sue being so much bigger and taller than him, a superwoman long before the cosmic rays had gotten to them.
“It’s okay, Sue,” he said into her hair. “I’m okay. I’m just tired. I’m going to go lie down for a while.”
She squeezed him tight, threading her hand up through the back of his hair. She loved him. He knew she loved him. It didn’t make things hurt less.
“Okay, baby brother,” she said, letting him go. She raised one hand to dab at her eyes. “But we’re going to talk about this later, okay?”
“Yeah, sis. Sure,” he said, knowing that, in all probability, they wouldn’t. Sue would get busy with the kids, or Reed would find some fascinating new phenomenon in space, or Doom would attack, and Johnny’s problems would be forgotten. He was used to it. The youngest member of the Fantastic Four, the one constantly adrift. The one left behind.
He’d rather everyone just pretend the entire day had never happened, anyway. His every worst feeling and thought about himself, broadcast into his family’s minds. He’d never wanted this.
Alone in his room, he stripped off his Fantastic Four uniform and left it on the floor, then climbed into the shower and scrubbed himself raw, the hot water turned on full blast. He washed his hair, remembering the touch of Radricul’s hand, the sharp nails against his scalp. He shivered as he turned the water off.
He stared at himself in the mirror for a long moment, almost not recognizing himself with his dripping hair and his red eyes. He raised a hand to touch his throat. He felt the flutter of his pulse, remembering other, colder, longer fingers wrapped around it, and then he let it drop.
He dressed in old clothes – a pair of Spider-Man pajama pants Ben had gotten him as a gag gift years ago that had turned into his favorite as of late and a worn t-shirt that he thought might have originally belonged to Reed – and fell into bed. He hadn’t been lying to Sue when he said he was tired. He felt wrung out, like a sponge that had been squeezed too hard. Maybe if he could fall asleep for a while then things wouldn’t feel so awful when he woke up. He could spend the rest of the day in the garage, working on his cars, and pretend the whole thing never happened. Maybe Ben would even come and help. Maybe he would stop looking at Johnny like he’d torn Ben’s heart out.
Ben forgot sometimes that Johnny had already seen him with a crater in his chest.
He was just dropping off when there was a familiar thump against his windowsill. He raised himself up on one elbow as Spider-Man slipped through his window. He felt himself start to smile. Peter dropping by unexpectedly, he’d learned in the last month, usually meant he had some pent up energy to work out. That sounded like the perfect distraction.
Maybe if he was good and played his cards right, he could get Peter to hold him down. Johnny really needed that right now.
He sat up, stretching in a way that had more to do with the fact that Peter was watching than a need to work out the kinks. He tipped his head to the side as he yawned theatrically, arms twining high above his head. He pasted on the smile he’d practiced for ages in the mirror at the age of twenty – slow and sexy-sleepy, natural. His ‘come to bed with me’ smile.
“Hey,” he said, reaching out a hand. “What are you doing here, stranger?”
Johnny could be a good actor when there weren’t any cameras around.
Peter didn’t move. He stood in front of Johnny’s bed, still as a statue, the line of his shoulders rigid under his costume. Concern gripped Johnny.
“Peter?” Johnny said, moving down the bed towards him. “What’s wrong?”
Abruptly, Peter reached up and violently yanked his mask off, keeping it clenched in one first. His brows were drawn tight together, the line between them that Johnny made fun of him for even more pronounced than usual, and his jaw was set tight. He looked furious.
“Are you just going to pretend today didn’t happen?” he asked. His voice was tight and controlled, like he was trying not to snap.
Like a bucket of freezing cold water over Johnny’s head, he realized Peter knew. He’d assumed it was only Ben and Reed and Sue who had been affected when Radricul had broadcasted Johnny’s innermost thoughts. Just Johnny’s family. But he’d been wrong, as per usual.
The people you love the most. Of course that would have to include Peter. He felt so stupid.
He opened his mouth to explain, but no words came out. After a second, he turned his head away, blinking back tears. Peter knew now. Peter knew. Out of everyone in the world, it had to be Peter.
It hadn’t only been acting classes Johnny had gone to with Julie Angel back when he’d been following her around like a lost puppy. He’d tagged along to yoga, too, where she’d gotten mad at him for how flexible he was – not the reaction he’d hoped that revelation would bring – and she’d been big on self-help courses.
Johnny remembered one of them. Sitting in someone’s smoky loft apartment, surrounded by high and beautiful twentysomethings, listening to a guy with a scraggly beard and paisley pants who told them the keys to love were within themselves. In the moment he’d mostly been frustrated by how Julie was leaning towards the dark-haired guy next to her and not towards him, and a little curious about the guy next to himself with the perfect smile and how he’d looked at Johnny when Julie’s guru had told everyone in the circle to introduce themselves.
“For someone to love you,” Julie’s guru had said, “first you must love yourself.”
It had always sort of prickled at Johnny. He could trick himself, if he tried hard enough, into loving parts of himself. He loved how he looked. He loved his hair and his body and his angular features, the ones that photographed so well. He’d even learned to love the wide mouth he’d hated as a teenager, once he’d grown into it. He loved his powers. He loved being able to fly. He loved the way he felt when a crowd of people all shouted his name. He could love the way someone who said they were in love with him looked at him, the desire in their eyes.
But love himself? When he was all alone, and there was no noise? When it was just himself and an empty room? Johnny would have taken literally anything else.
He didn’t buy that to love somebody else, you had to love yourself first. Johnny had never even liked himself, but he knew a lot about loving other people. He was good at giving his heart away. But he thought that maybe Julie’s guru was right about other people loving you back, and that was why Johnny was always alone at the end.
Peter’s mask fell to the floor.
“Were you not going to call me?” he said. Then, before Johnny could dredge up an answer, he added, “No, you weren’t. I get it now.”
Johnny flinched – Peter knew -- and Peter cursed under his breath.
“It’s not a big deal,” Johnny said, looking down at his sheets. Just two nights before, Peter had playfully tackled him down on them, complimenting the color. It brings out your eyes, he’d said. He’d never really expected Peter to be so romantic. At least, not with him.
He smoothed a hand over the sheet, getting rid of the wrinkles.
If Peter knew, he wondered, who else had it reached? Alicia? Maybe. Wyatt? Wyatt knew already, at least, had seen Johnny at his worst multiple times over and never judged him for it. Crystal? Would she be doubly glad she left him all those years ago? The kids – Johnny prayed that it hadn’t touched the kids where they were spending the day at Alicia’s studio. They didn’t deserve that. He’d never forgive himself if the kids had felt any of that.
“Not a big –” Peter’s voice rose dangerously before he cut himself off, clenching his jaw shut again. He inhaled sharply, visibly steadying himself. “It is a big deal, Johnny. I think you know that.”
He looked away, unable to meet Peter’s eyes.
Peter started to pace around the room, prowling like some big animal, like he could pounce at any moment. Johnny could feel his familiar body heat even when he refused to look at him, the side of his powers that loved feeling the warmth of someone else reaching out even as he reeled them back in.
“First I thought it was someone after me, all of those things in my head,” Peter said, his voice tight. “Somebody trying to get at me through you, what I feel for you. Distract me, throw me off my game. The, I don’t know, the Mindworm or someone. But then, after I swung straight through a vegetable stall and a market window – don’t laugh --, my spider sense didn’t go off. No weirdo in a costume swept in to try and kill me. And then I got home and you were on the news. I saw you like that – the way he had you – and I just… I knew.”
Johnny swallowed thickly, shame burning hot as molten lava.
“Well,” he said, hating Peter a little for laying everything bare, for not letting him hide. But that wasn’t fair. That wasn’t Peter’s fault. “You’re right, once again. That’s great for you.”
“What did he do?” Peter asked.
Johnny thought about lying, for all of a second. There didn’t seem to be any point. Peter had said it; he already knew.
“He had mind powers,” Johnny said. “He said he was going to show everyone I loved how I felt.”
The next thing Johnny knew the bed dipped, and warm arms wrapped around him, pulling him into Peter’s embrace. He went along with it stiffly, feeling a little like he was going to be sick. Peter, with all his strength, wasn’t giving him much of a choice.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said, holding Johnny close. “I’m not – I’m still kind of buzzing. When that hit me, well -- let’s just say when I met with that window, that wasn’t fun for anybody.”
“Are you okay?” Johnny asked. Peter shook his head dismissively, his arm curling around Johnny’s shoulders. He was still frowning, staring at a spot on Johnny’s wall. Johnny tentatively touched his arm, where there was a rip in the costume and an angry red line underneath it. It must have been fresh or it would have begun healing already. “Sorry.”
“No,” Peter said, tightening his grip on Johnny. His arms felt tense as steel coils. “No, don’t do that, don’t apologize. Listen, I have something I need to tell you.”
Johnny’s breath caught in his chest. This was it. One month of bliss, and then who Johnny really was had been revealed – no, forced – into Peter’s mind. After everything that had happened to Peter, how could Johnny blame him if that was too much? He knew how much Peter hated when people got in his head.
But it didn’t feel fair. Not when Johnny had never wanted anyone as much as he’d wanted Peter.
His eyes burned at the corners, and suddenly he remembered Kourtney telling him she hated it when men cried as she broke up with him. How small she’d made him feel that day – or how small he’d always felt when he was around her, the effortless way she embraced the celebrity lifestyle they were supposed to share. He couldn’t be alone with his own thoughts right now or he knew he’d play everything over.
“Please,” he blurted out. He didn’t mean to. It was only going to make everything worse. But the words had left his lips before he could stop himself. His hand wrapped around Peter’s arm, holding on like he was Johnny’s only anchor. “Don’t leave. Please, just not today.”
“What?” Peter said. He finally looked at him, still wearing that deep frown.
Johnny wanted to turn his face away so he didn’t have to look at him but he couldn’t turn away. Peter stared into his face, searching. Johnny could almost watch as it happened, Peter’s incredible mind cataloguing through all of Johnny’s thoughts and feelings and memories that had been forced on it, searching for an answer. Johnny, ice in his veins, watched as it clicked.
Johnny’s face burned with humiliation and his hands clenched into fists.
Then Peter kissed him, hard and quick, his hand cupped to Johnny’s jaw.
“You think I was going to –” he started, then shook his head, dropping his forehead down against Johnny’s. “No. No, Johnny. That’s not what I – I had to tell you, you’re a star.”
“What?” Johnny said, feeling more lost than before. “I’m a what? What does my being a celebrity have to do with anything?”
“Not that kind of star. You’re so bright and warm,” Peter said, staring into Johnny’s eyes. Johnny wanted to look away, but Peter’s hand slid to the back of his neck, just holding. “It’s more than your powers – you shine. And I haven’t told you that enough. I’m sorry. I didn’t think you needed to hear that, and I was wrong.”
Johnny opened his mouth, but realized he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I’m sorry,” Peter repeated and Johnny found himself just shaking his head.
“You’re not breaking up with me?” he said.
Peter made a frustrated noise. “My boyfriend had his mind invaded by an alien monster in the middle of Rockefeller Center and you seriously think I’m going to break up with you? No, just – come here, would you?”
He settled back against the head of Johnny’s bed, gently tugging Johnny down with him until Johnny’s head was on his shoulder and Peter’s arm was wrapped tight around him again.
“I’m not breaking up with you,” Peter said. “In fact, good luck ever convincing me to let go of you again.”
“I’m actually okay with that right now,” Johnny snorted, trying hard to blink the tears from his eyes. It didn’t help when Peter shifted, bringing them closer together, and neither did the gentle way he ran his gloved fingers through Johnny’s hair.
“I’d always talk myself out of it, you know,” Peter said. Johnny closed his eyes and let his voice wash over him, comforting as the ocean. “Telling you how special I found you.”
“Then what were all the blond jokes for?” Johnny asked, burying his face in Peter’s shoulder.
“Hush,” Peter said, scrunching his fingers in Johnny’s hair. His touch felt good after Radricul’s cold fingers, almost soothing. “I’m being nice right now, okay? Because you deserve it. And I used to tell myself you knew how bright you were, how warm and funny, but I guess I was wrong. I should be used to that by now.”
Carefully, he rolled Johnny over so he was on his back on the bed and Peter was hovering above him. He still had that unreadable look in his dark eyes. Johnny reached up to touch his cheek and Peter caught his hand, bringing it to rest over the spider on his chest.
“When I found out you died in the Negative Zone, you have no idea how crushed I was,” he said. “I couldn’t make myself go to the funeral, did you know that?”
“No,” Johnny answered honestly. He knew it had been broadcast, but he’d never been able to bring himself to watch it. He hadn’t really been curios to see who’d shown up and who hadn’t – it felt voyeuristic. That hadn’t been why he’d done it, to see who would care.
He guessed he’d just always assumed Peter must have been there. His throat felt tight.
“Well,” he said, stilted. “I heard Sue didn’t follow through with my request for topless fire dancers doing a tribute to me, so it probably wasn’t a lot of fun anyway.”
Peter snorted, but not like it was very funny. Johnny couldn’t blame him; he wasn’t exactly at his best right now.
“I just couldn’t face it,” Peter said. “I kept thinking – no way. Not him. Not possible. He burns too bright for the world to snuff out like that. When I finally went to see Reed and Sue and Ben, we sat around all night, just telling our favorite stories about you.”
“All your favorite stories?” Johnny asked.
“Every single one,” Peter said, rolling back onto his side. He picked up Johnny’s hand and brought the back of it to his lips. “Hey, remember when I stole your tights in front of that group of teenage fans?”
He laughed as Johnny elbowed him.
“That was not funny,” he said.
“What’d I say again – something about how you didn’t need pants with legs like yours?” Peter grinned. “I was right, you know. But no, I was thinking about the time you and Reed let me tag along on that space flight. The green star, remember?”
“I remember saving all our lives while you and Reed talked over me the whole time,” Johnny said, rolling his eyes.
If Peter was trying to make him feel better, it wasn’t exactly the greatest story he could have picked. Johnny had been so frustrated when they wouldn’t listen to him after their engine stalled, even though he’d built the thing, and even though he’d turned out to be right the whole thing had just made him feel so dumb. On top of that, he’d spent the two days after that incident sick from absorbing the flares from Reed’s aptly named Banner Nova. All in all, not a favorite memory of his, even if it did involve a lot of time with Spider-Man in cramped quarters.
“That wasn’t where I was going with that,” Peter said. “It was after you left the ship to let off that heat. I remember watching the way you glowed – and don’t fool yourself into thinking I didn’t always know you were beautiful – and then you became this literal explosion, this gorgeous glowing star, and I was sitting there watching you and all I could think was, yeah, okay, I can lift a truck over my head without breaking a sweat, but I can’t do that. And on top of that, you’d just come up with a solution to save our lives when two of the smartest men on the planet –”
“Do you even make the top ten?” Johnny asked, but his throat was tight with emotion and besides, he didn’t mean it. Spider-Man had always been one of the smartest men in the world where he was concerned.
“I told Reed, you know,” Peter said, his thumb skimming down Johnny’s shoulder, rubbing restless little circles. “I said it like a joke, that despite all I always kid you, you were actually a pretty bright guy.” He paused for effect. “Get it? Because –”
“Because I was literally exploding, yes, Pete, I get it,” Johnny said, rolling his eyes. He leaned into it when Peter pulled him into a kiss, his hand cupped softly to Johnny’s face.
“That’s what I was thinking about when Reed and I were going over that story that night,” Peter said. “How I wish I’d actually told you that, before. I kept thinking, maybe if I had, it would’ve changed what happened.”
It was a nice sentiment, but Johnny knew it wouldn’t have. Peter knew it, too. Johnny could see that in his eyes. He kissed him again, hoping to put the thought out of Peter’s head. Short of bodily hauling Johnny across the Negative Zone’s threshold, there was nothing anyone could have done to stop him, and luck had been on his side there.
Peter broke the kiss so he could groan, his forehead down against Johnny’s. “And then you left me your family. Who does that?”
“They needed you,” Johnny said.
“I should have told you when I got you back,” Peter said. “I should’ve taken you aside that first day and just told you everything.”
“But then I made you party with the universal Inhumans,” Johnny said, laughing a little in spite of himself.
“Made me. Please,” Peter said. “I could’ve thrown you, literally, out of my apartment any time I wanted.”
Johnny lit up one hand, holding it in front of them, watching the way the flames danced across his palm, up over his fingers. The fire flickered elegantly as he twisted his hand back and forth. “You want to bet?”
“Of course I do,” Peter murmured, pressing a kiss to Johnny’s shoulder. Johnny shut his eyes. “They’re beautiful, you know. Your powers.”
Johnny remembered Mike Snow back in high school, knocking Johnny down into the snow, tackling him. His voice in Johnny’s ear, growling, I know without those fireworks, you’d be nothing. A nobody.
He remembered what he’d accidentally done to Mike after that.
He extinguished his flame and swallowed hard.
“That’s easy to say,” he told Peter. “That I’m bright. That I’m warm. Like my powers. But that’s all it is – my powers. You didn’t know me before.”
“You don’t think I would love you if you didn’t have your powers,” Peter, a flat statement, falling like stone from his lips. Johnny reached to touch his chest, his palm covering the spider that sat there.
“If I didn’t have my powers,” he said, “I don’t think you would know me.”
Peter’s grip tightened on his shoulder. “You think you’d be dead.”
It was easy to forget, how much of everything he’d kept locked up tight inside had been shown to Reed and Ben and Sue and to Peter, too. How could Johnny explain it to him? He’d been to Peter’s childhood home, so warm and cozy, every room radiating love and the presence of someone who cared enough to worry. He and Sue had never had enough space for that, always hanging on by their fingertips, until Sue had met Reed.
Then life had been chaotic for different reasons. Part of the problem, Johnny thought, was that he’d never really had enough time to stop and figure out who he was. One minute he’d been a kid monkeying around in the back of Swenson’s garage, dreaming about racing hot rods, and the next he’d been on the cover of Time and Rolling Stone and every racing magazine besides, with sponsors living up around the block.
Zero to sixty, the Johnny Storm story. The problem always was that he crashed just as fast.
“I don’t know,” he told Peter, shrugging. He picked at a lose thread on his Spider-Man pajama pants. “Maybe.”
Peter was quiet for a long moment.
“I don’t know who I’d be without Spider-Man, either,” he finally said, staring hard at spot on Johnny’s wall.
“Sure you do,” Johnny said, putting his head down on Peter’s shoulder. “You’d have some great job somewhere, doing your genius thing, and a hot spouse, and probably like three kids by now.”
“I would have found you,” Peter said, with that bone deep certainty Johnny loved so much. “Maybe it still would’ve taken this long, and maybe it would have taken longer, but there’s always been this pull between us. Can you feel it?”
He held up his hand. Johnny almost didn’t take it, just to prove him wrong, but Peter was right. There had always been something drawing them together, even when they’d both pretended they couldn’t stand each other.
Johnny raised his hand to meet Peter’s, and sure enough, there was that same old spark as Peter threaded their fingers together.
“Feel that?” Peter said. “That’s gravity. I didn’t have to go to the Baxter Building that first day we met.”
Half a dozen smart remarks immediately came to Johnny – he could have said oh, you mean the day you broke into my house?, or yeah, but who else would you have shown off to? But he and Peter had always gotten each other when they’d really needed to, ever since that Christmas spent tied back to back in the water tower. Maybe even before. And right now, Johnny really needed Peter.
“So why did you do it?” he asked.
“Because,” Peter said, leaning their foreheads together and squeezing Johnny’s hand. Johnny let the strength of their connection, of all their years fighting and laughing and, yes, he knew now, flirting together flow through their joined hands, infusing him with warmth. “You’re my star.”
Johnny couldn’t help it; he cracked up. He pulled away from Peter, bent halfway over, and spent a solid thirty seconds laughing. When he’d recovered enough to look at Peter, he burst into laughter all over again at his affronted face.
“You’re so cheesy,” he said.
“I was serious!” Peter said, sounding offended.
“I know, that just makes it worse,” Johnny said, wiping at his eyes. The tears, he was mortified to discover, had nothing to do with his laughter.
He startled when Peter reached over and wiped a tear away for him. It always amazed him that Peter, with all that strength, could manage to be so gentle. It amazed him a hundred times over whenever Peter turned that unexpected gentleness on him.
“I was serious,” Peter repeated. “And I’m not making the same mistake in not telling you that anymore.”
Johnny’s eyes blurred all over again. Next thing he knew – maybe it was gravity again – he’d thrown his arms around Peter’s neck, clinging on with all he had.
“I’ve got you,” Peter said, holding on just as tightly. “I’ve got you.”