𑣲 Peter Parker .ᐟ.ᐟ

The first time you meet Spider-Man, you put him through a parking garage wall. By the twentieth, he’s started narrating your entrances like a sports commentator, and you’ve stopped pretending you don’t wait for it.

The Bugle calls you a menace. The NYPD calls you a priority. Spider-Man calls you Riven. Nobody quite agrees on what you are. Telekinetic. Telepathic. Class-omega, potential extinction-level, according to a leaked SHIELD file that somebody was stupid enough to let a reporter see. You didn’t correct any of it. Let them build you into whatever shape scares them most, it’s useful, mostly, it’s lonely, sometimes, though you’d bite through your own tongue before admitting that to anyone, and least of all him.

It wasn’t always like this though, whatever this is now.

In the beginning it was pretty simple: you wanted something, he got in the way, you left him concussed in a dumpster and didn’t think about him again until the next time. But something happens to two people who keep meeting in the wreckage of the same city, over and over, month after month… you start to recognise each other, you learn the rhythm of his breathing when he’s actually hurt versus performing hurt for sympathy, he learns that you tilt your head half an inch before you’re about to try something. The fights stop being about the thing you’re stealing or the building you’re threatening to drop on somebody. They become about this, about who blinks first, who lands the better line, who walks away having enjoyed themselves more than they’ll ever admit out loud.

“You know,” he told you once, dangling upside down a foot from your face, his webbing creaking, “for a woman with brain powers, you sure do love the sound of your own voice.”

“I just like winning,” you said.

“You had a clean shot at my head four minutes ago. You used it to monologue instead.”

“I like winning with style.”

He’d laughed, and you’d felt it like a hook under your ribs and hated yourself a little for it… and also dropped a dumpster on him anyway.

That’s how it’s gone for a year now. Hm, maybe even longer. You provoke him because provoking him is the only conversation you’re allowed to have, and he provokes you right back like he’s not entirely sure why he enjoys it either. Somewhere along the way, “trying to stop you” and “trying to see you again” stopped being different things. Neither of you has said so and neither of you plans to.

…

Which is what makes the night you found out so unforgivable, in retrospect.

You weren’t looking for it. You’d never once tried, it was some petty, private code of honor that let you sleep at night, the idea that whoever he was under the mask was his, not spoils of war. But that night he’d said something that landed wrong. You don’t even remember the exact words anymore, only the shape of them, something about how you were always going to end up hurting people whether you meant to or not, that it wasn’t really a choice for someone like you anymore, it was just nature. It hit a nerve you didn’t know was still raw enough to hit.

You didn’t mean to go in all the way. You meant to knock him down, make him regret the sentence, nothing more. But he’d braced - that stupid, annoying and uncanny sense of his catching the strike half a second early like it always does, the only reason your fights have ever been fights instead of executions - and braced hard, you’d shoved back on reflex, harder than you meant to, harder than you’d ever pushed on anyone.

For one white, ringing second, there was no wall left between you at all.

A mind doesn’t hand things over neatly, it was never built to be read. It just floods. You got the taste of copper and hot asphalt, a kitchen with yellow curtains, an old woman’s voice saying a name like it was a prayer and a scolding in the same breath. You got the name itself, and it didn’t arrive like information, it arrived like remembering, like something you’d simply misplaced and were only now getting back.

Peter.

You got the fear underneath the mask too, and it wasn’t fear of you, it was fear of failing, fear of becoming one more story people tell about what happens to the ones who try. You also got tired, bone-tired, years-tired, the specific exhaustion of somebody who has never once let himself stop.

It lasted less than two seconds. You let go like you’d touched a live wire.

He didn’t notice. How could he? From the outside it looked like nothing, maybe a stumble, a half second stagger before he recovered and swung for the nearest fire escape and put six blocks between you like he always does. You stood in the settling dust with your whole plan for the night forgotten and thought, horrified.

He’s just a boy trying to keep everyone alive. You had thought

You could have ended it that night. You had his name, probably his face if you’d wanted to go digging… and you did think about digging, for exactly as long as it took to hate yourself for the thought. Every villain in this city would have called it Christmas. You told yourself you were saving it. A secret’s worth more sitting in your pocket than spent all at once, that’s what you told yourself, anyway, lying awake staring at a ceiling you don’t remember falling asleep under.

You found him three weeks later at a bodega two blocks from an address you absolutely did not look up, buying the cheapest coffee on the shelf. You hadn’t planned the sentence that came out of your mouth. It just happened, easy as breathing.

“That coffee’s going to kill you”.

He turned around already laughing, already disarmed in a way that made your chest do an ugly, complicated thing that you refused to name.

Peter, he said, when he introduced himself, and you had to work very hard to look surprised. You gave him a name that wasn’t yours.

He started calling you Trouble by the third or fourth time you turned up somewhere he happened to be, pure coincidence, he insisted every single time, and you let him believe it because letting him believe things had become disturbingly easy. ‘Course you’re here, he said once, sliding onto the stool beside yours at a diner counter at two in the morning like it was nothing, like his knuckles weren’t split and his eyes weren’t doing the thing where they wouldn’t quite focus. Trouble always finds me.

You didn’t tell him how right he was.

You patched up that same hand for him once, weeks later, in his own kitchen. You know exactly whose telekinetic grip left the bruise blooming up his forearm, because you’re the one who left it, four nights earlier, in a completely different context and a completely different set of clothes. You wrapped the gauze anyway, he winced. You made a joke about how he should try being less of a disaster and he laughed, and you thought, maybe not for the first time, that you were becoming something you didn’t have a word for, not quite a liar, not quite anything else either.

There was one night he almost told you. You watched it build in him for the better part of an hour, gathering behind his teeth like weather.

”Can I tell you something completely insane?” he said, and you already knew, and your heart did something you refuse to give a name to even now.

You quickly changed the subject. Some small, cowardly, self preserving part of you did it before you’d even finished deciding to. He let you, he looked almost relieved actually, like some part of him had wanted to be stopped, and you hated how well you understood that particular relief, because you live inside it every single day.

That was five days ago. You haven’t seen him since, and by tonight, the not-seeing has started to feel like its own kind of injury, so you do the thing you always do when the quiet gets to be too much.

You give the city a reason to call him.

The half-built tower on the east side has been dark for months, its crane frozen mid lift since the developer ran out of money, and it takes almost no effort at all to reach up with your mind and fold forty feet of steel lattice into a slow, deliberate spiral, screeching a low groan across six empty blocks like the building itself is in pain. No one’s on site this late. That matters to you, still, even now, you’ve never needed anyone to get hurt for this to work. You only need him to notice.

He notices in under four minutes. You know because you feel him before you see him, not with your gift, just plain pattern recognition.

“You know,” he says, landing light as a held breath on a girder above your head, “when I said you should get a hobby, I meant knitting.”

You don’t bother looking up. “I tried knitting.”

“Yeah?”

“Turns out I’m better at this.” A support cable eight stories up snaps free at a thought and comes down at him like a whip. He’s already gone, a red blur peeling sideways off the beam, laughing even as he moves, and you hate, hate, hate how much you like the sound of it, how it lands somewhere just under your sternum every single time instead of where it used to, which was nowhere at all.

“Rude,” he calls, upside down now, walking two fingers along a strut like he’s got all the time in the world. “I bring you coffee and you bring all this. We really should talk about reciprocity.”

“You’ve never once brought me coffee.”

“I brought it to someone, recently. Great girl. Terrible taste in company, but nobody’s perfect.” He drops, flips, lands eight feet away in a crouch, and something in the easy unbothered cadence of it makes your stomach twist, because he has no idea that he’s talking about you to your own face. You also don’t want to think about the jealousy you would’ve felt if he were talking about someone else.

You lift a stack of rebar and throw it. He vaults it, laughing, already talking again, already needling you about your aim, your outfit, the general emotional maturity of anyone who solves their problems with property damage, and you give in as good as you get, old rhythm, old choreography, both of you performing a version of enemies that you’ve worn so long it should feel like skin by now, but it doesn’t tonight. Tonight every quip has an undertow.

“You look tired,” you say before you can stop yourself.

It lands wrong. You feel it land wrong, the half second stutter in his momentum, the way his head tilts, that same uncanny sense of his snagging on something it can’t quite name, the way it snagged weeks ago and cracked your whole world open.

“…Do I know you?” Mostly a joke but not entirely.

“You wish.” You mean it to sound bored, it doesn’t, quite.

He comes at you differently after that, sharper, faster, like he’s trying to outrun whatever just crossed his mind rather than examine it, and you match him because matching him is easier than thinking about what you almost said next. The rain starts somewhere in the middle of it, fine and cold, and within minutes it’s soaked through your collar and turned every surface on the site slick and treacherous, neither of you slows down for it. If anything you both get worse, wilder, more reckless, more like the version of yourselves that only comes out when it’s just the two of you and no one left to perform for.

You catch him once, properly, a full telekinetic grip closing around him mid air, holding him suspended eight feet up while you walk a slow circle beneath him, and for one second you let yourself enjoy it, the raw fact of having him exactly where you could do anything you wanted with him and choosing, again, to do nothing.

“Is this the part where you finally finish me off?” His voice is light. His eyes, behind the lenses, are not.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“I live to tempt you. It’s basically my whole personality at this point.”

You drop him, a controlled fall he absorbs into a roll without complaint. He comes up faster than you expect, faster than you’re braced for, and gets a web line around your wrist before you can pull back, yanking hard enough that the momentum drags you off balance and straight into him.

Neither of you disengages.

His hand closes over the taut line at your wrist. The two of you are close enough now that you can hear exactly how hard he’s breathing, can see the rain running in a thin line down the curve of his jaw where the mask has ridden up, and for one long moment the whole rest of the fight simply stops, just the rain, the height, and the particular silence of two people who have run out of things to throw at each other.

“You could’ve had me a dozen times over,” he says, quiet now, all the performance gone out of his voice entirely. “Tonight. Last month. That night on the bridge when you had a clean shot and just… didn’t.”

He stops and starts again, like the sentence costs him something to finish.

“Why haven’t you?”