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The label gun jammed for the third time, and Peter stood there pulling on it like that would help, like sheer irritation was a diagnostic tool.
“What is wrong with you?” He whispered, gently shaking it.
"You have to press it flat first," said the guy next to him — a guy from inventory, who had already shown him this twice. "See, you're tilting it."
"Right. Tilting. Cool cool. Got it." Peter pressed it flat. It worked instantly.
This was supposed to be the good part. Real job, real paycheck, a badge with his actual name on it. He kept almost feeling it for, like, four seconds around 9 AM when someone said "morning, Peter" and he had to stop himself from grinning like an idiot.
Then his brain, because apparently it hated him, went: You're really quiet tonight.
Cool. Awesome. Thanks, brain. Super relevant to label guns.
He'd meant it light, a joke, and Matt had laughed — actually laughed — and said something about the food, and Peter had let it go.
He hadn't even seen the new bruise until Matt reached for the water cup and his collar shifted. One second of yellow-green skin, gone before Peter's brain finished processing it, and by then Matt was already talking about something else, and Peter had just — sat there.
"Peter." His coworker again. "You okay, man? You've scanned that same box like four times."
"Sorry. Yeah. I’m okay. Long night."
"Rough shift?"
Peter almost laughed. There'd been no shift. Just him, on a roof, and then, like, three hours of sleep, and now this. He couldn't even remember what he'd scanned in the last ten minutes.
"Yeah," he said. "That’s close enough."
He dropped the box. It just slid out of his hands. He was thinking about Matt saying I'm fine, kid in that voice. The voice that meant stop. Or maybe don't ask. Or maybe please stop looking at me like that. Peter still wasn't actually sure which one.
His coworker gave him a look, and Peter waved him off and went and stood in the stockroom for a minute.
Fine. Which, statistically speaking, meant absolutely nothing good.
Not this time.
If Matt wasn't going to tell him, Peter would just — go look.
He went back out and scanned the next four boxes without dropping a single one, which felt like a personal victory he had no one to tell.
--
The wall went up sixty feet, floodlit in ugly sodium orange, and Peter had been sitting above it in the dark for two hours doing absolutely nothing that felt like superheroing.
"Cool. Just your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man... outside his neighborhood... sitting on a prison wall. Like a fly.”
He considered that. "...Fly-Man."
He winced. "I’m just gonna pretend I didn’t say that.”
Just a yard, empty this late, and a guard rotation that ran like a metronome — same two men, same fourteen-minute loop, same spot by the east fence where they stopped to talk for ninety seconds every single pass, like clockwork, like they didn't know they were being watched, because they didn't.
Honestly he'd kind of expected to catch something. Like — a guy corners another guy behind a truck, Peter swoops in, problem has a face, Peter punches the face. That was the whole system, that was how it worked in Queens.
It was stupid. Nothing was happening. Which should've been good.
It did not feel good.
Then, near the end of the loop, Matt.
Just walking the yard alone, same as the last two nights, hands loose, head tipped a little like he was listening to something.
Peter almost smiled. “That’s probably fine.”
Then Matt shifted his weight wrong on a turn, and Peter's whole body went still.
“That’s… not ideal.”
It was barely a hitch in the stride, a hand that started toward his ribs and then stopped itself halfway. Anyone else would've missed it completely. Peter's hands flat against the stone, stupid useless anger flaring up over nothing, over a guy just walking.
Fine, Matt had said.
He stayed until Matt went inside. Then he stayed a while longer than that, for no reason, watching an empty yard like it owed him something.
He swung home when it was almost light out, and didn't really think in words the whole way, just replayed the hand going toward the ribs, over and over, until it stopped meaning anything and just felt like static.
--
Peter had the granola bars, he had the terrible cafeteria-adjacent gossip he had overheard about the security company's Yelp reviews, he had a whole bit ready about a guy on the subway who'd tried to fight a pigeon. He was, objectively, bringing his A material.
He did not get through any of it.
"How's the yard," he said instead, before he'd even finished passing the granola bar through the gap.
Matt paused with it halfway to his mouth. "...Fine."
"Cool. Great. Anybody bothering you out there?"
"Kid."
"That's not a no, so that means it’s a yes."
"It's a 'why are you asking me that at 10 PM on a Tuesday.'"
"I contain multitudes," Peter said, and immediately regretted how much it sounded like something he'd say when he was trying too hard, which he was. "So. Nobody's bothering you."
"Nobody's bothering me."
"Great. Cool. Love that for you." He picked at the edge of the table divider, which did not need picking at. "You seem — I don't know. You seem like you're moving a little —"
"I'm sitting down."
"Okay, Mr. Literal, you know what I mean."
"I really don't."
He did. Peter could tell he did, because Matt's whole face had done that thing, and normally Peter would let that slide because pushing felt like a violation of some unspoken code, some rule about letting Matt have his dignity — except…
"You know, I overheard something recently," he tried, pivoting, because subtlety clearly wasn't working. "Apparently, the security contractor here has a 2.1 on Yelp, which, honestly, feels like it should concern someone —"
"Now who's changing the subject."
"I'm not — okay, fair, a little." Peter dragged a hand through his hair.
"Kid, did you sleep?"
Silence. Just for a second.
"...We're changing the subject," Peter said, mostly to fill the space, mostly because he didn't love what the silence had sounded like.
"You brought it up."
"I'm allowed to bring things up. I'm very fun and normal to talk to."
"You dropped a box of granola bars through the window an hour ago talking about a pigeon."
"That's not — okay, that's a separate issue, and also that pigeon had it coming." He was aware, distantly, that he was talking faster than usual, that the bit about the pigeon had died somewhere around minute three and he'd just kept going anyway because stopping meant sitting in the quiet, and the quiet had fine, fine, fine on a loop he couldn't shut off.
Matt didn't say anything for a second. Just sat there with the granola bar wrapper crinkling under his fingers, head.
"You good?" Matt asked. Quiet.
"Me? Yeah. I'm — yeah. Golden. I have a job now, did I mention the job—"
"You mentioned the job."
"It's a good job."
"You've told me four times."
"Because it's good," Peter said, and heard how thin it came out.
They heard the guard on rounds enter the hall before either of them managed to actually land anywhere. Peter stood too fast, knocked his head on the wall, said ow like an idiot, and Matt — Matt almost smiled, just at the corner.
"See you," Peter said.
"Yeah."
He was just out the window when he heard it, low, mostly to himself, half affectionate, not really meant to carry:
"Idiot."
Peter didn't turn around. He wasn't sure what his face was doing and didn't want Matt's radar catching it, whatever it was.
--
Here was the thing Peter had decided, somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday, lying on his back on a rooftop not sleeping: he couldn't be there for the after. He couldn't sit across from Matt catching bruises two days late and calling that protection. If he wanted to actually stop something, he had to stop it before it happened.
Which meant: the wall.
Visible. The way Spider-Man usually was, perched somewhere high and obvious, daring anybody to try something while he watched. It worked in Queens. Guys saw the suit, guys reconsidered their whole week.
“Back on the wall. I should be getting commission for how often I visit this joint.”
The yard filled up around exercise hour. Peter watched Matt come out, watched him find his usual stretch of fence, and felt something in his chest unclench for the first time in what felt like a week. There. Nobody was going to try anything with Spider-Man sitting sixty feet up doing his best gargoyle impression.
He didn't bother being quiet about the web-shooters. Let them hear it — thwip, echoing a little off the stone, and then nothing, just him, settling onto the wall with his elbows on his knees like he owned the place.
Matt's head came up. He went very still. Peter almost laughed, almost called down something dumb — don't worry, just me — before he caught himself, because technically he wasn't supposed to be talking to inmates from the top of a prison wall, there was probably a rule about that, there was probably a lot of rules about this actually.
A guard near the yard door glanced up. An inmate two lanes over stopped walking for a second, looked up too, said something to the guy next to him. Peter didn't catch it. He was watching Matt, who hadn't moved from his spot by the fence, jaw doing something tight and complicated that Peter chalked up to — he didn't know, prison being prison, probably.
This is working, Peter thought, Right?
This had to be working. Which honestly felt great because he'd been on kind of a losing streak lately.
Nobody so much as breathed wrong near Matt while Peter sat there.
He gave it another twenty minutes and left only when the yard started clearing for the shift change, dropping off the wall.
He swung home thinking: good. Good. That's one thing handled.
--
Peter dropped through the window expecting the usual — snacks half out of his bag already, like everything was completely normal, thank you. "I brought snacks and several extremely bad opinions—"
Matt didn't turn around. "You were on the wall."
"...wow, okay, rude. Just skipping right to the interrogation."
“Kid.”
Peter's mouth opened and shut. "...I mean. Yeah?" He shut the window behind him, suddenly aware of how loud it sounded. "How'd you even — okay, never mind, dumb question. You're basically a sonar dish. I don't know why I keep pretending you don't hear literally everything. But, yeah. I was on the wall."
"Why."
"Why do you think? I was making sure nobody touched you." He said it like it was obvious, because it was obvious, because he'd spent a whole night feeling good about it. "Which, by the way, worked. Nobody touched you. You're welcome."
"They're going to notice."
"Good."
The word came out before he'd thought about it, and it wasn't until Matt's jaw did something sharp that Peter realized it was the wrong thing to say.
"No," Matt said. "Not good."
"Wait, what? That's the point, that's literally the point, if they know somebody's watching, somebody with actual —" he gestured at himself, the suit, all of it — "then they back off. That's how this works. That's how it's always worked."
"If they know somebody's watching," Matt said, very evenly, in the voice Peter had learned meant he was holding something down with both hands, "then they know where to twist the knife."
Silence. Peter opened his mouth twice and didn't get anywhere either time.
"I don't — I don't get it," he said finally, and it came out more honest than he meant it to. "I'm Spider-Man. I've had literally everyone come after me at some point, I've had actual gods try to kill me, I think I can handle a guard giving me a weird look—"
"This isn't about whether you can handle a guard."
"Then what is it about? Because from where I'm standing, I did the thing. I watched. Nothing happened. That's a win, that's — Matt, that's the whole plan working."
"It's not a game where nothing happening means you won."
"Okay, but also—" and he just pointed at Matt, "—also, hi, hypocrite alert? You had everyone checking on me a few months back. Everyone. Karen, Jessica — you had Frank Castle, Matt. The Punisher. You sent a man with a documented body count to make sure I was eating enough vegetables—"
"That's different—"
"How is that different?! I show up a couple times, I sit on a wall, and suddenly it's a five-alarm crisis, but you can mobilize an entire task force including a guy who solves problems with a grenade launcher and that's just — Tuesday?"
"It's different because nobody could see them," Matt said, and something about how fast it came out, how ready it was, made Peter stop. "Frank didn't stand on your fire escape in a skull vest holding a sign. Karen didn't corner you at work. They checked on you and left, and nobody who mattered ever knew they'd been there." A beat. "You just told a yard full of people exactly who Spider-Man comes back for."
Peter didn't have anything for that. Not right away.
"I don't need it to be invisible," he said, weaker than he wanted. "I don't care if people see Spider-Man. I never have."
"I know you don't." For a second Matt sounded almost tired instead of angry, which was somehow worse. "You've spent your whole life making yourself the target. On purpose. That's the job — nobody gets to because it's just you, out in the open, absorbing it."
"So?"
Matt was quiet for a second. "Tell me something."
Peter frowned.
"If somebody couldn't beat Spider-Man..."
"...okay?"
"...what would they do instead?"
“Matt…”
"They’d stop fighting Spider-Man and start looking for leverage." Matt's jaw was tight "Yesterday you announced what yours is."
Peter blinked. "I mean..." He frowned. "Yeah?" He shrugged. "I wasn't exactly trying to be subtle."
Matt closed his eyes for a second. “I know.”
"...You're serious.” Peter said slowly.
Matt gave him a look.
"You're worried about…me."
"I can handle whatever this place throws at me." Matt sighed. “Don’t make me wonder whether something happens to you because of me.”
Peter still didn't fully get it — some part of him was still thinking.
But nobody got hurt.
Which was kind of the point.
Wasn't it?
"I still think you're wrong," he said. Quietly.
"I know."
"I don't think it's dangerous. I think it's the opposite of dangerous."
"I know that too."
"But I'll — " He exhaled. Okay. He wasn’t winning this one. He genuinely didn't have the tools to make Matt see it the way he saw it, and some small, stubborn, unconvinced part of him hated that. "I'll stay off the wall."
Matt didn't say thank you. Just nodded, once, like he'd been braced for a longer fight and was almost thrown by not getting one.
Peter climbed out the window still about eighty percent convinced he was right.
Which was a terrible percentage.
Even worse, Matt was making an alarming amount of sense.
Peter just wished it felt like enough.
--
No wall.
Fine.
No wall.
That was...
Ugh.
Okay.
No wall.
He kept saying it like a rule taped to a fridge. Not his fridge, of course. He couldn’t afford the deposit if the tape defaced his fridge.
The city went by underneath in its usual smear — water tower, laundry line, a guy walking a dog that was mostly the dog walking him. Peter didn't stop for any of it. Just swung, fast, faster than the route needed, like speed was a substitute for a decision he hadn't actually made yet.
He's probably right.
Thwip. Swing.
He's not right. I watched a whole night and nothing happened.
Thwip.
He wasn't asking for himself, though.
That one snagged. He let it sit there a second, turning it over mid-swing, not liking how it fit.
Fine. Fine, okay. If it makes him worry less, I stop. That's protecting him, in a way.
Easy. Simple. Solved.
Except then his brain, unhelpfully, went and pictured it the other way. Matt on a roof somewhere. Matt on a wall, no mask, no way to hide, just standing there so nobody would try anything with Peter — and getting made for it. Somebody clocking it. Somebody filing it away: oh, there's a guy Daredevil actually cares about, that's useful.
And Matt saying, after, I can handle it, I'm not asking you to stop.
Would Peter stop?
No. Not even close. He'd tell Matt to get down and mean it and probably not even be that nice about it, because the idea of Matt standing out in the open like that, findable, because of him —
Oh.
He caught a ledge wrong on the turn past Ninth and had to correct hard, boots skidding, heart going for a second before his hands remembered their job. Sloppy. He filed that under tired and kept moving, already rehearsing tomorrow — 5 AM, the job, the badge, coffee he wouldn't actually have time to drink.
Fine. Okay. Fine. He'd stay off the wall. He still didn't agree. Couldn't, not really. But fine.
Okay.
Fine.
He'd stay off the wall.
Because...
Because Matt had looked scared.
Which was weird.
Matt wasn't supposed to look scared.
...ugh.
A scanner crackled somewhere below, tinny through an open cab window. Structure fire, engine 8 responding —
Peter's whole body turned toward it before his brain caught up.
He hung there a second, one hand on a cornice, looking at the smudge of orange on the skyline that hadn't been there ten minutes ago.
"One thing at a time," he said, to nobody, to the rooftops, to himself.
He swung toward the fire.
Behind him, the wall he wasn't on. Below him, the job he'd be late setting an alarm for. Somewhere in the back of his head, something kept trying to get his attention.
He ignored it.
There was a fire.
He just swung.