Archive of Our Own

The attic wasn't technically abandoned, which Spider-Man figured was probably an important distinction if anyone ever asked. 

It belonged to an apartment building that had caught fire across the top three floors. The damage had been bad enough that the owners had stopped renting them out rather than bother with repairs. Luckily, the attic had escaped most of it. 

It had one window overlooking an alley instead of the street, which meant Spider-Man could slip in and out without being seen, and, more importantly, nobody had bothered checking the place in a very long time. 

There was no heat, electricity, or running water. The one window had been cracked sometime before Spider-Man found the place and never quite stopped letting the winter air in. On the bright side, there was a roof, four walls, and a door that mostly stayed closed if you kicked it in the right spot.

Spider-Man had slept in worse places, but Peter Parker had slept in better places, which was probably why this one felt particularly depressing.

He'd managed to collect a few blankets from around the neighborhood, although calling them blankets was generous. One had definitely been a blanket at some point. Another was more of a collection of fabric that Spider-Man had decided counted as a blanket because it was warmer than the floor. 

He'd found an old sweatshirt in a dumpster behind a laundromat and spent nearly an hour fixing the torn sleeve with a needle he'd borrowed from the little sewing kit at the laundromat's bathroom. He'd also found two pairs of socks that didn't match and a winter coat with a broken zipper. 

None of it was particularly comfortable, but ‘comfortable’ had become one of those words Spider-Man didn't think about very often anymore.

It was January, and Spider-Man had recently discovered that being a superhero in New York during winter had a major design flaw. Spiders can’t thermoregulate. 

Or, technically, spiders were ectothermic, which Spider-Man knew because he'd spent way too much time reading about the species after the whole radioactive-spiderbite thing, but that wasn't really helping him at the moment. 

Whatever the scientific terminology was, his body apparently had not gotten the memo that he was supposed to be some kind of superhuman. He still got cold. Really cold. 

The kind where his fingers went numb while he was trying to web-swing and he had to land on a rooftop and spend ten minutes blowing on his hands before trusting himself not to accidentally web a pigeon instead of the building he was aiming for.

Spider-Man thought about getting a better place. A real apartment, maybe. Something with heat and a bed and a refrigerator that contained real food instead of a bottle of water and half a packet of crackers that he'd stashed away for later. 

Unfortunately, apartments tended to require things like money and identification and a stable income, and he had managed to lose all three somewhere between May dying and realizing that Peter Parker went along with her.

Five months.

Spider-Man stared at the ceiling, trying not to think about that number.

That number of months since he'd sat beside May's hospital bed. Since he'd listened to machines beep steadily beside her and since he'd heard the beeping stop. 

That number of months since someone had told him a CPS agent was coming to bring him to a group home.

He'd run from the hospital that number of months ago with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and May's old phone in his pocket, because for some reason leaving that behind had felt worse than leaving everything else.

He'd never gone back. May was there in that bed, and he never went back. 

Spider-Man didn't want to think about what kind of person that made him. So he didn't.

May’s phone buzzed beside him.

Spider-Man reached for it, squinting at the cracked screen. The phone had been cracked for almost as long as he'd had it, mostly because, evidently, swinging between buildings while carrying expensive electronics was not a particularly good idea. 

May had always said she needed to get her phone a case, and Peter Parker had always known that wasn't in the weekly budget. 

There was a news notification waiting for Spider-Man.

AVENGERS ENGAGED IN INCIDENT NEAR QUEENS — CIVILIANS ADVISED TO REMAIN INDOORS.

He stared at it for a second. Near Queens doesn’t mean in Queens, right…?

Then another notification appeared underneath it.

SPIDER-MAN: FRIENDLY NEIGHBOR OR MENACE?

"Oh, come on." He rubbed his eyes and sat up, pulling off one of the “blankets” around his shoulders. 

The second headline was from Jameson, which meant it was probably accompanied by several minutes of screaming, accusations, and a creative new theory about Spider-Man being an alien sent to destroy New York. 

Spider-Man had stopped being offended by Jameson a while ago. Mostly because if he let himself care about every terrible thing people said about him, he'd never get anything done.

Besides, most of New York seemed to like him.

That was the weird part.

People waved when he swung by. Kids asked for pictures. The woman who ran the little bodega three blocks from May's old apartment had started keeping granola bars behind the counter for him after he'd stopped a robbery there. An old man on his patrol route sometimes left coffee on the roof of his building, even though Spider-Man had never figured out how the man knew he would be there. 

People called him their "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man," and he tried very hard to live up to it.

May had liked that.

She'd told him once that being Spider-Man didn't mean he had to save the whole world. It just meant that if he could help the person standing right in front of him, he should.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Spider-Man had repeated those words so many times that sometimes it felt like they'd been carved into his bones.

He looked at May's phone again.

The Avengers were near Queens. He'd been avoiding them for months.

That wasn't an exaggeration. They'd been trying to catch him for almost as long as he'd been fighting the bigger names in the city. 

Iron Man had cornered him twice. Captain America had gotten close once, before Spider-Man panicked and swung away. Hawkeye had put an arrow through one of his webs from what Spider-Man was fairly certain was an unreasonable distance.

Thor had somehow managed to make an entire rooftop explode… Spider-Man still considered that excessive.

Black Widow was the worst.

Not because she was the strongest. She wasn't. Not because she was the hardest to run from. Definitely not.

She was just really, really good at finding him, and Spider-Man had never figured out how she did it.

She'd been waiting on rooftops he'd landed on to rest four times now. The most recent time, she'd gotten close enough to grab his wrist before he'd managed to slip away.

She hadn't hurt him.

She'd just looked at him for a long second, like she was trying to figure out something he hadn't told her.

Spider-Man had made a quip about those cats that stared at you from alleyways. She hadn't laughed, and that was usually how he knew he'd done something wrong. But instead of getting angry, she'd just... let him go.

She'd stood there silently and watched him swing away.

Which is why he should’ve stayed away from the Avengers tonight. That would have been the smart thing to do; there’d be no way they’d let him get away this time. 

Unfortunately, Spider-Man had never been particularly good at doing the smart thing when someone needed help.

He pulled off the broken winter coat, quickly got dressed, shoved the phone into his suit pocket, and climbed out through the window.

The cold hit him immediately, feelings like thorns flowing through his blood. "Great," he muttered, pulling the mask over his face. "Loving this already."

He fired a web toward the next building and swung into the chilly night.

The city blurred beneath him, all headlights and neon and falling snow, and for a few minutes Spider-Man could almost pretend that things were normal. He could almost pretend he was fourteen again, racing across rooftops because May had told him to be home before midnight. 

He could almost pretend there was still an apartment waiting for him somewhere, with a warm bed and a light left on and someone who would complain that he was tracking snow across the floor.

Then the distant sound of an explosion shook the air, and Spider-Man stopped swinging, landing on the closet billboard.

That wasn’t near Queens; that was in Queens.

Another explosion followed. He looked toward the orange glow rising above the buildings.  The Avengers were fighting something, and they were fighting it in Queens.

The vigilante dove off the billboard and started swinging faster towards the fight. Queens is his responsibility. This fight is his responsibility. 

Because whatever else Spider-Man had lost in the last that many months, he hadn't lost that.

He couldn't. May had taught him better. If he could help, he helped. 

If Spider-Man didn’t help, he knew whatever pain, destruction, and death that followed was his fault.  

Even if the people he was helping didn't know his name. Even if the Avengers were probably going to try to take him in afterward. Even if he was freezing, exhausted, hungry, and pretty sure one of his ribs was still cracked from his encounter with Tombstone yesterday.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Spider-Man adjusted his mask tighter around his face, turned on his voice changer, and swung toward the explosions. "Here goes nothing."

— 

The first thing Spider-Man noticed when he swung into the fight was that whatever the Avengers were dealing with was much bigger than anything he’d handled this week, which was saying something considering Tombstone had thrown a car with a family in it at him yesterday. 

The second thing he noticed was that the Avengers had somehow managed to seal off the entire block, which was probably great for keeping civilians out of danger and probably less great for his continued status as a legally unclassified person who was definitely not supposed to be here.

The third thing he noticed was Iron Man, which honestly should have been the first thing, but Spider-Man was trying to prioritize these days responsibly.

“Hey!” Spider-Man called as he landed on the side of a building, one hand cupped around his mouth even though the mask made it completely unnecessary. “Great news! I’m here to help!” He waved dramatically at what used to be his childhood hero. 

Iron Man turned his helmet toward him like he was considering whether that counted as good news or a personal insult. “Fantastic,” Tony Stark said through the suit’s speakers. “Exactly what I wanted.”

Spider-Man winced immediately, lowering his hand. “Okay, that sounded sarcastic.”

“It was, Spider-ling.”

Below them, the thing tearing through the street roared again, and Spider-Man’s attention snapped down just in time to see a chunk of concrete hurtling toward a group of civilians who hadn’t made it behind the barricades yet.

He didn’t think; he just moved, firing two webs in quick succession, yanking the slab sideways hard enough that it scraped across the asphalt instead of crushing anyone, then swinging low to catch the edge of a streetlight before it could collapse onto a parked car. 

“Got it!” he called automatically, dragging the debris clear.

“Stop!” Captain America’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp enough that Spider-Man actually looked up, hands still on the streetlight he was setting on the ground.

The Avenger was in the middle of the street, shield raised, stance locked in like he was bracing for a threat. The problem was that Spider-Man was pretty sure he was the threat in question, which felt like a misunderstanding they could probably clear up if everyone stopped yelling for like ten seconds.

He slowly laid the streetlight down, “Me?” Spider-Man pointed at himself, because there were a lot of people in masks and armor and godly capes and it felt important to confirm.

“You’re interfering with our operation.”

Spider-Man glanced over at the monster currently trying to rip an empty bus in half as it had personally offended it. “With all due respect, Mr. Captain America, I feel like I’m pretty clearly doing the opposite of interfering.”

The creature then decided it was a good time to slam the bus into the pavement, and the street buckled past the perimeter that the Avengers set up like it was made of paper. 

His spider-sense screamed so loud it drowned out everything else, and he was already moving before the shockwave hit, flipping backward as the ground exploded beneath him. 

Cars skidded sideways, glass shattered, and people scattered as he fired a web toward a traffic light, swung low, and caught a woman who’d fallen in the street before carrying her in a tight arc and setting her beside a building.

“You okay?” he asked quickly.

She nodded too fast to be reassuring, but he had no time. “Great! Stay here and call an ambulance.”

He turned back toward the fight just in time for a red-and-gold blur to cut across his vision. 

Spider-Man ducked on instinct, the repulsor blast missing his head by inches and blowing a chunk out of the building behind him instead, causing the civilian beside him to run away in the opposite direction. 

He whipped around to where the billionaire was hovering in the air, “Whoa, watch it! You could’ve injured her or your new besite Spidey.”

“Then stop moving, and we can be friends,” Iron Man called back.

Spider-Man definitely needed to create some space between him and his ‘teammates’, “That’s kind of difficult when you’re shooting at me!” He shouted, swinging back towards the Avengers’ perimeter to get back into the fight. 

He could hear the rockets following behind him, “You’re being detained.”

He actually paused mid-swing for half a second. “Even though I’m helping?”

“Helping is the last thing that you’re doing”

He didn’t get to answer because the monster chose that exact moment to throw a car in his direction, and Spider-Man landed on the vehicle mid-flight, ran across its roof like it was solid ground, and kicked off just before it slammed into a building, firing webs to both ends to keep it from crushing anything below. 

“See?” he shouted, hanging upside down for a second as he stabilized it. “This! This is what I’m talking about! We can all work together!”

Black Widow landed on the rooftop a few feet away like she’d been there the whole time, which was deeply unfair because Spider-Man was pretty sure she had not been there 3 seconds ago.

She just looked at him like she already knew whatever he was about to say. “We aren't working together."

Spider-Man pointed at himself again and then to the Black Widow, and then the webbed-up car. “Aren't we?” He tilted his head to the side.

“You’re a dangerous enhanced individual without authorization.”

“I’m fighting a dangerous enhanced individual who is currently trying to kill people.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that you’re a vigilante.”

Spider-Man pulled himself upright on the web line, frustration starting to edge into his voice as he climbed onto the roof. “Okay, but I’m a vigilante who is saving people.”

Black Widow’s face went blank, and Spider-Man recognized that look immediately. She was assessing him again like the last rooftop, like he was a puzzle she could solve. 

“Who are you?” she asked.

Spider-Man let out a nervous laugh before he could stop himself. “Oh, you know, ‘Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’, I went over this years ago.”

“Your name.”

“Spider-Man.”

Man, if looks could kill. “Your real name.” 

“Also Spider-Man.”

Her eyes squinted. “Don’t make me ask again.” Her murderous expression somehow got more murderous. 

“Could we maybe have this conversation once Giant Murder Monster isn’t actively trying to murder everybody?” Spider-Man gestured vaguely toward the ongoing destruction behind her and suddenly realized that Giant Murder Monster was already being apprehended by Captain America and Thor.

For a second, just a fraction of a second, the corner of Black Widow’s mouth twitched up, and Spider-Man almost let himself relax.

Then Iron Man landed behind him.

“Time’s up.”

Spider-Man’s senses flared a bit too late, and he shot a web toward the next building on instinct, but a repulsor blast cut across his path and forced him to jerk sideways. 

“Hey!” He shouted after he hit the side of the wall on the rooftop. 

“Stop running, Spidey; you’re just making this harder.”

“You’re shooting at me!”

Captain America’s voice came from below as he moved into position. “Spider-Man, we’re not trying to hurt you.”

Spider-Man looked around at them properly for the first time in a few seconds—Iron Man hovering behind him, Captain America on the street, Black Widow on the roof, Hawkeye already nocking another arrow somewhere he couldn’t quite see but could feel, Thor looking like he was waiting for permission to intervene in a way that would probably level the block. 

“Could’ve fooled me.”

Steve lowered his shield slightly, like he was trying to make himself less threatening. “Son, we need you to come with us.”

“Why?”

“Because SHIELD wants answers.”

Spider-Man’s stomach tightened immediately, because he knew SHIELD. Everyone knew SHIELD. 

He’d read Jameson’s article about Nick Fury wanting to apprehend Spider-Man a few months ago, ever since the Vulture fight had gone viral and suddenly Spider-Man had gone from “weird guy swinging through Queens” to “unidentified enhanced individual operating in New York City.” 

He’d become too visible. Too consistent. Too hard to ignore, and it didn’t seem like SHIELD ignored things.

Spider-Man swallowed, even though his mouth was suddenly dry. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Iron Man crossed his arms. “You’ve been operating outside the law for two years.”

“Okay, technically, yes, but–.”

“You're interfering with police operations.”

“I’ve also saved people during those operations!” The vigilante rose to his feet.

Iron Man’s arm rose, as if he needed to be ready to blast the vigilante. “You’ve destroyed property.”

“Accidentally!” He threw his arms up, exasperated, “And don't you guys do that all the time?”

“You’re refusing to identify yourself.” Black Widow chimed in, conversationally, like she didn’t know how deep that hit. 

Spider-Man hesitated, just for a second too long, and hated that they could probably see it. 

There wasn't anything left to identify. 

Peter Parker had had a life once: a school, a best friend, a room that was always too messy, a kitchen where May would fuss at him for leaving the fridge open and Ben would inevitably take his side. 

Peter Parker had a name that belonged to somebody outside of a mask. But then Ben got shot, and May got sick, and that version of him had just… stopped existing in any way that mattered.

There was no one waiting for him to come home. There was just Spider-Man, and Spider-Man was useful, and Spider-Man could keep people alive in a way Peter Parker couldn’t.

So if SHIELD found out who he was, they wouldn’t just find Spider-Man.

They’d find Peter Parker, and make him go into the foster system, and Peter Parker would get someone else killed again. 

And Spider-Man couldn’t let that happen.

“There’s nothing to identify,” he said, his voice slightly cracking, and Spider-Man realized his eyes were watery.

Black Widow looked at him for a long moment, and Spider-Man immediately wished he could take it back because saying it out loud made it feel too real.

Iron Man lowered his arm slightly. “Okay. That’s enough.” He made some weird motion with his hand.

Spider-Man’s spider-sense screamed again, sharp and immediate, and everything snapped back into motion. He fired a web toward a nearby building, but Thor moved first, forcing him to swing underneath the arc of Mjolnir as it came down. 

Hawkeye fired from somewhere off to the side, and Spider-Man twisted mid-air so the arrow missed him by inches, embedding itself in concrete instead. 

Captain America moved to cut off his landing path, and Spider-Man stumbled onto the ground, frustration finally breaking through. “Guys!” he shouted, more raw than he meant it to be. “I’m trying to help!”

“We know,” Captain America said back, and he walked closer.

“Then stop!” He shouted, trying his best to scamper away from the soldier. 

“We can’t do that, son.” And Captain America raised his hand like he was about to hit him, and everything Spider-Man knew about responsibility went out the window as he realized how scared he was. 

Actually, really scared. 

So he ran.

He's not proud of it, but he shot a web and swung hard between two buildings, not able to avoid kicking Captain America in the head and clearing the rooftop as Iron Man took off after him. 

“Spider-Man!”

“Sorry!” The vigilante called back immediately, and it didn’t sound like sarcasm this time. It sounded too much like fear.

He didn’t look back after that. He couldn’t afford to. He just moved roof to roof, wall to wall, dropping and swinging and catching himself at the last possible second as the city blurred around him and the snow kept falling.

He could hear them behind him: Iron Man, then Hawkeye, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow somewhere quieter and closer than he liked if his spidey-sense was correct, all of them still there, still following.

And that was the worst part, because they hadn’t been trying to kill him. They’d been trying to detain him.

If they wanted him dead, the entire thing would be easier. 

Spider-Man knew how to deal with people who wanted to kill him. Punch, fight, stay alive. But when they were trying to capture him, that was another story. 

Spider-Man had a responsibility to keep people safe, and he couldn't bring himself to fight someone who wasn't trying to hurt anyone. 

It didn't help that he understood their side. 

They didn't think he was dangerous enough to kill, but they thought he was a problem. One they needed to identify, hand over to SHIELD, and figure out what to do with afterward.

They didn’t know.

They didn’t know he was fifteen and that he’d been sleeping in an attic with three blankets and a broken coat. They didn’t know he’d spent the afternoon counting leftover coins that people gave to the skinny, homeless kid, just to make sure he could still afford flowers for May.

They didn’t know that Spider-Man was all he had left.

And Spider-Man really, really needed them to keep not knowing.

—

Spider-Man had been swinging across random buildings in Queens for almost twenty minutes when he started to realize he might have made a mistake.

Not a normal superheroing mistake, either. Not the kind where he accidentally webs a police car to a lamppost or swings directly into a billboard because he was looking backward while talking. 

This was a much more serious mistake, mostly because his legs had started feeling like someone had replaced his bones with wet spaghetti and he was pretty sure he hadn't eaten anything since yesterday morning when an old lady gave Spider-Man a hot dog for getting her cat out of a tree.

The problem with running from the Avengers was that they were, apparently, very good at chasing people. 

Spider-Man had managed to lose them twice, but Iron Man had a terrifyingly good radar system, Hawkeye apparently had eyes everywhere, and Captain America was capable of running for approximately seven thousand years without getting tired. 

The vigilante had been hoping they'd eventually give up, mostly because he wasn't sure how much longer his body was going to cooperate with his (lack of a) plan, but every time he thought he'd finally gotten away, a familiar red-and-gold glow would appear somewhere behind him, and he'd have to change direction again.

His fingers were getting numb inside his gloves. His ribs hurt every time he swung. The bruising from Tombstone's little disagreement with gravity yesterday had settled into a collection of colors that Spider-Man was pretty sure weren't supposed to occur naturally on human skin, and the cut along his side that he stitched up yesterday had started bleeding again somewhere around the fifteenth rooftop. 

The thing he missed most about eating 3 meals a day turned out wasn't the feeling of a full stomach; it was his healing factor. 

At least he'd stopped noticing the cold a while ago, which was maybe worse than actually feeling it. 

When he was freezing, his brain could recognize that there was a problem. Now he was just tired enough that everything felt distant, like he was watching himself run from very far away.

"Come on," he muttered behind the mask, forcing another web out of web shooters. "Just a little longer." They had to give up soon.

The web caught a water tower on the next building, and Spider-Man swung around it, letting the momentum carry him toward a taller apartment complex. He landed hard on the roof, stumbled, and immediately had to throw a hand against the concrete wall to keep himself upright. 

His vision blurred for a second, and he blinked rapidly until the roof stopped moving underneath him, then looked behind him. 

Nothing. They weren’t there; he’d actually gotten away.

The vigilante let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh and dropped onto the edge of the roof. "Okay. Great. Awesome. Escaped the Avengers. Definitely planned that."

His stomach twisted painfully, and he pressed a hand against it.

"Not now." His hunger pangs, evidently, did not care about his schedule.

Spider-Man sat there for another few seconds, trying to convince himself that resting wasn't the same thing as giving up. 

He could get up. He could keep moving; he'd pushed through worse. He'd stopped Scorpion while running a 103-degree fever. He'd taken on Vulture after lifting a building off of himself.

He could handle being hungry, at least he had for the past couple of months. 

Hunger was just noise in the background, something he could ignore if he focused hard enough on rooftops and wind direction and the next place to land. He could handle being cold too, even if the chill had started to settle deep into his bones in a way that made his fingers feel a little less like his own. And tired, he was always tired, so that one almost didn’t even count anymore. Tired was just normal now, like breathing or lying or pretending he had everything under control.

What he couldn’t handle was them catching him. That was the only thing left that mattered.

Spider-Man pushed himself upright anyway, forcing his body to obey even as it protested every movement, and immediately the world tilted like it had lost interest in staying still for him. 

He sucked in a breath through his teeth, swayed, and had to lock his knees just to keep from going down again. 

For a second he just stood there, mask pointed vaguely toward the skyline, like if he waited long enough the dizziness would get bored and leave.

“Okay,” he whispered, mostly to himself, “Maybe I can’t handle all three.”

The words barely left him before his spider-sense snapped so hard it felt like something had struck the inside of his skull. 

Spider-Man turned on instinct alone, body moving before thought could catch up, and the repulsor blast tore across the roof where he’d been standing a fraction of a second earlier. Heat and light and force all at once.

He jumped, but his landing was wrong. Off by just enough that his ankle folded under him with a crack, sending a sharp spike of pain up his leg as he hit the concrete and rolled hard across the rooftop.

He came up on one knee, breathing ragged, one hand pressed to the ground to keep himself from tipping over again, and looked up just in time to see Iron Man descending through the snow like he owned the sky.

“Looks like I found the itsy-bitsy spider.” His hand was on his comm. 

Spider-Man just stared at him for a second, chest rising too fast, brain trying to catch up with the fact that this was real and not just another thought he could run away from.

“You guys really need hobbies,” he said, because his mouth had apparently decided sarcasm was still a survival strategy.

“Last chance. Come with us, Spider-Man.”

“Counteroffer,” The vigilante shot back immediately, even as he pushed himself a few inches farther back on his hands, “no.”

Iron Man landed a few feet away with a heavy crunch of metal and snow, and Spider-Man felt it immediately—the shift, the tightening of space, the way the roof suddenly felt too small for what was about to happen. 

He backed up again, slower this time, because he could hear them now. Not just Iron Man. Footsteps below. Movement on the fire escapes. The faint, impossible sense of too many directions at once.

He didn’t need to see them to know.

His spider-sense was already screaming their positions at him like it was trying to help and failing.

“Listen,” Spider-Man said, raising both hands in a way he hoped looked non-threatening and not like he was about to collapse, “I know I have the whole mysterious vigilante thing going on, but I promise I’m not trying to cause trouble.”

“Don’t make me fight you, man, you’re injured,” The Avenger said flatly.

Spider-Man glanced down at himself as he could somehow confirm or deny that on the spot. He couldn’t put weight on one side, his suit torn from the concrete, the blood on his leg and through his suit on his stomach, his shaking hands... yeah, that was probably not his best look.

“Define injured.”

The billionaire’s helmet tilted slightly, like he was actually considering the question for half a second before deciding not to humor it. “You’ve been running for over twenty minutes.”

Spider-Man gave a weak, breathless laugh. “You've been chasing for over twenty minutes; how about we reschedule this after we all take a well-deserved break?”

Tony’s repulsors began to glow, and Spider-Man’s hands dropped instantly. “Okay,” he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else, “we’re doing this again.”

The blast hit before he could finish the thought.

He moved; he always moved, but not fast enough this time. The repulsor clipped his neck and sent him flying across the roof like he weighed nothing at all. 

He’d hit a ventilation unit hard enough that the impact of going through it rang in his entire body, fell off the top of the building into the alley, rolled once, twice, and ended flat on his back staring up at a sky that wouldn’t stop spinning.

For a few seconds, there was nothing but air he couldn’t quite get into his lungs.

Then his spider-sense made itself known again, and Spider-Man forced himself up anyway, because there wasn’t another choice. 

Captain America was already from the street in front of him. Hawkeye was somewhere behind him, a presence more than a person. Thor landed with enough force to shake the entire block, snow jumping off the sidewalk in a sudden white burst.

Spider-Man looked at all of them and felt something in his chest just… sink. There were too many. Too fast. Too coordinated. 

He couldn’t fight them, so he did what he did 20 minutes ago, and what he's been doing for the past that many months. 

He ran.

Behind him, the Avengers followed.

If Spider-Man didn’t have a plan before, he definitely didn't now. 

Just survival. 

He vaulted a low wall, slipped on the snow mid-step, caught himself against a brick chimney hard enough to bruise his palm, and kept going anyway because stopping wasn’t an option he could afford. 

His lungs burned like they were full of broken glass. His shoulder throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Every breath dragged pain through his ribs and pulled at his already messed-up stitches.

Voices chased him from behind, Captain America calling for him to stop, Iron Man saying something sharper, but it all blurred together until it stopped meaning words and just became pressure.

He needed height.

He needed distance.

He needed somewhere they couldn’t see him fall apart.

He fired a web toward the next building and swung, but his grip slipped halfway through the arc. The momentum carried him wrong, slamming him into the side of the structure instead of over it. 

He caught a ledge with one hand at the last second and hung there, dangling above the street, staring down at the world that suddenly felt very far away.

He was so tired. So unbelievably tired, but pulled himself up anyway.

By the time he reached the roof, his legs were shaking so badly he had to crawl the last stretch, fingers scraping against frozen concrete until he could drag himself behind a large AC unit. He dropped his head down and crouched, trying to make himself smaller, trying to slow his breathing before it gave him away.

For a moment, there was nothing. No footsteps. No voices. No spider-sense screaming at him.

Maybe he’d actually lost them. Maybe—

A hand closed around his wrist.

Spider-Man jolted so hard it hurt, but her hand stayed around his wrist.  

Black Widow. 

Of course it was her.

She was there like she’d always been there, on those rooftops that he thought were safe, like she’d never been gone at all. Holding his wrist with a grip that was firm but not cruel, just enough to keep him from running again. 

Spider-Man twisted instinctively, trying to pull away, but his body didn’t have anything left to give, and she didn’t budge.

“Easy,” she said.

Spider-Man looked up at her.

Her other hand lifted toward her comm. Something in Spider-Man’s chest dropped so fast it felt like falling. “No—wait—”

Black Widow froze immediately. Spider-Man did too.

The words came out wrong.

His filter... He didn't realize when Iron Man's shot hit his neck where it hit. 

The little voice changer he'd built from scavenged computer parts had always done more than make Spider-Man sound older; it had been another layer between Peter Parker and the rest of the world, something that kept the person underneath the mask safely buried. 

Now it was sparking uselessly against his throat, and for the first time in months Spider-Man could hear exactly how young he sounded. 

He was fifteen. He was exhausted. He was scared. 

And suddenly there was no machine left to make him sound like anything else. 

For a second, neither of them moved at all.

Snow drifted down between them, soft and indifferent. Spider-Man could hear his own breathing, too loud, too uneven. He could feel her fingers around his wrist, steady and real.

And then her expression changed. It was subtle; Spider-Man would've never seen it if they weren't so close, but it looked like… sadness.

“How old are you?” she asked quietly.

Spider-Man’s throat tightened so hard it hurt.

He tried to pull away again, but her grip didn’t tighten; if anything, it loosened slightly, like she was afraid of breaking him.

“How old are you?” 

He stared at her the same way she did to him the last time they were on a rooftop together.  

The hand by her comm slowly fell by her side. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.” It came out automatically. Young.  Too young.

Black Widow’s eyes flicked over him instantly. Over the torn suit, the shaking hands, the blood darkening the fabric, the way he was barely holding himself upright as he leaned on his good leg. “No, you’re not.”

Spider-Man swallowed. “I’m fine.”

“You’re a child.”

That landed harder than those repulsor blasts combined, and the vigilante looked away. “I’m Spider-Man.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” 

Black Widow took a small step forward. Spider-Man’s breathing hitched, sharp and uneven. “You don’t know anything about me.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he hated it immediately. 

Hated that she heard it. Hated that it was true. Hated that nobody knew anything about Peter Parker anymore. 

The assassin’s expression deepened. “Baby...”

He snapped his gaze back to her.

She didn’t know. Not really. Not his name, not who he was under the mask. Just a kid she’d been chasing through rooftops for the last few months who was bleeding too much and moving too wrong to be just another vigilante.

“How old?” she asked again, quieter this time, like she was trying to make the question less sharp.

His eyes burned under the mask. “Fifteen,” he whispered. 

The word hung there and felt like it had weight even as Black Widow’s grip left completely.

Spider-Man watched it happen in real time. The realization, the recalculation, the moment everything she thought she knew about this situation broke and reformed into something worse.

For the first time since he’d met her, she was genuinely showing her thoughts on her face. 

“Wait,” she said, and there was something off in her voice now. “Fifteen?”

Spider-Man didn’t know what to expect.

Didn’t know if she’d call them. Didn’t know if she’d take off the mask. Didn’t know if this was the moment everything ended.

So when his spider-sense screamed again, he reacted without thinking.

DANGER!

He shoved her. Hard.

There was a dull, sickening impact in his back all the way through his chest, and for a second his brain refused to process it at all.

He looked down slowly.

The hole was there.

The arrow went right through him, going straight for where Black Widow would've been standing, but instead landed past her where she landed on the rooftop, somehow already back on her feet. 

Blood was already spreading across red and blue fabric without waiting for permission.

“Oh—” His good leg gave out.

Black Widow caught him before he hit the roof. “Kid?”

He tried to answer. He opened his mouth, but nothing came. She lowered him carefully, one hand pressing against the wound, the other cradling the back of his head like he weighed nothing at all. “Hey, hey, stay with me.”

His eyes fluttered. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“No,” Black Widow said immediately, voice sharp in a way he’d never heard from her before. “No, don’t apologize.”

He tried to focus on her face, but his head was tilting to the side. He was so tired. The snow was falling harder now, but she was warm. Or was he warm? 

It was hard to tell.

He’d forgotten what warm felt like.

“Hey,” she said, softer now, “Look at me.” 

He tried to turn his head towards her, but it only moved a little. “Good. That’s it. Stay with me.”

He couldn’t. He was so tired. Tired in a way that went deeper than pain, deeper than fear, deeper than anything he could name anymore. He’d been tired for months. Since the hospital. Since May. 

No. Since before then, since Ben died, since he got bit by the spider, since everything had stopped feeling like it was supposed to.

He just wanted to sleep.

Black Widow’s hand tightened around his. “Пожалуйста, маленький паучок…”

His eyes slipped shut, and he went slack against her.

“No. Stay with me.”

He felt her pull him closer and heard something in her voice crack for the first time, as it had finally found something it couldn’t control. "Come on, baby. Stay with me.”

Everything went dark.

—

Spider-Man woke up drowning.

For one horrible second, he was absolutely certain he was back in the hospital with May. 

There was something tight around his chest, something cold taped to his skin, something in his arm, and every breath felt like dragging air through a straw someone had crushed flat. 

A machine was beeping somewhere beside him, steady and clinical and far too familiar; it was going to stop beeping again, and his body felt so heavy that he couldn't tell where the mattress ended and he began. 

He tried to move and pain tore through his chest so suddenly that his eyes flew open, but the ceiling above him was white and blurry and unfamiliar, the lights too bright, the room too clean. 

He couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. He couldn't remember leaving the rooftop. He couldn't remember whether he'd actually gotten away from the Avengers or whether this was some strange dream his brain had built because he hadn't been able to—

"Easy..."

Spider-Man froze. He knew that voice. Black Widow.

His eyes moved toward the sound and slowly found her sitting in a chair beside the bed. For a moment, he couldn't understand why she was there. 

Then the memories came back all at once and in pieces at the same time: snow, a rooftop, her hand around his wrist, the broken voice changer, fifteen, the arrow, blood, her arms around him, her voice uncharacteristically terrified as she told him to stay awake. 

Spider-Man's breathing quickened as he looked down at himself and immediately regretted it. There was an IV taped to his hand, wires disappearing beneath a hospital gown, a pulse monitor clipped to one finger, and thick dressings wrapped tightly around his chest. 

Every breath pulled against something sore and deep inside him, and there was a strange pressure beneath his ribs that made him instinctively want to reach for it.

"Don't."

Black Widow was on her feet before he'd even realized he'd moved, one hand taking his into her own and the other settling carefully against his shoulder to keep him from sitting any farther up. 

Spider-Man stared at her, then at his chest, then back at her. 

"What happened?" His voice barely sounded like his own.

"The arrow went through the upper part of your chest," Natasha said carefully. "It punctured your lung and caused a hemothorax. You lost a lot of blood."

Spider-Man stared at her, trying to make sense of the words. "That sounds bad."

"It was." Her voice sounded far away.

"How am I alive?"

"Bruce got to you quickly. Helen Cho took over once we reached the Tower. She drained the blood from your chest, performed surgery to repair the damage, and kept you sedated while your healing factor did the rest." 

Spider-Man blinked slowly, feeling like everything was in slow motion. Shot. Lung. Blood. Surgery. There was something frighteningly clinical about hearing it said out loud, as if it had happened to somebody else.

"Bruce?"

"Yes, Dr. Banner."

"The Hulk?!"

A tiny, exhausted smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. "Bruce is just Bruce now."

Spider-Man thought about that for several seconds, then nodded as though this was extremely important information.

"Oh." His eyes drifted down toward the bandages again. 

His healing factor had always made him a bit detached about getting hurt. 

Especially before the whole homeless thing, his cuts closed, bruises faded, and bones healed after dinner and a good night’s rest. Usually he could take something that should have put a normal person in the hospital, make a few jokes about it, and keep going. 

This time, apparently, his body had finally decided it had reached its limit. "How am I alive?"

"You're stubborn."

Spider-Man blinked at her; his brain felt like it was lagging. "That's the medical diagnosis?"

Her small smile deepened. "No."

"Oh..."

She sighed softly, and, though the assassin never looked tired, Spider-Man became aware of how close to it she looked. 

Her hair was pulled back messily, there were dark shadows under her eyes, and she was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie that seemed a little too big for her. 

He couldn't make sense of why she'd look like that. Black Widow never looked tired; she always looked like she could walk into a room after being awake for twenty days straight and still somehow take down everybody in it.

He stared at her for another few seconds before the thought finally pushed its way through the fog.

"Did I die?"

Her smile broke. "No." She glanced away from his gaze to the beeping monitor by his side, as if trying to convince herself of that fact just as much as him. “No, паучок, you didn’t.”

"Oh."

Spider-Man let his head sink back into the pillow and closed his eyes for a second, listening to the beeping beside him. 

He was still here. He wasn't dead. 

May wasn't here. He remembered that now. May was dead. 

This hospital room was different than the one he spent both too much and never enough time in. He just couldn't figure out why Black Widow was the one sitting beside him.

"How long?"

She was quiet.

Spider-Man opened his eyes again. "How long was I asleep?"

"Eight days." The assassin’s gaze hadn't left the monitor. 

"What?"

"Eight days."

The number didn't fit anywhere in his head. 

Eight days was too long. It was eight days without Spider-Man. Eight days of New York continuing without him, eight days of villains doing whatever they wanted, eight days of people who trusted Spider-Man needing help while he lay unconscious in some bed. 

How many more people were dead because of him?

His fingers tightened around the blanket. "Are you sure?" His voice felt small.

The Avenger slowly nodded. 

Spider-Man turned his head toward the window. Snow was no longer falling outside; the sun was peeking around the curtains. It made the whole thing feel even more unreal. 

He'd gotten shot by an Avenger, and now it was eight days later, and he was in the Avengers' medical bay with Black Widow sitting beside him like she may have actually been worried.

He slowly lifted his hand to run a hand through his hair, only to drop it once he realized.

"My mask."

Black Widow finally glanced back at him. "It's safe."

"Where?"

"I'll get it for you when you're feeling better."

Spider-Man swallowed. The mask being gone suddenly felt worse than the pain. It was the line between everything. 

He was supposed to have the mask. 

Spider-Man had a mask. 

Then again, Spider-Man didn't lie in a hospital bed with an IV in his arm while somebody watched him breathe like they were scared it would stop.

He looked at Black Widow again. "Do you know?”

She knew exactly what he meant. "Yes."

Spider-Man's stomach dropped. "Who else?"

"The team."

The heart monitor started beeping quicker. "All of them?"

"Yes." Her jaw tightened slightly.

He closed his eyes.

Everyone knew.

There was no mask anymore. No voice changer. No safe distance. No Spider-Man nobody could identify. 

They knew his face. They knew his name. 

He had spent that many months making sure Peter Parker stayed buried because Peter Parker was the part of him that hurt too much to look at. 

Peter Parker had May, but May was dead. Peter Parker had an apartment, except it wasn't his anymore. Peter Parker had school, except he didn't go. Peter Parker had a future, but Peter Parker didn't exist anymore.

Spider-Man was easier. Spider-Man didn't have a dead aunt or uncle. Spider-Man wasn’t homeless. 

Spider-Man was strong; he saved people. Spider-Man would've saved Uncle Ben and Aunt May. 

Spider-Man wouldn't be lying in a hospital bed trying to hold back tears.

Peter Parker opened his eyes. "So what happens now?"

Black Widow looked at him for a long moment, as if she could see the storm inside his mind. "Now you get better."

Peter waited. "...And then?"

"You stay."

He blinked. "Stay? Stay where?"

"The Tower."

Peter stared at her like she had grown three heads. "Like... live here?"

She nodded like it was simple. "Yes."

He gave a weak little laugh that hurt his chest almost as much as his thoughts did. "You don't have to do that."

"We know."

"I mean it. Really. I'm fine."

Black Widow gave him a look that was somehow more intimidating than any weapon she'd ever pointed at him.

"Kid, you were shot through the chest. You pushed me so I wasn’t the same. You had a collapsed lung. You were severely dehydrated and malnourished, and Bruce said your bloodwork looked like you'd been surviving on spite."

Peter frowned. "That's not a real medical condition."

She almost smiled again.

Peter looked down at his hands. "I can find somewhere."

"No." She didn’t hesitate.

"I've been managing."

The assassin tilted her head. "Oh yeah? Where? FRIDAY couldn't find any place in your name."

He looked up. "Uh… Somewhere with a roof."

She blankly stared at him.

"Mostly."

That actually got a tiny laugh out of her, but it disappeared quickly. She looked down at their hands, then back at him, and Peter could tell there was something she hadn't said yet.

"Where?"

Peter hesitated. He didn't want to tell her. Saying it out loud made it real, and suddenly he was embarrassed in a way he hadn't expected. 

He had spent months surviving in that attic, telling himself it was temporary, telling himself he would find somewhere better when he had enough money, telling himself that sleeping with two ruined blankets and a broken coat didn't really count as homeless because there was a ceiling overhead.

"Different places."

"Peter."

He looked away. 

He knew that the Avengers knew his name, his backstory, everything. 

But hearing the name that he spent that many—

That he spent five months avoiding felt like his brain was splitting into two. 

He took a deep breath (when will that stop hurting?) and turned back toward the Avenger, "An attic mostly."

"Was it heated?" 

"No."

"Running water?"

"No."

"Food?" Every question was asked with a layer of sadness almost hidden behind the stoic tone, like she already knew the answer before asking. 

Peter didn't answer.

Black Widow's expression changed. "How many meals a day?"

He shrugged. "Depends."

"On what?"

"On what you consider a meal."

She looked at him for several seconds before asking, "How were you getting money?"

Peter picked at the edge of the blanket. "Fixing things. Phones. Computers. Electronics. Whatever people would pay me to do."

"So you had a job?"

"I wouldn’t say all that; it’s… It’s hard to find someone desperate enough to pay a homeless fifteen-year-old any mind."

Black Widow closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them again, there was something in her expression that Peter couldn't quite name. 

"I'm sorry."

He frowned. "For what?"

"For not seeing it."

Peter shook his head. "You couldn’t have known."

"I should have."

"I was wearing a mask."

"That's not the point." Her tone was clipped.

He didn't have an answer.

"We spent months hunting you," she continued, her voice quiet now. "Didn’t know if you were dangerous. We thought you were older, thought you had somewhere… someone to go to when you disappeared."

Peter gave a small, humorless laugh. "I am pretty good at disappearing." He mumbled more to himself than her. 

"And we were wrong." She looked down at his bandaged chest. 

Peter swallowed, finally working up the courage to ask the question on the back of his mind since he woke up, "Are you mad at me?"

Black Widow’s expression changed immediately. "What?"

"You seem kinda mad."

She took a breath, glancing toward the door before looking back at him. "I am."

Peter's stomach dropped.

"Just not at you."

He didn't quite believe her, but she continued before he could say anything. 

"I'm mad at myself. I'm mad at Clint. I'm mad at Tony. I’m mad at SHIELD. I'm mad at all of us for spending months chasing a kid we thought was an adult because apparently none of us stopped to ask why New York’s most wanted vigilante kept running away instead of fighting back."

Peter looked down at their hands.

"And I'm so sorry," she said, her gaze following his.

He frowned. "You don’t have to say that." 

"I do, actually. We all do."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he stayed quiet. The room was filled with the steady beeping of the monitor and the soft hiss of oxygen. 

He became painfully aware of how small he felt without the suit. 

Without the mask, there was no Spider-Man. There was Peter Parker in a hospital bed, listening to an adult tell him that he’s not the only one who makes mistakes.

"What about May?"

Black Widow's eyes lifted. "What about her?"

Peter swallowed. "What do you know?"

"FRIDAY found the hospital records. Your aunt's medical records. The death certificate."

."You know how she died?" His stomach twisted.

She nodded slowly. "She was sick."

Peter looked towards the ceiling. “She kept picking up extra shifts because we needed the money.” His voice was getting quieter, his eyes already burning. “I was eating a lot more after I got my powers. Healing takes a lot of energy, and I didn't really understand how much until she started working all the time.” 

He swallowed back the guilt. “She'd come home exhausted, and I'd tell her she needed to rest, but she'd tell me she was fine."

His mouth twisted. "She always said she was fine." Up until the day the beeping stopped. 

Black Widow's hand tightened gently around his.

“She got sick at work,” she said quietly. “Someone she was treating had hidden how serious their symptoms were. She was exposed.” 

Peter nodded, barely. “They brought her to the hospital. She fought for a long time, but then there were complications and…” His voice died off. A tear slipped down his cheek. “She took that extra shift because of me."

"No." Peter looked up and realized that Black Widow had unshed tears in her eyes. “She was working because she loved you,” Natasha said. “Because she chose to take care of you.."

Peter's eyes burned as she used her free hand to wipe the fresh tears rolling down his cheek. 

"I killed Ben too."

Black Widow went very still.

"I let the guy go."

"Peter—"

"I could've stopped him; I had my powers. I knew he was a robber and that it was my responsibility, but…I was angry, and I let him go, and then Ben died, and May got sick, and then she died too, and..." Peter's breathing caught, and an ugly sob ripped out his throat, accompanied by the burning in his chest. "And everyone I love dies because of me!"

Black Widow's voice was quieter than he’d ever heard it. "That's not true."

"You don't know that."

"I do."

Peter shook his head. "No, you don't."

"I know that you were a child who got powers and thought you were supposed to use them to protect everyone.” Her expression was nothing but pure sadness. “I know you blamed yourself when you couldn't. I know you kept going anyway. None of that means you caused the things you couldn't control."

Peter looked at her, tears streaming. "Then how do I stop feeling like I did?"

"I don't know, baby."

For some reason, the raw honesty hurt less than being told not to feel that way.

After a moment, she said, "But I know you didn't."

Peter didn’t have a response to that; it felt like the fight had been drained out of him. 

He turned his face toward the window. "What else do you guys know?"

"Your school and old address. Your hospital records. That you haven't attended school in months. That you're a missing person."

He went still. "Who reported me missing?"

“The Leeds family."

Peter glanced back at the ceiling, trying and failing to prevent the fresh tears that escaped at those words.

He had never thought about what happened after he left. He'd just assumed everyone knew they were better off without him, that Ned knew, and that he would make a new friend and move on like Peter Parker never happened. 

Maybe that had been what he wanted. If nobody knew Peter Parker, nobody could force him to become Peter Parker again. "Do they know where I am?"

"No."

Relief washed through him. He wasn’t ready to open that can of worms today. 

She reached over with her free hand, wiped the last of his tears, and carefully fixed the blanket where it had fallen away from his shoulder.

It was too gentle, too caring, too easy to lose someone else. 

"I can't live in the Tower."

Her hand came back to rest on their conjoined hands between them. "Why not?"

"Because–"

He stopped.

Because they didn't know him. Because people didn't do things for free. Because if he stayed long enough, they'd realize he wasn't worth the trouble. Or worse, because eventually he’d get his childhood heroes killed.

Peter looked down; he didn’t have the power to will his thoughts into words. "I don't know."

"The team is sorry," She said after a moment.

Peter glanced at her. "Everyone?"

"Everyone."

"Even Hawkeye?"

The Widow’s mouth tightened. "Clint hasn't stopped blaming himself since the arrow hit you. He keeps asking Bruce for updates, then finding an excuse not to come in here because he can't stand looking at you yet."

Peter swallowed. "Iron Man?"

"Already working on a new Spider-Man suit." If he had the energy, he’d be jumping up and down at the thought of Iron Man making him a suit.

Peter blinked. "He is?"

"Apparently your current one offended him personally."

Peter almost smiled. "Captain America?"

"Has only left the training room to ask Bruce whether you're awake."

"Oh.. And Thor?"

"Thor thinks you should have your own room with a balcony."

Peter stared at her. "A balcony?"

Natasha finally smiled. "Something about always having a way out. You're going to have to survive meeting Thor again, though, before you start negotiating real estate."

Peter smiled faintly, then the smile disappeared again.

"What about SHIELD?"

The assassin’s expression hardened. "They won't be taking you. Nick Fury has agreed to leave Spider-Man alone."

Peter frowned, the monitor beeping slightly faster again. "He knows everything?"

"No."

Peter's head slightly tilted to the side, "So, how’s he okay with this?"

"He doesn't get to decide."

Peter stared at her. "How did you manage to do that?"

She shrugged. "I didn't." Entirely vague and somehow the most Black Widow answer possible.

Peter looked down again. "So I'm not a prisoner?"

She shook her head. "No."

"I can leave."

"Yes." She nodded, “But I don’t want you to.” Her voice was suddenly full of emotion, and the least Black Widow answer possible. 

Peter’s eyes narrowed as his head tilted in confusion. "Why?"

"Because spiders stick together." Her expression slipped into an almost affectionate smile that matched the tone of her voice.

Peter chose to ignore the happiness that sent in his chest. "Actually, most spiders are solitary."

"I don't care."

Peter actually laughed at that, and the movement hurt his chest as he held down a wince. "That's so scientifically inaccurate."

Black Widow broke into a real full-on smile at the sound. "So are you, kid."

Peter smiled. It was the first real smile he'd managed in five months.

Then his eyes drifted toward the heart monitor, and something inside him shifted. He hadn’t realized it when it happened. 

Maybe it had been when he woke up. Maybe it had been when Black Widow started talking about his school. Maybe when she'd said May's name. Maybe when she told him there would be a room waiting for him in the tower. Maybe it was just the fact that someone was saying his name and expecting there to be a person attached to it.

He was Peter Parker.

Not just Spider-Man.

He’s Both.

He looked down at his hands. The bruised knuckles belonged to Spider-Man. The scars belonged to Spider-Man. The bloodstain on the edge of the dressing belonged to Spider-Man. But the hands were Peter’s. The memories were Peter’s. May had called these hands hers when he was little because he was always grabbing onto her fingers when he was scared.

Peter Parker wasn't gone.

He'd just spent five months pretending he was. "I don't know how to be Peter anymore," he admitted quietly.

Black Widow looked at him with more understanding than he knew how to deal with. "You don't have to know yet."

"What if I can't?"

"Then we'll figure it out. Together"

Peter looked at her. "You really mean that?"

"Yes."

He didn't fully believe it.

Not yet.

Trust didn't work like that. Grief didn't disappear because somebody gave you a room. Five months of surviving alone wasn't going to vanish because an Avenger apologized. Peter was still going to wake up scared. He was still going to dream about May. He was still going to feel guilty about Ben. He was still going to wonder when Black Widow and the others would decide he'd become too much trouble.

But maybe he didn't have to solve all of that today.

His eyelids were getting heavy again, and this time he wasn’t told to fight it. "Miss Black Widow?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I have pancakes when I wake up?"

She beamed at him. "Of course, baby."

"With syrup?" His voice was getting slower.

"Obviously."

Peter settled deeper into the pillow. The room was still strange. His chest hurt. His body was weak. He didn't know what tomorrow looked like, and he didn't know if he was ready to trust people who had spent months hunting him.

“And Peter?”

But there would be a tomorrow. There would be a room. There would be heat. There would be food. There would be someone waiting when he woke up.

“Yeah?” He mumbled, head going somewhere more peaceful.

For months, Spider-Man had been the only part of himself Peter had allowed to survive. Spider-Man had kept him moving when being Peter Parker hurt too much. Spider-Man had saved strangers, fought monsters, and swung through the city because somebody had to.

Peter Parker was still here. Still a kid. Still scared. Still grieving. 

Still alive.

“Call me Nat.”

When Peter Parker fell asleep, he didn't feel like he was disappearing.

And Nat would still be holding Peter’s hand when he woke up.