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Frank hates this goddamn hospital.
Too cold and bright and sterile, too many people hurrying about in frenzied desperation, trying to deal with the influx of the injured and sick who keep pouring in the front doors like a hole that can’t be plugged.
He shouldn’t be surprised after - well, all that. Your brain gets half cooked in psionic soup, bad shit is bound to happen. But it certainly didn’t make his life any easier. He found himself sidestepping through a bunch of swarming, broken bodies with the kid’s head pressed against the crook of his neck and blood dripping through his fingers.
Too late, he thinks. He wasn’t even sure if the kid was still breathing.
Too fucking late.
That was fourteen hours ago.
Frank shifts uncomfortably in his chair, some wobbly plastic thing, and tilts his head towards the ceiling. Fluorescent lights burn at his eyes, and it only takes a few seconds before he is forced to drag his gaze back to the bed in front of him.
“How you doing over there?” he asks. “I mean - better than before, right? Gotta count for something.”
He’s met by nothing more than beeping. Stupidly shrill beeping. But he can’t be mad at it - not really, it meant the kid was still alive. Frank rubs at his eyes, sighing. They rolled him back an hour ago. Un-masked, now. For the first time in the years since they’ve met, he gets a good look at the face underneath the costume.
Fuck.
It was some bruised, sallow-face child with curls hanging in front of his eyes. Frank knew he was young, but it was one thing to think about it, and another thing entirely to see it. The kid should have been out drinking, or socializing, getting fucked up at late night parties and rolling around to some boring ass 9-5 for the next forty years.
Not - this. Not getting shot and shanked and thrown into buildings by the crime-ridden underbelly of New York’ finest criminal network.
My girl would have been his age. The thought festers into something dark and cold, a knot in the back of his brain that clings like a vice. He tries pushing it down, stomping on it, right back to the place where he keeps the things too dangerous for human consideration. But he looks at the kid’s pale face, features slack, tubes sticking out of him as his breaths come out wet and labored, and he can feel something inside of him snap. A white hot incandescent rage burning in the center of his chest. All encompassing.
You did this to him.
You fired the gun.
You fucking killed h -
“Water?”
There was a hand on his shoulder. Frank startles, nearly swinging a fist out on instinct before stopping himself. One of the nurses was staring down at him. Older woman - sixties, maybe, greying hair tied up in a loose bun. She was holding out a cup in front of him.
“I, uh - ” he falters, trying to get his bearings.
“You haven’t gotten up in hours,” she says. “Drink.”
He wants to argue. To yell, or fight, or shoot. Those things were safe, familiar - things he knew how to deal with. But this? Sitting in a room with no other company but the thoughts floating around in his fucked up head was not conductive to himself or anyone else unfortunate enough to come into contact with him.
He takes the cup. “Thanks,” he mutters, hoping the words came out loud enough for her to hear. The cold water felt good on his parched lips.
“Those tubes,” he says, gesturing towards the bed. “They got like - nutrients in them? Hydration?”
“Fluids, yes,” she responds, adjusting one of the IV lines attached to his hand. “Saline, electrolytes, oxygen, plasma. We won’t push a tube feeding for a few days yet. His energy stores will be sufficient for now.”
“So he’ll be okay then?”
She turns to look at him. “He’s not out of the woods yet,” she says. Her voice was firm but not unkind. “We’re taking it hour by hour. But I do have to say, it is quite impressive the improvement he has made in this short amount of time. His breathing is remarkably strong at this stage, stronger than we would expect with his level of internal bleeding.” She tilts her head, contemplative. “Almost as though someone was pulling some strings from the outside.”
A brief image of Jean flickers through his mind, but Frank discards it. He doesn’t know what became of that girl, but he doesn’t want anything to do with it.
So - he sits.
He waits.
He talks. It helps with…everything, really. Something to keep his mind occupied as the days start to drag and the sky turns from blue to pink to black, then cycles back anew.
“You like garlic knots, kid?” he asks. It was too-early-in-the-fucking-morning o’clock, and he’s digging a plastic spoon-fork thing into some garbage cafeteria spaghetti that went cold forever ago. “There’s a new spot that opened up. Called Antonio’s, I think? Apparently they got these like…meatball slider things. But the buns are actually garlic knots. You seem like the type of person who eats out a lot. I mean - I did when I was your age. Cooking sucks” He takes another bite of the spaghetti, then grimaces. “God, this shit is awful. Tell you what - ” he points his fork towards the bed. “You survive this, we go get garlic knot sliders. My treat.”
There was a little more color in the kid’s face now than there was before, but he was still out cold, being pumped full of whatever drugs the nurses kept giving him. There must have been a few shift changes since Frank first started camping out here, new faces in and out of the room, monitoring vitals and talking in hushed tones. He hopes it was good news, or better news, at least. Something.
Anything.
He digs his fork back into the spaghetti, but his stomach curdles at the thought of taking another bite, so he tosses the styrofoam container in the bin. It was - quieter, at this time of night. Or early morning, technically. Whatever. Less people, less chaos. Just the steady ambience of beeping machinery and dim lights.
“You got a name, kid?” he asks, breaking the silence. “Let me guess - Aidan? Liam? Too many of those. I feel like - statistically, you could be like a Michael or something. What if I just called you that, huh? What do you think?”
The machines continue to beep.
“Yeah,” Frank continues. “Maybe not. Michael’s a bit boring. How about William? Luke? Gabriel? Anything ringing a bell? Or maybe your parents were some sorta hippies - what if they named you something stupid like Rainbow or some shit?” Maybe it was the exhaustion - the relentless pull of fatigue that was seeping into his bones, but he swears he could see one of the kid’s fingers twitch at that.
“Rainbow,” he echoes, lips pulling into a smile. “Fuckass name. I’ll just keep calling you that until you tell me otherwise.”
It was the third day, or maybe the fourth - keeping track of such things was starting to get difficult when sleeping in thirty-minute increments, but one by one, the tubes had started to disappear.
“See that, Rainbow?” Frank says, suppressing a yawn with the back of his hand. “Took you long enough.”
Damn, he was tired. Sometime in the night, word had gotten around that Spider-Man was being treated in this hospital, in this room. The crowds had since gathered in kind - loud but supportive. “They love you,” he says. He reaches a hand out, hovering briefly over the kid’s own, but doesn’t dare make contact. The act of touch didn’t feel deserved - not for him, not when it was his fault the kid almost died.
(The last time Frank touched him, he was choking up blood as he hung limply in his arms. Images like that have an unfortunate tendency to linger).
“Snack?”
Same nurse from before. Mary, or Maria, or something that started with an M. She was holding out one of those granola bars that made a mess when you tried opening it. Frank rubs at his eyes. “Stop trying to force feed me,” he mumbles, sliding lower in his chair.
Was the room melting?
“I’d offer you a bed, but we’re awfully short on those lately,” she says. “Perhaps a pillow?”
“I’m not tired.”
She gives him a soft smile. “Of course not.” She gestures towards the bed. “We’re weaning him off of the sedatives. In a few hours - maybe earlier, we are hoping to see signs of wakefulness."
Frank blinks at that. “So - out of the woods?”
“I never want to confirm anything if there is still reasonable doubt,” she says. “But I do believe he has made it through the worst.”
Thank fucking -
“Halle-goddamn-lujah. You hear that, kid? I guess now I owe you garlic knots.” He turns to Matilda. “You ever been to Antonio’s?”
Marissa stares at him for a second with a confounded look on her face. “Are you - sure you don’t want a pillow?”
“Never felt better in my life,” he affirms, crossing his arms.
(She gives him the pillow anyways).
He sleeps for a little bit, then a longer bit, then the kid is finally sitting up, talking - escaping, and Frank’s got his Spider-Man mask on his face, jumping around near the window to the delight of the crowd below.
He won’t come back for the mask, he thinks, later that night. It’s torn. He runs a thumb over the fabric, firm but stretchy, and places it on his kitchen table. Maybe he’s weirdly saccharine about this whole thing, but he doesn't quite have the heart to get rid of it.
The streets were strangely empty that night, a ubiquitous kind of quiet that could only be the result of a recent city-wide super-power related incident. Frank was still a bit fatigued when he makes it home, but is immediately put on edge the moment he steps through the front door.
Someone was here.
His eyes land on the table, barren, except -
A note?
Parchment paper. Wrinkled, like it had been crushed in someone’s pocket. The ink still smelled fresh. He opens it up - slowly, trying not to tear it, and starts reading.
Frank,
Took my mask back. Hope you don’t mind.
- SM
(P.S - I’m still waiting on those garlic knots)
Frank reads it once, then twice. He folds the paper back up, and places it carefully in one of the desk drawers. Another piece of junk that his stupidly sentimental heart would never dare to dispose of.
Despite himself, he could feel a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Good to see you too, Rainbow,” he murmurs.
(This time, he means it.)