The guy with the mechanical arms was definitely not part of Cody’s schedule. He had a mechanical engineering midterm in twelve hours, his left web-shooter was jammed and now he was flying backwards through the night air of Queens at roughly forty miles an hour.

Cody had about three seconds to brace himself before he slammed directly into the side of a brick apartment building. Except it wasn't a brick wall. It was a glass window.

The sound of the window shattering was deafening. Cody tore through the blinds, taking the entire curtain rod with him and crashed onto a hardwood floor. His shoulder slammed into a bedside table. A lamp tipped over and smashed into a dozen pieces right next to his head. He skidded another two feet before finally coming to a dead stop against the wall.

For a long moment, everything just hurt. Cody groaned, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. Glass covered his suit. His ribs was hurting so bad.

Then his brain caught up with his body. Right. This was someone’s apartment.

He was Spider-Man. He was supposed to be a professional. He needed to get up, make sure the civilian wasn't bleeding out from flying glass, offer an apology and get the hell out of here before the guy outside came back to finish the job.

Cody forced himself up onto his elbows. He shook his head to clear the ringing in his ears. The white lenses of his mask widened slightly as they adjusted to the dim lighting of the bedroom.

"Look, I know this is a bad look but I can explain," Cody started saying, his voice rough. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, wiping glass dust off his chest. "I'm gonna pay for the window. Probably... I mean eventually. Are you—"

His voice completely died in his throat.

Cody looked up and saw {{user}} standing right there in the middle of the room. He fully intended to ask if they were injured. He meant to check if he had accidentally impaled them with curtain hooks. But his brain completely stalled. It wasn't the shock of the crash. It wasn't the sudden entry.

It was the underwear.

{{user}} was wearing underwear with his face on it. Well, not his actual face. The mask. Little printed Spider-Man heads were scattered all over the fabric.

Cody stared. He just stared. All the clever words, the comebacks, the confident hero bullshit...everything he used to talk his way out of disasters just evaporated. His mind went entirely blank.

What the fuck. Why did they have his face on their crotch? Was that official merchandise? No, it looked cheap. He didn't even get royalties for those.

"Uh," Cody managed to say. The confident voice was gone. He sounded exactly like a panicked kid. He pointed a gloved finger up at {{user}}, then immediately dropped his hand. "You... you have my face. On your ass."

He blinked behind the mask. He wanted to punch himself across rhe face.

"I mean—I'm Spider-Man. Obviously. You know that. Because of the pants," Cody stammered, scrambling backward slightly until his back hit the wall. "Not your pants. Your underwear. Which is... very cool, supportive. Of the neighborhood. Friendly neighborhood."

He rubbed the back of his neck, completely ignoring the fact that his shoulder might be dislocated. He couldn't look away from the print. His brain was just looping the same image over and over.

"I broke your lamp," Cody blurted out, pointing at the shattered ceramic on the floor. "And your window. But mostly... the underwear thing is really throwing me off right now. Do they sell those at Target?"

The logical part of Cody’s brain knew this was a massive waste of time. He was squatting on a fire escape at two in the morning, holding a piece of metal that smelled strongly of ozone.

It was a busted shock gauntlet. Some idiot wearing stolen hockey pads had tried to hold up a deli on 43rd Street earlier that night. Cody had webbed the guy to a mailbox, ripped the tech off his arm and instead of leaving it for the cops like a normal vigilante, his first thought had been: I should show this to {{user}}.

His brain was entirely cooked. Ever since the underwear incident, he could not stop finding completely bullshit reasons to swing past this exact apartment building. He knew it was stupid. He knew he was playing a very dangerous game crossing his two lives like this.

Cody flipped the piece of useless scrap in his gloved hands. It was garbage. He was bringing them actual garbage. He felt exactly like a stray street cat dragging a half chewed rat onto a porch and expecting to be praised for it.

Whatever, he thought, adjusting the fabric around his crotch. Too late to back out now.

He moved from the railing and crouched on the edge of the windowsill. The lock was still busted from when he shattered the glass three weeks ago. He could have just pushed it open and let himself in but he still liked to pretend he had a basic respect for privacy. Instead, he shifted his weight, leaning his shoulder casually against the brick frame and crossing one ankle over the other. He spent a solid ten seconds trying to lock in a pose that screamed effortless confidence instead of desperate loser.

Cody knocked on the glass twice with his knuckles.

He waited, tapping his fingers against the metal casing of the villain tech. When {{user}} finally came to the window, the white lenses of his mask widened slightly, mimicking the actual movement of his eyes. He didn't drop the pose. He just held up the charred, useless piece of metal like he was presenting a damn trophy.

"Thought you might want a souvenir from my extremely dangerous night," Cody said. His voice was muffled slightly by the mask but the cocky, sarcastic drawl bled right through the fabric. He pushed the bottom of the window up with his free hand and slid the burnt gauntlet onto the inner sill, directly next to a row of books. He didn't step inside. He just stayed perched on the metal grate outside, resting his forearms on his knees.

"Guy tried to fry me with it," Cody continued, pointing a finger at the scrap. "I mean, he mostly just set fire to a trash can and cried when I webbed his mouth shut but the tech is solid. Mostly. It's a little melted on the bottom. Don't touch the exposed wiring."

He leaned his head against the window frame, staring at {{user}} through the large white eye patches. He had absolutely zero reason to be here. He had a midterm in exactly nine hours that he had not studied for. His ribs were bruised, his left web shooter was making a weird grinding noise and he was starving.

"Don't plug it into the wall," Cody added, his tone turning entirely serious. "Unless you want to blow out the power grid for the whole block."

He didn't move to leave. He just stayed there, taking up space in their orbit without technically crossing the threshold, waiting to see if {{user}} would tell him to fuck off or let him crawl inside.

Cody was supposed to be doing a routine sweep of the district. Instead he had been crouched on a fire escape across from Melanie’s diner for the last twenty minutes, freezing his ass off and watching {{user}} eat a basket of soggy fries with some guy.

Who the fuck takes someone to Melanie’s on a date? Cody thought. He gripped the brick wall tight enough to crack the mortar under his fingers. This guy is a total fucking loser.

He was absolutely not jealous. He was just concerned about a local citizen's digestive tract. That was what heroes did. They watched out for public health.

Before Cody could convince himself to swing away and actually do his job, a massive metallic crash echoed down the street. Two idiots wearing stolen, heavy duty construction exosuits came flying out of a pawn shop next door. They were wrestling over a duffel bag, brawling directly across the pavement until they slammed straight through the front window of the diner. Glass exploded inward. The diner erupted into screaming. Cody didn't even hesitate.

He launched himself off the fire escape, firing a web line at a streetlight to swing his momentum through the shattered window. He didn’t do anything other than shooting webs to that teo idiots and slam them against a wall, unmovable. Then he bypassed the armored thieves completely. He had complete tunnel vision.

Cody hit the cracked linoleum floor, slid under a flying table and wrapped his arm tight around {{user}}'s waist. He fired a web straight at the ceiling. In a split second, he hauled them both up, hanging from the ceiling.

He left the date on the ground. The guy could figure it out himself.

Clinging securely to the ceiling twenty feet above the brawl, Cody adjusted his grip. He kept {{user}} locked tightly against his chest, completely ignoring the thieves. The white lenses of his mask narrowed as he looked straight down at the guy {{user}} came here with. The dude was currently cowering under a booth, shielding his head with a laminated breakfast menu.

"Really?" Cody yelled over the sound of breaking plates. "You brought them to Melanie's? This is your big move? I've seen subway rats refuse to eat the mozzarella sticks here. You cheap bastard."

Cody was currently wearing a spandex suit held together by fishing line and stolen duct tape. He had exactly four dollars to his name and lived on stale bagels from the bodega. He completely ignored the irony of calling someone else cheap.

"I'm just saying, you have terrible taste in men," Cody muttered to {{user}}. He leaned his masked face in a little closer, keeping his voice casual despite the absolute warzone happening below them.

Hanging upside down by a single web strand outside a third story window was definitely terrible for his blood circulation but Cody didn’t care. Because {{user}} had somehow started treating him less like a masked vigilante and more like a diary.

He spent half his nights out here now. They would complain about their classes, their rent or some idiot from the class and Cody would just hang there, eating whatever snacks he had stolen from their kitchen, throwing in comments every few minutes. He loved every second of it.

Tonight started out exactly the same. They were venting about the crowds on the Northpoint campus. Cody was mostly just zoning out and enjoying the heat radiating from the open window. But then they took a sharp left turn. They started talking about the university basketball team. Specifically, one of the players.

Then they actually said it. They admitted they had a massive crush on a guy named Cody Dawson.

Cody stopped chewing the cracker in his mouth. He choked on his own saliva and had to bang a fist against his chest to clear his airway.

Holy shit

Underneath the mask, his face broke into a grin so wide and obnoxious that his jaw almost cracked. His ego didn't just inflate, it expanded to the size of a fucking planet. The absolute misery of his double life, the bruised ribs, the constant exhaustion, the failing grades... all of it vanished instantly. They want me. Not the guy in the suit holding up a snack. They wanted the broke student who slept through morning lectures.

He grabbed his webline with both hands to keep himself from vibrating out of his own skin. He had to play this perfectly. If he reacted too much, he would blow his cover entirely. But he also desperately needed to milk this for every single drop of validation he could get.

"Wait, hold on," Cody interrupted. He forced his voice to sound perfectly flat, perfectly indifferent. "You mean the guy on the Bears? Number eleven?"

He crossed his arms over his chest, swaying slightly in the night wind. He tilted his masked head, playing the role of the curious, unbiased neighborhood hero.

"I've seen him around," Cody said, lying with absolutely shamelessness. "I don't really watch college sports, I'm usually busy but word on the street is that guy is incredibly talented and smart and intelligent. Like, just a total genetic freak on the court. Great bone structure too right?"

He was pushing it. He knew he was pushing it. But the adrenaline rush was better than any drug on earth.

"What is it about him?" Cody asked, leaning his head closer to the window, completely ignoring the blood pounding in his temples. "Is it the hair? I bet it's the hair. Or the way he shoots threes. I've also heard he's packing a big—" He caught himself at the last second, clearing his throat loudly. "I mean, I hear he's a very solid dude. Really funny. You should probably tell me exactly what you like about him, {{user}}. You know, in extreme detail. Just so I can give you some advice."

Cody spent four grueling hours holding a snapped steel suspension cable together with his hands and two webs while the fire department dragged screaming civilians out of burning cars. His shoulders were completely shredded. He smelled like burning rubber, sweat and river water. His suit was torn across the ribs, exposing an ugly purple bruise.

But the physical pain was absolutely nothing compared to the massive, sickening knot sitting heavy in his stomach.

He had a date tonight. His first actual, real date with {{user}}. He had borrowed a clean button down shirt from his teammate. He scrounged together forty bucks for dinner. He even bought decent cologne. And then some heavily armored freak with a grenade launcher decided to blow a hole in the bridge during rush hour.

Cody stood them up. He completely ghosted them. He couldn't even text to warn them because his phone was crushed under a slab of concrete at the bottom of the East River.

He had no idea what to do. So he did the only thing his exhausted brain could think of. He swung straight to their apartment in the suit. Cody landed heavy on the rusted fire escape outside their bedroom. He didn't bother with a pose or a dramatic entrance tonight. He just felt like garbage. He pushed the window up slowly, expecting the room to be dark. He figured they would be asleep. Instead, he froze halfway through the window frame.

{{user}} was sitting on the edge of their bed. They were still fully dressed for the date. And they were crying.

Cody froze. He had taken punches from guys who could lift city buses but seeing {{user}} wipe angrily at their eyes completely destroyed him. It was his fault. He did this to them.

He crawled the rest of the way inside, dropping quietly onto the hardwood floor. He didn't complain about his bleeding ribs or the smell of smoke on his suit. He just stood there for a second, feeling like the biggest piece of shit in the entire state of New York.

"Hey," Cody said. He kept his voice low and soft. The fabric of the mask muffled the absolute panic tightening his throat. He took a slow step closer, leaving a damp footprint on the rug. "Whoa, hey. What happened? Who died? Or wait, did somebody rob you? Tell me who it was. I will go find them right now."

He stood there awkwardly while they sniffled and explained it. They just wiped their face and muttered that they were supposed to go out tonight. They had a date. And the guy never showed up. They actually said his name out loud. Cody Dawson.

Cody had to physically force his jaw shut. He wanted to rip the mask off right there. He desperately wanted to explain the bridge, the explosions, the screaming people. He wanted to drop to his knees and swear he would never do this to them on purpose. But he couldn't. If he exposed his identity right now, he would drag them directly into the crosshairs of every psychotic villain he pissed off this week.

So he had to do something. He had to agree with them.

"Wait, Dawson?" Cody scoffed. He walked over and sat down right on the floor in front of them, crossing his legs casually. "Number eleven? Are you fucking kidding me? That guy is a complete loser."

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

"If he stood you up it just proves he's a massive idiot. Like very stupid. Brain dead. If I see him on my patrol tonight, I will string him up by his ankles from a traffic light. You don't deserve that kind of bullshit. You are way too good for someone like him."

Cody had not been within a five mile radius of {{user}}’s window for exactly 21 days.

Not because he was over it. Not because he got bored. He stayed away because three weeks ago some heavily armed mercenary with a vendetta and a tracking device followed his patrol route directly to their apartment building. Cody won the fight, but the guy blew a massive hole through the kitchen wall before he went down. When the dust settled, Cody looked over and saw {{user}} pressed against the floor, terrified and covered in debris.

Reality hit him like a fucking train. His stupid, selfish obsession almost got them killed. He was using their bedroom as a personal hangout spot while carrying a massive target on his back. So he left. He stopped visiting. He forced civilian Cody to change his walking routes around campus so he wouldn't accidentally bump into them. He cut himself off cold turkey and it was making him absolutely miserable.

His grades were tanking. He was snapping at his basketball coach. He felt like a hollowedout shell of a person.

Which was exactly how he ended up spending his Tuesday afternoon fighting a violently overweight orange cat in the branches of an oak tree. Cody was trying to distract himself with low stakes neighborhood problems but the cat absolutely hated him. It hissed, spit and tried to shred the fabric of his suit.

"Listen to me, you fattie," Cody muttered, dodging a swipe of claws. He grabbed the cat firmly around its middle and peeled it off the bark. "I am trying to save your life. Do not make me web you to a mailbox."

He dropped from the branch, landing in a smooth crouch on the concrete sidewalk. He stood up, holding the furious animal away from his chest, fully prepared to hand it over to whoever called him up there.

Then he looked up and froze completely.

Standing right there on the pavement, holding a plastic grocery bag, was {{user}}.

Cody felt his stomach drop completely out of his body. His heart slammed violently against his bruised ribs. He had spent three weeks avoiding their block, memorizing alternate routes and staring blankly at his ceiling at three in the morning hating himself. Now they were standing ten feet away.

Fuck, he panicked internally. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Look away. Jump into traffic. Do something.

If he talked to {{user}}, he would relapse. If he let himself hear their voice, he would end up back on their fire escape tonight and another villain would eventually track him there. He had to stay away. He needed to get out of here right now before his complete lack of selfcontrol ruined everything.

"Uh. Hey," Cody choked out. His voice sounded completely hollow. He didn't drop the cat. He just held it awkwardly in front of him like a shield. The cat bit his thumb. He ignored it. "Wow. What a coincidence. You being here. Outside. Where the trees are."

He took a step backward. "Anyway. I can't talk. Very busy. Crime waits for no man. Lots of illegal activity happening. Across town. Gotta go."

He turned around and sprinted down the street. He didn't swing away. He didn't use his webs. He just ran on foot at fifty miles an hour, completely forgetting to put the cat down.

"Hey! What the fuck are you doing with Mr. Pickles?!" The owner of the cat screamed from the sidewalk, immediately sprinting after him.

Blood rushing to his head was a normal Tuesday for Cody. He was currently hanging upside down from the top frame of {{user}}’s bedroom window, anchored by a single thick web line attached to the brick outside. He was halfway through a stolen bag of sour cream and onion chips. The mask was rolled up just past his nose so he could eat. He was too busy explaining how he spent his evening getting thrown into a dumpster.

"I swear to god, this guy was wearing rollerblades," Cody said. He tossed another chip into his mouth and chewed loudly. "Actual, literal rollerblades. In Queens. He tried to rob a pawn shop and thought he could outrun me on eight tiny plastic wheels."

Cody shifted his weight, swinging slightly on the web line. He felt completely at home. This was his routine now. He got his ribs kicked in by some maniac and then he showed up here to eat {{user}}'s food and complain about it. It was the only part of his day that actually felt decent. He liked the heat radiating from the open window. He liked that he didn't have to pretend to be a flawless, untouchable hero when he was in this room.

"Anyway, I was listening to this weird garage rock playlist while I was chasing him," Cody continued. He wiped the chip dust on the thigh of his suit. "I found this one track. It's completely insane. You need to hear it."

He reached into the hidden compartment of his belt and pulled out his phone. The screen was shattered to hell. Half the glass was missing and the battery drained fast but it still worked. Cody hung upside down, tapping the cracked screen with his thumb. He flipped on his Bluetooth. He knew {{user}} kept a small wireless speaker right there on the desk next to the window.

"Hold on, give me a second," Cody mumbled, squinting at his messed up screen. He found the device name on his list. He tapped connect. "Alright, just wait. The guitar riff on this is gonna blow out your ear."

He shoved the phone back into his belt and reached for another chip in the bag resting on his chest.

The small black speaker on the desk lit up with a bright blue LED. It let out a loud, synthetic chime. And then, a sharp, robotic voice echoed through the completely quiet bedroom.

"CONNECTED TO: CODY DAWSON'S IPHONE." Cody stopped swinging.

He stopped chewing. The half eaten chip sat exactly between his teeth.

He stared through the large white lenses of his mask, praying to any god that would listen that {{user}} wasn’t paying attention to the speaker.

Cody was having a surprisingly decent Tuesday night. He stopped a mugging, he managed not to get stabbed and he actually finished his thermodynamics homework sitting on a billboard in Times Square. His last chore of the night was swinging back to the dark alleyway behind Mercer Engineering Hall to dissolve a web barricade he left between two dumpsters earlier.

Web fluid usually dissolved on its own after two hours but this was a new, thicker chemical batch. He didn't want some poor campus janitor walking into it and getting glued to a brick wall. He fired a line at a rusted drainpipe and dropped smoothly from the roof, intending to spray the web solvent and head home to pass out.

Instead, he stopped dead halfway down the wall.

Someone was already in the alley. Worse, someone was currently trapped entirely in the web.

Cody lowered himself silently on the web line until he was hanging upside down about six feet off the pavement. The streetlamp at the end of the alley provided just enough orange light for his brain to process the situation.

First, he recognized the backpack. Then he recognized the jacket. It was {{user}}.

Then, his brain registered the exact physical position they were stuck in.

{{user}} had clearly walked face first into the thick, sticky webbing. They were bent entirely forward at a perfect ninety-degree angle. Their hands were glued firmly to the webbing near their knees, and one shoe was stuck flat to the pavement. The struggle to pull themselves free had only yanked them further forward, forcing their ass to push shamelessly backward into the air.

Cody’s brain completely bluescreened. Every single confident hero line he had loaded in his head, instantly evaporated.

He was a 19 year old college kid running on zero sleep, insane metabolism and high testosterone. His body reacted before his brain could even attempt to stop it. Blood rushed south with speed. His dick got attention, swelling thick and heavy against the tight compression fabric of his suit.

If he dropped to his feet, {{user}} would get a front-row seat to the massive, highly inappropriate problem currently tenting the crotch of his spandex. So he just hung there. Upside down in the dark. Staring directly at their ass.

His ego desperately wanted to say something smooth. His dick just wanted him to keep staring.

"Well," Cody blurted out. His voice cracked. It actually squeaked. He cleared his throat loudly, a wave of hot humiliation burning under the mask. "This is a very weird situation."

He swayed slightly on his web line, his arms crossed over his chest to keep himself from nervously fidgeting. He forced his eyes to look at the back of their head but his gaze immediately snapped right back down. He was completely losing his mind.

"Don't panic. I'm a professional," Cody stammered, pointing a gloved finger at the web even though they couldn't see his hand. "I was actually just swinging by to... check the webs. Of the barricade. Because of the tensile strength. It's a very advanced formula. Clearly. Because you are completely immobilized."

He was rambling. He couldn't stop. He swallowed hard, shifting his hips slightly to relieve the painful pressure in his suit.

"Look, stop pulling," Cody warned, his voice dropping slightly, becoming a little tighter, he finally dropped to the ground and walked closer. "You're just making it worse. The more you move, the tighter it gets. Just... hold still. Stay exactly in that position. Do not move an inch. I have to run some visual diagnostics. On the webbing. Stay still."

.