Work Text:
Frank’s got a good thing going with work right now, which means of course he’s making an exit plan.
He doesn’t get to have good things. Probably doesn’t deserve them. Will definitely fuck them up if given half a chance. His life is hard, and he’s grown hard to match.
This crew doesn’t know that. To them he’s just Pete: kind of weird, usually reliable. “Pete Castiglione” gets good things from time to time. It’s nice to just be a guy, sometimes. But Frank’s only visiting this kind of stability — he doesn’t get to live here.
The company is on the small side and Marco, the owner, treats them like family. In an actually good way, not “if you don’t come in on your day off to work an unpaid double, Daddy’ll go get the belt,” which is what most bosses mean when they call their employees “family.” No. Marco treats them like he genuinely gives a shit.
Which is a problem, because Frank doesn’t have a great track record with families.
This job’ll be over soon. It’s another fucking condo, gentrification shit. Frank looks forward to murdering whatever sleazeball ends up buying the penthouse. On principle. He doesn’t know what the hypothetical shithead did yet, but he’ll find something. He can always find something on these rich fucks, and it’s usually something terrible, but if he starts thinking about that he’ll crawl into bed and never crawl out. Instead, he thinks about how the finishing guys are almost certainly going to install white fucking kitchen cabinets, which means the blood splatter will be great.
Marco’s company doesn’t do the fancy shit, cabinetry and fixtures and whatever. They build the bones of the building and call it a day, and the bones of this one are almost done. And then Frank can quit, even if every time he imagines telling Marco, his gut twists so bad he wants to throw his sandwich in the trash. He doesn’t, of course. He doesn’t waste food, and he needs the fuel for the long afternoon ahead of him. So he lurks in an empty section of what will become the lobby, avoiding the easy camaraderie the rest of the crew enjoys with their lunch.
“Hey, is that Ben’s kid?” A call from a few floors up. The guys are up there, dangling their legs into empty air and taking in the view. “Hey! Kid! Kid, get over here!” They all come clomping down the stairs and Frank tucks himself more firmly into his corner.
Not firmly enough, because one of the older guys, Joe, circles back to drag him out.
“C’mon Pete, you gotta meet Ben’s kid.”
Frank would rather scoop out his own eyeballs. But he can’t think of an excuse that’s not “If I get too close I’ll get you killed. All of you, Ben’s kid included.” That would probably bring down the mood, and everyone’s having a nice afternoon. Be a shame to ruin it. So out he is dragged.
“It’s a real pity,” Joe says as they walk, because he’s a goddamn gossip.
Frank grunts, too annoyed to follow the social script. But honestly he’s curious.
“Ben Parker was salt of the earth. You’d never meet a gentler guy. If he saw a worm on the sidewalk, he’d stop to put it safe, that type.”
Frank’s curiosity goes sour — he can guess the end of this story, and he doesn’t really want to hear it. But he’s the Punisher, not the Preventer. He can’t always stop bad things from happening. Bearing witness is the least he can do.
Joe says, “Must have been six, seven years ago? Got shot by a carjacker out of nowhere. Left his wife and nephew, so we do our best to keep an eye on them. It’s what family does.” Joe stops, puts a hand on Frank’s arm. “You too, Pete. You know that, right?”
Yeah. So. Frank’s pretty much a piece of shit.
Ben’s kid has his back to them as they approach, and in his beat-up, oversized Carhartt jacket it's hard to see the shape of him. Which is why when Marco says, “You gotta meet the new guy, you’ll love him. Hey, Pete! Get your ass over here!”, when the kid turns around, Frank is completely blindsided.
Peter goes very still, blinks once, then pastes on a friendly smile and says, “Well that’ll be easy to remember.”
Frank wonders if Marco and Joe would still consider him family if they knew that two nights ago he bent Ben’s kid over the back of the couch and spanked him till he cried.
It would definitely ruin a nice afternoon.
They chat. Well, the crew and Peter chat. Frank hangs back in his usual sullen silence. They trade updates about people Frank has never met, and Peter does his best to talk about his classes in terms that Marco and Joe and Frank might understand (they do not). Peter’s starting his Master’s next fall, which Frank actually didn’t know.
“When’s graduation?” Marco asks. “We’ll be there.”
Peter makes a face. “I probably won’t walk. The thing is like, four hours long. And you’d only see me for, like, ten seconds.”
Marco pokes Peter in the center of the chest and Peter steps back with a woof, which is fucking comical because poking at him should be exactly as effective as jabbing a brick wall. Frank knows for a fact that the kid’s taken a train to the face and walked away fine. Peter’s good at being exactly who people expect him to be. Sometimes Frank wonders how much of the real Peter he gets. But then he remembers that Peter doesn’t actually owe him shit.
“You’re walking, young man,” says Marco. “And it’ll be the loudest ten seconds that stage has ever heard. If you won’t do it for us and your aunt, do it for your uncle. For your parents.”
“Okay, okay,” Peter says, letting himself be pulled into a bear hug.
“They’d all be so proud of you, Petey.”
Right. Parents. And how someone raised by an aunt and uncle probably doesn’t have any. Sometimes Frank forgets that he isn’t the only one who’s lost people.
“You still doing that dance thing?” Joe asks. Frank chokes. “Ballet or whatever?”
“I do concert dance,” Peter tells Frank quickly. “Like, modern. Jazz. On stage and stuff. It’s… chill. Just for me.”
Not for science, he doesn’t say. Not for stripping, not for Spider-Man. Just for me. Frank hears it just fine.
“Nice perk to be surrounded by beautiful ballerinas,” Joe says with a wink, then hastily adds, “And also boy ballerinas! Whichever!”
Peter laughs, but Marco’s face lights up. “Wait! Kid! I gotta show you something!” He grabs Peter by the arm and Peter lets himself be grabbed.
They’ve got a temp building set up, for admin and shit, and it’s got a rainbow flag painted on the side. Marco beams as he shows it off. He says, “We made sure it faced the sidewalk. It’s a rough neighborhood. Figured if someone isn’t feeling safe and they see it…” He shrugs.
“Oh.” Peter seems honestly, genuinely taken aback. “Oh, wow. That’s… Thank you so much.”
“I don’t know a ton about this LGBT stuff,” Marco says, “but Petey filled us in when he let us know he was that way. And he’s family. It took me a minute, but I got there.” He eyes Frank hard.
“I think it’s great,” Frank says, hoping that’s the right thing to say to avoid getting his ass kicked. This is Ben’s kid. If Marco takes it into his head to defend Peter’s honor, Frank won’t even stop him. “Totally support people like that.”
Funny thing is, Frank’s walked by that flag a hundred times and never bothered to clock it. For all that he has sex with men on the regular, he doesn’t actually really think about sexuality as a thing he has.
“You got there pretty fast,” says Peter, bumping his shoulder against Marco’s. Gently, so gently. Frank never really thought about how gentle Peter has to be, every second of every day. He could squash all of them like bugs if he forgot himself, easy. But he won’t. Because he’s gentle. Gentle like Ben, who couldn’t let a worm die on the sidewalk if he was there to save it.
Frank is not a gentle man. It usually doesn’t bother him, and honestly it isn’t bothering him now. He knows what he is, and he’s made his peace with it. He does good in his way and Peter does good in a different one, and that’s how the world works.
But it’s nice to imagine. Being gentle.
The conversation wraps up. Peter promises to send invitations to his graduation and his dance recitals, to tell his aunt hello, to make sure he’s feeding himself. The last is accompanied by several strongly worded dinner invitations.
With a bashful shuffle, Joe says, “Bring that aunt of yours around, too.”
Peter smirks. “Invite her yourself. I know you got her number. I’m not playing yente.”
Joe goes bright red. Stammers, “It’s not… I wouldn’t… It’s not like that.”
“It’s been a long time, Joe,” Peter says, so damn gentle again. “He wanted her to be happy.”
Frank sticks out a hand and Peter takes it. Peter’s fingers are calloused against Frank’s palm, but his grip is soft. Frank says, “It was real good, uh.” Meeting you? He decides on, “It was good getting to know you.”
“Yeah. It was. I’ll see you around, Pete?”
“See you, Peter.”
Then Ben Parker’s kid sets off down the sidewalk, drowning in his uncle’s coat but filling his shoes just fine.