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Eleven PM. A shockingly civilised time to head home for the night, Jack still thinks. But these are his Tuesdays now. Civilised.
“Wrapping up?” Julio hollers at him from across the floor, startling the patient he’s changing saline bags for. He never knows what volume to start conversations at.
“Wrapping up. Got a date with some oven-bake mozzarella sticks and I Am Not Okay With This.”
“You know they cancelled that?”
“Cancelled it?”
“Yeah, after one season. Stole it from us.”
“They didn’t. I just started watching it!”
“How did you not know that, Jay? Everyone knows that.”
“I’m on a social media detox, Jay.”
They’re both J names, except Julio gets a cool name like Julio. That’s why they’re Jay to one another. Patient confusion is rife on ward 4.
Days at the MedBay aren’t slow exactly, but compared to Mercy General they’re a walk in the park. Although they get some–let’s call them exotic cases up here, victims of supervillain attacks that throw curveballs in the form of acidic goop, creative impalements, magical discombobulation, animal-themed claw marks… there are a lot of animal guys. Jack’s not one to shame, but.
But that’s a kind of excitement Jack can thrive on. The weird and wonderful. The urgent overflow from the city wards that Stark directs here, grateful just to have a bed and marvelling at all the future-y contraptions that catapult out of the walls and stuff. Jack didn’t know that was something Stark Industries did. It’s very cool.
Jack has now talked with Tony Stark four whole times, which he doesn’t really know how to handle if he thinks about it too hard. The job in the MedBay, the number in his phone that he can’t tell any of his old work friends about, it’s all like a trip gone very right.
And good God, some of the guys here are just. Disgusting. Disgustingly sexy. Does Stark Industries hire on hotness? Maybe it’s a compliment for Jack. Maybe he just hasn’t had a supervisor under fifty years old before.
Julio thwaps him with the empty saline bag as he goes past to trash it. Jack’s own patient, who he’d been sitting dumbly beside while he squinted (another couple month’s paycheck and then he can think about eye tests) across at the guy, shoots him a look.
Gladys, Jack mouths, don’t give me that.
“When can I see Emily?” Gladys says.
“Wow. Okay.” Jack can’t help but chuckle. The cheek of this lady. “I can see where I’m not wanted. Time to pack my bags.”
“Don’t be so dramatic about it.” She shoos him away, but she’s smiling.
Jack winks. “Tomorrow afternoon: you, me, and a dressing change. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Jack taps Julio on the shoulder as he reaches the door.
Julio points a finger. “I heard from the people at ICU that this isn’t your only gig.”
“Uh… huh?”
Jack’s just buffering a little because Julio somehow, bafflingly, managed to make that sentence the most smouldery thing he’s ever experienced.
“A couple of them saw you come in on one of your days off and disappear through a private door. And Flavia heard you on the phone to a Mister Stark.”
“Uh.”
“You his personal nurse or something?”
“I wish.” Jack coughs. “No. No, I’m not that.”
“But you were on the phone to him?” Julio’s brow knits deliciously.
“I… guess it might have seemed that way.”
“So you weren’t?”
“I’m kind of not supposed to talk about it.”
Now Julio is really interested. “Oh. Like, top secret, hush-hush stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“The Avengers?”
There’s a cute little shine to Julio’s eyes.
“Ooh. Nope. Don’t look at me like that, Jay. Joo-lio. I’m under an NDA–I’m not even kidding.”
Julio just seizes Jack’s face on either side, making him panic like crazy, and whisper-yells, “I’m gonna get it out of you!”
“For completely non-nefarious purposes?” Jack asks faintly with the complete intention of telling Julio everything at the slightest nudge.
“Oh, no. I’m going to leak it all to the press.”
“Ah. Well, then.”
“Go home, Jay. Or are you actually going home?”
Jack grins. “I am actually going home.”
“Hmm. Hmm.”
It’s only when Jack books it out of Ward 4 to de-glove and clean up that he remembers he’d meant to ask Julio if he wanted to grab a coffee some time.
Well. There’s always the next shift. Which is what he’s been saying for the last two weeks.
Gloves off, he sticks his arms under the sink and works soap across his palms. No projectile bodily fluids or alien goop today, a real win!
Jack hadn’t been lying: he is heading home, and mozzarella sticks will be involved. He’s also very much not lying about the fat NDA he’s under, concealing to the world the specifics of his role in the medical division of Stark Industries.
Peter Parker would--and has--described what Jack does as babysitting. Figures, because the kid is a massive baby about allowing others to wrest from him the joys of stitching himself up post-stabbing. Maybe ten percent of the gig involves actual nursing and ninety percent is all Jack’s squeaky-clean people skills-- manipulation, Peter says. Sort of correct, but all the bribing and coaxing and light trickery is in the name of keeping the stubborn kid kicking, so--necessary evil.
Peter gets his own private, top-secret ward, hidden away on a secret floor of the building that Jack accesses now, toe-tapping his way through an almost violatory biological scan, to poke around for a ring he thinks he lost there. He saw Bruce Banner in here once, apparently Captain America and co occasionally stop by, and he even once got to assist the legend Helen Cho as she operated on Peter. It was a confusing day because Peter was bleeding out, but also Helen Cho.
This place is kitted out like a penthouse: a big bright kitchen diner, a TV facing a cluster of couches and chairs and beanbags, with the actual hospital beds and equipment through a door on the left. Stark’s logic is that the kid is more likely to stay in his MedBay for as long as he actually needs to if he has snacks and movies.
There’s a clatter of metal as Jack approaches the door to the bay. A whispered ah, shit accompanies his entrance.
Peter Parker, suited up but for the mask, hoodie thrown on over top, darts up from behind the kitchen cabinets with wide eyes.
Okay, surprise. But he’s up and walking--which, now Jack thinks of it, doesn’t really mean anything.
Jack says, “Hi.”
Peter grins sheepishly.
He dives back out of view. Jack rounds the corner to find him juggling the spilled pans. “All this for a bag of Cheetos,” he’s muttering.
“Bag of Cheetos from the pan cupboard?"
Peter huffs, sitting back on his haunches. He really looks alright. Kind of perky. "You're right. I just said Cheetos because it was the first thing that came to mind but I was really thinking something like an omelette,” he says, gesticulating.
"Omelette?"
"Oh yeah." He springs up, and Jack sees the tension in his shoulders this time. He’s slapping a frying pan onto the hob now, and with his back turned, he spots a slight darkening of the back of his hoodie on the left. Oh, God, not more blood.
"Get those calories back, right?" Jack says faintly.
Peter points at him with a spatula. "Like you always say."
"I'll make you an omelette." Jack tries to take possession of the pan when Peter leaves it to get eggs.
“That’s super nice, but I’m good. Want to brush up on my cooking skills. Or at least, May says I should. Before college. Especially since I swing around so much. My grocery bills are gonna be through the roof! I need so much protein, you won’t believe. Does Tony still stock lunch meat? Oh, yeah, he does. Pastra-a-ami, perfect.”
“Patrol go okay?” Jack sighs.
“Pretty good.” Peter sneaks a slice of pastrami out of the pack and drops it in his mouth. He elbows Jack politely aside at the hob. “Some villain of the week turned up right at the end and I honestly thought that was my work cut out until, like, 3AM, which usually ends up happening when a superpowered guy shows up, but actually I’m pretty proud of myself tonight because I figured out his suit mechanism in about ten minutes and once I disabled that he was just some dude. Did some pep talking, got him to stand down and hopefully he’ll get a lighter sentence in prison since it turns out he was mostly just angry because the government was screwing him around on his Medicaid. He did manage to kind of bulldoze a couple buildings in the process and, I won’t lie, it was a close call on some civilians, but all’s well that ends well and all that.”
And that’s all on Peter’s Post-Patrol Prattle. Jack’s trademarked it. It’s ubiquitous after every more adrenaline-filled night out crime fighting, especially when Peter’s fighting off the pain of an injury. The kid is getting pink in the face with all the blood redistributing itself on his hoodie.
“Have you ever heard of moisturiser?”
“Hmm?” Pastrami goes into the bubbling omelette.
“Skincare.” The kid’s face has been in an eternal breakout the last five weeks. “For your poor face under the mask.”
“Why… skincare?”
“Because skincare is important, and you’re distressing me, Peter.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re distressing me right now. How many stitches will we need to do?”
Peter opens his mouth, then shuts it tight. He’s not looking at Jack, he hasn’t been looking at Jack.
“When you’ve made your omelette, can we please go over to a bed and take a look at you?”
Sometimes Peter goes through elaborate routines of distraction to get out of this moment. Tonight, Jack watches his eyes whir for a long time before he quietly says, “Okay.”
Somehow, it’s worse than if he’d fought Jack on it.
Jack leaves him in peace, heading through the door to the flashily named Ward X. He figures he’ll let Peter come in on his own time. Space is important right now. There’s nothing worse for Peter than feeling coddled, Jack’s learnt. He throws on a new set of gloves and prepares a suture kit.
He wonders how Julio is doing now. Does he have any plans for after his shift? With anyone?
Damn. Now Jack wants to check his phone, see if Julio snuck him a text, but he’d have to wash up all over again and that would be dumb. He sits needling his phone with a glare.
“Someone text you?”
Jack makes a very silly sound in his surprise.
Peter snorts. “Sorry.”
He always enters rooms silent as a ghost. He’s obliging still, hopping onto the bed and reaching over his head with a stifled wince to pull off the hoodie.
“I don’t think someone texted me.”
“I can check.” Peter goes to fold the hoodie but looks dismayed when he sees the red stain. “Wait, I leaked on this?”
“No need to check, it’s nobody. Yeah, you did. That’s what happens when you mince around in loungewear with an open wound.”
“I’ll check.” Peter leans across to where Jack set his phone, whispering a long fu-u-uck under his breath as his shoulders pull. His suit is torn to the underlayer across his upper back, and then, of course, there’s the big ol’ exit wound haloed with old blood. At least it’s not another ‘it-just-felt-too-weird-to-keep-the-knife-in’ stabbing.
“No texts,” Peter grits. He rights himself and blows out a breath that shakes. “Sorry, man. You waiting on someone?”
“You are unbelievable.”
“Thanks.” Conjuring the omelette from nowhere, Peter picks it up in his grubby little hands and swallows half of it in one go.
“Okay, Godzilla. Good to examine?”
Peter taps the spider emblem on his suit and it sags away from his torso. “Fine.”
Already-healing scrapes and bruising patchworks Peter’s back, climbing round his ribs, like he fell on his back and side hard. Jack takes a look at the other side of his shoulder, not feeling the need to lay hands on him as of yet, and finds the entry wound. All looks okay, bullet out of the picture. Beautiful.
“Just needs a dressing,” he comments. Fishing out a tub of specialist painkillers designed for Peter’s metabolism, he tosses them at Peter, who catches without looking.
“Who’s texting you, then?”
Well, Jack might as well let him have the distraction.
“Guy on my ward. About to wipe ya.” He alcohol-wipes the wound and Peter hisses. “Just a colleague right now. But, you know, he’s smart, and young, and not a complete wreck with a neglected wife at home. A really, really good nurse. Like, kind as hell.”
“Wow, what’s his name?”
“Julio.”
“That’s a badass name. That’s so cool, Jack, he sounds amazing.” Somehow, he’s got a genuine smile out of Peter for the first time tonight. He’s swinging his legs over the bed. “What’s the situation? How flirty is it?”
“I don’t know. I… honestly don’t have a lot of romantic experience, so I don’t know what constitutes flirtiness. He did just grab my face.”
“And…?”
“And we were on shift, so… nothing. He just talked--at me.”
“Do you text?”
“Yeah, a lot.”
“Ooh, that’s good.”
“Yeah, I thought.”
“So what’s the issue? You don’t sound that happy.” The kid rubs hard at his poor spotty face. His eyes look red and dry, too, like he’s let tears sit in that mask.
“Just the actual asking him out that’s making me shit my pants.”
“Oh, yeah,” Peter chuckles. “Is he not gonna?”
“I think he’s either oblivious, or waiting for me to. So I’ve just gotta pull up my bootstraps a bit. I’ll get round to it. Seriously, Pete, can I please take you to get some skincare in the next--like, week?”
“Skincare?”
“A cleanser and moisturiser. At least.”
“What’s a cleanser?”
Oh, Lord. He doesn’t even know about cleanser. Jack’s stumbled upon a straight male in the wild.
“What’s a--no wonder your poor skin looks like that.”
“Hey!”
“You gotta take care of it.” The dressing is on. Jack tapes it up with a flourish, because sometimes finishing up on a good dressing feels weirdly like topping off some culinary creation ready for serving. Bruise cream next. “Speaking of, not that this has worked the last fifty-four times I’ve said it, but I noticed you didn’t ping any alerts despite getting shot and can’t help but suggest the idea of maybe not actively engaging in self-sabotage for once. Like, in general.”
Peter hums as if sagely considering this thought. Then he says, “Sounds like you’re one to talk, Mister I mention the mozzarella sticks I’m going home to every night like they’re my loving partner.”
“Woah. Don’t come at the mozzarella sticks.”
“And perhaps--don’t let me get it twisted but--perhaps there’s a reason as to why you haven’t quite managed to find, or make, the time to ask a nice guy out, and maybe you should take care of yourself for once.”
Jack pinches at his brow like a man far older than himself. “Touche, Mr. Parker,” is all he can say. “Touche. Little shit.”
The mozzarella stick dig came in too hard. Come on. And he will ask Julio out. He just wants to make sure he can devote the time to… the relationship. Or something.
Wait, stop, stop, stop. This is Peter at his most scheming. He’s the nicest guy on the planet, until he really wants you off his back, and then he’ll throw something totally unexpected at you. Jack is going to have to rise above.
Peter’s already sliding gingerly off the bed. “Can I get outta here?”
“Ah-ah-ah. Bruise cream.”
“It’ll all be gone in a couple hours.”
Jack looks at him. Maybe a little pleading. “Bruise cream.”
Peter looks at the floor.
“I’ll do your back, but you’re free to do the rest if you want.”
Peter nods.
The silence falls a little heavier this time. It’s the pattern Jack tends to find: energetic evasion, then defeat. Peter’s shoulders are drawn tight, muscles bunching as Jack applies the cream.
“Look,” Jack says, “You’re not completely irritating, and I actually care about you a bit, so I’m very happy to be the person you talk to about whatever it is that's on your chest right now, or that person can be Mister Stark or your aunt or whoever, but--you've gotta take a load off, Pete. You’re like a slinky that needs to blow off some steam on the stairs.”
Peter erupts into laughter for a moment, caught off guard by that weirdness, which was kind of the aim. “Hey,” he says, “You call him Mister Stark.”
Jack gives him the courtesy of a nod, but nothing else. Just waits.
Something else he knows: Peter can’t stand silence. Especially if it’s on him.
A long moment of the kid worrying at the corner of his lip. His mask-hair hangs lank over his eyes. Jack hears a breath fly out of him in a rush.
Peter stuffs his head in his hands. “God, I don’t know. Dunno if I wanna talk to Tony. Not right now. Not yet.” His knuckles press back into his eyes. “I don’t know if I want to talk to anyone,” he mutters. “I don’t think… I’m very good at being Spider-Man.”
That throws Jack.
He stops himself from scooting forwards on his stool, keeps still. “What?”
“Or at least not anymore. I don’t know.” A long, difficult inhale, shuddering. “I think I might have to--to… not. For a little while. While I…” And he shrugs with arms glued to the tops of his thighs, that shrug Jack saw him do when he first met him, that says I know what I want to say but if I said it I’d be gone.
‘It was a close call on some civilians.’
Jack ducks his head, giving catching the kid’s eye a stab. “Peter, you know that you can’t save everyone.” He spreads his hands. “It’s a… just a terrible thing to accept, it’s one of the worst things, but…”
“No, it’s not… Sorry.” That habitual smile of apology still fights for life on Peter’s face. “Sorry, it’s not about that guy last month of anything. I mean, it’s not not about him, but it’s not really … not that. It’s--I nearly--today, I nearly let someone go.”
“Nearly? So just a near miss.”
The shrug. It’s the shrug. Not the right thing to say, then. Man, the kid’s a delight, he really is, but reading him can be like trying to do a Rubik’s Cube with no algorithm.
“Man, I shoulda made a second omelette,” he’s breezing, all strange and off-beat, not how human beings speak, “Are we done finally? Can I–”
“Peter--“
“Crazy hungry.”
“Peter, you’re evading.”
“Okay, psychologist.”
“I’m trying to--“
“Well, I’m fine, okay? I’m hungry. I almost let him go, Jack.”
Peter’s own words stop him. Jack almost feels the jolt to the kid’s stomach. He folds over himself.
“You wanted to?” Jack says quietly.
“Kind of. Yeah. For a bit.” Through his bangs, Jack gets a glimpse of his too-bright eyes. “I wasn’t lying about that omelette,” he breathes.
“I can make you one in a bit, you crazy.” There’s zero heat to it. “Why, Pete?”
The question makes the emptiness of the MedBay claustrophobic.
“God,” Peter wavers, “I know. I know.”
“No, that wasn’t--I’m not judging, not at all, just asking. You’ve got one of the best hearts I know, okay?”
Peter just presses his thumbs into his eyes. Jack tries modelling a deep breath, which Peter doesn’t seem to process, as if he’s not quite in the room.
Quiet: “He just…” And even quieter: “He was… not a good guy. The guy.” A long pause. “I was swinging him away from the fighting when I got shot and it knocked us both flying, a couple hundred feet from the ground, and I finally saw his face, actually looked at him, and he was…”
Something clicks, sickening.
“Not a good guy.”
By this point, Peter’s got a hand over the nape of his neck and the other braced over his lap, contorted. Or protective.
The traffic far below them both on the street level, silenced by distance and double-glazing, isn’t visible to Jack through the window that frames the hunched knobs of Peter’s spine, but he wouldn’t be surprised to find it stopped in its tracks.
When there’s a hoodie or T-shirt or, whatever, superhero suit, to be removed, Jack finds Peter always wants to do it himself. Always, insistently.
Jack feels the weight of his useless hands in his lap all at once, like a weight has been poured into them.
It’s a restless moment, for the heaviness. Jack feels like he’s running laps, testing the saliva in his mouth to see if words might ever form.
There's nothing to say that feels meaningful anymore. All Jack’s words are caught in a barb in the pit of his chest that pulls achingly.
Words come. “Someone you know?”
Peter’s eyes don’t flicker or raise. “Used to. A bit. I was younger. And…” Peter laughs then. Jack gets the kind of gut punch that might make you jump in fright in a movie theatre. All wrong. “I didn’t know he was out of prison, you know,” he adds, like he’s still figuring it out, like he’s just baffled.
Like he missed a beat. Jack feels that. Like the air in the room needs the defibrillator.
“Man,” Peter says, severely underestimating the gravity of exclamation needed in this situation, “I nearly didn’t save him. Nearly let him crack his head on the sidewalk. It makes me…”
Breathing shallowly, he wrings his hands out intently.
Jack grabs a kidney dish he’d had on standby in case there was still a bullet to be removed and offers it. “Nauseous? Need to take a spew pew?”
He doesn’t know why the hell he says that.
“No.” Peter actually snorts, which Jack thinks is very over-generous of him at first, but after a moment’s observations he sees Peter really, truly laugh. “No, no, no.”
He leans back, and back more, until his chin nearly faces the ceiling.
“Jack.” Splintered. “Jack, this is so much--so much worse than the people I’ve nearly lost. I was still trying to save them.”
“And you saved this one. You still saved him. That's amazing, Peter. Do you know that so many people would let someone who hurt them just fall to the ground?”
“Other people can’t do what I do. They don't get to decide like I do. You understand?”
Jack does understand. Not quite like Peter, but very intimately in his own way. He knows--has seen--the power of the smallest wayward incision made with a sleep-shaken hand, the dressing unchecked, the smiling patient left for an hour. He's felt pulses halt in his hands, feels the sudden still while asleep sometimes.
Jack nods. Peter sees.
“I don’t… know if I can trust myself anymore. That’s all.”
The million-dollar sentence.
Because Jack doesn’t know what the hell to say yet, he just clicks his tongue: “That’s all, huh?”
Peter huffs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jack. This is not your job, this isn’t--I don’t know why I’m… word vomiting, oversharing, whatever.”
The kid really is textbook sometimes. Jack knows the pitfalls in responding to this. If he’s genuine, Peter will find excuses upon excuses to make his little martyr act stand.
“Oh, the therapizing’s just a complimentary bonus I offer to all my one-on-ones,” he says. “Didn’t you know? Everyone on Ward 4 gets the Jack treatment.”
Peter rolls his eyes.
“Can you let me--say something?”
“Sure.”
“Look, I…” Jack starts, just as the enormity of everything that’s just happened opens up in front of him and forces him to pause.
The solidity of the kid right now, the aliveness of him, the fact that he’s not filled with holes like a Swiss cheese or green as a riverbed, is baffling to Jack. There should be something fundamentally changed about the room, or Jack’s hands as he gets up on instinct and holds up a hand to Peter and jogs to get him a spare T-shirt from the living area. The over-tasteful warm wall lighting throughout the MedBay is all the same, not even sympathetically harsh like a hospital.
Jack presses the shirt into his hands and sees something awful emerge in Peter’s eyes as he looks up at him.
It’s a terrifying thing, to be known.
Jack sinks down on his stool.
“I don’t wanna give you any big talk,” he says, “Because I don’t think that’s right. If it’s helpful for you to get an outside opinion, I think it would be a huge shame for you to stop trusting your instincts. I hope you know that. Your first response to anything is always-- unnaturally good, and kind, and only someone who’s fundamentally good and kind would have even thought up the idea of Spider-Man, let alone made it happen. I mean, the medical history I’ve compiled on you just in my time working with you reads like some Arthurian epic of chivalry.”
He thinks it’ll get a laugh from Peter, but the kid has his face seated on both his fists and is staring at Jack almost uncomprehendingly, as if he’s hearing Jack but only halfway to absorbing it.
“You saved him, Pete.” Jack holds his shoulder, light so he can shrug away, but Peter just breathes under it. “I know you would’ve saved him no matter what the snap reaction might’ve been. I know it. I really hope you do, too. You’re good, kid.”
Peter nods a little.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
Jack lets him go to give him a little privacy, since his eyes have dampened.
“Okay,” Peter says again, small.
“You did amazing.”
Peter pinches his eyes.
“Painkillers working?”
“Think so.”
Jack gets up, slapping his knees. He’s a bit of a premature dad. “Lemme make you an omelette.”
He’s in the skincare aisle of Sephora with a basket and a Peter that appears to be reading from a script today-- no, Jack, you can’t buy it for me, I really don’t need it, no, Jack, it’s too kind of you-- picking out a cleanser for Peter’s crazy combination skin and fending off Peter’s stream of protests, when his phone buzzes in his pocket:
JAY 2
u. me. tito’s pizza roll stand. after our shifts tomorrow. ???