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The Punisher kicks down the front door of the Metro General ER with Spider-Man’s crumpled body cradled in his arms like a dying star, and Rose immediately knows that she will spend the rest of this shift on the outside of her body.
The chaos is instantaneous and all-consuming, a flurry of scrubs and shouting and the squeaking wheels of the bed rolled out from Trauma, the awful sound Rose’s sneakers make against the cold tile floor as she practically sprints to Spider-Man’s side. They’re new. New shoes for new patients with new wounds who need Rose to tell them new lies, if they’re ever going to have a chance of living to see tomorrow morning.
New shoes. Payless. Can you hear me? What’s your name? Ten percent off for healthcare workers this month. New shoes for healthcare workers. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Spider-Man, squeeze my hand if you can hear these loud fucking discount shoes—
The Punisher smells like sweat and the city and he looks like adrenaline embodied, energy practically crackling around him as he watches them roll Spider-Man away, as Rose lets go of the bed and doubles back, doubles back, doubles back. Everybody has a role. Everybody has a job.
Rose has a role. Rose has a job.
It’s more complicated today.
Who can be trusted? Who can we trust?
“Is there anything important we should know?” Rose demands of the Punisher, who holds his jaw tight like he’s scared bullets might spray out if his mouth opens too far. From what Rose has seen on the news, she wouldn’t be surprised if he somehow has figured out a way to rig a bomb into his teeth. Pain and bullets and fire, they follow him like an anchor made of corpses, heavy and uncompromising. “Allergies? Abilities? A name he’ll respond to?”
The Punisher—Castle, he was Castle, on the news he was Castle—shakes his head and twitches, like his hands are itching for something to hold, something to squeeze. A gun, probably, one of those disgusting hunks of blackened metal that have brought more folks through those front doors than Rose can ever attempt to count, but she doesn’t have time to hate Frank Castle right now. She has a role. She is nothing but a piece of a life-saving puzzle dressed in old scrubs and new shoes. She has three minutes, tops, to gather the right people and the right information into the right place before it is too late.
Who can he trust? Who can we trust?
“Don’t know any of that freaky super-shit,” the Punisher says with a harsh scrub of his hand over his jaw. Adjusting that bomb in his teeth, maybe. Swallowing it whole, letting it implode in the bob of his adams apple, since his voice tightens as he says, “healing, maybe. Or somethin’ else that keeps the blood on the inside of him, something with his fuckin’—sticky powers, I don’t know. Too long of a drive not to have something helping him. Kid should be dead. Half an hour ago, he should've been dead.”
Rose nods and says in a clipped voice, “Thank you.”
Then, she runs.
--
They haven’t removed the mask, yet. The suit is gone but they’ve just lifted the lip of the mask’s bottom hem, scissors pressed to Spider-Man’s sternum as José preps the ventilator and Ima shouts something about blood pressure—seventy over forty, seventy over forty, where’s the surgeon, who can we trust—when Rose lunges to grab the scissors out of Genevive’s hand, the damn shoes squeaking as she goes.
Genevive curses, recoiling in shock from what Rose knows are her own crazed eyes and haggard appearance, the ripped nitrile glove on her right hand.
For one infinite moment, the overly trained and overly worked and overly strained trauma staff of the Metro General Trauma Unit stare at her, dumbfounded. Rose’s throat feels dry, like she’s trying to swallow a piece of cardboard, or maybe that bomb the Punisher had been gargling. It’s smoking in her throat.
The right thing. The right thing. Just trying to do the right thing, ma’am. I’m just trying to do the right—
Rose glances at Spider-Man where he lays on the bed, stock-still like a child, nearly naked and white as a sheet while the machines around them beep, and suddenly, violently, Rose is inside of a burning furnace. The room itself seems to smoke, blood pounding in Rose’s ears, lava in her veins. Her jaw trembles. For some reason, her abuela’s voice rings back from 1968 like a bolt of lightning through Rose’s mind, through her entire body—
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The three brave boys of the Bible, who held their heads high as they walked into the open flames to be burned for their belief, only to find themselves protected from the flames by God and his angels. Not a single one harmed. Recite their names, mija. Remind me of their truth.
Be brave, Rose. The right thing, Rose.
Then will come the angels.
Rose takes a deep breath before turning to Genevive, who is weaving an impressive slew of obscenities and hand gestures into her orders for one of the barely newer nurses to fetch another pair of scissors. We don’t have time for this shit and what the fuck are you doing, Ramírez, and who the fuck moved the fucking switchblade spewing from her mouth like poison, like truth.
“Get out,” Rose tells her sharply, pointing a scarred finger at the back curtain. José is rolling Spider-Man’s mask up to place the ventilator, a careful control and focus to his movements that remind Rose of Spider-Man himself, but that’s okay. That’s fine. He’s one of the angels. He’s someone Rose can trust.
Genevive looks at Rose like she’s stuck acid down her throat and then forced her to swallow, entire face twisted. She coils, like a pent-up ball of burning gas. Her eyes flash and she spits, “What?”
“I SAID GET OUT, SHELTON,” Rose raises her voice and shouts, in a voice that hurts. She is loud in her own ears. She is a furnace burning too hot for Genevive’s flames to touch, for Genevive’s experience in this trauma unit to matter much at all when the metaphorical dicks are pulled out and measured. Six years of experience compared to Rose’s near-forty. Fifty deaths on her conscience compared to Rose’s hundreds. The argument is over before it starts.
When Rose repeats herself again, there’s no question. No one fights her. There isn’t time, so the lines have been drawn, even as Ima glances back at the two of them standing there as she snaps the heart rate monitor onto Spider-Man’s finger, concern written all over her face.
Genevieve storms out of the immediate trauma area, and the footprints she leaves behind are bloody.
--
She’s a good nurse, Genevieve. Rose already knows that she’ll have to apologize when this is all over, set about mending fences the same way that she mends her niece and nephew's school uniforms, with a careful precision borne of years and years of practice and fuck ups and oft-made mistakes. There were no classes in nursing school about doctor’s egos or frayed nerves or operating on enhanced vigilantes—just lessons Rose picked up as she went. Just gut feelings she learned to trust and continues to follow.
So Rose will apologize, because Genevieve Shelton is a good nurse, quick and brave and full of the fire Rose once had, the fire that will let her do this shitty, thankless job for years and make her tougher for it rather than broken by it.
A good nurse, yes, but not a subtle one. Prone to gossip, loud-mouthed and mean, itching for recognition without much caring how she gets it.
Short on money. Drawn to tabloids.
Spider-Man is a white male between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven, and they have to puncture his chest with a tube to drain the blood that’s collected in his pleural cavity. He gasps while unconscious, wheezes and gurgles and jerks hard enough sideways to send Ima stumbling backwards into the monitors, only for Rose to watch Ima grit her teeth, pull herself back up, and plant herself again on his right arm with better footing, because they have a job to do.
Castle had called him a kid, and he is. God help her, he is, he is, he is. He might as well be an infant to someone like Rose, face contorted in his sleep, fingers still where they lie on the bed, curls a sweaty halo atop a smooth forehead. Rose can practically taste his youth through her mask, in the sounds and smells and tastes of his broken body that flow sickly sweet through the air between him and them.
Just trying to do the right thing, ma’am. Just trying to do the right thing.
The angels shoulder-to-shoulder with Rose glisten with sweat and exhaustion and flecks of blood, and hold a secret behind pursed lips that Rose knows will never make it out of the Metro-General OR, so help them God.
--
Spider-Man dies twice on the table. They’ll nearly lose him three times more before Rose ignores and works right through the end of her shift.
But they don’t.
They don’t.
Something is keeping him alive, long enough for Rose and her team to do what needs to be done. Long enough for the Trauma team at Metro General to maybe, hopefully, impossibly—save Spider-Man's life.
Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. Angels in the furnace. Rose can feel them in the operating room, a flash of red hair through the window she’s too tired to decide if she imagines. She can feel them sitting there across the recovery room from her in the aftermath, when Spider-Man’s chest is rising and falling softly like a debt repaid, like penance done.
Rose watches Spider-Man sleep, her scrubs stained with bodily fluids and hands shaking from exhaustion coupled with the fact that she’s very nearly too old to keep doing this shit, and wonders in the back of her mind if the three brave Bible boys also struggled to re-enter their own bodies once God had put the fire out.
--
Rose is fifty-eight when Spider-Man nearly kills her son.
James is on a bender, a warpath, a fucked-up crusade. Rose hardly remembers him before the addiction got ahold of his soul, the poison he tried and failed and tried and failed and tried and failed to control. He was angry, after the Snap. They all were. Rose goes to church about it, and when that doesn’t help, clocks in at Metro General. James tries and tries, he tries so fucking hard, Rose knows he does, but—
He can’t, is what matters. The anger, it chokes James until it has complete hold of him, gets into his blood and cells and the deep crevices of his mind like a cancer. Rose’s anger. All the sharp edges of it she’s tried so desperately to sand smooth, breaking her back and her wrists and her brain in the Metro-General Trauma unit for fifteen, twenty, thirty years, trying to do the right thing. The genetic part of that anger finds a home in James, and it's something Rose will never forgive herself for.
And when James shows up at that elitist Oscorp gala high as a fucking kite and shouting himself hoarse about world hunger, and Thanos, and fat-fucking Oscorp cats up there in their ivory tower, brandishing that gun that blares with unnatural green energy and kills two men and a woman in one blast, Spider-Man should’ve killed him. The cops, they could’ve, should’ve, would have killed him.
Spider-Man doesn’t.
James gets two good hits with the gun in, singeing Spider-Man’s uniform and nearly blowing off his leg while Rose watches from the barricade, screaming her throat raw.
He’s just a kid, she sobs into the vest of the cop blocking the door as Spider-Man lines up the shot with his wrist and disappears, feeling like something inside her is hemorrhaging, like her entire body is one bleeding wound. He’s just a kid.
Spider-Man limps out of the building fifteen minutes later, carrying James’s broken but breathing body like a baby in his arms. The EMTs swarm, and Rose manages to catch him. Catch Spider-Man. The blackened edge of his suit between her fingers, turning to ash that colors her hands black as he tries to slip quietly away.
The rest of the city doesn't love him yet, back then. Not the way they will. Not the way Rose will always love him, from this moment on.
James is alive.
“Ma’am,” Spider-Man says, with a voice that breaks from tiredness or pain or a million other things as he tries to tug himself free and Rose holds on harder, grips the smoldering remains of his suit harder. “I’m sorry about whichever one of your cats or dogs or lions or bears is missing, but I really gotta go. My juice is squeezed. If I don’t get out of here now, they’ll have to carry me on one of those fancy-ass stretchers, and that’ll cost the taxpayers a whole lot more than I’m worth.”
Rose drags him forward with the fistfuls of suit she has at his chest until he’s right there, right in front of her.
(Just a kid. He's younger than James. Younger than James.)
“Thank you,” Rose sobs into his sooty suit, and Spider-Man freezes, seeming suddenly uncertain. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
She starts to cry, hot tears she thought she’d run out of years ago, burning like fire down her cheeks. Like acid. Her knees are weak and they nearly give out on her, but Spider-Man catches her, now silent as he folds Rose into his arms and holds her, holds her, holds her there against his chest. Rose can feel him trembling, his own body begging to give out on him under her, and still he holds her.
Burn shock, Rose thinks in the back of her mind. He could need oxygen. An IV. The hospital.
“Why?” she croaks instead of telling him, looking up into the mask, still holding herself up by the fistfuls of his suit in her palms and Spider-Man’s deceivingly steady, strong hands on her forearms. “Why did you save him? Why not—why not just, God, why didn't you…”
“Just, uh. Just trying to do the right thing, ma’am,” Spider-Man says gently. There’s some self-deprecation to it, and Rose suddenly remembers herself, releasing his suit and taking a stumbling step backwards, wiping furiously at her eyes. Spider-Man holds out his arms as if preparing to catch her again, then relaxes when it’s clear she has her feet back steadily under her.
“Good luck,” he tells Rose, sounding impossibly honest as he nods towards the ambulance where they’re loading James, who just twenty minutes ago nearly cost him his foot. “To both of you.”
Rose remembers she nods. Furiously, violently, nothing like a fifty-eight year old and everything like a small child.
“Thank you,” she croaks again. “Thank you.”
Spider-Man nods kindly, misses twice with his web-shooting devices because of how bad his fingers are fumbling, and finally swings away.
--
Rose and Dr. Raj are the only two who continue to treat Spider-Man once he’s stable. Someone let Mr. Castle into the room at some point during the night—Mr. Castle, Raj calls him, not Punisher, and so Rose bites her lip and follows suit—and he’s still there the following morning when Rose shows back up, her new shoes echoing in the silent stillness of Spider-Man’s recovery room as she begins to check his vitals.
Rose can’t help but smooth Spider-Man’s hair back, adjust his ventilator so it doesn’t bite into his skin, scrape the dry flakes hanging from a too-quickly healed scab off his temple with the back of her fingernail.
Can you hear me, Spider-Man? What’s your name? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Spider-Man—
“I trust he’s got your discretion,” Castle says quietly, voice rough from either disuse or, if Rose didn’t know better, emotion. He’s a large man and his presence fills the room like a looming specter, dark and glowering and remarkably still for hours on end where he perches on the hospital chair. “Rest of the staff’s, too.”
Rose straightens up to look at him, uncaring that she’s glaring hard enough to shoot lasers out of her eyes if pushed. She says nothing.
Castle scrubs a hand over his jaw, looking suddenly much more like a regular, middle-aged man. He had a family once, Rose suspects. He carries himself like a soldier, then a father.
“I’ve got money,” Castle says stiffly. “Plenty of it. Whatever you need—I can take care of it. Tell the others the same.“
“I don’t want your money.” Rose looks at him with open disgust, wondering if he’s finally cracked from all those hits to the head vigilantes must suffer and lost his damn mind. Wondering if this is the way it works in his world, Punisher’s world, the world of the sleeping kid next to her who's currently breathing through a tube. A dollar for your help, ten for your silence, twenty if you end up dead. “We haven’t even heard his name. Nobody here needs your—blood money, to do our jobs, Mr. Castle.”
Castle shuts his eyes for just a fraction of a moment, like a tired blink. Then he says, gruffly, “Understood.”
“I should call the police,” Rose tells him. Quietly, as to not wake Spider-Man, who is, for some unexplainable reason Raj can’t untangle, still asleep. “Or damage control. Have you arrested just for—being here, in the first place.”
Castle looks at her for a long moment, then smiles a little and barks out a laugh as he leans back into the chair and scratches at the back of his neck. “Yeah. Yeah, I s’pose you should. Hell of a way to welcome the kid back to the land of the living, though. Live shootouts and hospitals have never been a good mix in my—you know." He shrugs a little. "Long and varied, professional experience.”
“You’re bluffing,” Rose says stiffly, knuckles tightening on the clipboard she’s holding at her hip.
Castle nods in agreement. “Like a fuckin’ car salesman. But I ain’t leaving, not unless he’s packed under my arm like a goddamn sack of potatoes. With all due respect, you're not the only one with promises to keep, lady. Luckily, I can keep mine while sittin’ right here, peaceful, while the kid rests. I’d prefer to keep it that way.”
A beat passes, and then Rose nods because this whole thing, this charade, this—utter ridiculousness they're experiencing right now? Is the Metro Trauma center equivalent of the Wild West. There's no precedent here, no procedure, and Rose has no reason to get rid of Castle other than his many outstanding murder charges and her own gut screaming that he's dangerous, which isn't enough, Raj claims, to warrant giving a guy who's making no trouble the boot.
“Fine,” Rose says through gritted teeth. “Call me if anything spikes or beeps. Or if he shows signs of waking.”
Castle inclines his head slightly. “'Course."
Rose goes to leave, but something stops her. A small stripe of yesterday’s flame, licking up her spine, reminding her that this currently very fragile looking young man is owed something by Rose she can never repay, never repay, never even try to repay. Not the way Frank Castle can.
“I can’t help but wonder, though,” she says icily, turning around to face Castle, again, “what good you are to him, in here, rather than out there.”
Castle raises his eyebrows, looking at Rose with a distinct sense of middle-aged-white-man pissiness she doesn’t have the patience for. “Yeah? Care at all to elaborate, Miz…” He trails off, squinting at her.
“Ramírez,” Rose supplies, voice steely. “I mean to say, Mr. ‘The Punisher’—he’s safe in here. The bastard who shot him, though? Still at large. What good are those big goddamn guns, if even you can’t go track the guy down and do what needs to be done?"
Rose watches, hovering there in the doorway, as Castle snorts a little; a rough, harsh sound completely devoid of humor as he nods his head like something, anything, is funny. Then he braces his elbows on the mattress of Spider-Man’s raised bed near Spider-Man’s hip and buries his head in his hands. Bows himself as if in prayer, shielding Spider-Man’s pale form from some unknown danger with his scarred knuckles and stiff soldier’s shoulders.
Rose takes her clipboard and leaves him there, feeling suddenly and strangely unsteady.
--
Day two, and still Spider-Man sleeps. The crowds outside become too large to handle safely and the police have to be called in, to patrol and look stupid and keep the type of trouble from breaking out that occurs when there are too many bodies and not enough airflow in a single, concentrated area. Rose is looking out at them in wonder through the blinds on Spider-Man’s window when it hits her, like the crackling of an ember, like a belt over her chest squeezing, a shock of memories from the month following the Snap. The bodies that had pressed against the doors of the ER like a compressed can of writhing worms, trampling one another underfoot in a bid to get in, get help, she’s bleeding, let me in—
—and then Rose is on the floor of a nearby supply closet, attempting and failing to suck air in through her mouth, failing to remember even one of the coping mechanisms that have been drilled into her mind since school—
Bodies, over and under and atop each other. The lack of supplies. The tang of blood and bitter fluid and dust that Rose couldn’t escape, get in, get help, get in, need help—
“Oh, is this closet taken?”
Rose jerks her head up, rubbing frantically at her face, trying to summon any semblance of her furnace, her fire, the flame that she calls on to get her through the days here, each day, every goddamn day she spends pulling bullets out of kids. She becomes aware a beat late that she’s pulled out her cross and is rubbing her thumb subconsciously over the smooth metal, and she drops the chain back beneath her scrubs, all while a woman with dark hair and smiling eyes looks down at her with raised brows.
“I’m sorry,” Rose says, too exhausted to even get to her feat as she continues to fight for breath, “but this area is for staff only.”
The woman makes a little oops face, but drops her bag down onto the ground anyway, taking a seat on the ground across from Rose.
“Name’s DeWolff,” she says with a wink and a warm smile. “Jean. We’ve been in touch, if my memory serves. And it usually does.”
Rose’s eyes widen slightly, surprise taking the place of the weight over her chest and the fist around her lungs. “The detective. The one who called about—”
“Funding Spider-Man’s stay,” DeWolff nods. “You wouldn’t hear of it.”
Rose shrugs, some of the lingering bleariness lifting from her mind as she unconsciously pulls out the cross back out and begins rubbing her thumb over the smooth side of it again. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. “Decisions like that are a little above my pay grade, Miz DeWolff. I’m just here to check the kid’s blood pressure and wipe his nose. You’ll have to take up any funding concerns with the director.”
DeWolff nods, taking this in. “I’ll stop upstairs on my way out,” she says. “But, I'll admit, that's not actually the reason I came by. I came to see the…” she hesitates, eyes searching Rose’s face as if she’s having some kind of revelation. Or maybe just a hunch confirmed. “Kid.”
Immediately, Rose is on guard, heart stuttering. A nurse’s instinct, a mother’s. She stiffens.
“Don’t worry,” DeWolff says quickly, raising a hand in a motion of innocence. “I know that look, and your operation is the farthest thing from compromised, alright? I dropped the card off outside the door. His secret is safe. I only slipped into your charming little closet here because I dodged the only family rule at the front desk pretty damn hard, and I’ll be late to pick up my kid from practice if I end up stuck in the Metro General crack tank.”
Something about DeWolff is disarming, comforting. Immediately safe. A good quality in a cop, Rose supposes, if any cop's qualities can be described as such. Rose can’t help but think DeWolff would make a better face for the kid to wake up to if—when—he wakes up at all, compared to Castle's narrowed eyes and the kevlar he only seems to shed if a shower requires it.
“The shift turns over in—” Rose checks her watch—”about thirty seconds. Take the east door. You’ll make it.”
“Thank you.” DeWolff gets to her feet and shoulders her purse. “For all of your team's help, Ms. Ramírez. Your...discretion, of course, but—especially this.” DeWolff taps a pin on her purse that Rose hadn't noticed before—a small red apple, split in half. The same one hanging from Rose’s lanyard, the same symbol worn by half the nurses in this unit and, Rose had never supposed but now realizes in a very full-bodied type of way, probably much of the New York police department as well.
An honor, they'd called the little pin, presented by the mayor one year into post-Snap New York, for all the first responders who had clawed this city through the crisis with their own fingernails. It hadn’t meant anything to Rose at the time—an empty gesture and piece of cheap metal, too little too late for the shit they'd been forced to weather—but she wears it, doesn’t she? She wears it, every day.
“Tough times,” DeWolff says with an intimate sort of understanding. “You ever get sick of working through them?”
Rose snorts, mopping at her face again with one hand, steadying herself to go out and face it, again. Do the job, again. “Every goddamn day.”
“Well, there we go,” DeWolff says with another wink, reaching forward to help Rose to her feet. “Looks like we’ve got more than just a red-and-blue friend in common.”
--
There are too many scars on Spider-Man’s body. Hundreds of them, maybe, red and purple and stretching across too much of his skin for Rose to avoid them when he sweats through the bedclothes on night two and Rose has to run him the closest thing Metro General provides to a bath—sponges and wet wipes. A good fever, a bad fever, Raj doesn’t know. Can’t tell them. Upon hearing their admittedly pitiful non-answer, Castle goes for a walk and doesn’t come back for a long time.
Rose can’t remember ever hearing about Spider-Man being treated at another hospital. She sponges over scars from what are almost certainly old sets of messy, amateur stitches, and tries very hard not to let her eyes linger. Tries not to picture this young man sewing himself together with clumsy, pained, bloodless fingers in the dim lighting of his kitchen after a hard night.
Rose goes home that night and dreams that James turns to dust in Spider-Man’s arms.
--
She doesn’t know how the girl gets in, just that she does.
“Excuse me, excuse—young lady,” Rose all but shouts down the hallway, as the girl’s fingers brush the doorknob. “That’s a restricted area—”
The door swings open. It’s Castle. His eyes slide from the girl’s face over to where Rose is huffing and puffing down the hallway, back to the girl again, then down to the bag she’s holding.
“Which one of us did you come to finish off?” he finally asks. “Me or him?”
The girl rolls her eyes, completely unamused as she brushes a strand of red-brown hair out of her face and muscles past Castle, and Rose feels an instant sense of kinship. She slips into the room behind the girl, lanyard jingling, and Castle looks at her. Gives her a look. Puts a finger to his lips as if Rose needs telling twice that this girl knows Spider-Man.
Rose could tell from the moment she slipped past Castle. There's that familiar impatience in her eyes, the stuff Rose only sees when the fear of losing something is very, very real. And in order for the fear to be real—
The girl—more of a young woman, probably, but they’re all infants to Rose—approaches Spider-Man slowly. Painfully, achingly slowly, as if worried she’ll disturb his sleep just by being there, just from breathing in the air ten feet from his side.
Try it, Rose wants to say. Try anything. Make him wiggle a pinkie, and we’ll take it.
Spider-Man is out of the woods. Both the at immediate risk of death woods and the ever-adjacent nerve and mobility issues for life woods, Rose and Raj are so certain they’d place money on it if doing so didn’t so blatantly violate their code of conduct. But still, he sleeps, and neither of them can make heads nor tails of why, so—here they are. Watching and waiting and praying, along with the rest of the city.
The girl seems to gather all of this, herself, from the monitors around Spider-Man, scanning each screen faster than Rose bets she could read the menu for the hospital cafeteria aloud, before leaning down next to Spider-Man and…
Giving a featherlight brush of the hair on his forehead. Pressing a thumb under the lip of the nasal cannula, smoothing over the irritated red dent on Spider-Man’s face from where it’s been pressed against his skin without being adjusted for too long. Her fingers are cautious, light. Providing careful, clumsy comfort.
A small part of Rose wonders what it’s like, to be touched like that. Like something fragile and easily hurt. She can’t remember the feeling anymore. Rose thinks of her abuela, miles below, buried in earth. Her son, miles away, buried by consequences in a different way. She aches.
Castle clears his throat, and the girl immediately takes a step back, but she doesn’t look bashful or shy, can’t be mistaken for having been caught in an unguarded or intimate moment. Instead, she plops down in Castle’s seat without looking at either of them and pulls out a sketchpad.
“I’ll be here a minute. Until my ride shows up,” she tells Rose bluntly, still not looking up. Rose, for some inexplicable reason, turns to Castle, who gives a short nod.
“Alright,” Rose says, because she’s beginning to realize that no family is coming to stand guard over Spider-Man, no mother is coming to cry over his frozen form, no out-of-state relative will burst through the front door, insistent on taking him home.
There’s only—Castle. Jean DeWolff hovering just outside the door. A girl with red hair who touches him a little too softly to be nothing to him, but doesn’t look him in the face long enough to be anything more than an acquaintance.
“The call button is in the basket,” Rose tells the girl. “I’ll be back to check on him in half an hour.”
“Thank you,” the girl says.
--
Three more patients, eight more, fifteen before Rose has finished her shift. Car accident after car accident and too many bullet holes, too many knife wounds, too many of those who are already used to living on the margins, stiff and cold under Rose's fingers.
That’s the problem, Rose guesses, with announcing to the entire world that the city’s best defender is currently out of commission.
The number of bodies.
--
Rose puts the drawing the girl leaves behind up on the shelf, so it’s the first thing Spider-Man sees when he finally opens his eyes, because she has a gut feeling. She returns the suit, too—the mangled corpse of it, and the mask, laying them both gently at the foot of the bed and taking a step back to imagine Spider-Man's face behind it, inside it. How he'd looked when he came in, face masked and blood gushing from his front and back and limbs all at once.
There’s something tight in Rose’s throat, taking in the mask and Spider-Man’s still-broken body all at once. Something that burns her eyes.
Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, walking into the furnace.
A brave kid, limping out of the burning building with James clutched safe in his arms.
Trying and trying and trying to do the right thing.
Rose’s pager buzzes with the news of their sixteenth trauma victim today, and her heart jumps like a fucking bottle rocket, buzzing against the inside of her ribs as she tries to remind herself to breathe, to move, to be brave one more time. Always needing to be brave just one. more. time.
Rest, she tells Spider-Man telepathically, sending it out to him the way she would a prayer and hoping it sticks. Rest.
Rose can be the brave one, for now.
--
On day three, Rose goes to check on Spider-Man’s vitals, only to stop dead because—
The bed is empty.
Castle is gone, along with the image the girl had drawn in the sketchbook, which has been flipped to a fresh page. On it there are two words, lettered in the shaky blue ink of Rose’s own clipboard pen.
Thank you.
Rose clutches the page in her hand and stares at it, tears brimming in her eyes.
Then she drops onto the recently vacated bed, buries her face in her hands, and breathes a long, teary, trembling sigh of relief.