Chapter Text
Harley Keener had exactly two bags with him when he showed up at Stark Tower, which was more than any reasonable person needed for one night.
"It's a sleepover," Peter said, staring at the duffel, the backpack. "Not a move."
"You don't know what I need for a comfortable evening, Parker." Harley hoisted one of the totes into his arms with a grunt that suggested it was heavier than he wanted to admit. "Maybe I get cold. Maybe I have a very specific pillow situation. Maybe I brought snacks because I don't trust rich people to have normal food."
Peter opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again, because Harley wasn't wrong, and also because FRIDAY chose that exact moment to announce, in her calm AI voice, that Mr. Stark had "prepared several activities" for the evening and would like everyone to know that he was "not going to be a hovering presence" and would "definitely not be checking in every forty minutes."
"That's ominous," Harley said.
"That's Dad," Peter sighed.
The guest suite Tony had set up looked less like a bedroom and more like a tech demo that had been ambushed by a Buffalo Wild Wings. There was a bowl of chips the size of a kiddie pool. There was a drone hovering near the ceiling that Peter was pretty sure was supposed to be a "mood light" but mostly just looked like it was casing the room for valuables. There was, inexplicably, a chocolate fountain.
"Okay," Harley said slowly, taking it all in. "This is either the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me, or I'm about to be assassinated by a rich man's Roomba."
"He gets excited," Peter said, already moving to unplug the drone before it decided to "helpfully" film them all night. "I told him low-key. This is what low-key looks like to him."
"I love it," Harley said, and meant it, dropping his four bags onto the nearest couch. "This is so much better than my house. At my house, sleepovers involve me and my mom watching Jumanji"
"Could you have?"
"Every single time."
They settled into the ritual of unpacking, Harley's bags produced an alarming number of snack items, a portable soldering iron ("for emergencies," he said, unhelpfully), three separate chargers for devices Peter didn't recognize, and a stuffed armadillo that Harley very deliberately did not make eye contact with anyone about.
"Don't," Harley warned, seeing Peter's face.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Your face was already saying it."
"You don't have to tell me his name. I wasn't going to ask."
"His name is Steve," Harley muttered, shoving the armadillo under a pillow with as much dignity as he could manage. "Now can we please talk about something else, like why there's a chocolate fountain in a room that also contains three separate fire suppression systems?"
It started, as these things tend to, with a completely reasonable question.
"So what do these do?" Harley asked, pointing to a shelf of gadgets that Peter had, with great restraint, not yet shown off.
"Oh, those are just some prototypes I've been-"
"Show me."
And that was really the whole problem, because once Peter started explaining a project, he did not know how to stop. It was a switch that flipped somewhere behind his sternum, and forty minutes later he was still going, holding up a pair of gloves that could apparently generate a localized static field.
"and the resistance calibration was actually the hard part, because if you get the frequency wrong you just end up with, well, this" He demonstrated by touching Harley's arm, and a small blue spark jumped between them with a crackling snap.
"Ow! Okay, mad scientist, maybe don't electrocute your guests."
"That was like a static shock, that's not even- it's not dangerous, I promise"
"Says the man holding the zappy gloves."
"They're not zappy"
Harley grabbed one of the gloves off the table before Peter could stop him and put it on, wiggling his fingers experimentally. "Okay, but what if I..."
"Harley, don't-"
He touched the chocolate fountain.
There was a beat of silence.
Then the fountain, apparently now carrying a low-grade static charge, began to hum ominously, chocolate rippling in strange little waves before it suddenly surged upward in a fondue geyser that hit the ceiling and rained back down in a delicious, disastrous shower.
"OKAY," Peter yelped, diving for cover behind the couch as chocolate pattered down like the world's most decadent apocalypse. "That is a malfunction, that's not supposed to-"
Harley, to his credit, stood in the centre of the chaos with his arms spread wide, getting absolutely coated, laughing so hard he nearly fell over. "This is the best sleepover I've ever been to!"
"You're covered in chocolate!"
"I'm aware, Peter, I can feel it happening!"
FRIDAY's voice cut through the chaos, entirely too calm. "Mr. Stark has asked me to inform you that the fondue fountain was rated for indoor use only up to a two-volt static discharge. You have exceeded that by roughly six hundred percent."
"THAT SEEMS LIKE INFORMATION THAT SHOULD'VE BEEN ON THE FOUNTAIN," Peter shouted at the ceiling, wiping chocolate off his glasses.
"Duly noted, Peter. Also, Mr. Stark says, and I quote, 'this is exactly why I said no unsupervised science.'"
"WE WEREN'T EVEN DOING SCIENCE, WE WERE DOING SNACKS."
Down the hall, muffled but unmistakable, came the sound of Tony Stark laughing so hard he had to sit down.
Cleanup took a while, mostly because Harley kept "accidentally" flicking chocolate at Peter every time his back was turned, and Peter kept threatening, without any real intention of following through, to use the static gloves again.
"If you zap me one more time," Harley said, holding up a very sticky roll of paper towels like a weapon, "I swear to god-"
"You started it! You touched the fountain with the glove I told you not to touch anything with!"
"That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to touch things with it! You can't just say 'don't touch this fascinating device' and expect me to leave it alone!"
"That is exactly what that phrase means, Harley, that's the definition"
"Not to a scientist, Peter. To a scientist, that's an invitation."
By the time the worst of it was scrubbed away, with FRIDAY periodically updating them on which surfaces were "structurally compromised" and which were merely "aesthetically tragic", they were both exhausted, faintly sticky despite three showers' worth of effort, and sprawled across the couch in sweatpants that Tony had, mysteriously, already had in Harley's size.
"Okay," Harley said, staring up at the ceiling. "I stand by what I said. Best sleepover ever."
"You almost burned down a chocolate fountain."
"I enhanced a chocolate fountain. There's a difference."
"There is genuinely no difference."
Harley turned his head just enough to look at Peter properly, chocolate-scented hair sticking up in odd directions, expression gone a little softer than his usual smirk. "You gonna tell your dad it was my fault, or are you taking the fall for this one?"
"I'm taking the fall," Peter said immediately. "Obviously."
"Why obviously?"
Peter shrugged, suddenly very interested in the frayed edge of a couch cushion. "Because you're my guest. And also because you'd never let me hear the end of it if I blamed you, and I'd rather deal with Dad's disappointed eyebrow than a week of you saying 'I told you so' every five minutes."
"Smart man." Harley bumped his knee against Peter's. "For the record, I wouldn't have actually minded. Getting blamed for stuff, I mean. Worth it."
"You say that now. You haven't seen the eyebrow."
"I've survived worse eyebrows. I grew up in Rose Hill, Tennessee. We've got eyebrows down there that could end wars."
It was well past midnight by the time the room had settled into something like quiet, the drone finally unplugged and grounded for the evening, the chocolate mostly banished, the lights dimmed to something soft and gold instead of Tony's preferred aggressive brightness. They'd ended up sprawled on the floor with their backs against the couch, a bowl of the aforementioned kale chips between them that neither of them was actually eating.
"Can I ask you something?" Harley said, and something in his voice had shifted, gone quieter, more careful than the easy banter of the last three hours.
"Yeah, of course."
"Why'd you want to do this? The sleepover. I mean, we've hung out, but this is different. You went through a lot of trouble." He gestured vaguely at the chocolate-scented wreckage around them.
Peter picked at the edge of a chip, not eating it, turning it over in his fingers. "I don't know. I guess after the seminar"
"Oh, God, please don't bring up the seminar."
"No, let me finish. After the seminar went so spectacularly wrong, and you were just there, in the audience, watching me short-circuit my own PowerPoint and then apparently forget how the English language works for four straight minutes"
"It was honestly impressive. In a way."
"I just kept thinking about how you didn't laugh. I mean, you laughed later, obviously, you've never let me live it down, but in the moment you just kind of, helped. You came up and fixed the projector cable like it was nothing, and you didn't make it weird, and I don't know. I wanted to hang out with you somewhere that wasn't a disaster. Where I could just be normal Peter instead of Peter Who Set The Slide Deck On Fire, Metaphorically."
"It was one slide."
"It felt like more than one slide."
Harley was quiet for a second, turning his own chip over the same way Peter had, an unconscious mirror. "For what it's worth," he said finally, "I wanted to come. I've been sort of looking forward to it. All week. Which is a stupid amount to look forward to a sleepover, we're not twelve."
"I looked forward to it too," Peter admitted. "Probably an equally stupid amount."
"Good. Misery loves company. Or, uh. Whatever the opposite of misery is. Looking-forward-to-things loves company."
"That's not a saying."
"I'm coining it right now. Don't ruin my moment."
Peter laughed, and it came out softer than he meant it to, and for a second neither of them said anything, just sat there in the quiet gold light with chocolate ghosted faintly into the carpet and a stuffed armadillo named Steve peeking out from under a pillow across the room.
"I'm glad you came," Peter said eventually. "Even with the fountain thing."
"Especially with the fountain thing," Harley said. "That's gonna be a great story. 'The Time Peter Parker-Stark Weaponized Fondue.' I'm telling that one for years."
"You are never telling that story."
"I'm telling it at your wedding."
"There isn't going to be a wedding if you tell that story."
"Fine, I'll tell it at the rehearsal dinner instead. Softer crowd."
Peter shoved him, lightly, and Harley shoved back, and it dissolved into another round of quiet laughing that had nothing performative about it, nothing designed for an audience, just two exhausted, chocolate-scented teenagers who'd been looking forward to this far longer than either of them wanted to admit out loud.
From down the hall, entirely too pleased with himself, Tony's voice drifted through the speaker system. "FRIDAY, are they finally being cute, or is this going to end in another fountain?"
"Currently just cute, sir."
"Excellent. Keep me posted."
"DAD."
"Going to bed! Love you! Don't blow anything else up!"
Harley grinned at Peter in the dim gold light, chip forgotten, and said, "Same time next week?"
Peter didn't even pretend to think about it. "Yeah. Same time next week."
The End