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The suit was waterproof, but Peter braced himself with every step all the same. It was hard to forget a lifetime of canvas sneakers rendered soggy by unexpected puddles, and the rain had been relentless all day and into the evening, long enough that it felt like all of New York had become one cohesive pool. He'd try not to think about the fact that he wasn't wearing sneakers, that said sneakers were webbed to a well in Forest Hills right where he'd left them. He'd try even harder not to think about the fact that he'd somehow, without even realizing it, been pushed east toward Koreatown.
He was miles away. The time was inching past midnight, which combined with the rain, meant that the streets were all but empty. Nobody to notice a dejected Spider-Man pacing along on street level—he'd take solace in that.
Not for the first time that night, Peter flung out his right wrist at an unsuspecting street lamp, willing his shooter to cooperate and spit out webs. It ignored him yet again, and his wrist greeted him with another sharp twinge of pain radiating up his arm. Peter ran his fingers carefully over over the area that had grown violently sensitive to the touch.
"Still broken," Karen informed him, pleasantly neutral. He wasn't sure if she meant the shooter, his wrist, or both. Biting his lip, Peter did exactly what he had been hoping he wouldn't have to do: he pulled his phone out with his free hand.
"What's that?" Ned sounded more than half asleep.
"Hey, man," Peter said. "Sorry I woke you up."
"Didn't wake me up," Ned said, patently lying. "You know me, total night owl, 'cept my dad keeps threatening to take my laptop away if he catches me up with it anymore, like I can't hear the literal instant he falls asleep and starts snoring his ass off—wait, what are you calling me for?" This seemed to wake him up in earnest. "Is everything alright?"
"Fine, it's fine," Peter said hastily. "It's just that—"
"Oh God, some guy's got you strung up in his underground lair and you need me to organize the rescue mission, huh—"
"What? No! Jesus, Ned. I just broke my web shooter, is all."
"Really? How'd you do that?"
Peter tried his best not to return to the image of his miscalculated, absent-minded jump and the precipitous crash into a fire escape that had happened before he could steady himself. "Uh, pretty big fight," Peter said. "The guy was like—huge. Like, physically large. But he got away and nobody really saw it so I guess you probably won't see it on the news or anything."
"Cool," Ned breathed.
"It was very cool," Peter agreed. "It's just—you know, kind of difficult to swing home with only one shooter." He'd tried that, in spite of all his better instincts and years of physics classes. It hadn't gone well. "And I don't exactly bring my MetroCard out with me when I'm patrolling, you know?"
"Wow," Ned said. "Patrolling. Like you're Buffy or something."
"Yeah, dude. And you're totally my Willow and stuff."
"Okay, good, 'cause I had a moment there where I thought you might call me Xander and I was gonna flip my lid. Hey, does that make Iron Man your Mr. Giles? You know, this is a pretty sweet metaphor, I dunno how we haven't thought of this before—"
Peter coughed. "We're definitely gonna explore this in study hall tomorrow, right down to Midtown High being a hellmouth. But I was kind of hoping you could do me a Scooby Gang solid and bring me a change of clothes? Just so I can get home without having 'Spider-Man takes the F train' plastered all over YouTube tomorrow…"
"Oh," Ned paused, just for a moment, and something like anxiety flipped in Peter's stomach. "I mean...yeah, of course! But if my anyone catches me sneaking out, I'm throwing you under the bus, just FYI. You and your peer pressure really need to knock it off. Where are you?"
Peter squinted up at the dimly illuminated Hangul of the shopfronts. "Uh, Flushing? I'll send you my location. If you take a cab I'll pay you back. With interest and everything. And could you maybe bring me an Ace bandage?"
"So demanding," Ned said. Peter was sure he could hear him grinning; he could hug Ned right then and there, if the confines of time and space had let him. "See you in a few."
A "few" ended up being quite a bit more than that—"Sorry, got out late, I had visions of my mother finding me opening the front door and stringing me up from the ceiling and that kind of stopped me for a bit"—but when Peter peered around the corner of the alleyway where he had sequestered himself to see Ned doling out dollar bills to a hangdog cabdriver, all frustration was swept away.
"Thank God," Peter said. Ned wordlessly handed him his backpack and Peter pulled out a pair of sweatpants and a ratty t-shirt. Perfection, as far as he was concerned. He deactivated the suit started changing without a second thought.
"You know," Ned said thoughtfully, "they say the Walgreens is 24 hours, but I feel like the cashier is always giving me a weird look when she feels like I'm coming in too late, and—holy shit, Peter, what did you do?"
Peter froze midway through slipping the t-shirt over his head. "Sorry," he said. "I figured you wouldn't mind, you know, years of gym class and all that."
"Not that. You think I haven't seen those scungy boxers more times than either of us can count? Please. I'm talking about the freaking shitshow that is your wrist."
Peter followed his gaze down. His wrist was undeniably unpleasant to look at: it was a constellation of purple bruises escalating to black, and the swelling felt like it was increasing before his very eyes. "Oh yeah," Peter said, casual. "That's why I needed the bandage."
"That thing is a million percent broken, dude. Like doctors wincing when they see your X-ray kind of broken."
"I've got the healing factor, remember?" A few months ago, Peter cracked a rib on a bad fall during a mugging. That had been Tuesday; by Friday the whole thing had felt like nothing but a distant memory. "It'll be back to normal in no time."
This did not comfort Ned in the way that Peter intended it would. "Broken bones need to be set," he said. "Or else you're going to turn into, like, one of those old people who claims your miserable wrist knows when it's about to start raining."
Peter shoved his hands into the pockets of the sweatpants where neither of them could see them. "C'mon, man," he said. "You know I can't just roll up into urgent care without having people ask questions. Both about how I did it and how it's healing so incredibly fast. Because I have super healing powers."
Ned frowned. Peter hated it when he frowned, both for making Ned unhappy and for making Peter brace for the inevitable scolding. "Maybe you should call Stark, then," Ned said. "I bet he's got some super secret doctor that won't rat you out on Twitter."
The flip in his stomach made another appearance. "Yeah, right," Peter said. "This is small potatoes, Ned. Besides, you know he tracks my suit and stuff. I bet he already knows my wrist is screwed up but he hasn't said anything, because he knows I can handle it. I'm an Avenger, dude." More or less. "You think War Machine calls Iron Man every time he stubs his toe?"
Ned was still frowning, but it was a frown that Peter knew well: the frown of the successfully browbeaten. "I guess not," Ned said.
"It'll be fine," Peter said. "Come on. I'll let you be the one to do the honors if it turns out they need to re-break my bones or whatever."
"I'm a lover, not a fighter," Ned said primly. "But I am going to laugh at you trying to take notes in calc tomorrow."
School was a far-off reality that Peter didn't even want to think about. He grimaced. "Fair enough."
The next day, Ned, constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, brought to school an old wrist brace leftover from when he'd gotten carpal tunnel syndrome from World of Warcraft. Peter was stubborn, but not stupid; if nothing else, it hid the bruising from watchful eyes. He pulled it on under the cuff of his sweater and adjusted the straps, making a mental note to stuff it in his locker before he went home and Aunt May saw.
"What's wrong with your wrist, Parker?" Flash Thompson's voice rang out from across the locker hall. "You jerk off too much, or what?"
"Yeah, Flash, that's exactly what happened," Peter said, placid. "How'd you know?"
Two days later the swelling had disappeared, and while the bruises were more purple than black, they didn't look to be going away any time soon. Peter reminded himself that superheroes regularly endured worse—that he had endured worse, actually, on more than one occasion—and tried not to gasp when MJ jostled him on the way off the bus.
She turned back and gave him the once-over, eyebrow raised. "Sorry," she said, sounding characteristically insincere. "It can't be that bad, though, right? Or else you'd go to the doctor like a normal person instead of wearing Ned's smelly old brace."
He hoped she meant that metaphorically, though that didn't stop him from taking a suspicious sniff once she walked away.
Scratching absently beneath the velcro, Peter tried to muster up some enthusiasm. It was post AP exams, which meant the whole school had taken on a lackadaisical atmosphere, even for the lower classes. Lackadaisical, in the case, meant a field trip.
"Why MoMA, of all places?" Ned moaned. "Do they think we're fresh off a tour bus from Nebraska? Are 'I heart NY' shirts going to be the new school uniform?"
"Maybe they looked upon their population of STEM-obsessed magnet students and realized they'd created an evil horde with all the technical ability to innovate but none of the background in humanities to serve as an editorial guiding hand." MJ, suddenly right next to them once more, blinked at Ned and Peter with limpid eyes.
"Where did you come from?" Ned demanded. "You sure you're not a mutant? That ability to sneak can't be all human."
"Some of us pay attention, Leeds." She gave Peter a look that might have been meaningful, one that he tried to elide, before stalking off.
The last time Peter went to MoMA, Uncle Ben had still been alive; he and May had taken Peter out for an afternoon of what May called "cultural enrichment," though at ten years old Peter hadn't felt all that enriched. Now, looking up at the oblique canvases with his tittering classmates spread through the galleries and a resolutely bored Ned at his side, Peter wasn't entirely sure that he'd matured that much further than his ten-year-old self. Maybe one day he'd be able to go to a museum and look at the grand canon and summon a thought more coherent than "huh"; maybe the day you could do that was the day you were a grown-up for real. It seemed like a great leap forward that was still well beyond his grasp.
Peter elected to pull Ned away from the Jasper Johns ("It's just a flag!") and toward another room, one that apparently contained a special exhibition. His wrist must have been diverting spider powers away from the rest of him, or else he was just tired, because Peter rounded a corner and only just barely stopped himself from running straight into Pepper Potts.
He stopped, looking up at her (because she was taller than him, significantly so, and undeniably would have been even if she hadn't been wearing an impressive pair of burgundy kitten heels), trying to summon words, or to figure out if he even should summon words. By the looks of it, she was going through the same dilemma: her mouth had formed a small "o" of recognition, but her eyes were darting to Ned, and to the rest of Midtown High milling around in the background, and, alarmingly, to the brace on Peter's wrist.
Because this was, in fact, the first time that Peter and Pepper had ever come face to face. Peter knew of her in the same way he knew of the Hulk, or the President (though Peter had never heard their voices echoing in the background of a phone call with Tony Stark that seemed to be equally divided between talking to Peter and bickering with various unseen companions). He read magazine articles about her, or at least he used to before the proximity made it feel weird. He and Pepper Potts had been shuffling around each others' orbits for long enough that meeting her without prior preparation was almost enough to make his brain short-circuit.
As Peter would have guessed, however, she had better composure than he did. "Stephen Shore," she said with a smile. Peter stared, trying to place who she crushingly was mistaking him for, before seeing Ned jerk his head out of the corner of his eye; it was the name displayed in large, sans-serif font on the wall behind her. "His color printing is truly unparalleled. You're lucky to catch the exhibition before it closes. Enjoy yourselves, alright?"
She swept away without another word. Ned turned to Peter, gaping.
"Why do you live the actual craziest life on planet earth?" he said.
"Great question," Peter said.
That night, Peter let his phone ring for almost a minute before he picked up.
"Wow, and I was almost thinking you were just gonna leave me hanging. Am I interrupting something important?" Tony Stark had a way of sounding both frenetic and bored that made him unreadable, which was undoubtedly the point.
"Just homework," Peter said.
"Great. Of course you wouldn't be out in the suit. Not with that broken wrist of yours."
Peter winced. "How'd you know it was broken?"
"Can't see you bothering to wrap things up if it's just a sprain. And of course I've got an eyewitness placing you in a wrist brace in the Museum of Modern Art at around one pm today. Pepper texted me from her donors' luncheon to tell me all about it. Texted me!" This clearly had some significance that was lost on Peter. "So why am I hearing about grievous bodily injuries from my girlfriend and not from you?"
"Isn't she your fiancée now? Congratulations, by the way—"
"Wow, kid. Incredible. You've officially superseded Happy for worst engagement congratulations I've gotten so far, and he literally cried. Don't derail me. What's up with the wrist breaking and no call?"
Peter slumped down on his bed, scattering pages of history notes he had been half-heartedly reviewing. He could hear the clanging sounds of Aunt May cooking in the other room; he almost wished he was eating her latest concoction instead of dealing with this phone call. "I figured you already knew about it," Peter said. "I mean, I know the suit tracks me and stuff."
"I'm not Big Brother," Tony said. "I'm trying not to go too overboard on the monitoring unless someone's about to fry you once and for all. I figured I could trust you to tell me or Happy if anything important but not life-threatening happened. It's not like I don't see every addition to your bodega cat photo collage."
Peter tried to ignore the twist of pleasure he felt at that; those were pictures he sent to Happy, more out of habit at this point than anything, though Happy's performatively annoyed responses certainly made it worth it. "Man, did you see that tortie the other day? She was so big and friendly. I literally had to wipe the drool off me when I got home."
"Focus, Pete. Do I need to start keeping a closer eye on you or can I trust you?"
"Sorry." He was sorry, he realized; this was what he had wanted all along, but hadn't known how to ask for. "I really did think you already knew and it just wasn't a big deal."
Tony's sigh was actually audible on the other side of the call. "How about this?" Tony said. "You get hurt and it doesn't heal within a day, you let me know. And no waiting for broken bones. Sound good?"
Peter closed his eyes. "Yeah."
"Alright. I'm gonna send Happy to pick you up from school tomorrow. Get you a real cast. Pepper said that it looked like you picked that brace out of a dumpster."
"She said that?"
"I may have embellished a bit. But the sentiment was there."
"Oh, and Mr. Stark? My web shooter kind of broke along with it."
"Jesus, Parker. Way to bury the lede."
The doctor was a severe looking woman who took X-rays and set Peter's arm with an astonishing quickness that Peter had never once in his life associated with a doctor's office.
Tony was there, repairing the web shooter with what looked like a minimum of brain power and stealing glances at Peter from time to time. "Hey," he said finally. "What'd you think of Stephen Shore?"
"Oh," Peter said, struggling. The exhibition had been just as incomprehensible as all the rest. He didn't know photography could leave him so uncertain. "I liked the one with the...gas station."
Tony barked out a laugh. "No, you didn't. Me neither. I can't stand all that depressing Americana crap either. I leave modern art to Pepper and Pepper alone."
"Oh, thank god."
A week passed, and then another. Peter's wrist yellowed and then went back entirely to normal; May's expression finally eased back from "murderous" once Happy's car reappeared and Peter had the entirely surreal experience of a cast being removed in the backseat of a limo.
School, already winding down, was reaching its last dregs of projects and presentations designed to do nothing but fill up empty time in the calendar. Peter found his mind wandering even more than usual. Summer break changed the prospects of Spider-Man duties entirely—though it was probably too good to be true to think that May would let him just sleep all day and fight crime at night. "Can't put Spider-Man on a college application," she'd say, jabbing a wooden spoon in his general direction. Another way the universe managed to conspire specifically against Peter Parker.
Five minutes from the end of Spanish (el subjunctivo was going to have to wait until the fall for him to fully understand), Peter was snapped out of his reverie by a sharp buzz from his phone. He pulled it out during passing period, checking his notifications during school hours like he absolutely wasn't supposed to.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Lunch?
Peter,
It was so nice running into you the other day, even if we didn't get much chance to talk. I really do hope you enjoyed the retrospective.
It got me thinking, though: how strange is it for that to be the first time we've ever met? I hear so much about you from Tony, after all. I'm hoping we can fix that. You're out of school soon, right? How do you feel about grabbing a quick lunch with me sometime? Just you and me. We can leave Tony to sulk about being left out.
Let me know about any dietary restrictions you might have.
Warmly,
Pepper Potts
Peter stared down at his phone, creating a roadblock in the middle of the hallway he was only aware of in a tertiary sort of sense. The number of things to unpack here was staggering. Some of them—like the idea that Tony Stark spoke about him, and spoke about him often enough that the literal CEO of Stark Industries could find it confounding that they'd never met face to face—Peter wasn't sure he'd ever be able to wrap his head around. The most pressing issue was figuring out how to respond. She'd said "warmly." Did he say "warmly" back? Or did "sincerely" still do the trick?
He started tapping out a draft, tentative, right there on his phone, as the bell rang to signify his lateness. Peter walked slowly with his head down.
It was more of a cafe than a restaurant, one of those places with open air skylights and hanging ferns dotting the wall. Pepper was already there, waiting for him, with an untouched latte in a mug right in front of her. Wooden cutlery sat on cloth napkins. As Peter got closer, he realized the foam was in the shape of the Stark Industries logo.
Pepper stood up when she saw him approaching. That's right, Peter realized. You were supposed to stand when you met with people for lunch meetings. That was the grown up thing to do. He shook her offered hand almost robotically, hoping that at the very least, he could downplay any visual representation of his nerves.
Pepper Potts had switched the business suit for jeans and a crisp white button-down, tucked in in that way where it looked casual but you knew the whole thing cost more than your aunt made in a month. Her hair was in a loose ponytail; the manicure on her outstretched hand was impeccable. Her smile was easy and open, like it hadn't even occurred to her to bring expectations to the table.
Peter knew immediately that he wanted nothing more in this world than for Pepper Potts to like him.
"Sit down, please," she said, lifting an eyebrow. It reminded him strangely of MJ. Peter sat down in the wicker chair, sporting the best posture he'd had in years. She sat down across him and took a long sip of her coffee. "Go ahead and order whatever you want. I hope the menu doesn't have too many alfalfa sprouts for your taste. I suppose I just like the ambiance."
"It's nice in here." Peter's eyes scanned around the restaurant; it was nearly empty. He wondered if that was by coincidence or by design. "It's, um. It's nice to meet you, Ms. Potts."
"Pepper, please."
Peter ducked his head and tried to fight a smile. "Okay, it's nice to meet you, Pepper."
"It's nice to meet you too, Peter. I'd been meaning to do this for awhile, actually."
"Really?" The server came back with a glass of lemonade. Peter sipped it; it had a sprig of lavender on the rim and more than a hint of the flavor. It seemed like something Aunt May would like.
"Of course," Pepper said. "You've gotten the biggest dose of unadulterated Tony Stark attention I've seen in quite awhile. Lord knows it can be a lot. It can be a lot for me, and I've known him longer than you've been alive. I wanted to make sure you weren't getting overwhelmed."
Peter had long since slated his level of communication with Tony somewhere around the level of "minimal," even after the Avengers invitation. They spoke on the phone as needed; Peter still sent his updates to Happy, though even with the bodega cats those had mostly slowed. Once, after a fight with a particularly unpleasant fight with a lizard man that had sent Ned off on a spiral about reptilians and government conspiracies, Tony had pulled Peter away from a downed electrical line and grabbed his shoulder, holding it so tightly and for so long that it nearly left a bruise. More often than not, Tony was a subject that Peter had studiously trained himself not to dwell on too much. Spider-Man could operate solo. He didn't need anyone holding his hand.
Pepper was eyeing him; she looked knowing. She probably was knowing. Peter thought you probably had to be the kind of person she was. "He has a way of popping in out of people's lives," Pepper said. She wasn't quite sad, but she was something approaching it. "It's jarring. He does it to all of us. Even Happy, and you'd think he'd know better than anyone else what the hell Tony's up to."
"May says Mr. Stark is irresponsible with other people's time," Peter said absently, then blanched.
Pepper's lips quirked. "Sounds like May has a good head on her shoulders," she said. "That's a pretty good description of it. But, you know, in his own way, Tony cares. And pays attention. I promise you. That suit's proof of it, if nothing else. I hardly heard from him for a week while he was working on that thing."
The Spider-Man suit was something that Peter preferred to think of as having arrived one day, fully formed out of the ether. Conceptualizing Tony Stark taking the time and effort to levy his intellect into making it was something that made Peter's chest constrict, sharply and unpleasantly.
"The suit is amazing," Peter said. "Like, probably the most amazing thing I've ever had in my entire life. It has a heating system. Did you know that? My old sweatshirt definitely did not have a heating system."
"It is pretty amazing," Pepper agreed. "I just…" She had finished her coffee; the foam sat untouched, now at the bottom of her cup. She picked up her wooden spoon and swirled the remnants around aimlessly. "I don't know. Tony can be a lot. He is a lot. And he puts a lot on people. And you're very young, and I think it's possible you were genetically engineered in a lab to be the one and only teenager that would make Tony Stark sit up and pay attention. Is any of this making sense?"
By now, Peter was flushed a brilliant crimson. He traced a finger over the handle of the mason jar that held his drink. "Um," he said. "I think so?" Pepper Potts in person had a way of making his head spin even more than her e-mail had.
Pepper sighed. She was, in her own way, completely unlike anything Peter had ever expected from her. She seemed to exist on the opposite spectrum from Tony, which meant that she was on an entirely different plane of existence from Peter. One day, maybe, he could figure out what he did that made her smile. "Let's just call our lines of communication open, then," she said. "If Tony is ever driving you crazy or whatever, how about you send me an e-mail?"
"What do you mean by 'driving me crazy'?"
"We can keep the definition loose," Pepper said with a grin. "Tony has a way of inventing new ways to drive people up the wall."
Peter smiled back, less widely but no less genuine. Pepper Potts was in charge of a multi-billion dollar company; she had a bodyguard, for Christ's sake, looming around the back entrance of the cafe. Peter was going to have to pinch himself several thousand times once he got home.
She was looking at her watch, something ornate with a band of twisted yellow and rose gold. "Sorry to cut this short," she said ruefully. "You'd think the captains of industry could leave me be for one morning out of their lives."
Seeing her move to stand up, Peter stood up as well. That was what you did, he knew, when you were having meetings with adults. "Why don't you come by HQ sometime?" Pepper said. "We could get you an actual internship, you know. You might be able to learn something useful. Might be good for college apps."
Somewhere, Peter knew that Aunt May had sensed these words and her head was imploding accordingly. "That would be...awesome," Peter breathed. "I'll e-mail you?" The words felt just as foreign as they sounded.
"E-mail me," Pepper confirmed. "Take care, Peter."
She swooped away just as disarmingly as she had the first time. It took Peter a moment, but somehow he found the motor skills to follow.