Archive of Our Own

Nicholas had exactly four hours of sleep and a bruise on his ribs shaped vaguely like a fire escape railing, and he was doing his best not to think about either of those things while their homeroom teacher droned through the day's announcements.

This was, in fairness, a fairly normal Tuesday. Patrol had run long the night before, a break-in at a hardware store that had escalated into a rooftop chase, which was frankly more cardio than Nicholas had signed up for on a school night. He was starting to suspect the universe had a personal vendetta against his sleep.

He'd gotten home close to one in the morning, showered off the adrenaline, and then laid awake another forty-five minutes anyway, because his brain apparently ran on its own inconvenient schedule regardless of what the rest of him wanted. It was almost rude of his body, honestly.

He'd have to remember to keep his sleeve down during gym. The bruise wasn't bad, but "why do you have a railing-shaped bruise, Nicholas" wasn't a question he had a good answer for yet, and "I fought a guy on a fire escape at midnight" tended to raise more questions than it answered.

He was fairly good at this by now, though. The logistics of running an entire secret life around a full course load, like some deeply unqualified event planner. He kept a spare uniform shirt in his locker for the mornings laundry lost. He had a rotating cast of excuses, "didn't sleep well," "dentist," "family thing", deployed with the strategic restraint of a man who knew that using the dentist excuse twice in one month made people start asking which tooth.

He'd gotten good at looking normal on four hours of sleep, which was its own kind of skill nobody was ever going to give him credit for.

What he had not gotten good at, after two years of trying, was sitting one row behind Byun Euijoo without his brain periodically forgetting to be used.

It wasn't fair, honestly. He could handle a scaffolding collapse. He could talk down a guy holding a crowbar at two in the morning. But put him in a plastic chair behind a specific head of orange and Nicholas turned into someone who forgot what page they were supposed to be on.

"You're doing the thing," said Harua, not looking up from his phone, angled just enough under the desk to be invisible to everyone except the person sitting directly beside him, which, today, as every day, was Nicholas.

"I'm not doing a thing." Nicholas said from the corner of his mouth, trying to make it look like he wasn’t talking but obviously was.

"You're doing the staring at Euijoo's neck thing."

"I'm reading the board."

"The board's up there." Harua tipped his chin toward the front without breaking eye contact with his screen. "Euijoo's down there. Different directions, last time I checked.”

Nicholas didn't have a great comeback for that, mainly because there wasn't one, so he turned his attention deliberately to the board, where their teacher was writing something about quadratic equations that Nicholas fully intended to forget the second the next test ended. It lasted three minutes before Euijoo shifted in his seat and dragged his eyes right back like a magnet.

He'd liked Euijoo for so long the feeling had basically stopped registering as an event and started registering as background weather. It wasn't dramatic, no slow-motion hallway moment, no swelling orchestral score, no wind machine. It was smaller and dumber than that.

It was knowing Euijoo drummed his pen against the desk in a specific uneven rhythm when he was excited. It was knowing he apologized to tables when he bumped into them with full sincerity. It was knowing he chewed the end of his pen when he was solving something hard, brow furrowed in deep thought.

Two years of small, useless, deeply embarrassing data that Nicholas had collected without meaning to, and now could not put down.

He wasn't going to pretend Euijoo was flawless, because he wasn't. He was already loud at 7am, had genuinely criminal taste in group chat memes, and had once argued for ten unbroken minutes that a hot dog was considered a taco. It was, if Nicholas was honest, precisely the opposite of flawless that made it so hard to talk himself out of.

He liked Euijoo exactly as he was, weird hot dog opinions and all, and that was a much harder thing to argue with than liking some polished, theoretical version of a person.

The bell rang. Nicholas registered it a full second late, still watching Euijoo wrestle his textbook into a backpack that had clearly never once zipped on the first attempt in its life.

"Nicho." Harua snapped his fingers in front of his face. "Lunch. Maki's holding seats, and he said if we're late again he's eating your pudding. Again."

"He wouldn't."

"He's done it three times this month."

They filed into the hallway, where Euijoo walked ahead with two guys from another class, laughing at something loud enough to carry. Nicholas watched him go for exactly as long as he could defend himself, then made himself stop, mostly by staring very hard at a bulletin board about the upcoming bake sale.

"You could just talk to him," Harua said as they headed for the stairwell.

"I do talk to him."

"You said excuse me to him in the hall once and then walked directly into a supply closet."

"…That door is deceptively placed next to the classroom door." Nicholas pouted.

"It's a door, Nicholas. It says SUPPLIES on it. In letters roughly the size of my head."

"From that angle you genuinely cannot see the sign."

Harua gave him a long, flat look that suggested he'd heard this defense before and remained wholly unconvinced. Which was fair, since Nicholas hadn't loved the supply closet incident either. Ten seconds in the dark with a mop bucket, quietly rethinking his entire life, before emerging holding a bottle of window cleaner he had no memory of picking up and saying “you too” to a teacher who had told him to pay attention in class.

The thing was, Nicholas wasn't actually bad at talking to people. He'd talked a man with a crowbar into standing down at two in the morning less than half a day ago. Under most conditions he was a reasonably functional human being with a working vocabulary.

Something specific happened to his brain in Euijoo's orbit, though. Some wire crossed the second those eyes landed on him, and none of Spider-Man's confidence carried over into a high school hallway. Instead, it was like he wore a different suit. A far more incompetent suit complete with a set of nerves.

"Nicholas Wang." Maki's voice cut across the cafeteria before they'd even reached the table. "You're late. I already ate your pudding."

"You little-"

"That was a warning shot. There's a backup in my bag, and you can have it if you sit down and manage to go six whole minutes without being sad about Euijoo."

"I'm not sad about Euijoo, thank you." Nicholas said, with the wounded dignity of a man who was, in fact, currently sad about Euijoo.

"You have a specific face," Maki said, gesturing broadly at all of him like a man presenting evidence in court, "that only happens when you're sad about Euijoo. Harua and I named it."

"You named it… What?"

"The Euijoo Face. It's very distinctive. There's a rating system." Maki stated matter of factly.

Nicholas sat down and accepted the pudding, because arguing with Maki cost more energy than he currently had, and free pudding was free pudding regardless of the emotional burden to acquire it.

"You know what you should do," Maki said, warming to the topic, "is tell him. Rip the band-aid off. What’s the worst case scenario?"

"He says no, and I still have to sit behind him for the rest of the semester, and I transfer schools and cities out of pure shame, and possibly change my name." Nicholas deadpanned.

"Sure, fine, but what about the best case?" Harua pointed his chopsticks at him for emphasis. "Two years of pining and you've never once let yourself sit with the yes."

Nicholas had, in fact, sat with the yes extensively, usually late at night, too wired from patrol to sleep, brain filling the empty hours with increasingly elaborate hypotheticals with no supporting evidence whatsoever.

He didn't say any of that. He ate his pudding instead, which was, as always, an excellent way to end a conversation without actually ending it.

"He's coming over here," Harua said, not looking up, subtly kicking Nicholas under the table.

"What?" Nicholas choked on his pudding.

"Euijoo. You have about four seconds. Compose your face."

Nicholas had just enough time to fail at that completely, still choking on the pudding, before Euijoo was standing at the end of the table with his backpack over one shoulder. He looked like he hyped himself up for ninety seconds before coming, and immediately regretted it.

"Hey," Euijoo said. "This is weird, I know we don't really- I mean, we're in the same class, obviously, but." He laughed at himself, short and self-conscious. "Nicholas, right? You're actually good at chemistry. Like real good, not just class-participation good."

It took Nicholas a beat too long to process that Euijoo was talking to him, by name, in full sentences, unprompted. "I- (cough) yeah. Decently. Why?"

"I'm so behind on the lab report due Thursday I might accidentally discover a new element out of sheer panic," Euijoo said, talking fast the way he did when he was nervous, words tumbling out before he could second-guess them.

"Someone said you actually understand the reaction mechanisms instead of just copying them off the board. I know this is out of nowhere, but… is there any chance you could help me with it sometime this week?"

Under the table, Maki kicked someone, possibly Harua, possibly Nicholas, possibly just the table leg, in a general show of solidarity. Nicholas didn't check. He was too busy trying to arrange his face into something resembling a normal human response.

"I mean, of course, if you're already busy it's totally oka-" Euijoo started backpedaling, fast.

"Yeah," Nicholas said, relieved it came out mostly steady. Emphasis on mostly. "I'm free most days after stuff."

"Really? Oh, thank god." Euijoo's shoulders dropped, like he'd genuinely been braced for a no, which made no sense to Nicholas and also made his chest do something complicated unsound. "I owe you. I'll bring snacks. It's the least I can do."

"You don't have to-"

"I'm bringing snacks, Nicholas. It's happening. Don't fight me on this." He grinned, gave a small wave, and was already turning to go, calling something over his shoulder about texting the details, weaving off through the cafeteria before Nicholas had fully recovered use of his own face.

There was a beat of silence.

"The Euijoo Face," Maki said solemnly, "has reached uncharted levels. I need to update the rating system."

"Shut up." Nicholas gritted through his teeth.

"You're doing it right now. Harua, document this for the archive."

"I'm not doing anything!"

"You're glowing. A teacher's going to walk by and assume you swallowed a nightlight." Harua pointed a finger at Nicholas.

Nicholas put his head down on the table, mostly to hide the fact that Harua and Maki were infuriatingly correct, and allowed himself ten seconds of undignified relief before hauling his expression back under control. Chemistry. After school. This week.

It was such a small thing. A lab report, a shared textbook, the mundane logistics of balancing an equation. It shouldn't have tilted the rest of his day slightly off its axis.

Alas, It did anyway. He spent fifth period only half-listening to the lecture, running the exchange back on loop. He caught himself smiling at nothing as the bell rang, and didn't bother trying to stop it.

🍓🕸️🍊

By the time Nicholas made it to his locker after school, Harua and Maki were already waiting, which was never a good sign, it meant they'd had unsupervised time together to conspire.

"We've been talking," Maki said, arms crossed, leaning against the locker beside Nicholas's.

"Is that a threat?"

"About the study session. Tomorrow. With Euijoo." Maki continued, unfazed.

"It's a lab report, not a study session, and also it's none of your business-"

"We think," Harua cut in, holding up a hand for silence, "you should wear that one blue shirt."

"I'm not discussing my wardrobe with you in a hallway?"

"The blue one," Harua pressed on, undeterred, "brings out your- uh, I don't have the vocabulary for it, but it's good. Very good. Maki agrees."

"I do agree," Maki confirmed. "Strongly."

Nicholas gave up, mostly because arguing with the two of them at full volume in a rapidly emptying hallway felt like a battle he was incapable of winning.

Patrol didn't start until well after dinner, but Nicholas found himself out early, restless in a way he recognized but hadn't quite named. He took the long way to his usual perch on the clock tower on Fifth, swinging in wide, entirely unnecessary loops over the financial district, and somewhere around the second bridge his thoughts drifted, unbidden, straight back to a cafeteria table and a specific, ridiculous laugh.

“You're actually good at chemistry.”

He released a web line from his wrist, sailed over an alley, caught the next cornice without really thinking about the mechanics of it, because at this point his body just knew how to do this and his mind was free to be an idiot elsewhere.

He was replaying it again. The way Euijoo had rambled through the whole request, cheeks a little pink, hands doing something anxious with his backpack strap, glasses slipping the smallest amount down his nose.

He swung low over a side street, close enough to catch the smell of a food cart, and let himself have exactly one more indulgent lap around the memory, the specific, devastating way Euijoo had said thank god, like he'd genuinely been bracing for a no, which was insane if he had any idea how far the entire scenario was from Nicholas's actual expectations. Or dreams. Nicholas was not going to think too hard about that word choice.

Then he made himself stop. This was not productive patrol behavior. This was the exact kind of distracted thinking that got people's ankles broken on badly timed landings, and he only had two ankles and a very limited amount of patience for hospital waiting rooms.

"Focus," he told himself out loud, muffled behind the mask, to absolutely no one. This was a habit he'd developed over a year of solo patrolling and had stopped being embarrassed about somewhere around month four. "You're working."

He was not, in fact, currently working. He was three rooftops deep into a mental highlight reel of orange hair catching cafeteria light, and he might have stayed there for several more unproductive minutes of swinging if the scanner app in his ear hadn't crackled to life with something that snapped his brain back into place instantly.

"Scaffolding collapse, corner of Ninth and Larkin. Pedestrian trapped."

Nicholas was moving before the dispatcher finished the sentence.

The swing to Ninth and Larkin took ninety seconds, which he spent doing the thing he always did on the way to a call, running the geometry in his head, angles and distances, because thinking about mechanics kept the more disruptive part of his brain quiet. It didn't fully work tonight.

It rarely did when the words "pedestrian trapped" were involved. His stomach had already dropped somewhere below his knees by the time the scaffolding came into view.

It was bad. Not catastrophic, but bad. A construction rig on the side of an old apartment building had buckled in the middle, half of it hanging at a dangerous angle, metal poles and boards creaking under stress that was one gust of wind away from a full collapse.

And directly underneath the worst of it, flattened against the brick wall in the world's least effective attempt to make himself smaller, was an orange-haired boy.

Nicholas's entire body went cold for exactly half a second. The geometry, the angles, the careful mental math, all of it scattering at once, replaced by nothing but the bright, unmistakable orange of his hair and the fact that this was not a stranger.

This was Euijoo, standing directly beneath several hundred pounds of failing metal, and if Nicholas had had a heart rate monitor on he was fairly sure it would have simply given up.

"Hey! Don't move, okay? I've got you," Nicholas called, already airborne, and it came out rougher than intended, more urgent, because his brain had stopped treating this like a regular routine call the second it recognized who was under the scaffolding.

Web caught the main support beam half a second before the structure gave a groan that Nicholas felt in his teeth.

Euijoo looked up. Even mid-catastrophe, with several hundred pounds of metal actively rearranging itself into a shape that was about to go badly for everyone underneath it, his expression wasn't the wide-eyed frozen terror Nicholas usually got.

It was something closer to intense, borderline inappropriate focus like he was collecting information for later. It took every ounce of Nicholas's self-control not to shout his actual name across the street.

"The load-bearing connector's sheared," Euijoo said, fast, like this was urgent information Nicholas needed right now, in this exact second. "Upper left, see it? That's why it's swinging instead of just dropping straight. It’s still got one point of contact, which is actually, okay, that's genuinely good news for you physics-wise, but it means it's coming down at an angle, not straight, so-"

"Fascinating. We can discuss mechanics later," Nicholas said, voice pitched lower and rougher than his own, swinging down and scooping an arm around his waist mid-collapse, because the scaffolding chose that exact moment to lose its remaining point of contact and come down in earnest.

"Wha-" Euijoo started, cut off as he was lifted clean into the air. Nicholas yanked them both sideways and up in the same motion, web snapping taut, and the scaffolding hit the pavement where they'd been standing half a second later with a sound that made Euijoo clap both hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes shut like he was bracing for the sequel.

They landed on the rooftop across the street with somewhat less grace than Nicholas would have liked. He took most of the impact so Euijoo wouldn't have to, rolled, and ended up flat on his back with Euijoo half-collapsed against his chest, his own pulse going a mile a minute, adrenaline and disbelief tangled into something that left his hands not quite steady.

"Oh, that was so cool," Euijoo said immediately, still catching his breath, pushing himself up onto his elbows to peer back at the wreckage with something close to delight, entirely unaware that the person underneath him currently sat one row behind him in homeroom and had a documented, multi-witness face named after him.

"You caught the trajectory perfectly! Did you calculate that or was it instinct? Because if it was instinct that's genuinely insane, the margin of error on a moving load like that is basically-"

"Are you hurt?" Nicholas asked, working hard to keep his voice from cracking, because the question mattered a hundred times more than it usually would.

Up close, and they were extremely close, Euijoo still sprawled fully across him, both of them out of breath on a rooftop that had suddenly gotten much smaller than it had any right to be.

"I'm fine, I think. I'll probably bruise, but honestly that's just Tuesday for me. I have genuinely terrible luck… my friends run a betting pool on how I'm going to almost die each month, and they are going to be thrilled about this one, scaffolding collapse is a whole new category!"

"You have a betting pool. For your own near-death experiences." Nicholas said, a little concerned.

"It started as a joke and got out of hand very fast. It was after the balcony incident, when I almost fell trying to photograph a cat, and I wasn't even-" He kept talking, the words spilling faster than Nicholas could track, but Nicholas found he'd stopped minding a while ago.

Nicholas realized, distantly, that he was smiling under the mask, which was a genuinely pointless thing to do given the mask's entire purpose, but he couldn't seem to stop it.

This was Euijoo. The same Euijoo who sat one row ahead of him every single day, who'd asked him for chemistry help six hours ago with pink cheeks and a white-knuckle grip on his backpack strap, currently lying across his chest on a rooftop with absolutely no idea who he was talking to.

It was, Nicholas thought, an almost unmanageable amount of information to be holding at once, and he had no one to complain to about it, because complaining would require explaining, and explaining would require several federal-level secrets.

"You're taking this remarkably well," he said, mostly because it seemed safer than anything else in his head.

"I mean, I'm alive? That's a great outcome, statistically. I try not to dwell on the timelines where I'm not." Euijoo finally registered that he was still essentially lying on top of Spider-Man, and sat up properly, cheeks going faintly pink. "Sorry! sorry, I'm probably crushing you, I should get off, this is not how I pictured meeting you, for the record."

"You're fine. You weigh nothing." Nicholas did not, in the moment, register how that sounded, or how much he meant it.

"That is untrue, and also I don't want my origin story with Spider-Man to be “lay on him until he couldn't breathe.” Imagine telling that story at a party."

"You're talking a lot," Nicholas said, which came out fonder than he meant it to. Dangerously fond, the specific fond of a man who had been quietly gone on this person for two years and was currently failing to hide it even from behind a mask.

"Sorry, I do that. Adrenaline makes me chattier, it's a known issue, ask literally anyone who knows me." He pushed himself fully upright, brushed the dust off his uniform, adjusted his glasses. "I should…thank you. Genuinely. You saved my life, I should probably be handling this with more dignity."

"You could try." Nicholas laughed.

"I could, but I think that ship has sailed, capsized even." He grinned, wide and unselfconscious, and something about it snagged directly on Nicholas's chest like a fishhook. "Can I ask you something? Purely for informational purposes."

"Depends entirely on the question. Are you gonna ask me to swing you home?” Nicholas joked.

"No, I could never. Anyways, when you calculate a catch like that, the angle, the timing, all of it, is that something you actually feel happening in real time, like a spider sense you've built up, or is it more like unconscious math your brain's doing without telling you? Because if it's the second one, that's fascinating from a neurological standpoint, that's basically expert-level pattern recognition running on autopilot!"

"I honestly don't know," Nicholas admitted, and it was true, and he found he didn't especially want to lie to Euijoo about anything, even something this small, even now. "I've never really broken it down. It just happens. I see where things are going, and I get there first."

"That's such a good answer and also completely useless for my purposes, but I respect it." Euijoo glanced toward the street, where sirens had started up, red and blue lights beginning to strobe against the buildings. "That's my cue. Emergency services are going to want a statement, and I should call my friends before they hear about this secondhand."

"Probably wise."

"Will you- this is a weird question, but does this happen? Do you just catch people and vanish, or is there a protocol, do I need to give a statement to you specifically, is there paperwork?"

"I tend to vanish," Nicholas said, and it cost him real effort to say it, because every instinct currently available to him wanted to stay exactly here, on this rooftop, indefinitely. "Easier for everyone. Less paperwork."

"That's very mysterious of you."

"I prefer efficient.”

Euijoo laughed a real laugh, surprised out of him, bright and a little too loud for the quiet rooftop, and it landed somewhere behind Nicholas's sternum with more force than it had any business having.

"Okay. Well. Thank you. For real! Not the obligatory kind. I mean it. I'm genuinely glad you're the one out here doing this, saving the city and all." Euijoo smiled at him, easy and warm, and it took everything Nicholas had not to say something he'd regret.

Nicholas didn't have a good response to that. He stood there a second too long, the mask hiding whatever his face was doing, probably for the best, because he wasn't entirely sure what it was doing, and he was sure it would have said far too much.

"Get home safe," he finally managed. "And bandage that hand. You're bleeding."

Euijoo looked down at his scraped palm like he was noticing it for the first time. "Oh. Huh. See, this is exactly what I mean about my luck…"

Nicholas was already moving, web catching the edge of the building, putting distance between them before he did something stupid. Before he said something only Nicholas would know. Before two years of carefully maintained separation between his two lives collapsed as easily as the scaffolding had.

He swung three blocks before letting himself stop, perched on a water tower, pressing the heel of his hand against his sternum like that would do anything about the ridiculous, persistent thud of his own heartbeat.

He thought about it the entire way home. While climbing through his window, while peeling off the suit, while sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark, still buzzing, staring at nothing.

Euijoo. Byun Euijoo, who sat one row ahead of him in homeroom, who was currently somewhere across the city giving a statement to emergency services with absolutely no idea that the person who'd saved him was the same person he'd asked to help with a lab report six hours earlier.

Nicholas lay back against his pillows, staring at the ceiling, and let out a long breath.

"This is going to be a problem," he told the empty room.

The room, as always, failed to reply. Nicholas closed his eyes anyway, heart still doing something complicated and unhelpful, and didn't fall asleep for a long time.

🍓🕸️🍊

The library smelled like old paper and the desperation that usually only showed up during finals season which was strange, since it wasn't finals season, but Nicholas supposed some rooms just absorbed the anxiety of every student who'd ever suffered in them.

He'd arrived fifteen minutes early, on purpose, because showing up after Euijoo felt like a coin flip he didn't want to lose.

Either he'd walk in to find Euijoo already settled and put-together, or he'd walk in flustered and late and give away exactly how much thought he'd put into this. Arriving early solved both problems. It also meant he got to watch Euijoo walk in instead, which turned out to be not remotely less dangerous.

Euijoo arrived seven minutes late, hair slightly damp like he'd jogged some or all of the way, backpack listing dangerously to one side under the weight of a textbook he clearly hadn't packed with any strategy, and a plastic bag that turned out to contain an absurd, borderline concerning quantity of gummy candy.

"Okay, so," Euijoo said, dropping into the seat across from him and upending the bag onto the table between them, "I had a small crisis in the snack aisle. This is not a normal amount of gummy candy for two people studying for maybe ninety minutes. I'm aware. I stood there and had an entire internal debate about it and then bought it anyway, out of spite, mostly at myself."

"That's a… lot of candy. Thank you for the fuel." Nicholas peered at the sugar mountain now occupying half the table.

"I didn't know what kind you liked, so I panic-bought one of everything. This is basically a hostage negotiation now, you have to help me or I'm stuck eating all of this alone, and that's a health crisis." Euijoo cracked his knuckles like a man preparing for battle. "Anyway. Hi. Thank you again, seriously, I owe you my entire academic future."

Nicholas felt something in his chest do a small, undignified backflip. "It's one lab report," he managed, and took a gummy shark to have something to do with his hands.

"It's the lab report standing between me and a grade my parents would frame and hang somewhere deeply humiliating, so, yes. Entire academic future. No pressure." Euijoo grinned. "Okay. Teach me your ways. Fair warning, I can’t promise you won't want to rip your own hair out mid-session."

Nicholas laughed before he could stop himself, and something about the sound visibly delighted Euijoo. His whole face brightened, which was an unfair amount of collateral damage for one laugh to cause to a man's ability to concentrate.

They got through the first section efficiently enough. Nicholas walked him through the mechanism, Euijoo asked sharp questions between the bad jokes, and there was a solid twenty minutes where Nicholas nearly forgot to be nervous, caught up instead in the easy rhythm of explaining something to someone who actually wanted to understand it, rather than just wanting the labor over and done with.

Euijoo had a habit of repeating things back in his own words to check he'd gotten them right, and another of pushing up his glasses like an anime character, which was somehow as endearing as every other fact about Euijoo that Nicholas kept in his mind.

It fell apart around the second section, when Euijoo hit a wall of confusion and put his head down directly on the textbook in surrender.

"I don't understand any of this," he said, muffled, into the page. "I understood it four minutes ago. It's gone. It packed a bag and left my brain and didn't even say goodbye."

"You understood the first half fine." Nicholas tried to console him.

"That was different, that made sense. This," he lifted his head just enough to gesture vaguely at the diagram, "is asking me to comprehend electron behavior, and frankly the electrons have never once tried to comprehend me, so I don't see why I owe them the favor."

Nicholas wanted to laugh at how adorable Euijoo was when he was frustrated, but got ahold of himself. "That's not how chemistry works."

"I know that's not how chemistry works, Nicholas, that's the whole problem." He slumped back with a full-body pout, reaching for another gummy shark. "Why couldn't this be easy, like physics? I'm good at physics. Physics respects me."

Euijoo finally sat back up. "Explain it again. Slowly. Pretend I'm a first-grader who somehow enrolled in AP Chem."

Nicholas laughed again and walked him through it a second time, slower, sketching electron movement in little arrows on scrap paper, narrating each step out loud. He was aware, distantly, that he was being significantly more patient about this than he'd ever been with anyone who'd asked him for help before, and also aware that this probably said something about him he didn't especially feel like examining in a public library.

Somewhere around the third pass, something visibly clicked across Euijoo's whole face. His eyes went wide, his mouth actually fell open a little, and he grabbed Nicholas's wrist with both hands like he needed to physically anchor the realization before it escaped.

"Oh my god. OH my god. I get it. Nicholas. I GET it, look-" He yanked the paper toward himself, snatched the pen, and started tracing the mechanism himself, talking fast and genuinely thrilled. "It's not that the electrons are being difficult, they're just going where the energy's lowest, that's it, that's the whole thing! Why did nobody just SAY that four hours ago?"

Nicholas glanced down at Euijoo's hands still wrapped around his wrist and briefly forgot he was supposed to say something. "I- think someone probably did."

"Nobody said it like THAT." Euijoo looked up at him, not registering he was still holding on, eyes bright with genuine joy. "You're actually a really good teacher, has anyone told you that? You should tutor people professionally. I would pay you."

"I promise, I don't want your money."

"I'll pay you in gummy sharks, then. It's basically currency."

"I'll consider it."

Euijoo grinned, then seemed to finally notice he was gripping Nicholas's wrist with both hands and let go with a small, flustered laugh, ears going pink. "Sorry. I get physically enthusiastic when I'm excited. My friends make fun of me for it constantly."

Nicholas almost mentioned that he had told Spider-Man the exact same thing about his friends the night before, and caught himself just in time. "It's fine," he said instead, filing the near-miss away under things to never do again.

"Fuma says I hug people I've known for four minutes. He's not wrong. I once hugged a substitute teacher."

"Did the substitute hug back?"

"He looked deeply alarmed, and then hugged back anyway, which I think says more about him than me." Euijoo popped another gummy shark, chewing thoughtfully. "Anyway. Where was I. Right- the lab report. The thing we're actually here for."

"We've made progress." Nicholas considered, shrugging.

"We've made incredible progress. I understand a concept. This is basically a miracle. I should call my mom and tell her."

"Maybe finish the report and get the A first."

"Fine. Boring, but reasonable."

They worked through the rest of it in fits and starts, punctuated by tangents Nicholas hadn't expected and found he didn't mind in the slightest. Euijoo had opinions about nearly everything, delivered with full confidence and occasionally zero supporting logic, and somewhere in the middle of a genuinely unhinged debate about whether cereal counted as soup. To which Euijoo strongly argued yes.

"Okay, final section," Euijoo announced eventually, stretching until his back audibly popped, wincing. "And then I'm going home to never think about reaction mechanisms again as long as I live."

"You say that, but there's a test in two weeks."

"I guess that just means we need a refresher session in two weeks, then." Euijoo jabbed him lightly in the elbow, entirely too pleased with himself.

Nicholas was too busy processing that Euijoo wanted to see him again to think of a comeback.

They finished the last section with Euijoo doing most of the actual work this time, checking his answers against Nicholas's explanations with such focus that Nicholas found unbearably endearing.

His tongue between his teeth, body hunched over the paper, muttering the steps under his breath like he was casting a very nerdy spell.

When he finished, he sat back, triumphant, holding the completed report up like a trophy. "Done. Look at that. Look at what we did. I understand electrons now. I'm basically a scientist."

"You're about five percent a scientist."

"My physics knowledge makes up the other ninety-five." He started gathering his things, sweeping the leftover candy into the bag, then paused halfway through zipping his backpack to look up with an expression that had gone, briefly, more sincere than the rest of the evening.

"Seriously, though. Thank you. I mean it. I was genuinely panicking about this, and you didn't have to say yes, and you're…you're really patient. I don't think people give you enough credit for that. You've got this whole composed thing going on, and then you just spent two hours drawing electron diagrams for me without once acting like it was annoying."

"It wasn't annoying." Nicholas said quickly. Maybe a little too quickly.

"Well. Still. Thank you." Euijoo smiled, small and real, none of the performative flourish from earlier, and Nicholas felt it land somewhere he wasn't fully braced for. "We should do this again sometime. Not- I mean, not just because I'm probably going to fail every test between now and graduation, though that IS a possibility. This was fun. You're fun to be around. I didn't expect that, honestly, you're kind of quiet in class, I had no idea you had, like, strong personal opinions about candy."

"I have extremely strong opinions about candy."

"See, this is what I mean!" Euijoo laughed, swinging his backpack onto one shoulder. "Okay. I'm leaving before I eat this entire bag for dinner. See you tomorrow?"

"Yeah. See you tomorrow."

Euijoo gave a small wave, already halfway to the door, orange hair catching the last of the evening light through the library windows, and Nicholas sat there a full minute after he'd gone, staring at nothing, feeling distinctly like he'd just been hit by something significantly heavier than a bag of gummy sharks.

“You're fun to be around. I didn't expect that.”

That made twice in twenty-four hours that Euijoo had sincerely thanked him for something.

He gathered his things slowly, replaying the evening, the wrist-grabbing, the electron epiphany, the deeply unnecessary cereal debate, and by the time he stepped outside into the cooling evening air, he'd arrived at a conclusion that felt less like a realization and more like a confession he'd been putting off.

This was worse than before. Before, liking Euijoo had been background hum, manageable around the edges of his day. Now he had actual, specific, recent evidence to work with.

The exact sound of his laugh up close, the exact way he rambled about collapsing buildings like it was the best thing that had happened to him all week. That was going to make managing anything significantly harder.

His phone buzzed in his pocket as he started the walk home. A text, from a number he didn't have saved yet.

euijoo: got your number from the class group chat, hope that's not weird!! anyway. THANK YOU again. also i'm serious about the tutoring thing. also also i already forgot half of what we covered, is that normal, please tell me that's normal

Nicholas stood on the sidewalk, reading it twice, something warm and stupid spreading through his chest, before typing back.

nicholas: it's normal. we can go over it again before the test if you want.

The reply came almost instantly.

euijoo: nicholas wang you are a SAINT
euijoo: also i'm keeping ur number don't be weird about it

He was not going to be weird about it. He was, in fact, already being extremely weird about it, standing on a sidewalk grinning at his phone like a man who'd just won the lottery, and he found he didn't especially care.

Patrol that night felt different. He swung his usual loop with something lighter sitting in his chest, and it took him embarrassingly long to identify what it was.

Not the usual adrenaline buzz he ran on, but something quieter, something that stuck around through a genuinely uneventful three hours of nothing happening, which normally would have left him restless and bored by hour two, but tonight barely registered.

He thought, somewhere around the second bridge, about a text that said don't be weird about it, and grinned under the mask for the rest of the loop like an idiot.

🍓🕸️🍊

The second time it happened, Nicholas wasn't even on patrol yet.

He was still in his room, wrestling a t-shirt over his head, when his phone buzzed against the desk in the specific rapid-fire pattern that meant someone was reporting an emergency to the city's help blog in a state of low-grade panic.

Anonymous: ok this is going to sound insane but there's a dog stuck on the ledge outside the convenience store on baker and i think it climbed up there chasing a pigeon and now it's stuck and crying and i don't know what to do. i called animal control they said 20 minutes but i don't think this dog HAS 20 minutes it looks so scared. i would climb up there myself but my mom would actually kill me and also i am not built for climbing.

Nicholas read it twice, already reaching for the suit folded under his floorboard, some part of his brain already doing the math on how fast he could get to Baker Street.

He didn't wait for updates. He was out the window before he'd finished the sentence in his own head.

The swing took under two minutes. He spotted the dog before he spotted the person who'd posted about it, and his stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with the actual dog. Standing on the sidewalk outside the convenience store, glasses pushed up into his hair, craning his neck at the building with an expression of pure, focused distress, phone still clutched in one hand, was Byun Euijoo.

Nicholas would have written the whole thing off as a stress dream if the dog hadn't started barking again.

The dog was small, scruffy, some unclear and enthusiastic mix of breeds, wedged onto a narrow ledge fifteen feet up, pressed into the brick, whining in a way that carried clean down to the street.

"Oh thank god," Euijoo said the second Nicholas, or Spider-Man, landed, loud enough that a couple of passersby turned though most of the crowd's attention stayed locked on the dog.

"You're actually real, I half thought I hallucinated you. Okay, there's a dog, obviously, I don't know how it got up there, it's a Pomeranian mix, I genuinely don't think Pomeranian mixes are supposed to be able to climb things, this feels like an unreal situation. Do dogs get powers like you too?"

"I've got it," Nicholas said, already climbing.

The dog, up close, was shaking, wedged into the corner of the ledge with the full body commitment of an animal that had no intention of being rescued easily.

"Okay. Okay, I've got you, you're fine," Nicholas murmured, mostly to the dog, gently working it free and tucking it against his chest with one arm while he found a grip on the brick with the other. It went limp with relief almost immediately.

He climbed down slower than he'd gone up, careful of the extra weight and the very fluffy passenger, and by the time his feet hit the pavement a small crowd had gathered but Euijoo was closest, already reaching out before Nicholas had fully registered handing anything over.

"Oh my god, hi, hello, you poor little thing," Euijoo said, taking the dog carefully, cradling it against his chest and scratching behind its ears while it trembled. "You're okay. That was very brave and also extremely stupid, we're going to talk about your life choices later, buddy."

"Is there an owner?"

"No tag on the collar, it seems. I'm taking him to the vet on the corner, they can scan for a chip." Euijoo looked up, something soft and grateful in his expression that made Nicholas's whole plan for the evening (which had mostly been "go patrol, think about literally anything else") collapse instantly.

"You didn't have to come for this. It's not really a Spider-Man emergency. I posted it to the blog, not, like, directly to you."

"You seemed pretty upset about it." Nicholas scoffed.

"I was! Look at his face." He adjusted his grip, and something in his posture eased now that the actual crisis had passed and only the emotional aftermath remained.

The dog, for its part, had apparently decided the worst was over and had started chewing thoughtfully on Euijoo's sleeve, which Euijoo allowed.

"I'll walk him over to the vet," Euijoo said, then paused, glancing between the dog, the wreckage of the ledge, and Nicholas. "Actually, would you want to come up for a second? My apartment’s like two minutes from here, I could grab a towel for him, he's shaking and I feel bad just marching him three blocks like this. You could, I don't know. Supervise. Make sure I don't also almost die on the way there."

Nicholas said yes before his brain had finished processing the question, which was, in retrospect, the entire problem with his brain lately. "Sure," he said. "I can do that."

"Really?" Euijoo looked genuinely happy, like he'd half expected to be turned down. "Oh- cool. Great. This way, it's the building with the ugly gargoyle thing on the corner, you can't miss it, my mom hates it, we've had a whole ongoing debate about removing it…"

He was already walking, dog tucked against his chest, talking the entire way, and Nicholas fell into step beside him on the ground for exactly one block before some deeply unhelpful voice in the back of his head pointed out, calmly, that he had just agreed to go up to Byun Euijoo's balcony. As Spider-Man. At night. For no necessary reason whatsoever.

He kicked himself internally, hard, several times, repeating stupid, stupid, stupid.

It was too late to take it back gracefully. Backing out now would mean explaining why, and there was no version of "actually, on second thought" that didn't sound suspicious coming from a man who was a masked vigilante with a very specific, very inconvenient crush.

So he said nothing, and swung up ahead to the balcony railing instead, landing with more composure than he currently possessed internally, and told himself this was fine. This was normal. Heroes checked on dogs. It was practically part of the job description.

Euijoo appeared a minute later, jogging up an interior staircase Nicholas could hear through the door, and let himself out onto the balcony with the dog now wrapped in what appeared to be a hand towel with cartoon strawberries on it.

"Okay, he's toweled," Euijoo announced, like this was a major logistical victory. "I'm calling him Ledge, temporarily, until the vet finds his real name.”

"It's a terrible name."

"It's a fitting name. He'll grow into it." Euijoo settled cross-legged onto the balcony floor with the dog in his lap, glancing up at Nicholas, who was still standing near the railing with total stiffness.

"You can sit, you know. I don't bite. Ledge might, he's had a day." Euijoo laughed.

"I'm fine standing."

"Suit yourself. Very dramatic, very rooftop-brooding of you." Euijoo scratched behind the dog's ears, and Ledge, apparently exhausted from his brush with death, had already gone boneless against his knee.

"Can I ask you something? You're going to say it depends on the question, I already know, go ahead and say it, get it out of your system."

"It depends on the question."

"Called it." Euijoo grinned up at him, unbothered, city lights catching in his glasses. "Do you ever get tired of this? Like- Dogs on ledges, scaffolding, whatever else. Wasn’t there a guy with like robot octopus arms recently? I don't know, does it feel like enough on its own?"

It was, Nicholas thought, a startlingly good question for 11pm on a Tuesday, from a boy currently holding a towel-wrapped dog he'd named after the exact spot it almost died.

"Some nights," he admitted, which was more honest than he'd meant to be. "Most nights it's fine. Worth it. Then some nights I just want to go home."

"That's a very human answer for a masked vigilante with spider abilities."

"I have different sides to me, you know."

Euijoo laughed that same bright, too-loud laugh from the rooftop, and Nicholas felt it land in the exact same place it had the first time, which was frankly getting to be a pattern he should have a name for.

"Fair enough. Well. For what it's worth, I'm glad you exist. Even if you do disappear on people constantly. It's very rude, by the way. No goodbye, no follow-up, nothing. I could be dead in a ditch for all you know."

"I'd know."

"Oh, would you." Euijoo raised an eyebrow, and something about the way he said it made Nicholas's stomach do something complicated, like he'd accidentally said too much and Euijoo had clocked it, even if he couldn't possibly know why.

"I keep tabs," Nicholas said, which was true and also deeply insufficient as an explanation, and probably the exact moment to leave.

"Keep tabs," Euijoo repeated, delighted, like he was filing the phrase away for later use against him. "Okay. Noted. I'll try not to end up on your radar again this week, purely out of consideration for your workload."

"Appreciated."

Somewhere below, a car alarm went off, thin and distant, and Nicholas used it as an excuse before he could find another reason to stay on this balcony indefinitely.

"I should go," he said. "Get him checked out.”

Euijoo looked up, and for a second something flickered across his face that Nicholas couldn't quite name. Not disappointment, exactly, but something adjacent to it. "Thanks. Again. You're racking up quite a tab with me."

"I'll invoice you."

"Please do, I'm good for it." Euijoo smiled, small and genuine, and Nicholas made himself step back onto the railing before he did something catastrophically stupid, like stay.

"Get some sleep," he said. "You've had a day."

"You say that like you're not also going to go fight more crime tonight."

"That's different."

"Sure it is." Euijoo waved, dog still cradled against his chest, and Nicholas launched off the railing before he could think better of any of it, web catching the next building over, the sound of Euijoo calling something after him, probably a thank you, lost to the wind.

He didn't stop until he was four blocks away, perched on a chimney, breathing like he'd sprinted the whole distance instead of swung it.

"That was insane," he told the night, to absolutely no one, which was becoming something of a habit. "Why did I do that."

lNicholas sat there a long moment before finally continuing on to the rest of his patrol with a distracted, hopeless sort of grin.

🍓🕸️🍊

It became, somehow, a thing.
Not a regular thing, exactly. Nicholas wasn't about to start scheduling it, But a thing that kept happening with a frequency that stopped being coincidental somewhere around the fourth occurrence.

Euijoo got stuck in a stalled elevator two blocks from his apartment. Euijoo's bike chain snapped downhill at an alarming speed.

Each time, Nicholas showed up. Each time, it took a little longer to leave.

Tonight it was nothing, no emergency at all, technically, just Euijoo texting the blog because he'd seen something that looked like smoke from his balcony and wanted someone to check it out before he called the fire department and potentially caused a scene over what turned out to be, upon Nicholas's inspection, a neighbor's badly timed barbecue.

"Okay, false alarm, I'll admit that," Euijoo said, leaning over his balcony railing to squint at the grill in question three buildings over, "but in my defense, from this angle it genuinely looked like the building was on fire, and I feel like erring on the side of caution is a virtue, you know."

"You reported a barbecue as arson."

"I reported smoke. The barbecue context came later. I stand by the initial report." Euijoo turned back around, already looking significantly less concerned about smoke and significantly more interested in the fact that Spider-Man was, once again, standing on his balcony at an unreasonable hour like this was just a thing they did now.

"You want to sit? I made tea. I always make too much tea, it's a whole issue.”

"I don't really do sitting during patrol."

"You're not on patrol right now, you're standing on my balcony judging me. Now sit."

Nicholas sat. He was aware that this represented some kind of tactical failure on his part, a slow erosion of every boundary he'd meant to keep in place, but Euijoo had already pressed a mug into his hands before he could formulate a proper objection, and it was warm, and it smelled like something faintly floral, and it was very hard to leave a balcony once there was tea involved.

"So," Euijoo said, settling into the chair across from him with his own mug. "tell me something. Anything. You've saved my life like four times now and I know nothing about you except that you're apparently allergic to relaxing."

"…There's not much to tell."

"There's always something to tell. Okay, easy one. Favorite food."

"I don't know if I should be answering personal questions." Nicholas laughed.

"It's food, not your home address. I'm not asking where you live, I'm asking what you eat. Everyone has a favorite food, even mysterious vigilantes." Euijoo took a sip of his tea, watching him over the rim of the mug with an expression that was somehow both patient and completely unwilling to drop the subject.

Nicholas actually thought about it, which felt strange, being asked something this small and ordinary while wearing a mask that existed specifically to keep things from being small and ordinary. "Dumplings," he said finally. "The pan-fried kind."

"See, was that so hard?" Euijoo looked disproportionately pleased with this information, like he'd extracted state secrets. "Okay, my turn to overshare in exchange. I like the soup kind better, but I'll never say that in public because Fuma will start a whole debate about it and honestly I don't have the stamina."

"Wise."

Euijoo grinned, and somewhere in the easy quiet that followed, the two of them just sitting there, tea cooling, the city humming faintly below, Nicholas found himself thinking, with a kind of low-grade horror, that this was possibly the most relaxed he'd been in weeks. On a balcony. In a mask. With someone who had no idea who he actually was.

He should have found that concerning. He mostly just found it nice, which was, if anything, more concerning.

A problem Nicholas discovered over the following two weeks was that Euijoo had started treating Spider-Man like a friend.

Not a hero. Not an emergency contact, not a public service, not even really a novelty anymore. A friend, the same easy, familiar way he treated Fuma or Koga, if either of them could climb buildings. He texted the help blog with things that weren't emergencies at all, just things he thought were funny or wanted a second opinion on, always signing off with a “juju” so he could discreetly tell Spider-Man it was him.

He'd started leaving snacks out on the balcony on nights Nicholas had mentioned, vaguely, that patrol ran late in his neighborhood.

He'd developed an entire private vocabulary of jokes that only worked because Nicholas, as Spider-Man, had been there for the setup.

This was, Nicholas told himself, good.

This was the goal. People trusting him and feeling safe enough to joke around instead of treating every encounter like a crisis. It was, by any reasonable professional metric, going extremely well.

The problem was that as Nicholas, the actual, unmasked, sits-one-row-behind-him-in-homeroom Nicholas, was getting absolutely nowhere.

Euijoo slid into the seat across from Nicholas one Thursday. “Hi Harua, hi Maki, Is it okay if I ask Nicholas something really quick?” He asked, smiling warmly.

“Hey, Euijoo! Please, take all the time you need!” Maki beamed. The two of them immediately scooted to the far corner of the table and pretended to chatter among themselves.

“So, quick question, has Spider-Man ever talked to you? Like, in a general sense, do people talk to him, or is it more of a swoop-in-swoop-out situation for everyone but me specifically?"

Nicholas nearly choked on a piece of his food. "Why would you ask me that."

"I don't know, you seem like you'd have thoughts on it. You have thoughts on everything." Euijoo shrugged, entirely unaware of the internal crisis he'd just triggered. "He's actually really easy to talk to, once you get past the whole masked vigilante of it all. Funnier than you'd expect. Dry sense of humor. We had this whole bit going about barbecues last week, it was genuinely one of the highlights of my month, which says something concerning about my social life, probably."

"That's- nice," Nicholas said, in a voice that came out several degrees flatter than he intended.

"It is nice! I don't know, I used to think he'd be all business, very stoic, very “citizen, you are safe now,” but he's not like that at all once he actually sticks around for a minute. He's kind of a smartass, honestly. I like it."

Euijoo said this with such warm, uncomplicated fondness that Nicholas felt something ugly and unreasonable twist in his chest, sharp enough that it took him a second to identify it.

He was jealous. Of himself. Actively, currently, jealous of a man he had complete and total access to at all times, because that man got to be funny and easy and worth staying for, while Nicholas, the actual Nicholas, the one who'd liked Euijoo for two straight years and drawn him electron diagrams and memorized his laugh, apparently registered as fine.

Quiet. A guy with opinions about candy, mentioned once, in passing. It was the stupidest thing he had ever felt about anyone, and he had once felt genuinely competitive with an actual spider when it made a nicer web than him.

"Sounds like you two are close," Nicholas said, aiming for neutral and landing somewhere closer to wounded.

"I mean, close is a strong word, he still won't tell me his actual name, or anything real about himself, which, reasonable, but yeah. I like him. He's easy to be around."

Euijoo stole one of Nicholas's fries without asking, which he did constantly and which Nicholas had never once minded until this exact second, when it felt like one more piece of evidence in a case being built against him by absolutely no one but himself.

"You'd probably like him too, honestly. You're both weirdly private about yourselves. You'd get along great, if you both weren't so allergic to talking about your feelings."

Nicholas opened his mouth, closed it, and made the decision not to respond to that at all.

It got worse before it got better, which Nicholas supposed was just the natural order of things when a person's dumbest impulses were left unsupervised for long enough.

It started small. A joke, made as Spider-Man on a rooftop, landed a little too well, Euijoo laughing so hard he nearly slid off the ledge he was sitting on, wheezing something about how nobody at school was ever that funny, everyone there took themselves way too seriously.

Nicholas felt a petty, immediate satisfaction that had absolutely no business existing. He'd chased that reaction for two years as himself and gotten polite laughter and a "you're funny sometimes." As Spider-Man, it took him ninety seconds and a bit about pigeons.

So he leaned into it. Just a little. Just enough to notice himself doing it, which was somehow worse than not noticing at all.

He started saving better material for the mask. A genuinely good joke about the city council he'd been sitting on for weeks. Just the kind of dry, deadpan thing Euijoo loved. It went to Spider-Man on a Tuesday night instead of to Nicholas at lunch on Wednesday, where it might have actually done him some good.

He found himself, mid-patrol, workshopping a joke in his head, and then delivering it to Euijoo on a fire escape twenty minutes later to the exact kind of delighted, disbelieving laugh he'd been quietly starving for since sophomore year.

It took him three separate instances of this before the horror actually caught up with him.

He was sitting on Euijoo's balcony again, mid-laugh at something Nicholas himself had said thirty seconds earlier, when it hit him with the force of an actual physical blow.

He was one-upping himself.

He was, with real strategies, saving his best material, for the version of himself that got to wear a mask and never had to sit one desk-length away wondering if any of it landed.

He was actively sabotaging his own chances with Euijoo by being, infuriatingly, too good at being someone else.

"You okay?" Euijoo asked, tilting his head, tea halfway to his lips. "You went quiet. What'd I say?"

"Nothing," Nicholas said, voice coming out strangled even through the modulation. "Just…thinking."

"About?"

About the fact that I am, apparently, my own worst romantic rival, he did not say.

"Nothing important," he said instead, and rolled up the bottom of his mask to take a long sip of tea specifically so he'd have an excuse not to talk for a few seconds.

This was, he thought, genuinely one of the dumbest problems a person could construct for themselves. He had two years of real conversations and real memory and a real face Euijoo already liked looking at across a classroom.

And instead of using any of that, he'd apparently decided the smart move was to funnel his entire personality into a side character.

He was going to have to fix this. He had absolutely no idea how, short of somehow convincing his own alter ego to be worse at flirting, but he was going to have to fix this.

🍓🕸️🍊

Nicholas’s plan went like this: stop hoarding. Stop saving the good material for the mask. Say the funny thing at lunch instead of on a rooftop at midnight. Tease Euijoo in homeroom the way he apparently had no trouble doing thirty stories up in a tight spandex.

It wasn't a complicated plan. It was actually embarrassingly simple, which was exactly why Nicholas had somehow failed to try it for two straight years.

He started small, because starting big felt like the kind of move that would end with him in a supply closet.

"You're going to fail the pop quiz," he said Monday morning, sliding into the seat behind Euijoo before the bell, close enough that Euijoo had to twist around to look at him properly. "I can see your notes from here. Half of them are just the word electron underlined three times."

"Let’s just say I don’t really have a good idea on how to make notes on chemistry," Euijoo said, twisting further in his seat, apparently delighted to have an audience for his academic collapse. "I have a system. It's called panic, then hope for the best."

"Smart system."

"It's gotten me this far." Euijoo squinted at him, something new and assessing in his expression, like it was surprising to see a Nicholas who talked to him unprompted before first period. "You're chattier than usual."

"I have different sides to me.” Nicholas said, and immediately regretted it, because it came out sounding exactly like something else entirely, said in an entirely different voice, on an entirely different rooftop, and he had to actively stop himself from flinching at his own line reusage.

Euijoo, mercifully, didn't seem to notice the echo. He just laughed and turned back around only when the teacher started roll call, though he kept glancing back twice more before the quiz actually started.

That, Nicholas decided, watching the back of his neck for the rest of the period with significantly less self discipline than he'd like to admit to, was a start.

He kept it up. Not aggressively, he wasn't about to become a different person overnight, and he was fairly sure Euijoo would clock a full personality switch as suspicious, but steadily and deliberately.

He started walking the long way to his locker, the one that happened to pass Euijoo's. He volunteered to be lab partners before Euijoo could get paired with someone else, saying it was “efficient to just keep working together because they were familiar.”

That was a flimsy excuse that fooled absolutely no one, least of all Harua, who mouthed “efficient?” across the room with an expression of disbelief and delight.

He teased him. Properly, the way he'd apparently been saving for a costume, about the betting pool his friends ran on his own survival, about his handwriting which looked like it belonged to Edward Scissorhands, about the truly deranged cereal is a soup opinion, which Nicholas brought up at every available opportunity purely to watch Euijoo get worked up about it again.

"It IS soup," Euijoo said Wednesday at lunch. "It's a cold, sweet soup, with croutons, and I will not be lectured by a man who genuinely likes licorice."

"I’m sorry your taste buds haven’t developed yet."

"It seems you’re the only one with trained taste buds then." Maki nodded gravely, backing him up without even looking up from his food, the traitor.

"All of you are wrong, but I respect the commitment," Nicholas said, reaching over to steal a fry off Euijoo's tray.

"Did you just-" Euijoo looked down at his tray, then back up, apparently rethinking something. "You've literally never stolen my food before. You always just watch me steal yours while looking disappointed."

"Consider it revenge."

"It’s deeply suspicious," Euijoo said, but he was smiling when he said it, and he didn't move his tray away, which Nicholas took, privately, as a win.

It kept happening like that. Small, deliberate escalations, each one landing a little more solidly than the last. He started sitting closer during group work. He learned, and then used, the exact rhythm of teasing that made Euijoo sputter instead of laugh clean through it, the kind that left him fumbling for a comeback and losing.

He walked Euijoo partway home twice under transparently thin excuses "I need the exercise," delivered by a boy who swung across the city most nights, was not a strong alibi, but Euijoo let it slide both times without comment, which felt like its own kind of victory.

By Thursday, something had visibly shifted. Euijoo had started doing a thing where he'd glance over mid-conversation like he was checking whether Nicholas was watching, and then look away too fast when he caught himself doing it. He fumbled his water bottle twice during lunch when Nicholas leaned in to say something low near his ear about the chemistry homework. It was purely about the homework, and also absolutely not about the homework at all.

He'd started laughing a beat too early at jokes that weren’t finished yet, like he was bracing for the punchline before it landed, off-balance in a way Nicholas found devastating to witness and was already plotting how to cause again tomorrow.

"You've gone feral," Harua observed on Friday, watching Nicholas watch Euijoo across the courtyard with the intensity of a hawk. "This is a new phase. I don't like it. I liked it better when you were just sad and useless."

"I wasn't useless."

"You walked into a supply closet, Nicholas."

"Will you drop that? That was weeks ago."

"You've evolved into someone who steals fries and says things like “consider it revenge”with a straight face, which is somehow worse." Harua shook his head, but there was no real heat in it. "Maki thinks you're going to combust before you actually do anything about it. I have a different theory."

"Which is?"

"That Euijoo's going to combust first." Harua nodded toward the courtyard, where Euijoo had just dropped his phone directly into a puddle mid-conversation with Fuma, clearly too busy watching Nicholas. "Look at that. That man has never once dropped anything in his life without a dramatic narration. That was a silent drop. That's kinda terrifying."

Nicholas watched Euijoo scramble for his phone, wipe it uselessly on his shirt, and glance up to check if anyone had seen landing on Nicholas, who was very obviously watching, and felt something in his chest do a slow, satisfied unfurl that he suspected was going to get him into serious trouble eventually.

For now, though, it felt fantastic. He was riding an actual high for possibly the first time in two years of aching, patient, entirely one-sided devotion, and he had no intention of coming down from it anytime soon.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he told Harua. "I'm just being friendly."

"Sure you are," Harua replied. "Very friendly. Extremely, suspiciously friendly. I've never seen a friendship escalate this fast."

Nicholas didn't have a response to that, mostly because he was too busy grinning like an idiot.

He kept the momentum going into the following week, mostly because stopping now felt like leaving a job half-finished, and Nicholas had never once in his life left a job half-finished, whether that job involved catching falling scaffolding or making Euijoo laugh.

The chemistry lab paired them together again, not by accident, though Nicholas had gotten better at making his interventions look like accidents, a quiet word to the teacher about “comfort and efficiency” that had landed him next to Euijoo for the third week running.

Euijoo hadn't questioned it. If anything, he'd started saving Nicholas a stool before class even started, an unclaimed seat with a bag draped over it like a small, quiet reservation.

"Okay, hypothesis time," Euijoo said, sliding the lab sheet between them, pen already tucked behind his ear like a man settling in for a long negotiation. "I think if we add too much of the reagent, the whole thing's going to turn a horrifying color and we're going to get yelled at."

"Is that a hypothesis or a prediction? Ow!”
Nicholas was replied with a jab to his side.

"Don't say that like I'm going to blow up the room. I've only done that once."

"Yeah, once that we know of."

"And I’d like to keep it that way.” Euijoo measured out the reagent with more care than the joke suggested, tongue between his teeth in the particular way he had when he was actually concentrating, and Nicholas watched him do it with full attention.

"You're staring," Euijoo said, not looking up, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"It’s not my fault that someone like you in the lab needs my constant supervision."

"You're staring, Nicholas. I can feel it. It's very intense. Is this the stare of caution or something else?" He glanced up then, and there was something teasing in it, but also something underneath the teasing, some genuine question he wasn't quite bold enough to ask outright.

Nicholas held his gaze for one beat longer, long enough to watch Euijoo's ears start to go pink before he answered. "Does it matter which kind?"

"Uh-" Euijoo fumbled the measuring cylinder, catching it just before it tipped, liquid sloshing dangerously close to the rim. "That's- you can't just say things like that while I'm handling chemicals, that's a safety hazard, I could've poisoned us."

"Noted. I'll wait until you're not holding anything that poses a threat to us.”

"Please do. I have goals for this semester and dying in a lab explosion because you decided to try being charming isn't one of them." He said it lightly, but he was smiling down at the beaker in a way that suggested he didn't mind the hazard nearly as much as he claimed.

The next real opening came on a Thursday, in the kind of unglamorous circumstance Nicholas hadn't planned for at all. A sudden downpour that caught half the school without umbrellas, turning the walk to the bus stop into a mad, undignified scramble under whatever cover people could find.

Euijoo, predictably, had no umbrella. He also, less predictably, had no jacket.

"You're going to catch something," Nicholas said, catching up to him under the school's front overhang, where Euijoo stood glaring at the rain.

"I'm aware. I made peace with it about ninety seconds ago. It's fine. I'll just run for it. Very main character, isn’t it? sprinting through a storm."

"You'll get soaked before you're halfway there." Nicholas, without giving himself time to think better of it, shrugged off his own jacket and held it out. Euijoo blinked at it like it might be a trick.

"You don't have to-“

"Take it before I change my mind and leave you with a cold." Nicholas kept his arm out, steady, and after a second of visible internal debate, Euijoo took it, pulling it on over his shoulders with a kind of careful, disbelieving slowness.

"This is a very boyfriend move," Euijoo said, testing the sleeves, which were slightly too long for him and swallowed his hands almost entirely. "Very “here, take my jacket” cliché you see in movies. Is that a thing about you?"

"Shut up." Nicholas tried to keep his voice as neutral as possible, mind running laps around Euijoo’s boyfriend statement.

Euijoo laughed pulled the jacket a little tighter around himself anyway. "Thank you. I would've regretted the sprint decision within about four seconds."

"You'd have regretted it within two."

"I would’ve." Euijoo glanced out at the rain, then back at him, settling into a quiet expression. "You want to just wait it out? My bus isn't for another twenty minutes anyway, and yours probably runs later than mine, so."

"Yeah," Nicholas said, too fast, the same reflexive yes that had gotten him into trouble on a balcony weeks ago, except this time there was no mask to hide behind while he processed how much he meant it.

They ended up sitting on the low concrete ledge under the overhang, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, watching the rain come down in sheets over the courtyard. Euijoo had gone quieter than usual, wrapped up in a jacket two sizes too broad for him, watching the water instead of filling the silence with commentary for once, and Nicholas found he didn't mind the quiet at all, not when it came with this particular company.

"This is nice," Euijoo said eventually, not looking over, voice smaller than his usual register. "I don't know. Just sitting. Not talking about anything in particular. I don't do that a lot. Usually I'm filling every silence because I get weird if it goes on too long, but this is… this is fine. I don't mind this."

"I don't mind it either," Nicholas said, and meant it more than the sentence really carried, and when Euijoo finally glanced over, something passed between them that neither one of them tried to name out loud, though Nicholas was fairly sure, watching the color rise in Euijoo's face, that they were both thinking about it anyway.

🍓🕸️🍊

The message came in around nine on a Friday night, right as Nicholas was finishing up a genuinely uneventful patrol loop, nothing but a jaywalker he'd told off and a cat that turned out did not need rescuing at all, just extremely rude about being looked at.

Anonymous: r u free right now? -juju

He stared at it for a solid ten seconds, phone screen throwing pale light across his face on the rooftop where he'd stopped to check it.

He did a fast, responsible sweep of the scanner first, because he wasn't about to abandon post on the strength of a five word text, however devastating the sign-off.

Nothing. No calls, no chatter, nothing worth the suit tonight beyond the suit he was already wearing. Which meant there was, technically, no reason not to go.

He told himself that was the deciding factor.

He was there in four minutes, which was not his best time but also not something he wanted examined too closely, landing on the railing with more care than usual because his hands weren't entirely steady.

Euijoo was sitting on the floor of the balcony with his back against the railing, knees drawn up, still in his school uniform like he hadn't bothered changing, a mug of something beside him. He looked up when Nicholas landed, and something about his expression made Nicholas's stomach do a slow, apprehensive turn before either of them had said a word.

"Hey," Euijoo said. "Sorry. This wasn't, like, an emergency. I know you probably dropped something."

"I didn't drop anything. Nothing was happening." Nicholas settled onto the railing across from him, keeping some distance. "Anything wrong?"

"No- not really." Euijoo picked at the hem of his sleeve, not quite meeting his eyes. "Can I ask you something? And you have to actually answer, none of your usual nonsense."

"Depends on the question."

"You always say that." Euijoo huffed a small laugh that didn't fully land. "Okay. Do you ever like someone and have absolutely no idea what to do about it? Like, you've got all this feeling, just sitting there, and no functional plan for what happens next."

Nicholas went very, very still. "I might know something about that."

"Good. Great." Euijoo pulled his knees in tighter, resting his chin on them, voice dropping into something more careful than his usual rapid-fire delivery.

"Okay, so, hypothetically, and this is hypothetical! Mostly…I think I have a crush on two people. Which is insane, I know, I've already had this argument with myself, you don't need to have it with me too."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking it."

"I have unspoken judgment, sure." Nicholas kept his voice light, even as something in his chest had gone tight and watchful. "Go on. Tell me about the two people."

Euijoo exhaled, long, like he was talking himself into it one breath at a time. "Okay. Person one. This is going to sound like a school assignment, bear with me. He's in my class. Has been the whole year, actually, but I didn't really notice, not like this, not until recently. He's smart. Actually smart, not just academically smart, he explains things in a way that makes them make sense, which is rarer than people think. And he's funnier than he lets on, he's got this whole quiet, deadpan thing going where you don't realize he's said something crazy until like four seconds later. And he's got this face he does. I don't even know how to describe it, like he's trying not to smile and failing. It's stupidly cute. I think about it more than I'd like to admit."

Nicholas sat very still, turning the description over, cataloguing it against half the guys in their year. Funny, smart, quiet, and coming up, humiliatingly, with absolutely no candidates, too deep in his own spiraling anxiety about the second person to notice he was looking directly at a mirror.

"That's… specific," he managed. "Sounds like you've thought about him a lot."

"An unreasonable amount, yeah." Euijoo laughed at himself, short and a little helpless. "The dumb thing is I don't even know if he's thought about me at all, like that, so it's mostly just me sitting there every day being quietly deranged about a guy who probably has no idea."

"I doubt that."

"You don't know him."

"I know people," Nicholas said, which was a genuinely stupid thing to say, and Euijoo gave him a look that suggested he'd noticed the stupidity too, but let it go, apparently too deep in his own nerves to interrogate it.

"Anyway. That's person one." Euijoo picked at his sleeve again, and this time the shift in him was more obvious, some new tension settling into his shoulders. "Person two is different. More complicated, honestly, because it doesn't make any sense, and also because I don't actually know anything real about him, which is an insane foundation to build a crush on, and yet, here we are."

Something cold and slow started crawling up the back of Nicholas's neck. "Who's person two?"

"I'm not telling you that."

"Why not?"

"Because it's embarrassing, and also because you'd probably laugh, or worse, you'd get weirdly quiet about it, which you do sometimes, and I don't think I could handle that tonight." Euijoo shook his head, looking down at his hands instead of at him. "It's- it doesn't matter. It's stupid. I probably shouldn't have brought it up at all."

"You brought up two people and you're only willing to talk about one of them. That's not really fair." Nicholas couldn’t tell if his voice was a successful mask for his pounding heart.

"Life's not fair, Spidey, ask literally anyone." Euijoo attempted a smile that didn't fully commit to the bit, and Nicholas, against every instinct currently screaming at him to drop it, to let this go, to swing away right now before whatever was building here finished building, leaned forward instead, unable to help himself.

"Come on. You can't just leave it there."

"I can, actually. Watch me." Euijoo laughed.

"Is it someone from school? Someone I'd know?" Nicholas pushed.

"You don't know anyone, you're a masked vigilante with no social calendar that I'm aware of."

"Fair. Is it someone from the neighborhood, then. Someone who lives nearby." Nicholas kept pressing, gently, more out of some instinctive need to close the loop than any real strategy, and watched color climb steadily up Euijoo's neck with each question, watched his composure fray a little further at the edges.

"You're doing the thing where you don't let something go," Euijoo said, voice going slightly unsteady. "You do that. You're annoyingly persistent when you want to be."

"I've been told."

"Stop it. I mean it. You're going to make me say something I'm not ready to say, and that's not fair, that's a whole ambush, I came up here to vent, not to get interrogated by a superhero at 10pm on a Friday." Euijoo looked at the ground.

"I'm not interrogating you, I'm asking a follow-up question. There's a difference."

"There is not a meaningful difference right now, and you know it." Euijoo pushed himself up off the floor, suddenly, restless with nerves, pacing two steps toward the railing and back, and when he turned to face him again there was something wild and cornered in his expression, the look of a man who'd run out of room to keep dodging.

"Do you really want to know? Because I don't think you actually want to know, I think you're just being nosy. And if I tell you, I can't untell you, and then this whole thing- it changes, and I don't know if I'm ready for it to change, and I don't know if you even-"

"Euijoo."

"Don't say my name like that, it's not helping-"

“It’s okay. I promise you can trust me.”

Euijoo looked at him for one long, unsteady second, chest rising and falling too fast, some internal argument playing out across his face and clearly losing to whatever came next.

Then, before Nicholas had fully registered him closing the distance between them, Euijoo reached up, hooked two fingers under the edge of the mask's mouth, tugged it up just far enough, and kissed him.

It lasted maybe two seconds. It felt like considerably longer, and also nowhere near long enough. A soft, startled, entirely too quick press of Euijoo's lips against his own that severed every single coherent thought Nicholas had been holding onto for the last several minutes, and several years before that.

Euijoo pulled back first, eyes wide, hand still half raised like he wasn't sure what to do with it now, breathing like he'd just run somewhere. "That's- okay, that's person two. I panicked. I told you not to make me say it, I told you-"

Nicholas didn't hear the rest of it.

He was already moving, some deep, instinctive, unhelpful part of his brain overriding every other function he had, launching backward off the railing before Euijoo’s mouth had even finished forming the first half of a sentence he never got to complete, something that might have started with "wait- " or "I-" or nothing at all, lost entirely to the wind and the sudden, dizzying drop as his web caught the next building over and yanked him up and away.

He didn't look back. He couldn't. He swung three blocks on pure muscle memory, hands shaking too hard to trust a fourth, before he finally stopped on a water tower he was becoming embarrassingly familiar with, chest heaving, mask still shoved half up over his mouth, staring blankly at the skyline while his entire nervous system attempted, and failed, to process what had just happened.

Euijoo had kissed him.

Euijoo had kissed Spider-Man, cornered and flustered and clearly terrified of the admission.

And Nicholas, the actual Nicholas, the one who'd wanted this exact thing for two straight years, had responded by fleeing the scene mid-sentence.

"Oh, fuck," he said out loud, to absolutely no one, voice cracking slightly on the second word. "Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck."

Somewhere behind him, three blocks away, he was fairly certain Euijoo was still standing on that balcony, alone, having just kissed a superhero and watched him bolt without a word.

Nicholas put his head in his hands and considered the possibility that he had just ruined everything.

He did not sleep that night, which was becoming something of a personal record for consecutive bad nights caused entirely by one specific person, and he spent a solid four of those unslept hours losing his mind in the isolation of his room.

The facts, as far as Nicholas could establish them, were: Euijoo had kissed him. After weeks of near-misses and rooftop conversations and one genuinely upsetting cereal debate, worked up the nerve to close a very significant distance and kiss him, mask half-up, hands shaking, the whole thing.

This should have been the single greatest development of Nicholas's entire romantic life. By any reasonable measure, it was the single greatest development of Nicholas's entire romantic life. And yet.

"He kissed Spider-Man," Nicholas informed his ceiling, somewhere around one in the morning, flat on his back with both hands pressed over his face. "Not me. Him."

The ceiling, for the hundredth time, had no comment, though Nicholas felt it could have at least attempted some sympathy.

He was aware of how insane this problem sounded even inside the privacy of his own skull. He was Spider-Man. This was not up for debate; he had the bruises, the aching shoulders, the entire secret double life to prove it.

By any rational accounting, a kiss aimed at Spider-Man was, definitionally, a kiss aimed at Nicholas, filtered through a layer of red and blue spandex and a couple of very inconvenient secrets.

There was no version of the math where this didn't count.

Except it didn't feel like it counted. It felt, if anything, like a very specific and very personal insult, engineered by the universe with Nicholas as the sole intended audience, because Euijoo hadn't kissed him.

He'd kissed the version of Nicholas that got to be funny without trying, that got to disappear before things got complicated, that got all the credit for two years of Nicholas's own personality without any of the two years of awkward, humiliating groundwork that had gone into actually building it.

"This is insane," he said. "I'm jealous of myself. I've hit a new low.”

"You ARE the guy in the suit," he said out loud, with real, exasperated emphasis, like saying it forcefully enough might finally make his own emotions listen to reason.

They did not. His emotions, much like the ceiling, didn’t respond.

By 2am he'd cycled through despair, indignation, a brief and deeply unproductive spiral about whether Euijoo would have kissed him, actual him, no mask, if given the chance, and finally settled into something that could only be described as competitive resentment toward a man who did not, strictly speaking, exist as a separate person from himself.

He fell asleep somewhere around three, still fully dressed, one arm flung dramatically over his face like a man in absolute tragedy, and woke up forty minutes before school to hype himself up enough to not skip school and land him in even deeper suspicion.

He decided, over a breakfast he barely tasted, that the responsible thing to do was to gather information. Carefully. Casually.

As Nicholas, not as the other guy, because if there was ever a moment to remind Euijoo that Nicholas himself had a whole personality worth kissing, unassisted by spandex, this was probably it.

The plan fell apart within the first ninety seconds of homeroom.

"Hey," Nicholas said, sliding into his seat behind Euijoo with what he hoped read as easy and casual and did not, based on the immediate look Harua gave him from two seats over, read as either of those things. "You seem tired."

"I am tired. Didn't sleep great." Euijoo turned around in his seat, and there was something different about him this morning. He was a little more subdued than usual, a faint shadow under his eyes that suggested his own night hadn't gone much better than Nicholas's.

Nicholas noted this with an uncomfortable pang of guilt, because it was entirely his fault.

"Weird night. Don't ask."

"I wasn't going to ask." Nicholas absolutely had been going to ask, several times, in several different ways, and pivoted hard.

🍓🕸️🍊

The time Nicholas really, really fucked up happened on a Tuesday. Because of course it happened on a Tuesday. Nicholas was fairly convinced that the universe had a specific goal of ruining his Tuesdays.

The call itself was almost embarrassingly minor by the standards of the last few months. A delivery scooter clipped a curb outside a corner store, sent its rider skidding, and knocked over a stack of crates that toppled directly into the path of a pedestrian who hadn't seen any of it coming.

Nicholas was two streets over when the scanner picked it up, and he was there in under a minute, which turned out to be exactly long enough to recognize, with the now-familiar lurch of his stomach, that the pedestrian in question was Euijoo, frozen mid-step with a crate half a second from clipping him in the shoulder.

He caught it before it landed with one hand, no drama, the kind of catch that had become so routine at this point it barely registered as effort. He steadied Euijoo with the other, palm flat against his back. "You have got to stop standing in places," Nicholas said, without thinking, in the same dry, teasing register he used at school, the one that came out of him automatically whenever Euijoo was doing something reckless and adorable and entirely his own fault.

"You really do need my constant supervision, don’t you?" Nicholas laughed.

Euijoo, still catching his breath, laughed. It was short and startled, and he opened his mouth to fire back something, the way he always did, and then stopped.

Time did something strange after that. Not literally, Nicholas would think later, replaying it. Nothing had actually slowed down, the world kept moving at its normal, indifferent pace, the delivery rider still swearing at his overturned scooter, a dog barking somewhere down the block.

But for Euijoo, standing there with one hand still braced against Spider-Man's chest, something had clearly gone very still and very quiet, his internal machinery grinding to a sudden, silent halt.

Did he just reference their chemistry lesson? Nicholas realized it half a second too late, the way you realize you've stepped on ice only once you're already falling.

He watched it land. Watched Euijoo's face do something complicated and slow, brow furrowing, eyes narrowing slightly, the tilt of the head, the way his gaze dropped briefly to Nicholas's hand still resting against his back, the exact placement of it, the exact pressure, before flicking back up to the mask like he was searching for something underneath it that had never been there for him to find before.

"Say that again," Euijoo said, very quietly, not really a question.

"I-" Nicholas's mind went blank. "Say what again?"

"That thing you just said." Euijoo hadn't moved. His hand was still flat against Nicholas's chest, and Nicholas could feel the exact moment Euijoo's breathing changed, went shallow and careful, like he was holding something very fragile and had just noticed it. "You said it exactly the way-“

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Nicholas watched the last piece slot into place behind his eyes with the same intensity of watching a scaffolding finally give out after minutes of creaking warning.

Every instinct he had, every single one, honed over two years of increasingly reckless double-life management, screamed at him to move, now, immediately, before this went any further.

He moved.

"Gotta run. I hear a car alarm." Nicholas said, voice climbing half an octave higher than he meant it to, already stepping back, already reaching for the nearest wall to launch from.

"Wait-"

He didn't wait. He was airborne before Euijoo's hand had even finished falling away from his chest, web catching the corner of the building above the corner store, launching up and out and away with a speed due to pure, undiluted panic.

He didn't look back until he was three rooftops away, which had become, he thought distantly, an alarmingly consistent number for him lately. When he finally did glance back, Euijoo was still standing exactly where he'd left him, in the middle of the sidewalk, crate forgotten at his feet, staring up after him with an expression Nicholas couldn't read from this distance and didn't especially want to.

Euijoo had stood there for a full ten seconds after he vanished, replaying the sentence, the hand on his back, before finally, quietly, to absolutely no one, saying the one word that made the entire last two months click into place at once.

"…Nicholas."

🍓🕸️🍊

Nicholas knew something was wrong the second he walked into homeroom the next morning and Euijoo didn't turn around.

Not immediately, anyway. Euijoo was already in his seat, uncharacteristically early. When Nicholas sat down behind him there was a beat before Euijoo turned, slowly, with a deliberate calmness that Nicholas knew was a mask.

"We need to talk," Euijoo said. "After school. My balcony. Don't be late, and don't-" he narrowed his eyes, some genuine warning in it now, "…don't try to get out of it with a car alarm."

Nicholas's stomach dropped somewhere around his shoes. "I… don’t know where your balcony is?"

"Save it." Euijoo said, and turned back around before Nicholas could formulate literally any kind of response, leaving him to spend the entirety of homeroom, first period, second period, and a lunch he didn't touch running through an increasingly desperate series of denial strategies, none of which survived more than four seconds of scrutiny.

By the time the final bell rang, Nicholas had constructed, discarded, and reconstructed at least six separate cover stories, and abandoned every single one of them somewhere on the walk to Euijoo's building, arriving at the front gate with absolutely no plan beyond a vague, doomed hope that maybe Euijoo had simply wanted to talk about something else entirely.

A group project. The weather. Anything.

Euijoo opened the door for him when he came up, arms crossed, expression carefully, deliberately neutral in a way that was somehow more unnerving than if he'd just been angry outright.

"Nicholas Wang," Euijoo started. "I have a question for you, and I need you to actually answer it, none of your usual deflecting, none of the tongue in cheek thing you do when you're trying to change the subject."

"I don't do a tongue in cheek thing."

"You're doing it right now."

Nicholas forced his face into something he hoped read as neutral and clearly did not, based on the way Euijoo's mouth twitched, fighting off either a laugh or the beginning of an actual breakdown, it was genuinely hard to tell which.

"Okay," Euijoo said, taking a breath, visibly steadying himself. "Are you Spider-Man?"

The silence that followed lasted approximately five seconds while Nicholas’s brain scrambled through every possible response and rejected them all in rapid, humiliating succession.

"No." he said, voice cracking on the vowel, which was, even to his own ears, an almost impressively bad lie.

"Nicholas."

"I'm not-" He tried again, aiming for firmer this time and landing somewhere closer to strangled. "That's a really specific accusation to just-"

"You referenced our chemistry session. Talking about me needing to be supervised once when I was mixing those chemicals, and once yesterday while catching a falling crate, dressed as a superhero." Euijoo's arms were still crossed, but his voice had started to shake slightly, some mix of nerves and something that might have been hope fighting its way through the carefully rehearsed calm.

"And you ran the second you realized what you'd said. And you've been weird for weeks. And you and Spider-Man have literally never once been in the same place at the same time, not once, in the entire time I've known both of you, which I did not clock until about two in the morning last night when I couldn't sleep because I was too busy having a full mental breakdown about it."

"That could all be a coincidence."

"It is not a coincidence, Nicholas, You know that, don’t you?" Euijoo's voice cracked slightly on the last word, and he pressed his lips together, visibly working to hold it together. "So. I'm asking you directly. Are you going to lie to my face right now, or are you going to tell me the truth?"

Nicholas stood there for a long moment, weighing the actual structural feasibility of jumping off this exact balcony and simply never coming back to this school, this city, or this conversation, before some deeper, more exhausted part of him finally gave up the fight entirely.

"Yeah," he said, quietly, all the air going out of him at once. "It's me. I'm- yeah. It's been me the whole time."

Euijoo stared at him for a long beat, arms slowly uncrossing, and then, in a voice that had gone strangely calm, "...Prove it."

"What?"

"Prove it. I need to see it. I've spent twenty-four hours convincing myself I'm not insane, and I need, like, a visual." Euijoo took a step back, gesturing vaguely at all of him.

"I- how am I- what am I supposed to do?"

"I don’t know, you figure it out.” Euijoo crossed his arms again, eyes narrowed.

Nicholas sighed, held up his wrist, and flicked it toward the far wall of the balcony. The web shot out with its usual soft thwip, caught the brick in a clean burst, and hung there, glistening slightly in the evening light.

Euijoo made a sound Nicholas had never heard him make before, something between a gasp and a wheeze, and took one unsteady step backward collapsing directly onto the couch, chest heaving, both hands pressed over his face.

"Holy shit," he said, muffled, into his palms. "Holy SHIT."

"Are you okay?"

"No. No, I am not okay, I just watched actual spider silk come out of your actual wrist. Like your ACTUAL wrist." Euijoo dragged his hands down his face, staring up at the ceiling like it might have answers.

"You DID ask me to prove it."

"I know I asked! I didn't think you'd just- do it! I thought there'd be more stalling! I had a whole plan for the stalling phase!" He flopped sideways against the couch cushions, one arm flung over his eyes, breathing slowly evening out. "Give me a second. I need a second. I just watched something biologically impossible happen in front of me."

"It's not impossible, it's just-"

"Do not explain the web fluid to me right now, Nicholas Wang." Euijoo lifted his arm just enough to peer out from under it, and despite everything, the residual shock, the strand of webbing still glinting faintly on the balcony wall behind them, there was something helpless and fond starting to break through his expression.

"Okay. Okay. I'm- processing. Give me a minute and then we're finishing this conversation like adults."

"Take your time." Nicholas said awkwardly.

He took about thirty seconds before he pushed himself upright again, hair mussed from the couch cushions, looking equal parts wrecked and for some reason delighted.

"Oh my god," Euijoo said finally, voice gone soft, cracking the slightest bit, the physical proof apparently having fully cemented what the slip-up in the street had only started. "The chemistry help. The dog. The rain. All of it. That was you. That was always you."

"That was always me," Nicholas confirmed, bracing himself for whatever came next. Anger, betrayal, some justified reckoning for weeks of quiet deception.

He instead got something he hadn't remotely prepared for.

"You let me have a full identity crisis over having two crushes," Euijoo said, and it came out somewhere between a laugh and a sob, disbelieving and happy and furious all at once.

"I thought I was losing my mind. I made an actual pro-con list, Nicholas. I compared you to yourself. I said, out loud, to my own reflection, “well, Nicholas is smarter, but Spider-Man is more emotionally available,” and then I had to sit with that sentence for a full week."

Despite everything, the panic, the months of jealous, tangled misery, the very real possibility he was about to get thrown off this balcony, Nicholas felt a laugh escape him, startled and helpless. "I wasn't more emotionally available. I was just wearing a mask. It's a lot easier to be charming when no one can see your face going through it in real time."

"That's cheating."

"That's not cheating, that's just…uh..."

"It is absolutely cheating, you had an unfair advantage the entire time, I was out here falling for two different guys who are both you, that's not a fair fight." Euijoo shook his head, but he was smiling now, really smiling, some of the tension finally draining out of his shoulders. "You know what the actual worst part is? I liked both of you. Separately. I had actual, distinct reasons for liking each one, and it turns out I just really, really like you, in every single format you come in, which is somehow both incredibly sweet and deeply embarrassing to say out loud."

"I liked you the whole time too," Nicholas said, quieter now, some of the panic finally settling into something steadier. "As both. There was never a version of me that wasn't into you. I just didn't know how to be the guy who got to say that out loud. It was easier behind the mask."

"Well." Euijoo took a step closer, and Nicholas felt his heart do something complicated and enormous in his chest.

"You don't need it anymore. The mask, I mean. I already know. So." He glanced up, something soft and a little nervous but entirely genuine in his expression. "Can I try that again? Properly, this time. Both of you at once, no confusion."

"Try… try what? " Nicholas asked.

All he got in response was a giggle before Euijoo kissed him. Properly this time, unhurried, no fumbling for a mask, no panic, no sudden flight, just Euijoo's hand curling into the front of his shirt.

Nicholas's eyes widened for a second before closing as he found own hand on the side of Euijoo’s face steadily.

It lasted considerably longer than the first one had, and when they finally broke apart, Euijoo was grinning, wide and unguarded, ears gone thoroughly pink.

"For the record," Euijoo said, still close enough that Nicholas could feel the words more than hear them, "I'm still furious about you just flying off after I kissed you the first time. I want that on the record."

"Duly noted."

"You owe me, like, a month of straight honesty as compensation."

"I can manage that."

"Good." Euijoo kissed him again, quick and pleased with himself, before pulling back just far enough to look at him properly, something warm and settled finally replacing the nerves. “Okay, now that I’m dating both of you at once, I have several follow-up questions. This is far from over, I have at least forty things I need explained about the timeline."

"I have different sides of me," Nicholas said, and watched Euijoo's whole face light up at the echo of it, recognizing it now for exactly what it was, and thought that maybe, after two years of aching and two months of an entirely unnecessary rivalry with his own alter ego, this had turned out to be a fairly decent way for things to finally even out.

🍓🕸️🍊

"Absolutely not. No. I've changed my mind. Put me back on the ground."

"You said you wanted to try it." Nicholas laughed, arm tight around Euijoo’s waist.

"I said that four days ago, in a moment of weakness, before I fully understood the physical reality of what “trying it” would actually involve!" Euijoo's voice had climbed at least an octave since they'd left the balcony railing, both arms locked around Nicholas's neck with a grip that made Nicholas genuinely fear he was going to be crushed.

"We're already three blocks in."

"Then turn around! Go back! I'll walk the rest of the way, I have working legs, I've used them successfully for eighteen years-“

Nicholas laughed, which did absolutely nothing for Euijoo's confidence, but he eased the next swing longer and lower anyway, letting them coast in a wide, gentle arc instead of cutting the usual sharp lines he took solo.

"You can open your eyes," Nicholas said, after a minute, when the yelling had settled into something closer to a continuous, muffled whimper against his shoulder. "It's actually a lot less scary if you look."

"No, I am NOT opening my eyes! I’ll never open my eyes again, oh my god, I’m gonna throw up.” Euijoo screamed against the wind.

"Euijoo."

"What?!”

"I've got you. I'm not letting go."

There was a pause. Euijoo's death grip loosened by some small, grudging fraction before he very slowly opened one eye against Nicholas's shoulder, then the other, and Euijoo lifted his head just enough to look out at the city sliding by beneath them.

“Yeah, nope. Passing out.”

"You’re being dramatic."

"You try having your boyfriend swing you seventy metres up in the air!" But he didn't close his eyes again, which Nicholas took note of.

He was, if Nicholas was being honest with himself, enjoying this significantly more than the situation probably warranted. There was something almost unbearably fond about it. Euijoo plastered against him with the singular focus of a man convinced he was about to die, nothing but raw, unfiltered Euijoo, gripping on like Nicholas was the only solid thing left in the world.

"You can let up a little," he said eventually, mostly because his conscience demanded he offer. "I'm not going to drop you."

"I know that. I have complete faith in your abilities as a superhero." Euijoo's grip didn’t loosen even slightly. "This is a separate issue. This is my body doing its own thing independent of my brain's confidence in you."

They swung two more loops before Nicholas finally brought them down onto the roof of Euijoo's building, landing gently.

The second Euijoo’s sneakers touched solid concrete, he immediately let go, staggered three steps sideways, and sat down hard on the roof ledge like his legs had gave way.

"Okay," he said, pushing his glasses up, chest heaving. "Okay. We're not doing that again."

"You didn't like it?"

"I didn’t say that. I said we're not doing it again, those are different statements." Euijoo dragged a hand through his wind-wrecked hair, and looked up at Nicholas.

"Actually. Hang on. New proposal."

"Go ahead."

"I think I'd like to formally request that we downgrade this relationship." Euijoo held up a hand before Nicholas could react. "Not you. Not- the whole you, don't panic, I'm not breaking up with you on a roof, I'd have no way to get down. I mean specifically the flying part. I think I regret agreeing to date Spider-Man. I would like to renegotiate and just date Nicholas, exclusively. No aerial component."

Nicholas laughed, and reached up to peel the mask off, dragging a hand through his hair as the cool night air hit his face. "That's not really how this works."

"Why not? You're one guy. Pick a lane."

"Because we're kind of a package deal," Nicholas said, settling onto the ledge beside him, shoulders pressed together. "You get the whole thing. Spider-Man included. That's just how I come. I can't really unbundle myself."

Euijoo groaned, tipping his head back to the sky, no real complaint in it, just theater. "Yeah. I guess I did sign up for this, didn't I. Whole thing. Both sides. Creepy organic web fluid and everything."

"Both sides." Nicholas agreed.

Euijoo turned to look at him properly, some of the earlier fear finally gone. "I got the whole package instead. Guess I'll live with it."

"Guess you will."

Euijoo leaned in and kissed him then, one hand curling into the front of Nicholas's suit.

When he pulled back, forehead resting against Nicholas's, still a little breathless, he was smiling too wide to fully commit to it.
"For the record," Euijoo murmured, "I'm still never doing that again."

"Sure."

"I mean it this time."

"You said that after the scaffolding too."

"That was different circumstances entirely, don't compare them." Euijoo kissed him again anyway, and settled his head against Nicholas's shoulder, grip on his hand loose and easy now. "Okay. Fine. Maybe once more to get me down from here. But you're buying me dumplings after. The pan-fried kind."

"Deal." Nicholas said, squeezing Euijoo’s hand and placing a kiss on his cheek.