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Rain hammered against the prison windows hard enough to blur the city lights beyond them into streaks of gold and white.
Matt sat on the edge of his bunk, listening to the storm move through Hell’s Kitchen. Water rushing through gutters. Distant traffic hissing across wet pavement. Three guards playing cards two floors down. One inmate crying quietly into his pillow.
And—
There.
The familiar thwip of webbing somewhere above the outer wall.
Matt smiled despite himself.
“You’re late,” Matt called toward the window.
There was a muffled curse, followed by the unmistakable sound of someone slipping on wet concrete. A loud thud echoed off the outer wall. “I’m making an entrance!”
“You just hit a wall.”
“A stylish entrance.”
Matt huffed a laugh.
A red-and-blue shape appeared outside the reinforced window a second later, clinging sideways to the brick. Spider-Man tapped lightly against the glass.
Matt gestured vaguely. “Door’s open.”
“Oh wow, thanks, I’ll just ask the armed guards to buzz me in.”
“You could try being normal for once.”
Spider-Man crawled through the half-open gap near the bars with the deeply unnecessary flexibility of a twenty-year-old enhanced by radioactive nonsense.
“Pot have you met kettle?”
“I’m not the one entering federal prison like a raccoon in a ventilation shaft.”
Peter gasped through the mask. “First of all, offensive. Second, raccoons are incredibly intelligent.”
He landed lightly against the wall beside the bunk.
Matt laughed quietly. “You stole pudding cups again.”
“…no.”
Matt held out a hand.
Peter stared at it.
“You can’t even see me right now.”
“You literally smell like artificial vanilla.”
Peter paused, then there was the faint crinkle of plastic.
“Traitor,” Peter muttered, depositing two pudding cups into Matt’s palm.
“You commit crimes while visiting me in prison,” Matt said. “Do you understand how ironic that is?”
“In my defense, the vending machine ate my dollar.”
“You don’t have a dollar.”
Peter dropped bonelessly from the wall onto the bunk opposite Matt’s. “I had a dollar once,” Peter corrected. “Past tense. Briefly. We had something special. How would you know anyways?”
“You live in Queens.”
“Okay, wow,” he muttered. “Little class warfare from the incarcerated population.”
Matt snorted softly as he set the pudding beside him.
The kid had been showing up almost every night for three weeks now. Always after midnight. Always pretending he was less exhausted than he actually was.
Peter moved more slowly than usual. His breathing dragged faintly beneath the mask.
Injured. Again.
Matt frowned. “Who hit you?”
“No one.”
“Your left shoulder disagrees.”
Peter glanced down automatically before freezing. “You can’t even see my shoulder.”
“You’re compensating for it.”
“…it’s horrifying that you can tell that.”
“It’s extremely useful.”
Peter muttered something under his breath about vigilantes being creepy and leaned his head back against the wall. The mattress springs squealed in protest.
Matt listened carefully to Peter’s heartbeat.
Fast.
Uneven.
“You forgot to sleep again,” he said.
Peter let his head thunk lightly against the concrete behind him. “That narrows it down literally zero.”
Matt folded his arms. “How long?”
“Define ‘sleep.’”
“Kid.”
“Okay, technically unconsciousness occurred at some point this week.”
“That’s still not an answer.”
Peter was quiet for a second.
Then:
“…three days.”
Matt went very still. “You can’t do that.”
“Sure I can. Watch me.”
“I can’t watch anything.”
Peter laughed weakly, but it faded quickly into quiet. Then his stomach growled loud enough that someone without Matt's abilities could hear.
“…that was unrelated,” Peter said quickly.
The silence after settled heavier this time. Matt could hear the way Peter’s heartbeat shifted every few seconds.
“You going to tell me what happened tonight?” Matt asked softly.
“Nothing happened.”
“You hit the wall hard enough to crack concrete.”
“…maybe something happened.”
Matt waited.
“There was this guy robbing a bodega in Midtown,” Peter said eventually. “Nothing major. Knife, cash register, existential disappointment, the usual.”
Matt waited.
“I stopped him, tied him up, cops came.” Peter shrugged. “You know, a typical Tuesday night.”
“But?”
Peter went quiet for a second. “The cashier asked if we’d met before.”
Matt tilted his head slightly.
Peter laughed once under his breath. “Which is not weird. I mean—I wear a mask. Spider-Man talks to literally everyone. But for some reason my brain just—”
He snapped his fingers once. “Gone. Completely gone.” He huffed. “He kept staring at me like he almost knew something.” Peter rubbed hard at the side of his mask. “And suddenly I couldn’t breathe properly and my hands locked up and I actually thought I was gonna throw up for a second, which is super dignified when you’re hanging upside down from a ceiling. And the dumb part?” Peter continued quickly. “He probably didn’t recognize anything. It’s not like anybody actually knows me, They just know Spider-Man.”
“Kid—”
“Even you!” Peter interrupted, waving vaguely. “Calling me ‘kid’ or just Spidey or whatever. You don’t even know my name!”
Matt huffed a laugh. “And yet you keep coming back.”
Peter just snorted. “You know what the worst part is?” Peter continued before Matt could answer. “Sometimes I miss it.”
Matt blinked. “The attention?”
“No! God, no.” Peter groaned. “Okay, maybe like… one percent the attention. Mostly I miss being somebody.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “It’s stupid.”
“No,” Matt said quietly. “It sounds familiar.”
For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then Peter said, softer this time: “Sometimes it hits me that nobody really knows me at all.”
Matt frowned slightly.
Peter stared at the floor. “I’ll see someone looking at me,” he swallowed, “and for a second I think they’re gonna… I don’t know. Recognize me or something.”
He gave a small, sharp breath that almost turned into a laugh but didn’t quite make it.
“And they never do,” he added, softer. “And it’s just—” He stopped, shook his head once like he was trying to clear it. “Like missing a stair, ya know?”
Matt frowned slightly.
That couldn’t possibly be true.
Spider-Man was everywhere. Kids wore his face on backpacks. Half the city had an opinion about him.
But he wasn’t talking about fame.
Peter stared at the floor.
Matt sat quietly for a long moment before speaking. “When I lost my eyesight,” he said, “everyone in my life decided what I couldn’t be.”
Peter looked up slightly.
Matt continued. “They pitied me. Protected me. Talked around me like I was already broken.” He smiled faintly. “So naturally I became a vigilante out of spite.”
Peter snorted.
Matt shrugged. "People get weird ideas about who you are."
“Easy for you to say,” Peter muttered. “You’re memorable.”
“I’m in prison.”
“You’re in prison for helping people. That’s annoyingly noble.”
“Language.”
Peter barked out a laugh despite himself. He slid slowly down the wall until he was sitting on the floor beside Matt’s bunk. Close enough that Matt could feel the warmth radiating off him.
“Can I ask you something?” Peter said quietly.
“You usually do.”
“Were you scared?”
Matt answered immediately. “Constantly.”
“No, I mean when people found out about you.”
Matt rested his arms on his knees. “I did it to myself.”
Peter snorted. “On live television too.”
“But yes,” Matt continued carefully. “Not because they knew. Because once people know, they can use it against everyone around you.”
Peter’s heartbeat stuttered sharply.
Matt exhaled quietly through his nose.
“And after a while,” he said, “being alone starts feeling safer than… risking that again.”
Peter frowned slightly behind the mask.
Matt rested his forearms against his knees. “You tell yourself it’s responsibility. That you’re protecting people.” He smiled faintly, though there wasn’t much humor in it. “Sometimes you are.”
The silence after that stretched long enough that Matt wondered if he’d pushed too far.
Then Peter said, very quietly: “You always sound like you swallowed a fortune cookie.”
Matt smiled. “And you cope with emotional vulnerability by becoming annoying.”
“That is medically false.”
“You climbed into a prison during a thunderstorm carrying stolen pudding cups.”
“They were complimentary.”
“You stole them from a federal commissary.”
“In Minecraft.”
Matt laughed again, softer this time.
Peter went still for half a heartbeat like the sound surprised him.
Matt shook his head.
The kid climbed buildings with cracked ribs, lived on coffee, and apparently considered sleep optional.
"Twenty?" he asked suddenly.
Peter nearly slipped off the wall. “…what.”
“Your age. Twenty. Maybe twenty-one.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You act like exhaustion is temporary,” Matt said mildly.
Peter stared at him.
“And you heal like someone who hasn’t yet learned that injuries stack.”
“That is a terrifying sentence.”
“You also say things that make me feel approximately ninety years old.”
Peter pointed accusingly at him. “That’s because you are.”
“You said ‘In Minecraft’ with complete emotional sincerity.”
“Ok, Boomer.”
“Elder Millennial, actually,” Matt said, a little too quickly. “Thanks for noticing.”
Peter squinted at him behind the mask. “That’s not— that’s not better.”
“Not financially.”
Peter shifted on the wall like he couldn’t decide what to do with his hands. “You are deeply invasive as a person.”
“I think you mean perceptive,” Matt said.
Peter made a sound like he wanted to argue but didn’t quite have the energy to commit to it.
“You’re a menace,” he said instead.
“Frequently.”
Peter huffed a laugh, but it didn’t really become anything. It just… faded. “Most people think I’m older in the suit.”
“Most people see the mask first,” Matt said, but it came out slower this time.
The room went quiet again.
Peter cleared his throat hard. “Well,” he announced, climbing backward onto the wall, “good talk. Very emotionally damaging. Same time tomorrow?”
“You really are planning to keep doing this.”
“Obviously.”
“You know this is objectively a terrible idea.”
“Correct.”
“You could get arrested.”
Peter snorted. “Mr. Murdock. Respectfully. I’m already breaking into a prison to hang out with a blind lawyer dressed like a sad Clementine.”
Matt looked down at the orange uniform. “…fair.”
Peter grinned beneath the mask. Then, softer now: “Besides…” He shrugged one shoulder. “Somebody should check on you.”
Matt’s chest tightened unexpectedly. “You don’t have to do that, kid.”
“You already said that, and I didn’t listen then either.”
“Get some sleep.”
Peter froze. “…wow.”
“What?”
“That’s the closes thing to a goodbye I’ve gotten out of you all month.”
Matt opened his mouth. Closed it again. “That’s not—” he started, then stopped, shaking his head slightly. “Just… don’t do the three days thing again.”
Peter went still for half a second, then, softer: “Yeah. Sure.”
He stepped backward onto the wall anyway. Rainwater slid off the edges of his suit as he turned. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Murdock.”
Matt didn’t correct him this time.
The sound of webbing snapped into the rain, and Peter was gone.