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First thing Peter hears is laughing. He thinks as much, at least. It’s staticky and barking, and it explodes through his head, making his ears ring. Making him jolt in the bed.
The sheets smell differently, something thinks for Peter from within his hazed subconscious. It’s dim. A strip of light exposes few of his stuff, half-packed in a bag. Cluttering the floor of a room that doesn’t belong to him.
A bang echoes in his mind, setting a nasty aftertaste on his tongue. He counts seconds for his heart to slow down and lets his eyes flicker around Frank’s shabby cabin.
The picture of a room is clearer now. He turns to look at the disheveled mattress. A torn pack of bandages on the bedside table, a few plastic bottles.
He registers his own shallow breaths, sincerely wishing now, more than ever, to hear EV’s precise and monotonous evaluations from the earpiece of his mask.
Whatever woke him up comes back like a chiming boomerang in his mind. It travels around his body, churns in his chest alongside the adrenaline for a solid couple of seconds before he considers a possibility of the sound to not stem from his nightmare.
A little bell goes off, tugging on Peter’s nape. When the hairs around his forearms begin to jump upward he already stumbles out of the bed in cold sweat.
Only then he is reminded of layers of swathes circling around his middle. Shit.
He’s no help in his state. Most he could do is web the threat away, but there’s none of his shooters in sight. And his costume… He breathes in with a serious strain, leaning on a side wall. His heart threatens to either burst out of his ribs or give up entirely, dropping him dead.
He looks up from the bandages. Ahead of him is an unlit exit, leading to the galley. The hull whines far down under Peter’s feet. Then it’s quiet again. If someone got in, he thinks, Frank would have dealt with them. No doubt, he would. Would he?
The boat makes another vile creak. At that his body signals — go, and he pushes off the wall and heads to the doorframe.
Every step he takes feels excessively slow. His vestibular seems to be sending him into a series of free falling. Bile rises to his throat and he grabs at his stomach, pushing forward.
Peter doesn’t know what he’s looking for. His brain is screaming at him, as he braves the narrow corridor. Something’s wrong, it says to him, everything’s wrong. He swallows.
“Frank?”
It comes out too quiet. He mouths his name twice, three times, and acknowledges with distraught the familiar tone his voice is gaining.
Instead of a boat’s passageway he’s in Happy’s apartment suite, surrounded by otherworldly criminals, and one of them is watching him from behind. He calls out for Frank and sees May’s worried face instead. A morbid feeling of danger thrums behind his eyes, between his ears. It makes his vision tunnel and his skin itchy. It recoils, hitting the walls of his scull.
“…Frank?”
He tries again. His feet are weltering through the dirt as he trips into someone’s arms, and he’s turning to dust. Stark looks at him, horrified, and Peter is squinting at Titan’s reddish sunset behind his head.
Another screech of the boat reaches through his senses. By the time he escapes into the adjacent room it feels like the composite hallway walls are closing in on him.
Something shuffles through, appearing in the doorframe opposite to his own. His wrist jumps up at the sound by instinct. He shoots. For a few moments, a number of unclear voices of wavering volume — a TV, Peter realizes — are the only thing filling the walk-through kitchenette, mingling with his breathing.
“Didn’t know you could do that,” Frank’s voice is rumbling to his right.
“Without the…” He gestures vaguely, with his left hand, for some reason. His figure is stiffened in an uncomfortable position, and Peter looks at the webbing.
Caught by the shot, a band-like contraption is stuck to the wall — his web shooter. Held in Frank’s hand. He studies it in silence before looking at his risen wrist.
“Frank,” Peter says. It sounds more like a squeak now, which in any other circumstance would be embarrassing. But his senses won’t shut up, signaling for a threat, making his gaze jump around the room, and surely Frank would understand.
“Did- is there someone… Frank, are we alone?”
Frank’s eyebrows make a complicated manoeuvre, eventually furrowing in thought. He lets go of the shooter, leaving it to the hold of a paneled kitchen wall. He’s silent for a moment. Then, in tactical fashion of a salted scout, he starts inching forward.
“I’d know if we weren’t. Just me and Casa Vianello over here. Some old shit.” His tone is ceding. He gestures backwards with the thumb, presumably at the tiny TV box. With lamps off in the galley, and a barely going one in the kitchen, it casts a distinct fluorescent line-out around his head. By the time he reaches Peter his perturbed expression is nearly swallowed by a dim yellow.
“What is it, Spider? I woke you up?”
“I don’t know. I thought… I don’t know. Are you okay?”
Frank doesn’t respond. He studies something on his face so intently it makes Peter want to back off. Frank doesn’t appear to be worried for the same reasons as himself, it seems. He feels awfully self-conscious of his own question now, in the middle of the night, under the gaze of a trained mercenary.
For a second he considers informing Frank, that he’s not obliged to answer, but thinks better of it.
It’s too little time for Peter to realize, when Frank reaches for his bandages. Soundless, he prods at his sides, his stomach, checking it for security, and looks arguably unamused, both by the question and Peter’s dumbfounded expression.
Whether it is out of comradery grown from recent days, or relating through similar wounds — Peter can’t tell, but something generous has made its way into Frank’s gestures, though seemingly obscure and mostly wordless.
It’s a terrible, shameful thing to acknowledge just how nice it is. To have someone beside him, no matter how loud every fibre of his consciousness resents the idea. He’s a total coward about it, even now, already bared, exposed again. Wishful thinking is what it was — relying the burden of knowing Peter Parker on people without a second thought, believing he could afford it. Funny, how little has changed since those days. He’s just handled by someone else now.
The light over his head crackles a few times and goes out. Frank’s voice curses in the dark, shuffling away. Hands disappear from his torso. He holds his breath. A grim kaleidoscope of dead faces jumps before his eyes. Peter doesn’t laugh — why would he? But he swears to hear it nevertheless, laughter thrumming from within his eardrums. It’s nauseating.
He’s about to puke when the sound finds a figure to match. Norman Osborn himself leans in to deafen him with it. His jolly face is specked with blood and wrinkled from the wild hooting. Attaboy, he screams. Peter tries squinting, shutting himself away from the vision, but alas, closed eyes or not — it doesn’t make any difference. He smells projectile smoke. Pieces of overheated metal threaten to set his feet ablaze. He braces himself.
The kitchen lamp blinks back to life. Along with it, Frank’s sturdy posture lights up in the middle of the room, right under the bulb he’d readjusted. A string of harrowing sound stretches and gains some distance from Peter’s head, molding into a dynamic television laugh track, exactly one room away.
He breathes, ashamed of how shaky it comes out. Frank is stilled, looking back at him. When their eyes meet, his face shifts. Peter blinks at him and sees how the wrinkles disappear around his eyes. How his temple muscles tense and push at the forehead.
When Frank approaches again, his movements are measured and forethought. Unbelievably slow, and even more so — quiet. This feature of Frank’s is decidedly new to Peter. He might as well still be seeing things, not fully awoken from his delirious nightmare.
Frank’s hands hover around him like he’s studying a sickly specimen. He pushes a whirl away from Peter’s eyes with a pinkie, dabs near the eyebrow patching, holds a palm to his forehead. Even goes as far as checking his pulse, fingers below the jaw, which grants him a timid huff from Peter. Frank’s mouth is stretched into a thin line.
“Bad night?”
Peter nods curtly, and gets a vaguely sympathizing ‘hm’.
“Figures,” Frank says, resting his hand flat on Peter’s neck, “I get that.” His fingers are cold against the clammy skin. It soothes Peter enough to see clearly, never mind the tears stinging his eyes. He looks up.
“Does it get any better?”
Frank’s head tilts sideways. Something old and wounded reveals in his features, before he schools them into a look of compassion.
“I wish I knew how to stop it, kid.”
He says it with reluctance, tired and mournful. When Peter thinks the conversation’s over, he continues.
“The things I see… Can’t fix ’em with a snap. What I do know, though,” he shifts, and his hand slides down to lay over Peter’s shoulder.
“When you’re alone, it eats you alive.”
“‘Specially with your…” he tumbles through his words, hesitating. “Dealin’ with that, at your age.”
“Shit’s bad enough as it is, but this… thing of yours,” he manages, “Is a whole different kind of animal.”
At that Peter frowns. “What do you mean?” He asks. To further his confusion, Frank winces at him, as if regretting saying anything on the matter.
He wafts his hand loosely around his own face, as a sufficient cue. When Peter stays silent, he promptly adds — “The eyes. They’re all... Or is it… Shit, was it always..? I’m sorry, kid, I shouldn’t have-“
But Peter is already ducking his head, letting out a gust of air with a neurotic twitch of his mouth. Hiding his blackout stare, at that. Here’s for the insomnia, and the senses mishap. There was no danger to them or the boat after all, he thinks. His body — whatever it draws from the arachnid in his DNA — is still playing tricks on him. Another set of recorded laughter emits from the faraway TV. Peter shivers.
He feels another hand join at the line of his shoulders, landing on the opposite side of the one already holding him straight. He looks at Frank’s distraught expression. Peter wouldn’t know how to even begin explaining. Giving in to exhaustion he lowers his forehead, setting it on the man’s collarbone.
Frank’s contrite mumbling pauses in-between words. His stammer is brisk, and in the next moment he is fastening his hands around Peter, enveloping him in a firm grip. And with that, Peter breaks.
He clings to the man, blinking away the view from Harbor construction site. There, bundled between two closest people he had left, he wished for nothing more than stay for as long as he could — for as long as Strange would let them — in the heights of Upper bay. It’s been four years. An ugly sob escapes him.
The nagging panic he’d came to Frank with settles in a pit of his stomach. Ironed out like a wrinkly shirt with the slow strokes over his back.
“That’s it,” Frank’s voice grumbles above him. Peter feels light fingers pressing down the curls on his nape. Belatedly, he realizes he’s still upward somehow. No thanks to his traitorous feet, but propped against a solid body.
Frank holds his weeping dead weight without question. After a while he breaks into a low murmur, and not a single word of his Peter identifies as sneer or a cue to withdraw.
He talks about Peter’s fried web-shooters, how he’d stumbled upon them abandoned. How he’d attempted to meddle with the frame, just in case they’d be needed again. He talks about a jammed button on his TV, the one responsible for switching channels and setting him free of old Italian sitcoms. He mentions Peter’s disregard for post-hospital rest, and there might be a slight edge to the words this time. But the notion is accompanied by a hand going along his vertebrae, so Peter really pays no mind to the scolding.
He hides his tremor in clenching a handful of Frank’s shirt, trying to follow the pace of his breathing. Frank readjusts his posture for stability after some time, and something Peter can’t wrap his head around is how gentle he is. Slow and steady, he widens his stance, one foot after the other, creating a semblance of rocking side to side. Pulling Peter along, left — right — left, like a lulling dance. They stay like that for a few moments.
Peter had sworn to keep his distance, especially from those who won’t stand in the face of danger — something inevitable, when it comes to having Spiderman around. But as he pushes the remaining tears out of his eyes until there’s none, and Frank holds him through it, Peter thinks that maybe, maybe just this once, he will make an exception.
The steel massif of the Golden Girl creaks again, and Peter doesn’t flinch.