“Seriously, Y/N, I just need to –“
Your hand remains on his shoulder when he sits down on his bed – a groan leaving him that’s muffled by his mask as he stops trying to explain himself to you. He clutches a hand over his side, a slight bend to his demeanor as you assume he’d probably been hit there with something hard. You don’t see blood anywhere, or any skin exposed – so he’s probably going to live. You’ll just take care of him like always.
“Are you okay?“
You ask him, your hand wandering from his shoulder as you kneel in front of him and rest both of your hands on his bent knees. The bed is low enough that you have a nice view of his covered face in front of you. He nods at you but doesn’t say anything. You shoot him a slight smile, your thumb dragging loosely over the textured red fabric covering his legs.
“Do you trust me?”
You’re not sure why you ask him that. Of course he trusts you. At least you hope he does – but judging from the fact that you’re in Spider-Man’s apartment you probably mean at least a little bit more to him than you think you do. You lean back to rest on the calves of your legs underneath you.
“I do.”
He says, quieter than he intends, unsure about what you mean – but when you trail your fingers up his arm that’s resting on his thigh – he understands your question.
Your fingers reach the seam of where the mask rests over the collar of his suit. The texture feels odd – ribbon-like almost and you turn your hand to press your fingers under the fabric to slowly peel it off.
First over the curve of his neck – and as you’re about to reach the beginning of his cheekbones his hand takes a hold of your wrist. He’s hesitating, even if he doesn’t want to. It’s become so natural for him to hide who is underneath the costume – that he doesn’t even make an exception for you.
You stop your movements and wait for him to drop his hand again so that you can take the mask off further. You’ve always had a thing for Peter – and taking in every part of his face like this gave you a whole lot of other reasons to appreciate him for. The moment wasn’t as gentle as you had always hoped it would be – you’re nervous, and he’s nervous – almost as if Peter Parker wasn’t Spider-Man after all.
Maybe you should just rip the band-aid off.
And so you do. You take your other hand to help you take off the mask completely – carefully freeing his face from the red fabric as you reveal Peter Parker staring at you just like always. You place the mask next to him on the bed as you let your elbows rest on his thighs.
He looks pretty fucked up – a nice bruise right on his left cheekbone, a cut above his eyebrow, and a few scratches here and there that need some cleaning. Nothing he won’t survive. One of your hands wanders up to grab a hold of his chin, to tilt him in a direction that lets you take a better look.
“What’s it look like, Doc?”
He asks you weakly, expression slightly tinging of pain before a smile forms on his tired face as you muster him. You return the smile, and you move your hand from his chin to stroke your hand through his tousled hair.
“You’ll be fine, Parker.”
You flatten your palms on his thighs as you push yourself up from your position in front of him. You vaguely remember where he keeps the jokingly small box that he calls a first-aid kit, and try to find it again in the mess that is his apartment.
He watches you as you move around, opting to just lean back into the comfort that his horribly uncomfortable bed was able to give him.
When you walk over to him again, his eyes are closed and his hand is still holding his side. You’ll have to ask him to get out of the costume to inspect that, but you’re not sure how to phrase that yet so instead, you’ll just stick to poking around in his face first.
You nudge his bend knee with your foot and he looks at you again, pushing himself up slowly so that you were able to get a hold of his face again. You sit down next to him, opening the small box to ensure everything you need is in there. You opt to first take care of the cut that was above his brow – taking a cotton swap in your hand and getting some disinfectant on it.
You push a strand of stray hair out of his face, and start cleaning the wound. He hisses when the cotton swap touches the skin.
“What even happened?”
He hesitates when you dig a bit too hard at the wound, and then answers you.
“Ah, fuck – uh – someone threw a car at me.”
You let the statement linger in the room, almost as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. He has that typical Peter Parker smile on his face again. The one where you know he’s trying to mask whatever emotion he’s currently feeling.
“You can laugh. It’s alright.”
You look him in the eyes again at that and crack a smile at him that matches his. You shake your head and press the cotton swap to the wound one last time before applying a closure to it to make sure it heals correctly.
“Do you know why they did that?”
“I was getting on his nerves.”
You laugh at that.
“You do have a knack for that.”
You move on to clean up the other scratches on his face – luckily there wasn’t anything just as gnarly as the cut above his eyebrow. As you said – he’ll be fine. The thing that concerned you the most was his ribcage – he kept holding it, but it didn’t seem like he had any trouble breathing.
“I should probably take a look at… that.”
You nod towards his hand pressed against his ribcage.
“Uh-uh.”
“You need to take off the suit for that one.”
“Oh.”
He says and the statement floats in his head for a second. He’s not about to get out of the suit in front of you – he’ll spare himself the humiliation of you knowing that he gets stuck in that thing just a little bit too often than he actually should. So he pushes your hands away and stands up carefully.
“I’ll be right back.”
And then he disappears, not so gracefully and with a slight limp, into his bathroom, leaving you behind as you wonder what has suddenly gotten into him. It was only when you hear the faint shuffling of fabric that you realize what he’s doing.
He comes back out a moment later, in nothing but his boxers as he struggles to find a pair of sweatpants in his closet.
“You need some help, Parker?”
You say as you still sit on his bed, waiting up on him. He turns his head to quickly look at you.
“Yeah! No I mean – uh, I’m fine I just need to, yeah, hang on.”
He stumbles over his words. He hadn’t been listening to you. You furrow your brows as you watch him struggle to open the lower drawer of his wooden closet.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so you had a nice view of the slowly forming bruise on his ribcage. It tints his skin a rich red – and you know that within a day or two it will cycle from purple to green to yellow – until it’s gone.
He is lucky that he can take a hit just a bit better than most people.
“Can you breathe with that?”
“Yeah.”
He pries out a pair of grey sweatpants and quickly puts them on – a little too quick because he winces as he leans down to push them up over his legs. Once he’s done and semi unsuccessfully dressed – he wanders back over to you.
You’ve got that attentive look on your face again, the one that makes him feel like an open book in front of you, and you reach out a hand to meet his. He sits down again, and you pull up his arm so you can watch him move. It’s just a contusion.
“You should see an actual doctor if it’s not gone by the end of the week.”
“I will.”
You gave him a pointed look as you let his hand slip out of your grasp.
“I promise.”
He adds, trying to get the point across a little more convincing this time. He watches your eyes roam across his chest – but he doesn’t feel exposed. You’re looking out for him. You hum and are content with your work – he’s still banged up for sure, but for right now you’re done with playing nurse for him. There’s nothing else you can do for him. He gives you a fake smile when you catch his gaze for too long.
You gather the supplies from the little first-aid box and place them back into it. Once you were finished with your work, you dust off your hands and turn back to him.
“Do you want me to kiss your boo-boos for good luck, Parker?”
You joke – but something changes in the air. Your gaze flickers between his eyes and lips for a moment, your intent shifts from caring about him to doing something else to him.
“You’d do that for me?”
You roll your eyes and stand up, trying to leave the moment before you do something stupid, but he catches your wrist with his hand and keeps you in place. You look down at him.
“Thank you for always being so good to me, Y/N.”
He says to you – and there’s something else that he wants to get out, but he swallows the words before they can even form on his tongue. He assumes it’s better this way, to keep walking that fine line between just being a friend and being something else entirely.
“Don’t mention it, Peter.”
You say and he feels something break in him. He doesn’t want your rejection, and he also doesn’t want either of you to get hurt. Making things unnecessarily difficult was another talent of his – but he couldn’t fuck it up with you. Losing you would be the thing that just might topple him over the edge of insanity.
But these moments – they keep piling up. He remembers every single one of them so well. Because you’re always there for him. It’s always been just you and him. He realizes that now.
“Just please be more careful.”
You say and his hand is still wrapped around your wrist, your expression softens at him. He isn’t sure just how messed up he looks, or if his hair is sitting right – and even the pain that he was in doesn’t seem to matter all that much anymore because right now the only thing he’s concentrating on is you.
You tilt your head at him, and finally – he pulls you back in a way that makes you almost stumble into him, as his other hand gets a hold of your face and pulls you in for a kiss.