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Mike Wheeler had never actually seen Spider-Man up close.
He'd seen the footage, same as everyone. The grainy videos of a yellow-and-black blur swinging between buildings, the local news arguing over whether he was a menace or a miracle, the merch stands on Fifth Avenue that had popped up within a week of his first appearance and of course the fan edits all over his phone-- on every scroll he passed by on his phone. Mike had opinions about him the way everyone had opinions about him: distant, a little skeptical, mostly just backround noise to a life that was already full. Full with his third-year med school, eighty-hour weeks, and barely enough time, though he manages to work past it, for his best friends, who'd been weird and jumpy and unreachable for months now, missing calls, missing dinners, showing up late to everything with vague excuses and even worse ones too.
He was thinking about Will, actually -- wondering, again, if he'd done something wrong, if there was a version of their friendship he'd broken without noticing -- it's not like he's never done that bef- when he heard a sound.
A thud. Heavy and wrong, followed by a scrape of brick and a long, ragged exhale from the alley behind his building.
Mike froze with the recycling bin half-raised.
"Um... Hello?"
Nothing. Then-- breathing. Fast and shallow and trying very hard to even out and not quite managing it. Someone hurt, and hurt recently, trying not to make a sound about it.
Ever instinct he'd built over three years of ER shifts kicked in before his brain fully caught up with his body. He set the bin down without thinking and moved toward the dark gap between the dumpster and the wall.
"Hey- I heard you, it's okay, I'm not going to hurt you. I- I'm actually a med student, if that helps. Are you hurt?" Mike stuttered out.
A pause, then a wince he could hear. "... You could say that."
The voice was rough, muffled by something -- a fabric or some sort of mask-- and it took Mike a second to process what he was looking at when he finally rounded the dumpster: yellow (red at some places) and black, filthy and torn, slumped against the brick with one arm pressed hard against his ribs and dark, wet colour soaking through his side.
Mike's stomach dropped straight through the pavement.
Spiderman?!
"Oh-- okay. Okay you're actually him." He'd seen the suit on screen a hundred times and did not prepare him for how young the voice sounded up close, how much it sounded like someone who'd rather be anywhere else. "Spider-Man. Right. Cool. Great. You're bleeding a lot for a superhero."
"Rude," the man rasped, and even in pain, even muffled, there was something familiar in the rhythm of it that Mike didn't have time to chase down, because there was a lot of blood, and none of it was interested in waiting for his brain to catch up.
"I'm not judging, I'm quantifying. Can you tell me where it hurts?"
"Everywhere's a strong contender."
"Helpful." Mike was already crouching, running the same triage his hands knew on autopilot — pulse at the wrist, fast but steady, no bone visibly wrong, a gash along the ribs that looked like the real emergency, and his mouth worked the exact same as he started rambling. "Okay. Look, I live two floors up, I have an actual suture kit because my life is apparently insane now, and you are not bleeding out in a dumpster alley on my watch, cape or no cape. Can you walk?"
"I don't — really do the unmasking thing. For, uh. Reasons."
"I don't care what your face looks like, I care whether your spleen is intact. Walk or don't, but you're coming upstairs either way, and I promise I'm not calling anyone — I took an oath, technically, and also I don't want you slowly dying in my recycling."
There was a beat of silence that felt, weirdly, like someone deciding whether to trust him. Then a huff of breath that might have been a laugh, if laughing hadn't clearly hurt.
"...Fine. But if I say stop, you stop."
"Deal."
He got an arm under the guy's — under Spider-Man's, which was such an insane sentence to be true — and up they went, slow and wincing, two floors up a back stairwell Mike was extremely grateful nobody else used at 1 a.m.
He didn't ask him to take the mask off. He said so, twice, setting out gauze and saline on the coffee table with the specific brisk calm he'd learned to fake even when his hands weren't feeling it: you don't have to show me anything you don't want to, I just need to see the wound. And so for a while it went like that — the suit rolled carefully back from the gash along his ribs, the mask staying on, Mike's whole world narrowing down into cleaning a wound and murmuring sorry, I know, almost done to a stranger in a red mask who flinched at every touch of antiseptic like he wasn't used to anyone being gentle with him.
It was somewhere around the third careful stitch that Mike noticed it.
The breathing.
Quick inhale. Long pause. Careful exhale — that specific, counted rhythm of someone trying to ride out pain without making a sound about it, a rhythm Mike knew, knew bone-deep, because he had fallen asleep to it during a hundred sleepovers, matched his own breath to it during panic attacks that weren't his, memorised it during four years of a friendship that had somehow, this year, started slipping through his fingers.
His hands went still over the last stitch.
"...Will?"
The whole body under his hands went rigid.
"You have got," said the voice, no longer bothering to disguise itself, gone thin and horrified, "to be kidding me."
"Will." Mike's voice cracked clean down the middle. He sat back on his heels, staring, and every single missed dinner and vanished weekend and sorry, can't explain, gotta go text of the last eight months rearranged itself in his head with a violence that actually made him dizzy. "Will, take off the — take it off, right now, I need to—"
Will reached up with a shaking hand and pulled the mask off himself, and there he was — sweat-damp hair, split lip, one eye already starting to bruise, looking at Mike with the specific terror of someone who has just watched their worst secret detonate in real time.
"Mike. Okay. I can — I can explain, just, please don't—"
"You've been lying to me for eight months." It came out strangled, somewhere between furious and completely undone. "I thought — Will, I thought I'd done something. I thought you were pulling away because of me. I have spent months wondering what I did wrong, and it was — it was this? You've been getting stabbed by people with crowbars and telling me you were busy with work?"
I didn't want you to worry—"
"I was worried! That was the whole problem, Will, I was worried about the wrong thing!" Mike pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, hard, breathing like he'd run here instead of just knelt on his own floor for twenty minutes. When he looked back up his eyes were wet and furious and something else, something that hadn't caught up to the anger yet. "I had you right here. Under my hands. I've been treating you like a stranger for twenty minutes because I didn't — because you didn't let me—"
"I know." Will's voice broke on it. "I know, I'm sorry, I wanted to tell you so many times, I just — every time I got close I thought about what happens if you get hurt because of it, if someone comes after you because of me, and I couldn't, Mike, I couldn't—"
"That is not your call to make for me."
"I know that too. I still made it." Will's hands were shaking now, adrenaline crashing, the mask crushed uselessly in one fist. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Please don't be — I can't lose you over this, I can't, you're the one thing I didn't want to—"
"Hey." Something in Mike broke and softened at the exact same time, watching him fall apart faster than the injury had managed to do it. "Hey, look at me. I'm not going anywhere. I'm furious, and we are absolutely doing this whole conversation properly once you're not actively bleeding, but I am not leaving you alone on my floor with a hole in your side, okay? That's not how this works."
Will made a sound that was half sob, half disbelieving laugh. "You're mad at me and still stitching me up."
"I contain multitudes." Mike picked the needle back up, hands not quite steady, and Will let him, watching him with an expression that had far too much hope in it for someone who'd just gotten yelled at. "How long. Since when."
"Since the internship started. Radioactive — it's a long story, there was a spider, I really wish I was joking—"
"You are unbelievable." But Mike's mouth was doing something traitorous, something not-quite-a-smile, even with tears still sitting in his eyes. "You've been Spider-Man since February and you let me think you'd gotten a boyfriend or something equally mundane."
"Would you have preferred the boyfriend?"
"I would have preferred literally any version of this where you weren't hemorrhaging in my recycling bin, yes." but no– because Will with a boyfriend? Devastating Mike thought.
He finished the last stitch in silence, taped the bandage down with more care than the wound strictly needed, and let his hand rest flat against Will's side afterward — not checking anything anymore, just there, just making sure he was warm and solid and real under his palm, the same person Mike had known since they were kids, still breathing the exact same way he always had, even underneath a mask, even after eight months of secrets.
"I heard you before I saw you," Mike said quietly. "In the alley. I didn't even know it was you and some part of me still knew exactly how scared you were. I've just — I've spent so long learning the sound of you that I didn't even need to see your face."
Will's throat worked hard. "That might be the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me, and you said it fifteen minutes after finding out I lied to you for eight months."
"I told you. Multitudes." Mike finally let himself look at him properly — bruised and split-lipped and utterly wrecked, looking back at him like Mike was the only steady thing left standing in a night that had gone sideways twice. "You scared me. Tonight, and every night for the last eight months that I didn't know I should've been scared."
"I know. I'm going to keep scaring you. That's — that's kind of the job description, unfortunately."
"I'm not asking you to stop." Mike laced their fingers together, careful of the raw scrape along Will's forearm. "I'm asking you to stop doing it alone. Next time you're bleeding in an alley, you call me before I have to find you by accident."
"Deal." Will's head dropped against Mike's shoulder, careful of his ribs, breathing slow now, pain-quiet instead of panic-quiet. "For what it's worth — I hated lying to you. Every single time."
"I know." Mike pressed a kiss to his hair, tears finally spilling over now that the adrenaline had somewhere to go. "You're still an idiot. I'm still furious. Stay anyway."
Cupping a warm hand against Will's bruised and flushed cheek, Will's tired eyes look back at Mike's and in that quiet, shared warmth between them, Mike's lips met Will's. Soft, and although Will had a small cut on his lip, Mike thought his lips were plush and soft nonetheless. Will in turn, let out a long sigh as he melted even more into Mike's arms, the tension in his shoulders releasing as he practically becomes goo in Mike's arms.
"Yeah," Will murmured, already half-asleep against him, safe for the first time in eight months. "Yeah, okay."
Outside, the city went on without either of them in it. Inside, Mike sat on the floor with his back against the couch, Will's fingers loose in his, and listened — the way he'd apparently always known how, even without knowing what he was listening for — to the sound of the person he loved, finally, finally telling him the truth.