Archive of Our Own

When Johnny steps through the gate, everything is different save for this: Peter’s arms—even if suited in stark black and white—are thick and hard and far too tight around Johnny’s waist. 

Johnny’s hand finds the top of Peter’s head for balance, the mask slick beneath his palm. He wants to grab a handful of Peter’s hair, just to feel it, just to make sure, but this will do for now. Johnny would know him anywhere: upside-down and sideways and inside-out. Broken and whole. Suited or bare. Johnny could pick him out of a faceless line-up by the shape of his rock head, his hitchhiker’s thumb, the arc of his waist between his hard hips alone. 

Peter’s loud, now. No line-up needed, not as he rambles, “You’re alive! You’re alive, you’re okay!” 

Johnny can’t help but smile—an adrenaline-fueled, wavering sort of thing. It’s a ghost, but so is Johnny, and Peter still has him hoisted in the air. Johnny can feel Peter’s heart beating fast, pressed against his stomach. It’s claustrophobic. Johnny needs to be standing. To feel the ground beneath his feet. He could just about kiss these familiar linoleum tiles. 

“Peter,” he says. “Spidey.”

Peter puts him down immediately. Maybe he heard it in Johnny’s voice. Maybe he’s learned to read minds since Johnny left. 

Johnny almost laughs, hysterical and panicked. It’s not like he’d know. Anything could’ve happened in that time. Between all the fighting and sleeping and hoping and scheming and flaming and—

“Hey,” Peter says. “Johnny.” He raises a hand to Johnny’s neck and the other finds the hinge of Johnny’s jaw. He lets go like he’s been burned only to yank his mask out of the way, freeing his lips. He palms Johnny again, tilts his head forward and plants a kiss like a punch on his forehead. It’s stubbly. His lips are warm. 

Peter pulls his mask back into place, his other hand lingering on Johnny’s cheek. His fingers curl behind Johnny’s ear; his thumb fits under the jut of Johnny’s cheekbone. He’s too hot through the suit. This mask is all big blank eyes and Johnny feels pinned by them, a butterfly on a board. Johnny can’t think. 

“You can’t read minds now, can you?” he manages, though he really means Kiss me again. Do it lower. Paint me black and blue so I know you’re really here. 

“Johnny,” Peter says. It sounds like a prayer. 

“Hold my Annihilus,” Johnny answers. “There’s something I need to do.”

He goes. 

——

The fight is not fast, but it ends quickly. 

They’re in space, and then at the hub—all there and safe: Sue, silver-moon hair poking up his nose and muscled arms around his neck, stammering up a storm; Reed, the grey patches near his ears wider than when Johnny had left and his elbows hanging loose with exhaustion but grinning like the sun after a hurricane; Ben, who gives Johnny a gentle, sun-warmed terracotta headbutt and doesn’t say a single word. The kids scream a little, tear up and cling, more childish than Johnny has ever seen them. The Light Brigade leaves and Johnny stays and Peter refuses to drop Johnny’s wrist from his grip, as if every blink has him thinking Johnny’s a mirage. 

He’d be pleased if he weren’t so on edge. 

He isn’t used to being touched like this anymore: with care. With affection. With the intention to do anything other than break. The Negative Zone is a jagged lightning bolt through his memory: it carves a before and an after, and Johnny is having trouble making the jump over the demarcation. 

It helps that, every time he flinches, Peter’s thumb starts stroking the knob of his wrist bone. It pokes out, a glass marble left on the twiggish plane of his forearm. Even without a mirror, Johnny can tell he's slimmed down. Starved, almost. His trainer would kill him if she could see him now. 

Johnny can only imagine—what with the way Peter had always tended to absorb Johnny as an extension of his own body—how much hammering on his newly-defined angles he’s going to have to endure. He’ll be bruised from it within a week. 

Some stupid, young part of him is thrilled at the thought: being marked up by Peter’s touch. 

Maybe it’s that part of him holding the reins when Johnny says he’s going with Peter, to his apartment. To stay there. 

It feels small and selfish to leave his team, to leave his family, but he’s not sure that he’d be able to handle the smothering they’d give him. At least he can yell at Peter if he’s too much. He can’t yell at Sue—not really—no matter how he might want to. Not after what he just did to her. 

He doesn’t like to think about that: the guilt. If Ben had closed the gate instead, he’d have suffocated from it; having closed the gate himself, the guilt at leaving Sue is near-crushing. He can’t win. 

And if he’d gone with her, he’d think about it every minute of the day, with every swish of her hips or click of her little mule loafers. 

So he goes with Peter. And he tries desperately not to think. 

——

Peter’s apartment smells like dust and soy sauce and webfluid. It’s got the same terrible green backsplash tiles in the kitchen and the same crowded, clumsy bookcases that Johnny has always tended to organize for fun. The same sneakers sit by the door: black Nikes meant for skateboarding that Peter’s had since they were teenagers, now so well-worn that the soles are duct-taped to the sides. The same brown denim jacket hangs on the hook; coffee mug succulent sits in the window; black stain sprays up and out of a socket from that tiny electrical fire they’d set when they were high and rewiring Peter’s funky lava lamp while it was still plugged in. 

It takes a weight off Johnny’s shoulders, being submerged in it: here is another thing that hasn’t changed. Peter is, at his core, the same. 

He crosses to Peter’s deep, corduroy couch and tosses himself onto it, pulling a throw pillow over his face. His body aches. He takes four deep breaths, and, when he’s done, he feels a bit better. 

He moves the pillow to look at Peter. He’s throwing papers and files into drawers, the line of his shoulders tight. When he’s done, he stands in front of Johnny, hovering in that white and black suit, mask now balled in his hand. His eyes are wide and his jaw is tight. 

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Johnny says. 

Peter laughs a hysteria-tinged thing, reaching up to tug on his hair. “Yeah, I—yeah. Ha ha. You could say that’s the general feeling I’m having. You, on my couch. You, in that suit. Just—you, generally.”

Johnny stares at Peter a moment longer. 

“I’m starved,” Johnny says. “You got anything other than web fluid in that dinky fridge of yours?” 

Peter tosses his mask onto the coffee table and starts into the kitchen, saying, “I’ve probably got some creamer that voted for Eisenhower,” as he goes. 

Johnny, now alone in the room, buries his face in his hands and exhales hard. The less he thinks about how weird it is to touch cushions, the less upset he’ll be. 

Honestly, Johnny is okay. This was just one more fucked-up something in the long list of somethings that have turned his life into a bad sitcom. 

It’s Peter, anxiously tapping up a storm on the walls and the kitchen counters, who isn’t handling this. It’s been clear since the moment he locked those big blank mask eyes onto Johnny and couldn’t seem to look away. 

Johnny is counting the minutes until Peter pulls on his classic red-and-blues and hops out the window to punch something out. It’ll be good for him to vent. 

Peter walks back into the room with an armful of brightly colored plastic baggies of junk. He promptly dumps them onto Johnny, who jumps at the unexpected impact. 

When Johnny lifts a one-pound package of Trolli brite crawlers off his chest, he doesn’t expect to immediately hock it across the room, unceremoniously knocking a mostly-empty lo mein container to the floor. 

Peter looks at him. 

Johnny looks at the limp noodle on the hardwood. 

Johnny has never thought of himself as particularly anxious, nor particularly calm. He has always been a fair amount of both. He flops easily. Hot and cold, the tabloids say. The tabloids are right, for once. 

He realizes, now, that the brutality of the Negative Zone had kept him fiercely in check: there wasn’t time to shake what with all of the getting his chest cracked open like a buttered crab leg in July he was doing. He joked, and he killed, rip and tear and rip and tear, and he died, stop burning the worms, and he died, and he woke up with insects crawling out of the cavity between his ribs, and he died, and he died, and he died. 

After that paralyzing first time, there wasn’t fear, for Johnny made himself rigid, hardened, and mean to cope. 

Being away from that pressure, that precedent, feels strange—tectonic plates on Sunday. 

Now he’s perched above a boiling, nervous pit on a precipice as wide as his pinky. 

If he moves wrong, he’ll slip. If he slips, there’s no saying how far he’ll fall. 

So he presses flat against the face of the cliff, digs his fingernails into the rock, and clings for dear life. 

But worms. Of all the things for Johnny to be given first. 

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s a tic. Every time you give me something, my brain says Don’t touch it. He has cooties.”

It sounds forced and grating. Johnny turns away to breathe. 

Peter laughs anyway: a fake laugh for a fake joke. “I actually showered this morning. Cleaned behind my ears and everything. No cooties here.”

“You spiffed yourself up for little old me? You shouldn’t have.” 

“What can I say? I’m thoughtful. Some might even go so far as to call me a giver.”

The words spur Johnny. “A giver of heartburn, maybe.” He touches the other packages on his chest, pushing aside a packet of those gross fruit pies Peter loves and two aluminum sleeves of Pop Tarts. 

“They’re the cinnamon kind,” Peter says, as if reading Johnny’s mind. “They’re, um—God.” Peter presses the back of his hand to his lips. 

“They’re my favorite,” Johnny says. 

“I don’t even like that flavor,” Peter says. “They’re the only ones I’ve bought since—Johnny. You were dead.”

“I know,” Johnny says. If you die enough times, it becomes old hat. “I’m like a cat. I have a billion lives. I only used up fifty percent of ‘em.” Peter glares. Johnny sighs. “I’m okay, though. I’m here now. God, you’re breaking my heart with those eyes, Petey.” 

“I couldn’t stop breaking into the Baxter Building and stealing sweatshirts out of your closet,” Peter says, jaw clenching. Johnny suddenly feels sick to his stomach. “I have three of your hoodies in my room. And a sweater. It’s not designer, don’t worry. I knew you’d kill me if you got back and I’d taken the green one with the zipper at the collar, so—”

“You should’ve taken it anyway,” Johnny says. “I have two more.”

“Of course you do, you peacock.”

“And another three in navy blue.”

“You are an embarrassing display of all the things abhorrent in today’s society.” 

Johnny flips him off with a flaming fingertip. 

For a moment, they just stare at each other, memorizing. 

Then Peter says, “I didn’t get it,” wrapping his arms around himself and sinking onto the edge of the coffee table. “I didn’t get it at first. Why I was—taking your freakin’ clothes. Why I missed you so much.” He looks at Johnny brokenly. “We fight eight times out of ten. All we do is threaten to choke each other. Johnny, it was so cold without you. I felt like I was freezing to death every single day.” 

Johnny says “Stop being so sincere,” so Peter doesn’t think the tears in his eyes are heartfelt or something. “It’s disgusting.”

“I can go get your clothes, if you want,” Peter says. He sniffles to try and get rid of the snot dribbling toward his lips. 

“Of course not. God, don’t be stupid.” 

“Okay,” Peter says. “I’ll give you a pass on calling me stupid because any word you say right now could logically be written down as Gospel. Burning Man hath risen again.”

“You’re so ugly,” Johnny says the way some people say I love you, holding an arm out. “Come here.” 

Peter pushes up from the tabletop and slumps towards Johnny and the pile of snacks on his lap. Johnny dumps the food onto the ground to make room. 

“Are you gonna eat those gummy worms?” Peter asks. He sits, then turns Johnny so his legs drape over Peter’s thighs. Johnny has never minded being manhandled by Peter and he isn’t about to start minding now, so he makes himself as comfortable as he can with his tailbone pressing against Peter’s impressively dense thigh. 

“No,” Johnny says, wrapping his arms around Peter’s rock of a head, holding it tight against his chest. He sets his chin by Peter’s ear and tries not to worry about the fact that Peter is mushy rather than angry right now. “But your floor swallowed them. I don’t think you’re ever getting those back.”

“I thought you liked the red and yellow ones.”

“I do,” Johnny assures, planting a hand in Peter’s hair and gently scritching his fingernails along his scalp. Peter tries to grab a fistful of Johnny’s suit, right over his belly, and shudders when he realizes he can’t. “They’re the best ones.”

“I was keeping them in the pantry for you. For when you came home.”

“You trying to say you knew I was alive?” 

Peter shrugs. “I was delusional. I don’t think I ever accepted you were gone. I couldn’t even bring myself to go to your funeral. It felt like—um.”

“What did it feel like?” Johnny asks. He doesn’t want to know, doesn’t have an ounce of morbid curiosity left in him, but it sounds like Peter wants to say it. 

“It felt like Gwen,” Peter says miserably. “And—you’re—Johnny, you were the Meredith Grey to my Cristina Yang, you were my person. When she died, you were there for me. And I didn’t know—who was I supposed to go to, with you gone? Who would I even have left to be that for me?” Peter tugs halfheartedly at Johnny’s hand. “I just couldn’t let myself believe it. It would’ve crushed me. But now you’re here.”

“I am,” Johnny says. 

“You smell different,” Peter mumbles. “Like ozone. You should go shower.”

“But then I’ll smell like your dollar store three-in-one cleanser.” 

“Even that’s better than this. It’s just wrong. Johnny.”

“Peter,” Johnny says, because he thinks Peter needs to hear it. 

Peter shudders again, then shoves Johnny up and off the couch cushions. “Go shower,” he repeats, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “You’ll feel better.”

“Would it cheer you up if I invite you to come with?” Johnny asks. 

“Maybe,” Peter says. “No. I don’t know. You still stink. I wouldn’t want to shower with you unless you smelled right to start with.”

“Is that a date? How romantic.”

“It’s a rain check, if you’re lucky.”

Johnny stares at the tensed planes of Peter—the way his knee bounces, his hands clench. 

“Do you want to come sit in the bathroom while I’m in there? Would that make you feel better?” he asks. 

“That’s a good compromise,” Peter says, relief heavy in his voice. 

Johnny feels Peter watch him shed the old suit like a second skin, exposing the textured scarring spanning down his chest, the horizontal line of it over his hips. It’s pinkish. It’s ugly. A cursed cross: an intersection in the miserable meat of him. 

No matter how many times Johnny tells himself that scars are sexy, these ones are disgusting. 

Peter doesn’t say a word. He stares, lips pressed together so tightly they go bloodlessly white, and he doesn’t say a word. It’s so unlike Peter that it makes Johnny more uncomfortable than he would be if Peter had continued crying about it. About him. Whatever. 

Johnny pulls off his boots, then his tights. Both drop onto the floor in a pile. Though it's far from the first time, Johnny feels a sick sort of rebellion in being naked before Peter. It says: look at me. It says: you’re not so special. It says: I don’t hide anything from you. 

Something in his gut tears like wet tissue. 

He climbs into the shower, pulls the curtain behind him, and turns on the stream. 

“I don’t know how much hot water will come out,” Peter calls. Johnny watches his silhouette sit itself on the countertop, legs dangling. “Hopefully some. It’s been pretty touch and go, recently.”

“I can just warm it,” Johnny says. He heats the pipes enough that the water comes out half-boiling, steaming up the bathroom in seconds. 

Johnny might have imagined it, but he thinks he hears Peter say, “Don’t fall,” over the hush of the water on porcelain. The sentiment is so weird and sweet that Johnny’s heart starts to beatbox and he almost has to sit down. 

“Should I sing for you?” Johnny asks, leaning against the tile. He’s just tired. He squirts some gross generic shampoo into his hand and starts to lather, arms aching. “Give you a show? I’m a little behind on the top forty, but I can give you some Beyonce. Sasha Fierce never goes out of style. I got a big egoooo, such a huge egooo! I love his big—”

“Just clean yourself, Flame Brain,” Peter says. 

“Okay,” Johnny says quietly. He does. 

——

That night, wrapped in Peter’s bedsheets while Peter apprehends robbers and rapists and missing cats with extreme prejudice, Johnny dreams. 

He sees it so distinctly: axes and insects and Prax Ord gleaming in the low light of their hive cell; billions of bugs and miles of reddish sand and a hard table digging into his tailbone. He can smell it: antiseptic and blood. Hear it: the crack of cartilage and the cries of fighters in agony. Feel it: the terrible, magnificent glory of being snuffed under a boot. 

Blood and entrails… screaming and dying… death and annihilation! 

He wakes up gasping and groping at his chest and wonders if there’s any of himself left in his stomach, or if that had been bled out of him over time. 

Two years. God. 

——

“Sonuva nutcracker,” Johnny says, shaking the pan to dislodge the pancakes from the terrible burned bottom. This is decidedly not a nonstick pan. Not even Johnny’s affinity for heat could’ve prepared him for this enormous, terrible hurdle. Peter needs new pans. So many new pans, to go with a new apartment: one that doesn’t leak or croak or mutter in Johnny’s ears; one without Dementor-like tendrils for fingers that crawl through the dark and stroke feather-light over Johnny’s neck while he hovers in that place between waking and sleep. Johnny hates himself for wanting to stay here with the eerie ringing and the coughing radiator and Peter’s dirty underwear all over the place, but he just. Wants things to be still. He wants to be still. He wants nothing at all to be different. For a moment. Fear or not, he wants to stay stagnant. 

It’s just bearing on four when Peter climbs through the window, graciously unbloody. 

He freezes halfway over the sill when he sees Johnny. One of his feet lands in the wet sink and he slips, falling head-first over the edge of the counter and faceplanting on the hardwood. 

He pops up comically quickly, whips off his mask, and stares. 

Johnny prefers the hot hazel of his eyes to the mask’s glare any day. 

Peter seems calmer now, too, the planes of him softer. Johnny can only imagine the state of his poor knuckles. 

“Did you forget?” Johnny asks, smiling ruefully. 

“No,” Peter says, shoving himself to his feet. “Ow. Ouch. No, I didn’t. I’m just shocked by the fact that you’re making food right now. In my deserted kitchen. I saw a tumbleweed come through here last week like it was a haunted Wild West saloon or something. I didn’t even know the stove still lit up. Shouldn’t you be asleep? Sleeping very deeply? Resting and taking care of yourself?”

Johnny glares. “No. I’m cooking for you like a good trophy husband would.”

Peter chuckles, rubbing a hand over his cheek. “If anything, I’m the trophy husband, Hot Stuff. Tell me you know that, at least.” He boosts himself up onto the countertop, massaging the knee he’d landed on. “So why are you taking over my kitchen so enthusiastically? And so early? What on Earth is possessing you to—”

“Me on Earth. That’s a pretty good reason, huh?”

“Fair. But don’t interrupt me,” Peter says, kicking Johnny’s thigh pointedly. “Just ‘cuz everything is shiny and new again doesn’t mean you’ve gotta get up before the sun to start cooking for all the time you missed. You could wait until a more reasonable hour. Say, five a.m.?” 

“It’s been two years since I’ve made a pancake,” Johnny says. He does not address the bottle of abhorrent cheap vodka left open by his elbow or the batch of oatmeal raisin cookies cooling on the stovetop. “Mind your own business. Let me do this.”

Peter stares, cowed, then starts pulling off the top half of the suit and setting towards his bedroom. “Did you vacuum my living room too?” he calls over his shoulder, incredulous. 

“Yes. I threw out all your gross old takeout and brought the bag outside.”

“Aw, even the potstickers? I was saving those for a special occasion.”

Johnny snorts. “Glad to see my Jesus-returning-on-the-third-day skit wasn’t special enough for your potstickers.” 

“Jesus? You know my cousin?”

Johnny rolls his eyes. This, at least, feels familiar. “Then am I the burning oil?”

“You’re the burning something,” Peter says. He returns tucked into a threadbare hoodie that yells GAP across the chest and some grey sweatpants with a hole in the knee. “Some might even call you flaming.” 

“If nothing else, I’m devastatingly hot.” Johnny slides a slightly crisp pancake onto the dish at his elbow. It’s plastic, the type of thing kids make in preschool. It’s from Franklin, actually, for Spider-Man: it’s all decorated with little marker drawings of Spidey swinging between distinctly misshapen skyscrapers, saving blobs that are either children or chimaeras, eating copious amounts of hot dogs. 

Franklin’s plate, for some reason, tugs Johnny’s heart right into the acidic pit of his stomach. 

Peter’s hand brushes the curve of Johnny’s shoulder. 

Johnny jumps, then relaxes under it. He looks over, meeting Peter’s eyes. 

When he looks at Peter, he doesn’t feel like Johnny Storm, wielder of the Cosmic Control Rod, master of Annihilus and the Insect Legion Fulminata. 

When he looks at Peter, he feels small, and soft-bellied, and lost in the come-down. When he looks at Peter, he doesn’t have to be hard. He doesn’t have to insist to himself that he’s okay. He can let himself feel. 

He takes a breath that stutters somewhere behind his ribs, like some fucked up allergic reaction, and does. 

It hits him like a storm wave, the fear and exhaustion, the undertow pulling him deep into unfamiliar waters. Something about the sea has always made him sad—the way it muscles towards the sky, towards the sand, and can’t reach either; the way it shatters rock and shaves the earth when all it wants to do is caress; the salt of it and the vitriol and the strength that goes so underestimated. It’s the place that rears sharks and it’s treated like a cesspit. Johnny doesn’t mind the sea, the melancholia. It’s a between place. It’s not weighty power and it’s not grounded. (It’s not the Four suit and it’s not Peter.) It’s less, and more. (It’s both, and neither.) It’s okay, and not. It’s here, and not. It’s quiet, and not. It’s the possibility of both. 

Johnny thinks that grey has never seemed so beautiful. Now, grey feels like somewhere he could call home. 

He sniffs sharply and leans into Peter’s warm chest, nose squishing into the hard lines of Peter’s collarbones. He presses his lips together so he doesn’t say anything mortifying and terrible like I missed you like a lung, or You’re my first and last thought, every time I live and die, like summer crashing into winter, me crashing into you. 

Peter’s palm cups the back of Johnny’s neck. His other hand sits on Johnny’s waist, then slides around to the small of his back, then climbs up the ladder of his spine to rest between his shoulder blades. 

“You're good,” Peter tells him. “You’re great. You’re the same Johnny you've always been, just sorta tired and wise. Like Gandalf. Hey, we’re gonna figure this out.”

Johnny takes a breath. “You think I could use the Cosmic Control Rod as a butt plug if I really commit?”

Peter cracks up, laughing way harder than the joke warrants, his arms coming around Johnny so tight that he’s entirely squished into Peter’s warmth. Peter lifts him a little again, a mirror of the moment at the gate, his crooked nose right next to Johnny’s ear, and he laughs, and he laughs, and Johnny has never experienced someone else’s relief so audibly. 

Johnny burrows into Peter’s neck. If he can still make Peter laugh as wildly as this, then there’s got to be some of him left unflattened. (Both, and neither. Both both both.) And that’s the best thing Johnny could manage to think right now. 

——

“Marco?” 

Johnny sets a finger on fire. It throws the corner of the living room he’s hiding in into stark relief. Nothing here but him. He breathes, relieved. “Polo.”

“Kirkland Signature.” Peter clambers across the pitch dark room, stepping easily over and around tables and loose magazines. “Target brand. Walmart brand. Shoprite brand.”

Johnny sighs. “Just find the circuit box, Kraven the Bargain Hunter.”

The door opens. “Hello?”

“Oh my god Mary Jane,” Peter says. “Why are you—what are you? Here?”

“Face it, Tiger,” comes her disembodied voice, “you can’t even find the jackpot without me.”

Johnny snorts. 

“Who else is here?” MJ asks. 

“Johnny,” he sighs, pained. “Unfortunately.”

“Oh!” and then, “Oh my gosh! Come let me hug you!”

“MJ,” Peter grunts as he clicks things willy nilly in the circuit box. For a very educated man of science and engineering, he’s surprisingly incapable when it comes to usual handyman tasks. I’ve got this, Johnny, he’d said. Go take a nap, Johnny, he’d said. Stop butting your nose in and let the master do his work, Johnny, he’d said. Johnny would like to say some things to him, now. “This is not the time.”

“What, do you want me to come back later? I took the subway all the way from Manhattan. From a shoot. I didn’t even get dinner first, and I know I passed three separate Prets.” A moment. “I look really sexy right now. And I want to squeeze Johnny’s cute butt.”

“My cheek awaits your tender caress,” Johnny says. 

“He’s a poet!”

“He’s a pain in my tail,” Peter grumbles. Something clicks. The lights come on. “I’m God.”

“His ego is minuscule, obviously,” Johnny says. Then, “Holy wow, look at you! You do look hot!”

“I know!” MJ does a little twirl in her black blazer dress and long, long leather boots. She makes a grabby hand. “Come here!”

Johnny goes and dutifully accepts both a loud kiss on the cheek and a sharp pinch on the ass. 

“I missed you,” MJ says, patting his face cheek. 

“Aw,” Johnny says with a smile. Over MJ’s shoulder, Peter shoves a handful of papers into the silverware drawer. “That’s so embarrassing for you.”

She laughs, loud, and rubs his shoulder. “I’ll come back for you another night, Johnny Storm. We’ll go out, okay? We haven’t been dancing in—well. We’re due for a dance!”

Johnny pretends his heart hasn’t just sunk into some tar pit in his gut. “Yeah,” he says halfheartedly. He clears his throat and tries again. “For sure. I’ll call you.”

She squeezes his hand once, her brown skin so bright and alive against his sallow, then goes over to Peter and steps on his foot. 

“Ouch?” he says. 

“Text Harry back before you give him a coronary,” she says. She kisses him on the cheek, turns around, and leaves, only the scent of her fancy dark perfume hovering in her wake. 

“What just happened?” Johnny says. 

Peter buries his face in his hands and mumbles, “Oy vey.”

——

When Johnny goes to check the silverware drawer for the papers, they’re gone. 

——

Sometimes Johnny forgets. Watching Peter tear a napkin to pieces or lose composure after dropping an egg or hyperventilate because he’d forgotten to call Betty Brant to make sure she’d gotten home from work safely—it makes it easy for Johnny to forget. Peter’s neuroticisms smooth Johnny’s own nervous tics out of him like a magnet; for a minute, Johnny will bite his nails or bounce his knee or shake like a leaf, but then Peter will start pacing on the ceiling and everything will feel different. It’s like Peter, simply by being Peter, makes Johnny more like the old Johnny. 

For that, Johnny is infinitely grateful. 

He doesn’t do a very good job of showing it, he thinks. 

——

oh shit, i fucked up — a list by johnny storm

1. let Reed open a portal to the Negative Zone in Peter’s coat closet—so u can keep an eye on things—only it means that there is a portal to the Negative Zone in Peter’s coat closet. u now realize that is not the type of fun science anomaly normal people want in their house.
2. called Peter in the middle of his big work presentation because ur pretty sure u can hear a hissing noise coming from somewhere in the apartment and u need something good and loud to block it out with before you freaking snap and set the whole place on fire. Death and annihilation and no space to breathe.
3. made Peter drink the glowing green horse milk and get shitfaced out of his mind and maybe u grinded on Mary Jane and maybe Peter kissed Els Udonta right on the lips. The apartment?? trashed. Annihilus clogged the toilet. your fucking fault. 

Johnny puts down his phone. 

He sort of wishes burning hurt. 

——

So Johnny isn’t actually handling everything as well as he thought. 

Peter curses him out and looks like he’s passing a rock collection worth of kidney stones, and it’s nothing like their fights over superior hotdog stands and the implications of flirty sky-written messages that cause a jealous Felicia Hardy to bruise Peter tip-to-toe. This one has a weight at the navel of it. A barnacle-ridden anchor slung with seaweed and shit. 

Johnny cracks like a painted vase under the boot of a tomb robber. 

It’s terrible—all gasping and stuttering, telling Peter about the bugs and how he still hears them skittering in the walls when the moon is that one shade of silver or the streets are particularly barren. Johnny explains the sea, and how it’s better to be clobbered by waves than to be the sky or the sand, and how he sometimes thinks he ought to have stayed behind the gate because it would’ve been easier than this. Better for everyone. All the conviction he’d had when he’d first come through is gone, because Johnny has never been the strong one. He’s the bleeding heart and the weeping soul and he’s all underbelly. He’s not made of the stuff the rest of them are: concrete dust and red red marrow. He’s all talk. He can’t even trick himself anymore. 

Peter keeps trying to hug him. Johnny keeps having to shove him away before he fucking chokes, but Peter still forgives him. Even for that. Peter forgives him for a lot of things Johnny thinks he shouldn’t. Peter is too compassionate for his own good. He’s too good to Johnny for his own good. 

Johnny feels well and truly hollowed after, when they sit shoulder to shoulder and stare at the ceiling and find themselves, for a moment, speechless. They’re never speechless—especially not together. But this speechlessness has something to it: not an anchor, but a buoy. A white donut float, bobbing on a lightly rolling tide, with enough space to share. 

Peter, eyes red, makes a promise that pierces right through Johnny’s brain: “I’d never let you drown.” 

Maybe they’re good together—better than either of them thought—if they can handle each other at their worst. Maybe it means that they can work this out. 

——

Peter’s back is warm against Johnny’s. They’re curled around their pillows, facing away from each other—Johnny towards the windows, Peter towards the closet. 

Peter sleeps loudly, snoring and muttering and rolling, his hair rustling against the sheets with every move. He doesn’t wear socks to bed. He keeps kicking Johnny’s shins with his freezing icicle toes. 

Johnny closes his eyes and remembers how to breathe. 

——

Johnny is taking a bath because he can’t stop thinking about the way Peter puts away a manila folder or tosses his mask aside or hangs up a phone call the moment Johnny walks into a room. 

He’s also taking a bath because he can’t stop thinking about Peter in general. 

Johnny’s problems can’t reach him in here, with the popcorn ceiling and the ring of mold where the porcelain ends and the subway-tiled wall begins. Not with Peter’s hamper overflowing with both of their clothes, or Johnny’s toothbrush—blue—next to Peter’s—red—in the plastic cup by the faucet. Not with Peter’s Colgate Total next to Johnny’s charcoal toothpaste, two sluggish tubes on the damp countertop. Not with the cracked mirror on the front of the medicine cabinet or the bloodstained tissues in the trash or the packet of half-dry asswipes on the lid of the toilet that flushes and flushes for hours at a time. 

It’s like Peter’s watching over him even when he’s out swinging. I’d never let you drown. 

Here, Johnny can pretend that there’s only lavender bubbles and tea candles and big budget bottles of Rosé grown slick where his sudsy fingers wring the neck. Only what he can see. If it isn’t in the room, it isn’t real. 

It’s both thrilling and terrifying. A nightmare in its release. 

Johnny sinks deeper into the tub, chin submerged, and shuts his eyes for a minute before opening them again. In the quiet, he starts to hear things. In the quiet, he remembers he’s alone. 

Johnny scratches his clay-masked forehead, then runs a hand over his chest. Just to check. 

Johnny gives himself a depressed, lackluster handjob before draining the tub and is almost relieved to open the door and all the windows and let the white noise back in. 

He’s never been good with silence. It gives him too much time to worry. 

He needs noise to focus him, if he’s going to figure out what the hell Peter is hiding. 

——

Johnny checks his reflection in the screen of his phone one last time, uneasy. He’s wan with nerves, the color all but sucked from his cheeks, and it makes the blues of his eyes stand out sharp and icy. 

Growing up, he’d always liked his eyes—he thought they were striking, blue green like his mom’s rather than pale like his father’s and Sue’s—but now he thinks he looks overwrought, almost fake. That even this most raw and untouched part of him is overdone. He doesn’t look like himself. He doesn’t look like much of anything. 

He shuts his eyes in revulsion, holds his breath, and knocks lightly on the frame of the door. 

It takes a moment, but May Parker opens it, her hair neatly curled and a pressed turquoise polo shirt hanging off her narrow shoulders. 

She smiles immediately, enormously, and takes Johnny into her arms. She doesn’t even have to speak. Johnny hears it. 

“I missed you too, Aunt May,” he mumbles, and kisses the side of her head. 

“Oh, my dear,” she says, rubbing his back. “My poor old heart can’t take all this back and forth! You’ll have to stay here forever. Move into my guest room. Never put yourself in danger again.”

Johnny feels his cheeks go pink and pulls back, trying to hide how pleased the sentiment makes him. “I guess Peter gets his protective streak from you, huh?”

“Oh, I’m sure you understand where it comes from. Has he been incessantly watching you these days?” May asks, palm on Johnny’s back, leading him inside. 

“Worse,” Johnny says. “He’s been hiding some mysterious thing he’s been up to from me, as if it’ll do anyone any good.”

May hums in understanding. She deposits him at the bench on the far side of her rickety kitchen table. “That’s a habit of his. He thinks everyone other than him is made of glass.”

“It’s ridiculous,” Johnny says. “As if I haven’t handled worse than whatever he’s got going on and still made it through.” Johnny huffs, tugging on his hair. “I wish he’d just talk to me, really talk to me, instead of changing the subject and—pretending everything is fine. I don’t know.”

“The thing about Peter,” May says, filling two mugs with water and then dropping bags of peppermint tea into them, “is that he always feels he’s hurting us from a noble place. He’s certain that keeping us in the dark about his problems is compassionate, because letting us see those parts of him would hurt us more than him pushing us away.”

“He can be such a doofus sometimes,” Johnny says. 

“Quite,” May agrees. She sits next to Johnny and holds out the mugs. He warms them with his palms. “That’s such a nifty trick.”

Johnny shakes his head, smiling. “So he hasn’t mentioned anything strange to you? Maybe something he’s tailing for the Bugle?” 

“I’m afraid not,” May says. “He just doesn’t think it’s cool to gossip with his decrepit old aunt anymore.”

“Hey,” Johnny says, chucking her little wrinkled chin with a knuckle, “don’t badmouth my Aunt May like that. The nerve of you!”

A smile shoots across May’s face and, though they don’t share an ounce of blood, it's all Peter. She pats Johnny’s cheek. “I’m so truly happy to see you,” she says. It shines out of her eyes. 

Johnny grins. 

She wipes a tear off his cheek, strong hand infinitely gentle. “Come on. Let’s watch Say Yes to The Dress: Atlanta and judge absolutely everything those poor girls try on.”

Johnny laughs wetly and says, “I’d like that very much.”

——

Johnny dreams in halves: a haze of navy night and yellow lands undulating, living and breathing, a body in valleys and hills and canyons deeper than they are long; a flame blistering black and the skin it devours terrible pink, his torso cleaved away from his legs, the Negative Zone’s moon half a hard-boiled egg on the horizon. 

He wakes with a strangled cry. 

The other half of the bed is empty. 

Johnny shoves the heels of shaking hands into his eyes. He sits, heaves, and listens. Feels with his warmth—a terrified, caged sort of sentinel security—for another body. Hidden, maybe. In the dark. In the coat closet. 

There’s Peter, who came back in an hour ago and fell asleep starfished on the living room floor, swatting at Johnny when he tried to corral him into bed. Familiar and soft-edged, he bleeds yellow. Johnny wants to take the warmth off Peter’s skin and wrap it over his shoulders like a flannel sheet smelling of clementine pith and clean, cold wind. 

He staggers out the window onto the fire escape instead. 

It’s raining. The thought to fly doesn’t cross his mind. It hasn’t, really, since he’s been back: his powers feel clumsy, uncouth, and he’s afraid to really test them near people, but there are people everywhere. It’s better, for a short while, to stay grounded. (Both, and neither. Neither, neither, neither.)

He tips his head back, lets the droplets hammer on his cheeks, pool over his closed eyes, slither down his neck in rivulets. He thinks it’s like spring coming. He thinks it’s like baptism. New life. Sinless. He hopes he’ll be clean now. He wants to be clean now. Snake the blessing down his navel to settle in his gut, gold and gilded to the depths of him, a Tabernacle holding his own blood and bread. 

For a moment, he worries he could drown chasing that feeling. Utter purity. (I’d never let you drown. Johnny wants to ask, really? How would you know? I’m halfway there now.)

He sits on the flooded iron floor, knees to his chest. He soaks. He grows soft, damp: stickers scrubbed off plastic boxes, image gone but glue left behind. He always sticks. Leaves a smudge over everything he touches. Will he melt in this rain—this city-style, this cloud-spitted, this angel-weeping, ark-carrying, dirty-watercolor rain? 

He sits until the clouds break. Crepuscular rays: that’s what he wants to put out. Shards of golden light fractured through the grey. Is it too much to ask, to glow? Gently, softly, light?

Johnny rises, sodden, and climbs back through the window. He shucks his clothes. Something about them itches. With limp fingers, he sifts through Peter’s drawers. Pulls out a hoodie large enough to get lost in and a pair of sweatpants that fall past his feet. He cuffs the bottom of them. Dabs his hair on a bath towel. Tosses his wet clothes in the drier and runs them. 

In the living room, he bumps into a barely-risen Peter, almost losing his footing. 

Peter steadies him, big hands round Johnny’s wrists. He’s sleep-rumpled, unshaven, favoring his left leg, though Johnny hadn’t so much as known he was injured. Maybe that’s why he didn’t want to make the trek to bed. All Peter’s nervous defenses are down and the raw openness of his face, his eyes, is enough to make Johnny’s stomach twist. He wants to say don’t let anyone else see that. Don’t you know what they’ll do with that?

“Hey, hey,” Peter says. “Where are you going?”

Johnny blinks. “I don’t know.”

Peter hunches forward enough to meet Johnny’s gaze, his brows tucked together at the middle. “Well, where are you now?” 

Johnny shakes his head. 

Peter pulls him close, arms circling Johnny’s shoulders. Johnny closes his eyes and lets himself be held. 

Peter smells like web fluid and burnt toast this morning. Johnny buoys himself on lungfuls of it. 

“I don’t even have the heart to tease you when you look like this,” Peter mumbles. “How can I fix it?”

Peter is always asking things like that—always willing to attempt the impossible for Johnny. 

“This,” Johnny says, “is good.”

Peter squeezes tighter. 

He waits for Johnny to pull away first. 

He keeps his hands around Johnny’s arms, as if Johnny needs to be held up. Part of Johnny is mortified by it. The other part is gutturally desperate for it. 

Peter stares at him for a moment then says, with a helpless little laugh, “Can I get my camera?” 

Johnny feels his cheeks go redder. “I thought you weren’t gonna make fun of me.”

“I’m not,” Peter says, and it’s starting to look like he’s blushing too: the shells of his ears go red and his feet shuffle a moment. “You’re wearing all my clothes, Johnny. You—looking like this.”

“You want this eternalized.”

“Yes,” Peter says. 

“Really?” Johnny asks. 

“Yes,” Peter says. 

“Okay,” Johnny says, figuring this might as well happen at this point. Being in front of Peter’s camera is never a pain, but now? He doesn’t think he could feel the sting of it even if it was. 

The prints are better than he could’ve imagined—all apricot with morning sunlight, dust motes turned white and orange, and Johnny achingly shadowed on the couch, by the window, on the edge of the coffee table. Feet knobby and bare and curls frizzled and wild from his lack of desire to take care of them recently, the tips a paler blond than the ashy roots—a honeyed reminder of summers lost. Lips parted, eyes closed. Like he’d been sucker-punched. 

One image has Peter’s hand peeking out the bottom, reaching for Johnny. 

God, Johnny wishes. To be reached for like that. 

Only Peter could turn this hollow, aching terror into something beautiful. He’d only trust Peter to handle him like this. Hands on wet clay. He wants Peter to sink into his skin and reshape him. A new image. Peter’s signature scrawled into the bottom of his foot. 

——

Johnny and Mary Jane don’t go dancing. They sit together on Peter’s wrinkled sheets, shoulder to shoulder, and hotbox his bedroom. 

The weed makes Johnny feel slow, deaf, and stupid. It’s everything terrible he’s ever thought about himself brought to the forefront of his mind, unavoidable, and it makes his stomach sink. It makes him swallow against that long-buried childhood stutter. It’s not a good high—not even close. But Mary Jane is doing her best to keep him happy and here, and he owes her infinitely much for that.  

She had grabbed his hand while they went through all the saved porn on Peter’s laptop to give themselves a good laugh, but now they're watching Guy’s Grocery Games and she’s yet to let go. She’s all strawberry shampoo and something about it makes Johnny want to laugh, or maybe cry. Supermodel uses kid’s shampoo. Sometimes the world really is beautiful. 

“So Peter hasn’t been around much lately,” MJ says, walking her pointer and middle fingers up and down the tendons poking through the skin of Johnny’s wrist. 

“Yeah—sorry,” Johnny says. His lips are clumsy. His eyes keep closing. “He’s doing something stupid. Spider-Man is, anyway. He’s h-hiding it from me though.” 

“Hmm. I haven’t heard anything about it.”

Johnny sighs, slumping down on the pillows. “Neither has Aunt May. So he’s giving us all the baby-proof treatment.”

“You know what he’s like,” MJ says. When Johnny looks at her, she elaborates by twirling her hand senselessly.

“Ah,” Johnny says, distracted by the pretty green paint on her fingernails. “Anyway, sorry he’s not around.”

“I think I’d rather flush myself down a toilet than deal with the two of you together,” MJ says. She prods his ribs and he squirms, grinning unintentionally. “Together, you two are a pain in my ass. An absolute shit-show. Together, you two make me drink alien horse milk and go crazy and sleep with some purple alien women. One of you at a time, however, is bearable.” 

“But I’m more bearable, right?”

“The most bearable,” MJ promises, hooking an arm around Johnny’s neck. “Oh! He’s making waffles! Mmm, waffles. Oh god. We need snacks.”

Johnny grabs the secret hidden Pringle’s tube from under Peter’s bed. They eat and watch the man on screen make some very crispy golden waffles and then put cheddar cheese on top of them. 

“God is dead,” Johnny says, chip crumbs on his chest and a single tear on his cheek, “and that man killed him.”

MJ laughs loudly. It rings like bluebells and New Years and headlights in the pitch black of night. 

He leans his head on her narrow shoulder. She holds him so tight and so different from how Peter holds him. She doesn’t hold him like she’s protecting him—she holds him like she’s just so thrilled to have him here. It’s really, really good. 

——

“Just tell me you’re not mooching off of my poor, poor Peter,” Harry Osborn says. 

“Uh,” Johnny says. 

“Quit it, Har,” Peter says, shoving something in his pocket, bustling through the room like a tiny-waisted tornado to find—something. Johnny isn’t sure what. “As if I didn’t mooch off of you for the majority of our young adult lives.” 

“That’s different,” Harry says. “I care about you. You knew my dad. That was a whole different enchilada.” 

“I care about him. Also, I know the Thing,” Peter says, distracted. He tosses a throw blanket right onto Johnny. Johnny removes it from his head and then folds it and hangs it off the back of the couch. “That’s pretty much the equivalent of knowing your dad.” 

“Ben is not my dad,” Johnny says, turning towards Peter, disgusted. 

“Did I say he was?”

“Pretty much!”

“I said knowing Ben is like knowing Norman was. That’s not the same thing.” Peter hits Johnny in the head with a throw pillow so aggressively that Johnny literally falls off the couch. 

“Ow,” he says from the floor. 

“Wuss,” Harry mutters. 

“My life is a misery.” Johnny’s new position gives him an entirely new outlook. Just, generally, a new outlook. Suddenly inspired, he turns onto his side and lifts the couch cushion. He finds a quarter. He holds it up. 

“You found it!” Peter says. “My hero.” He then deigns to help Johnny off the rug. 

“It’s all part of a day’s work,” Johnny says. 

Peter pats Johnny’s cheek twice then promptly runs out the door. 

Johnny shoves his hands into his pockets. “So should we take bets on what he’s doing with the quarter?”

“I don’t like you,” Harry says. 

“Excellent,” Johnny replies. 

They sit on opposite ends of the couch in utter silence until the door cracks open again. 

He looks over his shoulder, ready to guess Peter had bought a single rubber bouncy ball with the quarter. But it’s not Peter in the doorway. 

Not Peter is actually an enormously muscled man in a Jets jersey. His light brown skin is impressively smooth but his goatee situation is in dire need of an upgrade. 

“Oh my god,” the man says. “Johnny Storm is on Parker’s couch.”

Johnny feels his stomach sink as a carefully charming smile rises to his lips. “The Human Torch, at your—”

“The Nascar driver,” the man says reverently. 

And then Johnny’s smile is real. 

“I’m Thompson,” he says. “I mean Flash. Thompson. Flash Thompson. Well, my name is Eugene, but stupid names are apparently a curse handed down genetically through my mom’s side of the family or something—”

“Breathe, bozo,” Harry says. 

Flash does. “Wow, that was so uncool of me.”

“It’s fine,” Johnny says, shaking his head. “It’s—come sit down, what are you just standing in the door for? Are you a vampire?”

“No,” Flash says. He toes his sneakers off. He has surprisingly small feet for such a large man. “I’m just—wow. Wow, wow, wow. I mean, Parker talks about you a lot, but really getting to meet you.” He shakes his arms loosely, gobsmacked. 

Johnny, who has hardly left the house in weeks and thus hasn’t had a speechless fan experience in two years, preens a little. He thinks he deserves it. He thinks he needs this, actually. 

He smiles. “If I ever get back out there, I’ll make sure Pete gives you some tickets to watch a race in person,” he says. Then, looking at Harry, “Both of you.”

Flash runs a palm over Harry’s close-cropped hair as he perches on the arm of Peter’s big leather grandpa recliner. Harry, though, is looking at Johnny. He tilts his head slightly to the side. 

Johnny chalks that up as a win. 

And that’s how he meets Peter’s friends. 

——

Johnny comes home from Peter’s favorite bodega with a half-drunk chocolate Muscle Milk in his hand and something enormous and gaping in his chest. 

That’s the thing about deciding to let things hurt, Johnny has learned: more often than not, the pain is just an aching absence—the moment after church bells ringing when the city goes momentarily silent, a peach pit hitting the bottom of the garbage can. 

He toes off his sneakers, shucks his coat, and meanders through the apartment as if he’s being pulled. 

He finds Peter in the kitchen, dancing to himself while singing Born to Run under his breath and eating slices of honey-glazed turkey out of the paper wrapping. 

Johnny walks right up to Peter and captures his wiggling body between his arms. 

Peter stops with a squeak, mutters, “I didn’t freaking see you,” and then his arms come up around Johnny. 

Johnny presses his face into Peter’s shoulder and breathes. 

Peter’s fingers dance, agitated, through the ends of Johnny’s hair and along the top knobs of his spine. He palms Johnny’s lower back, cups the back of his head. Sways them slightly. Presses his nose into Johnny’s temple. 

“What is this?” Peter says. 

“Just,” Johnny says. “Shut up. Or I’ll burn your eyebrows off. And then you’ll look even more stupid than usual.”

“Yeah, okay,” Peter sighs, tightening his grip. His fingers find the skin of Johnny’s lower back beneath his sweatshirt and he drags his nails there, feather-light. Johnny shudders. Peter squeezes. “Whatever you need, Blondie, you got it. Dunno how you brainwashed me into being your yes-man, or whatever, but here we are. Maybe I oughta check in with one of the mind control crazies. Wanda, or Xavier. Ugh, that’s so annoying. Can’t you just admit if you somehow got mind control powers and are now forcing me to be nice to you? Because there’s no other explanation—”

“Have you ever stopped talking?” 

“Nope,” Peter says, popping the p.

Johnny’s next breath does that embarrassing stuttering thing. 

Peter makes a small sound like he’s been punched and rubs Johnny’s back, big circles, all warmth. “You’re all messed up today. It’s making me twitchy. And worried.”

“Just. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Am I ever anywhere else?”

“You’re always everywhere else. Especially these days.”

“Well,” Peter says. “Not today. Okay? I’ll stay in.” Johnny doesn’t bother saying that he knows Peter will be gone the moment Johnny’s eyes close; they both know, and Johnny can’t begrudge him that. “Come on, we’ll put on a movie. You can pop some popcorn right on the couch like I’m a hot date you wanna impress. Dinner and a show.”

“Are you gonna talk the whole time?”

“It would be asking an awful lot of me not to.”

Johnny huffs, but he can’t kid himself. He presses closer yet to Peter, close enough to feel the jackrabbit patter of his heart against his chest, and tries to settle into the familiar comfort of the noise. 

——

When Peter comes home from work-work on an especially bleak Friday, tie swinging and glasses coated in a film of dirty rainwater, he’s got a tiny bundle of something in his arms. 

“What is that?” Johnny asks pleasantly, shutting his well-loved copy of Emma.

Peter hoists it up and turns it. He holds it above his head and begins to deliver a warbling, possibly offensive impression of the Simba sequence. 

This is when Johnny realizes that there is a puppy inside the blanket bundle. 

A tiny puppy with matted yellow fur and the most miserable blue eyes Johnny has ever seen. 

“Oh my god,” he says. He scrambles out of Peter’s favorite grandpa recliner and across the room, nearly tripping over himself in haste. “Peter. Peter, this is a dog.”

“I found him in a cardboard box in an alley on my way home,” Peter explains, handing the bundle to Johnny, who cradles it like a newborn, promptly beginning to sob. “No tags, no one looking for him, nothing. We can take him to see if he’s chipped in the morning, but I doubt it.”

“Okay,” Johnny says, tipping his head on top of the puppy’s, the way he would do for Val. 

“I know we can’t technically have a pet in this apartment,” Peter says, “but I just couldn’t leave him. He was all alone. No one should be all alone. I took one look at his face and just knew I had to bring him home. Look at him, look at that. I couldn’t—I just. Something about him breaks my heart. It’s okay, right? You’re okay with it? We’ll keep him quiet. It’ll be fine. We’ll keep him safe.”

“Even without the tights you’ve gotta be the hero,” Johnny sniffles. He plants a kiss to the puppy’s forehead, then another. “Hi,” Johnny says to him, “hi, I’m Johnny. You’re safe now. Do you have a name, sweet angel?”

“I thought we could call him Sandwich, because I fed him my leftover ham and cheese while we walked home together,” Peter says. 

“That’s so stupid,” Johnny sobs. “I hate you. That’s perfect.”

Peter drops his chin on Johnny’s shoulder, looking down at the stray dog that is now their dog. “Should we take nice pictures all together? Like, family photos to put on the wall?”

Johnny, snot dribbling towards his top lip, looks at Peter. 

He looks at Peter because that sounds like Peter assumes Johnny is going to be living here for—well. A while. He looks at Peter because fruit bruises even when it isn’t touched. He looks at Peter because Peter is afraid to be around the people he loves, afraid to brain them with a misplaced elbow or a clumsy shot of webbing or a man in a metal Rhino suit, and he’s offering his home to Johnny. 

The worst part is that Johnny’s stomach doesn’t turn at the thought. 

“Yeah,” Johnny says. He turns just enough to bury his face in Peter’s shoulder and wipe his snot into the cotton of his ugly blue button-up. “You can take them, can’t you? Can’t you take them for us? Is there even a timer setting on your decrepit old camera? It’s not worth having if there’s no timer setting. I’d know. I’m the connoisseur of tasteful timer cam nudes.”

Peter snorts a little. “Yeah, there is. You trust me to do it?”

“I don’t trust anyone else to take nice pictures of me, other than me, clearly.”

“You’re making me blush, Torchy.”

Johnny wipes his nose on Peter again before planting a long kiss on Sandwich’s head. “I’m gonna call you Sandy for short,” he tells the dog. “Sandra Dee for long. I’m gonna buy you an itty bitty poodle skirt. You’re gonna be fashionable and gorgeous.” He kisses Sandwich once more, right between the eyes, and earns a sweet yip for his trouble. “But first, we are going to give you a bath. You smell like rotten bananas.” 

“Where are we gonna bathe him?”

Peter and Johnny look at each other. 

“Kitchen sink,” they say together, and without another word Johnny goes to disinfect it and Peter goes to find some soap and a towel. He comes back with his camera too, which Johnny is grateful for. Their family photo album has to include all their biggest moments if it’s going to be worth leaving on the coffee table for guests to look at, and this moment feels gravely enormous. 

They lather Sandwich up real nice. He hasn’t got any bugs, as far as they can see, but he’s so coated in grime that it takes three tries to make his overgrown fur really shine. 

Sandwich, for what it’s worth, loves the bath. He rolls over onto his back and yelps, squirming like a little doofus, the spread of his mouth practically a grin. 

“You’re so fucking adorable it sickens me,” Johnny tells him. Then, “Oh. Weird.”

“What?” Peter asks, dropping his camera to dangle from the strap round his neck. 

“He’s got a tiny little dingaling. Like, okay, logically I knew he’d have one, biologically and—genetically. Factually. But now I’m seeing it, like, really seeing it, and it’s just now hitting me that animals have sex. Oh my god, we’re gonna have to get this dog fixed. Morally, is it right to rob him of the joys of sex? I’m giving myself a hemorrhage.”

Peter squeezes the soap bottle in Johnny’s direction and an iridescent bubble spits out the mouth. “Happy thoughts, perv. Bubbles and puppies.”

“I can’t believe we’re living in the reality with both bubbles and puppies right now.” 

“It’s not such a bad reality, is it?”

Johnny rubs a thumb over the divet in Sandwich’s tiny head. His eyes close, as if he enjoys the attention. “Yeah,” Johnny says. “It’s aight.”

“It’s aight,” Peter repeats. “I guess I’m now in the business of making this reality the supreme reality for one Mister Johnny Storm, you needy motherfucker.”

“Mm. Good luck.”

“What do I need? Gucci hand towels? A butler named Fernando to serve us tea and crumpets by day and moonlight as a super secret spy?”

“More gummy worms.”

“That’s outrageous. I’d need to take out a loan for that.”

Johnny lets the smile cross his face without questioning it. He’s got everything he needs to make this his perfect reality—the sky, the sea, the shore. Right in arm’s reach. 

——

“Fetch,” Johnny says. 

Sandwich sits in place, tail wagging spiritedly, tongue lolling. 

“Roll over,” Johnny says. 

Sandwich yips. 

“Triple lutz?” Johnny tries. 

Sandwich bellyflops onto the grass and starts trying to eat it. 

“Oh, don’t do that,” Johnny says, scrambling to Sandwich’s side, lifting him into the air. “Spit it out, Sandra, Jesus. This isn’t Saladworks, as much as I could go for a caprese to compliment this lovely weather. Isn’t the weather lovely, Petey-O?”

Peter answers with a snore. 

Johnny looks over his shoulder. Peter is curled up in a ball on the grass like a larva. His glasses are poking up and his hair is in utter disarray. 

Johnny sniffs and turns back to the picnic blanket he’d set up for the dog to play on. “Alright, Sandy,” he says. He sets the dog down. “You've gotta help me out, here. We’ve gotta make Peter so jealous of how talented and cool I taught you how to be. How about…” Johnny spins a finger. 

Sandy’s big blue eyes follow the movement. That seems promising. 

“Can you spin, Sandy?” he asks, voice climbing octaves into some gross baby-talk Val would’ve punched him for using on her. “Spin for me! Follow my finger!”

Sandy’s head reels as he tries to follow the movement. 

“Come on, Sandy. Do me this one solid, won’t you?”

Sandwich promptly poops on the blanket. 

“Oh my god. Wrong solid, Sandy. Go wake your father. You’re his responsibility now.”

——

Today, 10:34 am

s.s.

Hey, Johnny—the kids miss you!

Bentley won’t admit it but I caught him

sniffing your socks twice in the past

week. Weird. Possibly diabolical. 

s.s.

Ben kept calling your name last night. 

The Mets were on, so I assume 

he wanted to heckle you. Didn’t have the 

heart to remind him you’re not here. 

s.s. 

Reed turned a classroom into a 

live re-enactment of a kraken-battle

for “educational purposes.” The fish 

kids were thrilled. Cleanup, however,

sucked, to put it lightly. You 

would’ve loved it!

s.s.

I miss you, little brother. 

j.s.

can we meet for coffee?

s.s.

Yes!!!!!!!

s.s.

:)))))))

s.s.

You name the time and place and 

I’ll be there!

s.s.

<3 <3 <3

s.s.

attachment: penguin_with_hearts.png

j.s.

i miss you, too, susie-q.

——

Johnny is in a pickle. 

The problem is: Peter wakes up rumpled and red-eyed and buries himself in a hoodie. 

The problem is: Peter drinks his coffee with hazelnut creamer and Nesquik stirred in because he thinks it tastes like Nutella. 

The problem is: Peter carries Sandwich around over his shoulder, his little paws dangling over Peter’s back, and fatherhood looks really, really good on him. 

Even when Sandwich keeps them up late with his little barks and the squeak of his new and expansive chew toy collection, Peter has a smile for him. For both of them: Johnny and the dog. A kiss for Sandwich and a pat to the cheek for Johnny as he slides across the hardwood on his holey woolen socks. 

Even when Johnny jumps onto the couch to hide from a centipede in the sink and Peter scoops him down, bridal-style, but Johnny is certain Peter is about to drop him so his arms go chokingly tight around Peter’s throat, summoning a terrifying and hilarious “Kthchck,” sound from him, he laughs between coughs. 

Even when Johnny paces in the middle of the night, or drinks himself silly and refuses to burn the alcohol out of his veins, or leaves the silverware drawer open, or forgets to wipe his toothpaste splashes off of the mirror, Peter just rolls his eyes and says, “Do it now, Bichead. For someone so bright, you can be real wishy-washy sometimes.”

Even when Peter shows up at five in the morning with a limp and a band-aid on his forehead and gives Johnny a look that makes him pretend to be asleep just so he can feel it a little longer, Peter stays quiet and keeps looking. 

Thus, the pickle: Johnny loves Peter so much he could just die. 

——

Johnny pulls his knees to his chest and buries his hands in the sand. 

The ocean is cold and dark green against the slate grey sky, clouds curling in on themselves, cotton gone wrong. The seafoam is furious, and every crackling wave is like a shout of thunder. (Help, help, help.)

Maybe, he thinks. Maybe the sand is good. Maybe the sand is better. 

Maybe being grounded isn’t the same as being trapped. 

Maybe the sand goes warm under the sun and maybe the sand giggles when you shake it out of your trunks and maybe the sand wants so badly to be wanted that it’ll stick itself everywhere in the pursuit. 

Maybe, Johnny thinks, the sand is good. Maybe, he thinks, he ought to find Peter. 

(I’d never let you drown. I’d never let you drown. I’d never let you drown.)

——

“I need you to tell me whatever it is you’re keeping from me,” Johnny says, as he walks through the door stinking of salt and sea spray and smoke from flying home. 

The sky, the sea, the land. He’s tired of having neither. The sea—Johnny gets it now. The sea wasn’t having a taste of both power and Peter. It made him Tantalus. Too scared to fly; too scared to take Peter’s face between his palms and kiss him absolutely stupid. 

Johnny’s done with that. He’s grabbing the fruit with two eager hands. This is his. It’s what he’s due. He’s damn well going to take it. 

Peter, sunken into his recliner, triple-chinned and nodding off, jerks to attention, says, “No,” and promptly backward-rolls off the chair to make a break for it. 

Johnny kicks off his shoes and runs after him. He hops on Peter’s back with his whole weight in hopes to stop him, but all he does is succeed in winding himself with the impact. 

Peter straightens, Johnny hanging from his neck. 

“This is new,” Peter says. 

“Tell me,” Johnny says. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

Peter drops him onto the hardwood. 

“Ow,” Johnny hisses, “ow, my ass, Peter. Peter, get over here.” Johnny grabs Peter’s ankle. Peter tries to sidestep too late and trips to the floor beside Johnny. 

“Asswipe,” Peter says. 

“Tell me,” Johnny says. 

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t need to know.”

Johnny sputters, rolling onto his side to face Peter. “I live here. I co-parent a dog with you. I think I deserve to know.” Johnny shoves Peter’s shoulder. “Besides, you never didn’t tell me things before. You told me everything before. Especially the things I didn’t want to know. And now I actually want to know something and you won’t tell me. The irony is choking me.”

“Yeah,” Peter says, knuckling his eyes like he has the intention to pop them right out, “but that was before.”

“So what?” Johnny says, heated. “I’m still a superhero. I’ve still got powers. I can still help you.”

“I don’t need your help.”

Johnny scoffs, laying flat on the floor and crossing his arms over his chest. “You always need my help.”

“Do not.”

“Do—oh my god, whatever.” Johnny stares very hard at the ceiling. “You want my help.”

“If I wanted your help, I would’ve told you what was going on.”

“If you didn’t want my help, you would’ve jumped out the window by now.”

A long, silent moment passes as that ruminates. 

“I’m not gonna bring you into bullshit after you just went through bullshit of your own,” Peter says stubbornly. 

Johnny sits up sharply, sparking. “You have no right.”

“You’re tired, it makes sense that you’re tired—”

“God, just—shut up, Peter, shut up. Stop it.”

“You shouldn’t have to deal—”

“But I do deal!” Johnny rubs his palms over his face, then shoves himself to his feet, pacing. “I deal, and I deal, and I keep on fucking dealing. I dealt with Crys, and Frankie, and Lyja, and I dealt with fucking Galactus, I dealt with gods and stupid, uptight heroes with superiority complexes, I dealt with a million things, and I’m still dealing, and I’ll fucking deal with you because, for once, it’s something I actually want to deal with.”

“Trust me,” Peter says, slowly rising to his feet, eyes hot, “you don’t want to deal with me.” 

“Why is it so impossible for you to believe that I care about you?” Johnny asks, stalking closer. He grabs Peter by the shoulders and shakes him. “I chose you. I could’ve gone anywhere, and I chose to come live with you because I want to be around you. All the time.” Johnny sucks in a breath that stutters. Turns to hide it from Peter, because he knows it’s painted all over his face. “I keep on choosing you. I know what you’re about. I know you, better than pretty much anyone else. Why can’t you just accept that?” 

“I can’t—”

“You can—”

“Not when it puts you in danger, or—or hurts you more,” Peter says, turning Johnny to face him. “Not when you’ve already been hurt so much and I couldn’t stop it then. I’m stopping it now. Shut down in the station. No one aboard. I can’t let you get hurt anymore.”

“You can’t stop it,” Johnny says. “Nothing can stop it. And I’d rather have you here with me while I’m hurting than gone because you were scared of making it happen.”

“I…” Peter says. “I don’t know.” 

“You’re unbelievable,” Johnny growls, seeing more than feeling the sparks spit out of his eyes. Better than tears. It’s better to burn than to cry. 

“I’m—?” Peter laughs, a bubble of hysteria. “Me, I’m—you’re unbelievable, you’re—”

Johnny never gets to hear what he is, because Peter’s hands are cupping his jaw and Peter’s nose is pressing into his cheek and Peter’s lips are taking his like they’re something he’s been owed. 

Johnny, for a moment, drowns, before the sand pulls him somewhere safer, warmer, dry. 

Johnny pulls back with a sound like a toilet plunger. 

“What?” he says. He pushes his hair back with shaking hands. “What?”

Peter sucks in a sharp breath. “Was that—? Sorry. I’m sorry, maybe I read this situation very wrong—”

“I didn’t think you—you feel things? For me?”

Peter throws his hands in the air. “I feel a lot of things for you, Flame Brain, you’ll have to be more specific.”

“You like me,” Johnny says. 

“You beautiful idiot,” Peter says, “I love you.”

Johnny grows still. 

“What’d you—?” Peter says. He pulls on his hair. “What did you think I was doing, keeping you around, hiding an illegal dog in my apartment with you, introducing you to all my friends?”

“I thought that was just—” Johnny waves his hands helplessly. 

“We’re always just,” Peter says, his cheeks red and a glint in his eyes like he’s furious. “We’re always just, Johnny, and I thought we could be more than that, but if you don’t want—”

“I want,” Johnny says, fast. He crosses to Peter, grabs his upper arms runs his palms over the dips and curves of them, “I want,” Johnny says, voice cracking, “more than anything, you stupid man. God.”

“Can I kiss you again?” Peter asks, already leaning in, fingers trailing up either side of Johnny’s neck in a way that makes his lungs go limp. 

“Yes,” Johnny says, leaning up as Peter leans down, neck arched like he’s looking at the crucifix above the altar or the stars bobbing on the skyline or the top of the Empire State Building, like he’s looking at a Pollock firework-splattered in newspaper colors, catching Peter’s lip with his teeth and rolling it just to hear him groan. 

He pulls back to meet Peter’s eyes. 

Peter’s are open, looking at him. Peter’s always looking at him, looking for him, but never looking, except now he is. Johnny has never seen this sort of dark heat in his gaze, this knife-sharp set of his jaw. Like Peter wants to take him, teeth and tongue, and rip his throat wide open. All hunter, condensed heat and the moment before lightning; a serrated blade hidden in the desperate angle of his lips. 

“Come on,” Johnny says, burning, aching, starved. Bushfire and ribcage. “Are you gonna give it to me?” 

Peter makes a sound like he’s been punched and leans in like he can’t help it, bobbing towards Johnny’s lips and away. “Baby, I’m gonna give everything to you. I’ll give it to you so good.” 

Johnny kisses him, “Good,” and kisses him, “please,” and a pool opens in the pit of his stomach, so warm that it makes him start to shake. He’s not afraid of it. Peter won’t let him drown. “Please, please.” 

Peter kisses from the corner of his lip to the edge of his jaw and then under, tilting Johnny’s chin up with his knuckles, sucking along the column of his neck with scruffy, unshaven lips. Johnny grips at Peter’s shirt, weak-kneed. It's not even the kissing. It’s just Peter. It’s just Peter. A comet come home. A rainbow gone round, full circle.

Peter’s hand slides up Johnny’s shirt, tracing the planes of his abdomen, his chest, fingertips sitting in the dips of Johnny’s collarbones. Like he’s mapping, an atlas of the highway between Johnny’s pecs and the valley leading to his waistband, county lines and highway dashes written in knotted scars that Peter doesn’t so much as stutter over. A new territory. Johnny wants Peter to dig his hands into the meat of him and turn it like dry soil. 

“Oh,” Johnny breathes as Peter mouths at the shell of his ear. Mind hazy and incoherent, babbling, “P-Peter, Peter, Pete.”

Peter groans as if the sound of his own name is too much, pushing his bulge into Johnny’s hip, lips open against Johnny’s throat. Johnny pulls at the elastic of Peter’s sweatpants helplessly. 

He’s been waiting forever. For this moment. 

He chases Peter’s lips again. To make sure he has them. And with the way Peter kisses him—like he’s never breathed, like all he is can be condensed onto the weight of shared air and a frantic pulse—Johnny knows. Johnny knows this is more of a person than he’s ever had before. This is Peter reaching into the sop of his own chest and pulling out his heart, red and shuddering, and handing it to Johnny, saying burn it, swallow it whole, it’s yours, it’s all I have to give. It’s so much, and just enough. 

Peter’s hands slip up into Johnny’s hair, palms flat, fingers pulling and pulling until Johnny’s mewls, his mouth slack against Peter’s, his erection straining painfully against the confines of his boxers. 

“Johnny,” Peter says, and he kisses Johnny’s cheek, the bridge of his nose, his thumbs brushing over the ends of Johnny’s brows, having and holding and worship to the bones of him, “you’re a little overwhelmed, huh?”

“Shut up,” Johnny moans, “shut up, shut up. Asshole.”

“I can do that,” Peter says. “I can definitely do that.”

“Do you get off on the sound of your own voice or something? God, what are you gonna do, write me a sonnet? Or are you—unf—gonna do something?”

“The irony,” Peter professes, then his hands find the undersides of Johnny’s thighs and he lifts him. 

Johnny gasps, arms looping round Peter’s neck and knees locking around his waist. Peter finds his lips and walks blindly, kissing and kissing like he really, truly means it, sucking on Johnny’s tongue, their teeth clicking, until he finds the bed and drops Johnny like a sack of potatoes. Johnny feels, like a familiar friend, a spark in his stomach. A bit of that old joie de vivre. 

Johnny rolls onto his side and poses like Vogue has called again, cheek in his hand and one leg bent up, putting his crotch on display. 

Peter groans, stance going soft and forearm pressing over his eyes. “You’re killing me. I can’t get outta my pants fast enough.”

“Try,” Johnny says. 

Peter tugs his jeans off, then his socks, then his shirt, until he’s standing there wearing tight blue briefs and a stupefied look and absolutely nothing else. Johnny feels wholly leveled, looking at it. He lays down flat. 

“Come here,” Johnny says. “Please.” He holds a hand out. It shakes. 

Peter takes it, kisses the knuckles, then crawls closer on his knees. He pushes Johnny down by the shoulder, his expression tender. 

Johnny closes his eyes against the swell in his chest, the sting in his throat. 

“Hey,” Peter breathes, stroking his hair back, pressing his weight onto Johnny, tip to toe, “what? What’s that face on your face?”

Johnny shakes his head, a little gasp slipping out. “Nothing. Nothing, I just—looking at you, looking at me. You look at me like—I dunno.”

Peter presses a light, lingering kiss to Johnny’s cheek. “I look at you like you’re the only star in my sky. Because that’s what I see when I look at you, dingdong. Just you, making everything else so much brighter.”

Johnny keens, unintentional and mortifying and so wanting, color rising to his cheeks like pins and needles. 

Peter kisses across Johnny’s forehead just to be a jerk. “You’re still thinking. I can tell because it looks like you’re very gassy.”

A laugh startles its way from Johnny’s throat, a wave of warmth following it. “Just kiss me,” Johnny says, shaking his head. Their noses rub together. “Kiss me until I can’t breathe, until I forget my name,” Johnny leans in, lips dragging against Peter’s, and flips them over, Johnny grinding his ass onto Peter’s dick hard enough to make him hiss, “and then fuck me until I cry.” 

“I love you,” Peter says brokenly, looking up at Johnny like he’s the crucifix above the altar or the stars bobbing on the skyline or the top of the Empire State Building, like he’s looking at a Picasso in echoes and smudges and devastating stygian blue. 

“If I don’t have your cock halfway to my diaphragm in five minutes I’m going to light your bed on fire,” Johnny answers. 

Peter’s eyes go black. His hand finds Johnny’s throat, light and then flexing, thumb tracing Johnny’s adam’s apple, and then they’re kissing like a fistfight. Johnny’s mind is blissfully, blissfully loud: a swing band with a scat solo and the trill of trumpets screaming, the itch of their stubble and the slick of each other’s tongues and the little growl Peter makes when Johnny’s hand migrates south. He pulls Peter free from his boxers, palms at him, spits into his hand in a way that makes Peter’s lips fall apart, and slicks him up. 

“Your clothes are in the way, Torchy,” Peter says like a command, leaning close, breath hot on Johnny’s ear. Johnny turns his lips towards the warmth, kisses Peter speechless and tugs him until Peter grabs Johnny’s wrists and flattens him to the mattress in one smooth movement. “You first,” Peter mumbles into Johnny’s mouth. “You first.”

Johnny feels his stomach pool blazingly as he moans brokenly and entirely against his will. 

Peter grins like a knife. “How do you want me?” 

Johnny makes a choked noise. “Any way you—any way you can give it to me,” he says. 

“Is that really what you want?” Peter stares, cockiness melting away, pupils blown wide like he can’t quite believe he has this. One of his hands trails up Johnny’s stomach to hike his shirt out of the way. His fingers flex open and shut, jellyfish-style, right above Johnny’s waistband, and Johnny’s toes curl. 

“Please,” Johnny says. “Please, Peter.”

“No need to beg, beautiful. Your wish,” Peter says, strong but not dangerous, so utterly safe, “is my command.”

Peter gets Johnny’s shirt off, then his pants, then there isn’t much left to talk about at all. 

——

When Johnny pulls himself from a warped Colosseum-scape with a burning horizon and a crowd hissing rip and tear, heart pounding and sky just beginning to lighten, he’s alone in bed. 

Naked and sore and something like cold. 

He takes a breath, then another, and then starts to cry. 

He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and shakes with it. 

Footsteps come bounding around the corner, loud. “I heard—hey, hey, no, what’s going on? What happened?” Peter clambers onto the mattress and wraps himself around Johnny’s back, clinging even when Johnny tries fruitlessly to elbow him off, sobs hitting him hard as his utter heartbreak melts into relief and then anger. “Come on. Torch, talk to me, I’m right here.”

“Why the fuck,” he says between gasps, “would you let me wake up alone?”

Peter tenses, then rolls Johnny onto his back. He lowers his weight onto Johnny’s hips, anchoring him to the mattress. Weight and measure. This is the sand, the shore. Held, not trapped. “Johnny, Johnny,” he soothes, hands stroking Johnny’s hair, wiping tears from the dips beneath his eyes, “stop.” Peter’s own eyes grow wet, shiny in the dark. “Look at me. Look at me. I’m right here.”

Johnny looks, vision blurred. He looks, and it’s Peter, it really is, with his big thick eyebrows and his broad lower lip and his protruding ears. He looks, and his heart starts to slow. He looks, and he can breathe again. 

He raises a trembling hand to Peter’s cheek. Peter catches it, kisses the palm with something like reverence, something like an apology. 

“Don’t do that,” Johnny manages. “I thought.” He presses his lips together and shakes his head. 

The truth is, Johnny doesn’t know what he thought. That Peter had turned tail and left him in the night? That Peter had gone back to the couch? That Johnny had given him absolutely everything and it still hadn’t been enough? That Johnny had somehow bothered him so bad that he’d had to go punch something to pulp to deal with it? 

That it had all been a dream. One terrible, good dream between the nightmares. 

“Okay,” Peter says, eyes wide and earnest. “No more thinking for you, and no more Cheerios at sunrise for me.”

“I sound insane,” Johnny says. 

“No,” Peter shakes his head, hair flopping. He leans in and kisses Johnny sweeter than he did yesterday, softer. Like all that anger in him, all that raw and raging power, is gone, and in its place is a pool of untouched honey for Johnny to take and taste. “That’s ridiculous. You woke up and I wasn’t here and you’ve been—you know, stressed, sad, worried—” dead, he doesn’t say, “—so I should’ve been here. Of course you expected something bad.”

“I’m sorry,” Johnny says. 

Peter leans forward to kiss the tip of Johnny’s nose. “It’s a marvel—the first time I hear those words come out of your mouth and you don’t even have to say them.” 

Johnny chews his lip. “Will you—?”

Peter kisses Johnny long and leisurely and then lays down, tugging Johnny’s head onto his chest. Johnny listens to the frantic beat of Peter’s heart and reaches for his free hand and wills them both to chill the fuck out for once. They deserve it. 

——

Johnny drops his chin in his hand and sighs deeply. 

“What?” Wyatt asks, peeking over his sunglasses. “That’s a gossip face. You can’t make that gossip face and then just sit there, saying nothing.”

Jen kicks his shin under the table. “Spill it, sexy.”

Johnny sighs again, then leans back in his chair. He looks at them. “So you know how I’m living with Spider-Man right now?”

“It’s literally the only thing you talk about, but go off I guess,” says Wyatt. 

Jen smacks his chest. “Yes, we know,” she says, her eyebrows wagging. 

Johnny sighs for a third time, just to really make sure his emotional turmoil comes across. “So we—well. Did it.”

“Finally,” says Wyatt. “Ten years after swinging, you finally make it to home plate.”

“I honestly never thought the day would come,” Jen says. “Did anyone check the sky for pigs?”

“Shut up. I’m very sexy and enticing, so it only makes sense he would…” Johnny flaps a hand. “But that’s not the issue. The issue is much, much graver than that.” He pauses for effect. Then, whiny, “I let him nut on my face and he dapped me up when he was done.” 

A moment. 

Jen bursts into laughter so loud and enthusiastic that the restaurant goes silent to watch. Wyatt snarfs into his mimosa, orange juice dribbling down his chin. 

“Nice,” Johnny says sarcastically. “You two are the best friends a guy could have. I should’ve told Jan. Bobby, even.”

“Bobby,” Jen howls, hammering on the edge of the table. 

“He—he dapped you up,” Wyatt says, dabbing his shirt with a napkin. “He really went—” he makes a rude gesture and a popping noise with his lips, then follows it up by miming half of a bro-handshake and saying, “Nice one, dude!” 

Johnny buries his face in his hands. 

“I can’t believe you let that put his penis inside you,” Jen says, mopping under her eyes with the neck of her blouse. “And you didn’t make him disinfect himself first.”

“Spidey isn’t dirty,” Johnny says. “He’s just… you know. Sort of a mess.” 

“His suit stinks,” Wyatt says. 

“He could do with washing it more,” Johnny allows. “But he’s also got a full-time job and a part-time job on top of all of his vigilante-ing, and he takes care of his sweet old aunt when he can. He’s always up to something. Plus, I bet it’s hard to wash those suits.”

“Shrinkage a problem with him?” Jen says shrewdly. Wyatt breaks into another wave of laughs. 

“You guys are so mean,” Johnny says, slumping in his seat. He takes a deep, conciliatory sip of his very strong Bloody Mary. “You’re turning this into a joke. This is my life now.”

“We know,” Wyatt says, reaching over to pat Johnny’s hand. 

“That’s why it’s funny,” Jen says. 

Johnny drops his forehead on the edge of the table and wishes he weren’t so good at staying alive. 

——

Johnny shuts the door behind him and groans. 

He hears another matching groan come from somewhere else in the house. 

Maybe the two of them have evolved past the need for spoken language and this is just how they’ll communicate now. Trading groans. 

Then he tilts his head to the side. “You good?” he calls. 

Another groan, this one gross and gurgling and hoarse. 

Johnny drops his jacket on the floor, checks to find Sandwich napping in a sunspot, and hurries through the apartment, shoes squeaking on the hardwood. 

He finds Peter laying flat in the dry bathtub, staring at the ceiling, one leg bent at the knee and the other bent somewhere around the shin region, nose broken for the umpteenth time, blood weeping sluggishly out of a wound in his side. 

Peter squints at him through one swollen eye. “Hey, babycakes.” 

“Motherfucker,” Johnny says. 

He runs to the hallway closet, rustling through boxes and packets with shaking hands. His hands have been doing that a lot lately—shaking. Maybe Peter brings it out in him. Maybe he finally cracked without noticing it. Either way, it makes doing things very difficult. He brings the entire tray of First Aid supplies with him into the bathroom, rolls up his sleeves, and starts stripping Peter from the top half of his suit. 

“The Sinister—sixty-eight, seven-hundred-seven, I don’t even know what they are these days.” A hoarse cough and an accompanying wince. His voice is thick and strained. “The Sinister Spice Drawer. They had an explosive under Manhattan. Took the stupid Avengers too stupid long to get—”

“Shut up,” Johnny says, wiping the deep gouge in Peter’s flank so he can figure out what the fuck he’s looking at. “Shut up right now, shut your mouth.” 

Peter raises a hand to Johnny’s cheek and holds it like an apology. “Don’t you need me to keep talking? So you know if I pass out or something?”

“You’re not going to pass out, you stupid, stupid little man. God.” Johnny wets a sterile cloth and wipes the wound again. It’s not so deep that Johnny has to worry about internal injuries. It’s just long, and bleeding like hell. 

Johnny takes a shaky breath. 

“I’m gonna stitch you now,” he says. 

The corner of Peter’s mouth raises for a moment. “Whoop-dee-doo. Can you make patterns?”

“I hate you,” Johnny says vehemently, threading the suture needle. “I can’t believe you. You didn’t even call me, you absolute asshole. I could’ve helped. I cannot believe you called the Avengers before me. They suck. They can’t do shit. They don’t even like each other.”

“They like each other a little,” Peter says, holding the tips of his thumb and pointer finger a hair-width apart. “I mostly like Natasha. I would’ve just called her if I didn’t think she’d have murdered me in the night as retribution.” 

Johnny pokes the needle through one side of Peter’s wound. Peter yelps. 

“Good,” Johnny snaps. “You deserve that.” 

Peter frowns. “Are you seriously angry at me right now?” 

Another stitch. “Oh, not at all. What could’ve possibly given you that idea?” 

“You look like you’re shitting a cinderblock.”

“It would be easier to shit a cinderblock than it is to look at you right now.” 

“Hey,” Peter says, growing heated. “I didn’t call you because you were out with friends. I was trying to be respectful.”

“You must think I’m dumber than I am if you think I believe that for a second.”

“I don’t think you’re dumb.”

“Then why do you treat me like I am?” Johnny ties off the last stitch. They’re a little crooked, but they’ll hold. 

“I don’t treat you like you’re dumb,” Peter says. “You’re way smarter than anyone gives you credit for.”

“I know that,” Johnny says furiously, eyes spitting sparks. “So why won’t you give me a chance to show it? The stupid Avengers, Jesus Christ.”

“What, I hurt your feelings? Because I didn’t call you?”

“Because you’re trying to protect me!” Johnny grabs gauze and starts to mop the blood off Peter’s upper lip the best he can. “I don’t need you to be my bodyguard. I can handle myself. God, I thought we just talked about this and then you go and do it again. That’s so fucked up, Peter.”

“I can’t help it,” Peter says, and when Johnny meets his eyes, they’re pooling, wet. Johnny’s heart skips. “I can’t help it. You were just gone. I don’t want you anywhere near something that could—” Peter breathes sharply, the sound loud through what Johnny is fairly certain is a newly deviated septum. “You’re where you belong. Here, with—your family, the Future Foundation, all the kids. You’re where you belong.”

“With you,” Johnny says. 

“With me,” Peter says, fist held over his heart, like Niagara plummeting only to crash. 

Johnny leans forward slowly. He presses his lips to Peter’s forehead. He speaks into Peter’s skin, hoping maybe this way it’ll penetrate his thick skull. “You cannot protect me from everything,” Johnny says. “You need to let me live my life. If I spend every minute scared that some fucked up thing is going to happen to me, I’ll never do anything real again.” He takes a deep breath, kisses Peter between the brows, and continues. “I’m made of the same stuff as you. I’m strong enough to handle this. I’m good enough to help you turn the Sandman into Glassman when you need backup. I’m backup. You call me first.” 

“I’m more scared than you are,” Peter says. “I look over my shoulder to make sure you’re safe even when you’re not there.”

“You can’t do that,” Johnny says, the feelings in his stomach doing something weird and twisty. 

“I can’t stop it.”

Johnny sighs. He pulls away and probes the bridge of Peter’s nose, Peter’s gaze hot on him. 

“You didn’t even call me to help you here, now,” Johnny. “To patch you up. What were you gonna do, bleed out in the bathtub?”

“I would’ve gotten the med kit. Y’know. Eventually.”

“What if your freaky healing started fixing your leg wrong? You’re gonna have a crooked leg forever. I don’t want to be seen in public with Peg Leg Pete.” 

Peter pouts, then winces when the movement pulls his nose. Johnny’s thumb strokes at the bruises under Peter’s eyes, little Monet bursts of purple and green. A torn up canvas. A fucking masterpiece. 

“You’re so stupid, Peter,” Johnny says softly. “Let me be here for you. Whatever weird crap I get pulled into with you isn’t going to be any worse than the weird crap I get into alone. Actually—it’ll be better, because I’ll be with you.” The moment Johnny finishes saying it, he pretends to vomit into Peter’s lap. 

Peter huffs a laugh and drags his palm from Johnny’s neck to cup the back of his head. “What’s my prognosis, Florence Nightingale?” 

“Stupid bitch disease. It’s incurable.” 

“Damn. Sounds bad.”

“It’s terrible. I’ll do what I can, but I think it’s terminal.”

“How much time have I got left?” 

Johnny slots his thumb into that divet above Peter’s cupid’s bow. He’s unshaven and prickly and blood clings to the creases in his lower lip. “By my calculations, the time you’ve got left is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend with me.” 

“Hm,” Peter says, tilting his head to nip Johnny’s finger. “Guess I've gotta keep you around forever, haven't I?” 

“Maybe I should leave you to die instead. Mercy killing.”

“Should I call the funeral home? I’ve got them on speed dial.”

Johnny holds Peter’s face between his hands, just because he can. “Yes,” he says, then kisses him. 

Peter kisses something tender, like hot grass under the sun or fresh bread or a big, hand-knit pair of long johns. 

When Johnny pulls away, he aches deeply. “Humor me. Can I call someone to check your leg? Doctor Susan Storm, maybe? I hear she’s good at what she does.”

“Ugh,” Peter says, and he drapes his arm over his eyes. “I suppose.”

“You’re a saint.” 

“I’m aware. Patron saint of biceps and—”

“No.”

“—rippling abs and—”

“No.”

“—hot, delicious sex.”

“How could you possibly be the patron saint of something I’m better than you at?”

Peter gapes. 

Johnny grins smugly, calls Sue, and laughs so hard he dry heaves when Peter gets put on crutches for a week. Karma is delicious. 

——

Johnny dreams that it’s Peter in the arena with an axe buried in his sternum and him waiting at home bereaved in white and black and it’s the most Earth-shatteringly terrified he’s ever felt. 

He wakes slowly, like paddling towards a surface miles above him. It’s soupy and thick and terrible and even when Johnny’s eyes are open he can’t be sure what’s real. 

He looks over his shoulder. Peter is laid out akimbo on top of the comforter. He’s wearing a beaten silver watch and a work button-up tucked into a pair of enormous sweatpants he’s cuffed at the ankle. He’s drooling, pink-cheeked with sleep. He looks young. 

Johnny sneaks his fingers between two of the buttons of his shirt to feel at Peter’s chest. It’s smooth and hairy and perfectly unblemished. The relief is like sunshine in August and a Long Island iced tea. 

Desperate to smother himself in it, Johnny burrows into Peter’s side and wraps Peter’s arm around himself. He drops his head on Peter’s stomach, grateful that Peter sleeps like a rock, and closes his eyes. This is real, and this is good, and this is grounded. Peter is grounded. Peter loves him. 

When sleep takes Johnny again, he doesn’t dream. 

——

“Johnny?” 

Johnny sighs and puts down his grilled cheese. “Yeah, Pete?”

“The dog—Sandy, shh, shh—can you—no, Sandy—bad dog! Sandwich! Stop! Mmph, stop, you crazy—crazy! Oh, gross. Dog germs.”

Johnny finds them flat on the living room floor, Sandy sitting on the top of Peter’s chest and lapping at his chin, his cheeks, his nose, little paws prodding everywhere. 

Peter screws up his face and tries to turn out of Sandwich’s area of reach, but it’s no use. Their dog is a menace. It’s only fitting. Sandy prances agilely down the length of Peter’s body and back up. Johnny knows if Peter really wanted Sandy gone, he could get rid of him. Watching them makes Johnny’s chest do something so fucking weird that he has to physically massage the knot away. 

“Please help me,” Peter grunts, trying to lift the wiggling loaf of dog off him. It doesn’t work. Sandy is a slippery little thing. 

“No,” Johnny says. He takes out his phone and snaps a picture of them. It’s a little blurred and grainy from the dark, but definitely worthy of the family photo album. 

——

“I know we never met before, and maybe it’s weird that I came,” Johnny says softly, trying not to rupture some unspoken sanctity of the moment, of the early morning, “but I—well. I just felt weird not introducing myself to you of all people.” He takes a big gulp of coffee, then leaves the second paper cup on the grassy earth before him. “This is for you. I made it the way Peter drinks it—hazelnut creamer and Nesquik—because there’s no way he thought of that himself, but Aunt May wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. That pretty much leaves you as the only other person who could’ve… inspired it. So. I’ll just leave that there. Maybe you can smell it. Or make the wind knock it over and soak into the dirt, so you can drink it, sorta. Whatever you’re into.”

The air is still and chilly, the city greyish but bright. Johnny burrows more deeply into his coat, for comfort more than for warmth. “I didn’t know any Jewish prayers,” Johnny confesses. “I didn’t want to ask Pete because I know he’d get all weird and freaked out if he knew I was doing this. He’d probably jump out the window and break the Shocker out of prison just so he’d have someone good to punch. Anyway, I googled a prayer that seems nice. I’ve only got the English version, but maybe that’ll be good enough? I hope it is.”

Johnny pulls the printed slip of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it. He smoothes the creases, clears his throat, and reads as best he can, “God, filled with mercy, dwelling in the heavens' heights, bring proper rest beneath the wings of your Shechinah, amid the ranks of the holy and the pure, illuminating like the brilliance of the skies the souls of our beloved and our blameless who went to their eternal place of rest. May You who are the source of mercy shelter them beneath Your wings eternally, and bind their souls among the living, that they may rest in peace. And let us say: Amen.”

He folds the paper and returns it to his pocket. “I think I butchered that word in Hebrew,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind me trying. I read online that it’s a prayer wishing for the peaceful rest of the dead’s soul, and I figured that couldn’t hurt. But—well. I’m not so good at religion. My parents were pretty WASPy and we only went to church on Christmas. I don’t know how to pray, not really. I can’t think of a real way to do it other than just talking. Talking, I can do. Peter would say I could benefit from a lot less talking, actually.” Johnny laughs, feeling strange. “You poor guy. You probably want me to quit it, too. I’m the one sitting here, on top of your body, talking your ear off. At least Peter can leave when I bother him. You don’t have that luxury.”

Johnny's gaze wanders and catches on a woman laying a blanket over a headstone across the way. Johnny’s first thought is to wonder about her mental health. But, he guesses, these things—prayers and tombstones and little holiday poinsettias in plastic planters—are for the living. 

“Can I tell you a secret?” Johnny whispers. He lays his palms flat on the ground and scoots closer to the spot where rock meets dirt. “I used to think that loving people right, that staying with them, was as good as a death sentence. I thought that planting seeds was the same as planting my coffin. I dunno.” Johnny shakes his head. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Everything is different now. Everything is—Peter. Everything is Peter, and all I want is to be with him forever. All day long, and all night. All the hours in between. And that doesn’t feel like a death sentence.” Johnny sucks in a breath and when he breathes out, he sobs, sudden and aching, suckerpunch sweet. He presses his wrist to his mouth and says, “It feels like I got told I’m gonna live. It feels like someone cut a tumor out of my head or something. It feels like he saved me.” 

Johnny mops at his eyes with his sleeve. He bites back a hysterical laugh and promptly inhales half his coffee in a fit of discomfort. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry for all the waterworks. I can’t help it. It’s just—thank you. I never thought to thank you until now, but thank you so much. You raised the weirdest, most neurotic, beautiful asshole in all of New York City and I owe you for that a million times over. I could never repay you. It means that much to me. He does.” Johnny sniffles, smiling down at his legs. Another twin pair of tears cuts down his cheeks. “I just wish you could see him now. He’s so good. And so strong. And I can tell that sometimes Aunt May looks at him and sees you. That’s how I know you must’ve been great. Because if you’re anything like Peter—if you could make Peter the way he is? You’ve got to be made of the best stuff out there.” Johnny wipes his nose. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m so, so sorry you died. I know I couldn’t have changed anything. I didn’t even know Peter then. But he misses you, and May misses you, so I’m sorry you died. I’m sure you didn’t deserve it. No one does, but especially not one of the good guys.” 

Johnny closes his eyes and lets the silence linger for a moment. When he opens them again, the air feels warmer. 

He reaches a wavering hand out, a paper airplane too weak to make it across the classroom. A note that never reaches its recipient. 

His hand drops before it can touch the stone. 

“Thanks for letting me sit with you,” Johnny says, stuffing his hands into his pockets as to not think about unbreachable distances and how close he was to being on the other side of this. “I, um. I hope you’re resting easy.” Feeling silly, Johnny chuckles. He wipes his face on the shoulder of his coat, then stands. “We should do this again sometime. I’ll bring wings and we can talk about the Mets or something. God, they suck these days. Maybe it’s better you’re not around to see it. You can just smell the mortification permeating the air every time they play.” 

Johnny lets his eyes trace the engraving on the stone one more time. “See ya, Uncle Ben,” he says. 

Johnny goes, counting rows towards a newer stone—Gwendolyne Stacy, beloved daughter and sister, earth-shaker. Johnny’s got a million thank yous to give, but he feels good about starting here. 

——

Johnny rises at three in the afternoon. The city is loud, Peter’s crutches are clicking on the hardwood, and Johnny hadn’t dreamt at all. 

He wraps Peter’s sheets tighter around his shoulders and smiles, utterly relieved. 

Peter’s knuckles rap on the lintel. 

Johnny peeks over the edge of the comforter at him. “Hey you,” he says. 

Peter grins brilliantly, then hobbles into the room. He tucks something into his desk before tipping over onto the bed and collecting Johnny to his chest like a big stuffed bear, crutches dropping to the floor with a clatter. 

Johnny huffs amusedly, squeezing at Peter and the comforter in one big armful. 

“You look happy today,” Peter mumbles, kissing and kissing and kissing Johnny. “You look so good, happy.”

Johnny thinks he ruins it by laughing, but Peter swallows the sound and moves to Johnny’s cheek, to his jaw, to that especially tender part of his ear. 

Johnny sighs breathily and reaches up Peter’s shirt just to feel him. All muscles moving under his skin. All wicked grin and laugh like leather. 

“Let’s do something today,” Johnny says, feeling disconcertingly alive. He’s so full up of Peter and how stupidly romantic he is. He feels hot, in his veins, like he’s got a tap to the Phlegethon where his heart should be and now he’s indestructible. Achilles in steel-toed boots, Patroclus laughing against his tender throat. 

“Okay,” Peter says, and then he looks at Johnny. The thing is, he sometimes looks at Johnny like he just can’t believe it, and it always knocks the air right out of Johnny’s chest. He could weep with it, smiling all the way through. “What do you want to do?”

“Mm,” Johnny says, tracing his hands up Peter’s arms. To learn every inch of him. “How about we take Sandra Dee to Central Park and show him off? We can pick up an old stroller from the Baxter Building and push him around like the princess he is.” 

Peter shakes his head and says, “That sounds perfect, you weirdo.” 

Johnny wears a pair of jeans that make his ass look enormous and his best plaid coat, because he’s trying to remember how to care about clothes again. Peter looks like Ferris Bueller if he dumpster-dived: all long-sleeved polo and enormous knit vest. It’s a mark of how much Johnny loves him that he lets Peter leave the house like this in his company. It’s a mark of how time heals that Johnny even noticed. 

Johnny cleans Peter’s glasses for him, before they go. They were gross. So smudged and weirdly sticky. No one takes care of this guy. He takes care of Johnny so good and no one takes care of him. Johnny is really going to fix that. 

They smuggle Sandwich out the building in a Whole Foods tote bag. 

“You’re devious,” Peter says as if it thrills him. 

“I’m innovative,” Johnny shrugs. “I can’t help my brilliance. Ideas just come to me, like magic.”

“Or like—gosh, coherent thoughts, maybe!” 

Johnny says, “Shut up, Sweater Vest,” but cannot help laughing at Peter’s smug expression. 

“It was my Uncle’s,” Peter admits. He raises an arm, crutch in his grip, to show it off. It’s olive green and starting to grow thin with wear. It makes Peter’s eyes look especially bright, but it makes the rest of him look like a moron. 

“I love it,” Johnny says honestly. He pulls Sandwich from the tote bag as they turn a corner, draping him over his shoulder. “Sandy agrees, don’t you, baby?”

He licks Johnny’s face enthusiastically. Johnny screws up his nose but endures it. He appreciates affection in all forms. 

They grab one of Val’s old strollers—pink and slate grey and solid enough to survive the apocalypse—and buckle Sandwich inside. He loves it, laying flat on his back and grinning and yipping. He’s got a diaper on today because he’s an excited pisser and Johnny doesn’t want to figure out how to wash a stroller if Sandwich gets really into it and springs a leak. 

Peter grabs Johnny’s hand and asks Reed if he wants to bring the kids to the park with them. “Sue, too,” he suggests. 

Reed smiles like he’s glowing from the inside out. 

The kids—all of them, Val and Franklin and Bentley and the moloids, sure, but also Alex and Leech and Artie, all of them, really—run around in the grass with Sandwich, who keeps yelping and panting and, Johnny can only assume, tinkling. 

Sue brings lemonade because she’s truly the most prepared mother of all time and the four adults sit themselves on a picnic blanket and sip at it, Sue leaning on Johnny’s shoulder, Peter’s boulder of a head in Johnny’s lap. Johnny keeps them all warm. 

It’s so noisy—so peaceful. The sun is gentle and Reed is talking like a comedy record and Peter keeps pressing secret kisses to Johnny’s thighs and laughing at the kids and saying “I’m getting a little verklempt over here” every time someone calls them all family. As Sue looks pointedly from Peter to Johnny with increasing urgency, Johnny smiles. She’s going crazy. Everything, absolutely everything, is as it should be. 

He’s here. He understands, now. It’s time for him to believe in this chance and take advantage. 

——

“You’re bruised,” Johnny manages, yelping as Peter nips at his neck. “Look, you’re swollen, Peter—ah, ah—Peter—”

“Spider-Man hit a brick wall,” Peter says. 

“That’s not it,” Johnny says. “What aren’t you t-telling me? What are all those papers you keep hiding?” Johnny says, gasping unevenly when Peter hikes Johnny’s knee up and over his sweaty shoulder. 

“Research papers I can’t seem to finish,” Peter grunts. “I’ve tried sleeping on ‘em and repeatedly banging my head against them and feeding them to the dog, but nothing helps.”

“You’re so full of it,” Johnny whines, fisting the sheets. 

“That’s so ironic of you to say,” Peter says, punctuating it with an especially hard thrust that has Johnny seeing what he thinks must be God. Even he can tell the sound that slips from his throat is absolutely profane. 

Peter meets Johnny’s gaze with his mouth open and a look in his eyes like he’s breathed between the lips of a bullet and laughed. 

Johnny reaches for him, to hold him. 

Peter catches his hands halfway and pushes them down onto the mattress above Johnny’s head, callused fingers blindingly tight around Johnny’s wrists. 

Johnny gasps, a slick wave of want lapping from his stomach up his throat, a blush eating away at his skin. 

“Oh,” Peter says, voice cracking. “You like that, huh?” 

Johnny feels, looking at him, that, for once, his life is coming to a screeching halt. The non-stop roar of space and aliens and flying and falling and fear and rip and tear and used and used and used—

He wants to be held. He wants to feel like someone has him, like he has someone, really, for the first time. Heart and soul. Mind and body. Like someone wants him bad enough to do anything to keep him here. 

He wants the shore. The sand. He wants it. 

“Please,” he says, eyes stinging. “Peter, p-please.”

Peter makes a wounded noise and leans in, kissing like he’s angry. His lips pull aside, breath on Johnny’s chin, and he says, “I’ve got you. I promise, I’ve got you. Okay? I’ve got you.” He thrusts, deep and slow, and the angle is so good, the warmth is so good, the weight of Peter on him is so, so good. 

Johnny all but sobs. 

“Yeah—ah, yeah,” Peter mumbles. “You’re so beautiful like this. So, so beautiful.”

“You, on the other hand,” Johnny says weakly, “are a mess.” 

Peter thrusts hard, thumbs pressing into the palms of Johnny’s hands. “How’d I manage to bag a guy like you? Unh.”

“Pure luck,” Johnny manages, legs shaking, breaths growing short. “And dedication.”

“I’m dedicated,” Peter says mindlessly. 

“Are you close, sweetheart?” Johnny asks, digging his heels into Peter’s back. “Oh, oh, oh.”

Peter breathes something incomprehensible, eyes nearly closed. 

“For me,” Johnny chokes, “come for me, Peter. Go ahead, for me. For me.”

As if he’d needed the invitation, Peter starts to thrust fast, wild, hands bruisingly tight on Johnny’s wrists. He finishes with a cry. 

Johnny leans up, kisses him through it, sucking on his lower lip. 

“Good boy,” Peter breathes, eyes closed, sweat on his temples, mouth hanging open. “Best boy. You’re so good.”

He unsheathes and Johnny whimpers, but then Peter is sliding down the bed, hands trailing from Johnny’s wrists to pin his hips and then his mouth is all over and Johnny moans brokenly, back trying to arch, but Peter’s hands are so strong and warm and tight and Johnny stays pressed flat and behaved, tingling down to his toes, more and more overwhelmed with every bob of Peter’s mouth. 

Peter does something with his tongue that almost kills Johnny on the spot, his vision whiting and a slurry of things including but not limited to oh god and please and fuck fuck fuck slipping between his lips. He tugs on Peter’s hair fruitlessly. Peter won’t give him a moment to breathe. The sheets are rough and Peter’s mouth is so warm and wet and Johnny’s own harsh breathing echoes in his ears and he’s going to—

“Pete—Peter,” he cries, choked, the muscles of his stomach jumping. Peter catches him, always catches him, palming Johnny’s belly, eyes gleaming as he stares up at Johnny. 

Johnny goes limp, gaping at him, and lets himself float, overwrought, so far out of himself he could disseminate on the breeze like springtime into the still heat of summer. Peter wipes at the sticky spill with the sheet, delicate. 

Peter’s hands slide up to Johnny’s waist. Lips butterfly-light, he kisses the inside of Johnny’s thigh. It’s so sweet and unexpected that Johnny’s eyes sting. 

Peter kisses him again, by the knee. Kisses him again, in the spot where his thighs rub as he walks. Again, up his stomach, near his belly button. On that horizontal scar from the axe. His chest, up the side of his throat, his jaw, his lips, and a tear slips out of Johnny’s eye. Just one, but Peter sees, and Peter kisses it away. 

“Are you okay?” Peter asks, earnest. 

Johnny shakes his head and laughs like he’s sobbing. “I’m great,” he says. “This was—you’re perfect, you’re everything, that was—” Johnny opens his eyes. “It was good for you, right?”

Peter laughs, all wild relief, and captures Johnny’s lips, embracing him, flipping them over so Johnny’s looking down at him. “As much as I hate to stoke your ego, it was really good,” Peter says. “So good.”

Johnny turns his head aside, blushing. He’d smother it in his hands if Peter wouldn’t heckle him for it for life. 

He takes a breath. “Thank you,” he says. 

Peter reaches up to palm his cheek. “You don’t ever need to thank me,” he says. “I’d do anything for you. Besides,” he snorts, smile growing devious, “it’s a nice change to hear you so compliant for once. It felt like a dream come true.”

“You’re a dream come true,” Johnny grumbles. 

Peter laughs, loud. “Not even nice to me in my own bed. What am I really getting out of this?”

“You get to use me like a beautiful, living-breathing dildo.”

“Mm.” Peter runs his fingers over Johnny’s forehead, twirls one of Johnny’s curls on his finger. “I guess you do have your uses.”

“Damn right I do.”

“Lots of ‘em. Your hair is so pretty right now. Hey, let’s do pancakes.”

“It’s—Peter, it’s two in the morning.”

“Paaancakes.”

“You’re such a weirdo,” Johnny says. He kisses him. “Weird, weird little man.”

“Maybe my weirdness is why I’m so great in the sack,” Peter says. 

Johnny smiles. “You’re okay.” 

Peter’s expression goes soft, a little dopey. Nothing like Johnny thought he’d be, especially what with the way Johnny’d started to question whether Peter was the one who could catch on fire with that look in his eyes halfway through the act. Hungry, and raging, and entirely in command. 

“You’re so good for me,” Peter whispers, and he cradles Johnny’s face. He pulls Johnny flat so they’re tummy to tummy and kisses him once, twice. Soft. Johnny feels bruised, but pleasantly so. Used, but like a favorite, well-worn sweater. Deeply, deeply loved. “You’re so, so good, Johnny.”

Johnny wrinkles his nose, trying to will his own flush away. “You totally like me. That’s so gross.”

“I do like you,” Peter says, kissing Johnny’s temple, the tip of his nose, his eyelids. “I like you sooo much. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole life. You’re the first thing that’s ever happened to me that I want to keep happening again and again, forever. Please let’s make pancakes now.”

Johnny noses into Peter’s neck, smothering a smile. “In a minute. Okay?”

Peter wraps his arms around Johnny so tight. He squeezes and squeezes and keeps on kissing and brushing Johnny’s hair with his fingertips and everything is, for a moment, blissful, as Johnny’s mind empties of all but what is here immediately and in the reach of his arms. 

——

Johnny has never smoked a cigarette in his life before today. He’d never wanted one. They’d kill his lungs, ruin his health. They’d make him ugly. 

But now he’s got this pack of Camels in his hand and he’s frantically puffing and coughing his way through it, lightheaded on the fire escape, because Peter hasn’t come home in two days and Johnny doesn’t know where the hell he could be. 

The house is so quiet that he’s been seeing flashes of green armor again, hearing hissing like a pipe leak, frantically scrubbing worms off his chest. Checking to make sure his gut isn’t gaping. Counting his limbs. And he fucking hates it. 

Sandwich has taken to sitting in bed with Johnny. Having him around is the only thing keeping Johnny from slipping into the catatonia playing at the edges of his mind, a long-fingered and thieving sort of thing ready to pull the sheet out from under the dream and send Johnny reeling, mediocre-magician-style. 

Johnny keeps one hand fisted in Peter’s pillow, the other on Sandwich’s back. It bobs with his breaths. He tries to stay here. He doesn’t quite know where here is anymore. 

It’s three in the morning and Johnny has finally dissociated himself to sleep when his phone rings shrilly, Stop In The Name of Love piercing through the still sector of night in Peter’s bedroom. Sandwich yips in annoyance and Johnny listens to his little nails clatter on the floor as he goes to hide somewhere else. 

Johnny grapples for his phone, squinting through swollen eyes, the screen blinding him. He presses it to his ear, heart thumping. “Peter?” he gasps. 

The word is hardly out of his mouth before Peter’s voice is rough in his ear, “I need you. I’m sending you my location, I need you now.”

The line clicks off. 

Johnny doesn’t even consider changing into his suit. He leaps out of bed and out the window, thanking both God and Reed for his unstable molecule-treated phone case, and hurtles full-tilt in the direction of Hell’s Kitchen. 

It’s a warehouse, gaping and dark, like always, except it’s full of men in ugly black tuxes and what seems to be the entirety of Peter’s rogues gallery. It’s almost nostalgic, like a game of Super Smash. Peter is flying, nothing more than a blur of purple, but it seems like the crowd is fighting amongst themselves as much as they’re fighting with Spidey. 

“I need you to defuse the bombs at the locations I sent while I stay here and web up the peanut gallery,” Peter says when he hears Johnny swoop in, to-the-point for the first time in his life, probably. He punches out a man who looks like he’s probably named Guido. Peter’s clearly got no problem handling whatever this clusterfuck circus is.

Johnny blinks. A moment. 

“This is what you were hiding?” Johnny yells. “A bargain-brand wannabe mafia group?”

“Bombs! Bargain-brand wannabe mafia group with bombs! And a grudge!” Peter kicks the Vulture in the face. The Vulture squeaks as he falls. “Go!”

“I hate you,” Johnny growls, but he pulls out his phone and sets off. Peter’s labeled each location with a detonation time. “You could’ve at least put them in chronological order!” Johnny hollers, knowing Peter’s freaky ears will hear. 

But he goes, using Google Maps and pure New York instinct to lead him. He melts wires and carries IEDs high into the night to detonate and absorb. Steadily, he grows wearier, knocking off a Macy’s and a Target and Port Authority. Half the bombs are in the sewers. One is in a trash can, another in a mailbox Johnny needs to break into. A necessary casualty. He goes all the way to Penn Station, takes out three explosives on the train tracks, and then realizes with a lurch in his gut just where the last bomb is. 

He hurtles back to Hell’s Kitchen, cursing, stomach churning and brain split straight out of his mind with worry and burning, busting discomfort. 

He’s taken in too much heat. In the Negative Zone, he’d let every ounce of extra flame burst free from him, so hungry and huge that Johnny would wonder how he’d managed to master it for even a moment. But he can’t let it out now. Not yet. Still, it itches at his fingers, spits off of him in sparks. He doesn’t know how long he can maintain this. 

The bomb is underground. It’s enormous. Wires and countdowns and the ticking echoes in the caverns of the basement. 

“Oh god,” Johnny breathes. 

The sound of fighting upstairs—of Peter’s This is the most hilariously unorganized thing I’ve ever seen, and I went to public college. Hey, you! Yeah, you, where’d you even get that knife, Crate and Barrel? Oh, you’re better than that! Please tell me you’re better than that. For the love of God, who smells like fish?—rings in Johnny’s ears. 

He takes a deep breath. Reed taught him well. He just needs to be calm. And remember. 

He goes in. 

It takes two minutes and Johnny chewing his lip bloody, shaking like a leaf from the wooziness of holding in the heat and the pure anxiety of trying to detonate a fucking Frankenstein’s monster bomb, but the ticking stops. 

The smoking doesn’t. The explosive trembles. 

Johnny grabs it in his arms and shoots up, out of the basement. 

“Get down!” Johnny yells, swooping out the broken window with barely enough time to force his powers out like a proverbial turkey baster and suck the heat of the explosion into him. Shards of shrapnel melt around him, hot liquid metal dripping to the street, the building shaking from the foundation. Everything is red, wavering, and angry, and then it is still. 

Immediately, his vision starts to black. It’s too much. 

“Spidey?” he chokes. “Spider-Man!”

“I’m fine, go, go!” he hears faintly. 

Johnny shoots up and up and up until the tips of his hair brush the undersides of the clouds. He balls the heat in his chest like the soft inside of good bread and then tosses his arms out, letting the flames shoot wild and fierce across the horizon in a blinding orange glare. Thank you, it says. Fire never likes to be caged, despises being manipulated or controlled. It changes the nature of it, the way it burns. Johnny gets that, now. 

Emptied and cooled off, Johnny’s vision spots. He’s gasping like he’s just finished drowning, heart sitting heavy in his chest like a hunk of ice. He flutters down towards the street like the last lingering bits of confetti from the World Series parade. 

Peter’s waiting for him. He wraps his arms around Johnny urgently, a hand cupping the back of Johnny’s head, and takes his weight when Johnny’s knees go soft with relief, with utter exhaustion, with the brilliant realization that he can still do this after everything. Johnny shivers, the closest to cold he's felt in a decade, and then he laughs. 

“Alright,” Peter says, fingers urgent in Johnny’s hair. Then he asks it: “Alright? You’re alright?”

“I’m, like, so hot,” Johnny says. “You got them all?” 

Peter laughs, wild, and kisses Johnny hard through the mask. “Of course I did, who do you think you’re talking to? Hey, I’ll go get you—a hot dog, something, roasted nuts—”

Johnny shakes his head loosely. “It’s the ass of night—“

“I think that bodega on fifty-seventh is still open now—”

“—just get us out of here, Bug Boy.”

Johnny can tell that Peter is squinting at him through the mask. “You’re not gonna faint on me?”

“Mm. Questionable. Odds are six-to-four against.”

“Y’know? That’s not bad, for you.” Peter lifts Johnny up and then they’re swinging, Johnny entirely unwilling to shut his eyes against the rush of wind, boneless save for the slot of his chin over Peter’s shoulder. The city is quiet, a smattering of apartment lights left on like hovering fireflies smudged against the ooze of holographic oil-slick buildings. The sky is clear and blank: a thing of potential. Johnny can only imagine what he must’ve looked like against the backdrop of it. 

Peter drops them a few blocks over, in the shadow of a damp alley. He sets Johnny delicately on his ass. His gloved hands flutter over Johnny’s cheeks for a moment, nervous, and then he whirls around and punches the far wall. The brick cracks. 

“What, knocking out every guy that’s ever hated you wasn’t enough?” Johnny mumbles. His head falls back against the wall. His throat is sandpaper dry and his arms feel useless. It’s the best feeling he’s ever had. 

Peter looks at Johnny. 

Johnny smiles deliriously up at him. “I can’t believe it was just mob shit. Again. You were hiding just mob shit from me.” You must really love me, he doesn’t say. “I thought it was a skrull invasion or something. I thought you were selling my panties on the black market. It was just mob shit.” 

“Just mob shit,” Peter repeats. He shakes his head. “Johnny, that was bomb shit, that was the Sinister Saltwater Fish Farm officially joining up with organized crime to get rid of more than just me. They wanted to level the whole island. Several million people. Esploded.”

“And we stopped them,” Johnny says. He swallows painfully. “You and me. But mostly me. Now we just wait for the police to go get ‘em. It’s done. You can chill out.”

“I’m not good at this,” Peter says, slumping against the wall. 

“Not being the hero?” Johnny asks, tilting his head up to look at him. 

Peter kicks him halfheartedly on the thigh. “Letting the people I love be in danger,” he corrects gruffly. 

“I was in danger in a hundred different universes before the Negative Zone,” Johnny says, and with the way his heart soars at Peter’s proclamation it almost comes out easily. “It never stopped you then.”

“Yeah, well,” Peter says. He looks at the sky. “That was before I really understood that you’re—I dunno. Breakable.”

“Oh,” Johnny says. 

“You never really get hurt in fights,” Peter says, as if he hadn’t heard Johnny speak. “Going nova sucks it out of you, but you don’t get punched, or shot, or anything like that. You just faint all over the place and sometimes almost drown. That, I can handle. It’s just.” Peter looks back at Johnny, then sits heavily beside him. He pulls his mask off and drapes it over his knee. “When you’re flamed on, you’re so invincible. You look like nothing can touch you. You’re too big, too bright.”

“Too hot,” Johnny adds. 

“Will you let me be sincere for five minutes? Yeesh,” Peter says, but he sounds relieved for some reason. He takes Johnny’s hand, raises it to his lips, and speaks into the skin. “You’re just the perfect hero, Torchy.” Peter sighs, kisses each of Johnny’s knuckles one by one until Johnny’s flushing stupidly. “And then you went and died on us, and now I don’t know how to let it go. I can’t lose you. I haven’t got many people, and you’re one of the best of ‘em.”

Johnny knocks the side of his head into Peter’s. “I can’t lose you either, numbskull. But we’re better as a team than alone. I watch your back, you get distracted watching my ass.”

“Just like it’s always been,” Peter says. 

“Well,” Johnny says. “I may have watched your ass here and there too. Just to be fair.”

“Ain’t nothin’ ever been fair with you, sweetheart,” Peter says laughingly, tossing an arm around Johnny’s neck and kissing his temple. “So it’s the Human Torch and the Amazing Spider-Man back at it in tandem, huh?”

“The Amazing Spider-Man and the Unwarrantedly Sexy Human Torch.” 

Peter huffs an exhausted but genuine laugh. “Is that what you want?”

“Me and you?” Johnny asks. Both, he thinks, hysterical with relief. He can fly. He can touch both. Have both. The suit and Peter. The sky and the shore. Both, both, both. “Always.” 

——

“Oh my god, get out of here,” Johnny says. “Go away, go away, I never want to see you again.”

“Oh, come on. You don’t like it?”

“You can’t wear that in public.” Johnny jumps to get his slacks over his thighs. “And you especially can’t wear that to a restaurant, where paparazzi are going to take pictures of you, immortalizing this particular outfit for all time, because I cannot cannot deal with the ramifications of that.”

“It’s nice! It’s two-percent cashmere!”

“It’s yellow!”

“I look great in yellow,” Peter says. He lifts his arms, as if another angle of the sweater will somehow make it acceptable. 

“You look like Big Bird. Or a Crayola crayon named Lemon Mustard Mac and Cheese.” 

That gives Peter pause. “I thought it was a statement piece.”

“You’re a statement piece,” Johnny says, “and the statement is maybe I should be behind bars for the safety of the general public.”

“The only bars I’m behind are the bars of your love,” Peter says, interrupting Johnny halfway through buttoning his shirt to shove his cold palms across Johnny’s pecs. “The warden threw a party in the county jail! The prison band was there and they began to wail,” Peter sings, shimmying a little. He tweaks Johnny’s nipples. 

Johnny squirms. “You’re somehow a more convincing fake Elvis than the fake Elvis I tried to marry in Vegas one time,” he says, trying for a moment to get away before leaning into Peter’s chest and kissing him, fingers hooked into Peter’s belt loops. “Which is funny, because you’re actually horrendous. There’s not a worse singer in the world.”

“You were auto tuned for the whole of your disastrous singing career,” Peter accuses. 

“I was not!”

“Prove it.”

Johnny squints at him. “Another time.”

“Another time,” Peter echoes. He shoves Johnny away, freeing him to finish getting ready. “That is the most obvious way to admit guilt without admitting it. You, pal, have fooled yourself.”

“You’re the fool,” Johnny says. He finishes his buttons, leaving the top half open. He pulls on his loafers, then sits on the bed, waiting. It’s a strange world indeed where he finishes getting ready before Peter does. “Take off your yellows, fool.”

Peter sticks his tongue out at Johnny, then takes the sweater off. He’s got a crisp button-up on under it, and his slacks fit especially well for once. Probably because Johnny helped buy them. 

Johnny looks up at Peter’s face, all smudged glasses and hopeful look in his eyes. 

“Better,” Johnny says softly. “You always look good, but now you look like a suave gentleman instead of a rejected character design for a muppet.”

Peter grins, and Johnny can see the relief in his eyes. Johnny is so glad, so grateful, to have Peter like this—no more boundaries, no masks, whether physical or otherwise. The real, whole Peter is raw and weird and wholeheartedly invested and so, so good for Johnny. 

“I want to punch your smug face,” Johnny says. 

Peter laughs, then comes to Johnny like he’s being pulled. He climbs onto Johnny’s lap, knees on either side of Johnny’s thighs, and loops his arms round Johnny’s neck. “At least I’m beautiful,” he says. 

“If that’s your only redeeming quality,” Johnny says, “you’re in trouble.”

Peter’s already distracted, lips moving silently, hand rising slowly to Johnny’s cheek. 

“What?” Johnny says, starting to blush. “What?”

“Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four,” he mumbles. He pokes Johnny’s cheek. 

“Are you—?”

“Shh, shh,” Peter says. “Counting.”

Johnny stares wordlessly. 

“Your freckles,” Peter clarifies. 

“I forgot to cover them,” Johnny says, ready to punch himself. 

“I love them,” Peter says. “Don’t cover them ever again. Thirty-three, thirty-four—”

“You are such a doofus,” Johnny says, so blazingly red that his eyes start to sting with it. 

Peter leans in until Johnny’s lashes poke against Peter’s glasses. “Thirty-five,” he says. 

“You’re too much.”

“Thirty-six,” Peter says more loudly. 

“I love you.”

“Thirty-seven.”

“I love you so, so much.”

“Thirty-eight.”

“I love you so much that I’m going to kiss you now,” he says. 

Johnny catches him mid-number, swallowing the sentiment. He smiles into Peter’s lips. 

When Peter pulls away, he says, “Thirty-nine,” and boops Johnny right on the nose. 

Johnny grins at him, then tweaks his ears. “Let’s go. Are you ready? Let’s go. Come on. Dinner.”

“What I’m hearing is that the sooner we go to dinner, the sooner we can get back here and do some athletic activities,” Peter says. 

“So that big brain is good for something,” Johnny says. “I’ll call MENSA and let them know the good news.” He kisses Peter’s chin. “Come on. Sue and Reed will only wait so long before they order for us, and Sue is not above geting us something super gross just to be spiteful.”

Peter smiles, then gets off Johnny’s lap. He collects his shoes—a pair of Converse, which Johnny is pointedly choosing to ignore out of the goodness of his heart—gives a sleeping Sandwich a kiss on the head, and leads the way to the door. They pull their jackets on. When Johnny locks the door behind them, he spends a long moment staring at the wood. 

This feels like a new phase for him. A lightning bolt across his brain, a new demarcation, a new first step. This one, he won’t be taking alone. 

Johnny turns to face Peter and takes his hand. 

Peter shoots him a smile and hammers a little tattoo on the side of Johnny’s wrist. 

Side by side, they step into the future. For the first time in a long time, Johnny feels ready to meet it.