Archive of Our Own ^beta

In his twenty-four years of living, Pond had never managed to say more than three consecutive coherent words to Phuwin.

He had said ‘excuse me’ once, when they reached for the same handout in Intro to Media Theory. He had said ‘your pen’ once, when Phuwin dropped one and Pond nearly threw himself through a table trying to pick it up first. He had said ‘I—yeah—thanks’ when Phuwin smiled at him after class and offered him lecture notes.

That was the full extent of it.

Which was unfortunate, because Pond was—quietly, uselessly, terminally—gone on him.

Everybody liked Phuwin.

That was the problem.

Professors liked him because he was sharp and articulate and always seemed to be three steps ahead of whatever point they were trying to make. Groupmates liked him because he carried presentations without making anyone feel stupid about it. Seniors liked him because he was polite. Juniors liked him because he was pretty.

And Pond liked him because he was all those things and also because sometimes, when a lecturer said something so painfully obvious it bordered on offensive, Phuwin would tilt his head and blink with this expression of exquisite patience that made Pond want to laugh into his sleeve.

He liked him because Phuwin was confident in ways Pond could only observe from a respectful distance. Because Phuwin answered questions like he trusted his own brain. Because he wore his intelligence like it belonged to him.

And he was undeniably handsome. Too handsome.

Pond, meanwhile, wore his own crush like a medical condition. An incurable disease.

He knew this.

Joong had told him so.

“You don’t even talk to him,” Joong had said flatly over lunch one painfully tiring day, watching Pond pretend very badly not to look across the canteen. “At this point you’re not in love, you’re just stalking him. It scares me.”

Pond had choked on iced tea. “FYI. I do talk to him.”

Joong lifted an eyebrow. “Recall one full conversation.”

Pond opened his mouth. Immediately closed it.

Joong nodded with deep satisfaction. “Exactly.”

Across the canteen, Phuwin was laughing at something one of his friends said, head tipped back, sunlight catching on the edge of his glasses. Pond looked away so fast he almost gave himself whiplash.

“It’s not like that,” he muttered.

“Mm. Yeah right Pinocchio”

“I’m just… waiting for the right moment.”

“There is no right moment,” Joong said. “There is only you acting like he’ll evaporate if spoken to directly. Or maybe you’re just concerned about you combusting in front of him on the spot.”

Pond stabbed at his rice. “Maybe he doesn’t even know I exist.”

At that exact moment, halfway across the room, Phuwin looked up.

Their eyes met.

Phuwin blinked once, then smiled. Small, quick, knowing.

Pond nearly dropped his fork.

Joong made a noise like a man watching a doomed but entertaining television drama. “Oh, he knows.”

That should have helped.

It did not help.

If anything, it made everything worse.

Because now Pond had proof that Phuwin was aware of him, which meant every time he failed to say hello was no longer the romantic tragedy of an unseen yearning soul. It was just plain outright embarrassing.

On Thursday, after a lab session that left half the class looking like casualties and the other half pretending not to understand the assignment, Pond found himself shoulder to shoulder with Phuwin at the printer in the library.

This was already too much proximity.

Phuwin held out a stack of stapled notes. “You missed the last tutorial, right?”

Pond stared at the notes. Then at Phuwin. Then back at the notes.

“Yes,” he said, which at least was a word. One word. 

“I figured.” Phuwin smiled a little. “I took extra notes. You can borrow them.”

Pond took them with both hands as if accepting a sacred artifact.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

There was a pause. A long pause and an excruciating silence that followed.

Phuwin’s smile turned faintly amused. “You know, you can just say hello.”

Pond felt every functioning thought leave his body.

“I—”

Phuwin waited.

Pond stared at him like a man who had been told gravity was optional but only in front of witnesses.

Then somebody from farther down the hall called Phuwin’s name, and the moment broke.

Phuwin laughed softly through his nose, rescued both of them from the silence, and stepped away.

“See you around, Pond.”

And that was somehow worse than if he’d never noticed him at all.

Because Pond stood there in the hallway holding borrowed notes and thinking: He knows my name. I’m going to die.

It turned out he was only slightly early.

*

The day of the accident was a random Tuesday.

It rained in the afternoon, the brief sharp kind that washes the campus trees clean and leaves the roads slick with reflected light. By evening the storm had passed, but the pavement still gleamed. The air was damp and heavy and smelled like motorbike exhaust, wet concrete, and fried roti from the stalls by the gate.

Pond left the library at nearly 8 p.m. with a backpack full of books and notes he hadn’t really absorbed and a massive headache sitting between his eyes.

But he saw Phuwin clearly at the crosswalk.

Of course he did.

The universe, apparently, was a petty little machine designed for maximum humiliation.

Phuwin was standing under the traffic light in a navy windbreaker, phone in one hand, umbrella hooked lazily over the crook of his arm even though the rain had stopped. He looked tired in a way that made him seem more real than usual. His hair was a little messy, glasses sliding low on his nose, mouth set in concentration as he typed out what was probably either a genius-level message or a grocery list. With him, Pond honestly couldn’t tell.

Pond slowed.

Not enough to seem suspicious.

Probably enough to seem suspicious.

The pedestrian light had not changed yet. Motorbikes hissed past. A bus rumbled through the intersection. A group of students crossed behind Pond laughing too loudly at something on a phone screen.

Phuwin looked up.

Spotted him immediately.

And, because apparently the universe was not done, lifted one hand in the smallest wave.

Pond’s heart stopped.

He lifted his own hand in something that was probably more twitch than wave.

Phuwin smiled.

The light changed and people started moving.

Phuwin stepped off the curb, still glancing back over his shoulder toward a friend calling something from the sidewalk behind him.

That was why he didn’t see the car.

Pond did.

A black sedan turning the corner too fast on rain-slick asphalt, the front wheels skidding wide, the horn blaring half a second too late.

It happened all at once and too slow.

The headlights.
The wet road.
Phuwin halfway across the lane, turning his head.
The shape of impact arriving faster than thought.

Pond moved before he knew he had decided to.

He dropped his bag.

Ran.

Caught Phuwin around the shoulders hard enough to spin him sideways.

There was just enough time for Phuwin to look at him in shock, for their eyes to meet, wide and bright and alive, before Pond shoved him clear away from the rushing car.

Then the world hit him.

There was no elegant version of it.

Just metal and force and the horrible weightless wrongness of leaving the ground.

Pond thought, absurdly, So this is what falling feels like.

The streetlights smeared into gold.

Phuwin shouted his name.

Everything went white.

*

When Pond opened his eyes again, his head and body was aching. And the man who just called out for his name was beside him. Phuwin was asleep beside him. Phuwin is what?!

For a full ten seconds, Pond could only stare.

Because he was in a bed. A real bed. Not a hospital bed, unless hospitals had recently upgraded to white sheets, exposed brick walls, a string of fairy lights hanging over a cluttered desk, and what appeared to be half of a big city visible through industrial windows.

And Phuwin was there.

Curled on his side beside him, face buried in Pond’s pillow, one arm flung loosely across Pond’s waist like this was not a deeply illegal way to start a cardiac episode.

Pond made a sound so small and strangled it barely qualified as human.

Phuwin stirred.

No.

No, absolutely not.

Pond went rigid all the way down to his teeth.

Phuwin made a sleepy noise, blinked slowly. He was wearing one of Pond’s shirts.

Not a shirt.

Pond knew that shirt. Or, rather, this body knew it, because Pond had certainly never owned a faded grey Columbia University t-shirt in his life, but he recognized it with the strange certainty of a dream you’re already inside.

Phuwin squinted at him through sleep-heavy eyes.

“Mhm..Morning,” he mumbled.

Then he leaned down and kissed the corner of Pond’s mouth.

This appeared to be his final stretch. Pond stopped existing.

Not metaphorically.

Not emotionally.

There was a clean and total shutdown of all higher function.

Phuwin pulled back first, frowning now. “Okay. Weird reaction.” He sat up a little straighter. “Are you in pain?”

Pond stared at him.

Phuwin stared back.

Pond just started a humiliating staring contest that he couldn’t seem to break.

Phuwin’s hair was a mess. He looked warm and real and entirely too comfortable in Pond’s bed, in Pond’s shirt, in Pond’s space, in Pond’s entire impossible life.

“Pond?” he said carefully.

That was when Pond noticed two things simultaneously:

One: Phuwin had called him Pond, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Two: there was a red-and-blue suit crumpled over the desk chair in the corner of the room.

Pond looked at the suit.

Then at Phuwin.

Then back at the suit.

Then at his own hands, where faint scars crisscrossed his knuckles and a bruise the size of a thumbprint darkened one wrist.

Phuwin followed his line of sight to the suit and sighed. “You’re concussed.”

Pond’s mouth finally worked. “I-I’m what?”

Phuwin pushed his glasses, his glasses, up his nose and gave him a long look. “You took a transformer to the shoulder last night, remember? Or does the hero complex come with selective memory now?”

Pond stared at him.

Transformer.

Hero complex.

The suit.

The city outside the window.

His own body, humming strangely under the skin. A strange tingling sensation he can’t quite pin, but feels entirely normal.

There was a mask on the desk too. Web-shooters beside it. A police scanner blinking low on the shelf.

Pond looked back at Phuwin. 

Phuwin blinked.

And then, because apparently no universe would ever grant him mercy, Phuwin’s expression changed from concern to suspicion.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Did you get hit in the head harder than you told me?”

Pond opened his mouth.

“Don’t answer that,” Phuwin said immediately. “I can tell by your face.”

He reached out and put a hand to Pond’s forehead.

Pond nearly levitated.

Phuwin frowned in concentration. “You’re warm.”

Pond, who was currently discovering that spontaneous combustion was a real possibility, gulped and said, “Yeah.”

Phuwin narrowed his eyes. “Why are you acting like I’m a stranger in your bed?”

Because in his reality, Pond was too terrified to even say hello to you, he thought wildly. Because you kissed me and I died. Because I got hit by a car and woke up inside some kind of extremely specific wish fulfillment brain damage. This was definitely not the heaven described in texts.

Instead he said, very intelligently, “Morning?”

Phuwin stared. Then, inexplicably, he laughed.

It was soft and bright and entirely too fond for Pond’s nervous system to withstand.

“Okay,” Phuwin said. “You’re definitely concussed.”

He slid out of bed and stood. Pond’s eyes tracked him helplessly.

He moved around the loft like he belonged there—barefoot, familiar, not even glancing before opening the fridge, turning on the kettle, reaching for mugs from the shelf. Comfortable. At ease.

Like he’d done this a hundred times.

Pond sat up too quickly and immediately regretted it. The room tilted. Something in his side protested. His body felt wrong, too sore in places he didn’t recognize, too strong in others.

Then the kettle clicked on.

The police scanner crackled.

A voice said, “…reports of electrical disturbance in Midtown—”

Pond’s blood ran cold.

He knew that movie. 

*

If this was a dream, it had an aggressively detailed and huge production budget.

Pond lasted approximately eight minutes before locking himself in the bathroom to have a private emotional breakdown.

The crisis was justified.

The bathroom mirror gave him a face that was unmistakably his and not his at all: same mouth, same eyes, same absurd hair that refused to stay in one place, but sharper somehow, more worn around the edges, with a faint scar by his jaw and a healing cut over one eyebrow.

He lifted the hem of his shirt.

There.

On his side, well-defined muscle peeking out, low and pale against skin, was the spider bite scar.

Pond sat down on the closed toilet lid before his knees gave out.

He was Spider-Man.

Not a Spider-Man. Not some vague multiverse superhero adjacent thing.

The suit outside was unmistakably the one from The Amazing Spider-Man. The apartment looked like every cinematic version of “young broke genius friendly neighbor saving guy in New York” ever committed to film. The police scanner. The web shooters. The fact that Phuwin had looked at him like he was both infuriating and beloved.

Pond pressed both hands over his face.

“This is fine,” he whispered into his palms and tried to calm himself.

Outside the bathroom door, Phuwin said, “I can hear you spiraling.”

Pond jerked upright hard enough to see stars.

The doorknob rattled once, gently. “If you die in there, I’m not dragging you out.”

Pond stood very carefully, splashed cold water on his face, and opened the door.

Phuwin was waiting with two mugs and an expression that belonged to somebody who had already solved six problems this morning and was deciding whether Pond counted as the seventh.

He handed one mug over.

Pond took it automatically.

Tea. Strong but sweet. Strangely just how Pond likes it.

“How bad is it?” Phuwin asked.

Pond clutched the mug. “What?”

“The concussion.”

“Uh.”

Phuwin’s gaze moved over his face with unnerving precision. “Your pupils are fine. You’re tracking movement. You’re upright, sort of. But you’ve looked at me like I’m a home invasion twice now.”

Pond swallowed. It was both the hardest and easiest question in the world to answer honestly.

“Feels weird,” he managed.

Phuwin leaned against the kitchenette counter. “Define weird.”

“I feel like…” Pond looked down into the tea, then at the loft, the suit, the city beyond the glass. “Like I woke up in the wrong life.”

Silence.

Pond braced for mockery, concern, diagnosis, something.

Phuwin just watched him for a long second.

Then he said, “That’s either a concussion symptom or a very dramatic cry for help. Either way, I’m concerned.”

Pond made a strangled sound.

Phuwin’s mouth twitched. “There you are.”

“What?”

“That face.” He nodded at Pond’s general state of collapse. “You look less like you’re about to file a restraining order against your own boyfriend.”

Pond nearly dropped the mug.

“My what?!” His act completely falling apart. 

Phuwin went still. Very, very slowly, he set his own mug down.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re not joking anymore.”

Pond had exactly three options:

1. Tell the truth: Hi, I’m a university student from another reality who got hit by a car and woke up inside your boyfriend’s Spider-Man body and also I’ve had a crush on you for months.
2. Lie.
3. Fake a seizure.

He chose option two because it seemed less likely to result in immediate institutionalization.

“I just—” Pond rubbed the back of his neck. “Uhh, my head’s weird.”

Phuwin’s face softened.

Not fully. There was still worry there. But also something else, something warm and practiced, like this wasn’t the first time Pond had staggered in half-broken and said dumb things while pretending not to be afraid.

Phuwin stepped closer.

Pond’s entire body went on alert for reasons both medical and embarrassingly not. Then Phuwin lifted one hand and very gently touched the healing cut above Pond’s eyebrow.

“You really don’t remember?” he asked, quieter now.

Pond looked at him. He thought about lying harder.

Then said, because it was technically true, “Not clearly.”

Phuwin exhaled through his nose. “You fought Electro on a power grid at two in the morning.”

Pond stopped.

Electro.

Power grid.

There it was.

The timeline snapped into place with the cold inevitability of a blade finding the groove it was made for.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

And if that was true—

If Electro existed, if this was that Spider-Man timeline, if Phuwin was in this world the way Gwen Stacy had been in the movie—

Pond’s stomach turned over.

Because he remembered the rest.

He remembered the tower.

He remembered the fall.

He remembered the terrible, unforgiving crack of physics refusing mercy.

Pond looked at Phuwin and thought, with sudden devastating clarity:

No.

Absolutely not.

Not in any universe.

*

Phuwin, it turned out, was infuriatingly easy to love in every reality. This one was just crueler about it because he loved Pond back.

Or at least, this version of him did.

There was no world in which Pond was prepared for that. He discovered it in humiliating increments over the next forty-eight hours.

In the way Phuwin stole fries off his plate and ate them while maintaining eye contact like this was a long-established right.

In the way he sat cross-legged on Pond’s bed with a physics textbook open between them and corrected his calculations without malice, only dry amusement.

In the way he patched cuts with calm, competent fingers and muttered, “You know, for Spider-Man, you’re terrible at not bleeding.”

In the way he looked at Pond when he laughed, like the laughter had weight, like it mattered that it existed.

The first day, Pond spent most of his time trying not to reveal himself as an imposter.

This was harder than expected, because apparently Spider-Man’s life was full of routines he had to fake his way through.

Swinging, for example.

The first time he left the loft alone after Phuwin reluctantly allowed him to “walk off the remaining brain damage,” Pond climbed to a rooftop, stared at the city, and thought: I am about to die in a much stupider way than getting hit by a car.

Then he shot a web.

And the world came rushing up to meet him.

There was no language for how impossible it felt. How right. How horrifying. Every building edge, every wind current, every fire escape and antenna and water tower announced itself to his body before his mind could process it. He could feel distance. Angles. Tension. The exact moment a line would hold or slacken.

It was like being handed a new set of laws and expected to improvise.

He nearly face-planted into a billboard twice, clipped a church spire once, and somehow still landed on a rooftop without breaking anything vital.

When he got back, breathless and exhilarated and one hundred percent sure this was going to kill him eventually, Phuwin was sitting at the desk typing on a laptop.

He looked up once, took in Pond’s expression, and said, “You had fun.”

Pond froze.

Phuwin leaned back in the chair. “That means either the patrol went well, or you hit your head again and forgot how to lie. Both seem plausible.”

Pond tried for casual. “Was just… checking mobility.”

“You’re grinning.”

“I am not.”

Phuwin smiled. It was small. Knowing. Fond enough to be dangerous.

“You are such a dork,” he said.

And Pond, who in his real life would have paid actual money to hear Phuwin say anything remotely affectionate to him, had to sit down on the edge of the bed before his knees gave out.

That night, after Pond came back from a low-level robbery intervention with a split knuckle and a bruise blooming over his ribs, Phuwin made him sit on the kitchen counter and patched him up.

The loft was warm with low lamplight. Rain tapped at the windows. The city beyond them looked like a field of stars that had fallen and decided to stay.

Pond watched Phuwin open the first-aid kit with the ruthless competence of someone who had long since accepted this as part of loving him.

“This is disgusting,” Phuwin informed him, peering at Pond’s bloody hand.

“Thank you.”

“You have gravel in your skin.”

“Occupational hazard.”

Phuwin shot him a look. “You say that like it’s charming.”

Pond wanted to say, Everything you say sounds charming to me. Instead he said, “It’s very Spider-Man.”

Phuwin rolled his eyes so hard it was practically a public service. “You are not allowed to describe your own bad decisions as ‘very Spider-Man.’”

Pond looked down at him, at the bent head, the concentration, the little crease between Phuwin’s brows when he was trying to be precise, and asked before he could stop himself, “Why do you put up with me?”

Phuwin didn’t even look up.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Pond floundered. “This. Me. The whole…” He gestured vaguely at the suit hanging by the window, the bandages, the city, existence.

Phuwin dapped antiseptic onto his knuckles. Pond hissed.

Then, only then, did Phuwin glance up. His expression was unexpectedly soft.

“Because you’re good,” he said simply.

Pond stared.

Phuwin went back to the bandage. “And funny. Against your will, mostly.”

“That feels rude.”

“It’s accurate.”

Pond tried again. “You could have anyone.”

“Mhm.” Phuwin taped the gauze in place. “And yet I keep choosing the one who hangs upside down outside my window at two in the morning because he forgot his keys or is incredibly beaten up.”

Pond’s ears went hot.

Phuwin finally smiled properly then, the full one, bright and sharp and devastating.

“I like you, Pond,” he said. “Not in a vague abstract way. In a very specific, ongoing, incredibly inconvenient way.” He leaned in just enough to press a quick kiss to Pond’s bruised wrist. “Try to keep up.”

Pond was in love with him in every reality.

That, unfortunately, was also the problem.

Because now he knew what he was about to lose.

*

The exact moment Pond realized where in the timeline he was came on day three, in the most mundane way possible.

Harry Osborn called.

Pond, who had been making coffee and trying not to visibly stare every time Phuwin wandered around the loft in soft clothes and bare feet, nearly dropped the mug when the name flashed on the phone screen.

Phuwin looked up from where he was highlighting something at the table. “Aren’t you going to get that?”

Pond stared at the phone like it might explode. “No.”

Phuwin lifted an eyebrow. “You’ve been dodging him for weeks.”

Pond’s blood ran cold. “Have I.”

“Yes, Pond.” He set the highlighter down. “You have. That’s why he keeps leaving increasingly passive-aggressive voicemails.”

The phone buzzed itself quiet.

Then a second later, the television running low in the corner cut to a news report.

‘Oscorp board faces questions after the late Max Dillon—’

Phuwin muted it immediately.

Too late.

Pond had already seen enough.

Harry Osborn.
Max Dillon.
Electro.
Oscorp.

The room seemed to sharpen around the edges.

This wasn’t just vaguely Spider-Man flavored. It was that story. Or close enough for terror to make the differences irrelevant.

He had watched all Spider-Man movies and drabbled on the comics. He curses why it had to be this timeline.

Pond knew what came after Electro. He knew Harry would get worse. He knew the desperation. The blood. The suit. The glider.

And he knew, most of all, the tower.

The clock face. The gears. The fall.

Phuwin noticed the change in him immediately. “Hey.”

Pond looked up too fast.

Phuwin’s face was all concern now. “What happened?”

Nothing, Pond wanted to say. Everything. I know the shape of your death. I’ve seen it framed and scored and slowed down for maximum devastation by people who thought tragedy was beautiful if the lighting was right.

He set the mug down with great care.

“Phuwin,” he said, voice already wrong in his own ears, “tell me about Oxford.”

Phuwin blinked.

“What?”

“Your program.”

Silence.

Then Phuwin leaned back slowly in his chair, suspicion replacing concern. “Why?”

Because Gwen Stacy was supposed to leave for England, and maybe if you leave, maybe if I push hard enough, maybe if I get you on a plane in time—

“Just tell me.”

Phuwin studied him. “It’s a research fellowship.”

Pond nodded too quickly.

“It starts next month.”

Pond nodded again.

“And I already told you,” Phuwin said carefully, “that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.”

Pond swallowed. “Maybe you should.”

Silence.

The air in the loft changed. Phuwin went still in a way Pond was starting to understand meant danger.

“Okay,” Phuwin said at last. “That came out of nowhere.”

Pond looked away. “It’s a really good opportunity, Phuwin.”

“Mm.”

“You’d like it.”

“Mm.”

Pond, idiot that he was, kept going. “It’s probably safer.”

That did it. Phuwin stood. 

“Safer from what?”

Pond’s mouth snapped shut.

Phuwin stepped closer. “No, actually, let’s do this ‘talk’ that you’re pushing right now properly. Safer from what, Pond?”

Pond backed into the counter before he realized he was moving.

Phuwin’s expression hardened—not mean, not cold. Hurt. Confused. Too sharp and intelligent to let Pond get away with nonsense.

“You’ve been weird since you woke up,” Phuwin said. “I told myself you were concussed. Fine, okay. Then I told myself you were scared because of Harry. He was your best friend! Then I told myself I was imagining it. But now you’re talking like I need to be evacuated from your life.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Then tell me what you’re doing.”

Pond couldn’t.

How could he? Hi, I saw you die in a movie from another universe and now I’m trying to outmaneuver the script.

So he did the worst possible thing instead.

“I just think you should go,” he said.

Phuwin stared at him. For a second the hurt in his face was enough to make Pond physically ill.

Then it vanished. Not because it was gone. Because Phuwin had hidden it.

“Okay,” he said.

One word. Flat enough to cut deep. 

He picked up his bag from the chair. Walked to the door.

Pond panicked. “Phuwin—”

Phuwin turned back.

“Do not,” he said quietly, “tell me to leave if what you really mean is that you’re scared.”

Pond stopped his steps. 

Phuwin’s eyes were bright behind his glasses, furious in a way that looked a lot too much like pain.

“You don’t get to make decisions for me just because you think that feels protective,” he said. “If something’s wrong, tell me. If you need space, say that. But don’t put me on a plane just so you can call it love.”

Then he left.

The loft door slammed hard enough to rattle Pond’s entire being.

Pond stood alone in the kitchen and thought: I am going to lose him in every universe because I never know how to say the right thing before it’s too late.

*

They didn’t speak for thirty-six hours.

That was long enough for Pond to remember exactly how badly silence could hurt when Phuwin was involved. Long enough for him to patrol half the city like a man trying to outrun fate with web fluid and denial.

Long enough for Electro to nearly fry half of Times Square.

Pond knew the setting the second the blackout started.

He got there a split second too late and was still in time to watch blue-white electricity arc up the side of a tower, shaping itself into a human outline made of rage and unstable current.

Max Dillon, Electro, looked like the night sky had learned how to hate.

Pond had no plan.

He had instinct, reflex, the suit, and exactly one horrifying memory of how the movie had gone.

This time there was no orchestra music, no audience, only the ugly sound of transformers blowing and people screaming in the street.

He did what Spider-Man did.

He moved.

Web line. Lamp post. Vault. Land. Quip on autopilot because panic apparently came with a built-in coping mechanism.

He barely got the words out before a surge of electricity blew a crater through the billboard behind him.

By the end of it, he was bruised, half-deaf in one ear, hanging sideways off a traffic camera with his mask torn at the jaw—

And Phuwin was there.

Of course he was there.

Not in danger. Not screaming. Not waiting to be saved.

At a mobile command table with emergency crews, glasses pushed up, sleeves rolled, arguing with three engineers and one police captain who looked seconds away from crying.

Pond landed on the truck roof, staring.

Phuwin glanced up.

Their eyes met across the flashing emergency lights.

Phuwin did not smile.

He said, without preamble, “Your web shooters are polymer-based.”

Pond blinked. “Hi to you too.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes?”

“Good. Then if we alter the conductivity at the point of contact, we can force his charge to arc somewhere else.”

Pond climbed down from the truck, still breathing hard. “You’re helping.”

Phuwin looked at him like he had said something offensively stupid. “The city is blacking out, P—Spider-Man. I can be mad at you later.” He said those last lines in almost a hush.

And because Pond was already hopeless, that did something catastrophic to his heart. They worked together like they’d done it a hundred times.

Maybe this version of them had.

Phuwin talked fast with a marker in one hand, sketching angles and circuits onto the side of a police barricade. Pond followed because his body understood momentum and because Phuwin’s brain, in any universe, made the shape of impossible things seem almost manageable.

“Electricity follows least resistance,” Phuwin said. “So don’t give it one path.”

Pond yanked his mask back into place. “That sounds like relationship advice.”

Phuwin glared at him. “Focus.”

Then, softer, like it cost him something to say it at all: “Don’t die.”

Pond looked at him. Wanted, desperately, to say ten different things.

Instead he nodded once and went swinging with their plan in action. 

In which, the plan worked.

Not elegantly. Not neatly. There was a lot of property damage, two near misses, one power station that absolutely filed for emotional compensation, and Pond would later find a bruise shaped exactly like Queens on his left side.

But it worked.

When Electro finally went down in a storm of light and smoke and collapsing voltage, Pond landed hard in the rain-slick street and ripped off his mask.

Across the wreckage, Phuwin was already shoving through EMTs and firefighters toward him.

“You’re bleeding,” Phuwin said.

“You noticed. Thought the red spandex would cover it up.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Still helping?”

Phuwin stared at him for a long beat.

Then he stepped in, grabbed Pond by the front of the suit, lifted his mask just above his lips, and kissed him hard enough to make the whole ruined street disappear.

It only lasted a second.

When he pulled back, his mouth was trembling.

“I’m still mad at you,” he said.

Pond’s breath came sharp and wrong. “That seems fair.”

Phuwin looked at the blood at Pond’s temple, then back at his eyes.

“You don’t get to decide the shape of my life by yourself,” he said quietly.

Pond nodded, because there was nothing else he could do.

Phuwin let go of the suit.

Then, because apparently he was incapable of not being himself even in the middle of emotional devastation, he added, “Also your quips under pressure are getting worse.”

Pond laughed out loud, half broken open by relief.

And Phuwin, impossible, brilliant Phuwin, laughed too.

*

After that, trying to keep distance became impossible.

Pond still knew what was coming. That did not stop the days in between from becoming unbearable in their sweetness.

They made dinner at the loft while the city was rebuilt.

Phuwin stayed over more often than not, and Pond stopped pretending to be surprised when he woke up tangled in sheets and warm limbs and the faint smell of coffee already starting in the kitchen.

Sometimes Phuwin worked at the desk while Pond hung upside down from the ceiling beam above him, half in suit and half out, muttering over web-fluid formulas.

“This,” Phuwin said one evening without looking up from his laptop, “would be easier if you used the chair.”

“This is better for circulation.”

“This is why you have blood rushes to the head and say insane things.”

Pond let one hand swing toward him dramatically. “You wound me.”

“You are upside down. Gravity is wounding you, not me.”

Pond dropped lightly to the floor behind him and looked over his shoulder at the equations on the laptop screen.

Phuwin, feeling him there without turning, leaned back just enough that their shoulders touched.

It was such a tiny thing.

Pond thought about it for three full hours afterward.

Another night, they ended up on the roof.

New York spread beneath them in lights and sirens and the occasional distant helicopter beam sweeping over buildings. Phuwin had stolen Pond’s jacket. Pond had stolen one of the dumplings Phuwin insisted he wasn’t getting any of. This led to a ten-minute argument that ended with Phuwin feeding him the last one anyway because, in his words, “You burn calories like a lab accident. It’s just unfair.”

Pond looked over at him.

The wind moved a strand of hair across Phuwin’s forehead. He pushed it back absently and kept looking at the city.

“What?” Phuwin asked without turning his head.

“How do you always know when I’m staring? Tell me, do you have any hidden superpower that I don’t know of?”

Phuwin finally glanced at him, lips twitching. “Pond. You stare like it’s your full-time job.”

Pond went pink. “I do not.”

“You do.”

“That’s slander.”

“It’s an observation backed with evidence.” Phuwin’s smile softened. Then said, “You know what I like about you?”

Pond’s whole nervous system braced.

“What?”

“You look at things like they matter,” Phuwin said. “At people too.”

Pond swallowed.

Phuwin leaned back on both hands, face tipped toward the night sky. “Most people move through the world like they’re trying not to touch it. You never do.” He cut Pond a glance. “It’s cute. Very dorky. But cute.”

Pond looked away at the city because looking directly at Phuwin while hearing that felt medically irresponsible.

“I don’t think being called dorky is supposed to count as flirting.”

“With you, it does.”

Pond laughed helplessly.

Then, because courage in dreams apparently arrived in weird places, he asked, “What do you like about me, really?”

Phuwin was quiet for a second.

When he answered, there was no teasing left in it.

“You keep trying,” he said. “Even when you’re scared. Even when it would be easier to let the world stay broken.”

Pond stared at him.

Phuwin met his eyes steadily. “You don’t know how rare that is.”

Something inside Pond went very still.

Because no one in his real life had ever said anything like that to him. Because this version of Phuwin saw him, not the fantasy of him, not the silent crush version, not the stammering idiot from across a lecture hall. Him. Mess and fear and ridiculous hope and all.

He wanted to say I think I loved you before I got here. I think I’m in love with every version of you in the universe.

Instead of letting his thoughts consume him, he leaned over and kissed him.

Phuwin kissed him back slow enough to feel like a promise.

When they broke apart, Phuwin touched the side of Pond’s jaw with his thumb and said, very quietly, “Whatever it is you’re afraid of, you’re going to have to tell me before it eats you alive.”

Pond almost did.

He almost told him about the movie. The fall. The clock tower. The way the knowledge had been chewing holes through every happy thing.

Instead he looked at the skyline and said, “I’m working on it.”

Phuwin sighed, but not angrily. “Fine,” he said. “But, work faster.”

*

Pond started going to the clock tower alone.

At first he told himself it was just to check whether it existed.

Then he stood inside it beneath the giant bronze gears, looking up at the web of beams and the open spaces between them, and knew immediately that fate had a set in mind.

The air inside the tower was cold and metallic. Dust floated through shafts of light. Old mechanisms clicked somewhere overhead with the patient, ominous rhythm of a countdown.

Pond walked the whole structure.

Mapped lines.

Measured distances.

Calculated web anchor points from every angle he could think of.

Because if the universe thought it was getting that scene, it was going to have to fight him for it.

He wasn’t Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man. He wasn’t Peter Parker. He was, just Pond—terrified, stubborn, sleep-deprived, and currently in possession of enough foreknowledge to qualify as a cheat code.

And Pond had something Peter hadn’t.

Phuwin’s voice in his head, dry and exact from the power station:

Don’t give it one path.

A single line transfers force to one point. One point snaps.

Change the angle. Change the load. Change everything.

Pond looked up at the tower clock and whispered into the dust-choked air, “I dare you.”

*

It happened on a Friday.

Of course it did.

Friday, when the city was already tense from a week of blackouts and Oscorp headlines and Harry Osborn’s increasingly erratic public appearances.

Friday, when Phuwin had one hand on his bag and the other on a stack of research papers because he had finally decided he was going to Oxford for a semester after all—not to run, he had made very clear, but because “turns out I can be in love and still accept a fellowship, thanks.”

Friday, when Pond had almost let himself believe he had outwit the plot. 

Then the call came.

Not to Pond. To Phuwin.

A shaken voice from Oscorp security. An emergency. Harry wanted to speak to him. It would only take a minute.

Pond saw the shape of it immediately.

“No,” he said.

Phuwin, phone half-lowered, frowned. “What?”

“No.”

“Pond—”

“We’re not going.”

Phuwin stared at him.

The old argument threatened to rise between them again—control, fear, decisions made in someone else’s name—but then he saw Pond’s face.

Really saw it.

And whatever he saw there made his own expression change.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Then tell me why.”

Pond opened his mouth.

The window exploded inward.

Glass rained across the loft.

The glider came through the frame like a blade.

Harry Osborn looked barely human anymore—skin gone sickly, eyes bright with fever, the suit fused over him in hard green-black lines that made him look less like a man and more like a wound that had learned how to fly.

“Found you,” he hissed.

Everything after that happened at speed.

Pond moving.
Phuwin ducking.
The glider carving a path through the desk.

Harry’s laugh when he saw the fear on Pond’s face.

“Oh,” he said. “You know.”

Pond’s blood went to ice. Harry’s gaze slid to Phuwin and sharpened with delighted malice. “That’s worse.”

“Harry,” Pond snapped, mask already in his hand, “don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Harry smiled with too many teeth. “Take what you took from me?”

The glider surged.

Pond lunged.

For one terrible second, his fingers brushed Phuwin’s wrist and missed.

Harry grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him up onto the glider with a triumphant snarl.

“Clock tower,” he called down over the roar of the engines. “Come get him.”

Then they were gone.

Pond stood in the wrecked loft with his mask in one hand and every nightmare he had been outrunning laid out neatly in front of him.

For exactly half a second, he was afraid.

Then fear calcified into purpose.

He yanked on the mask.

And ran toward the tower like he was coming for the universe’s throat.

*

The clock tower was waiting.

It always had been. It was just a matter of time.

Harry hovered near the giant open face of the clock, glider whining, one hand twisted in the back of Phuwin’s jacket. Below them, the city burned gold and black in the distance.

Phuwin’s glasses were gone.

There was blood at his temple.

He saw Pond swing in and shouted his name anyway.

“Pond!” The sound of it nearly tore Pond apart.

He landed hard on a beam and took in everything at once.

Harry’s position.
The glider.
The open drop.
The gears.
The distance between them.
The points he’d marked, memorized, prepared.

This wasn’t a movie, he told himself. This wasn’t a movie. This wasn’t a movie.

Harry grinned. “You came.”

Pond’s voice came out low and dangerous. “Let him go.”

Harry laughed. “You know what I think? I think you only ever understand loss once it has a face.”

Phuwin, still somehow himself with a glider blade at his throat, said through clenched teeth, “Your monologue needs editing.”

Harry shook him once, vicious. “Quiet.”

Pond felt the world narrow to a pinprick.

“Harry.”

“Beg.”

“No.”

Harry’s smile sharpened. “Wrong answer.”

He dropped him. Just like that. 

For one shattering instant, time became memory.

Phuwin falling backward through open air.
Arms flung out.
Eyes wide.
The exact angle of disaster Pond had seen coming from another universe, another screen, another life.

No.

Pond moved.

The first web shot wasn’t for Phuwin.

It was for the tower beams.

Left anchor. Right anchor. High crossbar.

Three lines in under a second.

Then two more: one to the turning gear housing, one to the support strut beneath the clock face.

Only then did he fire for Phuwin.

Not a single line. Not an ankle snare. Not a straight shot built to turn velocity into death.

A web spread.

Wide.

Forked.

A net, a cradle, a desperate ugly geometry of force.

Phuwin hit it hard.

The whole structure jerked.

The web lines screamed with tension, stretching, redistributing, bleeding momentum sideways into the tower instead of snapping it through one point of contact.

The gear housing groaned. One of the outer strands tore.

But the cradle held.

Phuwin stopped falling.

For one heartbeat the whole tower was silent.

Pond hung suspended in his last web line, staring.

Phuwin was alive.

Alive.

Alive.

Then the world started moving again.

Harry screamed in fury and lunged.

Pond tore himself back into motion with something like laughter breaking loose in his chest, raw and disbelieving and half-sobbing.

“Not this time!” he shouted, and if the universe heard him, good. He had hoped it did. 

The fight after that was brutal and ugly and fast.

Pond fought like a man who had already won the only victory that mattered.

Harry came at him all blades and madness. Pond gave ground only where he chose, using the tower beams like he’d studied them for days. 

Web to glider wing. Pivot. Kick. Steel shrieking against bronze. 

One desperate moment where Harry nearly got a hand around his throat before Pond slammed him into the gear housing hard enough to crack the plate.

In the end it was the glider that killed the momentum of the fight.

Pond webbed one wing to a turning gear. The machine caught. Twisted. Tore the steering control out from under Harry and sent him spinning sideways into the support frame with a scream of metal and rage.

The glider stalled.

Harry went down with it.

Pond didn’t look longer than a second.

He was already moving toward the web cradle.

Toward Phuwin.

Toward the impossible sight of him alive and breathing and furious and still here.

Pond dropped beside him on the beam and ripped away the last restraining strands with shaking hands.

“Hey,” he said, voice wrecked and shaking. “Hey. Look at me.”

Phuwin did.

Blinking hard. Chest heaving. Alive.

Pond almost collapsed from relief.

Phuwin looked from him to the ruined web structure above them, then down through the open tower to the drop below, then back.

“You absolute psychopath,” he breathed.

Pond laughed once, broken. “Hi.”

Phuwin’s mouth trembled.

Then he reached up, caught Pond by the collar, and pulled him down into a kiss that tasted like fear and adrenaline and the sweetest thing Pond had ever survived.

When they broke apart, both of them were shaking.

Pond pressed his forehead to Phuwin’s.

“I knew,” he whispered.

Phuwin frowned. “What?”

“I knew this was coming.”

The truth was loose now, impossible to put back.

Pond closed his eyes briefly. “I knew there was supposed to be a tower. And a fall. And you—” His voice cracked. “You weren’t supposed to survive it.”

For a second, Phuwin just looked at him.

Then, because this was Phuwin in every universe, he reached up and put a hand on Pond’s face.

“Well,” he said softly, breath still unsteady, “good thing you don’t follow instructions.”

Pond laughed and started crying at the same time.

Phuwin touched the web strands still trembling above them. “Nice angles.”

Pond swallowed. “You gave me an idea.”

“What? When?”

“Power station. You said if I gave it one path—”

Phuwin stared. Then something unbearably tender passed over his face.

“You listened.”

“Always,” Pond said before he could stop himself.

The whole tower seemed to go quiet around them. Phuwin looked at him like he was seeing something old and beloved and newly fragile at once.

Then he said, very softly, “You know you don’t have to be Spider-Man with me, right?”

Pond’s breath caught.

“What?”

“You can just be Pond. My Pond.”

The world went white.

*

At first he thought it was another explosion.

Then the white sharpened into fluorescent light.

The smell changed.

Not dust and metal and city wind, but antiseptic, stale air-conditioning, cotton, plastic, the clean artificial scent of hospitals trying to bully death into staying professional.

Pond opened his eyes.

The ceiling above him was plain. White acoustic tile. Fluorescent panel. A crack in one corner.

There was an IV in his arm. A monitor beeped softly somewhere to his right.

And Phuwin was asleep in the chair beside the bed, folded awkwardly over his own crossed arms, hair falling into his face, one hand still resting on the mattress near Pond’s wrist like he’d fallen asleep making sure Pond was still there.

For a second Pond could only stare.

Not Spider-Man.

Not a loft in New York.

Not a clock tower.

Hospital.

Phuwin.

Real.

Pond’s throat tightened so fast it hurt.

He moved one hand.

The mattress rustled.

Phuwin woke instantly to the slight movement. It was like he was hyperaware of his surroundings. As if waiting for Pond to wake up.

He jerked up so fast his glasses nearly slid off his face, stared for one wide shocked beat, and then said, voice breaking clean down the middle, “Oh my god.”

Pond blinked at him.

Phuwin reached for the call button with one hand and Pond’s face with the other like he couldn’t decide which emergency to address first.

“You’re awake,” he said. “You’re actually awake.”

The nurse came in. Then a doctor. Then there were lights in his eyes and questions about his name and the date and pain levels and whether he remembered the accident.

Pond answered mechanically.

Name: Pond Naravit.
Date: whatever it was.
Pain: yes. Everywhere. Especially pride.
Accident:—

He looked at Phuwin.

Phuwin was standing by the bed now, hands clenched together so tightly his knuckles had gone pale.

The memory came back in one terrible rush.

Rain-slick road.
Phuwin in the crosswalk.
The car.
The shove.
Impact.

Pond swallowed. “I remember enough.”

That got him another hour of monitoring, a lecture about concussions, and eventually a few blessed minutes alone when the nurse left to update paperwork and the doctor went off to terrorize someone else.

The room went quiet.

Pond looked at Phuwin.

Phuwin looked back.

For a second neither of them seemed to know where to start.

Then Phuwin laughed once—wet, disbelieving, furious all at once—and scrubbed both hands over his face.

“You are unbelievable.”

Pond’s voice came out rough with disuse. “Hi.”

Phuwin stared at him. Then, incredibly, huffed out another laugh.

“That’s what you’ve got?”

Pond swallowed. “It feels like the right place to begin.”

Something in Phuwin’s expression shifted. Softened. He dragged the chair closer and sat down heavily.

“You were unconscious for two days,” he said. “You scared the absolute life out of me.”

Pond winced. “I–Uhh.. Sorry.”

“You should be.”

Phuwin leaned back, but only enough to cross his arms. Not enough to put distance between them. “You pushed me out of the way and got hit instead.”

Pond looked down at the blanket over his lap. The monitor kept beeping.

The dream, if it had been a dream, still clung to him in textures and sound. Webs under his fingers. City wind. Phuwin in his shirt. Phuwin falling. Phuwin alive.

“You didn’t fall,” he said before he could stop himself.

Phuwin blinked. “What?”

Pond looked up.

The words felt absurd in the bright hospital room, but they were the truest thing he had.

“You didn’t fall,” he said again, quieter.

And Phuwin’s face changed.

Not confusion.

Recognition.

Or something near it.

“When you were out,” Phuwin said slowly, “you kept talking.”

Pond went still. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes.” Phuwin looked suspiciously close to smiling now. “Mostly nonsense. ‘Tower’ came up a lot. Also ‘No, not like that’ and ‘change the angle’ and one truly dramatic ‘I’m about to rewrite the physics of the universe.’”

Pond closed his eyes. 

“I need the morphine to kill me.”

“No, because it gets worse.” Phuwin continued, amused.

Pond made a dying sound.

Phuwin leaned forward, elbows on his knees, that almost-smile still trembling at the corner of his mouth.

“You also said my name,” he said.

Pond froze.

“A lot.”

The silence that followed was catastrophic.

Phuwin looked down at his own hands for a second. When he spoke again, his voice had gone softer.

“I figured there were two possibilities,” he said. “One, you had a very intense near-death hallucination. Two…” He shrugged one shoulder. “You finally ran out of ways not to tell me.”

Pond looked at him.

This close, Phuwin looked exhausted. There were shadows under his eyes. His hair was flattened on one side from sleeping in the chair. He still had a faint scrape on his wrist from the road.

Real. Entirely real.

Pond felt suddenly, violently brave.

Maybe because he had already loved and lost and found him again in another life. 

Maybe because dreaming being Spider-Man had taught him that courage was sometimes just saying the thing before fear could edit it down to nothing.

Or maybe because Phuwin was looking at him like he’d been waiting.

“In the dream,” Pond said carefully, “we were… together.”

Phuwin’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t interrupt. He was listening closely.

“I woke up in this whole…” Pond gestured weakly around himself. “Other reality. I was Spider-Man.”

Phuwin’s mouth twitched. “That does explain the physics monologue.”

Pond let out a breath that was half laugh.

“And you were there,” he said. “Not just there. You were—” His throat tightened. “You were mine. Or I was yours. Both, I think.”

Phuwin’s gaze didn’t move from his face.

Pond kept going because if he stopped now he never would again.

“And I knew you were going to fall,” he said. “I knew it was coming and I still couldn’t say any of the right things in time. I kept trying to push you away to keep you safe. Which, apparently, is a thing I do across dimensions.”

Phuwin’s smile went faint and helpless.

“I noticed.”

“In the dream,” Pond said, voice roughening, “you told me I didn’t have to be Spider-Man with you. That I could just be Pond.”

The hospital room was quiet enough that Pond could hear the air conditioner breathing through the vent.

He looked at Phuwin and, for once in his life, didn’t look away.

“I think maybe I needed to hear that,” he said. “Because here, before the accident, I couldn’t even say hello to you without forgetting how language worked.”

Phuwin was very still now.

Then he leaned back in the chair and said, with the devastating calm of a man who had known more than Pond ever imagined, “Pond.”

Pond braced.

“You were not subtle.”

Pond blinked. “What?”

“You stared at me in class like I was an exam question you were afraid to fail.”

“I—”

“You nearly walked into a glass door outside the media building because I said your name.”

Pond’s mouth fell open.

“I offered you my notes twice,” Phuwin continued. “You said ‘thanks’ like it physically hurt.”

Pond covered his face with one hand. “I’m going to pass out again.”

Phuwin laughed softly.

And there it was, that exact sound, no multiverse required. Bright and warm and a little incredulous, like he couldn’t quite believe Pond was real either.

Then Phuwin’s expression changed.

He stood up.

Walked towards Pond. 

And took Pond’s free hand gently away from his face.

“I knew,” he said.

Pond stared at him.

“I didn’t know you liked me that much,” Phuwin amended. “I thought maybe you were shy. Or maybe you thought I was intimidating.” A tiny pause. “Which I can be.”

Pond let out a helpless breath. “You are.”

Phuwin smiled. “I know.”

Then the smile softened. “But I did know you were trying,” he said. “You always looked like you had something to say and were fighting your own soul about it.”

Pond’s throat hurt.

Phuwin looked down at their joined hands, then back at him.

“I thought you were cute,” he said.

The world stopped. Did he just–

“What?”

“You’re dorky and handsome,” Phuwin said, entirely too calm for someone detonating a person from the inside out. “And painfully obvious. And when you think too hard, you make this face like the universe has become a difficult math problem.” His fingers tightened a little around Pond’s. “It’s cute.”

Pond could only stare at him.

Phuwin exhaled softly through his nose. Courage mustering up. “I–I, uhh, was actually planning to ask if you wanted coffee this week.”

Pond blinked. “You were?”

“Yes.”

“I got hit by a car.”

“You did.” Phuwin’s expression went dry. “Terrible timing.”

Pond laughed then, small and startled and disbelieving enough that it hurt his ribs.

Phuwin’s eyes went warm.

The hospital room brightened with late afternoon. Somewhere in the hallway a cart squeaked past. The monitor kept making its gentle annoying proof-of-life noises.

Pond thought about the dream. About towers and webs and alternate selves and all the ways his terrified brain had built a story large enough to teach him one simple thing:

Love didn’t make him Spider-Man.

It just meant he had to stop running from hello.

He looked up at Phuwin.

And said, clearly this time, “Hello, Phuwin.”

Phuwin’s entire face softened into a smile.

“Hi, Pond.”

Pond swallowed.

Then, because apparently he was done wasting universes, he said, “I like you.”

Phuwin laughed again, quieter this time, and leaned down until their foreheads almost touched.

“I know,” he said.

Pond made a sound of protest. “That’s so evil.”

“I also like you,” Phuwin added, mercifully. “You know. For the record. So you don’t have to get hit by another vehicle to confirm it.”

Pond closed his eyes for one second in sheer relief.

When he opened them, Phuwin was still there. 

Real. 

Alive. 

Looking at him like he mattered.

“You’re not allowed,” Phuwin said, voice turning serious again, “to try and be Spider-Man next time.”

Pond laughed helplessly. “That line sounds better when you say it.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“No, you’re concussed.”

“That too.”

Phuwin shook his head, but he was smiling.

Then he did something small and devastating: he lifted Pond’s hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles.

Not a dream. Not a different universe. Not another life.

This one.

Pond looked at him and thought that maybe some realities were not rehearsals or punishments or alternate routes at all.

Maybe some were just second chances.

Outside the window, the sky had gone the color of late rain. Gold at the edges. Gentle.

Pond squeezed Phuwin’s hand once.

“Coffee,” he said.

Phuwin lifted an eyebrow. “Is that a question?”

“It’s a plan.”

“Bold of you. You can’t even sit up all the way.”

“I can recover.”

“Mm.”

Pond looked at him.

Then, quietly, because now he could: “Stay?”

Phuwin glanced at the chair. Then back at him.

“I wasn’t going anywhere.”

And this time, when Pond closed his eyes, it wasn’t because he was falling.

It was because, finally, he didn’t have to.