Five Increasingly Clichéd Meet-cutes, Plus One Not So Cute-meet

#1, Of Course, Happens on a Rooftop

A/N:  I do not own these characters [they belong to Marvel and 21st Century Fox respectively]; I only own the situations they find themselves in. (P.S. Now cross-posted on AO3 and Fanfiction.net.)

The first time they met, Peter had only been Spider-Man for about a year and a half.

He was sixteen, almost seventeen, a senior at Midtown High, and could only afford to patrol Queens between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM because he'd had to get a part-time job. He'd gotten the job to ease Aunt May's suspicions about him being Spider-Man (recently, she'd asked him why he always came home sporting bruises in that skeptical tone she used when she wanted to interrogate him but refrained from doing so because she didn't know if she should, which made Peter realize he hadn't been as subtle as maybe he should've been). He was afraid that she'd get a heart attack if she ever found out he was fighting crime and aliens in his free time. Peter couldn't deal with her death.

Not—not after Uncle Ben...and Captain Stacey.

And G—Captain Stacey's daughter (even now, he could barely think her name before falling apart).

Their deaths were still so, so fresh in his mind.

He still felt the guilt of them every single day, unable to talk about the pain, anger, and all-around shame he felt in having had a hand in their demise with anyone, because who could, or would, understand? Not to mention the fact that he couldn't tell anyone he was Spider-Man.

He'd learned that lesson the hard way, with Harry blaming him for his father's death. He still felt horrible for being the cause of Harry taking up his father's work as the Green Goblin.

Peter still woke from his tormented nightmares covered in sweat, afraid his hands were still covered in Ben's blood. The sound of Gw—her spine breaking still echoed in his ears anytime he heard something snap. Captain Stacey's scared, imploring eyes still haunted him every time he saw a squad car or a uniform.

It was the nightmares that made Peter decide to run himself ragged with school, patrolling, and his internship at Oscorp. Keeping himself busy to the point of bone-weary exhaustion meant that he didn't have to worry about the nightmares taking his few hours of sleep away from him. It meant that his dreams couldn't torment him with his many failings as a hero (he really hated that word—preferred vigilante, actually—because he was no hero). If he kept himself busy, he could just fall into bed and pass out without worrying about reliving those nights—no muss, no fuss.

Thus, working on only two hours of sleep (he'd gotten up early to fix May breakfast before her shift at the hospital because that's what you did for people you love), six cups of coffee, four Monsters, and two Red Bulls, Spider-Man found himself swinging through the streets of New York, barely able to keep his eyes open. It was a Wednesday night, and Spider-Man had already stopped several muggings, helped a few kids get away from bullies, and even saved a poodle from a speeding cab.

Spider-Man had just handed the poodle back to its owner when his exhaustion made itself known through the fact that he failed to throw out a new strand of his very own patent-pending silk while he webbed away. He grabbed a nearby lamppost just in time to catch himself from painting the pavement with his insides. This near-death experience convinced him to find a roof to perch on, so he could listen for the crimes that would inevitably happen, rather than accidentally causing his own death by sluggish reflexes.

He blamed his sleep-deprived brain for the reason his Spidey Sense didn't alert him to the blur coming at him when he swung his body up on top of the roof of a nearby high-rise he liked to frequent, because it was right in the heart of his burrow and it had a nice overhang that kept him safe from wind and rain.