Archive of Our Own

He meets Daredevil when the man saves him from a shootout.

It’s a Saturday, and it’s raining something fierce, clogging up the drains and drowning the poor plants people leave on their fire escapes to try and lighten up their apartments. Peter’s in a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, a bit far from Queens, but he hasn’t talked to Harry for months and he has a couple punches on his train card to waste.

So they’re at this restaurant, on one of those maybe-hang-outs-maybe-dates that seem to be getting more and more common in the less and less common times Harry’s in New York, and Peter’s leaning on his hand and listening to Harry’s voice and the rain pounding on the window beside them and the cook sizzling something in the kitchen.

Peter knows that something’s going to go wrong just before the window explodes, barely manages to get Harry down before the gunfire ricochets through the restaurant.

Someone grabs Peter, and he elbows them with just too much superstrength and gets the glory of listening to their nose collapse back into their skull.

“Nobody move,” one of the guys with the guns says. “And nobody dare call for fucking Daredevil, or--”

“Don’t need to,” Daredevil tells him, then smashes the guy’s face in with his own gun.

“You’re Spiderman,” Daredevil tells Peter the second time they meet, when he’s standing on the top of the stairs to the train station.

“Spider-Man,” Peter corrects. “It’s got a hyphen. I know you’re not saying it with the hyphen.”

“Eh, I wouldn’t know,” Daredevil answers with a bit of a smile.

Peter hears the train leave. The next one is to Queens.

“I’m not going to stop,” Peter tells Daredevil.

Daredevil tilts his head in acquiescence. “I know.” He doesn’t look happy about it, in what little Peter can see of his mouth. “You need to learn how to punch.”

“Hm?”

“You free Saturday morning? I’ll teach you.”

“To punch.”

“Eh, among other things.”

Daredevil, with blood on his knuckles and wiped across his chin, a shark-toothed grin and a kind of danger in his stance that would make gods back down. Daredevil, with his hand held out to Peter, a lopsided smile and a steadiness to his frame.

Peter runs his tongue over his teeth. “What time were you thinking?”

Daredevil trains him hard, sends him home with bruises and sore muscles and his hair mussed by a noogie. He wants Peter to train with his eyes closed, to stop being dependent on his sight. He talks a lot about responsibility and moral ground and sins, and Peter thinks that Uncle Ben would have liked him.

“You’re strong,” Daredevil tells him as he winds boxer’s tape around Peter’s bare knuckles. “You need padding in your gloves, or you’re going to break your fingers.”

“Like motorbike gloves?” Peter asks. His fingers have gotten more flexible since the bite, and Daredevil’s noticed, wraps his hands differently.

Daredevil tilts his head in that half-looking way he does, the light catching on one of his horns. It reminds Peter of those movies about Jesus, with the single stream of light through the church window.

“Motorbike gloves are a start,” Daredevil allows, finishing off the wrapping and moving his hands back so Peter can flex them. “But you’ll need more than that-- How hard can you punch?”

Peter lifts and lowers a shoulder. “I can catch a bus.”

Daredevil grins. “Wanna find out?”

May notices that he’s spending more time away on the weekends. She asks him about it as they’re struggling with a cookie recipe.

“Oh, I’m getting tutoring,” Peter says, and it’s not that much of a lie.

“For Spanish?” May asks. She’s got flour up to her elbows and her hands are buried in some dough she’s trying desperately to make stop sticking to her hands.

Peter swallows. “Yep.”

May hums. He thinks she knows, sometimes, when his excuses are a little too flimsy and his injuries are a little too hard to hide, but she just tells him to be careful, vague enough that she doesn’t have to know if Peter doesn’t want her to.

“Bring them over sometime,” May tells him. “Any friend of yours is a friend of ours, okay?”

Peter smiles to ignore the guilt crawling up his throat.

Peter punches all the way through a punching bag. “I’m so sorry,” he says, struggling to pull his hand back through the bag. “I’m, genuinely, like, so so sorry, Mr. Devil--”

“Please, Mr. Devil was my father,” Daredevil tells him with that lopsided smile.

“What should I call you, then, Mr-- uh?”

Daredevil tilts his head to the side in that way of his. “Mike.”

Peter squints at him. “You don’t look like a Mike.”

“What do I look like?” He asks, like he’s genuinely curious. Peter briefly entertains the idea that he’s a vampire that’s never seen his own reflection.

“I dunno.” Peter looks Daredevil up and down. “You’re wearing a lot of red.”

Daredevil cracks a half smile. “So I’ve heard.”

Peter nods and smiles.

“Spider-Man?”

“Mhm?”

“You got something you wanna say?”

Peter coughs. “My arm’s stuck.”

Daredevil laughs.

(It’s the first time Peter’s heard him laugh. He has dimples, and lines around his mouth, and Peter thinks that his face looks more natural when he smiles.)

Peter meets Deadpool when the guy’s trying to steal a car.

Spider-Man drops on top of the car and leans forward until he’s staring at Deadpool through the windshield. Deadpool doesn’t notice for a good minute, but when he does he jumps hard enough to bang his head on the roof and almost shoots Peter through the windshield.

Deadpool then leaves the car to yell at Peter in good New Yorker fashion, and Peter crouches on top of the car and stares at him.

“Is that a Cinnamoroll water bottle?” Peter interrupts, easing forward a couple of steps so he can look closer at the reusable water bottle bouncing off of Deadpool’s hip. He gasps. “Pompompurin!”

Deadpool stares at him for a good long moment, hand hovering over his Pompompurin water bottle. Then he declares, “You are going to be my best friend.”

Deadpool likes physically throwing Peter around, knowing he’ll stick to whatever surface he lands on. He doesn’t train Peter, not the way Red does, but he says a lot of things like they make sense and gets really intense sometimes, eyes of his mask narrowed and voice low, and Peter gets the idea that he’s waiting for something to happen.

“You’re freaky,” Deadpool tells him once, when Peter scrambled a couple of steps up a wall to catch the bomb Deadpool had just defused. “Should use that.”

“What do you mean?” Peter stands fully, tilting his head back so he can see all of Deadpool.

Deadpool sits on his hip. He’s been gathering Cinnamoroll keychains and water bottles and hanging them on his belt as a display of dominance, and they all bang together when he moves. “Spidey, it’s a lot easier to solve organised crime when people talk to you.”

“People talk,” Peter objects.

“Not the ones you want,” Deadpool tells him. “Perps don’t talk out of the good of their bleeding fucking hearts, they talk because they think they have something to lose if they don’t.”

“I’m not going to threaten people, DP,” Peter tells him. “And I’m not trying to take down organised crime. I’m just protecting my neighbourhood.”

“Sure, from petty crooks or whatever. But those folks ain’t the ones threatening the neighbourhood, it’s the big pharma or whatever the fuck, the ones with the cash and the people to work for them.”

“People like you,” Peter snaps.

The eyes of Deadpool’s mask narrow.

Peter asks Red, because Red is allegedly an Adult and is also very creepy and it seems to be working out for him. He’s in his gym like he always is, and Peter’s sitting outside of the warm up square trying on Red’s gloves to see if the padding works.

Red pauses for a very long time, thinking about it.

“You don’t have to be one or the other all the time,” he decides. “If you’re taking down a drug ring or need information, I’ll teach you how to be intimidating. If you’re rescuing a kid or walking a grandma across the street, it’s better if you’re not.”

“But you’re scary,” Peter argues. Red’s gloves are slightly too big on him, but too short in the thumbs. “All the time.”

Red’s mouth purses a little, and Peter gets the idea he’d prefer if he wasn’t.

Peter gives Deadpool a Hello Kitty phone case as an apology. Deadpool tells Peter to call him Wade in response.

It’s an odd kind of understanding.

He meets the Punisher when Red brings him to the gym.

He’s leaning against the doorway with a gun strapped across his back and a pitbull sitting by his side with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. Peter stares at the gun for a good moment before deciding that the dog is more important, and reaches down to give it scratches behind its ears.

The man, who he doesn’t know is the Punisher yet, stares at him with raised eyebrows. Peter decides that he couldn’t care less.

“This is the Punisher,” Red tells Peter. “Frank, this is Spider-Man.”

“He’s a child,” Mr. Punisher notes. Peter would glare at him if he wasn’t too busy getting licks from the Punisher’s dog.

“He can bench press a tank,” Red argues. “‘Sides, I’d rather he have some training than run out there on his own.”

The Punisher sighs hard through his nose. “You ever wanted to use a gun, kid?”

That’s finally important enough for Peter to look up at him. “Not really. Gun violence is a really bad statistic. You shouldn’t use them if you don’t have a licence.”

Red smirks and Peter gets the feeling he’s just won him an argument.

The Punisher’s dog is called Max, and the Punisher’s name is Frank Castle, and he teaches Peter the quickest way to unarm and disassemble a gun, and where to shoot where it won’t kill, and how to pack bullet wounds.

Peter develops a new type of webbing that acts well enough as an antitoxin and damn well as a bandage and figures out a way to get headphones under the mask so the sound of a gunshot two blocks away doesn’t deafen him for half an hour. The Punisher likes the first and Daredevil likes the second and Peter can admit that both make it easier to deal with Deadpool.

The Punisher teaches him to shoot big guns where Peter actually feels the rebound because small guns aren’t useful when he has his webs. He gets used to it after a bit, because he has to aim well with his webs and this is just a different medium.

The Punisher chuffs and tells him he’s good for his age.

Then he goes and tells Wade.

Wade’s pissed. Peter knows because he doesn’t send a single meme all day, and because the entire underground vanishes overnight, in the way they only do when they’re scared of something much, much worse.

Peter swings through Queens, then does a lap around Brooklyn, skims Harlem and ends up in Hell’s Kitchen when he finally finds them.

Deadpool and Daredevil and the Punisher are a lot different when they’re not with Peter. Frank and Wade are tanks in the narrow alley, dead still like predators about to attack their prey. Red stalks from side to side, smaller but barely separate from the shadow other than the slight light of a horn or the edge of his batons.

“He’s a child,” Wade growls.

“He’s a child that can tear a man’s arms out of his chest,” Frank argues.

“Doesn’t fucking matter.” Wade has his hands resting on his pistols. “‘Cuz that kid is fourteen years old and doing the same shit we’re doing.”

Frank crosses his arms over the skull on his chest. “He’s gonna be doin’ it anyways. He either gets trained or he gets got.”

“You’re a dead fucking man, Castle,” Wade growls, low and dangerous.

“The kid’s been catchin’ buses since before Matty got to him; he’d be dead in a gutter by now if no one’d taught him how to punch.”

“So this is your idea?” Wade asks Red, something menacing in his voice.

Red tilts his head from the shadows. “He has more people than we did,” he starts, and Peter suddenly remembers that people call him the devil for a reason. “I’m not going to let them lose him.”

Peter crawls a little further around the edge of the roof, and Red’s head twitches, and suddenly he has a pair of pistols and a rifle pointed at him.

“Fuck,” Wade swears, holstering his pistols. “Fuck.”

Wade tells Peter he needs to keep his identity shut tighter than Walt Disney’s cryo-tube. Tells Peter he shouldn’t be doing this shit at all, and when Peter says that isn’t Wade’s choice to make, that his age doesn’t matter when he can get a building dropped on him and stay standing, Wade’s voice gets panicked and weirdly intense, and he grabs Peter’s shoulders and tells him,

“There are some fucked-up people out there who would do too many things to get to you if they knew, Spider-Man.”

“I can protect myself, Wade, that’s what Red ‘nd Mr. Castle are teaching me,” Peter whispers, because he knows.

Wade looks at him, long and hard. “The trick isn’t to protect yourself. The trick is to get them too scared to try. Red and Castle and me can take care of that for a little, but you rely on us and we’ll loop back ‘round to people thinking you’re weak.”

“Red says I can do both. I can be the-- the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man and someone bad guys fear.”

Wade rubs his palms up and down Peter’s arms, a nervous tic of some kind. His eyes behind his mask are wide. “Fuck,” he mutters. “You’re just a kid.”

“May,” Peter asks. He’s absently wrapping his hands with a scrap of fabric, weaving it between his fingers in the way Red’s taught him. “Is it--” He cuts himself off.

May hums from the kitchen. She’s wrestling with the sewing machine. “I’ve not vanquished this mighty beast yet, but I’m getting there!” she yells back to him.

“Hm.” Peter unwraps his hand again. “Is someone less powerful if they’re younger? Like, should they not do things that older people do?”

May looks at him for a moment, hard and silent, before she turns back to wrangling the sewing machine, though it’s a bit more contemplative now. “Well,” she starts, tilting her head, “younger people aren’t necessarily less powerful, but they have less experience, and--” She stops.

Peter winds the fabric over his knuckles. “And?”

“And it’s… easier for a young person to lose the rest of their life,” May says. “If someone your age goes through something, it’s going to affect the eighty years you still have left, while with someone my age?”

Peter hums, tracing his thumb over the scabs on his knuckles.

He meets Jessica Jones when she corners him on a streetlight.

“Hey, kid,” she says.

Peter clears his throat. “I’m not a kid.”

She raises an eyebrow and doesn’t deign to answer.

Peter skitters a little closer to the actual light part of the streetlight. “Can I help you with something?”

She blinks at him. “I’m lookin’ for a murderer. Reports say he was a fan o’ yours, Spider-Man.” She grabs a photo out of her jacket and holds it up to him. He webs it up into his hands and looks at the face. “Met him?”

Peter frowns. His eyesight’s not good close up like this, when it’s dark and there isn’t massive contrast, so he pulls off his glove and runs his fingers over the photo instead, feeling for the difference in ink. Below him, the woman he doesn’t know is Jessica Jones tilts her head.

“Uh, am I legally allowed to say…?” Peter asks to buy himself some time to make out the colours.

“I’m a PI,” Jessica tells him. “You’ve been trainin’ with the Devil.”

Peter freezes. “No, I haven’t.”

“You’re also a shit liar.”

“Hey!”

Jessica tilts her head to the side. Her eyes are half lidded, and Peter can smell the alcohol on her. She still has a type of deadly gaze. “Tell him to pick up my calls,” she says instead of anything else. “What do you know about that perp?”

Jessica is sharp and angry and has a heaviness to her shoulders that’s starting to become familiar. She notices how people talk to Peter, how he notices things that someone without radiation in their blood wouldn’t be able to see, how he puts things together because he enjoys the kind of puzzles that work like equations, solve for x.

They find the murderer at the end of the night, and he is a fan of Spider-Man, which does kind of make Peter’s skin feel like it’s covered in oil, and Jessica takes one look at him and drags him back to her office.

“Sit,” she tells him. “Breathe.”

He sits. He buries his head between his knees and tries not to scream.

Jessica rubs his back until the tears clog up his mask and he has to tear it off, and she rubs his hair instead. He chokes and sobs and eventually levels out and breathes.

“There’s a shower down the hall,” she tells him. Then, “It’s not your fault.”

He doesn’t ask how she knows he wants to tear his skin off.

He comes home. May sees him, and her face goes stormy because he hasn’t carried himself with arms scratching his skin raw for months now.

“Who do I need to kill?” she half-jokes, and Peter collapses into her arms and shakes and shakes and shakes.

Peter meets Matt Murdock when Harry needs an attorney to emancipate from his dad. He asks Peter if he knows anyone and Peter panics and texts Jessica, who sends him over to Hell’s Kitchen and Nelson and Murdock.

The building’s small, kind of run down, but then again so’s everything around here after aliens and Ultron and everything else. Harry’s wearing Peter’s hoodie, and it slips back from his wrist as he runs his fingers over the braille at the bottom of the sign.

Mr. Murdock has a kind smile and a rumpled suit and red-tinted sunglasses that hide his eyes. Mr. Nelson has soft eyes and a similarly rumpled suit and hair that curls around his ears. He recognises Harry, but doesn’t focus too much on it. Mr. Murdock doesn’t, but it’d probably be more concerning if he did.

They help Harry. He doesn’t really trust them, because Harry has struggled with trusting people for a long time, but Peter grabs his hand at some point and that seems to help.

“You two are close?” Mr. Murdock asks Peter when Mr. Nelson talks to Harry alone. Mr. Murdock does something weird to the back of Peter’s brain, the sense that tells him things are dangerous.

“Yeah,” Peter answers. “We’ve known each other since we were…” He gestures down by his knee, then realises that’s insensitive and adds, “Small. Since we were small.”

“You just gestured, didn’t you?”

Peter shrugs. Swears. Agrees.

Mr. Murdock laughs. He has dimples and lines around his mouth and Peter knows that smile.

“Holy shit,” Peter says, and Red laughs even harder.

Peter meets Hawkeye when Jessica’s hired to solve one of his assassinations.

Peter’s helping her on this case, ‘cuz Red wants him to practise lying to people and Wade wants to see if he can manage to be threatening. There’s a big political game beforehand, the kind of thing that means stuff’s been covered up and Jessica gets this dangerous look in her eyes, and they end up right back in New York, about six blocks from Jessica’s apartment.

“Open up, Barton,” Jessica calls as she knocks on the door. Peter slips around the outside of the building to look for an unlocked window.

Hawkeye’s standing at his island, a pot of coffee in hand, staring blankly at the lopsided dog doing its damndest to lick its own eyeball in front of him. He sniffs, glances up at Peter in the window, flinches backwards and slams his hand on the counter hard enough to crack the coffee pot so it leaks all over his fingers, swears and sticks his fingers in his mouth, effectively solving the problem before he notices Peter again, flinches again, trips over his dog’s tail and slams his funny bone into the edge of the counter, swearing loud enough to startle his dog into knocking into his knees and sending them both crashing to the ground.

Jessica cackles and gives Peter a double thumbs up.

Hawkeye is a disaster, and his dog is also a disaster, and he is also scarily competent, and his dog is called Lucky. He offers to teach Peter how to shoot a bow and arrow, but it’s not really useful to Peter when he has his webs, so he offers to teach Peter to hide in vents instead. He talks about the Avengers, the people who’ve saved the world over and over again, like they’re asshole coworkers that keep stealing your food from the fridge. He prefers the low-level street crimes, perches on the edge of buildings next to Peter and watches crime bosses work.

“Here,” he tells Peter, dumping a box of parts on the roof next to him. “The Avengers’ garbage.”

Peter blinks a few times, then grins and digs through the box. “Thanks. Like, a ton.”

“Which is only half of what that weighs,” Clint jokes, swinging around to sit next to him. “Can I get some of your web fluid to make a web arrow?”

“No, webs are my thing.”

“Y’know, people say you’re really cute, but I look through those eyeless goggles and see the truth.”

“What’s the truth?”

Clint levels a finger at him. “You’re an asshole in disguise.”

Peter rears his head back and laughs. Clint watches him for a moment, something longing in his eyes, then huffs a laugh too.

Red teaches him to fight. Wade teaches him to threaten. The Punisher teaches him to shoot. Jessica teaches him detective work. Clint teaches him to hide.

The Devil’s prodigy, people start calling him. Don’t touch him-- He’s Deadpool’s legacy. The Punisher’s marvel. Criminals start to flinch away from him. The underground starts to avoid him specifically. Other parts of it start to target him specifically.

“You’re Spider-Man!” a little kid with dark curls tells him, eyes wide.

“Yeah,” he starts, holding out his hands in what he hopes is a placating manner. “Don’t worry--”

The kid rushes him, wraps their arms around his middle in the tightest hug they can manage. He freezes, hands still wide, before he squeezes them back just as tight.

“Of course I won’t worry,” they mutter into his stomach. “Spider-Man won’t let anyone hurt me.”

Someone leaves Spider-Man jelly donuts the first night of Hanukkah. Another leaves him blue and red fabric to help improve his suit on the sixth night, and a third leaves a first-aid kit on their roof addressed to him. A child stops him in the street so they can share some of their gelt with him, and he almost cries.

Wade finds him somewhere just outside of Queens on the second night with three sets of jingling antlers on his head, and rolls up his mask to his nose to have half of a jelly donut. His skin is scarred, worse than Peter’s seen before, and Peter wonders if he gets sugar stuck in there. Peter asks. Wade says yes. Peter asks where he got the reindeer antlers with dead elves hanging from them.

He runs across Jessica on the third night, and gives her some of his gelt to eat instead of the flask of whiskey in her hand. She pours the alcohol out for someone Peter doesn’t know. Unwraps one of his gelt and stuffs it in her mouth as she watches the polluted sky. Tells him, “You’re not so bad, Pete,” and he chuckles and pulls his mask on the rest of the way to hide his blush before he realises he never told her his name and she laughs into the darkness.

Peter finds Clint in a dumpster in Harlem on the fifth night, staring at the sky and tinkering with his hearing aids. Peter sits on the edge of the dumpster and helps him fix them. Clint says that he got kicked in here by an asshole in white that Luke Cage is now chatting to, and judging by the way that conversation was going, they’re either going to land each other in hospital or fuck by the end of the night. Clint offers Peter his busted hearing aids for a fudge slice from the bakery down the street. Peter bargains the hearing aids, two dollars and twelve cents.

He brings May’s casserole to Mr. Castle’s safehouse on Christmas Eve (the seventh night of Hanukkah), because May found out that Frank didn’t have anyone to share his holidays with and immediately sent Peter off with warm food and an offer of company. It takes a couple tries to figure out what safehouse he’s staying in, but he does before midnight and holds out his hands and casserole at the front door. Mr. Castle doesn’t accept the offer of company, but he does take the casserole, and he looks at Peter for a watery moment before resting a hand on his shoulder as he says goodbye.

He finds Red on Christmas, watching over his church in Hell’s Kitchen. It’s the final day of Hanukkah, and Peter’s preparing to come home soon, spend the last night with May, even if she’s already asleep.

“Happy Hanukkah,” Peter starts.

“Merry Christmas,” Red returns. He doesn’t turn his sightless gaze away from the candlelit silhouette of his church. Peter wonders if he goes there more than weekly, if he begs for forgiveness from his God every time he goes out in costume. Peter wonders what moving with that guilt on your chest is like, decides that it must hurt.

“Thank you.” He leans his head on Red’s shoulder.

Red pauses, sucks in a breath, and puts his gloved hand over Peter’s hair.

All of this to say, he meets a lot of people before he meets Tony Stark.

Mr. Stark lies to May. Gets Peter alone and all but tells him to his face he’s Spider-Man. Asks Peter if he’s ever gone to Germany.

Here’s what Peter does: he asks why. And pushes until he gets an answer.

“The Accords - they’re to keep people like us in check,” Mr. Stark explains. “Like you said, there’s responsibility that comes with being as powerful as the Avengers are - someone needs to hold us accountable.”

Peter’s sitting on the bed, watching Mr. Stark silently. He’s tangled his fingers together, leant his elbows on his knees. He stares at Mr. Stark for a moment, two, then calmly asks, “And does ‘keeping us in check’ require knowing our identities, Mr. Stark?”

Mr. Stark pauses. Clearly realises where he’s gone wrong. “Well--”

“Because I don’t know about your villains, Mr. Stark, but mine would take any chance to hurt me, and mine tend to have connections with the kind of people who would control the Accords.” Kingpin, turned on Spider-Man as soon as he started being Daredevil’s. Mr. Negative, who hunts through dozens upon dozens of informants and connections and hires. Norman Osborn, hidden up in Oscorp tower.

Mr. Stark seems to realise that he’s defeated. Stands. “Kid, I’m not going to out you to the world, but your aunt deserves to--”

Peter webs his hand to the door. Bites down on the fear bubbling in his chest and turns it into enough anger to be threatening. “You will never get close enough to tell her,” he says, slowly and clearly like he’s been taught in AcaDec. He doesn’t add a threat. He’s Deadpool’s fucking prodigy, he doesn’t have to.

Mr. Stark looks at him, and his mouth flattens as he realises that too.

Peter thinks over it. Knows he doesn’t have much time, maybe a day at most. Paces his room and lies to May and scrapes off the webs and thinks over it.

He calls Clint, who’s closest to the conflict. Finds a third factor, outside of friendship and Accords - Sergeant Barnes, the Winter Soldier. Clint is going to free the Scarlet Witch. Try and help Captain America.

“They know we’re going to be there,” Clint says. “They won’t kill us, but-- I wouldn’t bet on me getting out of this one, Spidey.”

Peter paces. Thinks. Friendship, Accords, Barnes. Solve for X.

“If they know where you’re going to be, go somewhere else,” Peter advises him. “He’s expecting a fight in Germany, go to Singapore. Or--”

He pauses. Thinks. Paces. Bites through his lip.

“Or,” he tells Clint, “You could bring the fight here?”

Red agrees the moment Mr. Nelson reads out the heavily redacted Sokovia Accords. Mr. Nelson agrees too, starts drafting up a court case surrounding them. Gives Peter a hug. Ms. Page gives Peter a hug too.

Red wraps Peter’s knuckles in boxers’ tape. Helps him put on motorbike gloves to protect his fingers.

Wade agrees as soon as Peter asks. He takes one look at Peter’s panic, at the way he’s bitten through his lip and pulled his hair out of shape, and picks his pistols up from where they’re hidden in his closet, straps his rifle across his back and holsters his knives.

He sticks a Pompompurin band-aid over Peter’s bloody lip. Kisses his hair and pulls his mask down the rest of the way over his face.

Frank agrees when Peter mentions Sergeant Barnes. He’s already locking the safety gates to keep Max in the living room and strapping on his gun belt by the time Peter starts explaining the Accords.

Frank lets Peter give Max a hug goodbye and tells him every safe house that has medical kits. Makes Peter repeat the addresses back to him until they’re memorised.

Jessica’s already agreed before Peter gets to her door. Red’s told her, explained the Accords and as much as she doesn’t have a secret identity, she doesn’t really care for the law but knows it well enough to be a PI.

She offers him whiskey. When he refuses, she offers him a ride.

Peter meets the Scarlet Witch when Clint shows up with a young woman with red eyes and brown curls. Hands her off to Peter and tells him her name is Wanda. Tells him to keep her safe.

“I can fight,” Wanda tells Clint, and she’s got an accent and a familiar hoarseness to her voice.

“I know you can, but these guys can do it better,” Clint answers.

Peter meets Captain America when he comes in with a kind of unsteady grief to his heavy footsteps and a dark haired man half-asleep but still wincing in pain on his shoulder.

Peter meets the Winter Soldier when he spots Peter from the entrance to their plane and almost silently gestures Captain America towards him. The Falcon tucks up under his arm to help them get across the square to them.

“You’re the Spider-Man, right?” he asks, with the barest hint of a Russian accent. His hair is long, dishevelled. He has bags under his eyes and more scars than skin. Peter’s seen a hundred people like him. Tried to save them all.

“Yeah,” Peter answers. “You need to get to Siberia, right?”

They all nod. Peter thinks.

“Hey, Harry.”

It’s a Saturday. The sky’s heavy with smog, and it’s probably going to rain soon, judging by the clouds on the horizon. Peter’s crouched on the edge of a building in Hell’s Kitchen, a bit far from Queens, but as much as Red doesn’t want the property damage he knows he’s going to need the best lay of the land for the plan to work.

“Spider-Man! You know--?” Harry’s wearing Peter’s hoodie over his suit, messy like he’s thrown it on hastily as he left. His eyes are piercing blue and they widen as they realise. “Oh,” he breathes, “oh, no.”

“I can’t stay right now, I--” A plane flies overhead, and Peter snaps his head up to it, trying to figure out whose it is before it vanishes too far away from him to see. “Harry, I’m so sorry.”

“Peter,” he breathes. “Peter, God--”

“I need your help,” Peter says. “Please. You still have access to a private jet of some kind, right?” He webs his way down until he’s standing in front of Harry, ignoring the way his heart breaks when Harry stutters a step back. Takes off his mask. “Please, Harry.”

Harry stares at him for a moment, eyes wide and pupils dilated, before he grabs Peter’s face and kisses him and Peter belatedly realises that he’s really fucking in love with Harry.

Harry backs off, just enough to lean their foreheads together, and mutters, “Yeah, of course I’ll help you, Pete, of course.”

“Hey, Uncle Ben.”

It’s Wednesday. Just stopped raining this morning, so the grass in front of the gravestone is still wet, as is the pebble Peter settles in front of the grave. His fingers are aching, and his pinky is broken from a punch against Iron Man’s armour, but it’s mostly healed already. His knuckles are covered in Cinnamoroll band-aids.

“It’s been a while since I visited you, but, well, a lot’s happened. I made some friends.”

Ben’s stone is new, as far as the stones in the graveyard go. Only the barest hints of moss have started to creep over the words. Beloved husband and uncle. The best of us.

“They’re good people. I think you’ll-- you would’ve liked them. Red’s got the same beliefs as you, kind of. The power and responsibility thing. And Jessica’s real tough, you would have had fun drinking with her. And Harry-- Harry.”

Peter’s ribs scream as he crouches. They got hit with the Vision when he was doing his density thing, and about three or four of them broke according to Red. They’re healing well, though, like everything does with Peter since the bite.

“Honestly, I think they’re waiting for me to… I don’t know. Break. Like they have. Like I haven’t broken already.”

There’s a pile of rocks in front of the grave, but only a small one. Ben only had May and Peter when he died. And Peter had only been Peter for a couple months. He’s now the last person to carry the Parker name.

“They-- We got in a fight though, recently. It was… pretty bad. But-but you said I should always fight for what I believed in. So I did. And I got some other people and my friends to help. And they did.”

He’ll go to Nelson and Murdock this afternoon, learn a bit of Spanish and a bit of Braille from Red. He might bring Ned, because he likes Mr. Nelson, or MJ, who seems to get along with Ms. Page. He’ll swing around by Jessica’s office, then see if Mr. Cage will let him help with anything at the bar before patrol.

“It-- It wasn’t really a fight fight. We just needed to keep ‘em distracted while Red got Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes to Harry’s jet. But Wade got dismembered by the Vision-- which is fine, for Wade, he grows back, so it wasn’t really something big. And Colonel Rhodes--”

Spider-Man had been doing his best to web up the Black Widow in spite of her seemingly never-ending knives. He hadn’t even known until Red had him weave together a stretcher.

“We all got away, though. And-- I mean, Mr. Stark knows who I am, but I don’t think he’ll come for me. I’m not-- He doesn’t seem like a bad person just… misguided, I guess. And, I mean, if he does come for me…”

Peter rests his knuckles in the grass, imagines reaching all the way down to Uncle Ben’s chest.

“I guess if he does come for me, he’ll have to get through all of New York’s vigilantes first.”