The tightly woven sheet of clouds outside your window blanketed the sliver of a moon hanging high in the sky, offering none of its luminance to the city below, making the already cold, rainy night seem even more dreary and off-putting in its darkness; darkness that made it difficult to see him in your equally blackened room. The masked form of him had practically fallen into your arms the moment you'd slid the window of your shared bedroom open at the sound of his panicked knocking, the entire weight of him supported by your chest; your back protesting the angle; his wet, sticky arms around your neck as he slumped against you.
When the bridge of his nose found the crook of your shoulder he released a soggy sigh into the skin there.
The dampness of his suit spread over the front of you, your borrowed t-shirt quickly soaking through and warming your skin. He groaned when you shifted, an arm pulling too tightly at his back to prevent him from sliding down your body, chests smashing together as you tried your best to support his drooping, lethargic form. "Hey, c'mon," you encouraged as you started taking slow, measured steps towards your bed, his booted feet lagging and unintentionally smashing against your bare toes. "Peter, hun, you're really heavy."
He nodded, the corrugated material of his suit chaffing against your wet skin. You freed up an arm to pull his mask off, his wet hair sticking to the insides, lifting as you freed the strands and flopping back down onto his ears and forehead, dampened curls sticking to his skin as you dropped the fabric to the ground at your feet.
"Pete?" you adjusted your arms again, looping them underneath his, pulling his face from off of your shoulder, his chin bouncing off of a bony collar, to get a better look at him, "Peter, what's wrong?" His hands hung limply at his sides, cascading pitifully over the tops of your own. When his eyes met yours, you were startled by how utterly exhausted he looked; the darkness in the room accentuating the bruised coloration beneath dull brown. It was the color of his skin that bothered you most, or really, the lack of; so pale that his skin was nearly glowing, rain water and sweat glistening, his clamminess casting its own ghastly light.
You furrowed your brows, voice escaping you in a whisper, "Peter?"
"I need to lie down," he muttered, voice soft as he looked away from you and angled his body in the direction he wanted you to guide him in.
"Ok, yeah, sure," you managed.
You succeeded in dragging him over to the bed, pushing the blankets you had hurriedly whipped off of your legs at the sound of his beckoning out of the way and settling him in onto wrinkled sheets. Satisfied with the way his pillow cradled the back of his head and neck, you turned and crossed over to your dresser, switching on the lamp at its corner.
As the light traveled across the room it brought a shocking revelation with it; a trembled gasp ejected from your lungs, every hair on your body stood on end as you caught sight of yourself in the mirror hanging on the wall above the wooden furnishing.
It made sense: why the dampness on your chest had been this strange, heated, sticky thing that had spread over your skin from Peter's suit, why your brain had questioned the lack of chill and had alerted you to the tangy, metallic scent in the air.
You felt your stomach hit the floor, felt as it pulled all of the heat from your face and chest with it.
"Oh my god." You couldn't help but to begin to shake, nerves quickly winning out over your limbs.
You looked like a macabre scene from an old horror film with the way his blood coated the front of you. A despicably sanguineous abstract painting of Peter's life decorated the whole of your chest and abdomen, the pale blue color of your shirt unseen as the purpled darkness of his substance continued to leech through the threads.
"Oh my god, P-Peter." You were full on trembling now, gasping for air as you began to panic.
But it was on your skin, too. All down the length of your arms, tangling with the fine hairs that were at attention. You turned to look at Peter then, hands moving to cover your lips at the sight of his limp form, at the ugly stain spreading beneath his suit; your hands stopping abruptly as they reached eye level. His blood had run into the crevices and channels of your fingers, underneath your fingernails; the skin at the joints of your fingertips sticking as you clenched and unclenched your fists.
There was so much of it and he was still losing.
You were going to be sick; now was not the time.
You closed your eyes and took a deep breath. Your dirty hands found the hem of his old shirt and ripped it from you, throwing the offending thing into the farthest corner of your room. You were nude from the waist up; dewy, pink, plasma-like fluid running down your skin in the places he had most soaked.
His suit had done a good job of hiding how badly injured he was. The thin slices through the fabric alerted you to what you were likely to see. It was only as your shaking fingers rolled the top half of his suit down past his ribs, peeling away gently at the places that had already begun to dry, that you noticed you were crying.
Peter's chest was mangled, he had been slashed from nipple to nipple one way and from nipple to navel the other. The latter of the two wounds had left his skin flayed wide open, the edges jagged and oozing, parts of it unveiling the pink sinewy tissue of the muscle beneath.
He had two large lacerations on his lower abdomen, flesh torn across his hip where the blade had sunk into his flesh and had then been ripped out; you were relieved momentarily as you realized whoever had knifed him hadn't managed to penetrate anything vital. Peter had spared himself of that at least. Then there was also the issue of the exposed pearly, white bone of his hip peeking out at you from amongst the red.
But his chest was still moving.
Up and down it moved, in time with the air you could hear him drawing in shakily through his nose; wounds stretching as he did so. A shaky palm found a place over his heart; the fluttery feeling of it beating against your skin helping to calm the frantic pounding in your chest.
You took in another deep, steadying breath.
The watery mess of your eyes made it nearly impossible to see as you dared a glance at his face. He was looking at you, watching you with hooded eyes, his face shockingly white, more obvious now under the exposure of light; his wild, dark hair standing out in stark contrast to the pale color. A wet sob pushed past your lips and a bloodied hand wiped roughly at the tears and snot running down your face.
"I'm sorry," he said, "I could only think to get here. I had to get to you."
You shook your head at him, a wayward tear breaking free from your chin and falling onto his chest, "Peter, look at you, I-I can't - " A pale, too-cold hand came to rest over the one on his chest.
"You can," his fingers squeezed at yours weakly, "Please, [Y/N.]"
You were shaking your head again at his words, eyes closed in an attempt to block out the sight of him broken and bleeding; but you couldn't un-see it; it would probably haunt your dreams for the rest of your life.
"I can't, you're asking too much of me, Peter. We have to take you to someone else, a hosp - "
"No." He cut you off, his tone firm and making you open your eyes to look at him again, carefully avoiding the sight of his chest. "It has to be you. You know that."
Your eyebrows furrowed at him then, leveling your gaze; you could feel the puffiness of your eyes against your cheeks, burning; you could feel that they were reddened, moisture still pooling at the corners and overwhelming your eyelashes.
"Please." You looked away from him, taking a moment to absorb the sight of him lying on the bed in the reflection of the mirror, at his profile and the straight line of his nose and jaw as he continued to look at you; seeing just how pitiful the two of you looked together as you huddled close to his prone form on the blood stained sheets. The color of your naked chest and arms contrasting greatly with the red, inflamed skin of his.
You had smeared some of his blood on your face.
The hand not on yours was clenching tightly at the loosed fabric of his suit, red and blue balled up in his palm, knuckles white and strained against the skin there; he was trying to hide his pain from you. But you knew. His entire being was screaming it at you.
"I can't do this without you." When you met his eyes again, they were glistening, brown like mud.
"Ok, Peter."
It would be a long night.
There would be no erasing the sounds he had made as you'd pushed that needle through his burning skin over and over, or the way he'd choked on his sobs, biting his tongue, his lips, and cheeks to keep them from you as best as he was able as you pulled the thread tight after each pass.
His whole body had trembled and he'd nearly screamed as you'd cleaned his wounds with disinfectant, any color that he had left to tinge his skin with the signs of life vanished, sucked out of him like the air he blew through his teeth as he clenched down on his jaw, sinewy muscles popping along the lines of it.
There'd been a moment where his heart and breathing had settled enough for him to lean a head full of wet hair back into you, your breasts cradled snugly between shoulder blades as he relaxed his tired body against you, face leaning into yours to whisper at the corner of your mouth, "I'm crazy about you," he'd said, "I hope you know that."
Your lips had found his temple, pressing a light kiss to the skin there, nose sifting through wet curls as your hands continued drawing the warm bath water up his arms, his waist, his chest, freeing the rest of him of that ugly red.
You'd never cried so much as you did that night. That terribly, horribly long night.
He often asked too much of you.
But for him, you would do it. You would always, for him.
