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He was exhausted, tired from a long day at work with Otto, then from running around chasing muggers and kidnappers, helping one elderly woman cross the street without getting hit by a taxi—it was a close call, he didn’t so much let her take his arm as he did physically stop the taxi from hitting her.
New York was brutal.
His reflection was exhausted. Sure he didn’t get bags under his eyes anymore, but they were dull and drooping, his hair flat from the mask and oily—yuck, so oily, he needed to shower.
He didn’t want to shower, just wanted to sleep.
He spit the toothpaste into the sink and rinsed his mouth, wiping his face, too. He’d pulled the covers from the floor and draped them over the mattress, ready to slip under, flipped the lights—and heard skidding tires, honking, a crash, and the long drawn-out whine of the horn stuck.
Sounded like it was close by his apartment, almost right outside his window.
He flipped the lights back on with a sigh—sleep will just have to wait for later—and without hesitation, grabbed his suit, slipped in as quickly as he could, and leaped out the window.
The wreck was farther away than it seemed due to the hush of the night—it was just after midnight, and he really just wanted to sleep, but people might need help—but it was still super close, only a few blocks away, and he got there before anybody else.
The positioning of the cars on the street and the skid marks made it clear what had happened, just a simple accident: two cars approached from oncoming lanes, one breached its lane and hit the other. The wet streets combined with the slamming of brakes swiveled the car easily so they both sat on the side of the lane, one with its lights off, incognito, or something with the other blinking brightly behind it.
As Peter neared, he could tell the one car was on its side and there were two people still in there, not moving. One in the driver’s side—thank God for seatbelts—and a smaller person in the back—was that a child!? The light pole under which the car rested was teetering at an angle, and as he watched from too far away, it came down on the hood, shattering the windshield and denting the driver’s door.
The driver of the other car was attempting to ram into his door, seemingly all right and the only occupant. Trapped, but okay.
Peter’s concern was with the flipped car. Neither occupant moved and the hood was pretty damaged, most likely a head-on collision.
Placing blame was someone else’s job, so he didn’t even try to worry about that.
He landed smoothly and ran past the one occupant, snatching the door with his webs and yanking it off for the guy to stumble and fall out onto the pavement.
Hopping onto the top—the side?—of the flipped car and peering through the window showed both the mother and daughter unconscious, hanging from their seatbelts, and Peter was relieved to also hear heartbeats. He leaned forward as if to unlatch the girl from the belt, but the car creaked ominously, teetering slightly and threatening to roll onto the roof. It was then Peter noticed that the road was at a slight incline, stacking the odds against them.
Nothing particularly horrible would happen should the car come to rest on its roof, but he didn’t want these innocent people to be even more banged up and hurt, and that included whiplash from slinging them through the air with his webs. They were unconscious so they wouldn’t be able to brace themselves at all.
He first secured the girl using his webbing, then unlatched the belt. She flopped a bit, but not much, and he slowly and carefully pulled her out, laying her gently on the pavement. The man from the other car ran over to check on them—“Are they hurt? Are they okay?”—and Peter instructed him to keep her safe as he grabbed the mother—well that was an assumption, they could just be friends or sisters for all he knew.
The mother was even easier to withdraw since she was right there by the window. He just grabbed her himself without webbing, laid her with the girl, but then rethought that. He should get the car upright to make cleanup and removal easier on everybody, so he gently lifted her again.
The man was at his elbow, ready to help with whatever he could, almost eager, so Peter just asked, “Could you grab her? Let’s get them off the road.”
The man followed him onto the grass and stayed with them both after Pete laid the mom down.
He approached the car, getting a good look at it in the dark, trying to figure out the best approach to uprighting it. He’d done this multiple times, so it wasn’t hard. To lift it from the other side, or to pull it with webs from this side? Webs would secure it so it wouldn’t move much and wouldn’t make a bigger mess, so he went with that route.
Toyota Camry’s don’t weigh much, less than two tons, so it wasn’t heavy. As it flipped back down, it landed with a thunk, and the glass jingled, scattered a bit, and Peter stepped back a few steps to avoid ripping his suit up from the shards.
It was still hard to see with the light pole knocked out, so it was almost excused that the car coming fifty miles per hour didn’t see him step into its lane. Except that headlights exist, as do brakes and speed limits.
Peter’s spidey-sense sent him a warning, giving him time to turn and look, eyes widening comically like a deer’s in the headlights. He hadn’t even released the webbing before he was hit, shattering that windshield and rolling over the hood, denting the trunk, impacting the ground painfully on his left shoulder.
His whole body was a mass of pain suddenly. It’d been a while since he’d been hit by a car. It was a sensation that one never really gets used to.
The concrete was unforgiving and the wetness soaked into his suit, but that was the last thing on his mind. His shoulder was a mass of pain, most likely dislocated, but his main concern was his left leg. Definitely broken. Definitely his femur, and it was definitely not a pretty sight.
His lungs had given out when he’d been hit and they took a minute to get back on board and reload, and once there was air again, he screamed low through clenched teeth, not wanting to move at all, but also wanting to curl up and hold his leg. It was both a sharp stabbing pain all up and down his thigh from the clearly broken bone trying to poke where it doesn’t belong and the dull burning red-hot sensation of wrongness that always accompanied breaks.
Not five minutes ago he was brushing his teeth for bed, and now he was bleeding on the concrete with a broken leg. At least he didn’t have to worry about the people anymore—he could hear the sirens, weren’t too far off.
He probably should be gone by the time they arrived, and he just realized the car that hit him was also gone. A hit and run. Wow. How nice.
New York was brutal, man.
When he felt he had a hold on his emotions, he pushed the pain to the back of his mind, shot a web at the next available light pole in the direction of his apartment, and yanked himself up. It was a clumsy landing, only using one leg, and he had to clench his eyes shut along with his jaw to rein back another scream.
The ambulance and subsequent police cars were pulling up, driver’s looking at him, so he definitely couldn’t stay, webbed another rope toward the roof of the closest building, and took off, not even close to sticking that landing.
This time, he did curl up, and he did scream, but he didn’t hold his leg as he’d wanted. That would inevitably cause more pain.
His vision was enveloped in white as he laid there, pain never-ending like lava through his veins. Knives were heated over the stovetop and slowly rammed through the flesh of his thigh, burning their way deep into his bone.
He needed someone to set it for him because he knew he wouldn’t be able to, not on his own, but Spider-Man didn’t exactly have a lot of allies. MJ was the only one he could think of. She’d hate him for it, but she’d understand. She always understood.
He called her.
“Peter?” She sounded tired, but not the just-woke-up-and-still-sleepy tired, more of the I’ve-been-awake-too-long tired.
“MJ—“ His voice was weak, pathetic, breaking on those short two syllables. He hadn’t meant to show his pain, but it was all-consuming and hard to buffet, “MJ, can—“
He stopped again. How was he supposed to ask her to patch a broken bone? He hadn’t rehearsed this beforehand! He didn’t have anything to lead the conversation into it.
She interrupted—well, he’d stopped talking, so it wasn’t an interruption—“Pete,” she sounded worried, “Are you okay? Where are you? What happened?” And much more awake than before.
“I’m fine, I’m on the roof—well, not the roof—“ a spike a pain cut him off, made him clench his teeth and no way was he ever going to scream in front of her, so he just breathed in carefully before continuing, noticing that she’d remained silent to hang onto his every word, “It’s my leg, God, it hurts—it’s broken. Bad. Sable is out for my head, so—“
Talking was getting hard, and she must’ve been able to tell he was straining, because she cut him off, “Yeah, yeah, of course, I’ll do my best, get over here!”
He breathed in deeply to get a hold of himself and heard a chair breaking in the background of her call, shattering loud and dramatically
He loved her so much.
She was so beautiful and cunning and so smart to already be preparing a splint.
He didn’t deserve her.
“Be there when I can.”
Summoning the willpower to move was more difficult than getting out of bed when it was still dark outside, but nevertheless, Pete overcame.
Shoving the pain to the back of his mind so that he could steadily make his way to MJ’s—his phone was buzzing, MJ again.
He hadn’t even gotten hey out before she was talking, “Oh, Pete! You said it was your leg! You stay right there. I’m coming to you.” Something heavy thudded and Pete wondered if she’d packed a backpack or something.
He was glad of her words, but didn’t want to make her come all the way up here when he could just—his bone shifted as he moved, grating against delicate flesh and he winced, collapsed back down, and resigned himself to just wait for her.
He realized he’d stopped listening to her when he heard his name, “Pete? Are you still there? Are you okay? Pete?”
Weariness heavy in his voice, he replied, “Yeah, sorry. This is… worse than normal. I didn’t hear you, I’m sorry.”
She was so gentle and caring with her next words, “Send me your location. I’m on my way.” He heard the door close behind her, and the call cut off.
It took him a minute to figure out where in the world he was before he remembered that he could just send her his GPS signature.
He opened Snapchat and sent it, along with I’m on the roof and Thank you so much and I love you for good measure.
Waiting was the worst because he knew she was at least 15 minutes away, but he didn’t have anything to focus on besides the pain. There were no distractions.
Just pain, and broken bones, and the wet grimey suit, and ow, okay, oh yeah, his shoulder was also busted, he’d forgotten about that.
He needed something else to focus on, create his own distraction, and he decided to scoot closer to the door, prop his back up on something. His shoulder he could set without help so that she wouldn’t have to, but he needed a flat surface.
He was just leveraging himself against the wall beside the door when it slowly opened, squeaking only a bit. It was MJ, no doubt about it, and he gave away his location, “Over here.”
He relaxed against the wall, settled back down, and closed his eyes.
She was here. She was going to fix him up. She was going to make it all better.
“Oh my God, Pete!” Horror laced her words, and he knew she’d seen the leg.
“Yeah. It’s not pretty, but I’m hoping the scar will be wicked!”
It wasn’t going to leave a scar, nothing ever did, well, the big horrible nearly-fatal wounds did, but this wasn’t that. He just needed to talk.
He smiled through the pain, then realized he still wore the mask and she couldn’t see it, so he tugged it off, scratching against a rough spot on his chin and making him wince, and her eyes just got wider when she looked at him.
Was there something wrong with his face?
“Oh, Pete.” She sounded sad, why did she sound so sad?
“What? What’s wrong with my face?”
She paused, looked puzzled, crouched beside him, and asked, “You can’t feel that?”
He was getting worried now, and more than a little scared. She never joked in these situations, so what was she talking about?
“Feel what?”
“You’re missing half your cheek. I can see your jawbone.”
…What?
Sure he might have skidded a little upon landing back on the ground after that hit-and-run, but his face didn’t really hurt—wait. Yeah. Yeah, it did, now that he thought about it.
He reached up to touch it, but MJ grabbed his arm, held it, and he looked down at the mask beside him. Sure enough, there was a hole on the left side under the eyepiece.
He could feel the blood now, dripping down his neck, and for a moment, he forgot about his leg.
His breathing was erratic and he was getting lightheaded.
Did he just lose half his face from a hit-and-run?
Did he just lose half his face from a hit-and-run?
He was Spider-Man! He was supposed to stop these things! This wasn’t supposed to happen to him! He could dodge bullets! Why didn’t he dodge that car?
He was gazing at the nearly identical patch of bloody tissue that made up his left shoulder when his leg ignited in furious pain.
MJ was setting it, and he had to remain still, but it was a horrible and nasty break, hurting beyond imagination, and he couldn’t juggle the pain, exhaustion, and shock altogether, so he thankfully passed out.