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Matt skips a night of patrol midway through the week after Labor Day and then, when Peter comes into the office before school the next day for a bonus super-early morning shift to help Ms. Page wrangle a monstrous load of paperwork, he’s absent from there too.
Peter pesters Foggy between rounds of stapling and color coding and copying until he’s awarded with an exasperated eye roll and the pulling up of a sleeve to reveal an elbow bandaged with vet wrap, which is hot pink and stamped all over with cheetah print.
Peter stops hole-punching and squints.
Ms. Page taps him on a shoulder blade and he turns to see a second arm, bared as well, sporting an identical belt of pink.
The squint persists.
“We donated blood, hon.”
Oh.
Oh?
“Matt passed out.”
Ah.
Why?
“He’s dumb.”
Well, yes, but how so?
“Got no blood to give.”
Ms. Page had stayed up all night last night trying to get a head start on the mess of paperwork in front of them. She can be forgiven for not holding up her end of the conversation, Peter reasons.
But just this once.
He flicks his concerned gaze back to Foggy, whose baggy eyes shrink further into his face and whose mouth expresses an intense and deeply felt irritation. “Fuck’s sake, kid. Fine.”
Matt sounds all floppy and loopy on the phone when Foggy shoves Peter into the conference room so that he can call and be undisruptive.
He’s in his and Wade’s apartment, Peter is informed by a slurred and floaty voice. Safe and sound, tucked into an afghan on that ratty fucking couch that he refuses to get rid of regardless of how many times he tries to bleed out on it.
Peter hums. “Wade there?”
“‘S at a meeting a few blocks over,” Matt drawls. He sounds farther away, like he’s put the phone on speaker and set it a couple of feet away.
“What’s going on, then? Why aren’t you at the office?”
“Sick day. Oh, reminds me, ‘m sorry I missed out on the work last night. It was—ahhh—hold on…” Matt drifts off. A couch spring creaks. Peter can hear a grimace in the hiss that follows.
There’s a bit of a commotion, and then a new voice emerges from farther away. “Get your ass back on that couch before I come over there with a seam ripper and ruin all your boyfriend’s stitches,” it snaps, sharp like the edge of a razor.
That voice is one that Peter recognizes; it belongs to Ms. Temple, and it’s full of a potent concoction of piss, vinegar, and bleach that he’s found to be unique to the shared cadence of medical care professionals.
“Hi, Ms. Temple,” Peter says, projecting. Foggy throws him a look through the glass of the conference room windows: keep it down. Peter winces and gives a little salute.
“Mmm. Spider-Man. You in the mood to babysit this morning?” Ms. Temple asks. She’s moved closer to the mic—Matt’s definitely got him on speaker.
“I’d love to, ma’am, but I need to be at school a little after eight.”
“Ah, well. Figured I’d give it a shot. This is hell.”
Matt squawks in protest. There’s the sound of flesh hitting flesh, and Matt makes another, breathier screech. He moans in defeat and laments, “Peter, save me, ’m bein’ assaulted by my doctor.”
“Pity, that,” Ms. Temple deadpans. There’s another little scuffle.
Peter’s brain catches up to the other end of the conversation and he butts in to ask, “Hey, back up a minute: stitches?”
“Mmm, like the kind snitches get,” Matt says.
Ms. Temple snorts. “No, like the ones idiots get when they let themselves get impaled.”
“Impaled?! Like, on something sharp?” Peter asks. Foggy glares and Peter throws a conceding hand up.
“It wasn’t—not like—”
“Wouldn’t call a galvanized pipe particularly sharp, but it sure was a pain in the ass to remove,” Ms. Temple interjects.
Fucking. A pipe. A fucking pipe.
How do you get impaled on a fucking pipe? Ow?
“Wasn’ as bad as it sounds. Was a pretty small pipe.”
Ohhhhh-kay. Drugged-up Matt is not to be trusted—even more so than sober Matt.
“I’m—I gotta go before I’m late for school. I’ll see if I can swing by this evening to help out, Ms. Temple.”
“Alright, Peter. I’ll be at work, but Wade or Foggy should be here. This idiot—” There’s the quick shift of fabric and an indignant yelp “—will probably still be out of it. See what info you can drag out of him.”
“Wha’s ‘out of it’ s’posed to mean?” Matt asks, half self-righteous and half self-conscious.
Peter pulls the receiver away from his ear and presses the end call button, fingers achy at the prospect of returning to his hole-punching post in the other room.
Wade appears on a bench in a corner of the front courtyard of Peter’s school as he’s descending the steps after Acadec practice, lagging behind Ned and MJ to watch them argue over something related to the lab they’re partnered on in chem. He spots the magenta headphones bobbing up and down to the rhythm of whatever song is playing through them and adjusts his trajectory accordingly.
A teacher—one whom Peter hasn’t yet learned under—is on a smoke break across the courtyard from Wade. She sizes him up and narrows her eyes as Peter approaches, taking a pointed drag from the butt of her dying cigarette.
The courtyard smells like an ashtray and a half.
Wade’s eyes are closed and his music is loud enough that it spills from his headphones and out into the immediate vicinity. Peter leans in real close, waits until his head-bopping hits a lull, and prods him squarely in an eye.
He’s successful in getting Wade’s attention; he jumps, yelps, and yanks his headphones away from his ears. His eyes take a moment to focus and lock onto his antagonizer and then his mouth breaks out into a toothy grin. “Petey! Just who I came to see.”
“What’re you doin’ here? There an emergency or something?”
Wade’s bald head shakes. “No, I was just in the area, figured I’d stop by. Where’s the rest of your little gang?”
“Went on ahead of me. Ned’s so damn scared of you, it’s a good thing he left before you showed up.”
Wade pouts. “What’s he got against me?! I’m just a big ol’ teddy bear,” he bemoans, standing and crushing Peter in an embrace so tight it lifts him off his feet and he sees stars. He taps out against the small of Wade’s back.
The soles of his shoes scuff against the ground as he’s set down. Wade sits to retrieve his headphones. The teacher coughs conspicuously, and Peter turns to give her a glare.
A thought comes to mind, watching her standing alone, hunched. Sucking on her stick of cancer.
To voice or not to voice?
Fuck it. He’s feeling impulsive. “I was thinkin’ about going and giving blood this weekend. Since I’m old enough.”
Wade’s fingers pause in their fiddling with the buttons on the headphones. His eyes, wide and alarmed, the picture of incredulity, find Peter’s.
“My sweet, summer child. Boyo. You’re a hot little nugget of highly manic, highly radioactive energy. You donate blood and they put it under a ‘scope, they’ll have you stuck in the highest security research facility they can dream up ‘fore you can say ‘irradiated spider bite’.”
These are fair points.
Doesn’t mean Peter has to like ‘em.
He harrumphs to emphasize his displeasure.
Wade’s shoulders aren’t impressed. “Not gonna happen, kiddo.”
“How about organs?”
“Oh, my god, you’re gonna give someone cancer.”
Oh, now there’s a thought. Peter adds a little fry to his voice and asks, “What about you?”
“I don’ want your organs. Can grow my own back just fine, thanks.”
Peter shakes his head vigorously. His hair falls across his eyes and he blows it out of the way to match Wade’s mean-spirited glare. “No—not me. You. You ever tried to give blood?”
“What, are you stupid? I’ve got—I am—” Wade starts to gesture to himself, but shifts gears halfway through to collect his argument. “I got so much cancer. But—” He breaks eye contact to stare into the middle distance with an excess of vitriol. He lowers his brow and sits back for a second, silent. Pensive.
“You constipated?”
Wade rolls his eyes and mutters, “Thinking.” He chews on the inside of his bottom lip.
Peter waits.
He tires of waiting and hums the Jeopardy theme. His heels bounce to the rhythm.
Wade’s face goes suddenly blank. He says, “I used to donate plasma when I was strapped for cash, ‘fore I got diagnosed. You think if I donate blood now it’d give the recipient cancer?”
“Like an STD?”
“What? Pete, no, that’s only a—do you know how STDs work?”
“Well, I hearda one called ‘crabs’, which I was kind of hoping was where your genitals grow crab claws.”
Wade’s face crumples into his palms. “What the fuck kind of sex education are they giving you?” he whimpers into his hands.
Peter shrugs, eyes big. “Dunno. I don’t even live in an abstinence-only school district; at least they taught me about birth control.”
Wade fakes a dramatic sob into his fingers.
“Anyway. You have cancer. But you also have crazy regenerative abilities, so maybe it’d cancel out and the person wouldn’t be affected?”
“Son, you weren’t alive at the height of the AIDS epidemic. There’s guidelines upon guidelines for this shit. I ain’t been eligible to donate since the turn of the century, if not before,” Wade replies, rocking into his hands. “Hell, I wouldn’t be allowed to most of the time regardless of how cancerous I was.”
“Why most of the time?”
Wade picks his head up and cocks his eyebrow, bends his neck. Pulls the corners of his mouth down, waiting. There must be something Peter’s missing, something he’s naive to.
He wracks his brain for things Wade’s done or had done to him that would render him ineligible: there’s the cancer, of course. Would scarring or open wounds disqualify him? A criminal record? What else?
Oh—
“Fuck, oh, shit—eugh! I don’ wanna think about that!”
Wade throws his weight back and cackles. Says, “Minimum three months, Spidey! How long was I in Brazil, hm?”
Peter doesn’t want to say it.
“Say it.”
God, what he would give to send his knee right into Wade’s self-satisfied nose as hard as he can. He grimaces and says, “Three months.”
“To! The! Day!” Wade replies, clapping after each word to emphasize his point. “And what did our friend the devil do yesterday?”
Hrnh, gross.
Peter plasters on a thinking face. Wade observes, expectant. He doesn’t want to talk about Wade’s sex life in any greater detail, and if they keep on the topic for too long he’s bound to find something out that’ll scar him forever.
What’s the best course of action here? With Matt, it’d be impossible to escape the topic until he was thoroughly embarrassed. With Wade, the key to success is almost always distraction. “I signed up to be an organ donor on my ID; do I needa get that changed?” he asks after a beat.
Back into the hands that bald head goes. Mission success.
“What?! It’s a fair question!”
“Your liver alone would make Geiger counters go crazier than the damn Elephant’s Foot.”
“Would not!” he retorts.
Wade pulls his head up minutely. A single eye gazes up at him through the fingers. “We playin’ by toddler conceptions of absolute truth? Yes, it absolutely would.”
“No, I’m serious, the Elephant’s Foot kills anyone who gets near it in, like, ten minutes.”
“Elephant’s Foot ain’t parading around in a suit made of human flesh,” Wade says from behind his hands. “Give the thing a people skin; it’ll lower the radioactivity level.”
“No the fuck it wouldn’t! It’d burn off in, like, five seconds!”
“Who told you that? God? I don’t answer to that bastard,” Wade replies, smug.
Peter drags his palms down his face, pulling the lower lids of his eyes down against his cheeks. “I just… It’s just common sense!”
Wade’s face emerges once again and he pushes off the chair to stand up, abrupt. Peter startles. “Regardless: neither one of y’all are allowed to donate any bodily substances,” Wade says, making for the courtyard’s yawning doorway.
Neither one? Peter and who else, the Foot?
“Ten points for Gryffindor!” he calls out, broad back to Peter, almost out to the sidewalk.
“You take that back, you bitch! I’m a Hufflepuff!” He cries to the retreating figure, but Wade’s already finished with the conversation, has checked out, is putting his headphones back over his ears.
The teacher, cigarette dead between her fingers, gawks after him.
Does he want to chase this conversation?
He knows his answer: yes. But not with Wade, who’s decided to be a damn brick wall.
When he broaches the topic with Mr. Stark, the man stares at him through his greasy lab goggles with his lips parted and his eyes all scrunched up like a baby bird, and Peter has to bite his cheek to keep from laughing.
“Sorry, you wanna what?”
“Give blood!”
Dr. Banner snorts from his workbench a row over.
Stark’s face contorts again into something reminiscent of an animal who’s just bitten into a lemon. “Why?”
Peter blanks.
Banner, ever the philanthropist, comes to his rescue: “Probably ‘cause he’s just passed the minimum age threshold, I’d assume.”
Peter nods with vigor. Tony reaches out and puts a hand on the crown of his shaking head like he’s trying to settle a bobblehead. “Okay. I’m sure you already know how much you cannot do that, right?” he asks, concern written across his every feature.
“Why not? Daredevil did it, and he’s enhanced.” he counters.
Stark removes his goggles and sets them down, leaving behind brown-black fingerprint smudges in the lenses. He cards an oily hand through his oily hair and sets about retrieving a sweatrag from beneath the dismembered robot sprawled across his workshop tabletop. “Kid, Daredevil isn’t radioactive. And he’s not someone whose example you should be following.”
He's not a damn kid.
“Yes you are. My lab, my rules,” Stark says, triumphant in his successful retrieval of the rag.
Dr. Banner comes sidling over, real casual-like, eyeing a component of the robot next to Mr. Stark’s left hand. “I’m inclined to quibble with you there, Tony,” he says, making eye contact with Peter and holding it as he leans against the corner of the countertop and surreptitiously inches the part away from Stark’s impatiently tapping fingers. “Not about the ‘kid’ semantics—”
Peter deflates.
“—but about Daredevil. How do we know he isn’t a mutant? Or radioactive?”
Stark scoffs.
“I’m serious! Just consider it. Would enhancements like his—” he nods at Peter “—be transmissible?”
A disbelieving stare. “You forget that Jennifer exists or something? That right there’s proof enough for me.”
Jennifer?
Banner’s mouth goes all small. He’s managed to get the robot part all the way to the edge of the table without catching Mr. Stark’s attention. “My cousin. I tried giving her a blood transfusion a while back—god, has it been over ten years? Jesus, I’m old.”
Peter cocks his head. “What happened to her?” he asks in a near whisper.
Stark pulls a drawer open to his right and pats around for a moment, produces a thing of fresh glass slides and covers. “She’s fine, just a bit greener, is all,” he says as he crosses behind Peter to the microscope and pulls open yet more drawers to rummage around in. Dr. Banner takes the opportunity to tuck the pilfered part into his crossed arms and return to his station. He and Peter exchange furtive nods.
Hrrrm. “But there’s a chance it could be fine, right? If someone was given my blood?”
Stark stands and turns to face him, a finger prick lancet in one hand and a box of alcohol swabs in the other. “Wanna find out?”
Oh. Needles. Peter’s not on the best of terms with those. “Not really,” he mumbles, tucking his hands into his pants pockets and hunching.
“You asked, kid.”
He’s not a kid.
“Whatever. C’mere and lemme poke you, near-adult.”
Eugh, fine. He swallows against the bile trying to climb its way up his esophagus and tries to think of anything but the needle, which means, of course, that he becomes immediately and singularly fixated on it.
His blood is decisively abnormal. Dr. Banner does some molecular-biology-doctorate shit to it involving a centrifuge, takes a peek on the highest magnification scope the lab offers, and declares that his DNA is “so effectively fucked it might as well be half-cooked scrambled eggs”.
This does not bode well for his donor eligibility status. He sits and sulks for a minute. “I could go in and try anyway.”
“That’s a good way to blow your cover and earn a one-way ticket to the Raft,” Mr. Stark reasons.
Hmmm.
“I’m gonna go. I’ll just lie to ‘em.”
“Pete, no.”
“Okay, then; what should I say? How would I even start? ‘Hi, my blood is Chernobyl water, want some?’ That would go so well.”
“Why do you want to do this so badly?”
He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know, and that scares him.
There’s something deeply unsettling to him about the fact that he can do so many things that others can’t, but this thing that is so purely philanthropic, so selfless, so completely human as giving blood is barred to him forever.
And suddenly he completely understands why Matt did it despite his injuries.
Why Wade spoke about his ineligibility with the bitterest look of defeat gracing his face.
It’s demoralizing. It’s a matter of identity. Of humanity. Of purity and politics.
For the two of them, it had been a statement. It had been a cry into the uncaring void. A scream that dared the universe to acknowledge their humanness:
I’m here, and I exist, and I’m not doing anything wrong by taking up space, Matt cried.
I’ve been through too much fucked up shit for the betterment of my kind for them to ostracize me when I show the burden I’ve been tasked with carrying, the scars I’ve collected from it all, Wade said.
I’m worthy of love, and I’m worthy of loving and expressing my love. For my fellow humans, for my communities, for the people I hold close. For myself, if I can manage it. And I’m not stained or dirty or rendered inferior for it, their desperate unsung voices echoed in synchrony.
And I’ll jump through your stupid hoops, I’ll sacrifice as much time and health and love and compassion as it takes to prove it.
Of course, there are the necessary guidelines, concerns about public health and safety. That’s where Peter’s getting stuck—it’s where Wade is trapped as well. It’s why he let Matt get poked so soon after such a significant injury, knowing the risks.
Peter’s unfathomably angry with himself. Because it’s not some selfless act of giving when he knows he might be hurting someone he’s trying to help. And in his heart he never really expected he’d get to donate, that he was chasing his own tail so fast, so exhaustively that it was nauseating.
It still stings, though.
Stark must read these thoughts on his face, because he sets down the motherboard he’s been mugging at for the past half hour and levels his gaze at him. “Kid. It’s not a moral failing to be ineligible for shit. Even—scratch that, especially—if it’s shit you really want to do.”
“Yeah.”
“And there’s no reason to blame yourself,” he says, eyes prickly with laugh lines and earnest and hard to look into for too long.
“Mhm.”
“And I’m here for you if you need to talk about shit.”
“Thanks, Mr. Stark,” Peter says. Breaks eye contact to stare intently at the hands in his lap which he knows are his but which feel impossibly alien. “I should probably head out; s’gettin’ late.”
“You gonna be okay gettin’ home in the rain?”
He nods, stands, smiles, unhearing. Thanks Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner again. Walks robotically in the direction of the door and pretends he doesn’t hear his blood—his mutinous, undonatable, inexpugnable blood—roaring in his ears.
He shoots May a text telling her not to wait up for dinner, that he’s swinging by Matt’s, and then pockets his phone for the remainder of the miserable, soggy subway journey to the Kitchen.
Wade and Matt are both home. Foggy’s there too, nearly hidden behind a stack of paper boxes and binders, typing furiously while Matt, laid out on the couch, dictates to him.
Wade’s got a look in his eyes that Peter doesn’t like; it’s one he seldom sees, but when he does, it’s usually on the edge of a roof, or muddied by the acetic burning stench of bleach and vinegar, or tempered by a resolute surety that’s impossible to penetrate.
He makes a mental note to mention it to Matt when Wade’s not around.
He waits until Matt and Foggy come to a stopping point for the evening, until that unnerving trench coat is retrieved from the coat closet and goodbyes are exchanged. The door closing startles Wade out of a stupor in the kitchen. He takes one look at the state of the living room and begs off for the night, citing exhaustion. Matt listens, mouth pressed into a thin line, as he passes them and ambles down the hall.
Matt sits up slowly, painfully. He takes the shirt he’s wearing off to reveal a tapestry of bandages adorning the area surrounding his left shoulder joint. There’s a few dots of bright red on the one spread across his shoulder blade and into his armpit.
“D’you ever worry about arthritis?” Peter asks before thinking.
Matt’s head swivels in his direction. “I don’t need to worry about that shit; I got plenty going on already.” He cracks his neck to punctuate his point and winces as his shoulder moves with the stretch.
Fair enough. Peter sometimes forgets that half the folks he hangs around are old fucking farts. He winds his way around the mess of papers spilling forth from the coffee table and steals Wade’s favorite seat. “What’s goin’ on with him?”
“‘S been a long month, and he’s still jet-lagged, and I think he’s having somethin’ of a domestic with Cable,” Matt responds. He sets to work trying to remove the bandaging, tongue caught between his teeth in concentration. He gets the front half off okay, but reaching across to get to his upper back elicits a sharp, abbreviated hiss. Peter hasn’t seen him in such rough shape since the “Abe incident”, as he’s taken to calling it in his head.
Thinking back to that version of Matt hurts, and seeing the ghosts of the ensuing months written in eddies and whorls of scarring across his chest, across his eyelids, only exacerbates it. Peter stands, restless, and crosses behind the couch to help with the hard-to-reach parts.
Matt doesn’t thank him, but he doesn’t refuse the help either.
There’s a little bruise on the inner elbow of his uninjured arm., and suddenly the initial purpose of this visit resurfaces in his memory. “How d’you know your blood’s okay to give?”
“Full of questions this evening, are we?”
Peter flushes.
Matt chuckles and continues, “I’m not a hundred percent on it, but there’s this… feeling, I guess you could call it? And I get it, kind of—Ahh—” He sucks air through clenched teeth as Peter peels back the gauze stained with flecks of blood. He mutters a sorry under his breath. Matt forces himself to exhale and resumes, “I get this feeling up and down my spine when someone who’s been exposed to enough mutagens to matter is around. Like: you, Wade, Jones? Y’all three have fuckin’ battery acid running through your veins, I swear. Barton and Stark, even Rogers—none of ‘em gimme that feeling.”
“And you can tell that you’re good too?” Peter asks, examining the exposed bunch of stitching where Matt’s armpit meets the skin stretching across his scapula. Nothing’s popped, just some weeping and some irritated skin from being pulled taut to close the wound.
He was right on the phone; it couldn’t have been a particularly fat pipe. Any bigger and it would probably have shattered something instead of shifting shit around.
Matt says, “Like I said, I don’t know for sure, but Claire said the hospitals are so desperate for donors it’s probably worth it to try. They put everything through a bunch of tests before it passes muster, and since Jen Walters—”
“Dr. Banner’s cousin? You know her?”
Matt turns his head as much as he can so that Peter may better appreciate his judgmental brow in all its glory. “I’m a public defender in New York, and I’m told she’s frequently seen being very tall and very green in the courtroom. The amount of overlap between the circles we run in is pretty expansive.”
Another vigilante lawyer? This a pattern now?
“God, no. She’s much too high-profile for that.”
Hm. Confusing. Peter pats him on the uninjured shoulder and asks after the medkit.
While he’s holding medical shears between his teeth and taping and smacking Matt’s hand away from the art that is his bandaging job in-progress, he tacks another one of those cries into the void onto the pushpin-and-red-string corkboard in his head. Makes sure Matt’s drawling, sulfuric Kitchen accent makes it in there:
I’m here, and I’ve been having to force myself to believe that I matter, and it’s fucking hard to do that and make sure the world knows it too, and I care more about the world than I’ll ever be able to make me care about myself. And I’m tired, and getting old, and it’s easier to get poked with a needle than it is to be impaled by a pipe.
Then Peter adds one in his own voice, and it says:
I’ve been blaming myself for things that are out of my control my whole life, and it’s damn hard to kill old habits, but I’m trying; that’s the most I can ask of myself right now.
Because I’m a person, and I get to be selfish and feel grief and be angry at nothing, and because redistributing the burden of living doesn’t mean I’ve failed—it means that I’m willing to accept help, that I’ll have more help to offer to those in need.
I’m still learning that I’m enough, regardless of what I do or don’t; can or cannot; will or won’t do for others.