One day Harley Keener looks over Rose Hill—he can see all of it at once, which is why he’s on the water tower in the first place—and knows: yeah, I’m done.

He’s never hated it. Has a lot of empathy for the people here, for the individual stories less than two dozen people in the wide world care about. He’s just done.

Mom figures it out in all of two days. She has one request: finish school. High school at the very least, though she’d be very proud to come cheer for him at a college graduation. She’s always wanted to go to one of those.

“That’s what Rory’s for,” Harley tells her, and she doesn’t argue because he’s right. Harley’s smart, but his baby sister is going to take the world by storm. And right now she’s in a full-fledged love affair with academia (it’s because it’s bullshit, and she fucking loves out-bullshitting every other bullshitter out there, as proved by how totally she annihilates this point every time he brings it up—) and will likely be a tenure-track professor at an ivy-league school of her choice before she turns thirty.

“Still,” Mom says, “I don’t want you ending up like me, baby boy. You get that degree. More than one would make me happy, but do at least one. For you.”

“I’d be proud to end up like you,” Harley says. He means it. She owns the diner she started out waitressing for, has turned it into the kind of homey-culinary masterpiece people fly here to try. She put Rose Hill on the map. Could have franchised and started her own chain—chose not to. She’s a bit of a control freak. If her good name is being served with the food, she will personally oversee the immaculate creation and presentation of each and every dish.

Harley likes making his mama happy, so he makes arrangements. He only knows one person outside of Tennessee, so there’s no quandary about who to text for school recommendations.

The text goes something like this:

yo Mr. Mechanic I am leaving Rose Hill but also need to graduate from high school ya got anything for me?

Which is how he ends up applying for Midtown School of Science and Technology in fucking New York City.

Rory’s real mad at him. That’s the worst. She stalks out of every room he walks into. Throws a big old goodbye party for him, bakes the lemon bars and his favorite brownies to serve with Blue Bell ice cream and sets up a build-your-own pizza bar with a wood-burning brick pizza oven at the end that she fucking built for this fucking party and no one else on the planet could pull this kind of shit off but Aurora Jane? She makes it happen with eleven days’ notice. And then doesn’t fucking talk to him, even while she’s hosting the best party Rose Hill will see until whatever she decides to celebrate next.

Forget academia. Harley’s baby sister is gonna be POTUS someday.

Hopefully she’ll be talking to him by then.

He doesn’t take the Mustang Tony Stark gave him to NYC. He leaves it in his meticulously cleaned and organized garage workshop, with a giant fluffy bow he ordered on the internet and a piece of paper he scrawled Rory’s car now and love you always little sister stuck to the hood. He threads the keys on a ribbon, hangs it on Rory’s locked-frozen doorknob, hugs Mom goodbye—they both pretend she’s not crying—and rides his motorcycle to New York City.

The motorcycle was the first big fight he and Mom ever had. Was the root of every fight that came after it. She always gets extra angry when he reminds her that it’s pretty much her fault—she named him, after all.

The second time he did that, she changed his nickname from Harls to Hal. He adopted it wholeheartedly. It’s a pleasant degree of separation from Hurl, complete with dramatic fake vomiting, which is what the schoolyard bullies did to his name.

Harley’s happy to compromise, in most—nearly all—situations. His mother and sister run their household, and that’s just fine with him: he’s spoiled rotten in his garage workshop, and that was true long before Tony Stark broke into it. Mom understood him from the beginning. Gave him tools and space to use them and bargained so hard with local autobody shops and junkyards that eventually they just gave her what she asked for—which was pretty much anything Harley wanted. Harley lucked out when he was born to Ella Keener, and he’s not about to forget it.

He’s still going to get everywhere he’s going via his badass namesake. He spent every dollar he made in two years of repairing every broken mechanical thing in Rose Hill and the surrounding three towns on his Iron 883, and every dollar after that customizing it. And fought with Mom every step of the way. Deep down, he knows she gets it—and he gets why she’s scared. But they can’t agree.

And she can’t stop him, so Harley Keener rides his Harley Davidson all the way to New York City, parks it in the secret private garage of Avengers Tower, and tries really hard not to be so awestruck that this actually worked and this is suddenly his life to look cool living it.

He passes the entrance exam to the school Tony picked out for him just fine.

So this is his life now. Living with the Avengers, going to school where Tony Stark told him to go to school, and maybe he should be a little more stubborn and a little less dependent but the fact is: he’s still a kid, and pretty damn glad to be so happily dependent, and he’s out of Rose Hill. That’s what matters.

Then he meets Spider-man.

He wishes he could say he was cool about the whole thing, that some short little dude in a weird homemade costume hadn’t had to leap in and save the day and Harley’s life, but his mama didn’t raise a liar.

It’s only the second time he takes his bike out and about the city. The first time he seriously underestimated NYC traffic and got so frustrated that the scowls so many of the (many, many, many) people walking and driving everywhere seemed to habitually wear started to make sense. Who could live here and not look like that?

So the second time he goes at three in the morning. There’s still traffic. There’re still people everywhere. But whole stretches of road are his for the taking, and he’s past worrying about getting tickets or getting lost (it’s a grid, how hard can it be?) or anything else that kept him cautious and he just goes.

A little bit of speed leads to a need for a lot more speed, so he follows roadsigns to the nearest highway. Which is where he finds out that he’s not the only idiot breaking speed limits on a bike in the middle of the night, and ends up taking on what he thought was a friendly race. And he wins.

That was a mistake.

He tries to reason with the suddenly aggressive dudes he’d been thrilled to be with a whole two minutes before—but they’re drunk, or on something, or just really really angry, and his accent’s an offense they’re apparently taking personally, and that on top of him not letting them win has earned him a welcome-to-New-York beating.

And probably a one-way ticket back to Tennessee, he thinks, despair making his fingers fist tighter as he gets up from where he’s been knocked on his ass, gets two good hits in, makes a lunge for his bike, gets kicked down again. Sneaking out like he did was already pressing boundaries he should’ve stayed well within. Coming back bloody—if he makes it back at all—he doesn’t even want to know what Tony will look like. Sound like.

Then one of the world’s sorest losers snaps off his helmet and rears back to beat Harley with it and Harley rolls desperately—right into a heavy-booted foot and mocking, spitting laughter—because a good hit with that thing could break his bones, and much as he doesn’t want to find out what Tony Stark’s angry-scared-and-disappointed face looks like (he’s barely survived Mom’s, the few times he’s earned it, and oh is he earning it) he also doesn’t want to die. He twists and claws and swears and braces as well as he can—

—the hit never comes.

“My dudes, my dudes, you gotta learn to use words,” comes a light, chastening voice, and Harley watches through his visor as some—person?—in weird red and blue clothes effortlessly twists the helmet-turned-weapon out of Harley’s attackers hands, shooting a bunch of white stuff at Angry Biker Dude 2 from his other arm. “And the way to use words is just like Thumper’s mama taught us! ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all’.” To go with this sassy wisdom is a push that actually looks pretty gentle, but Angry Biker Dude 1 is knocked flat on his ass and, a second later, stuck there. Angry Biker Dude 3 is glued to the bike he never dismounted, and Harley feels a totally inappropriate pang of regret that that bike might be well and truly fucked from the stuff. What Harley has figured out about his maybe-rescuer and the kinda grossly sticky (and crazy strong, if the useless struggles he’s seeing are any indication) mystery-shit he’s shooting at people is: he doesn’t want to get shot next.

“So what’s the problem here anyway? This kid owe you money or something?”

Kinda rich to be called a kid by someone whose voice sounds barely-pubescent, but Harley’s just glad to have the weirdo’s back turned to him. If he can get up, get to his bike—he’s being identified as an “uppity motherfucking outsider” and he has no idea how super-strength-sticky-boy is going to take that. Out of the four people present, Harley’s accent is the one to earn him a bright chalk circle in time to the “one of these things is not like the others” song.

“Wow, so straight-up xenophobia then,” red-and-blue-mutant says easily. He takes a little victory loop around the abruptly-ended fight scene—or maybe he’s just double-checking that the people he wanted stuck are well and truly stuck. Sprays a bit more of the white goo for good measure.

There’s a…crab? Spider? on his chest. Is the white stuff supposed to be spider silk? Is it spider silk?

Oh god. Oh god, Harley is going to puke. What if this guy’s next step is to suck his victims’ blood? What if he’s saving Harley for dessert? He’s walking towards him. Holding a gloved hand out. He’s going to eat him. Harley never should have left Rose Hill.

“Hey, you okay? Can you stand?”

“I’m toxic,” Harley says. It comes out more breathless than intimidating, but it’s all he’s got. “Don’t—you don’t want my blood. I swear you don’t want it. It’ll poison you—”

“Uh…”

Harley closes his eyes and prepares to die.

“I’m—I’m Spider-man,” says that oh-so-innocent sounding voice, and Harley’s worst fears are confirmed. “Friendly Spider-man! Emphasis on the friendly. Totally Safe and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-man, at your service. Unless you're a bad guy, in which case rethink your life choices! But I'm pretty sure you're not a bad guy, so...”

Harley peeks his eyes open. Spider-man is crouched in front of him now, hand withdrawn and at least an arm’s length away, head tilted to the side and weird eye-goggles managing to look…forlorn.

He looks pretty darn harmless.

“Okay, uh, thanks,” Harley manages. Shifts his legs a bit, testing to see if he’ll be able to stand on them. He can feel the shakes coming. The adrenaline crash. “Um. The whole…blood-sucking thing…part of your spider deal?”

“What?! Ew! NO! Ew, ew, ewww—”

“Eat the filthy outsider kid, Spider-man—thinks he can come on our turf and fuck with us—”

“I DO NOT EAT PEOPLE—god—”

Harley limps desperately for his bike.

“Hey, wait—”

He really shouldn’t drive. He’s hurting and dizzy but if he can just get far enough to find a safe place to park, breathe a bit, figure out how’s he’s going sneak back into the tower—which way to go to get back to the tower—

“Okay, look, I get that you don’t want my help, but you need it,” Spider-man says awkwardly. “Sorry it took me so long to get here—heard you take some real hits there. Where do you need to go?”

Harley leans heavily on his bike. Struggles to stay calm, to breathe evenly—gives up and takes his helmet off, hoping the chill in the air will shock his brain back into focus. There’s a surprised little sound from Spider-man, and Harley tenses, looking up at the masked-and-goggled face.

“You’re—” Spider-man cuts himself off.

“What?” snaps Harley. He has so many regrets in this moment, and they’re all about to come crawling up his throat, splatter all over the pavement.

“Uh, nothing, I’ve just—I’ve seen you before,” Spider-man says, each word more awkward than the last. “What are you doing out at 4:00am? We gotta be at school in, like, three and a half hours—”

“What are you doing out here?“

“I was gonna go home! Then I heard this fight happening, and the lady was trying to drive away but the dude got in a car and followed her and you know all those domestic violence murders? I couldn’t let that happen so I followed them and stopped the guy’s car and boy was he mad, I hope he goes to jail because he should not be around just anyone, and then I was hitching a ride home on a bakery truck and heard these guys beating on you and—wait why am I telling you this?”

“You go to Midtown Tech?” Harley says slowly, wondering if his brain could possible have put the pieces together right, or if he’s even more discombobulated than he thought he was.

“N-no,” Spider-man lies. “Of course not. What high schooler would be out at this time of night?”

“We are,” Harley says dryly, and cracks a bit of a grin, because this has been both the best night and the worst night and probably his last night in NYC, but—well, there are worse ways to blow his life to hell. And now that he’s pretty sure he’s not going to be webbed to the roadside or have the blood sucked right out of him, this shorty in his homemade suit is…pretty damn intriguing. And weirdly adorable.

“Not a high schooler,” Spider-man insists, looking around like he needs a change of subject. “How are you feeling? You okay to drive? I could—I could help you get home if you’re not.”

Harley opens his mouth to say that he’s totally fine even though he definitely isn’t, but curiosity gets the better of him. “Help me…how?”

“Um, I could—I could help you find a taxi or—I’ve never tried it before, but I could…swing you? I use my webs to swing between buildings—”

“That stuff come out of you?”

“Gross, no. It’s a chemical compound designed to mimic spider silk. One hundred percent manufactured, synthetic, not natural, not organic, GMO-free though!“

“Well if it’s GMO free,” Harley says, and he’s still smiling. He can’t help it.

“You—you serious? You wanna try?”

Might as well be honest. “After tonight I’m going to be grounded for life,” Harley says. “I’ll lose the bike for sure. And get my ass shipped straight back to Tennessee. Might as well enjoy the city while I can.”

“Oh gosh, I forgot about the bike for a moment. Um, those things get towed from parking spots all the time…hey, I’ve got an idea.”

What happens next defies everything Harley knows about the limits of both the human body and physics, and he’s decently knowledgeable about the basic mechanics of both. But that is his 400lb motorcycle, being lifted with two human-shaped hands and balanced upside-down, the padded seat held on one slim, hoodie-clad shoulder like a—like a fucking boombox. And that is a dude lying about not being in high school, maybe younger and definitely not all the much older than Harley, cheerfully motioning for Harley to follow along as he carries a fucking motorcycle across the road and starts strolling down the sidewalk, mindful not to knock down a stop sign as he goes.

Then again: Harley lives with Captain America. And The Hulk. And Thor. Maybe these super-dudes aren’t as rare and special as everyone thinks.

The motorcycle ends up stashed on a rooftop Spider-man swears it will be safe on, and then Harley’s being offered a piggy-back ride, and he thinks fuck it and hops on and then gravity has no meaning and he has never, ever felt so close to actual death, so thrillingly, painfully, beautifully alive.

“Where to?” asks Spider-man.

“Avengers Tower,“ Harley says, because at this point—why not?

“You’re—you’re messing with me.”

“You can kill me with your little finger. I’m very motivated not to mess with you.”

“I help people. Don’t hurt them,” Spider-man says sulkily. “I can get you close, I guess.”

Scratch ‘worst’, Harley decides, flying through New York City, whooping loudly as he goes—straight-up best night of my life.

“All right, ground rules,” Tony says, sitting across from where Harley is too sick with nerves to do more than shuffle his cereal around with a spoon. “Your bike seems to have disappeared. Good. If it reappears, I’ll re-disappear it.” He peers at Harley carefully. Harley just nods humbly, shoulders hunched up in unhappy anticipation. “I guess you need a curfew. What was your curfew at home?”

“Didn’t have one,” Harley says quietly. Which is true.

“Huh. Well, let’s go with 2:00am. Between the hours of 2:00 and 6:00am, you stay in the tower. On your own floor, unless there’s some kind of emergency. You got that, FRI?”

“Yes, Boss.”

“And you, kid?”

“I can…I can stay?”

“I have a feeling you’d end up in worse shape than this—” a too-eloquent gesture at Harley’s stiff-and-sore form—“if I allowed anything else. Yeah, you can stay, kid. Of course you can stay.”

“Thanks,” Harley whispers. “Thank you, Tony.“

Before they parted ways, Spider-man told him to stick a spider sticker to his school locker if he wanted to un-stash his bike. Harley buys a whole pack of spider-themed stickers from a Harry Potter-inspired corner in a bookstore and sticks one to his locker the following Monday.

Spider-man is on the rooftop at 10:00pm, just as promised. “Does this mean you’re going back to Tennessee?” he asks.

“No,” Harley says, mouth smiling on its own, as it seems determined to do whenever those stupid goggles are pointed his way. “I still can’t believe it, but—I’m not actually in that much trouble. I think it was a one-time thing, though. A ‘I have no idea what to do with a kid’ grace period. Something like that.”

They lean together against the rooftop wall, watching the night city.

“You…move in with a long-lost dad or something? Uh. Wait, that’s probably too—don’t answer that. Unless you want to—”

“I do have a long-lost dad,” Harley says slowly, “and he can stay lost for all I care. Nah, the people I’m staying with aren’t even related to me, don’t have any sort of legal responsibility towards me or nothin’. Well I think there’s a temporary guardianship thing in the works. Had to happen for me to enroll in school.”

“My parent isn’t related to me either,” Spider-man confides. “Not by blood, anyway. But she’s the best. Your people good people?”

Harley looks at him. Memorizes the softening of his voice, the cadence of it. Narrows his list of classmate moonlighting as superhuman spider-themed vigilante data-set parameters even further. “The best,” he echoes honestly.

“That’s good. That’s really good. Um. You—you want me to get your bike down for you now?”

“Nah, it’ll just get confiscated.”

“That sucks.”

“It’s fair,” Harley says. Bites his lip, almost changes his mind, but confesses—“I put the sticker up so I could see you again.”

There’s a beat. He tries really hard to tell what Spider-man might be thinking. Can’t.

“And I brought a cover to protect my bike.”

“Ah.”

A little disappointed, Harley pulls his cover out of his backpack, goes about making sure his bike-baby is tucked in well. Turns to tell Spider-man he’s ready to go.

“You got any more stickers?”

Harley has exactly 257 spider-themed stickers. “A few.”

A sharp little nod. A web shot; a free arm reaching out, gathering Harley in easily; a quick, controlled drop to the sidewalk. A little pat on the shoulder. “See you, then,” Spider-man says, waving as he swings off.

Turns out you can have a crush without ever seeing your crush's face. When you're not even sure your crush is human. 

In the end, Spider-man gives himself away.

With Miss Nat’s and the internet’s help, Harley learns some basic profiling skills, and can no longer go anywhere in school without at least part of his brain automatically cataloging height and weight and stance; probably seems weirdly attentive to classmates’ comments as he spends class discussions comparing pitches and phrasing choices. He decorates his locker with spiders twice in three weeks (a very calculated interval gambling his desire to see Spider-man against his fear that Spider-man will get sick of him and stop showing up) and gathers all the data he can in the hidden, happy moments on the rooftop. He learns that Spidey made his own web-shooters, and joins the Robotics and Engineering clubs post-haste.

Seven weeks after Spider-man saved Harley’s life, Peter Parker stops—just for a split second—to smile at the spider Harley has carefully plastered to his locker, and suspicions click into certainty.

He makes his move the very next day.

“Hey,” he says casually, sliding into place across from Peter Parker and Ned Leeds in the cafeteria. “Mind if I sit here? I’m Harley.”

“Uh—” says Ned.

“Sure,” says Peter.

Turns out crushes can get really unbearable really fast when there is finally, finally a name and a face to go with it—especially when that face is Peter’s.

But Peter is crushing on Liz Allen, who is smart and beautiful and kind and honestly Peter has great taste, and most of all Harley just wants him to be happy. Ned is great too. They’re good guys and good friends and Harley finds out that it’s pretty great, having friends. He’s not going to mess with it.

It takes him two whole days to get up the courage to show Tony his first Midtown School of Science and Technology report card. It’s childish. But he wants to show Tony how grateful he really is to be here, and he doesn’t know many ways to do it.

“Never doubted you for a second, Keener,” Tony says, and Harley can’t breathe around the love and gratitude making a taking-flight hot-air balloon of his chest. “Nice work, kid. Uh. I’ve been meaning to ask…what did happen to your bike? Do you need a new one? I’ll buy you a new one.”

“So if it re-appears, it gets to stay?” Hope just about closes up his throat.

“Don’t see why not. Long as you keep up what you’ve been doing—which is good stuff, kid, all of it—there hasn’t been a single incident since it disappeared. That wouldn’t change if it reappeared, would it?”

“No, sir,” Harley says. Means it. That heady hunger for speed and thrill that makes him stupid—he’s got better ways to fill it. Ways that involve Spider-man’s very, very strong arms around him.

Still, he misses his bike. Visits to the rooftop help, but…

“Bring it home then, punk,” Tony says, reaching out and messing up his hair in a move he’s attempted only twice. It ruins Harley’s entire aesthetic, but makes him too happy to care.

So another spider sticker appears on Harley’s locker, and he finally, finally brings his baby home.

Somehow, Harley Keener and Michelle Jones become…allies. Friends, maybe, though neither of them has enough practice with the whole friendship thing to do much more than hang out doing their own shit in either silent or snarky companionship. They’re both seen as scary and off-putting, and that only multiplies when they're together. It's useful. She likes his bike. He offers to teach her to drive, and she says that breaks too many laws, but she does take him up on a ride.

“Look, we made him jealous,” she says, tipping her chin towards Peter, who is pretending not to watch them while showing a lot more on his beautiful, expressive, and beautifully expressive face than he thinks he is.

“Does it count if he doesn’t know he’s jealous?” Harley asks, only a little bitterly. They exchange dry stares. Sigh in unison.

Harley Keener and Michelle Jones understand each other a little too well. They both prefer to keep a certain amount of distance between them and just about everyone else. They both notice a lot more than most of their classmates and all of their teachers do. They both really fucking appreciate the strange and remarkable human(?) called Peter Parker.

“So, um, you and—you and Michelle,” Peter says, doing some anxious and adorable hand wringing to squeeze the words out. “You’re—together?”

Harley looks at him for a few seconds, coming to a decision that makes his stomach lurch violently, probably attempting to abandon this clearly doomed ship. “No. I’m gay,” he tells him. Feels suddenly very cold, waiting without daring to breathe.

“Oh,” Peter says, surprised. “Oh, that’s—I mean obviously that’s cool. That you’re gay. Um. It’s cool that you told me. Thanks.”

“Sure,” says Harley, trying to subtly suck in enough oxygen to keep from passing out.

“I know you’re Spider-man,” he confesses next. Peter came to school late, limping, white as the walls, and insisting he’s fine. Well. Harley sure as hell isn't fine. “If that’s how you got hurt, I already know. So let me help. Please. Please, Peter.”

Peter goes even whiter. Harley puts out ready-to-catch hands, sure his friend is going to pass the fuck out. Any second now. “You…you know…?”

“Since a few weeks after I met you. Haven’t told anyone. Never will. Come on. Come on, Peter, you look—you must feel awful. Let me—”

“I—I can’t—”

“You can’t die on the school steps, that’s what you can’t do.” Not that Harley was out here waiting for him or anything. He just happened to feel like skipping first period today.

With a heartbreaking sigh of defeat, Peter slumps into him. Very, very cautiously, Harley puts a supporting arm around his shoulders. “My—my ribs,” Peter whispers. “They…hurt...a lot. Makes it hard to—well, to do anything. But especially breathing. I don’t know why—usually it just takes a few hours, but—”

“Let’s hide out in the bathroom for a bit,” Harley offers. “Rest up from making it this far. Then whatever you want to do next, I’ll back you up. Promise.”

Peter just nods. He looks so, so miserable.

Harley scares some random senior out of the first floor bathroom, then traps the doors shut with wire scraps he has in his backpack. Those things always end up coming in handy. Sits on the floor next to Peter, who is breathing quick, shallow breaths, eyes tight with pain. Whose head presses softly into Harley’s shoulder, about ten minutes in; now Harley can’t breathe, either.

“Hal?”

“Yeah, Pete.”

“…Thanks.”

“‘Course.”

“You’ve put in him crisis,” Ned says bluntly, apparently able to hold complete conversations while annihilating Harley’s ass on Metal Gear Rising. Harley doesn’t answer, because he hates losing and it’s taking everything he has to not die quicker. No way he’s carrying a conversation. “I’m serious. He’s questioning so many things he can’t talk in anything but questions.”

Harley’s avatar dies a terrible, unjust death, cut into a gratuitous number of tiny pieces. “Don’t know what you expect me to do about that.”

Ned shrugs. “Me neither,” he says amiably. “I just hope someone does something soon. For my sanity, at the least. Don’t know if there’s much hope left for Peter’s.”

“What about mine?”

“Please. You weren’t sane to begin with.”

“Point,” says Harley, and resignedly picks up the controller to see how long he can delay death this time.

“Gotta be honest, I never get tired of watching him do this,” Tony says lazily, staring openly as Steve Rogers crushes cinder blocks with his shield and bare fists. He’s invited Harley to the training room again—more and more, Harley’s being asked to come up with ideas for Avengers tech, and more and more, his ideas are listened to. Tony’s still the only one to really take him seriously, but Tony’s also the one who counts the most.

“My boyfriend can do it better,” Harley scoffs.

And immediately regrets. He regrets so hard.

“Oh?” Tony’s eyebrow is so fucking amused. So fucking patronizing.

“Gotta go,” says Harley. Books it.

Okay. Okay, okay, everything’s okay, he just needs to install, like, fifty new brain-to-mouth filters.

He and Peter are friends. He and Spider-man are friends.

He’s not gonna fuck that up.

He’s not.

Harley is very, very focused on not fucking things up all day every day in school. It’s going okay, he thinks. He can totally keep doing this.

Forever. He’ll just not-fuck-up forever. This is a plan.

He makes it two steps around the corner and into the hallway where Peter's locker is when all his determined little thought-trains crash. Because there's Flash, and there's the mocking crowd, and there's Peter Parker with that particular shuttered-and-padlocked face he makes. And he’s done.

"Oh, hey," says Harley loudly, strolling up with only slightly longer strides than absolutely necessary. Heads turn. People make way. "Is this another episode of Eugene Thompson and the Freudian Phallic Obsession? Cool if I take notes? I have this term project for Human Psychology and you, adorable little Flasher you, are like number three on my list of case studies. Number two is the pervs who make multiple Twitter accounts to thirst-tweet Spider-man—oh wait, that's also you."

"Fuck off, Keener," warns Flash. He's already taken two steps back. Which puts him closer to Peter, unfortunately, who is sending big wide Alarm Eyes at Harley in between darting glances to the side like he's scoping escape routes. "This has nothing to do with you."

"Right right, except Peter's my friend, and I don't like it when people fuck with my friends, Flasher."

"I'm fine, Harley," says Peter. He sounds a lot more annoyed with Harley than he looked towards Flash.

"You absolutely are, Petey. Flasher, on the other hand—you do know the whole 'he teases you because he likes you thing is totally outdated, right, Thompson? In this century there are sexual harassment laws and everything. Grow some balls, confess your feelings, and brace for rejection. Pete's cool, he'll let you down quietly—"

"Harley." That's Peter.

"Shut your cock-sucking mouth, Keener." And that's Flash, mad as hell. Perfect. Perfect. "If you're implying I have a—a thing for Penis Parker—you're out of your—"

"A thing for penis, recent polls and Freudian slips confirm." Harley gives him his shark grin. "Come on, kid, own it. You can be as cool as me if you try a little. And hire a better personal shopper. And the hair—but I digress. Now that I've thought about it for oh-point-five seconds, I was wrong, totally wrong, totally take it back. No way you have a thing for Peter. That—" he takes care to flex to full potential as his arms fold across his chest, makes sure his raised eyebrow and pitying smile take in every inch of his target and finds each and and every inch absolutely lacking, "would require taste."

There’s a chorus of appreciative hisses and oooohhh burnnns from the audience. Flash stares at him, opens his mouth, comes up with a beaten fuck you, Keener—Harley answers with a single raised brow—and he’s won. Flash is on the retreat, not caring who he shoves along the way. Shouts at people to stop recording. Tries to grab a phone to delete streaming video and gets laughed at.

Peter buries his face in his hands. "I'm gonna kill you."

"Okay," says Harley. "We skipping 5th period for this?"

Peter just glares at him, as tall as he can be without going on tiptoes, bristly as an angry cat. Harley’s grin slips a tiny bit. But Peter pauses for a split second once he’s turned to go—Harley’s cue to fall in next to him—and it’s back full force. Classmates are quick to get out of their way.

The lecture he’s about to get about not being cruel to cruel people is acceptable collateral, Harley decides, if he gets to see Peter’s shoulders soldier straight again, chin set in I’ll take on the world and win.

Peter fights the big scary fights just fine. And if he’d rather not fight the small ones, Harley is more than content to fight them for him.

“By the way, I don’t know how closely you were listening back there,” Harley says, swinging a not-entirely-casual arm around those magnificent shoulders, because he can’t actually not-fuck-up forever—“but I have excellent taste.”

It’s taking all his courage just to keep his arm where it is, his hand resting on a shoulder that can casually carry a motorcycle. He doesn’t dare look openly enough to see clearly, but Harley’s like 95% sure he just saw Peter’s lips quirk up.

“That’s gay,” Peter says.

“So, so gay,” Harley agrees, cheerful with stupid, indomitable hope. He experiments with slowing his pace just a tiny bit, and Peter slows too. Stays tucked snug and safe under Harley’s arm. Harley's heart may burst. “Hopefully of the contagious variety—”

“Pushing it, Keener.”

“Yeah, that’s one of my many, many strengths.”

“God. Why do I even try.”

“Seriously, Parker, you could be trying so much more.”

The bell rings.

“Shit. We’re late—”

“We’re skipping 5th period, remember?”

“Your horrible, irresponsible plan, Hal, not mine—”

“Annnnd here’s the next phase of my perfect, beautiful plan—the parking lot! Hey look, there’s my bike! I totally forgot I’d parked it there.”

Peter hesitates for all of two seconds. “I...shouldn’t. I’ve missed too much stuff lately, need to not draw attention to…”

Harley hits him with the full strength of his very best smile, the one Rory says he should need a license for so he can be held responsible for using it almost entirely for evil, and his spare helmet. That he may or may not have bought specifically for Peter. And might die if he doesn’t get to see on Peter’s gorgeous head in the next five seconds. Straddles the bike. “I’ll buy you ice cream. Three scoops. Four? Five—a giant fucking sundae with all the works—”

“Fucking fuck, I already regret this—” but Peter Parker is pushing Harley’s spare helmet over his curls, and swinging his very attractive leg over the back of Harley’s bike, and reaching loose, hesitant hands around Harley’s waist.

“Hold on tight,” Harley says, enthusiastic emphasis on tight, feeling very much like a second sun is exploding some kind of sappy, searing sunrise in his actual sternum.

That lecture is still coming, he’s sure of it. Whatever else comes—if it’s anything like this, engine purring and tires pealing and—like web-slinging, but reversed, Peter’s arms so warm around Harley—he can’t dream of anything luckier than living it.