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Despite not yet having officially met Peter Parker, you’ve come to develop quite the crush on him.
Your father’s had his dossier on hand for a long while now, and has spent the last several weeks eyeing the boy’s progress and developments with his abilities. You’re in the lab often to help him with work, and your latest projects have been upgrades for Peter, so you’re rather familiar with him as well. You’re in awe of the control he already has over the powers he had acquired not that long ago, and even if, admittedly, he did look a little silly in his red and blue hoodie get-up, it didn’t detract from his precision with his web-slinging. You’re not sure how many times you’d replayed that clip from the streetlight camera of him stopping a car from hitting one of the public transport buses. He’d intervened quick as lightning and had dashed away just as fast.
There’s a freeze frame your father had taken from that clip, when Peter had swung close to the camera, showing a clear view of the goggles he’d seemed to have sewn into the hood. It’s a reference you’d studied often when working in the lab, since one of your focuses for the new suit was engineering more streamlined eyepieces. Actually, your workspace did have quite a few reference photos of Peter’s homemade suit tacked to the wall, and one might think you’d built some sort of rudimentary shrine to him.
You don’t meet the boy himself right away. As soon as the suit was done, your dad had whisked him away to deal with the internal conflicts with the Avengers. There hadn’t been anything to work on then, which left you alone with your online schooling—talk about boring. You practically lived at the compound while your dad was gone, for protection, is what he’d said, and so you’d just be watching your class’s pre-recorded lectures in his office on his desktop. And since that’s where he’d also had Peter’s file stored, you’d found yourself looking at it time and time again, scrolling through photos and replaying those videos and feeling even more like a creep. All the information in the dossier is formal, things like the finer details of his powers and the tech he’d built to support it, when those powers been acquired, how they could’ve been acquired. It’s a lot of knowledge about just one person, but it’s almost equivalent to “nothing” to you. You don’t know the movies he likes or the music he listens to. You wonder if his tastes are similar to yours or if they’re completely different. You hope it’s the former, if anything.
The day your father tells you he’ll be showing Peter around the compound, you think your heart stops beating for a moment. Is this it? You’re finally going to meet him? It’s strange, since you’d already known of him for a long while, but he’d always just been on a screen, and your mind had to fill in the blanks for what the dossier didn’t account for. Will your assumptions be correct? Even if they aren’t, you don’t think it’d change anything. You’d still want to know more about him—and hear it from him, not have to read it off a file.
You wait for them down in the lab, cleaning up your worktable since you’d been doing some research for one of your classes. You’d always been bad about keeping the area tidy. There’s almost always tools and papers scattered about. But your nerves right now are giving you the urge to put everything in order, since your hands are so fidgety. When everything is put away properly, you smile in contentment. Wow, you forgot how much space there was on this desk.
You stand there for a moment to admire your handiwork, and your eyes slide from the cleared desk up to the numerous pictures of Peter’s homemade Spiderman suit sticking to the wall. You’d left them up there because you liked to look at them. That’s the truth. But should anyone have asked why you still had them hanging there when it was no longer necessary, you would’ve owed it to the fact you were so lazy about keeping the area organized. Now that’d you cleaned the workbench, however, if you left the photos there, it’d look like the shrine you’d joked it could be. But honestly, that is what it had come to be, since you’ve long since moved onto to other projects. With a determined huff you start to grab the pictures and pull them down, not minding the tape that remains stuck to the wall since you hadn’t peeled it off correctly.
You’ve only pulled down three pictures before the lab doors open. You slam the ones in your hand down on the workbench and twist around with a smile that’s probably a bit too wide to not warrant suspicion. You block what you can of the pictures still hanging up, which isn’t many.
“Hey, sweetheart, got someone here for you to meet,” your dad begins. None other than Peter Parker is trailing behind him, and you can see his eyes are roving all over the room, taking in the expensive equipment and machinery all over the place. On a normal day, it’d be easy to pick out your workspace, messy as you keep it, but today what marks your area is the fact you’re standing in front of it… as well as the Spiderman pictures you hadn’t had the chance to tuck away somewhere (that’s right, not throw away, to keep somewhere for safekeeping).
“Yeah?” Your voice sounds an octave higher than normal and you could be imagining it, but you’re too nervous to tell for sure. You clear your throat and your smile shifts to a more casual grin as opposed to the crazed Cheshire beam it had been a few seconds prior.
“You remember Peter, right?” your father continues as they come to a stop before you. “[Name], this is Peter Parker. Peter Parker, this is my daughter [Name].”
Peter holds his hand out to you and—god, his smile is amazing and his eyes are so pretty and his eyelashes—
Shake his hand, idiot.
You take hold of his hand as if pushed along by an invisible force, and you suppress a cringe at the rushed, almost too eager movement. You don’t say anything. You forget to, actually. You’re so caught up in those damned eyes of his, but oddly enough, he doesn’t say anything right away either.
“[Name] here helped out with your suit.” Your father interrupts the silence, clearly noticing what was going on. You drop Peter’s hand quickly after noticing you’d been holding it for quite a while and over his shoulder you see your dad raise a brow.
Peter’s broken out of his trance (trance? Is he just as drawn to you?) at the same time you are when your dad speaks up, and his eyes light up. “You did?” he exclaims. “It’s amazing. Really! it looks awesome, it works great, and it feels so light. I always wondered how it’d been put together.”
With each compliment you feel your face heating up more and more. If you put your hand up to your cheek, you’re sure your palm would feel cool against the skin there. But Peter being as enthusiastic to meet you as you had been to meet him helps you relax, and your smile becomes a more comfortable one, as opposed to nervous. “We get access to a lot of different materials,” you explain and shrug as though it’s no big deal. “It’s just a matter of finding out what’ll work best, and then getting it sent here.”
“Wow.” Peter sighs, becoming even more impressed with the sheer amount of resources at the compound and what you’re able to work with. He looks behind you to your workbench, where he can see pictures of the suit he’d made for himself. “Is that my old suit?”
You look over your shoulder to glance at the pictures as well before turning back and smiling sheepishly. “It is. Needed those as reference.”
Peter’s smiling but he wants to cover his face to conceal his reddening cheeks, because put next to your own work, he can’t help but feel so embarrassed, despite the fact you wouldn’t fault him or anything for it, since, like you’d mentioned, there are better materials on hand here.
You can see the embarrassment on his face quite well and you grin lopsidedly. “What you had first was good—really good, actually, for what you had to work with.” It’s no lie that Peter Parker is a genius. His dossier showed that well enough, as did his Midtown High School records. Playing around with retro technology is one of his pastimes, for crying out loud!
“Thanks.” Peter smiles. His response is genuine. It means a lot to hear you say that.
It’s silent again as the two of you just stare at each other, and Tony continues to watch on, eyes narrowed as his gaze shifts from you to Peter and then back again. The lovestruck look in your gaze is hard to miss, and he’s sure Peter isn’t any different. His dad instincts kick in almost instantaneously, the urge to tell you that Parker is off-limits almost escaping him at that very moment because getting involved with a superhero has the potential to put you in danger too. He has a plan to tell you all this, of course. Later, when Peter isn’t around. But the hearts in your eyes are giving you tunnel vision, and even Iron Man is powerless against an infatuated teenage girl.