Peter makes it eight blocks away from the crime scene before he falls to his knees on a random rooftop and pulls his mask up just far enough that he can puke his guts out.
He's always hated throwing up, more than most people do, he thinks. The way it leaves his throat burning, he has to shut his eyes against tears that threaten to spill out. Of course, as soon as he closes his eyes, he can't stop seeing the woman he'd found. That's something that's been burned into his mind, and that's going to stay with him forever.
Suddenly, puking over, Peter isn't so much upset as he is pissed. Someone did that to a person—they took a woman and did God knows what to her, before leaving her to slowly bleed out. They killed that other woman, and there's no telling how many other people were killed. Peter can still hear the rasping sound of her trying to breathe, through what he's assuming was at least two broken ribs, and it makes him clench his fists at his sides. He steadies himself and tries to get on with his night.
He stops the usual few muggings and attempted thefts, and he might be a little bit rougher with the perps than usual. It isn't until he's crossed over the river, just north of Long Island City, that Peter really loses it.
He can hear muffled screaming coming from between two buildings as he swings over them, so he quickly drops down to the roof looking down at the alley.
There's a man holding a knife to the throat of a young woman he has shoved against the wall beside a dumpster. He has a hand clamped over her mouth, and as he traces the knife down her neck to slice the thin strap of her dress off, Peter drops down from the roof.
" Hey!" he shouts at the man. "Leave her alone!"
The guy takes his hands off the girl and flips the knife in his hand so he's holding it like he actually knows how to use it. Peter knows he could just web the guy up and be done with it, but he really doesn't want to let the man off easy.
The man lunges at Peter, and he probably would've managed to carve up a pretty good chunk of Peter's arm if it weren't for the new, knife-proof suit. Peter punches him in the face, and the guy goes down hard. Sure, Peter isn't the best at hand-to-hand, but he still has super strength and fairly good aim. The guy groans and tries to get back to his feet, but Peter kicks him hard enough that he feels something bend and snap in the guy's chest.
The girl is sobbing against the wall, and she has makeup running down her face in streaks, her whole body shaking.
Peter has a horrible moment where he realizes he just beat a man, in front of someone no less, but he manages to tamp down the inevitable freakout because this girl still needs help. He finally webs the guy, now groaning on the ground, up before carefully walking toward the woman with his hands down at his sides and open. Non-threatening.
" Hey… it's alright," he says softly, as he comes to kneel in front of her. "Are you hurt?"
She shakes her head, but Peter can't make out any words through the tears.
" Alright, I'm gonna call the police now," he explains as he pulls the burner phone Frank gave him out of one of the many convenient hidden pockets that the new suit has.
He dials 911, and the operator picks up almost immediately. He explains that there was an assault and gives the street they're on as well as the name of the bank across the road from them. The girl is still crying even after he hangs up, and Peter feels a little bit helpless since he can't make her feel better. It takes him way too long to realize that she's staring at the man, and Peter goes to stand between them.
" I called the police," he says. "They should be here soon…"
As he turns the walk away, the woman's hand shoots out and grabs his ankle. "Don't—" she chokes out, "don't leave me with him."
Peter feels like an idiot for almost leaving. "I won't go," he promises. "Why don't we go sit on the curb and wait for the cops? It smells pretty bad over here."
She nods and lets Peter help her to her feet so she doesn't stumble in the stilettos that she's wearing. They both sit at the edge of the street, and Peter doesn't know what to say or do, so he just listens to the woman cry into her knees with her arms wrapped around herself. He wishes he had a jacket or something to offer her; it isn't that cold, but he thinks that something more than the torn, leather mini-dress might make her feel more secure.
It takes almost twenty minutes for the police to pull up, and Peter only leaves when the officers get out of the car. He nods to the woman, swings up to the top of a nearby building, and watches as one of the officers comforts her while the other gets a good look at the would-be rapist and radios in for an ambulance.
When Peter gets home, he barely has time to pull off the mask before he's stumbling into the bathroom and puking again, this time because of what he did. He hurt a man badly, a bad man, but a man nonetheless, because he was frustrated and pissed off and hurt by what he'd seen. Once he's flushed away the evidence of being sick and thoroughly cleaned his mouth with so much off-brand Listerine that it burns, he slinks his way back into his bedroom and strips out of the rest of the suit before hiding it in a cardboard box that he shoves to the back of his closet.
He grabs his phone off his bed once he's pulled on pajamas with every intention to call Matt and tell him what he did, but something stops him.
Matt hadn't been able to stand the idea of anyone dying on his watch, but that had changed. Bad things had happened to him.
Would Peter having a moral crisis over doing the mildest version of something that Matt does on a damn near daily basis make his life any easier? Or would he start thinking that he's some sort of corrupting influence and not want to work with Peter at all anymore?
Peter forces himself to calm down all on his own by the tried and true method of bottling up all of his feelings about the night and hoping for the best.
When he wakes up Sunday morning, Peter has a plan for what he wants to do.
He might not have been able to help the woman who Luke found dead, and it's still possible that they were too late even for the one they found alive, but Peter can stop something like that from happening again.
Harlem is Luke's domain, Hell's Kitchen is Matt's, and Chinatown is Danny's. They all know exactly what's going on with organized crime in their areas, but Peter doesn't have a single damn clue about what sort of gang activity there is in Queens. He's sure he could find some information about all of that on the internet, but he needs better results than just Googling 'gang activity Queens NY' could possibly yield.
With a heavy backpack and an even heavier sigh, Peter heads out of the apartment and to the subway.
Walking into the Tower has got to be one of the hardest things Peter has done in a while, and he has to keep repeating to himself that this is about the greater good and not about him, in order to get his legs working. He enters the building at smiles at the security guard on duty, a woman he's met a few times but whose name he doesn't remember, and rushes to get on the elevator to head up.
There are already two SI employees on the elevator, and they both look more than a little surprised to see a schoolchild press the button to one of the floors that they don't even have access to and not be denied. Fortunately for all of them, they don't try to engage Peter in a conversation, so there isn't any awkward rambling that might lead to Tony needing to get his lawyers to draw up more non-disclosure agreements.
Peter readies himself to see Tony as soon as the elevator doors slide open to the lab, but he's pleasantly surprised to see that it's completely unoccupied. Sure, he has to double check around the place and make sure Tony isn't hiding somewhere before he can sit down and get to work, but he still manages to get to work pretty fast.
He pulls out his laptop and hooks up a cable from one of the computer banks to a port specifically meant to give the resident AI access to whatever device is connected. He's more than positive that he could just ask Friday for a dossier on every gang and their activity in Queens, but something about that seems too easy. He wants to actually do some work for himself, so he starts with a simple search through news databases for any reports on gang-related activity in Queens.
He starts typing his notes into a document and quickly finds a divide that allows him to split the gangs into two main sections: nationality based and street gangs. The various Italian mafia families as well as the Russians, Greeks, Koreans, Irish, Albanians, and Chinese all fall under nationality based while Bloods, Crips, various white supremacist gangs, Vatos Locos, Latin Kings, and Trinitarios, are all classified as street gangs. He divides those further until he has a nicely sectioned out order to start his research in.
He does use Friday's help to look up police records that he probably shouldn't have access to in order to start building his list of known members for each of the different gangs, listing off their various charges under their names and including a mugshot of each one in the document. He honestly feels a little bit like he's creating a LinkedIn for criminals.
After his eyes hurt from staring at the screen and the word 'gang' no longer sounds like a real word, Peter opens a new document and moves onto creating a database on other repeat offenders in Queens who could have ties to organized crime, including everything from weapons dealers to pimps. It's a lot of work, but nearing eight hours in, he finally has enough useful information to get started. He's pretty lost in the work of reading page after page of arrest records and court documents that he's just figuring out how to make sense of when the soft ding of the elevator doors opening rings through the lab.
Peter looks up to see Tony, who looks just as surprised as Peter's feeling. There's a stretch of awkward silence before Tony speaks.
" When did you get here?"
" Uhh…" Peter has to pause a second to think.
" Mr. Parker arrived just after ten AM," Friday supplies cheerfully.
" It's like, six-thirty," Tony says, his eyebrows going up even higher. "You've been here all day?"
" Is it really that late?" Peter asks, blinking a few times to make the blurriness in his eyes go away long enough that he can read the clock in the corner of his computer screen. Sure enough, it reads 6:33 PM. "Oh, I should head home. I have some stuff I need to do for school," he says, realizing full well just how lame the excuse sounds, but he doesn't feel like talking to Tony until he gets some sort of apology about the man's behavior.
Tony looks like he wants to say something more, but he just nods with a tight look on his face. "Alright. Good luck on that."
" Thanks," Peter replies as he unplugs his laptop and shoves it back into his backpack. As he's leaving, he hears Tony clear his throat and Peter turns back to look at him.
" I just wanted to say, uh, nice suit. You make it yourself?" Tony asks.
Peter just smiles back at him and shakes his head. "I have a guy."
Over the course of the next week, Peter continues to sneak over to the Tower to work on his research. He isn't quite ready to bash heads and break elbows for answers like Matt does (that would kind of ruin Spider-Man's friendly image), so he uses Friday's pretty much infinite (and definitely illegal) access to almost every camera across the five boroughs in order to figure out where the gangs most likely have hideouts. Facial recognition and gait analysis prove to be invaluable since they allow to AI to compile a list of places where one or more of every person Peter told her to look for, and where they frequent.
He adds all of the addresses to the document and finally decides to call Matt in for some backup. He isn't about to burst into every possible gang hangout he found; he just wants to do surveillance to figure out if these places really are involved in heinous activity. Matt's better than any sort of listening device on the market, and it's easier to ask for his help rather than try and bug all of the places anyway. He checks back at his research one last time, and he's surprised that he missed the pattern before. The heaviest foot traffic from Albanians is always on Wednesdays, but the location seems to rotate randomly between eight or nine different places. With this new information, the call to ask for assistance is surprisingly easy to make.
The phone rings three times on that Wednesday afternoon before Matt picks up.
" Hey, Peter," he greets. "What's up?"
" Hey, Matt. Are you free tonight?"
" Umm…" There's a moment of silence. "Yeah, I don't think I have anything planned. Why? What's up?"
" I need some help checking out a few places for nefarious activity. You in?"
" Yeah, of course. Where do you want me to meet you?" Matt answers immediately.
" Long Island City, 48 th and Center at nine o'clock," Peter answers. He's been practicing saying that all day, even if the muttering under his breath got him weird looks from both Ned and MJ alike.
" Sounds good," Matt replies.
" Alright, I'll see you then," Peter says, before hanging up.
He spends the rest of the day committing the addresses the Albanians have been meeting up at to memory before it's time to head out and meet with Matt.
Peter finds himself sitting on the edge of a roof, just swinging his feet and enjoying the view across the river for a few minutes before Matt nearly makes him fall off the building from sneaking up beside him like the ninja that he is.
Matt snorts at the shocked noise that Peter makes as he sits down beside him. "So, what sort of nefarious activity are we looking into?" he asks.
" We, my friend, are looking into the Albanian Mafia. They're meeting tonight, but I'm not sure where. I figured we could scope out the possible places and maybe listen in on what they have planned." Peter answers as he stands up.
Matt seems a little surprised but gives Peter an approving nod anyway. "Good choice. They've been pretty weak since Fisk sold them out to the FBI, so it's a good time to make a move on them."
Peter smiles at the praise. "There's an apartment building about two blocks away. I've seen a few known Albanians and Associates going in and out of the place. I was hoping you'd be able to listen in and tell me if you can hear anything going on."
" I'd be more than happy to. Lead the way, Spider-Man," Matt says with a gesture ahead of himself.
Peter nods and heads in the direction of the aforementioned building, being sure to only make jumps that are humanly possible so that Matt isn't left behind. It's exciting to jump without using the webs sometimes; there's just something exhilarating about not having a safety line.
It only takes about five minutes to get to the place, but it takes a good fifteen minutes of Matt tilting his head in slightly different directions for him to determine that there aren't any Albanian crime syndicate meetings going on in the building.
It takes them three more hours and six more buildings to find where the meeting is taking place: an innocuous, three-story brick building near the corner of 39 th and 24 th .
Matt and Peter are perched on the roof of an apartment complex two buildings away with Matt listening in on the conversation they're having. He's reciting the few things actually being said in English to Peter, and after twenty minutes Peter finally speaks up with something other than a snide remark about how the Albanians managed to last this long with such bad planning skills.
" Should we move in on them now?" he asks suddenly.
Matt frowns and tilts his head a little more before giving a hesitant nod. "I mean, yeah. It'd probably be pretty easy to take them, but I don't think that we can prove they're doing anything illegal, so the cops would just let them go."
" I don't know," Peter replies. "I know that at least five of the guys who attend these meetings regularly are on parole, so if they have any weapons or drugs on them, then…"
" Then they'd go back to jail. That's really smart, Spider-Man. Where'd you get your intel?" Matt praises again.
" Good, old fashioned research. And breaking multiple privacy laws."
Matt laughs at that and smiles. "Alright. We should go in through the back door— easier to get in without being noticed."
Peter nods. "Lead the way."
Matt leads him two buildings over, before dropping down into the small area that was probably intended to be a courtyard and knocking the man guarding the back door out with a well placed him from his club. He catches the man before he can hit the ground, and drags him out of sight of the door before turning back to look at Peter.
" All of them are armed. If you get shot, it probably won't go through the suit, but it'll still hurt like a bitch. So try and avoid that," Matt says with the tone of a man who's definitely speaking from experience.
" Noted," Peter replies, heart skipping a beat. "I'll try not to get shot."
Matt gives a nod of approval, before leaning down to grab a set of keys off the man he'd just knocked out, and using one of the keys on the ring to unlock the back door to the building. He just barely opens the door enough to slide through, indicating Peter to follow him with a slight tilt of his head. Even though this is Peter's operation, he's more than happy to hand the reins over to Matt, at least until he learns how to break into gang meetings on his own.
Matt darts behind a shelf filled with dusty cardboard boxes, and Peter joins him, looking up to Matt as the man does his listening thing again.
" There's only ten of them in the building, and they're all on the second floor. One guy is outside the front door, sitting in a car and waiting, but he's on his phone, so I don't think he'll notice us until the shooting starts," Matt explains in a hushed tone. "Everyone has a handgun on them, but there are a few heavier guns around in crates; I think they might be discussing a weapons deal, so be extra careful. They're sitting at a table, and there's really no sneaking in. We just have to be faster than them."
" Got it," Peter says quietly.
Matt nods. "Let's go."
They make it up the cramped staircase easily enough, Matt managing to guide Peter not to step on any of the creaky parts of the stairs somehow. Of course, their stealth becomes completely obsolete the second that Matt finishes his count of three and flings the door wide open, throwing his club to hit one man in the head hard enough to knock him out as Peter webs two men to the chairs they're sitting in.
Complete chaos breaks out after that with bullets flying everywhere. Peter feels one bullet graze the edge of the suit before he ducks into the little cover that a nearby shelf offers. There's the sound of Matt's club whacking into another head, followed by angry Albanian yelling, as Peter rolls out from behind the shelf and webs another guy up after punching him so hard his own wrist hurts. The idiots clearly don't have very good aim, judging by the two guys on the floor bleeding from gunshot wounds, and Peter realizes just how right Matt was about these guys being weak.
Unfortunately, neither of them realized that the Albanians' weakness would make them prone to extremely dangerous, extremely horrible decisions. Decisions involving grenades in enclosed spaces.
Matt's beating the next to last man standing into submission as the only other Albanian still on his feet reaches into one of the nearby crates and pulls out a grenade that doesn't look like any kind Peter's seen before.
" Daredevil—move!" Peter yells, before pretty much drop-kicking Matt out of the way and behind an overturned table just before the device explodes.
Peter must pass out, because he comes to being carried down the stairs bridal-style by Matt just in time to see Matt kick the guy who must've been waiting in the car out front down the stairs.
Peter tries to say something, but all that comes out is a whine when he finally registers the horrific pain that's encompassing his entire chest.
" Don't try and talk—your ribs are broken," Matt grits out as he slams open the front door. "Claire can't fix this; I'm taking you to the hospital."
" No hospital," Peter chokes out. He knows if he goes to a hospital, even if they get him out of the Spider-Man costume, it'll be inevitable that a doctor finds out about his healing factor, and therefore his other abilities. He can't have that happening. "Tower," he groans. Someone has to know what to do there.
" Avengers Tower?" Matt asks.
Peter nods, making another absolutely pitiful whining sound as that jostles an injury he hadn't realized he had.
Matt looks incredibly conflicted for a moment before he exhales deeply. "Fuck it," he says before heading for the car that the gangsters' lookout left unlocked and running.
He sets Peter down in the passenger's seat, debating for just a second before clicking the seatbelt into place, and slams the door before climbing into the driver's seat and muttering what sounds like a quick prayer under his breath before he rolls down the windows and slams on the gas. There's the horrible, shrieking noise of metal on metal as the mirror of the car they're in scrapes along another parked car. Matt immediately overcorrects with the steering wheel and takes them into the wrong lane.
" Stay awake, Peter," Matt says, swerving back into the right lane. "I'm gonna need you to give me directions."
" Right here," Peter says with a groan, gasping incredibly shallow breaths as he tries to catalogue all the injuries he has. Matt already said broken ribs, but Peter's starting to suspect possibly also a punctured lung when he tastes blood in his mouth after a ridiculously painful coughing fit.
Matt grits his teeth and presses down harder on the gas as he flies down 25 th .
" Your next right," Peter gasps out.
Matt nearly rolls the car with how fast he takes the turn on the road leading up to the bridge, and Peter thinks he would probably be screaming if he wasn't in such intense, all-consuming pain from whatever the hell had happened. Why can't he remember what happened?
Matt grinds the edge of the car along the cement barrier splitting the bridge in two, and Peter cringes at the awful noise. Matt's a fucking abysmal driver, and it's a damn miracle they don't end up in the East River.
Peter sees his life flash before his eyes on Park Avenue as Matt makes another physics-defying turn at his instruction and swerves into oncoming traffic to floor it through a red light.
" What the fuck was that?!" Peter finally shrieks, despite the way it makes his chest feel like it's on fire. "Are you fucking blind?!"
" Yes!" Matt yells back, swerving back into the right lane again and slightly hitting another car. They've got at least one police car after them now, but even the cops seem hesitant to try and drive dangerously enough to keep up.
" Yes, what?!"
" Yes, I'm fucking blind!" Matt screams back, laying on the horn.
" What?!" Peter screeches as it finally all clicks. The sunglasses. The complaining about the emojis in the group chat. The functioning perfectly in the pitch-black. The lenses on his mask being tinted so dark that Peter can't see his eyes through them. The fucking sunglasses . "It's right here!" he adds on last second as they almost fly past Avengers Tower.
Matt lays on the horn again before driving right up onto the fucking sidewalk, thankfully managing to avoid the few people on Park Avenue at midnight on a Wednesday, well, technically Thursday now. He throws the car into park and jumps out before running around to the other side of the car and pulling Peter out, back to carrying him in the way that puts the least amount of pressure on his ribs.
Everyone on the sidewalk has their phones out, some already having been filming Matt's disastrous driving before they knew it was Daredevil and Spider-Man in the car. Matt completely ignores all of them in favor of running into the Tower.
Security is on high alert since, hello , someone almost just ran a car through the front of the building.
" Get me Tony Stark, now!" Matt yells in his terrifying Daredevil voice.
It's a well-known fact that Spider-Man and Iron Man have worked together in the past and are on generally good terms with each other; it's also known that Daredevil has worked with the Avengers once or twice, so the security officer in charge makes the decision to help.
" Weapons down," he orders the two other guards who do as he says. "Daredevil, follow me."
Matt follows behind the guy to the elevators and actually growls at him when he offers to take Peter for him. Peter's pretty out of it with the pain and the fuzziness filling his head. He's really nauseous and—
Matt, incredibly, manages to pull Peter's mask up just enough to uncover his mouth and tilt him so that he pukes on the floor, instead of either Matt or himself.
The elevator doors open onto the infirmary floor where one of the nurses whose name Peter can't remember is waiting with a gurney beside Tony, who looks like he's seen a ghost.
" Hey, Mr. Stark," Peter manages to mumble before everything goes black.
Peter wakes up to the sound of yelling just beside him. He thinks that's not very good bedside manners for someone with broken ribs. He opens his eyes, and has to blink away the blurriness in his vision to realize he's in a hospital bed, and that the people yelling are Matt and Tony.
" I knew this was exactly what was going to happen once he got dragged into your shit!" Tony yells at Matt, who is back to just growling.
Tony's in pajamas, and Matt's still decked out in the full Daredevil regalia, and Peter knows he must be at least a little bit drugged up with pain medication because he can't suppress the giggle that comes from the sight of the two of them arguing. Oh right, arguing about him.
" Not his fault," Peter mumbles from where he's lying, causing both heads to turn and look at him.
" That's bullshit, Peter," Tony practically spits.
Peter shakes his head and immediately finds himself regretting it. "Woah, dizzy," he groans before continuing with his thought. "Not his fault," he repeats.
" How is it not his fault?"
Matt growls at the accusation.
" Dragged him into my shit," Peter explains in a slightly slurred voice. "We were doin' a, uh… a Spidey thing, not a Daredevil thing."
Matt gives Tony an 'I told you so' look.
" You still should've looked out for him," Tony snaps at Daredevil.
" You think I don't know that?! At least I tried!"
" What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!" Tony's voice has gotten defensive.
" You know how bad off he'd be right now if he'd been in anything other than the suit I had made for him?" Matt snaps. "He'd probably be dead. I've never seen anyone that close to an HE grenade detonation come out as good as Peter did. The guy who detonated it killed himself with the blast. If he'd been in your suit, which you took away, or no suit at all, then you'd be scraping him off the walls. Be grateful he got out as well as he did."
" As well as he did?" Tony says incredulously. "Six broken ribs, two almost completely shattered , a broken collar bone, a severe concussion, and a punctured lung isn't anything near 'well' by any sane person's standards!"
Aha, so Peter had been right about the punctured lung.
" It's a hell of a lot better than dead!" Matt snarls.
" Stop fighting," Peter whines, trying to move his hands up to cover his ears because, ouch, loud yelling and concussions don't mix, but wincing when moving his arms causes everything to hurt, even with whatever painkillers are flowing through his system.
Matt immediately loses the angry posture he'd had and turns to Peter, reaching out to set a hand on top of Peter's own. "I'm sorry. We're done fighting," he says, glaring over at Tony when he says something under his breath. "Do you want me to go?"
Peter immediately shakes his head, and reels at the awful feeling of vertigo it causes yet again.
" Your Aunt's on her way. You sure about that?" Tony asks.
" I wan' him to stay, Mr. Stark," Peter mumbles, shutting his eyes in an effort to make the room stop spinning. "Wha' time is it?"
" Just past four. You were in surgery for a couple hours," Matt answers.
" It took us a while to get a hold of May," Tony adds.
" Why do bad things always happen on Thursdays?" Peter says suddenly to nobody in particular as he stares up at the ceiling.
Tony and Matt exchange a look before both turn back to Peter with plastered on kind expressions. Like how you'd look at a really dumb puppy.
Matt sighs. "Go back to sleep if you can, Peter. We'll wake you up when your Aunt comes if you want."
" Okie dokie," Peter murmurs before the black at the edges of his vision expands to immerse everything in darkness once again.
When Peter comes to for a third time, the fuzziness in his head is far more subdued, and he's a lot more aware of his surroundings. Particularly, he's aware of Daredevil standing in the least well-lit corner of the room (how does he even know it's darker over there if he's fucking blind ?) and May sitting beside the bed while trying to engage Matt in some sort of conversation.
Matt suddenly lifts his head from where he's been keeping it mostly aimed at the floor and speaks up in his Daredevil voice. "He's awake."
May turns to Peter immediately and squeezes the hand she'd been holding while he slept. "Don't you ever," she says, " ever do that again."
It's obvious from how red her eyes are that she's been crying, and that just breaks Peter's heart. "I'm sorry I made you worry," he murmurs. "But I can't promise I won't do it again, because I can't really remember what I did."
" Yeah sweetheart, sometimes that happens when you get a bad concussion. Daredevil was just telling me what happened," she says calmly, running her other hand over Peter's forehead in a soothing gesture.
" You got blown up," Matt says. "Turns out they were discussing something about a new weapons supplier who they'd just gotten a shipment from. One of them had a grenade, and it went off about a foot away from you after you pushed me out of the way."
" Guess I got you back for getting shot for me, huh?" Peter replies with a grin. "We're even now."
" I think I actually owe you now. I'd be dead if you hadn't taken the hit," Matt replies grimly. "Your resilience and healing factor are the only reason your insides didn't get turned into gelatin."
Peter decides, with the help of the painkillers, that he isn't going to freak out about getting Matt that close to being killed right now. "I think the suit probably helped too."
Matt huffs softly and smiles. "It certainly kept the shrapnel and bullets out."
" About that," May chips in, "I thought that grenades were pretty much just dangerous because of the shrapnel.
" That's true for the most common kinds," Matt explains, "but this wasn't a frag grenade. It was a military grade, high explosive grenade. I don't usually see those around; I'll see what Frank knows about who might be dealing in those."
" Are you okay?" Peter asks, because even though he isn't letting himself freak out, he's still letting himself be moderately concerned for Matt's well-being.
" I was completely deaf for about two minutes after the explosion," Matt replies honestly. "But I'm fine now, just a little bit of ringing in my ears."
Peter frowns at that. Now that he knows the secret (okay, it's not really a secret that Matt Murdock is blind, but it is a secret that Daredevil is Matt Murdock so Peter's going to call it a secret), he's suddenly very concerned about Matt losing his hearing, even only temporarily. Now that he can think again, it makes the most sense that Matt uses some sort of echolocation in order to do what he does, and Matt can't do that if he can't hear. "Are you sure your hearing's alright?
" It's fine, Peter. I'd tell you if I was hurt, alright?" Matt assures just as Tony walks back in.
" Funny, considering you wouldn't let anyone check you for a concussion after you came in. I saw how you were driving—you're trending on Twitter with that by the way. You've given every New York driver a bad reputation," Tony says as he makes his way to the other side of Peter's bed.
" New York drivers gave themselves a bad reputation," Matt mutters, crossing his arms over his chest as he glares at Tony. At least they're acting vaguely civil towards one another now.
" Yes, but you've further tarnished it," Tony retorts before doing something to one of the monitors Peter's hooked up to. "Alright kid, you're gonna need to stay here for at least another two days before you can go home. Cover story is that you, dear Peter, were the victim of a hit and run. Speaking of which, you sure you didn't hit anyone, Daredevil?"
" Keep talking and I'll gladly hit you," Matt growls.
" That's pretty big talk coming from a guy in bondage gear," Tony shoots back.
Before World War 3 can break out, Peter decides to intervene. "Hey, Daredevil, shouldn't you be heading home soon? I mean, you still have to go to work today, right?"
Matt turns his attention from Tony to Peter. "Are you sure? I can stay."
" No, no, it's alright. I don't want you to miss work for me. I'm sure I'm in good hands now that my aunt's here anyway," he says.
Matt looks relieved that he's been given permission to leave while it's still dark outside. Peter can't imagine sneaking home in the Daredevil suit is at all possible in the daylight. "Alright. I'll call you, okay?"
" I look forward to it," Peter says cheerfully before Matt leaves the room and stalks off down the hall. When it's just him, May, and Tony left in the room, Peter closes his eyes again. "I think I'm gonna go back to sleep now."
" Alright, sweetheart. You do that," May murmurs, squeezing his hand again. "I'll be right here when you wake up."
He does.