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Johnny feels like he’s sixteen again, teaching himself how to do stupid tricks with his newborn power. Except he’s not sixteen and he’s not doing tricks; he’s trying to stop his hands from shaking and lighting ablaze. He’s sitting in the bathtub of his old bathroom in the Baxter Building, taking refuge here rather than in his own apartment. It seemed smarter—was smarter, probably, considering he wasn’t setting off any smoke alarms. That’d mean his entire building would have to evacuate, and he’s not too sure they’d like him after that.
Now, if he could get his hands to just stop shaking. If they would just stop sparking up when he didn’t want them to—when he didn’t need them to. He tightens his jaw and turns the faucet on. He doesn’t care that the water is ice cold and that it hurts a little when he shoves his hands under the faucet. The fire dies.
The noise of someone crashing through the bedroom window startles Johnny. He doesn’t turn off the faucet, though, and doesn't even bother to try and peek through the cracked door. It’s all dark, slices of moonlight decorating the bedroom from the newly moved curtains. New York City was bright and, at one point, Johnny grew to hate it. So he bought black out curtains. They were still being used, Johnny thought to himself.
The stranger stumbles into the bathroom, all suit and soot. Red and blue and Johnny would recognize Peter Parker’s face from anywhere.
“Parker,” Johnny grins.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Peter says, hand slapping over his heart. “The hell are you doing in the bathtub, matchstick?”
Johnny shrugged, “Thought I’d visit home.”
“Johnny,” Peter says. Johnny eyes the split eyebrow, cut on his nose, the bruises on his face. He would offer to help if he weren’t so afraid of hurting Peter more. His hands shake a little more and his wrists light up. Johnny wants to throw up. Instead, he presses his cheek to his knee.
“Do you ever wish, like, this has never happened to you?” Johnny asks. Peter pauses, the rag in his hands still pressed to his face.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Peter says. “I really wonder about everything that would have gone differently. I’d just be normal. Wouldn’t have so much blood on my hands.”
Johnny blinks and swallows. “Do you think we would have met each other?”
“Hm,” Peter says. The flames on Johnny’s wrists die out. “I’d like to think we would’ve found our way to each other.”
“That’s a nice thought,” Johnny hums. Peter doesn’t ask why he’s in the bathtub with the cold water running. Johnny can’t quite clock if he’s grateful or miserable.
Peter living in the Baxter Building is only temporary, but his room already looks like a place you’d call home. It’s a cluttered mess with keepsakes strewn about on bookshelves and tabletops and walls, some things tucked away in boxes. The ones that are most important, Johnny learned, were tucked away in a Nike shoebox that sat somewhere in the safety of his closet. Peter didn’t talk about it, not had he ever pulled it out, so Johnny never asked.
“Does that hurt?” Peter asks after Johnny has removed his once on fire hands from the freezing water. He jabs his toothbrush under the faucet before applying toothpaste. Johnny shrugs.
“Kind of,” he says. Peter looks at him quizzically, finishing with his teeth before speaking.
“Then why do you do it?” Peter asks. Johnny shrugs again.
“To feel in control?” he says. That’s where the conversation ends, a form of mutual understanding brushed upon somewhere in there.
Johnny told himself it was going to be okay a lot. Most times, he wasn’t just doing it for himself. He was also trying to convince other people things wouldn’t turn to shit, even if he knew they likely would. He’d try to be some form of positive.
But he was so tired of being that. He couldn’t be the positive anymore. Not right now, at least. He needed someone to take care of him as if he were sick. In some form, Johnny wanted to feel less alone. He wanted to feel like he had some form of human connection.
Peter’s hand brushes his shoulder. “Johnny?”
Johnny takes a shuddering breath, almost like he’s gasping. “Hey, Pete.”
Peter doesn’t say anything as he clambers onto the couch, wrapping a cold hand with Johnny’s warm one and laying his head on Johnny’s shoulder.
Johnny feels like he could cry.
“If you read another article about yourself, I think you might break something,” Johnny says, watching Peter pace around the living room. His knees are tucked to his chest, hands safely trapped between them.
“They’re saying I failed,” Peter says. His voice cracks, and suddenly Johnny is very afraid that Peter might cry.
“You did everything you could,” Johnny says, all soft and tender. Like Sue used to talk to him when he would scrape his knee. He feels like he’s treading dangerous water.
Peter stops. “Then why is my best never enough?”
“I don’t know,” Johnny says earnestly, shrugging. “I don’t know.”
As the situation presents, Peter Parker and Johnny Storm happen to be roommates. For the time being, at least. Once Johnny’s hands stop shaking and lighting on fire whenever they please, they will no longer be roommates.
The thought makes Johnny feel faintly hollow. Almost like his chest aches.
Peter is a good roommate, albeit a little messy. He’s scatterbrained, but he tries to clean up after himself before getting too distracted. Johnny spends most of his time in the kitchen, making whatever he pleases when he pleases. They coexist, a little tenderly, if Johnny were to categorize it.
It’s nice. Johnny likes it. Peter is the best roommate he’s ever had. He doesn’t like all the blood he finds on the bathroom counter, though. He thinks Peter should take better care of himself.
His hands are still shaking, still lighting fire. Johnny hasn’t asked Reed about it yet. He doesn’t know why/
“You’re the real Johnny, right? You’re real?” Peter asks, breathing laboriously . He’s holding Johnny’s face in his hands. Johnny can see the tears pooling in Peter’s eyes too clearly.
“It’s me,” Johnny says, his hands lifting to cover Peter’s. “Hey, hey, it’s me.”
“Tell me,” Peter swallows thickly. The tears finally fall from his eyes. “Tell me something only we would know.”
“When you got stabbed,” Johnny starts, “it was on your birthday. And you still met with me at the Statue of Liberty. I almost pushed you off into the water because I thought you were so stupid, and you were bleeding all over my brand new white shirt I wanted to show you. It was two-thirty in the morning. The scare is right here.” Johnny moves his hand to press against the scar, right above his left hip bone. Peter heaves, then he’s sobbing into Johnny’s chest.
“I’ve got you,” Johnny murmurs. “I’ve got you.”
It’s the first time they’ve shared a bed since they were seventeen.
“Today,” Johnny decides, “is going to be a good day. For both of us.”
“Really now?” Peter asks, smiling over his cup of coffee/
“Yes. Because I said so, and I deserve to be right for once in my life,” Johnny says.
Peter nods. “Okay. Today is going to be a good day. For both of us.”
Johnny smiles.
It turns into a good week. A good week with a crashing halt.
Johnny wakes up screaming. He never wakes up screaming. He doesn’t know when Peter wakes up, but he’s engulfed Johnny before he can push Peter away. Johnny is seconds away from lighting ablaze as some form of defense, so he pushes Peter away and does so. Peter doesn’t look hurt, doesn’t even look confused. It’s all soft and understanding and Johnny wants to die.
He falls back into Peter’s arms when he isn’t on fire. He’s unsteady—it’s like he’s walking a tightrope and there’s no netting underneath. This fall could kill him. He doesn’t let go of Peter, too afraid of that fall.
They fall asleep upright. He doesn’t miss the look Sue gives him at breakfast.
“Were you going to tell me?” Sue asks. She’s gentle, always has been. Her hands are soft on top of Johnny’s. He’s so afraid of hurting her.
“I don’t know,” he says. It’s the truth. He hadn’t made the decision yet.
“Oh, Johnny,” she says. “You don’t have to carry everything yourself.”
Johnny doesn’t know what to say to that. He pulls his hands out of Sue’s and walks out of the room. He spends the rest of the day in the bathtub.
“Have you told Reed?” Peter asks, turning Johnny’s hands over and tracing the lines of his palms. Johnny sighs.
“No,” he says. “But Sue knows. So she might have. I didn’t tell her not to tell anybody.”
“Do you think he could help?” Peter asks.
Johnny shrugs. “Maybe. But maybe this is, like, something neurological. God, I can already imagine the therapists frothing at the mouth to get their hands on world famous Johnny Storm.”
“You, I don’t think it’s that bad of an idea,” Peter says. “Therapy, I mean. Even if it doesn’t help with the shaking hands.”
“I’ll have to think about it, Parker,” Johnny says.
“What’s going on with you two?” Val asks one day. Johnny raises an eyebrow, pausing his whisk.
“Me and who?”
“You and Peter.”
“Nothing,” Johnny says, shrugging and beginning to whisk again. “Nothing.”
“Oh,” Val says. She presses her lips together in a thin line, brows furrowed together. “Okay.”
She leaves before Johnny can ask her any questions.
Johnny is cleaning Peter’s split lip when it happens.
His face is a mishmash of small cuts and larger bruises that Johnny has been fussing over for the last thirty minutes. When he removes his hand from Peter’s face, Peter’s hand is on the back of his neck and they’re kissing.
When it’s over, Johnny blinks in surprise. Peter looks like he wants to run, fingers tapping erratically against Johnny’s neck. He stays there, partially trapped because Johnny is between his legs.
“You can tell me to go away. I'll move out,” Peter says, stumbling over words from talking too fast. Johnny snorts.
“I have my own apartment, dumbass,” he says. Peter licks his lips, eyes glued to the wall behind him.
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Kiss me again.” Peter does.
It’s tender passing touches that probable clues everyone else in. At the moment, Johnny and Peter are just friends who kiss sometimes (a lot). When he tells Sue this, she looks like she wants to rip her hair out. She asks him about his hands instead.
“I think they’re getting better,” Johnny says. He hasn’t been paying attention. If they’re getting better that means he has to leave.
Johnny really doesn’t want to leave. At least not right now.
“Oh,” Sue says. She says it so gently that it makes Johnny feel like he’s seven. “You’ve got it bad.”
“What are we?” Johnny asks while Peter traces his face. They’ve opened the curtains, light from the city pouring over Peter’s face and shoulders. His middle finger never stops moving.
“What do you want us to be?” he asks. Johnny bite his lip.
“Together.”
“Alright, then,” Peter smiles. “Boyfriends.”
Johnny feels so in love he could burst at the seam. He grabs Peter’s face, pulling him closer to kiss him until all that love feels like a flood.
“Johnny Storm, you’re beautiful, you know?” Peter asks. Johnny is wearing one of his sweaters, and under it, one of his old ratty t-shirts.
“Wouldn’t if you didn’t tell me everyday,” Johnny says. Peter smiles at him from the bed. Johnny’s hands aren’t a fire hazard anymore, but he hasn’t told anyone that. Not yet, at least.
“Do you wanna meet my aunt?” Peter asks. He’s sitting up, staring at Johnny curiously. He’s offering a piece of himself, Johnny notes. He feels like he could die.
“When?” he asks.
“Today. We always have lunch on Friday,” Peter says.
“I’d love to,” Johnny says. Peter smiles.
Johnny meets May in Peter’s sweater and a bashful grin.
She’s kind and soft and warm; Johnny knows where Peter gets it from now. She smiles at Johnny like she means it and it makes his chest feel full. Peter is practically glowing. Johnny feels the best he’s felt in months.
He helps May with the dishes.
“You’re his everything, you know?” May says. Johnny startles, pausing his work on a plate.
“I think that’s you,” Johnny says. She laughs very softly, almost like it’s a secret.
“He looks at you like you hung the moon,” May says. “Like you created every star in the universe just for him.” Johnny yet to notice. He wonders if he looks at Peter the same way.
“I’m glad he has you,” she says, bumping his hip. “I think he’s needed someone like you for a long time.”
“I’m real lucky.”
“You both are.”
“Peter?”
“Hm?”
“I know I asked you this God knows how long ago, but do you ever wish this never happened to you?”
“Yeah. It’d spare me a lot of growing up too soon. A lot of other shit, too.”
“Yeah.”
“I still think we would’ve found each other. I still think that, too.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I think we would still be where we are now. Just… in a more normal sense.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Yeah. It does.”
There comes the time Johnny has to move out of the Baxter Building and back into his own apartment. His hands don’t shake as often and he’s not a risk to anyone in the unexpected sense anymore. He doesn’t want to leave, but Peter offers to go with him.
“I need to get out of here anyway,” Peter says. Johnny grins like an idiot, kissing Peter like it’s the end of the world.
“You’re gonna love it. You’re gonna make it feel like a real home.”
“Good. Fantastic, even.”
The apartment clutters.
A cardigan thrown here, two pairs of shoes by the door, books there, a filled bathroom, a constantly unmade bed.
It’s the best feeling in the world. Every time he comes home, his chest swells at the sight. It feels like a home now and not just some place Johnny would say he lives.
And maybe this was because Peter Parker was home. He had a knack for making things his, for making them feel loved and lived in. Peter was light and he was love.