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She’s not exactly sure when they fell into this particular rhythm - and why it’s never felt awkward or stilted, most of the time, at least, when it’s just the two of them.
It had been growing, the indeterminate something she felt around him, towards him, that bloomed in his very presence. The steadfastness he coaxed out of her had been present almost as long as they’ve known each other, since he was a kid - or - more of a kid than he is now, anyways. Since she was younger and greener - had less of an idea what she was doing and was willing to turn to a fresh face, new name, bubbling “ superhero” in the off chance it’d work out and she wouldn’t get fired.
It’s why she communicated with him the way she did, why they’ve had each other on speed dial for years now, why she’s risked her job and security and life on the daily just because helping him feels like the right thing.
She feels a lot of things – and most of the time they don’t lead her anywhere good.
She can pinpoint it started sometime in the last six months, the few friends that still put up with her irregular schedule and regular mood swings hooked her up with some guy they met at a bar - he’s a total catch, he’s a hunk, at least have a fun night if you don’t like him?
In their defense, she supposes, the date had gone pretty well for being a blind spring both of them were too desperate and lonely to pass up. Yuri thought, maybe they could make a good match considering how neither one of them wanted to admit that.
The guy was built, a real gym rat, biceps the size of her head. He had blond hair and held the door open for her, he was funny , funny like he wasn’t even trying - funny like he wasn’t awkward or stilted, didn’t have that air like he was doing anything to make Yuri warm up to him. He should’ve been perfect, he was perfect, his name was James and Yuri bolted in the quiet period between dinner and dessert, using her empty wine glass as a pass to the bathroom that was conveniently located near the kitchen exit.
Yuri hauled herself up the fire escape, only needing to untangle the dress she was wearing from her heels once, the grooves of the stiletto molding easily to the metal ladder rungs. When she reached the roof she inhaled deeply, the wind kissed her cheeks pleasantly and whisked away the nervous sweat stuck to her brow. The moon was almost full, practically the only thing visible in what should’ve been a clear night besides Venus peaking out brilliantly to the northeast. The night air was cool enough to feel refreshing, but the ever-present smog painted itself in her lungs more like a fond reminder than a nuisance.
She meandered on the roof slowly, kicking at pebbles and crumpled beer cans, she had never been to this restaurant before but was semi-familiar with this area of Greenwich. It was half past eight and she already felt tired despite the night barely even starting for most people, she watched in a near haze the purple and red lights dancing from projectors placed by the clubs, the subtle base thumping in time with her pulse.
Yuri scanned over the roof again, looking for a nice place to stretch her legs and probably down the flask of tequila she had in her bag in case this date ended up actually going anywhere when her breath caught - her heart beating out of her chest for a hot second.
She squinted, her eyes not yet adjusted to the darkness, and followed the lithe silhouette of a man perching in an uncomfortable-looking position near the edge of the building, his phone held close to his face and the brightness dimmed.
Yuri sighed, this brooding spot had clearly already been claimed, and was stuck between approaching the kid if he needed help or being officially off-duty and slinking off to sulk for the rest of the night. The longer she stared though, the more she took in - how unusual his clothes were, tight and brightly colored, his face looked covered too - all woven in,
“Spider-Man?” Yuri called out, dumbfounded.
She saw the figure tense in his odd crouch and spring with immediate grace and lightness to his feet, more like he floated than stood, and did it all so quickly without a single creak or pop of a joint. It was definitely him. He pressed a gloved hand to his forehead, his back tensed in a line of agitation and he still hadn’t even turned to look at her.
“I’ll go, I’ll go,” he pacified. “I was just dealing with - something - I’m leaving right now.”
He stammered for a second, finally turning around to look at her and Yuri felt her mouth quirk up without her permission as his eye plates went wide on his head.
“Yuri?” He questioned her, just as shocked to run into her in this - particular situation.
Yuri let her eyes drift towards his feet, two pizza boxes stacked on top of each other and webbed together sat near his ankles.
“What are you doing?” She asked. A little forward, it’s not like she’s his boss, he can do whatever he wants with his time. Just most of the time, or, any time they’ve ever met he’s been actively fighting crime, employing his slightly disturbing mutated-superhuman-spider powers, or annoying her - or all three at once. Now he’s just sitting by himself on a quiet rooftop in Greenwich, looking as disgruntled and lonely as Yuri herself.
“Oh, you know. Just - hangin’. Just hanging out.”
He answers her semi-casually, swinging his arms back and forth the way he tended to do when he was nervous. She’s not sure when he got so easy for her to read, but she shakes the thought off quickly before it can fester.
“By yourself?” She teases lightly, glancing at the two pizzas forgotten on the roof.
“Well, I seem to notice you’re also on this roof by yourself, so,” he blunders, a little sharper than he normally is but he’s got one of those soft voices, the type that never sounds too mean even when he’s upset or tired.
Yuri holds her hands in front of her, walking towards him, “Guilty,” she admits, and takes a careful seat on the edge of the roof, swinging her legs lightly. She glances down and fights the slow creep of vertigo crawling up her spine, she doesn’t love heights but has to deal with them more than enough in her line of work. The exposure helps but, not like she’s cured.
Spider-Man sits next to her gingerly, leaving ample space between them, fiddles with a slice on the inside of his thigh. The cut has already healed, but he worries his smallest finger inside the hole of his tights and whines softly, annoyed. Yuri leans over and slaps the gloved hand away, unthinking.
“You’re gonna make it worse,” she chides him.
He scoffs and settles his hands on the ledge instead, like he might use some of that freakish strength to propel himself off the roof and leave her alone with her poor manners and his sad litter. But he doesn’t, he sits with her in silence for a solid five minutes before she feels him peering holes into the side of her face.
When she finally looks at him, it seems to give him the courage to ask the question he’d been building up to,
“Did you have a date?”
She raises a brow at him and he fumbles, raising his hands in the same pacifying gesture she did to him, “Just ‘cause you’re dressed so nice! Not that you look bad, other times, just, you know.” He finishes lamely.
“I did have a date,” she answers, simply.
“Oh! How did it go?” He’s got that vibrant optimistic sound in his voice again, and Yuri kinda loves it, but she also kinda hates it.
“Well, he’s still downstairs, probably getting the check, and I’m on the roof, so.”
“Ah,” Spider-Man breathes, awkward to his very core.
“Did he suck?” He asks, leaning in closer to her, eye plates widening and analyzing her face.
Yuri huffs gently, a smile as amused as it's self-deprecating working its way onto her face, “No, he was great.”
She feels Spider-Man shift beside her, already trying to puzzle out the meaning behind her words, but she beats him to it.
“I suck,” she clarifies.
Spider-Man doesn’t push, doesn’t make one of his oftentimes more tension-building than tension-resolving jokes he’s so prone to cracking, just sits with her for a moment. Yuri feels her heart clench in a painful arrhythmia, she appreciates his gentle presence more than she could ever put words to and she doesn’t even know his name , it doesn’t seem right sometimes but, what can she do?
“Well, if it helps, I just got done being broken up with. That’s why I’m up here, by myself, with two cold pizzas. So, I guess I suck too.”
Yuri sits with that for a minute, quietly reeling that Spider-Man was dating someone, what a confusing ass shit-show that relationship must’ve been. But, also, it’s nice to know their resident superhero has problems just as mundane and gut-dropping as everyone else.
“You know,” Yuri says with a smile, leaning in to bump her shoulder against his, “that actually really does help.”
“I’m so glad to be of assistance,” he laughs, a little, some more of that carefree schoolboy personality she’s come to recognize bleeding back into him.
She hears him inhale and twist slightly, “Do you, do you wanna help me eat this pizza? I mean, I could probably eat it all by myself but I’d just get really bummed out after.”
Yuri huffs, her smile showing more canine than it normally does, “Thought you’d never ask.”
——
It’s not like things change drastically between them, they’ve always been friendly, but maybe they’re just more like friends proper now instead of friendly co-workers. On official business, he still meets her at neutral locations, police precinct rooftops and residential crime scenes, but off of official business she thinks maybe he spends more time in her office than he probably should.
The first time he slinked up to her window and seamlessly slid in through the comically small opening Yuri damn near passed out, trying to usher him out almost like a real spider. He insisted, and convinced her, that his “spider-sense” would let him know if anyone was coming before they even rounded the corner to her office.
“And then where are you gonna hide if someone does come in?” Yuri interrogated him, gesturing around her sparse and generally cramped office space. Enough room for a small couch and a desk but not much else.
He leveled her with a stare before simply looking up.
“The ceiling?” Yuri hissed, “they’d see you in a second!”
“Trust me,” he drawled, leaning a little too far into her space - a little arrogant, a little juvenile - “I’ve been doing this job for eight years. They never look up.”
——
Yuri didn’t exactly understand why he wanted to be in her office so much, usually tinkering with his gadgets or scribbling formulas and algorithms with messy handwriting in neon green dollar store spiral notebooks that gave her a headache just looking at them.
Ever since their heart-to-heart, ever since his breakup, he’s seemed to exhibit a level of neediness she’s never really experienced from him before. He’s almost clingy, in a way that makes her think she should be annoyed by it, which in turn makes her question why she isn’t.
It’s something of a hard pill to swallow for her to realize she likes having him around, sometimes it’s the general thrill of seeing Spider-Man hanging off the wall, getting that awful beetle that had taken up residence in one of her ceiling panels, but mostly, it’s just him. He’s sweet and calm, reliable in a pinch and used to the chaos that’s been most of her life - even more than responding to it, he thrives off of it.
She’s spent most of her life trying to navigate the push and pull of relationships, trying not to step on toes and leave hearts jaded when her job pulls her away too many times - but he gets it. He’s the one disappearing more often than she is. But usually never for long.
Before, Yuri would sometimes go weeks without hearing from Spider-Man, but now, it’s rare that even twelve hours pass without at least a text from her Spider. She’d woken up to the short shrill blare of her text tone that she’s taken to leaving on at night, purely due to her Spider’s nocturnal habits, and glares at her clock reading 3:24 am before checking her messages.
- Got a lead on Tombstone. Checking it out. Be back tomorrow. Maybe. Probably. Let’s hope.
Yuri stares at the message, her eyes burning and vision swimming. Her department has been keeping tabs on some talk swirling around Tombstone and his gang for weeks but haven't been able to turn up anything more than revoked statements and rumors. She knows if Spider-Man’s caught wind of something, though, it might be more reliable and more illegal than she should be getting herself caught up in for now. She feels confident in his ability to handle himself, and really wants to go back to sleep, so she hearts the message and passes out as soon as the screen goes dim.
——
Four days later, Yuri has shamelessly texted Spider-Man twenty-four times and left him three voicemails. She feels like she’s about to crawl out of her skin with anxiety, even an HR rep not subtly just “so happens” to stop by her office and ask if she needed to talk, she seems anxious, also she’s been lashing out a little too much at her colleagues.
She dedicates all her focus to the Tombstone whispers, ignoring more pressing matters to the chagrin of her bosses and insisting she had good intel from an anonymous source that something serious was going on.
By the end of the week, Spider-Man’s been missing for six days and New York’s started to notice, or, at least her Twitter feed really has. They get a call from the northwest of Harlem about guys going on a rampage, they relay the word ‘invincible’ to her more times than she ever wants to hear again, and the Harlem department eventually infiltrates a drug ring organized by Tombstone and his men, most of whom are conveniently webbed to the ceiling and more than willing to negotiate plea deals, but, still no Spider-Man.
Yuri tries not to let the despair show too much, shoulder-checks one of her colleagues pestering her about celebration drinks at the bar down the street. She trudges to her empty apartment and doesn’t even bother to turn the lights on before settling on her couch heavily, head in her hands and panic crawling over her skin like mosquitoes on a summer shoreline.
She must’ve fallen asleep, clothes rumpled and drool sticking her hair to the leather of the cushions when the sound of her balcony door opening makes her heart leap into her throat. She grabs her taser from her belt slung across the coffee table just in case and creeps towards the sound of panting, someone unsteady on their feet, and her finger is on the trigger before she hits the ceiling light and illuminates -
Her Spider. He’s sagging against the wall, one of his eye plates shattered and gone leaving a portion of his face open, his eyes are blue, and there’s dried blood sticking along the ribs of his suit and Yuri opens her arms automatically.
She’s not sure - exactly - if she was just gesturing, going in for a hug, maybe, even if she’s not sure how well Spider-Man would receive being coddled like that - but she really doesn’t have to overthink it, because her Spider falls into her arms easy as breathing.
He clutches at the back of her shirt and buries his face into the junction of her shoulder, bending down significantly to make himself fit against her and Yuri notices he’s favoring his right leg.
“C’mon, it’s okay, c’mon,” she shepherds him to the couch, mumbling to him but more to herself, trying to keep from fizzling out in the face of this. She ends up with him half on top of her, still trying to push his face into her neck and she’s not sure if he’s trying to preserve his identity or if he's doing anything he can to feel more comfortable in his visibly broken body - it could definitely be both.
She tries to get his legs stretched out, wincing at the odd angle his left knee bends at, and smooths her hands down his chest, catching on rips in his suit - some with smooth pale skin underneath and some bleeding sluggishly on her palms. She knows she needs to do something , some kind of first aid or call someone who actually knows more about this stuff than she does, but her Spider’s making pathetic whimpering noises, whining into her neck and she just needs him to calm down first.
“Shh, it’s okay. I’ve got you,” she soothes him mindlessly, rubbing her hands across his arms and chest and stomach, trying to create some sort of relaxing rhythm. It seems to be working, at least a little, he’s not quite hyperventilating anymore and leans against her rather than trying to crawl into her skin.
“Feelin’ bad?” She asks, senselessly, more to get him talking.
Spider-Man huffs, places both hands on the sides of his knee, snaps it back into place with a sickening crack and a deep groan she can feel building beneath her hands on his chest.
“So bad,” he affirms. “Like, so insanely bad.”
Yuri flounders for a moment, looks at his thighs and how they squeeze together in discomfort and wonders if there’s a way she could make him feel good before forcibly booting the thought from her head.
“How can I help?” She breathes by his ear, “what can I do?”
He places his hands on top of hers, gaudy white and red gloves dwarfing her small palms, and guides one to his chest and one to rest right under his ribs.
“Just like this,” he pants. “Please. Just this.”
She holds him like that, a tender sort of feeling festering deep into her gut that both relaxes and grows when Spider-Man finally falls asleep, cradled against her chest and in her arms, calm breaths gently breezing down her neck through the mask.
——-
She wakes in the morning with her arms empty, back stiff from the couch, and an annoyed groan in her throat - but - she’s pretty sure she’s not alone . She smells coffee, like someone brewed her shitty store-bought grains way too strong in her equally shitty coffee pot.
“Spider?” She mumbles, rubbing at her mouth and not really expecting him to answer. He probably knew the second she went from unconscious to awake, something with his freaky sense abilities. She rounds the corner to find him sitting at her island, leg propped up, mask still fucked, sipping coffee from her world’s best boss! mug that’s so sweet she can smell it.
She feels that warm sensation ripping its way through her chest, a smile fitting itself like an easy reminder on her lips at the mere sight of him.
“Hope you don’t mind,” he mumbles, sheepishly, and she can see the way his eye twinkles where it’s exposed. She normally doesn’t like blue eyes that much, they’re a little intense and alien, almost, staring her down over three consecutive shots of tequila and asking if she’d ever consider children. But his, they’re deep - patient, she supposed. Like a still river, nothing waiting underneath, just the apparent serenity nature finds itself in on occasion.
She smiles and shakes her head, her feet ache with the desire to pull herself closer to him and she decides not to fight it for now. She smooths a hand up his spine, between his shoulder blades and it makes him jolt, slightly, and then relax - leaning back into the pressure.
“Thought I lost you,” she mumbles, pressing the side of her face against his forehead, taller than him for once while he’s sitting down.
He huffs, a wheezing broken sound, and she figures he’s probably broken a rib, or three.
“Almost did,” he relents, softer and not as snippy as he usually is. He’s tired, she can tell.
“Everything got really stupid really quickly, then Tombstone broke my phone which is such a loser move, I’ll need to get your number again for my new one, by the way, and then -“
Yuri pulls his shoulder back a bit, making him face her. They can play their little back-and-forth game another time, she just wants him to know she cares, right now. That she lost sleep over him, felt herself falter in the void his absence created.
“Thank you for coming back,” she tells him, genuinely.
She watches his exposed eye widen in surprise, the one still covered by the plate doubles into a saucer, and she pulls him into her chest again, smushing her cheek against his suit-covered scalp.
She wonders what color his hair is, if he’s the type to get sleepy and needy like a stray cat if she ran her fingers through it. She settles for massaging the nape of his neck, and he relaxes, pushing further into her chest. He’s sort of pressing his face into her boobs, but, her mind keeps resetting like a broken record to the mental image of his thighs, tense and drawn, and how far they’d stretch if her hands were inside of them pushing up and out. So, she won’t really say anything, even as her face heats, the blush painting down the sides of her neck.
“I’m a little surprised you didn’t change your mask in your, spider-lair, before coming here.”
He scoffs, nuzzling her collarbone. “My very secure and incredibly secret lair of a walk-up in Chinatown is under a new contract, on account of me getting evicted when I disappeared for a week, so, my suit restoration abilities aren’t very liquid right now.”
Yuri knows how important it is to him, to keep his identity a secret, and stiffens in the implication he’d come to her at all when it’s compromised.
She feels her Spider pull back to look at her, “I trust you,” he says simply.
Her nails tease at the seam where his face mask sits against the back of his neck, a question in her eyes, but he does it for her - peeling the mask off his face carefully and setting it gingerly on her dirty island counter before looking back at her.
Yuri gapes, fits her hands to cradle his face. His lip is busted and swollen, and he’s sporting a truly spectacular black eye, soft brown hair soaked to his scalp with sweat and old blood and he’s young . Yuri always called him a kid, always knew, somewhere in her mind but -
“How old are you?” She asks, a little incredulously.
It’s incredible watching the emotions play out on his face, and she wonders if that’s another reason for the mask, she can see everything he’s thinking clear as day. His brow droops a little, full lips pushing out in a pout.
“Yuri, I’m an adult,” he whines. She knew a small part of him was a little self-conscious around her and her peers, noticeably younger and in bright red and blue spandex.
She tilts her head, feels her eyebrows raising, and marvels at how she can see his eyes skitter around, not wanting to look at her.
“A young adult,” he mutters, beaten.
She’s mesmerized by his lips, how pink they are.
“Tell me you’re not twenty-one,” she begs.
“No!” He’s quick to assure her, and then frowns a little, blunt white teeth catching on his split lip.
“I’m twenty-three,” he supplies her with a sheepish smile and a spectacular blush blooming across his cheekbones so far his ears get red.
“God,” Yuri falters for a second, pinching between her eyes, shocked at what her life has become for this, this boy.
“I’m too old for you,” she breathes, caught between looking at his lips and his eyes, how pretty he is, the bit of green stuck to his irises.
“I’m very mature,” he assures her, nodding and moving closer, angling his head and Yuri decides, fuck it.
He even kisses young, juvenile and overly enthusiastic until Yuri cups the back of his head and swallows his surprised whine when she lavs her tongue over his soft pallet. His mouth opens wider, letting her in - submitting - effectively, and Yuri feels a thrill shoot down her spine at how pliant and sweet he is.
He whimpers, soft and small when she places her hand on his neck, thumbing at his windpipe while her other hand drifts to play with the jut of his hipbone through the suit.
He pulls away before too long, her saliva sticking to his lips and a bit of a tent the tights of his spandex can’t hide between his legs. Yuri can tell he’s a little overwhelmed, though, and pulls his face to rest against her neck again - cards her fingers through his hair and feels him melt against her.
“What’s your name?” She asks, gentle, figuring now is as good a time as any.
His breath hitches, a little torn, a little vulnerable.
“Peter,” he sighs against her skin.
“Okay,” she soothes him. “I’ve got you, Peter.”