Archive of Our Own

Thunder cracked through the large shadows of buildings.

He felt it in his back teeth, in the cartilage of his ears. The inhibitor collar registered the spike a half-second later, a faint pulse of heat against his collarbone, and managed it, barely.

Thank God he'd finished the calibration last Tuesday or his Spider sense would have killed him right there.

Naim shot a line between two glass-faced towers on 47th and didn't look at the sky even as it answered itself, that low resonant crack rolling down through the canyons of steel and concrete, settling into his chest. He'd never been struck. 4 years of web-swinging in every weather condition the city could manufacture and not once. Didn't matter. The thought arrived like bees buzzing in his chest, what if this time… nah.

He was late.

Eleven minutes. He'd checked the watch on a dead sprint across a rooftop on 39th, the band loose on his wrist where he'd put on weight and then immediately lost it again. The Scorpion had been in the middle of dismantling a cash-in-transit vehicle on the FDR and the math had not been kind to him, because the city didn't schedule around Ryan's set list or Naim's intentions or any of the promises he had made and kept and broken in roughly equal measure.

He'd texted from a fire escape three blocks from the venue while pulling his jacket on over the suit, thumbs going fast: running late so sorry leaving now. The read receipt had arrived. Nothing after.

Damn, that stung.

The street was already spilling people when he slipped out two blocks over, adjusting his collar, he's way too hot right now for this kind of jacket. A cab leaned on its horn at something. Lightning hit close enough that he felt it in the fillings of his back teeth.

The venue was a bar called Colophon on the west side of Chelsea, narrow frontage, red neon sign missing the O so it read C L PH N in the rain-slicked dark.

He jogged across the street and nearly got clipped by a sedan running a yellow, the driver's window already rolling down to yell something Naim didn't wait to hear.

Billie was at the door under the awning, stool, clipboard, expression of a person who had been standing in the same spot for four hours and expected to be there four more. She looked at him, mentally clocked out, filed the insurance claim, and was halfway to a beach in Bali.

"They're almost done," she said, and unhooked the rope.

He went in.

First time he'd seen Ryan play there. Ryan had called it a music class crowd afterward, unprompted, before Naim could say anything, and Naim had nodded and not mentioned that he'd counted at least sixty people. But he knew Ryan just wanted to be humble about it. (probably couldn't even hide it with his smug smile). He'd had 2 years of residency. and every open mic and every weekend where he'd hauled his own hardware across the bridge in the back of a borrowed van.

(Naim had missed the last show entirely. A gas leak in the L line and three dozen people trapped and Vulture deciding that was a good evening for a smash-and-grab at the Garment District. He'd called from the hospital waiting room, still in the suit, voice going strange on the phone, and Ryan had said it's fine. dot. dot. dot.

The second time he'd shown up at intermission. Ryan had grinned like an idiot, he look way too jolly sometimes and it scare the living shit out of Naim. But at least that had felt like something salvaged. It wasn't.

Cause the third time he'd called to say he was fifteen away and never made it at all.)

The band was already breaking down when he arrived. Someone was coiling a cable near the monitor wedge, loop over loop. A handful of people remained at the bar, two of them leaning into each other at an angle that had nothing to do with the music. The stage lights were half-killed, the room settling into the amber of the bar fixtures, and it smelled like spilled beer in there.

Naim thought about Norman.

Didn't mean to. Just popped up uninvitedly. Slotting himself neatly into the things that didn't go the way they were supposed to pile, which was, admittedly, a very large pile. The revolving door he used to slip back out didn't help. Something about the motion of it brought him back to West 66th with the building going down in sections, the steel groaning so loud Naim could feel it in his chest, and Norman Osborn was somewhere inside that sound. Naim had been careless. Wrapping the web around the main concrete beams was a bad fucking ideas. He'd done the math. Just not enough of it. Load-bearing columns, yes. Cascading pressure, no. Gravity, apparently, needed no invitation when you had 2000 tons of concrete looking for somewhere to be. The space Naim made became the last place Norman Osborn occupied… beside the graveyard apparently.

Naim'd known he fucked up.

He'd known, walking home, hands shook so hard he'd had to stuff them in his pocket. He'd known before Harry called the first time, and the second time, and the seventh time, all within four hours, the city still smelling like pulverized concrete when he finally stepped out of the shower and stared at the phone and let it ring.

He hadn't known about the drug until the guard called. His ear rang the whole time that stranger telling him in a flat professional tone we have a Naim Parker listed as Mr. Osborn emergency contact. Mr. Osborn was found unresponsive in his dressing room approximately twenty minutes ago. You'll want to come now.

The hospital room had a plastic chair with a crack down the seat and Naim had sat in it for six hours. The IV line in Harry's arm was clear. Harry's face was the color of something left too long in the cold, and the bags under his eyes had not faded even in sleep, had looked instead like bruises, the dark spreading slowly. Though Naim acknowledged he was possibly hallucinating at this point, given the forty-eight hours without sleep.

He'd carried Harry home to the loft with one hand under his arm and Harry's weight listing into him, and the inside of the loft had stopped him in the doorway for a full three seconds. The smell, first. Then the sight of it. Every surface cleared in the sense that everything had been swept onto the floor, dishes in shards across the kitchen tile, a lamp with its shade three feet from the base, the good china that Harry had kept because his mother had kept it, scattered in pieces so small they were closer to dust than porcelain. And the Solace Quantum Core in the corner, the matte-black casing cracked down the center, the cooling system exposed, everything that made it extraordinary now open to the air and darkened.

(Room-temperature general quantum processing. He'd read the spec sheet in a magazine and spent three weeks thinking about what he could do with two hours of access with his arachnid hormones dysregulation alone. How good it must have felt, to not nullify his senses to smithereens and felt vaguely lobotomized with the collar dull presence on his neck. All of it solvable, probably, given sufficient compute and someone who could keep his attention on the variables rather than on whether the city was currently on fire.)

He'd spent the whole afternoon cleaning the loft while Harry sat in the window with the IV stand beside him and the winter light doing nothing for his color, watching Naim quietly in the reflection, on his knees on the kitchen floor sorting porcelain fragments into a dustpan. He'd fed Harry something around 7 PM, he couldn't remember what, something from the cabinets that hadn't gone bad. He'd sat in the chair beside him and closed his eyes for a moment and woken to Harry's mouth against his.

It wasn't violation. Didn't feel like it. Just overwhelming. Like he was starving and Naim was the first thing he'd been allowed to touch in a long time. Grief disguised as anger. There was biting, grabbing, sucking but there was also this terrible gentleness like Naim was one of his precious china thing.

He'd jolted back and knocked his elbow on the arm of the chair and Harry had looked at him with something Naim had no word for, it sat in the cavity behind his sternum for weeks afterward, that particular face, the sorrow in it going down so deep it had no floor.

Naim had stayed another four days. Neither of them mentioned it.

And then Harry had found out. Not just about his father, about the building, the web… about Naim, about what Naim was and what Naim did and what Naim had done, standing ten feet away while the building came down, and Harry had looked at him across Aunt May's living room with a bomb in his hand and a grin so miserable Naim couldn't tell where I love you ended or I want to watch you burn began.

Naim should have listened. Like a splinter living in his heart, prodding at him in sleep, when he was moving too slow on patrol, when he let something hit him that shouldn't. He'd been impatient. And scared and he'd wanted it resolved. Fix it with force and a clean outcome, and instead Aunt May had opened the wrong door at the wrong moment and the city had one more name added to the list that Naim kept internally and never wrote down because writing it down would make it permanent and he wasn't ready for that.

Naim went toward the back.

Ryan was there, by the equipment cases, jacket off, and he wasn't alone.

Naim almost said his name. Got as far as the breath before it.

Hunter had his hand flat against Ryan's chest. Pushing hard, the heel of his palm finding the center of Ryan's sternum and leaning into it, and Ryan's back found the wall with a sound Naim felt more than heard. Hunter was talking low and fast, you ended it, you did this, you—

Ryan shoved him back. Both hands, hard enough that Hunter stumbled a step.

"You made me a fucking secret. Hunter."

"Here we go—"

"I was sneaking into your bedroom like I was contraband—"

"Contraband—? Jesus Christ, Ryan, my parents would've literally killed me, like actually put me in the ground—"

"Don't be dramatic—"

"I'm not being dramatic, they would've beat the living shit out of me and then prayed over my body!"

Ryan tackled him.

Both arms wrapping Hunter at the midsection, the two of them going down against the equipment cases with a crash of shifting weight, and then they were struggling on the concrete, Hunter's elbow finding Ryan's ribs, Ryan's knee finding purchase, and then Hunter grabbed Ryan's face with both hands and kissed him, and Ryan kissed back. Naim watched Ryan's hand find Hunter's hair and grip. Watched Hunter's fingers work under the hem of Ryan's shirt, the ripped one, the one Naim had told him twice to throw out.

Naim stepped back.

His heel caught a can, empty, rolling, and it skittered sideways across the floor and Ryan's head came up fast, eyes wide, finding the dark where Naim was standing.

He pushed Hunter away.

"Naim?"

Naim was already moving. Street lights stretched as he did.

He didn't grit his teeth. He wasn't much of a crier, hadn't been. Even after Aunt May died. Sitting on the steps outside the church in the specific gray light of late winter and just… catalogued. That was probably the best way to describe it. He'd sat there and his brain had gone clinical on him. Like making a goddamn grocery list: the lease, the business accounts, the storage unit on Flatbush he didn't have a key for yet, the jobs he'd need to pick up, the numbers. He'd sat there and run the numbers because the alternative was the other thing and he hadn't had room for the other thing.

Ryan had come and sat beside him without saying anything. Thigh against his, a cigarette burning down between two fingers, both of them looking at the street. He hadn't said a word. He'd just been there, warm, bright, incandescent, unbearable, ruinous.

The only person he'd had left in this goddamn world.

He'd let Ryan run the bath that night. Let him wash his hair and hand him a towel and fold back the sheets, the whole ridiculous gentle ceremony of it. He hadn't had the energy to feel embarrassed.

He thought about that then, pushing through rain.

No family. No aunt, no uncle, no one waiting in an apartment somewhere who expected him home. No Harry. No Ryan, apparently. Just Naim in the rain on a Chelsea sidewalk, water already running cold down the back of his neck.

He heard the car horns half a block behind him. Someone in traffic, someone running between stopped cars, and he knew without turning around the shape of that urgency. He didn't turn around.

The alley was dark and narrow and smelled like standing water. He got the backpack open, got the suit out, went through the motions. The web line caught on the third floor of the building opposite and he pulled himself up into the rain.

It came down in sheets. Didn't really feel like rain at that point, just a presence, a texture to the air, the city going soft at the edges behind a scrim of it. It got into his eyes and plastered his hair flat and the suit was soaked through in thirty seconds. He didn't try to blink it away. Just swung. Building to building, the familiar arc, the brief weightlessness at the top of each pendulum before gravity remembered him.

His apartment door had been sticking for two weeks. He'd been meaning to plane the bottom edge. He shouldered it open and dripped on the floor and didn't bother with the lights.

The backpack landed wetly somewhere near the kitchen.

He stood there in the dark for a moment, water running off him onto the floorboards, and thought about nothing in particular with great intensity.

The vodka was on the shelf above the microwave. He'd taken it off a dealer three months ago, small-time guy who'd nearly gone under the wheels of a delivery truck, and the guy had pressed it on him with such specific insistence that it had seemed rude to refuse. It had been sitting there since, behind a box of protein powder and a roll of electrical tape.

He touched the inhibitor collar. Thought about the Kraven incident, the tranquilizer that had worked on Kraven's dogs and two of his guys and done precisely nothing to Naim except make him very briefly aware of the sensation of something trying to happen in his bloodstream and failing. His biology, eating the chemistry. His biology, doing what it always did, processing everything too fast, too efficiently, leaving him stranded on the wrong side of every human solution to a human problem.

He pulled the collar off.

The world came up in volume immediately, made his head ache a little, the rain on the window, the traffic four stories below, the couple arguing through the wall, all of it suddenly textured and present in a way it hadn't been a second ago. His wrist tingled. He ignored it.

He took the vodka down from the shelf.

Somewhere in the lining of his jacket, the crime tracker was doing whatever it was doing. Blinking. Logging. Waiting for him to care.

He drank standing at the kitchen counter, looking at the middle distance, the rain drawing lines down the window glass behind him.

He drank until the room went soft at the corners, which took longer than it should have, and then a little past that, and then the floor came up and met his face. It didn't hurt as much as it probably should have

The tracker blinked in the dark.

…

Naim came up through black water slow, his mouth tasting like old carpet, his face pressed into something that might have been a couch cushion or might have been the floor. Hard to tell. Both were equally likely.

His phone screamed.

He reached for it without opening his eyes, hand dragging across the surface he was on. Found the leg of the kitchen counter. Found a wet sock. Found the phone on the fourth sweep, face down, the vibration traveling up through his palm.

He rolled onto his back and looked at the ceiling.

The screen was too bright. He squinted at it like it had done something personally offensive to him.

Ryan. 100 missed calls.

He declined it.

It rang again immediately.

He made a sound in the back of his throat and let his arm drop to the floor, the phone loose in his hand, the buzzing continuing against his palm like something that refused to understand the situation.

"You should probably take that."

Naim's eyes opened fully for the first time.

He moved his arm. Slow. Probably more than what he had expected right then since his brain was still currently sorting through a backlog of where-the-fuck-am-I requests, had not yet gotten to him.

Harry Osborn was sitting on his barstool, the one by the kitchen counter that Naim never used. He'd been meaning to replace it since March because of the cracked vinyl seat. The green and purple armor catching the thin neon light coming through the rain-streaked window. The mask was pushed up. His face underneath. Good bones doing nothing to help the hollow eyes. Hair stuck to skin.

"It's getting under my skin, if I'm being honest." Harry took a sip of water from the counter.

Naim moved.

He got maybe four feet, hands and knees off the floor in the direction of the web shooters on the counter, and then the Goblin Glider came off the wall where it had been resting and hit him full in the chest, pinning him back against the plaster with a weight that drove the air out of him completely. His arms spread. The wall cracked behind his left shoulder, a thin fracture line running up toward the ceiling, a small cascade of plaster dust coming down across his face.

He gritted his teeth and breathed through it.

Harry stood. He walked across the apartment slowly, stepping over the empty vodka bottle without looking at it, hands loose at his sides, and stopped close enough that Naim could see the specific blue of his eyes gone almost black in the dim. He looked around the apartment. Eyes scanning absentmindedly.

"This isn't like you," he said. Quiet. Observational. "You were always cleaning something."

"What do you want, Harry."

Not a question. He didn't have the breath for question marks. Literally and figuratively.

"Am I not allowed to check in on my old friend." Harry tilted his head.

"We stopped being friends when you killed my aunt."

Harry's eyes flickered from Naim's eyes to his lips. He didn't flinch. Harry Osborn hadn't flinched at anything in a long time. A pained grin tugged on his lips almost instinctively. Looked more like a grimace than a smile to Naim. Probably both.

"You did the same thing to my father. So I'd call it even."

"Your father was a psycho."

"Was he." It came out flat.

"It wasn't my fault what he was—"

"Did he deserve to die?" Harry interrupted.

Naim's jaw tightened. The plaster around his left shoulder was crumbling in small flakes, drifting down. "It was an accident. I didn't mean for it to—"

Harry's hand came up and pressed flat against the wall above Naim's head. Harry was taller than he remembered. Significantly. He'd always been the tall one between them, sure, but Naim had this image of him, this old Oscorp lobby image, Harry hunching in on himself the way he always did around Naim, that habitual collapse inward, shoulders dropped, spine curved. Like a junkie on a corner on 11th street who didn't want to be seen.

"Do you remember MJ?" Harry said. "From Oscorp."

Naim blinked. The pivot landed strange. "Wasn't she your girlfriend? What did you do to her."

"Nothing." Harry said it simply, like it was the most honest thing he'd said. "When you were interning. I used to see you two together in the atrium, by the east elevators, you'd eat lunch there sometimes. I told myself it was nothing. Friends. Kept imagining you and her kissed." His hand came off the wall. He looked at Naim directly. "And then you two did."

"We were just friends," Naim said. The glider shifted slightly and the wall behind him gave another quarter inch and more plaster came down, small chunks this time, hitting the floor.

"I know." Harry's voice didn't change. "MJ told me that herself. Later." The corner of his mouth moved. "While I was fucking her. She said it. We were just friends. Because I couldn't—" He paused mid-sentence. Something behind his eyes quietly went offline. "Because I couldn't stop thinking about it. Couldn't stop thinking about you. Every person who got near you. Every person you touched or looked at or talked to for too long." His hand darted to Naim's jaw. Gripped it. Forced his chin up. Naim's throat worked.

"I'd lie there," Harry's eyes had drifted somewhere far far away, "staring at the ceiling. Just—"

"You're insane," Naim said. Flat. "Harry. If you're still in there somewhere, you need to wake the fuck up. Stop this."

Harry laughed. Wheezing like a pneumonia patient. It came up from his chest and he pulled back just enough to let it out, head dropping slightly.

"Of course I'm insane," he grinned like Naim had just pointed out he was wearing green. "You made me insane, Naim. So." He tilted his head, considering. "You get to pay for it."

He didn't say anything else.

His thumb moved. Slow drag across Naim's lower lip, following the line of it like he was reading something written there. Naim went rigid. Harry's grip on his jaw tightened and then he closed the distance and kissed him.

Naim wrenched his head sideways. Got maybe an inch.

Harry's fingers found his jaw again and brought him back. No discussion. Teeth knocked against teeth, the angle wrong and graceless, Harry's tongue dragging across his, savoring it. Naim's hands pressed flat against the glider, still pinned, the edge of the board biting into his sternum.

Then the door.

Three hard knocks. The sound cut through the apartment like something solid dropped on concrete.

Naim. Naim, are you inside?

Ryan's voice. Muffled through the door.

Harry pulled back. He turned his head toward the door. Slow. A predator in disguise. Then he looked back at Naim. Grinning.

"That your boyfriend?"

Naim stared at him. Jaw set. Said nothing.

"Should I let him in?" Harry knocked his forehead into his, eyes boring into him "Little reunion."

"You're not touching Ryan."

"We'll see."

He reached behind him. One of the razor boomerangs, the large ones, came out in his hand. He held it loosely. Carried it like his favorite pen. Dragged the edge of it along the wall as he turned and walked toward the door, a long scraping shriek of metal on plaster, and he was almost sauntering, playing a game of his own making.

Naim's eyes swept the apartment. Fast, functional. The glider still had him. The web shooters were across the room. His toolkit was on the worktable. Scraps and spare parts buried on top of each other. The magnetic field nullifier. Small matted black little thing next to a cracked oscilloscope.

He closed his eyes. One second. His mom. His aunt. Her hand soft on his shoulder before everything went to shit. Ryan's voice through the door, Naim I'm so fucking sorry. Golden hair and blue eyes.

He shot the web.

It caught the edge of the nullifier and the thing darted across the room into his palm and he slapped it against the side of the glider and hit the activation in one motion. The magnetic field collapsed. The board dropped. It hit the floor with a clang that shook the dishes in the sink and Naim dropped with it, landed on his feet, wheezed, his ribs screaming as he pulled his first real breath in however long the glider had had him.

Harry was almost at the door.

Naim shot. The web caught Harry across the shoulder blades and he yanked, hard, all his weight into it, and Harry came off his feet and crashed backward into the worktable. The table went over. Metal and components scattered across the wooden floor in a cascading avalanche of sound. Tools and circuit boards and soldering irons and a jar of screws that exploded open and rolled into every corner of the room.

Naim? Are you there?

"Just a second," Naim called out.

Harry was already moving in the wreckage. He came up from the pile of equipment with something in each hand, small spheres, smooth, harmless, the kind Naim used to fish out of the net when he worked at the tennis court that one summer. He threw them both underhand and they clicked as they hit the floor, the casing splitting open, and wings unfolded from each one, thin articulated things, and then they were airborne, buzzing around Naim's head like something that had evolved specifically to be impossible to hit.

He shot at one. Missed. The web tangled on the leg of the overturned table.

He shot at the other. Missed. The razor edge of the drone's wing caught the sleeve of his suit and opened it from shoulder to elbow, the fabric peeling back.

Naim. Ryan's voice again, softer now. Are you mad at me?

Harry opened his mouth.

Naim shot first. Web hit Harry square across the lower half of his face and sealed, and Harry's expression behind it shifted to something incandescent. Naim turned back to the drones. Got one in his fist, the wings thrashing against his palm, cutting into the web. Got the second one by leading it in a circle and letting it fly into his grip, and the two drones tangled against each other in his hand and fought the web and slowly, mechanically, ground down and went still on the floor.

If you don't let me in I'm coming in, Ryan said. Naim.

"I'm naked right now," Naim said.

Silence from the hallway.

He breathed. He watched Harry work at the web across his mouth, fingers finding the edge.

I don't care, Ryan said. I'm coming in.

"Fuck," Naim mumbled.

Harry got the web off his mouth in one rip, taking skin with it. His expression when he looked at Naim was… something. He reached behind him, unhurried, and drew out two boomerangs, big ones, essentially flying machetes.

The door slammed. Once. Twice. A third time that splintered the frame. And then it swung open and Ryan Whelan was standing in the doorway, and he was looking at Naim, and then his eyes moved to Harry and Harry's eyes moved to him.

---------------------

Ryan was an impulsive person. The clinical term, probably. The personal term, per his mother, was nightmare. Case in point: he once threw himself out of a moving car mid-argument with her. He did not win the argument.

He'd told Marcus before the set, told him loud enough over the feedback squeal of the monitors getting checked, I'm waiting for someone tonight, so don't let anyone clear my gear after. Marcus nodded, didn't say anything afterward, Ryan thought he was being sarcastic, then walked it back, then felt faintly stupid for having an internal debate about a nod.

He had imagined the night ending with Naim's shoulder against his in a booth somewhere with cheap beer and the low hum of the city outside. And he was wrong. Again.

Naim didn't show.

An hour after the set. Two.

He sat at the bar and thought about it, hated himself for even thinking about it, turning it over, looking at every angle. Naim wasn't ashamed of him. He knew that. Naim had let him press his thumb along his jaw on the Q train with the whole car watching, had tilted into it like it was nothing, like the moon to the earth's gravity. Had let Ryan back him into corners, doorways, the gap between two parked cars on Delancey at two in the morning while a cab laid on its horn. Naim wasn't built for shame like that. He went boneless when Ryan pinned him, eyes going half-lidded, patient in a way that made something in Ryan's chest feel enormous and stupid.

(But something in the back of his head, down in the part that kept score, kept forcing him to remember and Hunter kept bumping into him during practice.)

Ryan hadn't been counting the shots. The shots had other ideas. The yellow bar light dissolved quietly into a memory he hadn't made yet. He didn't mean to stare at the door again, ashamed that he was, until he wasn't, and then was again after the next drink went down.

Hunter was in the parking lot when Ryan went out for air. Sitting on the curb next to a dumpster with his elbows on his knees, and Ryan almost turned around.

My parents finally found out, Hunter said, not looking up. Like, fully found out.

Ryan sat down next to him on the asphalt. It was cold and damp and smelled like regret and cigarettes and old cooking oil from the kitchen exhaust. Hunter's jaw was doing the thing it did when he was trying not to cry, that tight grinding thing he always did before he'd snapped at Ryan for asking too much.

Ryan had tried to say something useful. He had. But Hunter had already started, the self-blame going dark and spreading the way it did, bleeding outward until it found Ryan standing there, and Ryan had grabbed his arm, and Hunter had shoved back, and they'd ended up in that pushing, grabbing thing that had never been a fight and had never not been one either, and then—

It had felt like muscle memory. The aggression. The grip of Hunter on his shirt. How Ryan had always known how to push back. A language he used to speak fluently and had thought he'd forgotten. Almost like home.

His stomach had already dropped before he fully registered Naim standing there.

Ryan couldn't make him out clearly in the dark. Didn't matter. The shape of it burned into Ryan like he'd been staring at the sun for too long.

And then Naim was gone, and Ryan was standing in a parking lot dumbfounded with Hunter's hand still warm on his skin. When Ryan came to himself Naim was already half a block away moving faster than Ryan had ever seen him move. Ryan panicked. Because Naim never moved fast, Naim always walked behind Ryan with his phone out and his headphones in and Ryan would have to reach back and grab his wrist, c'mon, let's go, move, and Naim would say 'm goin', 'm goin without looking up from the screen, and Ryan would yank the headphone out of his ear and Naim would finally look up, annoyed and then not annoyed, and Ryan would push him into whatever wall or doorway was nearest just to have his full attention for thirty seconds.

Ryan had called. He kept calling. He sat down on the curb when the street got quiet and called and called until his phone screen blurred.

(He was crying. He didn't notice for a while. He kept wiping his face with the back of his hand like it was sweat.)

Naim wasn't answering because Naim was asleep, obviously. That was the reasonable explanation. The only explanation. Except Ryan's brain wouldn't stay in the reasonable explanation, kept sliding off it, kept landing on the other one. Naim had no class in the morning. Naim had no aunt anymore. Naim had nobody keeping him anywhere. Naim could just leave. Could pick up whatever fit in a backpack (considering the sparse choice of clothes Naim wore, which was probably not a lot) and go somewhere Ryan didn't know, and Ryan would just be a person that happened to him once.

He'd gotten in his car. The door hinge squealed, that rusted grinding sound that he kept meaning to fix, and the engine turned over twice before it caught, and he drove to Naim's building because what else was he going to do.

Naim had always kept him out of the apartment. It's messy, he'd said, the first time and the second time and every time after, standing in the hallway with the door cracked, like Ryan was going to care about messy.

Ryan had driven past the building enough times to know which window was his. Had followed Naim home once, when they'd said goodbye. Had watched the light turn off from the street (which was, yes, a completely normal thing to do, obviously.)

He could hear something from the hallway. Something loud enough to come through the door, a crash and then a voice, a specific wrongness to Naim's register, and Ryan thought of Naim's face in that parking lot, the way it had gone flat, and he stopped thinking and hit the door with his shoulder.

The frame splintered easier than he expected. Which was great. His shoulder dislocated on the same hit, which was less great. He winced and stumbled up.

The guy in front of him was tall. Brown hair. Green armor that looked like something from a movie but wasn't, dented, scratches cut deep into it. And then there was something in his hand, flat and tumbling end over end through the air before Ryan could make his legs work.

Something hit him from the side, hard, and they rolled together across the floor and came up against the wall, plaster against Ryan's back, and it was Naim. In a red and blue suit, and bleeding, a dark wet line opening up along his upper arm that soaked the fabric and kept soaking it.

"What the fuck, Naim," Ryan said.

"Why the hell would you come here."

The guy in the armor looked at both of them with his head tilted at a slight angle, eyes open and still. "Sweet. Now I'm gonna rip your little fuck toy into chunks. See how much of him my dog can eat before he chokes."

Naim shot a line of web across the room and yanked and the guy's feet came out from under him.

"You need to go," Naim said, already pulling Ryan by the arm.

"Fuck you, I'm not leaving without—"

Naim made a sound in his throat. Frustration. Exhaustion. The guy was already getting up. Clinking sounds hit the floorboards and bounced across them as Naim shoved Ryan sideways. The three pea-sized little things exploded in white light.

Ryan's ears went to a high clean tone and stayed there. Pressure sticking to the sides of his head. The floor shook under him or perhaps he was shaking, he couldn't tell which.

Naim hit the ceiling with both feet, the web line going taut above him, and Ryan watched him use the arc of it like a slingshot, body tucking, then snapping open, both boots connecting with Harry's chest with a sound like a car door slamming. Harry went down hard, hit the floor shoulder-first, rolled with his palm out to catch himself, feet sliding on the scratched hardwood, and laughed. It sounded absolutely unhinged. Reminded Ryan of those cartoons he used to watch with his little sister back in their apartment.

The two boomerangs left Harry's hand before he was fully upright, broad spinning ugly things that arced out in opposite directions and came back in like a mouth closing. Naim twisted at the waist, violent, a full-body wrench, and one went over his shoulder and one went under his hip with maybe two inches to spare either way, and Ryan's heart did something he didn't have a name for.

"Grab me something from the rack," Naim said. Not looking at him.

Ryan looked at the rack. A rack of things he could not identify, looked like props from a cyberpunk movie, and his brain produced nothing useful. "What do I throw?"

"Anything." Naim hissed.

Ryan threw a pin. In his head the logic was: small bomb good, big bomb bad, everyone went to smithereens with big bomb, pin was small, pin was fine. It tumbled through the air in a slow wobble and Naim caught it and looked at it for one full second.

"This is a tracker. What the fuck is wrong with you."

"You said anything," Ryan tugged on his hair. "How the fuck am I supposed to know—"

The floor shuddered. A low mechanical sound built from somewhere near the window and then the glider tore itself off the wall and went to Harry like a dog to a hand, and Harry stepped onto it, one foot then the other, and the mask clicked into place and he rose.

"Didn't I tell you." Harry tilted his head down at Naim. "You're gonna bleed out in this shitty room, Naim, and I'm gonna let you. Then I'm coming back for what's left. Gonna stitch you up all wrong. Make you into something that belongs to me. Something I can fuck whenever I want."

Ryan opened his mouth and then closed it. That was the most genuinely deranged thing anyone had ever said in his presence and he had been in a metal band for four years.

He looked at the rack and thought fuck it.

He grabbed everything. Both arms full, tucked against his chest, and he started throwing. He threw without knowing what any of it was, one after another, a hard fast volley, and the Goblin raised both arms to cover his face. He looked irritated. Or as irritated as he could be under that mask.

Something rolled off Ryan's forearm as he reached for more and bounced across the floor toward Naim.

Naim's hand shot out. The web caught it mid-roll and he came up with it in his palm, and he looked at it for maybe half a second, and threw it straight up at Harry.

It hit the glider.

The web exploded out thick white fast, a mass of it spurted out and hardened in the air, spreading and catching. The glider lurched and Harry's arm went out for balance and the web got his arm and his side and he wrenched against it and could not move, suspended, wrapped, the glider fighting to hold altitude and failing to go anywhere, and Ryan stood there with an empty rack. Chest heaving.

He walked over to Naim with his hand up.

Naim looked at it. Shook his head in exasperation. High-fived him.

And Ryan grabbed him by the jaw.

He didn't think about it. Like how he did everything without warning and smashed his face against Naim's. Naim made a small surprised sound against his mouth and then both his hands were in Ryan's hair. Tongue scraping, deep and swaying. Naim's weight shifting into him and Ryan holding him there, crashing like waves into shores.

Something beeped.

They both looked down at the same time. Three round green things on the floor, blinking red, very fast, getting faster.

Naim hit him in the chest with both hands and Ryan went through the hallway door and the wall came up to meet his back and then the world turned into light and noise and the noise was so big it became no noise at all, just a ringing, white vibration. The orange filled the doorway and Ryan was on the floor and didn't remember getting there. His vision did a slow tilt. Red and orange in the door frame. Something was burning and he remembered that time when he almost burned the apartment down because he forgot to turn off the oven. His hand came away from his temple wet.

He sat up. That took longer than it should have.

He became aware of weight across his legs.

Naim.

Naim was face-down across Ryan's legs and not moving and Ryan said his name and nothing happened and he said it again, louder, and he grabbed Naim's shoulder and then stopped. The back of the suit shredded, irregular dark shapes embedded in a pattern from mid-back up to the shoulder, blood so dark that Ryan almost thought it was crude oil oozing up from Naim.

Ryan's hands hovered, shaking, and every instinct he had was screaming to just pull the damn things out. Then he thought of Marcus who used to be an ICU nurse before the band, had sat them all down once after some dipshit stabbed one of them with a half-broken beer bottle and said, with the energy of a man who was very tired of their shit: don't fucking touch them.

He gritted his teeth. Pulled his hand back.

"Naim." He got his hand under Naim's face. Pale against his skin. Like blood drawn away from the corpse. "Naim, hey."

Naim's eyes opened halfway.

Ryan exhaled.

The Goblin was gone. Ryan checked without wanting to look away from Naim and the room was empty except for fire, tendrils of it spreading orange from the corner where the explosion had caught something, and the smoke detector in the hallway was screaming, and somewhere below them a door banged open.

"Okay," Ryan murmured against Naim's ear. "Okay, I've got you, I've got you—"

He got Naim up the only way he could figure, agonizingly careful, getting under him and lifting until Naim's weight was distributed across Ryan's shoulder, Naim's chest against Ryan's back, the shrapnel untouched, and Naim made a sound that Ryan was going to hear for a long time.

"I'm taking you to the hospital, just stay—" Ryan said. Moving toward the door.

"No." A wheeze. Barely a word.

Ryan kept moving. "Yeah?"

"Ryan." Naim's hand found his arm. Hanging loosely like all the bones had been taken out. "No hospital. Please."

Ryan's chest seized. He ran the numbers without meaning to. He wasn't a fucking doctor. Couldn't risk Naim's life in these useless, shaking, piece-of-shit hands that couldn't even trace a goddamn circle without the line going crooked. He could barely pass geometry.

The elevator was still working, lucky him for that, and the alarm was going and someone in the lobby was yelling at someone else and Ryan walked through it like he didn't hear any of it. The night air hit him cold.

"Ryan.. Please…"

His car was at the curb, the door hanging open where he'd left it, the interior light on, and he got the back door open and got Naim in sideways, on his side, face toward the seat, the shrapnel toward the ceiling, and Naim whimpered when Ryan shifted him and Ryan said I know, I know and meant it, and got in the front and turned the key and the engine caught on the third try.

Please please please from the backseat like a child nagging for his mother.

Ryan looked at him in the rearview. Pale and breathing shallow and asking him for something Ryan didn't know how to give.

He swallowed. Pulled out onto the street.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Fuck."

He steered left instead of right, tires screeching, away from the hospital, and drove toward the venue, where Marcus was still probably breaking down equipment and drinking the bar's tap beer and who was the only person Ryan could think of who might know what to do with metal in someone's back, and he pushed the gas down and ran the first red light and didn't look at Naim's reflection again because if he did he was going to stop being able to drive.

Naim didn't make a sound the whole drive.

Ryan's hands were tight on the wheel and there were tears on his face that he kept wiping off with his shoulder because he needed both hands, the streets were wet and his tires were bad.

Ryan checked the mirror every thirty seconds. Naim's chest was moving. Ryan counted the rises and falls the way he used to count beats, the way he'd learned to subdivide time until it was manageable.

He thought, stupidly, uselessly, that if he had something, anything, a fraction of what Naim had he wouldn't have been standing there like a fool. Wouldn't have been throwing shit at a man in a flying suit. He would've been able to put himself between Naim and the thing that hurt him, would've been able to take it.

He just wanted to wrap Naim up. Wanted to put him somewhere nothing could reach him and stand outside that door for the rest of his life. His baby. His stupid, bleeding, webslinging baby who never told him a goddamn thing.

He pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine. Back door open, both arms under Naim, taking the weight of him slowly, eyes tracking the shrapnel like it might shift if he breathed wrong.

The pub was dark, everyone already cleared out, Marcus included. Fuck. Ryan dug through his pockets until his fingers closed around the spare key he'd lifted from Jacob's office months ago so he and Naim could sneak in after hours and fuck on the pool table.

Ryan carried him through the side door and into the backstage and laid him down on the couch that had been there since before Ryan joined the band, the ugly green one with the duct tape on the armrest.

Marcus's kit. It had to be there somewhere. Marcus didn't go anywhere without it. Ever since that asshole had terrorized them and promised from outside the door to kill each of them in slow and agonizing death. Real specific about it. Ryan still didn't know what happened to him and he'd made his peace with not knowing. He dropped to his knees and tore through the cabinet under the monitor board, cables, junk, the sad cardboard box of stuff people left behind on the last tour and never came back for.

The kit was under a rain jacket. He yanked it out.

Suture kit. Needle driver, forceps, thread sealed in plastic, alcohol swabs in individual packets, gauze. He opened his phone and pulled up the video he'd watched once as a joke with Marcus and now needed to know with his entire body, and he watched the first forty-five seconds twice with the phone propped against the cabinet door.

He cut the suit off Naim's back. The fabric came away in pieces, the material strange under the scissors, rough, hard to slice through, and then there was just Naim's back and the blood. Ryan hissed through his teeth and told himself to keep going.

His hands wouldn't stop shaking.

There was a reason surgeons didn't operate on people they loved. Ryan had always figured it was some professional ethics thing, a manual shoved in a corner somewhere. Turns out it was his hands shaking so bad he could feel it in his teeth, going half-blind every time Naim made a noise.

He pulled the first piece of shrapnel out with the forceps, slow, following the angle, and swabbed the wound with alcohol.

Naim hissed.

"It's okay," Ryan's voice trembled saying things he didn't even believe himself. "Baby, it's okay, it's almost done, you're okay."

Naim didn't respond.

It's okay. Almost done. I've got you. It's okay. On his lips almost like he was praying. He didn't know who he was talking to. If god existed, he would surely hope he could hear him. Take Naim's pain away. Punish him instead. He didn't deserve this.

When it was done he sat back on his heels and looked at Naim's back, at the sutured lines of it, uneven imperfect closed, and he exhaled for a long time.

He got Naim a pillow from the costume rack. Pulled his oversized jean over Naim with him whimpering slightly. A blanket from the bin in the corner that smelled like old shows and other people's sweat but was warm. He shifted Naim onto his side, got the pillow under his head, pulled the blanket up. Then he lay down behind him because there wasn't anywhere else, the couch barely wide enough for both of them, and he looked at Naim's face.

He looked so small. The furrow still there between his brows, soft, unconscious, like he was puzzling something out in whatever he was dreaming. He looked like a kid. It made Ryan's sternum ache, a terrible tenderness he didn't have better language for.

Ryan didn't sleep. He watched Naim breathe, chest rising, because if Naim woke up and remembered what happened last night he'd leave. He had no reason not to leave. Ryan had given him no reason to stay. So Ryan pressed a little closer to the back of the couch, cornered Naim a little more against the cushions, told himself it was stupid and did it anyway, because maybe slightly harder to leave was still slightly harder.

When Naim stirred Ryan was already watching.

"Hey," Ryan said. "Hey, you with me?"

Naim's eyes opened. They moved around the room, the cables, the monitors, the bare bulb in the ceiling, and he looked confused in a way that was so earnest Ryan almost couldn't take it, like a deer that walked into a building by mistake and wasn't sure how to feel about the indoors.

"Where is this," Naim said.

"It's the pub. Backstage. You're okay."

Naim sat up slowly, then stopped. Looked around again. Ryan could see the exact moment he processed it all, the eyes going through a series of things without settling. Then Ryan leaned in and kissed him, because there wasn't a better instinct he had access to right now, and Naim let him, blinking slowly when Ryan pulled back.

"I'm thirsty," Naim said.

Ryan got up so fast he clipped his knee on the monitor board. He found a water bottle in Stacy's bag, unopened, and brought it back, and Naim took it and drank the entire thing without stopping, throat moving, and wiped his mouth with his wrist.

He looked down at himself. At the blanket. Then he reached back and his fingers found the sutures and he went still.

His ears went pink.

"Thanks," he whispered, barely audible.

They sat in the ugly quiet of the backstage. Ryan took Naim's hand. Looked at it. Turned it over once.

"I'm not going to make excuses for what happened," Ryan said. "It was a shitty thing that I did. I fucked up and I don't expect you to forgive me, you shouldn't forgive me…. I'm not asking for that." Ryan bit the inside of his cheeks. "I just need you to know that I can't live without you. I will try and I will fail. You're the best thing that happened to me and I know that's a fucking low bar given my life, but I mean it. If you want to try again I will never ever pull that shit again. I'll do whatever—"

Naim laughed.

Ryan's face went hot.

"That was fucking so corny, oh my god."

"I know."

"That was the corniest thing I've ever heard in my life."

"Fuck you." Ryan hissed.

Naim settled. The laugh faded down to something smaller. He looked at their hands and was quiet for a moment, and Ryan waited, chest compressed.

Naim turned his hand over and held Ryan's back.

"I'm glad you said it," he said. "Even if it was terrible…. I can't do it without you either. For the record."

Ryan kissed him. Naim kissed back and Ryan tipped him back toward the couch and Naim made a sharp sound against his mouth.

"Your back—" Ryan pulled away. "Shit, I'm sorry—"

"It's fine." Naim grabbed his shirt. "Get back here."

Ryan came back. Naim kissed him and Ryan let himself be pulled in and they stayed like that for a long moment, the room warm and quiet around them.

"I should've told you," Naim said, between. "About— The suit."

"You don't have to—"

He pressed his forehead to Ryan's jaw. "I'm sorry."

Ryan ran his thumb along Naim's cheekbone. Felt the warmth of his face.

"You don't have to be sorry about that."

Ryan's hand slid down Naim's stomach, over the waistband of his jean, and cupped him through the denim. Naim made a noise into Ryan's mouth. He was already getting hard, filling out against Ryan's palm, and Ryan squeezed gently while he kissed down Naim's throat. He sucked at the skin there, teeth scraping, tongue soothing after. He wanted to mark him. Wanted everyone to see that Naim was his.

"Was your ex always that crazy?" Ryan asked against Naim's neck, and it came out dumber than he meant it to.

Naim rolled his eyes. "He's not my ex."

"Sure looked like it." Ryan popped the button on Naim's jeans. "What kind of person wants to stitch someone up and make them a sex slave?"

"The insane kind." Naim's head tipped back against the concrete, throat exposed, and he gasped when Ryan pulled his cock out and wrapped his hand around it properly. "Fuck."

Ryan stroked him slow at first, watching Naim's face go slack and needy. Then he shifted down and took Naim into his mouth.

Naim's hand flew to Ryan's hair, gripping hard enough to sting. Ryan hollowed his cheeks and sucked, tongue swirling around the head, tasting salt and precome. Naim's hips twitched up and Ryan took him deeper, relaxing his throat, wanting all of it.

It didn't take long. Naim came with a broken gasp, hips jerking up mindlessly, and Ryan swallowed it all down, even when it made him choke. He wanted everything that belonged to Naim. Wanted it inside him.

Ryan pulled off and sat up, wiping his mouth. Naim was sprawled out on the concrete looking dazed, eyes hazy and half-lidded.

Maybe I'm the insane one too. All these fucked-up thoughts he had about keeping Naim locked up in his apartment, padding every surface he might touch, making sure no one else could ever touch him or see him for that matter.

Ryan looked at the ceiling. "I think I get it though. The crazy thing. Like— not the armor and the suicidal bombs. But the other part."

Naim cracked one eye open. "What other part."

"The— wanting to just. Keep you. Somewhere no one else can get to you."

Naim blinked at him slowly, still lust-drunk. "I don't know, Ryan. I don't think you're crazy." He sighed, boneless and satisfied.

"But if I did want to lock you up. What would you do then?"

Naim chuckled, eyes drifting shut. "Ryan, you can barely parallel park. You're not keeping anybody anywhere."

Ryan shoved him playfully and Naim's back hit the wall behind them and he hissed in pain. Ryan said shit shit shit and pulled him in by the back of the neck instead, kissed him once hard, then his cheek, then his ear, and Naim's hand came up and just rested flat against Ryan's chest like he was checking his heartbeat.

"I'm so fucking horny right now," Ryan murmured between kisses.

"I'm so tired, Ryan."

"I know." Ryan kissed his hair, breathing him in.

He reached down and unzipped his own jeans, pulling his cock out. He was hard and aching and he wrapped his hand around himself, stroking fast and rough, panting into Naim's ear like a dog in heat.

When he felt the pressure building, that white-hot tension coiling at the base of his spine, he cupped his other hand over the tip so nothing spilled on Naim.

Naim's breathing had already evened out. He was asleep against Ryan's shoulder, face pressed into Ryan's neck.

Ryan came into his own hand with a choked-off groan, hips jerking. He sat there for a moment catching his breath, then wiped his hand on his shirt and carefully laid Naim down flat. He lay down next to him, resting his chin on top of Naim's head.