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Peter doesn’t notice anything is off until they land on a rooftop to catch their breath and Miles misses the landing. Peter’s Spider-Sense has been at a low, incessant buzz ever since the fight ended, but sometimes it’s just like that. Between getting in final edits for his lab’s most recent paper, struggling to maintain any semblance of a social life, and Spider-Manning (not to mention doing things like eating and sleeping), it’s not a surprise that his senses aren’t as reliable as they should be. Peter can’t remember a time where he went an entire week being well rested. So his Spider-Sense is always telling him something is slightly off— and the thing that usually is off is himself. He’s learned to pay that quiet buzz no mind.
But Miles misses the edge of the roof by three feet and every nerve in Peter starts screaming and he’s reaching out to grab Miles’s outstretched hand and haul him up before the rest of his body processes what’s going on.
You okay? Peter wants to ask. Landings are hard, I get it, he wants to joke. But he reaches for Miles expecting Miles to reach back and the kid doesn’t. Miles misses the edge of the roof and freefalls down sixteen stories. Peter throws himself off the building to catch Miles in his webs only to find him with one hand stuck to the wall a couple stories down. He caught himself.
And then Peter’s body goes Danger Danger Danger so loudly, so rudely, so abruptly that his throat closes in on itself for a brief, anaphylactic second. Miles falls, hitting the ground with a hard splat.
Peter’s there in an instant. Miles’ right arm is at the wrong angle, his left leg is going in the wrong direction. There’s blood coming out from somewhere— everywhere. “Miles? Miles!”
Miles was fine just minutes ago— minutes ago they were kicking ass, webbing up some would-be robbers. Miles even tried out a few quips and while the execution of them left a lot to be desired (The guys didn’t even groan the same way they do when they’re tired as fuck of hearing Peter run his mouth. They just laughed. Which, hell yeah. Miles is funny because Peter is a good teacher. But they also flat out told Miles that he wasn’t funny and Peter thinks that hurt his own ego more than it did Miles’.), Miles was out there. He was Spider-Man. They were Spider-Man.
Miles moans and croaks out: “I think I got shot.”
Peter smells it, the sharp tang of a bullet embedded into flesh. The guys had guns and got off a few rounds at the very beginning. Peter had assumed they both had dodged successfully. Miles hadn’t yelled out, hadn’t shown any sign that he was injured. But Peter knows how it goes: the sheer adrenaline wins out in the moment. Combined with his healing factor, there are a good number of injuries that Peter doesn’t even realize he’s sustained until he looks down at his body in the shower after a patrol and notices the newly formed scabs and thinks Huh, how did that get there.
“Being shot sucks,” Peter says. “Let me see. This is going to hurt.” He doesn’t give Miles much notice— he talks and maneuvers Miles to his side at the same time. Miles breathes out a quick, harsh breath through his nose.
Miles hasn’t just been shot. He’s been shot twice, right in the side, right where you really shouldn’t be shot, right where there’s a bunch of nice, fragile, life-sustaining organs. Peter feels for the exit wound and only finds one. He can’t decide if that’s a blessing or a curse. “Just a scratch,” Peter says. He needs to get Miles somewhere safe now, somewhere he can staunch the bleeding, dig the bullet out, and stitch it up and hope that the healing factor does the rest. And then set the bones right before they heal. God, he hopes they take their sweet time healing. “We’ll get you home and fixed up in no time.”
“”M sorry,” Miles says, his voice small and tinny, like it’s coming through a radio with poor signal. “If I was better at this, I wouldn’t be hurt.”
Peter’s not panicking. They’ve both been through worse than this and are still here, web-swinging about. Okay so maybe Peter’s been through worse. Miles has been through sprains and cuts and bruises. Not gunshots and multiple broken bones. “You’re doing fine. I’m surprised you haven’t gotten shot sooner, to be honest. Not that I want you to get shot, of course not, but because it comes with the territory. Haven’t you heard the rule? You’re not a real Spider-Man unless you’ve suffered a few bullet wounds.”
Peter’s funny. That’s his whole shtick— the annoyingly funny Spider-Man. Quippy and web-slinging about. Miles doesn’t think he’s funny, but that’s more because of the generational gap between them. But Miles always plays along. Sure, he’ll call Peter lame straight to his face, but he’ll offer him a huff of amused noise and Peter will feel vindicated that he isn’t losing his touch with the youth. Not like Peter isn’t still part of the youth, of course. There’s less than a decade separating them.
But Miles doesn’t laugh now. He just goes: “Everything hurts, Pete.” And that’s when Peter’s stomach sinks to the soles of his feet.
Peter’s never traveled faster in his life. Not even when he is throwing himself headfirst into danger, when the milliseconds of difference between action now and action then dictates the difference between the EMTs needing shock blankets or body bags. Miles is dead-weight on his shoulder, blood seeping out of the webbed-up wound and onto Peter. The scent of Miles’ blood is so strong that it’s all he can smell, all he can taste. Peter swings through his apartment window without even doing his usual check to make sure no one is watching. It’s not like his Spider-Sense would even help— it’s so overwhelmed with Miles’ pained moans right by his ear, with Miles’ own Spider-Sense reaching out to Peter’s, gripping it, and begging Help help help.
Peter deposits Miles into the bathtub, leaves him only to grab a handful of towels from his closet and to rip off his gloves and his mask. He gets the first-aid kit from under the sink, washes his hands, and kneels next to the tub. He hasn’t noticed it until now, but this entire time he’s been saying It’s okay, It’s okay, It’s okay. To himself? To Miles?
Peter peels off Miles’ mask. Peter is expecting him to look pale— he does— but his mouth is bloody and when he opens it to say something, he coughs up more blood. Peter feels out of his depth. His own medical knowledge is sparse, made up from second-hand knowledge from May and trial and error from his own injuries. Peter gets banged up all the time, can stitch himself up no problem, and the few times that he’s been severely hurt, he’s managed to make it out by the skin of his teeth.
But Peter knows he’s racing against time here, that 911 would take far too long to come, that Aunt May is six feet under, that Rio is visiting her Mom in Puerto Rico, that he would have to waste even more time by swinging him to the emergency room in his suit and say what? That they were stopping a drug sale and Spider-Man was too late to stop the gun from firing? It’s too risky— too many people involved who could just take off Miles’ mask oh-so easily.
And then Miles would heal much too fast. They would take a blood sample and find he’s covered in radiation, head to toe. They would keep him, test him. Dig into his DNA and find what Spider-Man is made out of.
Peter can’t— he can’t do any of that. He’s not going to leave Miles alone. He’s not going to risk injuring Miles any more than he already is. He’s going to get the bullet out and he’s going to fix Miles up and in the morning they’re going to the diner across the street and eat their weight in pancakes and eggs with money that Peter doesn’t have but is going to spend anyway. It will be a two-fold celebration: partly for Miles making it through his first round of severe bodily injuries (by bullet no less), partly for Peter making it through the night without breaking down.
(It’s so much different when it’s just you, when it’s your own mortality in your own hands, when it’s your own stupid brain with its childlike invulnerability scoffing and saying Oh you’ll be fine because that’s what you do. You get punched, you take a bullet, you fall off a building and you get back up. Because you wouldn’t be around for the alternative reality where things don’t pan out because you would be dead and you wouldn’t know anything, feel anything, be able to do anything except for being dead.)
They’re both going to make it through. There is no other option. With that thought comes a wave of mental clarity. Peter focuses. They’re going to make it out. Miles is going to be just fine. There is no other option.
“This is going to hurt, really really badly,” Peter warns, ripping through Miles’ suit to give him better access to the wounds. “I don’t have any anesthetic.” He’s never needed it before— he’s fine to suffer through the pain because the topical anesthetic only takes the edge off momentarily with how fast his metabolism is and he doesn’t have the connections to source the real shit. But god, he wishes he had it now.
“Okay,” Miles says, though it’s more of an exhale than it is an actual word. Peter splashes rubbing alcohol over the wound and Miles sobs and cries out, “Fuck, fuck.”
“Language,” Peter chides, trying to lighten the mood, but all Miles does is sob some more. So Peter changes tactics. “This is just the beginning— so sorry. I’m going to have to dig in and get the bullet out. There’s still one in you and you don’t want to have your body try to heal around it, trust me.” Peter doesn’t tell him that even though there’s an exit wound, he’s not sure which entry wound it correlates to. Best case scenario, the first one he picks has the bullet in it, right at the surface, a little present for him. With his damn Parker luck— well, they’ll cross that bridge when they get there.
Peter pads a towel on Miles’ side, gives him a smaller one and tells him to bite down. “It helps, to bite down on something.” Miles takes it without complaint.
Peter douses the forceps in alcohol and then quickly digs into the first wound. He doesn’t quite know what he’s doing— just knows that he needs to get the bullet out and hopes that his Spider-Sense will alert him before he pierces anything and makes it all that much worse. Miles is nonstop crying now, tears streaming down and mixing with the blood on his face. But he’s quiet as he can be, a shudder going through his body every so often. Once this is all over, Peter is going to break out the heated blanket and the canned chicken soup. Miles will be so warm he’ll forget what it ever felt like to be cold.
There’s nothing in the first wound, fuck. Peter goes into the second one and knows it’s right (No shit, where else would the bullet be?) when the forceps hit something and Miles screams out in pain. “Bite, bite, bite,” Peter directs, one hand going to put the towel back into Miles’ mouth. “I know it hurts, I know. But biting down helps and you need to do that for me.” Miles sobs even more, his entire body hiccuping and writhing in pain, and Peter needs him to stay still, needs Miles to calm down, and he knows it’s an impossible ask, but he needs Miles to do it regardless.
Peter holds Miles down with one hand, his other digging more into the wound, and does what he can to calm Miles down: starts talking. He talks about his lab research, talks about how the original journal they were going to submit to had a huge ethics violation a few months ago and it’s thrown everything out of whack; he talks about suit upgrades he’s been meaning to make that he hasn’t quite figured out yet; talks about how the little all-natural and organic grocery store two blocks down sells the most expensive olives that he’s ever had but he made the mistake of buying them once when he was having a really bad day and they were so incredibly good that it’s been devastating for his wallet and overall morale. “I can’t spend twenty dollars on a small jar of olives,” Peter says. “I just can’t. That’s obscene. That’s fuck-you money that I’m so far from having. I don’t even like olives that much.”
The bullet comes out in one piece. Bullets are always smaller than he thinks they are going to be, considering the pain and suffering they cause. It’s covered in blood and Peter drops it into the trash before Miles can take a look. “Worst part is over,” Peter declares. “Just gotta stitch you up and then you’ll be brand new. Might not even scar.”
“I hate needles,” Miles says, voice raw. Peter takes another towel, wets it in the sink, and uses it to rub the grime, tears, and blood off of Miles’ face. He looks so young, his round face and even rounder eyes caked with worry, with fear, with exhaustion.“I hate needles so bad.”
“It’ll be over before you even know it,” Peter says. “I’m a pro at stitching, trust me.” Stitching himself up, he doesn’t add. He’s never done it on another person.
Miles nods and then proceeds to pass out when Peter does the first stitch. He freaks out for a second, worried that Miles has lost too much blood and he’s going to have to take him to the hospital anyway because there is no way Peter is doing a blood transfusion in his bathroom. He doesn’t even have the blood to give! They’re not the same blood type! Peter’s checked! But Miles’ heart is steady and a bit weak, but not alarmingly so. Peter reaches out with his Spider-Sense and Miles’ Sense does the same and there’s no urgency there, no impending doom. Miles just can’t do needles.
Peter quickly finishes up the stitches. He cleans and bandages the area and then leans back and allows himself to take in a deep breath. He still needs to do something about the broken bones. He hopes they haven’t healed too much yet. Breaking a bone always sucks— Peter’s right forearm has a nasty habit of shattering and even though it’s healed multiple times over, the change from fall to winter always makes it act up— but what’s even worse is having to rebreak the bone to set it correctly.
Healing powers are great. It’s the only reason Peter’s been in the game as long as he has been. But they’re not perfect, they won’t push the bullet out of the wound before closing the wound. They won’t set the bone right before fusing back together. It’ll chase infection away, but when Peter does get sick, he gets sick and no amount of fever reducers or pain medications will make it better. He just has to outlast the storm.
Peter puts his hand on Miles’ broken leg first. His upper leg is fine, but below his left knee, his leg is twisted the wrong direction and Peter knows it is going to hurt, can feel the sympathetic pain already crawling through his own leg and spitting acid into his mouth. This is going to be awful but it needs to be done. He doesn’t have any splints, or any bandages big enough to wrap around, so Peter settles for tearing a clean bedsheet into strips. With those by his side, Peter puts his hands on Miles’ broken leg and with firm pressure, starts to move his leg back in place.
Miles’ leg won’t move back into place. The bone’s healed too much, locking it into place. God, if Peter just had a tiny bit of anesthesia to make this better. Peter takes a steadying breath and then puts force behind his hold, rebreaking Miles’ bone.
Miles shoots up with a scream, his bio-electricity buzzing across his body and shocking Peter. Peter’s grip stays tight. Peter tastes blood in the front of his mouth— he’s bitten straight through his lip. Miles screams and screams and it sounds like the screams are overlaid, warped, and turned into chaos. A screaming Miles is an alive Miles, Peter’s brain chides. And an alive Miles is better than the alternative.
But then it’s over and Miles leg is in the correct position and he takes a second to lean back onto his heel and gasp. His heart feels like a live wire, dangerously sputtering in every which way. The air tastes metallic and smells of burnt plastic. Peter is pretty sure his palms are burnt, but he doesn’t look at them. Instead, he looks at Miles, who’s squished between the tub spout and the wall, gasping for air. Tears are streaming down his cheeks. He still has sparks of electricity coming off of him, small tendrils of blue and orange.
“Deep breaths,” Peter says. “I had to rebreak your leg so it would heal correctly. I still have to do your arm. Do you need water?”
“I need to never get shot again. Jesus, Pete.”
“I know. I know. It’s going to be a miracle if I don’t get any noise complaints.”
“Is that what you are really worried about here?”
“I can’t get on another super’s bad side. I really can’t.”
“Your life is kinda fucked up, you know that, right?”
Peter rolls his eyes. “Can you lift your leg up? I have to wrap it so it heals correctly.” Peter holds up the strips of what was once a bedsheet.
“Dude, are those your sheets?” Miles asks. “What happened to ‘You always need a fully stocked medkit, Miles. Don’t skimp out of one because you’ll always pay for it in the end’?”
“Do as I say, not as I do. Now lift your leg up, please.”
With the leg wrapped and then rewrapped because the first time it was much too tight, it’s time to deal with the broken arm. Like the leg, it needs to be broken and reset. “I’m going to count down and on one I’ll break it, okay? Brace yourself. Try to keep the electricity down.”
“Just do it, man.”
Peter says, “Three, two,” and breaks Miles’ arm. Miles jumps a bit from the pain, but all that comes out of him is a puff of air out of his nose. Peter quickly sets the bone and wraps his arm in the fabric.
“Any other major bodily injuries to take care of?” Peter asks, helping Miles out of the tub.
“I hope not,” Miles says. “Jury’s still out on that one.”
Peter sits Miles down on top of the toilet and helps wash off the blood from his abdomen, helps him to wash off his face again. Gives him some space to get a little more ready for sleep and goes to his room to remember where Miles last put his pajamas. Miles stays over a semi-frequently amount of time, enough for him to have a few changes of clothes and his own toothbrush. If Peter could only find where those damn clothes are now. Peter doesn’t find them, so he settles for his own clean sleeping clothes.
With Miles changed and on his way to being healed, Peter leads Miles to his bed. He knows that Miles is really shaken because he doesn’t even try to argue to take the couch like he does whenever he spends the night. Just goes straight to Peter’s bed without a word and lets himself be tucked in like he’s a young, tired child.
Peter unearths the heated blanket from the depths of his closet, shakes it out to get most of the dust off of it, lays it on top of Miles, the heat on medium. Peter makes him drink a glass of room temperature water. Miles downs it without complaint, mutters a sleepy Thanks, Pete, and then goes straight to sleep.
Peter strips himself out of his own suit and cleans the bathroom in his underwear, washes all the blood down the drain, breaks out the bleach and scrubs his entire bathroom until he’s dizzy from the chemicals. He can’t bear to actually take a shower. He knows it's clean but all he can think about is Miles pale and curled up and crying out in pain and fear. So he settles for a quick rub of a wash cloth around his body and he puts on his pajamas. He’s not going to be able to sleep tonight. If he closes his eyes for longer than the quarter second it takes to blink, he sees a reality where Peter has a dead Miles in his bathroom, a reality where Peter just stares and stares and stares at Miles’ unmoving form until some outside force— his phone ringing, someone at the door knocking— jolts him into action and the realization that he has led one of his own to an untimely end.
Instead of sleeping, he cleans. Peter isn’t a clean person— he isn’t dirty, per say, but his threshold for mess is higher than average. He doesn’t have the time to truly dedicate to cleaning, but he’s always liked the methodical, systemic routine of it all. It calms him, centers him. He targets the living room first, then the kitchen. Goes so far as to clean out the entire fridge, all the leftovers that he promised to get around to one day, tossed into the trash, organizes his kitchen shelves, puts all of the cans in order of expiration date— only a few of them are actually expired beyond redemption. He washes the windows clean, wipes down all the surfaces, the mirrors, breaks out the mop and cleans the floors. Hauls down the laundry to the basement to wash— no one is awake at this godforsaken hour so it’s just him and the whirl of the machines going round and round. He extends his hearing so he can make sure Miles is still asleep, listens to his deep, even breaths, listens to his heart beating in a steady pattern.
Eventually, he runs out of things to clean. His apartment is only so big. Legally listed as a one bedroom because the landlord decided that there was just enough space to put up a shoddy temporary wall and charged 1-bedroom prices instead studio prices. His laundry is washed and dried (folding to be done on a different day). Their damp suits hang from the ceiling on a thin piece of web.
Peter creeps into his bedroom and watches Miles sleep. Takes comfort in the fact that the kid is breathing, is alive, and thinks about the best way to practice dodging bullets. He’s not going to sleep, but there’s nothing else for him to keep himself occupied. Peter unplugs the heated blanket and lays on top of all the sheets and blankets beside his young mentee. He stares up at the ceiling and focuses on the warmth of Miles at his side, at the fact that Miles is breathing, that his heart is beating, that he’ll be okay.
They make it to the diner a few days later. Miles had woken up that night by projectile vomiting across the room and with a fever so high that if Peter didn’t know that Miles already ran hotter than normal, he would have panicked. Instead he cleaned up, ran Miles a bath, made sure his bones were healing correctly, fed him canned chicken soup (he just drank the broth) and gave him an obscene amount of pain meds to get the fever down. By midday, Miles was well enough to start telling Peter he was a shitty cook. By nightfall, Miles talked about swinging home. Peter persuaded him to stay one more night, especially since his mom wasn’t there. Miles acquiesced.
By the time they make it to the diner, Miles’ wounds look like they’re months old, just slightly indented and discolored skin where he was shot. You couldn’t tell his bones were broken except for the fact Miles kept reaching to scratch at his leg and arm. Con of fast healing is that it itches, a lot. “Only hurts a little bit now,” Miles says as they wait for their first round of pancakes to show up. Peter sips at a coffee, Miles a milkshake.
“We’ll work more on dodging this month. And just what to do in a gunfight in general,” Peter says. It’s his fault Miles got hurt in the first place. His fault for not setting Miles up on the right path. He doesn’t like guns— only knows his way around them because it’s a hazard of the job. If it was up to him, he’d never have to deal with them. It seems like that belief subconsciously superimposed itself onto his training sessions with Miles.
“Sure,” Miles says with a shrug. “I mean, like you said. You can’t be a real hero unless you’ve suffered a couple bullets. It was bound to happen at some point.”
“But it shouldn’t have. And I’m sorry that it did and that when it did happen, I didn’t notice.”
The food arrives, giving the conversation enough time to air out before getting too heavy. Peter worries about being a mentor on his best days, worries that he’s not fit for the duty, worries that all he’s doing is getting someone else killed, worries not just that what he’s doing is not enough, but that he’s doing everything all wrong. On his worst days, the fear is so paralyzing that it chokes him, consumes him, makes him sloppy, makes him angry.
Miles doesn’t need to know about Peter’s failings— he’ll find out the way the rest of the world does, piece by piece. Hopefully it’ll take him a while.
They dig into their food. It’s a shame that Peter knows exactly how good this food is, because it tastes like nothing in his mouth now. Even the texture is off, rubbery and sticky, how he imagines eating slime would feel like. A few minutes pass of the two of them eating, and then Miles says, “You know, you’re a good mentor, Pete. Sure you’re a little weird sometimes and you kinda are like, so old, for someone that’s only a few years older than me. But you’re good.”
Miles says this so casually, so truthfully. Doesn’t even take a second to fully swallow his food so it all comes out in a garbled mess of chewing.
“I shouldn’t have let all that happen in the first place,” Peter says quietly.
“Sure,” Miles says, still chewing. “But who was the one to take care of me? Not Ganke, that’s for sure. Dude, I puked all over your shit. That’s disgusting.”
“You were sick.”
“Yeah and you took care of me. Own it, dude.” Peter feels his Spidey-Sense flood with warmth. It feels like a hug. Miles smirks at him from across the table.
Peter knows a losing argument when he’s having it. “Sure,” Peter concedes. “But this isn’t getting you out of more practice.”
“More holograms?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m only going if there’s holograms. Those things are cool as hell.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Hell yeah.”
They finish eating. Peter picks up the check and winces at the price, but it wasn’t as awful as he was expecting it to be. But still, put two Spider-men, one who’s recovering from an injury and also is still growing, together and you’re bound for disaster. Peter pities Rio. Pities Aunt May for putting up with him during his teens.
They walk to the subway together, Peter going uptown to put in some lab hours and Miles going to Brooklyn to hang out with his high school friends, when they hear someone scream from ten blocks away. “I got it,” Peter says, already searching for somewhere he can slip out of his clothes. His suit, as usual, is his first layer. “Go have fun.”
“And give you all the credit? No way, white boy.”
“You’re recovering,” Peter argues. “No. Go home.”
Miles jogs up ahead, turns around to stick his tongue out at Peter. “I’m already closer to it than you are. Catch up!”
Peter knows he’s not the best. He gives in too easily, doesn’t set firm enough boundaries. He doesn’t know quite what he’s doing. But he’s trying his best and he has to hope it will be enough.
Peter sighs and catches up to Miles.