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Some would say that you knew Peter Parker better than the back of his hand. How he always took his coffee with exactly three shots of cream and four sugars. Just enough to wake him up when he did sleep at night, but not enough to make him more jittery than he normally was. The fact that he only ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches whenever he was down and refused to tell anyone what happened. Peter only slept on his left side for the simple fact that it was easier for him to jump in the middle of the night if something did happen. And that was only on the nights that Peter did sleep…which was almost never as of lately.
You knew more about Peter than he knew himself or anyone else for that matter. But you also knew less. Peter only told you the bits and pieces of his life that he wanted you to know. The ones that he kept secrets from everyone else for the last two and a half years, and since he came back. You had always known he was Spider-Man. You just never knew anything else besides the obvious.
Peter had left hours earlier in the night with nothing more than a quick kiss and a “see you later.” And as much you wanted him to stay in for once, you knew it was pointless to beg for something that Peter would eventually feel bad for.
You wished Peter would open up sometimes for the sake of your relationship. At least that’s what you hoped for, but you were never ready for what was to come with it.
Peter came stumbling into your apartment with his suit torn to pieces and blood dripping out, and from underneath the shredded suit, you saw the claw marks that scattered his ribs and back. His mask hanging halfway off his face but didn’t cover the gash above his left eye or the dried blood around his cracked lips. And the only thing keeping Peter up was the back of the door when closed it.
“Peter.” You jumped off the couch, tripping over your laptop cord in the process. You reached for him, ignoring the way his blood seeped into your cotton shirt and against your skin. Sticky and not wanted. You wrinkled your nose, leading Peter towards your bedroom. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Peter grumbled. His head rolled to the back before resting against your shoulder. “Can’t ‘member.”
You tried to stay calm, tried to remember this was Peter’s job. This is what he did when he wasn’t around you and Ned or in class. Something about keeping a legacy going when Peter could hardly keep going himself. It had been two and a half years since everything went down, and Peter had become more of a mess than he already way. He had always been somewhat of a mess since you met him during your freshman year of high school, but now…now took the cake on how much Peter had let his life slowly go downhill.
And this wasn’t the first time that Peter had shown up at your doorstep, bloody and bruised, but nothing compared to tonight. The way his suit was hardly on his body, and his head constantly swaying back and both with the blood smearing across the side of your cheek. His body went limp against yours, and you hooked both forearms under his armpits and hoisted up back up to where you could drag him a little better.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Your fingers trembled as you laid Peter across your bed. And maybe now it was pure luck that you invested in more sheets as time went on and Peter started to show up every time he was injured. More times than you would like.
“Sleep,” his voice hardly a whisper as he went to close his eyes, “sleep, please.”
“No, no, no sleep,” you said as the palm of your hand gently smacked his cheek a couple of times. “We’ve gotta stay awake, you’ve gotta stay awake.”
Peter mumbled something incoherent, swatting at your hand as he opened his eyes. “Sleep, tired.”
“How can you be tired when you’re literally dying?” You bit your lip, knowing well enough the only time Peter demanded sleep was when he was in enough pain to allow it to take over his body.
“Please,” Peter said, coughing on the blood that traced his lips.
Your heart shattered into a million pieces while you reached for a tissue from your nightstand. You cupped the back of Peter’s head gently, lifting up just enough to wipe his lips clean of the blood that still trickled down his forehead from the gash. Maybe it was the luck of the draw Peter that had allowed for that single wound not to be as deep as you had initially thought.
“Gotta clean you up,” you said, pressing another tissue to his forehead, “we can’t have you drippin’ blood everywhere, can we?”
Peter grunted, letting you reach for his hand and replace it with your own.
“Put enough pressure to it until I get back.”
Peter had his eyes half-lidded and nodded his head before he closed them altogether. You shook your head before you went into your bathroom. Underneath your sink sat the emergency kit, you had put together of gaze, peroxide, alcohol, bandages, sutures, scissors, and medical tape. A simple emergency kit that you were having to replenish far too often for someone who told you that they weren’t going to hurt themselves anymore.
Your bed sheets were starting to turn a darker shade of grey, the more Peter’s blood seeped into them. And you weren’t even sure if it was fresh blood or blood on his body that had not had a chance to dry before you placed him on your bed.
Peter’s hand laid off the edge of the bed, bloody tissues in it, and his eyes were closed as you walked over towards him. Reaching for the scissors that you had replaced months ago, you cut the rest of his suit off of him. And maybe if you this hadn’t become your job, your regular scissors wouldn’t be working, but you invested in something that was able to cut through his basic blue and red suit. Something that was quick and easy, making things less painful for Peter and you.
Vomit mixed with the faint hints of iron from all the blood on Peter’s body, greeted you with a single smack to the face. And if death had a smell, this is exactly what you thought it would be as you ripped off the rest of his suit.
“You have to tell me what happened,” you started to plead with him.
But Peter moved towards you more, coughing so rough that it allowed you to drop the pair of scissors. Jumping out of the way before you got stabbed with the sharp pair, and Peter had his hand over his mouth with little traces of blood seeping through his fingers. You reached the wastebasket you kept at the other side of your nightstand and brought it over to him. Just in time to see Peter cough up the blood, he had inhaling on the walk back to your apartment.
You went to rub his back but stopped at the sight you saw.
Black and purple welts covered his body mixed with bruises that had started to turn a nasty shade of yellow and brown from days earlier. Dried blood clinging to his body, cracked with little lines allowing you to know Peter had been bleeding for at least an hour before he had made it back to you. Claw marks deeper than you could imagine, at least a good three to five inches deep, were across his ribs and stomach. Bright red skin mixed with fresh and old blood and looked as if the skin was being peeled away from his body.
If it weren’t for the fact Peter’s body was able to heal itself, you would have been called for an ambulance.
And even now, you weren’t sure Peter’s body could handle these types of injuries. Sure, you had seen him in bad shape before, but that was nothing more than a black eye and a cut above his lip. This time it was something. Something worse. And it was common sense that no one could lose as much blood as Peter had and still live.
Then again nothing about Peter had been normal for the last six years.
“Pete,” you said while taking some of the gauze that had alcohol poured on it, “I’m sorry.”
Two simple words you always told him before you started to clean him up. The roughness of material of the gauze meeting the already delicate skin of his chest sent Peter over the edge.
Peter’s eye flew open, a deep moan left him and his hand gripping around your wrist, forcing you to pull back. His fingers dug into your skin, demanding you, wanting you to stop every single thing that you were doing. The pain behind his eyes, you couldn’t unsee that whatever did this to him was still messing around on the inside of his head.
“Hey, Pete,” you leaned forward and with your hand took the gauze to keep cleaning off his wounds. “It’s okay, it’s okay…”
“Stop, it will fix on its own,” he begged with tears rolling down his cheeks as the drop of alcohol entered one of the deeper claw marks. “Please, please—”
Peter’s scream echoed in your ear, but you couldn’t stop. It didn’t matter how much he begged and pleaded, how much your heart broke every single time he cried out in pain, you knew it was better to some kind of medical attention to him than none at all. You reached for one of your shirts that you thrown on the ground earlier that night, and without thinking, you shoved it towards Peter’s lips. His teeth sunk into it as you worked on cleaning the wound the best you could. His head rocked back and forth, tears rolling down his cheeks, and the air on his arms standing straight up every time you applied pressure to stop the bleeding a little more.
“It’s okay, I promise,” you said while grabbing another gauze pad. Trying your best to ignore the whimpers that left Peter every so often, and avoiding his hand when he reached for yours to get you to stop.
You climbed up onto the bed with the needle in your hands and pulled his legs together before you sat on them. Peter’s lips began to tremble, and you leaned forward just enough to push some of his hair that was dried to his forehead with blood and sweat.
“Just bite down okay, I’ll try to be fast this time,” you said with a slight smile.
Your fingers ran over the bright red, raw, fresh skin that flapped around as you threaded the needle into it. Skin that needed more medical attention than something that you learned from Claire months earlier.
Peter jerked to the right, almost allowing to you fall off of him, but you caught yourself with your hand. “Pete, I gotta do it, okay. I know it hurts, but the fast you let me work on you, the fast it will be over.”
He shook his head, but you ignored it. Knowing somewhere, it would cause more damage to leave these kinds of wounds open instead of trying to fix them. Flesh meeting flesh as you started to stitch him up with as much accuracy as you could. Your hands trembling every time you reach for the scissors to cut the strand and started to thread a new piece. Peter’s gaze following your hand with the movements, and every once in a while, he would buck, throwing you off and it would take your palm laying flat on his chest to remind him that he was safe.
Eventually, Peter stopped fighting with you, letting sleep slowly consume him when you started to stitch up the claw marks on his ribs and back. He winced every once in a while, but it’s only when his chest began to have a steady rhythm to it, do you know Peter was actually asleep.
You tried your best to scrub the blood out from underneath your fingers. Soap turning bright red the fast your hands moved underneath the running water. Your mind started to run wild with every single possibility as to how and why Peter got himself into this kind of mess tonight. Peter was more careful than this, never letting himself get to close to danger.
“What did you do?” You asked, glancing over your shoulder to a sleeping Peter before you left your bedroom. “How do you keep getting yourself into these messy?”
But you knew the answer would never come.
You did your best to lift Peter up off the bed and onto the floor before you were able to change the sheets to your bed. His eyes fluttered open briefly, but only for you to motioned him to go back to sleep while you wrapped the bloody sheets up to put in the washer with an ungodly amount of bleach.
“Thank you,” Peter said while he pushed himself up the best he could on the bed.
“You would be lost without me,” you said with a slight laugh.
Peter nodded his head with one of his hands on the freshly stitched up wound that was now covered in the white gaze. You tossed the sheets down by your door and helped Peter crawled up into your bed more.
You forced a smile on your face as you pressed a kiss to his forehead; holding back every single emotion running through you as you walked out of your bedroom with the sheets in your hands.
You wanted to scream, cry, punch his dumbass in the face for being beyond reckless this one time and almost dying in the middle of your bedroom. But it would do good. You knew in three or four days, Peter would be right back out there doing whatever he thought he needed to be done.
And maybe that’s the part that hurt the most was how he always put in life in his danger and was reckless.
But that was the thing, Peter wasn’t exactly reckless. He had become careless. Listening to more of the demons in his head than anyone else. And at some point, you accepted the fact that every single time Peter lashed out, it was from hiding his emotions, pretending that everything was okay. That everything would be okay, but it never was. Nothing was ever okay for Peter after what happened two and a half years ago.
Between him constantly showing up and you having to clean him up was nothing compared to the nights that followed. And other nights when he stayed with you. The way his body would curl up within itself, almost in a fetal position, and the loud pitch cries that left his lips before he would start violently thrashing in the bed.
It would only end with you almost getting punched in the face, but somehow still being able to miss Peter’s fist as you wrapped his arms around his torso. You held him tightly to you, reminding him that whatever his mind was tricking him into thinking wasn’t real. That none of it was real. That everything he ever needed was right here, right now, and nothing else mattered. And Peter would eventually curl up next to you, your fingers threading through his hair as he fell back asleep.
Peter never told you about the nightmares that plagued him. The demons that ran through his mind and allowed him to be off his game most of the time. You only speculated that it had to do with something about the fight with Thanos and Tony Stark’s death. Another death that Peter had to endure before he turned eighteen and one death was too much. But having to deal with three had a certain kind of after effect on Peter.
“Y/N,” Peter’s voice broke through your thoughts when you entered your bedroom.
You looked up to Peter sitting up in your bed, hand still touching his left ribs and tears staining his flushed and bruised cheeks, and he was trying to hug himself as every sob choked through him.
“You should be asleep,” you said in a way that was more motherly than a girlfriend.
Peter shook his head, and with one arm outreached, and no words said, he asked for you to join him.
You moved carefully across your bedroom floor and into your bed. You wrapped one of your arms around Peter’s waist, making sure not to put anymore pressure on the wounds on his back. One hand threading through his hair, gently massaging his scalp as Peter turned slightly in your arms to where his face was buried into your shirt.
“What happened?” You asked in hopes of a couple of hours in pain and it being the middle of the night would allow Peter to talk more than usual.
He leaned back, bloodshot eyes and trembling lip. “I’m– I’m ready to tell you everthin’.”
You saw it in his eyes. The pain behind his brown eyes. The ones that had been holding inside of him for the last couple of years was slowly breaking him into two, allowing the light that shone brightly in Peter to go out instantly now.
And that’s the thing about trying to hide the pain.
Pretending it’s not there.
It’s inevitable.
It’s something that demands to be felt.
Something that most try to run away from, cause the familiar feeling isn’t one that they want anymore.
It’s stubbing your pinky toe on the corner of a table with a slew of cuss words, and firmly believing that you are bleeding and probably going to die.
It’s a broken heart you didn’t see coming, cause you left the rose colored glasses on for far too long.
It’s hitting your funny bone in the perfect spot and laughing through the tingling sensation coursing your body.
It’s watching the people you love die in front of you, and you can’t do anything about it. You just bury the feelings in hopes that maybe the pain won’t catch up.
But it does.
It always does.
“Everything?” You asked, trying not to sound more surprised than were you. Shocked that Peter even wanted to open up about things that he only kept to himself.
Peter was ready to let it all out. Everything that had been consuming him, eating away at him, and you were ready to listen.
“Everythin’,” he repeated himself, “the pain, the nightmares, everythin’.”
You nodded your head, holding Peter so tightly, you felt his heart beating in his chest. His hair stood up on his arms with every single breath he took. The way his fingers curled around your back, lacing together, almost afraid that if he let go the demons in his mind would take over. That if the slightest hint of you leaving him would leave him crumbled within himself, not being able to move on from the one person holding him together.
And with one shaky breath, Peter Parker was finally ready to let go of all the pain.