Archive of Our Own

There was a relentless, never-ending beeping somewhere beside him, sharp enough to drill straight through the fog in Peter’s head. He groaned and tried to roll away from it because it was seriously hurting his brain, only to realize something plastic was covering his face.

His heart lurched so violently that the monitor answered with an even faster series of beeps. He went completely still, because there was only one reason anyone ever put a mask over someone’s face and attached them to a machine that sounded that expensive.

He’s in the hospital.

A hospital where, in America, that meant he was approximately three beeps away from financial ruin. He had been in a hospital before, obviously, but usually there had at least been Mr. Stark and his flashy black card.

This time, all he had was an oxygen mask, a headache, and the deeply unsettling possibility that someone was already printing an itemized bill in another room. His eyes flew open as the full horror of the situation settled over him and sure enough—

Yep.

He’s in a hospital room.

Not just any hospital room, either, but a single-bed room, which meant private.

Peter’s stomach dropped so hard it probably qualified as a second medical emergency.

Fuck, how long had he been out?

He blinked hard against the fluorescent lights and finally took in the rest of the room. Get-well cards had been lined up across the windowsill, beside a small mountain of plushies and enough balloons to qualify as a hostile takeover by Hallmark.

One balloon bobbed cheerfully over his bed with “get well soon” written across it in aggressively sunny letters. He stared at it, then at the attached price tag someone had apparently forgotten to remove.

It looked like the hospital had decorated his impending bankruptcy with a cheerful little ribbon.

The monitor began beeping faster again, and a low, exhausted groan came from the other side of the room. He whipped his head around so quickly that the universe briefly became a watercolor painting.

Frank was folded onto the tiny hospital couch. His giant body barely fit on it, both his arms crossed. Peter did not waste a second once he saw Frank’s eyes fluttering open. He tore the oxygen mask away from his face, his throat dry enough that his voice came out rough and thin.

“W-where’s my mask?”

He realized he wasn't wearing a mask, which meant the hospital knew exactly who he was. Peter’s stomach twisted, and it wasn’t because of the anonymous-superhero thing at the top of his worries at the moment.

No, it was that he knew there were only three things in this world that no one could outrun:

Death, the IRS, and the American healthcare billing office, especially if you don’t have insurance.

And last he checked, he did not, because Medicaid now apparently wanted proof that he worked eighty hours a month, went to school half-time, enrolled in job training, or completed approved community service.

Fighting crime as an unpaid, masked vigilante did not count, which felt deeply unfair considering he had personally provided New York with approximately six hundred hours of emergency public safety this month alone.

Needless to say, he had to get out of here.

Now.

He clawed at the IV cannula with sudden, panicked urgency, his brain supplying increasingly horrifying numbers that probably did not even include the ambulance ride. He could survive being thrown through a wall by a supervillain, but he could not survive a hospital billing department discovering he was uninsured.

“Hey, hey,” Frank said, pushing himself off the couch. He crossed the room in two steps and caught Peter’s wrist before he could rip the IV out entirely. “Jesus, you’ve been shot. You need to rest.”

“I need to leave,” Peter insisted, although the room tilted hard enough to make that plan seem medically ambitious. “Frank, you don’t understand. There’s probably someone downstairs assigning a dollar amount to every breath I take!”

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Frank said. “I got you covered. You’re good.”

Peter froze.

“Really? You have my bills covered?”

“I meant the mask,” Frank said, like Peter was the one being unreasonable. “But still, you’re not leaving this goddamn room, you got it? Jean used her magic voodoo shit to keep you alive, and I’m not letting you bleed out and die again on my watch.”

“But…what about my identity?”

“Your name stays off whatever needs to stay off. You know, HIPAA and shit.”

For one brief, shining second, Peter’s nervous system considered powering down entirely. Then the words, not the bill, caught up with him, and the monitor launched into another frantic chorus.

“How…how long had I been unconscious?”

“About a day. Doctors were able to perform life-saving intervention.”

“So I’m still financially doomed,” Peter groaned.

Frank scratched at his jaw, considering this with the grim concentration of a man planning a hostage extraction. “I don’t know, man. Maybe they got a financial option or something. Hospitals got that, right?”

“With what job?” Peter asked.

Frank frowned. “What, you don’t get paid to help fellow New Yorkers?”

“No?”

Why would he be charging people?

“Shit,” Frank muttered, and he started to pace the room. “Maybe you need a Venmo. Cash App. Hand it out to everybody you save like a business card.”

Peter looked genuinely offended. “I’m not doing that!”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m Spider-Man, Frank. What do you mean why not? I can’t web a guy out of a burning building and then go, ‘Hey, before you reunite with your family, could you maybe scan this QR code?’ Are you crazy?”

Frank’s face stayed perfectly serious. “Could put it on TikTok.”

He blinked, and for a moment, he thought he heard wrong because…

“What?”

“Put your story on TikTok.”

He never thought he’d hear Frank Castle suggest social media strategy with the same solemnity he usually reserved for loading firearms. Hell, Peter never thought Frank knew what TikTok was, let alone consider it as a digital outreach.

“What are you saying, dude?”

“If I tell you, does that mean you’ll stop bringing up that Staten Island bullshit?”

Peter didn’t even have it in him to roll his eyes because of course he’d still try to leverage it.

“What is it?”

“It’s gonna sound crazy,” he started. “You ever just post as your civilian self and tag the mayor?”

“The mayor?” Peter repeated, his eyes widening. “Like Mayor Mamdani?”

Frank stared at him. “No. Former mayors Adams and de Blasio. No shit, Mayor Mamdani.”

Peter narrowed his eyes. “And do what?”

“You haven’t seen what people have been doing lately?” Frank questioned.

Was he serious?

“I’ve been a little preoccupied lately, if you couldn’t tell.”

“Right,” Frank muttered, wincing, and then he cleared his throat. “Well, people have been tagging the mayor, and shit gets crazy. Guy posts about a pothole on his street and tags Mamdani. And comes home from work, and they’re filled.”

Peter squinted at him. “What?”

“I can’t believe you don’t know.” Frank paced once around the foot of the bed, clearly irritated by how reasonable this had started to sound. “Broken water pipes. Playground shit. Streetlights. People put it online, tag the mayor, and bam! Somebody from the city shows up before they can make a follow-up video.”

Peter stared at him.

“So your solution to my uninsured gunshot wound is for me to TikTok Mayor Mamdani?”

“Hey, it doesn’t hurt to try it! Did you see that otters are returning to the Bronx River? Otters, man. First time in a hundred years,” he said, sounding almost personally betrayed that Peter had somehow missed it. “And—”

“Frank—”

“Someone even tagged the mayor to get him a man and guess what he does?”

“Dude—”

“He gave him options for finding a man!”

Peter stared at him for a long, silent moment. “Frank.”

“What?”

“You’re pitching these things as proof that the mayor can erase my hospital bill?”

Frank crossed his arms and shrugged one shoulder. “I’m saying the guy gets things done.”

Peter wasn’t sure at this point if the throbbing in his head was caused by the gunshot, the concussion, or Frank Castle sincerely presenting “the mayor helped a guy find a boyfriend” as evidence of a functioning emergency healthcare system.

“You know…those and an otter returning aren’t the same as authorizing a seven-figure trauma bill, right?” he questioned slowly.

“You don’t know that, and they’re a sign,” Frank insisted.

“A sign of what?”

“That maybe,” Frank said, gesturing sharply toward Peter’s IV, “New York’s got its shit together enough to help a good kid who had always been savin’ their asses while doing unpaid public services.”

Again, that would only work if people knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man.

Yet something told him there was no point in arguing with him.

So Peter looked down at the clear bag dripping steadily into his arm.

“That bag is going to cost me like, seven hundred dollars.”

Frank frowned and then collapsed back onto the couch. “Then tag him about the bag and everything else. Hey, while we’re on the topic, I always thought Mamdani was Spider-Man. Don’t laugh, a lot of people thought that too.”

Peter stared at him.

Frank stared back, perfectly serious.

“Why,” Peter asked slowly, “on earth would you and others think that?”

“Same height. About the same build. Both got that whole…talks-with-their-hands thing.” Frank gestured vaguely to drive home his point. “Always running around the city. Shows up wherever there’s a problem.”

He was serious.

Oh my God, was he actually dead and this was a method to torment?

“Well yeah, he’s the mayor. His job is to show up where there are city problems literally. I got handed the key to the city by Mayor Mamdani on live TV, Frank. There were cameras. There were photos.”

Frank’s eyes narrowed, leaning forward and placing his elbow onto his knees.

“Could be a cover.”

Peter made a noise somewhere between a cough and a dying appliance. “How?”

“Wait,” Frank said, suddenly sitting forward. “It just hit me.”

Peter’s shoulders loosened despite himself. Finally. Frank understood that this was insane—

“So you guys are friends,” he finished.

Peter’s relief died instantly. “No, we’re not.”

“You got the key to the city.”

“No, Spider-Man got the key to the city. Big difference. That’s a ceremonial thing.”

“Ceremonial friendship.”

“That is not a phrase!”

“Why are we still arguing about this?” he asked, throwing his hands up in the air, and Peter almost wanted to strangle this stubborn man. “Guy gives you the key to the city, you take pictures together, he knows you’re here, and you’re telling me he wouldn’t help with a hospital bill?”

“I’m done talking about this,” Peter muttered, yanking the blanket up all the way up and over his head, ignoring the pain that immediately flared across his side in protest. “I’m going back to sleep, Frank. Goodnight.”

If he was already financially doomed anyway, might as well lie in that same, uncomfortable bed.

“Why can’t he run for president?” Frank asked after a few moments of beautiful silence.

Peter shut his eyes tighter, nose flaring. He knew better than to humor him. He knew exactly what Frank was doing, and yet the words escaped anyway because apparently a concussion had lowered his defenses against conversational bait.

“Because he isn’t a U.S.-born citizen,” Peter mumbled.

Even though we also have a president who is a convicted felon.

Yet what did Peter know?

There was a beat of silence.

“Aren’t you from Queens?” Frank asked.

He threw his blanket down. “I’m not Mayor Mamdani!”

Frank laughed then—an actual, rough laugh that made Peter squint at him in suspicion.

“Yeah, kid. I’m pulling your leg.”

“You’re messing with me on purpose,” Peter accused, narrowing his eyes further.

“Yeah.”

“That is so mean.”

“You’ll live.”

Peter snorted. “Statistically, given the bill, that remains to be seen.”

“You know, I heard if you even say “New York,” he’ll show up.”

“I’m not doing that,” he answered, deadpanned.

“Worth a try,” Frank said.

“If I do it, will you let me sleep?”

“Okay.”

“New York,” he said, with all the exhausted conviction of a man placing an order at a drive-through he did not want to be at with two screaming kids in the back. Then he dragged the blanket over his face again. “There. Are you satis—”

Suddenly, the hospital phone rang.

Okay. That was a weird coincidence.

Hospitals had phones, obviously, and phones rang, but nobody should have been calling him—not when no one in this building was supposed to know who Spider-Man was beneath the mask.

He slowly lowered the blanket just enough to peer at Frank. Frank was already looking back at him, his expression sharpening as he seemed to reach the same conclusion. Without a word, he crossed the room and picked up the receiver on Peter’s behalf.

“Yeah?”

Peter strained to listen beneath the blanket, but Frank had turned away, his broad back blocking most of the sound. His posture stiffened almost immediately as he yelled, “What? You’re shitting me.”

That did not sound good.

“Is everything okay?” Peter asked, and Frank only held up a finger.

“Yeah. Okay. Great, I’ll let him know.” Then, he hung up before looking over at him with an expression that was dangerously close to smugness. “Well, kid, what did I tell you? You don’t gotta worry about your medical bill anymore.”

Peter blinked once, then twice before his mouth dropped open.

“What?”

“Somebody paid your whole stay,” Frank said. “Everything.”

Peter’s mouth somehow dropped wider. “What? Who?”

A knock sounded at the door.

Peter moved on pure instinct, snatching his mask from the bedside table and pulling it over his face. He was going to call out to Frank to stop, but it was already too late. Frank had opened the door, and the person standing on the other side made Peter’s head reel harder than the concussion ever had.

Mayor Mamdani stood in the doorway with a bright, easy smile.

Mayor Mamdani.

The mayor of New York City.

Wearing a bike helmet now, which is new to Peter.

The last he checked, half of social media had apparently been tagging the mayor with increasingly frantic reminders to wear one, and Peter guessed he had finally decided the internet’s collective anxiety wasn't worth arguing with.

He was holding a paper bag from what looked suspiciously like a very expensive bakery. Behind him, two deeply overwhelmed staffers hovered in the hallway, looking as though neither had been briefed that their afternoon now involved visiting a masked vigilante in Bellevue.

“Hey, Spider-Man,” he greeted.

Peter stared at him.

Frank, traitor that he was, leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed and a look of unbearable satisfaction. All the while, Peter’s brain offered several possible explanations—hallucination, medication side effect, government conspiracy, an elaborate Frank Castle prank—and rejected all of them because the mayor was still standing there, very real, very smiling, and apparently holding muffins.

My God, Peter thought faintly, even through the haze of painkillers and sheer disbelief, the mayor was handsome. Not in the vague, oh, objectively, I can see why people would say that way, either. This was worse because of his warm smile, neat suit, bright eyes, and the kind of effortless confidence that made Peter abruptly understand why New Yorkers kept tagging him in videos about potholes and dating emergencies.

Then Peter remembered he was wearing a hospital gown, had been shot, and was currently being visited by the mayor because Frank Castle had apparently summoned him like a civic-minded demon.

“Hi,” he managed, then immediately hated himself. Spider-Man was supposed to sound cool and mysterious, not like a man who had just been caught staring at a city official while actively losing a fight with hospital linens.

The mayor’s smile softened.

“I heard about what happened and what you did for the city.”

“Oh. Uh, it’s…it’s no big deal.”

“No big deal? You’ve saved New York so many times. Give yourself more credit than that.”

Peter made a helpless little gesture with his good hand. “I mean, it’s sort of the job.”

“An unpaid job,” Frank cut in from the doorway.

Peter turned his head so fast the monitor complained. “Frank.”

“What?” Frank asked. “It is.”

The mayor’s expression shifted, his gaze dropping briefly to the IV in Peter’s hand and then to the hospital room around them. “You shouldn’t have to worry about any of this after what you’ve done.”

Peter’s stomach sank. “Oh, I mean—if this is about the bill, I don’t want special treatment.”

Frank stared at him. “Kid.”

“What? I don’t! There’s got to be someone who needs it more than me! Right?”

“Well, that is true,” the mayor said with a nod.

Peter blinked. “It is?”

The mayor laughed and nodded, stepping farther into the room. He set the bakery bag on Peter’s bedside table with the careful gravity of someone placing down a diplomatic offering, narrowly avoiding the call button.

“Saving people should not come with a punishment afterward,” he said. “Especially not a bill that follows you home. You risk your life every day in helping the city, and as a major, I can’t exactly play favoritism.”

“Uh…what?” Peter asked, dumbfounded by where this was going.

“I’m going to speak with Bellevue’s patient-financial-services team and the people at City Hall who handle emergency assistance,” the mayor continued. “We’ll make sure your care here is covered, and we’ll see what we can do so New Yorkers who step up in a crisis are not left choosing between getting treatment and going broke.”

Peter’s mouth opened and then closed like a gaping fish.

“Wait,” he said faintly. “You can just…do that?”

The mayor smiled. “I can make calls. I’m told that’s a significant part of being mayor.”

Frank gave Peter a look that was so damn smug it should have been illegal.

“Told you, kid.”

Peter looked between them, utterly betrayed. There were at least twelve reasons this should not have worked, and somehow Frank’s ridiculous civic-engagement séance had beaten all twelve of them.

He opened his mouth to argue, then looked at the IV, the equipment he’s hooked up on, the private room, balloons, the mountain of ‘get’ well cards to Spider-Man before his shoulders sagged.

“Thank you, Mayor Mamdani,” he said.

The mayor’s smile turned gentler.

“I got you. And thank you for everything you’ve done, Spider-Man. If you need anything, you let me know.”

“How?” Peter asked, confused.

“Just use TikTok and tag me,” he answered. “I got a team helping me out after all. New Yorkers are all in this together, aren’t we?”

Peter nodded automatically, still too stunned to process the sentence. “R-right.”

“Great! Now I should probably head out so you can recover in peace.”

Frank’s smugness became so intense that Peter considered asking the nurse for something strong enough to erase the last ten minutes. The mayor adjusted the helmet strap beneath his chin.

Then the mayor turned toward the door, and Peter’s brain finally caught up.

“Wait,” he blurted. “Did—did you actually hear me say ‘New York’?”

The mayor paused in the doorway.

Then he glanced back over his shoulder, smile widening just enough to be suspicious.

“I don’t know what you mean," he remarked with a twinkle in his eyes. 

And then he was gone, his staff scrambling after him.

For several seconds, Peter stared at the closed door.

Then he slowly turned toward Frank.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “He has the New York tingles.”

Yeah, he could see why people mistake the mayor for Spider-Man, and honestly?

He didn’t blame any of them.