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“Just this?” the cashier drawls, an accusatory eyebrow cocked, as he scans the packaged bandages through the till. Then, with a sigh so almighty he could be the most inconvenienced person in the world, he leans over the register, pulls a bottle of chilled water from the shelves, before he scans that through, too. “It’s on me, Spiderman. You could do with it.”
“Uhh.”
“Take it.” The cashier shoves the bagged items towards him, dark eyes leaving no room for questions. “I don’t want anything to do with whatever the fuck is going on with you, but taking your money feels wrong when you’re all fucked up like that, so take it.”
Oh, how he loves the people of New York. Peter Parker isn’t one to accept a strangers’ random act of kindness at the best of times – he feels much too guilty taking up their time and resources like that when, really, he doesn’t deserve all that – but he's sort of working with a time crunch right now, so he just snatches the bag and makes a beeline for the door. "Thanks!" he coughs out over his shoulder.
The cashier calls after him, “don’t die, Spiderman!” and, well, Peter doesn’t have anything to say to that.
The alleyway he ducks into is not one he is new to. The apartment buildings on either side utilize it for their trash, tossing it in black bags from their balconies and into the metal dumpsters below, and nobody is really bothered to pay half a mind to anybody who may be lurking amongst the mess. That's perfectly fine, he supposes. Being left alone is what he needs right now.
Because he’s lost. Completely and utterly, well and truly lost. His suit is entirely offline; his eyepieces are dysfunctional; he's too disorientated to understand what he's supposed to do and which direction the Tower is in. It feels as though there's cotton in his mouth and TV static in his brain. He thinks he may have dropped his phone somewhere at some point, but he can't remember. No, he can barely even recall how he got here in the first place. It's like he's been sleepwalking and he's only just snapped back into consciousness.
The suit is glued to the wounds with sticky blood and Peter grinds his jaw as he unpeels it, short, breathless groans edging through his teeth gritted together so hard he thinks he may shatter them. In a moment of hot hypersensitivity, he throws his mask above his nose, and the sudden rush of cold air in his lungs feels revitalising. Probably the one thing he has some sort of grasp on is the fact that he's probably going to bleed out of the holes in his stomach if he doesn't wrap them stat. He thinks that, once he's out of the woods, he can figure out where he needs to go from here.
They sit just to the left of his belly button, jagged and ugly, surrounded by purpling skin; two delightful bullet holes, leaking sluggishly. It’s the first time he’s looked at it since he’d been shot– well, however long that was ago, and the sight alone has hot bile rising in the back of his throat. It's disgusting; it's fucking disgusting, and Peter can barely force himself to look at it. Superficial scratches are something his healing factor can deal with on it’s own, but bullet wounds are different, especially when the bullets hadn’t come out the other side.
“F- fuck." He bites his tongue, his feet skidding on the concrete as he reaches for the nearest trashbag. Bruised fingernails tear holes in the plastic and, grimancing at the stench, he plunges his hand inside. There's something very specific that he's looking for, and he's certaon that at least one of these assholes from one of the apartment complexes have–
–and bingo. The pads of his fingers skim over cold glass and trash comes spilling out of the bag as he wrenches a wine bottle from the very bottom of the mess. The poor man's disinfectant, he recounts, staring at the rosy pink liquid spilling around inside of it. It’s no vodka, but he’s got to take what he can get.
“Alcohol is alcohol, right?” he mutters, sleepily admiring the way the wine sloshes.
Leaning against the wall, he uncaps the bottle of water he'd been helpfully provided with and pours the contents onto the wounds so as to flood any dirt and old blood out of the way. It only stings, but the chilled water hitting tender skin has his teeth grinding and toes curling in the steel toecaps of his suit's boots.
“God,” he breathes. “This is so fucked.”
Absolutely, dizzyingly, undeniably fucked, because this wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn't supposed to happen at all. He isn't supposed to be slumped in some alleyway like this, tending to his own wounds as though he's not got any other options. But he's so, so tired and so sickeningly disorientated, and he's sure that if he can just get himself out of the deep end, he can get home again.
Steeling himself, Peter uncaps the wine bottle with shaking hands and tips it onto the wound. It burns – fuck, it burns, unrelenting and electrifying as pain skitters through his skin and down to the tips of his toes – and Peter bites down so hard he can feel the blood leaking through his teeth from where they’ve sunken into his lips. An ugly sob escapes him and he throws the empty bottle somewhere into the pile of trashbags scattered in front of him. “Fuck,” he groans out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fucking g– guns.”
It throbs even once it’s over, but the worst of the pain declines in choppy increments. Watery blood and wine trails off his abdomen and onto the concrete beneath him, mixing with a grey puddle left by the rain in multicoloured swirls, like oil into water. He rubs the last of it away with his glove and applies the bandages with shaking hands.
It’s messy work – messy enough that Bruce isn’t going to be happy with him at all – but it gets the job done. For the most part, the bleeding has slowed down, and Peter’s head feels just a fraction clearer, like a beam of sunshine breaking through a vast horizon of dark, thunderous cloudscape. It's fine. It's okay. He’s got to take what he can get.
But it’s as he’s clambering to his feet, the wall he’d been lying against playing a reliable crutch, that he feels it; that horrifying feeling of ice skittering up his spine like a spider; terror hitting his stomach like a rock amongst the sediment of a lake bed; the undeniable sensation of his innate fear response shooting through his bloodstream. The molecules in the air displace and there’s a soft scuffle of rubber shoes against concrete behind him. Peter spins to face them with wobbly instinctive reflexes, his webshooters looming, fists itching to protect himself, and–
>><<
Peter Parker is not, by any capacity of the word, a stupid person. In fact, it’s safe to say that he is entirely the opposite. Academically, he is absurdly gifted, with aptitudes in chemistry, physics, and engineering due to his genius-level intellect. He is effortlessly multilingual, read-well, talented at math and perceptive to the point where it is actually unsettling, with an undeniable strength lying in strategy and quickfire improvisation.
But while Peter Parker is dexterous with an unbelievably keen intelligence, there is one glaring trait that he lacks in particular; common fucking sense.
This is especially prevalent in his duties as Spiderman, Clint Barton had come to realize one foggy evening when Peter had come bumbling through the window with a four inch blade embedded in his stomach. According to KAREN, he’d reflexively thrown himself in the path of the blade instead of doing literally anything else that could have incapitated the problem at hand. Just like the self-sacrificing idiot that he is.
Perhaps kicker of that night, Clint reminisces, is that Peter had busied himself with finishing his fucking chemistry homework barely ten minutes after their resident doctor had removed the blade from his stomach and stopped him from bleeding out on the common room floor. It’s due tomorrow! he’d insisted at the time, having battled away the one man army that is Mother Bird Bruce Banner. If I don’t get it done, I’ll get a detention! It’s important!
He has this extraordinary habit of avoiding assistance offered to him, preferring to achieve his own authentic victories and deal with the fallout on his own. It does make sense – Spiderman was nothing short of a powerhouse solo act for a long time and even superpowered humans are creatures of routine – but, eventually, the kid is going to have to get used to the fact that he’s part of a team now.
It’s this that comes to mind when JARVIS summons Clint out of his workout at exactly half one in the morning under the guise of, “I have pinged Mr. Parker’s location on your watch for you, Mr. Barton. He should currently be out of commission. He requires back-up to incapacitate the attacker as well as immediate urgent medical attention.”
“Should?” Clint echoes, slinging his bow over his shoulder.
“According to his heart rate and adrenaline levels, he is currently still engaged in battle.”
“Of course he is.” The window opens automatically for him as he approaches the glass. He doesn’t move nearly as fast as Tony’s stupid suit does, and leaving down the side of the Tower saves him a lot of crucial time where he needs all he can get. “Of fucking course he is.”
The location is an alleyway only a short five minutes away from the Tower, which tells Clint that he was probably trying to get home from patrol before he got into trouble. It’s Parker luck, is what Peter would tell him. It’s always Parker luck.
And really, at this point, Clint is starting to believe him. Upon touching down on the concrete, he picks up on the scuffle immediately. The unmistakable sound of Peter’s web fluid discharging and the resounding thwump of skin hitting the ground of the low-rise apartment complexes towering over the otherwise-secluded backstreet. Before he can so much as shift a foot, a little red and blue body skids across the floor and rams into his ankles.
“Hey,” Peter Parker rolls unceremoniously onto his stomach. “What’re you doing here?”
The boy’s chest heaves and his arms shudder with the strain of his own weight as he pushes himself onto his hands and knees. It doesn’t take much critical observation to know that there is something very, very wrong with the teenager panting at his feet. His limbs shake with the threat of buckling with every fraction of movement. The slanted white eyes of his suit zoom in and out feverishly, implicating that either the suit or the functionality of Peter’s vision took damage, and there’s a sickening mass of blood soaking into his torso.
JARVIS, apparently taking initiative while Clint reels at Peter’s state, starts to speak through his hearing aid. “I have detected an unidentifiable substance in Mr. Parker’s bloodstream. There are also two bullets in his stomach and his left leg is broken in two places. The wounds in his stomach appear as though he has attempted to clean them up himself, implicating they are not new, and run the risk of infection if left untreated. I recommend immediate medical intervention so that his wounds do not heal before the bullets can be removed and so that the bone does not heal incorrectly, Mr. Barton.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Clint bends down to tend to Peter, but the teenager is on his feet in an instant, swaying dangerously like a leaf in the wind. The fact that he’s still standing is an indubitable exhibition of his strength and iron will, but today, Clint does not have time to be impressed or proud.
The kid is drugged, bleeding out and absolutely dead set on defeating his target. That in itself makes him a deadly force to be reckoned with.
The person that barrages out of the backstreet towards them is not someone that Clint recognises. They don’t look like much – a man perhaps in his twenties, with thick, dark hair, an unkempt beard and clothes that are a victim to the wear and tear of age – but Clint takes note of the syringes dangling between his fingers and makes the safe assumption that they are the source of the drugs coursing through Peter’s system. They’re handicapping him; slowing him down; or maybe that’s down to the bloodloss.
With expert precision, the marksman unloads two arrows into the man’s body; one to his shoulder and the other to his left knee. Everything in him wants to spill the guy’s brains onto the pavement there and then, but he’s smart enough to know that there’s a large possibility he’s the only one who knows anything about this drug. Not that they aren’t capable of dealing with it on their own, but with their resident billionaire genius out of town, he isn’t going to take any chances.
Those shots were more than enough to disable him. He tumbles to the concrete with a violent cry as his knee is taken out of commision and the plastic syringes scatter across the floor. He holds the arrow sticking out of his shoulder as though his life depends on it, even though Clint knows he hasn't been hit anywhere fatal. It’s safe to assume that he isn’t going to be going anywhere fast.
And– oh, shit.
Clint’s head snaps towards the kid, who has by now listed forwards into a quivering pile of red and blue on the ground. “Pete,” he gasps, immediately diving towards him. The dark puddle soaking into his workout sweatpants is the last thing he cares about right now. “Pete, kid, stay with me.”
The white eyes adjust erratically as Peter tries to look up at him, and so, trusting the empty backstreet outside of the alleyway and the shadows cast by the flickering street lamps to keep them hidden from prying onlookers, Clint peels his mask off.
Peels, because the kid is soaked in sweat to the point that he may as well be more liquid than solid. His skin is slick and colourless; a sick shade of grey; and his hair sticks to his forehead. While there are no noticeable bruises or lacerations on his face, Clint takes note of how his pupils are blown wide from whatever drug he’s been put under and realizes that shit, this could be so, so bad. Peter’s superhuman metabolism allows him to quickly work through foreign substances, but that doesn’t necessarily make him immune from the side-effects of that.
Not to mention the fact that, what with how Spiderman is a popular public figure, it’s not unusual for people with grudges to spend legitimate time and effort creating something that could really do a number even on him. This guy could have conjured a drug designed specifically for Peter’s physiology. It’s not exactly unheard of. Hell, they do that at the Tower.
“Shit, Pete,” Clint whispers. “How’re you still awake?”
If he can even call it that; he’s looking past him, visibly dazed, eyes twitching as they search desperately for something to focus on. The boy is sluggish in responding to touch and sound. It’s as if Clint isn’t even there in the first place. Something thick places itself in his throat and chest.
“Cl’nt,” Peter slurs, then. “‘s that you?”
“It’s me, kid.” He brings his free hand – the other one occupied in trying to quench some of the bleeding from the bullet wounds, both of which being barely a finger-size apart from each other – up to Peter’s face to unstick his sweaty hair from his forehead. If there’s one new thing on his to-do list, it’s making sure Tony makes his next suit bulletproof. “It’s me. Just stay awake for me, okay? Stay awake. Keep talking to me, kid.”
“Mmm,” is all Peter offers, blinking slowly.
“Mr. Barton,” comes JARVIS’ voice from his hearing aid. “I recommend that Mr. Parker receives medical attention as soon as possible. I have alerted Dr. Banner and his medical team. They are preparing for his arrival at the Tower. I have also alerted Sir, who has proceeded to cancelled the remainder of his trip to come back to the Tower as soon as possible.”
“Shit,” Clint curses; partially because he has the sicko on the floor behind him to worry about, but mostly because he’s so, so afraid that jostling the kid too much will catapult him into a stage too far gone. “Shit. Okay. Okay.” Panic seizes his heart, but the last thing Peter needs is for him to start panicking right now. He cards his fingers through the boy’s sweaty locks again. “Call someone from the Tower to pick him up, J. Can you get me– uhh– I don’t know, one of Stark’s suits to fly him home in?”
“Certainly. ETA: 124 seconds.”
It’s then that Peter finally cries out; the adrenaline from the fight must have run its course. “Sss… Cl’nt,” he limps out through torrid lips. His head lolls against the concrete and his blinking gradually becomes slower and harsher as seconds pass, as though he is trying to keep himself awake consciously. Blood sluggishly pools through his teeth and out of the corner of his mouth. “Snnnzzzz.”
“No, no, no,” Clint hisses. “Stay with me, Pete. No sleeping, you hear me? No sleeping!”
“No sssleeping.”
“Pete!”
To reiterate; Peter Parker is one of the most intellectual people that Clint Barton has ever met, but he has this marvellous habit of being a fucking idiot with chronic selective hearing, and that often gets him into truckload of trouble. Today is apparently no exception, for he beams at Clint with the biggest fuck-you grin of all time and decides to fall asleep anyway.
>><<
Throughout the rest of the week, Peter Parker swims in and out of consciousness.
There are times where the kid is awake and yet so out of it that Clint isn’t even sure he considers him awake in the first place. Everything and everyone is a threat to him during these periods of time, cycling between snarling dangerously at them and cowering as though they’d just circled around him and beaten him to a pulp. It isn’t unusual for him to become suddenly hyperaware of his surroundings, throw himself off the bed in a desperate escapade frenzy and tear the IV out of his arm while he’s at it.
Fortunately, these episodes soak the energy out of the kid like a sponge. It is exhausting for him to be this acutely distressed and manic and, considering he barely has any steam chugging through his body in the first place, it never takes long for him to lose the fight to unconsciousness. More often than not, he ends up vomiting before he does so.
Other times, Peter wakes up vacant and confused. Bruce and the rest of his medical team can often check on his ailments, refresh any dirty bandages and clean him up without much interference during these periods. They’re generally short and he often goes right back to sleep within ten minutes. Clint isn’t sure he’s entirely aware of anything at all when he’s like this, but he’ll take it over the kid overexerting himself to the point where he vomits again.
It’s almost terrifying, watching this overwhelming sickness rip through Peter like a hot knife through butter; how quickly that downhill drop comes; how fast the other shoe can drop. Within the industrial steel walls of this Tower, their spider is their sunshine, and seeing him in that bed, his skin washed out to a sickening shade of grey and a shallow rasp in his throat with every breath… It's haunting.
Both Bruce and Tony declare to Clint several times that the symptoms will mitigate early into the following week, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. The image of his Peter Parker bleeding sluggishly through his fingers on the concrete, pupils blown and barely even coherent, remains imprinted on the underside of his eyelids and he just can’t blink it away.
Clint has seen a lot of Peter. So, so much. He’s seen him kicking back on the couch in the Tower’s common room, nestled between Sam and Natasha with a bowl of buttered popcorn between his legs, laughing at some dumb gimmick in the movie he’d convinced them all to watch. He’s seen him sleeping the stars away at his own desk, exhausted by his own hard work, eyelids relaxed with a nightmare that never came. He’s seen the way his eyes light up with constellations of pride as something he created comes to life; the way his entire being glows with child-like wonder as he realizes he’s faced with something new and incredible.
He’s seen the kid struggle with grief and loss; wrestle with the concept of his own self-worth. He’s seen him learning that he’s allowed agency that he shouldn’t have lost in the first place; that he deserves support and family. There are a lot of flip-sides of the coin to this kid and Clint thinks he’s seen them all; yet seeing that twisted amalgamation of sickness and detachment take it’s hold on his body; watching the blood run between his teeth with a look in his eyes so terrible and empty that perhaps, it was downright disturbing; has left him with an ache he isn’t sure will ever leave him after this.
“He’s going to be fine,” Bruce insists one early afternoon, after Clint had come barrelling into the infirmary demanding updates for the fifth time that day. The doctor motions to Peter’s stomach, now free of bandages but instead bestowed with two angry scars where each bullet had penetrated him. “The surgery wounds to get the bullets out have already scarred over. Those’ll probably fade before the week is over, too.”
“But–”
“–hey.” Clint must look as bewildered as he feels, for Bruce looks him up and down, places two large, comforting hands on his shoulders, and says, “seriously, Clint, he’s going to be okay. This is just his body rejecting the drug; that’s why he’s been vomiting so much. That’s why he’s so feverish. You know this. You’re just panicking.”
“I’m not panicking,” Clint snaps, “you’re panicking.”
“Clint–”
“Look, Doc–”
“Clint.” Bruce puts strength into pushing Clint into one of the chairs pushing against the wall behind him. “Listen to me. Christ, you’re almost as bad as Tony. You asked me for updates and this is me giving them to you. He is alive. He is stable. Do you hear me? He’s going to be okay.”
And the marksman supposes that he believes him, but Peter Parker is rarely out of commission for more than half a day, and so far it’s been three since he’d scooped the boy up from that alleyway. It’s hard to accept the fact of the matter when all he’s seeing terrifies him to the core.
But all of this worrying has been exhausting, he thinks, and for the first time since Peter had been admitted, he finally casts his eyes across the sleeping boy and allows himself a moment of calm. After all, their resident doctor is right. Peter is alive; he is stable; and he’s going to be okay, even if that means he has to wait some more.
>><<
“Pneumonia? You’re telling me he’s picked up pneumonia?”
“ Relax, Clint. Please relax,” Bruce begs, intentionally standing in his way so that Peter’s infirmary bed is not in his direct line of sight. “It’s not uncommon or a surprise. We’ve got him on oxygen supplementation and administered an IV for fluids. I’ve prepared a course of antibiotics for him but I’m not sure he’s going to need it. He’ll get through the pneumonia before the antibiotics become effective.”
It doesn’t take a medical degree to identify the fact of the matter. Peter is clammy and shivering even as he sleeps the early evening of the fifth day away, fever ripping through his body like a wildfire through a dry bush. They can only hope this doesn’t trigger any more violent episodes like the last one.
“He’s going to pull through,” Bruce tells him again, for what must be the billionth time this week. The doctor peels his sterile blue rubber gloves off his hands and discards them. “I’m going to go make some lunch. I’ve given him a little something to keep him under, but I didn’t exactly go crazy with the dosage, so be careful not to wake him, okay? He’ll work through it faster if he sleeps through the worst of it.”
Sam, who’d been sitting quietly in the chairs behind them until now, grabs Bruce’s wrist before he can open the door. “Any news on the person who did this to him?”
With a harsh swallow, Bruce turns to face him, something serious folding his expression. “Tony slipped me an update earlier this morning,” he tells them. “He was going to tell you himself when he catches you guys later. He– uhh. The man killed himself in his holding cell before SHIELD could begin interrogation.”
And, well– isn’t that just the thing.
“Fucking coward,” Sam spits, clenching his fists in his lap until his knuckles are bone-white. It isn’t often one sees the Falcon as angry as he is now, and when Clint looks back over at the feeble boy sleeping the sun away – hears his shallow breaths rasping in his slumber – he supposes that it’s justified.
>><<
“Unbelievable.”
The teenager looks away from the textbook creasing the thin infirmary sheets on his lap, through the shaggy brown forelock hanging over his eyes, and smiles warmly as soon as he sees the marksman hovering in the threshold of his infirmary room. “Good morning, Clint!”
“You–” Clint steps into the room, his nostrils flared, “–are unbelievable.”
Yeah. Peter Parker may not be stupid, but he’s definitely an idiot, because he apparently has no idea what the problem is with this scenario. “Umm?” he questions. “Why– why’re you mad? Did I do something wrong?”
“You–” and Clint just sucks in a long, deep breath, pushing down the synthesis of anxiety and stress that had been festering inside of him for the past week and a half with everything he has in him and more. “You– you’re studying? You’re seriously studying right now?”
“Uh– I mean–”
“Pete.”
“I’m sorry, I–”
“Peter. Pete, Pete, Pete.” The marksman grabs the teenager by the shoulders, leveling serious grey-blue eyes with puppy-dog brown ones. “You were shot in the stomach twice. You were drugged. You then developed pneumonia, and kicked it in the ass within two fucking days like it was no big deal. And you woke up– you woke up, from all of that, and the first thing you request– you ask for a fucking textbook?”
The boy looks down at the book in his lap, heat spreading across his pallid cheeks in splotchy humiliation. “I was– I was bored,” he murmurs sheepishly, “and I have midterms.” He closes the textbook and pushes it onto the bedside table to his left. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” The plastic tube connected to the IV in the crook of his elbow shudders, and he stares out of the window, searching for some kind of distraction.
The sharpshooter just closes his eyes, letting his head hang, and stays like that for a good minute. “I’m not mad at you, Pete, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m just glad you’re okay. Oh, God– I am so, so glad you’re okay. That’s all I care about. You’re okay. ” It’s then that he suddenly looks back up at the teenager, putting a large hand against his cheek and using the other to push the freshly-washed hair away from his forehead. “You’re– you’re okay, yeah? No more secret bullet wounds I need to worry about?”
And Peter can only laugh as he wraps his arms around Clint and leans into his warmth; into the soupy scent of his cologne that leeches off his clothes; relishing in this feeling of being protected and safe. “I’m okay,” he says, his giggle electric, animating the infirmary with his light and his laughter, and the marksman basks in that. “Gee, I’m okay. Are you okay?”
Clint is struck with something, then, as he looks down into his boy’s timid smiles that crinkle the corners of his eyes and dimple his cheeks. Something as gentle as the rhythmic percussion of waves on sand; as calm as the forest after dawn light kissed its colours to life.
It’s raw and strange and it doesn’t wipe away that droplet of misgiving that trickles at the back of his mind, but it’s enough to remind Clint that right now, everything is okay, and everything will continue to be okay until it isn’t anymore. And that will be dealt with when they get there.