Archive of Our Own

They’re round the corner of the Art block, snickering like hyenas.

“And when he is in class, he’s all, Professor Hayes, I’m not feeling a hundred percent today, can I sit out of evaluation? And nobody gets to criticise his work.”

“Hayes actually falls for it?”

“Somehow, yeah. Peter’s totally the teacher’s pet.”

A scarlet thread has tautened around Harley’s knuckles before he can so much as tease out a rational thought. 

Peter.

He freezes a moment. Sticks his fists in the coats of his winter coat. He wants to hear just what these guys think.

“The other day he walked out and he was, like, howling in the corridor. So embarrassing. Yeah, Hayes went straight to him. It’s literally not even fair. It’s obvious he just acts that way so he’ll get attention and won’t need to work.”

“Do you think he actually got raped?”

“Of course not. Not even that kidnapper would wanna touch him.”

A crackling of laughter. 

Harley feels like stoked embers. Achilles suddenly shadowed in rage, burning to kill.

He surges round the corner and sees them: tall, taller than Harley, even, their breath foaming in the chill of the winter air; baggy clothes and an abundance of piercings, but still lame. Lamer than Harley had expected. Still art kids. Harley can take them, easy. He can fucking knock them out.

“Heard you talking shit about my friend,” he grits, and they turn.

And smile. Like they’re embarrassed for him.

“It’s his little boyfriend!” says one through the totally unstylish sweep of bangs across his face. Justin Bieber did it--a decade ago. Harley wants to pull the hair out of his scalp.

“Fuck you,” he says instead.

Ooh, they all say, low and mocking.

“I pity you, man.” Justin Bieber crosses his arms over his stupid puffer coat. “He’s still got you wrapped around his finger with all the bullshit about his trauma. You really believe that shit? The panic attacks and the meltdowns?”

“You’re in no fucking place to judge him. You don’t know him. So get your fish hook nose out of his business and shut the hell up.”

The eyes of a guy with a bulb-like lip piercing light up. “You don’t think he likes Peter?”

That makes the whole gang of them come alive with the sweet, sweet rush of homophobia. They toss insults around, a colourful arrow-hail of words that include both fag and faggot in full.

Jesus. New York was supposed to be progressive.

“No other way he’d hang around a retard like Peter Parker,” spits Justin Bieber, and Harley loses it.

See, he’s dealt with bullies time and time again, and he doesn’t much care what people say about him. But when it comes to Peter? If someone so much as raises an eyebrow at him in disapproval? Fucking Armageddon.

Thread becomes iron, sending Harley’s knuckles so close to the surface of his fists that he swears the skin breaks before he even throws his first punch to Justin Bieber’s bigoted, contemptible, asshole face.

It feels familiar. It takes him back to those dust-covered scuffles under the sun of Tennessee. 

It feels good.

Until the art kids start to fight back.

Justin Bieber has disappeared behind the ranks of kids now enclosing Harley, shoving him back and forth, starting to punch. Fists and nails and the scrape of thick pewter rings. Harley’s breath rushes hot through his throat as he staggers back under the blows, starting to regret this already, but still burning, burning, burning with rage. They can’t say that about Peter. He drives a fist into someone’s stomach, hears them choke, feels his own already-bloodied lips curl bitterly upwards. 

Not for long--three of them wrest his limbs out of his control, arms twisted back, legs skittering under him, and Justin Bieber re-emerges in a hurricane of chemically-straightened hair to drive a torpedoing fist smack into Harley’s jaw.

“Nico,” says the guy pinning his left arm to the one on his right. “He’s wearing nail polish.”

“Oh my God.” A kick to Harley’s back from the right. “He really is a fag.”

Just as Harley’s about to retort it’s called having style, down comes a barrage of fists and knees and feet across his front, caving him in. Jeers and cackles rise above the sounds of impact. 

This is when Harley starts to wonder if he really can handle this.

His face hits the concrete floor, sending his vision spiralling into haziness. He groans. And groans again as a foot catches the tender spot just beneath his ribs. Blood starts to run into his eye. Like a fruit about to be excavated, he feels his ribs bend under the pressure of a million Timberland boots. 

Shit shit shit shit. Okay. Okay, maybe Harley can’t handle this at all. Maybe he’s totally overwhelmed. Could these guys actually… kill him? Does that happen? No, they’ve gotta stop before then.

But it doesn’t seem like they will. Wrung-out testosterone flows thick through the air, egging on those who haven’t gotten a good hit in yet, and the laughs and shouts have become so loud nobody can hear their own thoughts, not least Harley, on the ground amid it all. His senses are off the rails. Somehow, the grit against his floundering palms has become more painful than the blows. 

Someone has to hear. They have to.

Justin Bieber reels back his fist to explode Harley’s face for good, probably, when he’s yanked away. There one second, gone the next.

Harley blinks. The whole gang hesitates.

Then, screamed like a battle cry: “Harley, run!”

That voice, that all-too-familiar voice, gives Harley the sensation of drinking the espresso of a lifetime--but also a bottle of bleach at the same.

Peter.

Harley, to his own credit, does his damndest to obey, scrambling towards the edge of the gang of kids in a way he can tell is utterly ungraceful. Whatever. He’s a bloodied, bruised, pulsing mess. 

Like some kind of twisted showmaster, Nico cries, “Just the man we’ve been looking for!”

Someone catches Harley by the collar suddenly, yanking him up, and a choked noise flies out of his throat. He’s in a headlock. He’s standing against his will, adrenaline-pumped legs shaking. And there is Peter, with his black wool coat and golden-brown hair and jaw set more sharply than he’s ever seen, the real Achilles to his helpless Patroclus. 

As his eyes meet Peter’s, he watches the grit fall right off Peter’s expression in a landslide until raw fear is uncovered. Fear for Harley. Harley hates that the thought lights a match in his belly.

“Let him go,” he growls, lunging for whoever’s restraining Harley. 

A couple of kids surge forwards and hold him back. Oh, now he’s angry they jeer, and are you gonna have another breakdown? And both so fucked-up, they’re made for each other.

Harley is ready to start a natural disaster, but the comments fly right by Peter, who thrashes in the grip of the kids holding him down.

“Did they paint each other’s nails?” someone is snickering. They’ve seen the matching blue on Peter’s nails, then.

Yeah, they did. Over Teen Wolf. It was very fucking relaxing, okay?

“The plot thickens. They’re both fairies.”

“Say it,” Onion-Piercing says an inch from Peter’s face. “Admit you’re gay.”

And there forms a standstill.

“I’m reporting you,” Peter snarls at him, incensed, not at the demand, but with them. For what they’ve done to Harley. Harley is on top of the world and eating shit beneath it. Peter has never been this angry, ever. He looks feral, stripped down to his most primal parts. “Homophobia, physical assault, bullying--”

“I’m reporting you,” Onion-piercing pantomimes. “Do you think they’ll really believe you? You?”

Again, Peter says, “Let Harley go.”

“No thanks. He hit us first.”

The guy opposite Onion-Piercing punches him in the stomach. Harley’s own stomach roils with outrage. He cries out, struggles, but Peter hardly even reacts. He straightens, slowly, like a prince drawing himself up before a crowd. What’s happened to him, what divine influence, that’s made him so powerful? 

“I won’t admit anything to you. I don’t need to prove myself.”

“Why is it a problem, then? Why would you want to hide anything?”

Don’t say anything, Harley mouths. Peter’s right. He doesn’t need to prove anything. Let them tear Harley apart. Let them get locked up for it, see how they like that.

Peter watches his mouth move. Again, the broken look as his gaze rests on Harley.

Blood has begun to leak slowly from Harley’s forehead onto the concrete, deafeningly drip-dripping.

Another expression altogether crosses Peter’s face, something clenched and keen and utterly foreign to Harley.

“I’m not gay,” he says. “But I am bisexual.”

The floor is gone, and the arm that has him in a headlock becomes all that’s left tethering Harley to this mortal plane. He honestly thinks he pees a little.

Because-- what.

Before the gang can erupt, before anyone can even think, Peter moves on them. Harley gets the idea this time and jabs his captor in the ribs, running somewhere, nowhere, anywhere away from the fight, clattering to the ground against a wall. From here, he gets a bafflingly crooked view of Peter Parker as he whirls his way through the entire group of kids like they’re grass stalks in a meadow and he’s a deadly tornado. His expression never once shifts from that stony assuredness as he knocks down art kid after art kid, blurry both with Harley’s off-kilter vision and the sheer athletic speed of his movements. Harley forgot he could run. And box. And dance.

All Peter’s foes have scattered from sight after a swift but restrained ass-kicking; all but one--Justin Bieber, of course, sticking around like being the main antagonist is his life’s dream. Peter catches him by his shirt, gets all up in his face, and tells him with narrowed eyes, “If you touch him again, getting reported will be the least of your worries, okay? Next time, I won’t be so nice. Tell that to all your buddies. Don’t you dare touch him again.”

There’s no time to process what any of this means. But I am bisexual. Don’t you dare touch him again. All the fury has drained out of Peter in a rush and Harley can recognise his face again, even blurry across the courtyard. It brings him back to reality with a thunderous crash. Goddamn, he aches. He throbs. He burns.

It’s just them. Nothing to distract Harley from his utter mortification.

The pain of new wounds is like a bitter old friend. But Peter across the courtyard from him, panting as hard as him, fixing him with that look? Saving him? Entirely new.

Harley tries to be cool. He grins over at Peter, throws out a wave, only his wrist sort of cracks when he does it and it sends a tree-trunk-sized splinter of pain fizzing up through his forearm and he ends up grimacing. 

Well, shit. There goes being casual.

Peter fucking sprints at him. He trips to the ground at Harley’s feet. “Okay,” he says, sounding like he doesn’t think anything is okay at all. “Okay.” Harley squints down at his own body, wondering if a rib is sticking out of him or something, but there’s nothing really dramatic. His t-shirt is ruined though, all bloody and dirty and torn with grit, which is a damn shame. It said Hawkins, Indiana. He liked it.

“Okay, okay, okay.” Peter’s pale all of a sudden. Like, ashen. Like he could throw up on Harley, and they do not want that, what with the way Harley is kind of split open and therefore very vulnerable to infection. Gone is the whirling dervish, the man of action. Peter is wholeheartedly back, wide, arresting doe eyes and all. He puts a hand on Harley’s shoulder, then jerks it back, then drops his forehead against it. “Oh my God, Harley. Jesus. Jesus Jesus Jesus.”

“I’m good,” Harley mumbles in a paltry attempt to get him to stop worrying. He forgets Peter’s never seen him all battered like this.

“Can you walk?”

Harley huffs. “It was a couple of art kids, not Megatron.”

He spits out a wad of blood, then realises that he probably shouldn’t have done that in front of Peter. Peter lets out a little gasp like he’s been hit.

“Shit,” he says under his breath, just as Harley says, “It’s fine.”

Something snaps in Peter just then. 

“We’re going to the ER,” he says--no, demands.

“No. No--Peter, that costs money--”

He’s cut off by Peter’s arms around him, sweeping him up into a bridal carry.

He stops breathing.

Peter’s arms round his back and legs and Peter’s cloudy breath gusting across his face and Peter’s heart trembling like a tectonic plate right against Harley’s bruised side, painful like the beat of a tattoo, floors him, grounds him and sends him spiralling into incoherence all at once. Harley’s arms loop around his neck of their own accord.

“This is silly,” Harley protests weakly. “Peter, put me down. I can walk fine.”

Peter doesn’t even look at him, just walks on.

Harley tries not to think about how comfortable he is in Peter’s arms. How easily Peter can lift him, as if he’s nothing close to a burden, as if all his messy limbs make sense when Peter holds him.

When they reach Harley’s car, Peter fishes the keys right out of Harley’s jacket pocket, holding him with one arm for a second and not shifting an inch, and Harley thinks about the fact that Peter knows exactly where in his jacket he keeps his keys. He thinks about people imbued with supernatural reserves of strength, adrenaline, when they see loved ones in danger. Loved ones, he thinks, over and over. Bisexual.

Peter sits Harley in the passenger and does up his belt for him without a word. He rounds the car, gets in, hands Harley the box of tissues from the backseat, sticks the keys in the ignition, and pulls out of the parking lot.

Then ensues twenty-five minutes of complete and utter silence.

Harley is a talker. He talks to himself and he talks to other people and he talks to the pot plants in the kitchen. Silence--no music, no remarks from Peter about the cool way the Dairy Queen looks all lit up in the early-evening gloom--is torture. That, and there are literal, visible waves of hostility radiating from Peter. Harley doesn’t know what the fuck he did to deserve that. The over-sympathy was mortifying but better than this.

Harley wipes his face with a tissue. He assesses himself vaguely. His head is pounding like a bongo drum. His knuckles resemble the gross factory-churned chicken pulp they show you in documentaries that try to scare you into going vegan. His ribs: ouch, ouch, ouch. His face hurts. He’d forgotten that. Nose still intact, though; he checks with the hand that doesn’t feel like a dislocation waiting to happen, and it’s still as squat and unflattering and not-quite-in-the-right-spot as always. Yay. Small mercies, you know.

He’s quite literally bursting with the desire to ask Peter about but I am bisexual, about the worry in his eyes and the sudden ferocity and the bridal carry and now the incomprehensible rage, but he shuts his mouth. Doesn’t even hum or whistle. Settles for tapping on the leather of the seat. Grey fog smears endlessly past the windows.

They’re at the hospital. Peter insists on carrying Harley to his seat in the waiting room, which turns Harley magenta. Then he goes to the receptionist’s desk and talks in a flurry, waving a hand back at where Harley’s cursing the blue plastic chairs against his sore back and legs and ass.

He returns holding two painkillers and an ice pack. Harley swallows them dry, forgetting to pretend like he’s not a pro at downing them after a beating. He slaps the pack against his forehead and gets a little relief. God, it brings things back. Things Harley would like to stay buried, please, until he gets to therapy on Tuesday.

More silence. Toe-curling silence. The pain and the tension together are becoming too much to bear. 

Harley fixes his eyes on Peter, beside him but emotionally a planet away, staring down at his phone. He squints at the screen over his shoulder and--it’s not even turned on.

It’s got to be hours until he gets treated. Peter can’t get any less hostile, Harley reckons.

So he talks. He says, “I hate this. I can’t sit here in silence any more. Tell me why you’re mad at me.”

Peter’s brow sets. He tosses away his phone but doesn’t quite meet Harley’s gaze. “I’m not mad at you.”

“But you’re mad.”

“I’m--thinking about how Tony would always brush it off afterwards, too.”

The floor flies back to its proper place at last and jars Harley’s knees into putty.

The agitated whirring of anger around Peter has quietened. Harley has seen him cycle through a myriad of emotions in the last half an hour, but this is the most heart-wrenching of them all: raw and pained and exposed.

“He would, uh--” Peter’s eyes flicker up, finally darting to Harley’s. “He would try and get on Larry’s nerves. So he’d pick him, not me. Protecting me. But sometimes it was worse. I could hear everything. Every time, I thought, will it be this time? Will it be now that, you know, that Larry kills him?”

“I was sticking up for you,” Harley says, omitting the part that has him punching himself still: trying to.

Peter’s voice is pointed. “Exactly.” He rubs at his face with a hand. He always does it so harshly, like a reprimand to himself. “You need to--you can’t--don’t stick up for me like that. Okay?”

“Friends stick up for each other,” Harley insists. He barely even feels the way friends bites at his insides anymore. “We’re not in the Room. Those guys weren’t kidnappers, just assholes that will keep being assholes until someone does something.”

Peter lays back in his chair, looking suddenly like all the weight of the universe has been loaded onto him. Like he’s hundreds of years old and wants mortality back, wants an end. Harley stops thinking about how the light above them is slightly flickery; how the receptionist licks her finger before turning each page of her paperwork; how the girl sat across from them has something stuck into the bottom of her foot. It’s just Peter.

“I’m sick and tired of fighting, Harls.”

As he rubs and rubs and rubs at his face, Harley sees his split knuckles, matching his own.

“I’m sorry if doing that--brought stuff up.”

Peter sighs.

“But I’m not sorry that I did it.”

Peter jerks up.

Now, that’s the kind of attention Harley wants. “I’m not sorry,” he says, “That I wanted to punch the noses right off of those dickbags. Because they were being fucking awful about you, and I saw red. Yeah? And to be fair, you fought them too.”

“Only because you did first. Did you think they’d actually learn anything from you hitting them?”

“God, why do you have to be so reasonable?” Harley feels a match strike again, fire pressing upwards through his chest. “I didn’t think about the futility of violence. I just hit them because they were saying shitty things about you and I got mad. Happy?”

“What did they say?” Peter asks, quieter.

“They don’t… think what you say about the Room is true. They think it’s for attention. That you’re fooling me, everyone.”

“I don’t much care if people don’t believe me, to be honest. They can say what they like.”

“But they--no. They can’t. They have to treat you like a human being. With respect. They weren’t even trying to understand.”

“Why does it bother you so much?”

There are too many answers to that for Harley to even know where to start, and besides, most of them are things he’s vowed never to say to Peter.

Although...

“Back then, you--you said you were bisexual.”

A statement, not a question. Harley hopes Peter won’t dodge it. But he does, entirely. He dives towards his backpack and roots around in it, coming up empty, like he just needed to stall.

Like he’s overcome with emotion.

Harley doesn’t think that was the response of someone who only pretended to come out.

Bisexual?

But this is Peter. Peter. Peter is his friend and nothing more. Peter can’t be…

Peter’s hands are on Harley’s face. Red alert.

He looks at Harley, and Harley catches something in his eyes. They look at each other, and look, and look. His face is really very close to Harley’s.

A wild possibility springs to life in Harley’s mind.

Softly, Peter says, “Let me take a look at you." Red creeps into his cheeks. "I mean, if that's--alright."

"Yeah," says Harley, not trusting himself to say anything more.

Peter’s fingers gently probing his face are fucking heavenly, and distracting, very distracting. Those brown eyes are trained on him, focused. Harley huffs, feeling that he needs to laugh, because what else can he do? And Peter smiles in return. Thank God. A smile.

Peter taps his forehead. “Might need glue or something, but not stitches, I don’t think.”

“Yes, Doctor Parker.”

Peter’s head ducks as he snickers.

“How’s your wrist?” he says, taking it in those cool hands of his.

Harley just shrugs.

A sympathetic wince from Peter as he catches sight of the back of Harley’s hand. “Ouch, the knuckles.”

“Yeah,” Harley says again, pulse stuttering for no reason.

He starts to wonder if he can handle this.

“I don’t…” Peter bends over Harley’s wrist, which he still has clasped in his hands, Harley hasn’t forgotten, not even close, and hardens. “I don’t like that you stuck up for me. It’s nice that you care, but I just--don’t want you to get the idea that you can go around doing that. Because--look at you.”

Peter has no idea how much Harley cares.

Harley doesn’t want to look at himself. He pulls his wrist away, ignoring the spike of pain. “Can you just give it a rest? Okay, maybe I fucked up. But I’ve been in fights.” To come so close to the truth fills his mouth with panicked sourness. “You don’t understand. I… I really…”

But the words he thought would come, the words that are a step to the left of the truth, evade him. All that is left is I love you, I love you, loud and urgent as an alarm.

“No more fights,” Peter says, suddenly fierce, eyes alight, and Harley wonders if there isn’t as much heat in him as there is cool. “You have to promise me that.”

“I don’t have to promise you anything.”

“I came out of class and you were on the ground getting absolutely battered--”

Harley cuts in. “Why did you say you were bisexual?”

Peter swallows. Clicks his jaw. Studies the floor.

“Because I am,” he breathes. Harley thinks he’s imagined it at first.

Cue the sudden, frantic straining of his heart against its years-old chains. Holy shit.  

He watches Peter. Peter, with his bloody knuckles and hair blown out of place, blown into errant curls he hasn’t yet thought to tidy away. His old New Balances. His fine fingers. His golden eyes. The blue polish chipped on his nails.

Peter jerks to life all at once, fierce again, and says, “Let me look at your ribs.”

It only becomes clear exactly what that entails when Peter’s hands land on the hem of Harley’s t-shirt. Harley shifts away. “Peter, we’re in a waiting room.”

“Just let me see.” And Peter is hot-faced, almost desperate-looking, hands tight-fisted, and his face is close, too close to handle, too close to avoid the scent of his pear shampoo and the curve of his eyelashes, and he’s holding Harley’s shirt still, absent-mindedly now, fists balled at Harley’s waist, and he looks like he isn’t even aware that he’s leaning so close but Harley is aware, so, so aware.

“You don’t need to fuss over me like this, like you’re my mom or--”

“I do, because--because you made a stupid mistake and now you’re not even letting me help you.”

“I let you carry me to the goddamn car. You’ve done enough.”

“I’m worried.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“I’m--” Peter laughs, but looks absolutely incensed. There’s a horde of emotions behind it. “I’m overreacting? Harley. You’re totally fucked up.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not!”

“I’m fine!”

“You’re--”

But Peter doesn’t finish his sentence. Because Harley’s done something he promised himself long ago he would never do. Harley is grabbing Peter’s face and Harley is mashing his nose into Peter’s cheek and Harley is kissing him.

Harley is kissing Peter.

Thought returns. He lurches back. Horror curls sharp-tipped fingers around his throat.

Peter’s eyes are the size of continents. He sits stock-still, jaw slack, staring and staring and staring at Harley. Then, tremulously, as if investigating a daunting injury, he brings a hand up to his kiss-impressed lips.

“Oh no,” Harley stammers, “Oh no. Oh fuck. ” He can’t go back. Nothing can revoke that look on Peter’s face.

Harley’s made a fatal mistake.

He bolts to his feet, yanks on his jacket, saying, “I’m so sorry, that--it didn’t--I wasn’t--fuck--”

“Harley,” Peter says. 

Harley doesn’t look at him. “I’m so sorry.”

“Harley...”

Harley can’t bear to listen to his accusation, or worse, sympathy. “I’m gonna--I’ll leave. I’ll go. I have to--”

Peter grips him, halts him. “Harley.”

Peter’s eyes have burst into flame. He brings them closer to Harley, closer than close, all in a rush, and time shows no signs of accommodating this seismic change by slowing down, lights above them, lights within them, fury and frustration and anxiety and--

Peter’s lips are on his.

Soft yet impassioned and warm, not cool at all, as delicately warm as the first whispers of a summer breeze.

And in that moment, as Harley stands there in the waiting room and feels his legs go out from beneath him just as Peter’s arm curls around his back, catching him, always catching him, he sees, behind his closed eyelids, a galaxy winking to life. 

Oh my fucking God.

It takes Peter pulling away for him to understand what the hell has even happened. A sharp inhale tears itself from Peter. He searches Harley, searches for affirmation in his eyes. There’s a galaxy in Peter’s irises too, and Harley realises this: they were meant to explode. They always intended to fling themselves at each other.

Peter looks torn to pieces and Peter looks beautiful. Without another lifetime spent breathing in his air, Harley will surely drown.

“Peter,” he half-whispers, half-sobs, seizing the wool collar of his coat, leading him towards the bathroom door, crashing through it, not caring. 

They rock back into each other so fervently their teeth clack. Harley presses Peter against the wall, wanting, needing to be closer, feel every inch of them melding together so they have one mouth, one body, one name.

Peter’s fingers are cupping Harley’s jaw, fervent then gentle in turns, and his heart beats against Harley’s chest like it’s jostling past the skin and bones between them and drumming the shared rhythm of their pulse. Harley must be dipping his fingers in the nectar of heaven. He tastes it on Peter’s tongue as it ventures into his mouth. The ecstatic whine in his ears must be from somewhere far above.

Inside Harley’s mouth, Peter whispers, “Harley.” 

It’s everything. Refraction, a thousand million colours in one. Harley keens, not caring that it’s loud and splintered and wanting. He grabs Peter’s waist, squeezes it. Peter melts into a smile against his lips.

The years of inhibitions that had shackled him are simply swept away at the way Peter says his name. Like it means more than he can comprehend. Like he wants to take every atom of Harley for himself, give all of himself back in return.

Harley wants that. Oh, he wants that. To be Peter’s, wholeheartedly.

When his fingers drift up to tangle in Peter’s curls-- finally-- it rouses something in Peter that has him whirling them around, his lips clumsy on Harley’s and chest insistently pinning him against the tile. Even the ache of Harley’s bruised ribs feels touched with something heavenly. 

Peter is short but broad and strong, with muscled arms that Harley uncovers when he slips him out of his coat. Strong enough to carry him. Strong enough to keep him afloat. Only with the lanky length of Harley’s arms can he clasp Peter entirely, encircle him like the red-hot equator. The feeling when he does that is so much more than the world in his arms; the universe, perhaps, or two or three.

Countless universes. Harley loves him. Harley loves him so much.

Peter starts to walk them backwards towards the sinks, still kissing and kissing him with abandon, and Harley doesn’t need to open his eyes to know he’ll get where they need to be. He lets Peter lead them until their hips catch the counter. Peter hoists himself up, puts his legs either side of Harley, captures him there with his stomach to the sinks and laces his hands around the back of his neck and opens inside him again. 

This time, loosened by the heady taste of Peter in his mouth, Harley lets his tongue swipe across Peter’s lower lip, thrilled at the whine he gets in response. Peter runs his nails up the ruts of Harley’s back, rucking up his T-shirt, and Harley shivers. 

Harley’s gasping, Peter’s gasping, they’re both gasping, panting sharply through their noses, but he’d happily drown in Peter. That, he’s always known.

Peter makes an attempt at taking Harley’s lip between his teeth, which would have been incredible if there wasn’t a whopper of a bruise coming up there. Harley makes an ah sound into the shared cavern of their mouths, and they break away, just a little. 

Harley laughs. He hardly recognises his own voice. It’s husky and uneven and reverent, an oratory to the mortal saint whose forehead is pressed against his so tenderly a lump rises in his throat. “Sorry. My face is still…”

“Oh,” Peter says, a smile whipping across his face, a delightful flint-spark of a thing born of the delirious passion they just shared.

“...all messed up.”

“Yeah,” huffs Peter. His eyes, his eyes, are no longer golden but the burnished colour of burnt coals. Harley’s set him on fire.

He nudges his way back to Harley and kisses the purpling ridge of his lip. His forehead. His cheekbone. The pain is soothed.

Watching the utter devotion in Peter’s demeanour, Harley crumbles a little.

Unexpected wetness welling in his eyes, he says to Peter, “Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to do that for?”

It comes out shot through with a dark kind of relief. Peter studies him with his blown-wide irises. It looks like he can’t quite see clearly. Harley understands. Everything’s in a haze.

“I thought you didn’t at all,” Peter says, and Harley wants to laugh. He wants to laugh until he cries. “I thought… that one time, when we were watching Stranger Things, and I held your hand and you…”

Oh. Harley’s lips form it soundlessly.

“Christ, that? That was me not wanting to scare you off. You told me you weren’t…”

“I thought I wasn’t. Then--then you. I’m… not as straight as I thought.” A hint of that priceless smile again, but this time it falters. “You’re the first boy I ever… I don’t know--I don’t know what to...”

Harley understands him with a painful clarity. He’s felt that. He wants so badly to pull Peter close and tell him that he’s there for him, know he’s that one special person who can be there most of all.

And now, he is.

“Hey.” He talks soothingly. He knows just how to do it. He curls an arm around Peter’s bowed head, kisses the crown. Thinks about all the times he’s done that in the years past, before any of this. 

He thinks he’s been an idiot. They both have. 

“Pete?”

“I’m okay,” wavers Peter. “Phew. There’s just--a lot going on.” He emerges wet-eyed and looks long and hard at Harley. “Everything just happened. All at once. We just kissed, Harls.”

It was such an absurd notion, them kissing, up till about two minutes ago, that Harley has to laugh.

Peter chuckles himself. 

“I had a total gay crisis,” Peter admits with a sniff.

“And you didn’t tell me?” 

Peter whacks him in the chest. “I was having a crisis over you, weenie.” His lips curl upwards, and already Harley wants to kiss them again. Make up for all the ones they lost.

So he does. He lets his head split open with the feel of Peter, the taste of Peter, the hitching of his breath, Peter, Peter, Peter.

His at last.

“Am I a shit kisser?”

Peter’s brow dips. “Wait, am I your first kiss?” 

Harley remembers Guy. Now’s probably not the best time to talk about that. “No,” he says for now.  

Peter doesn’t believe him in the slightest. “Aw.”

“Fuck off,” Harley tells him in the least fuck-off way possible. 

“And your first boyfriend?” 

All the breath is punched out of Harley.

“My…” he can’t help but scan Peter’s expression, searching for the trick. 

Nerves, he finds, uncertainty, but not a dash of insincerity. 

“Oh.” 

Capturing his face in his hands, Peter says, “Did you think I’d make out with you then ditch you?” 

“Maybe.” 

“Harley.”  

The hungry way Peter kisses him floors Harley. He hums, incoherent, pawing at Peter, nudging him closer, closer, closer still.

“What about that time,” he pants, “When we-- mmph --stayed up late together, with the ASMR? When you were gone in the-- mmph-- in the morning?” 

“I ran away,” Peter confides a breath from his lips. “I was terrified of you. You just… made me want you so badly.” 

“This is actually happening,” Harley breathes, laughing, wondering if he’ll cry too. He’s a total mess and he doesn’t care. “It feels like a dream. You feel like a dream.” He brushes back Peter’s hair. 

Peter smiles. “Very much real.” 

A little of reality trickles in. 

“I can’t believe we spent so long sitting around being awkward. Like, cradling my wrist? Feeling my face? That was so cruel.” He pokes Peter, for emphasis.

“Oh my God,” Peter groans, “I’m sorry. The whole time, I thought you were still freaked out from the fight. You were all messed-up. Your heart was racing and I wanted to fix it. I was trying to help you chill out."

"You were not helping me chill out.”

They snort. Harley butts his head against Peter’s shoulder, lets him run a hand across the back of his neck. He’s never felt safer. A net beneath a miles-high tightrope.

“We’re so stupid," says Harley.

“So stupid. This could have happened earlier. We didn’t talk.” 

“I feel like… I don’t know.” Harley isn’t sure what he’ll even say until it escapes him. “I feel like this is right. I’d never have thought that a year ago, even a month, but I feel like this is the time it needed to happen.”

The tightening of Peter’s hands, which have snuck into his own, is affirmative.

He licks his swollen lips. Harley’s stomach whooshes. “So, uh, how long have you… liked me?”

“Since the moment I met you, baby.”

It’s a half-joke, but still Peter goes red. His gaze flickers over Harley’s face, which must have something very confusing written on it, because he gets so close their noses brush to assess it. “Seriously?” he says at last.

“Seriously,” Harley echoes. To say it is to be Sisyphus tossing away his long-carried stone. “For so--so long.” A tear escapes him. A tiny fragment of all the years of hurt. “Woah,” he huffs. “That’s such a relief to say. Wow.”

Peter brushes away the tear with a touch like the wing of a butterfly. “Well, looks like the pining worked, huh?” he says sweetly, humorously.

Harley’s feelings for him can’t hope to be contained. 

He wants Peter to brush away a million of his tears. He wants Peter to exaggerate his big ears when he sketches him, yank them fondly. He wants Peter to greet him at their kitchen island with his infamous morning breath. He wants Peter’s hands in his hair, patting his knee, tracing his collarbone, resting over his thumping heart, fingers laced in his. He wants Peter to laugh like a caveman, right in his face. He wants days and days and endless days where he blinks awake with Peter beside him.

Peter glances at the door. Oh, yeah. They’re still in a public bathroom. It’s a wonder nobody’s walked in on them yet. “We should probably get out of here,” Peter says. “Give your poor face a rest, too.”

He hops down from the counter and they both hover, close but not close enough. And all of Harley’s fears sidle back to him.

He takes Peter’s arm. “Peter. Are we… what happens now?”

A thousand shades of emotion pass across Peter’s face.

“I don’t know,” he says. “We figure it out one step at a time, I suppose.”

Finding himself desperate, Harley blurts, “I just want you to know that--every day I spent as your friend… I always adored you. When you’re tired and cranky and upset and rude, I adore you. Always have, always will. I just--hope that I’m…”

I hope that I’m enough for you.

But Peter grabs a fistful of Harley’s shirt and meets his eye steadily, with that bountiful forgiveness that’s always been there, if only Harley would take it. “You’re the fucking sun in my galaxy, Harls. Don’t try to act like you’re not. It might not have looked like it, but I think it’s been that way for a long time. Even if it took me a while to figure it out. Know it now, okay? You need to know it.” He shakes Harley, once. “Or I’ll kick your ass.”

Harley looks at him.

“I love you,” he says.

Peter looks back at him.

“I love you too.”

---

They’re so wrapped up in their dream they nearly walk right out of the hospital without getting Harley treated. 

Harley laughs. Nothing could possibly bother him today. He could be half-dead and he’d never stop loving Peter with every ounce of his attention.

“Want me to carry you again?” Peter asks him as they finally rise from their chairs to see a doctor. He makes a playful grab at Harley.

“Peter!” Harley shrieks.

---

They do not give Harley’s face a rest. They kiss in the corridor of the hospital. Then in the car on the way home. Then at the apartment door. Harley feels like a deity.

---

“We spent so long laying all over each other on the couch,” Peter comments between long, sweet, languid kisses, “And we could’ve been doing this too.” He punctuates his point with a peck to Harley’s chin. He’s so weird.

Harley shuffles them down so they’re laying in a comfortable tangle on the same old couch they have, indeed, spent years holding each other on. They aren’t even watching TV. It feels like sacrilege to do anything else but rest in each other’s presence.

He hums in agreement, admiring the gooiness of Peter’s face. He could blow up with pride knowing it was him who did that to Peter.

His boyfriend.

Today’s been a rollercoaster.

“I was waiting on your bisexual crisis,” Harley jests. Then, “When was it that you figured that out?”

Peter pulls his hand free from where it’d retreated inside the sleeve of his hoodie. He runs it up and down the topography of Harley’s side. “It took a while. A lot of confused Google searches. A lot of denial, a lot of… hating myself.”

Harley makes a wounded noise. He squeezes Peter’s arm in its path across his torso.

“Like you said in the aquarium.” Peter eyes him guiltily. “I kind of panicked, then, when you asked me about my sexuality. I’d only just started rethinking what you meant to me, and I already thought you didn’t like me in that way, and… did you notice? That I acted super weirdly?”

“No? Well, I mean, you were pretty adamant you were straight, I guess. But I didn’t question it. Hey, have you come out to your folks?”

Peter shrugs. “Nah.”

“Nah? Was that an attempt at being cool?”

“I’m cool,” Peter insists.

“Sure you are.”

“I’m cool.”

“Why don’t you wanna tell them? They’d totally be okay with it, I think.”

“It’s…” And something clouds Peter’s expression. “I’m just kind of scared. Because it’s a big thing, and… they’ve never disapproved. And I don’t want them to start now.”

“I have literally never seen parents that love their kids more. I’m surprised Tony didn’t move here with you.” It’s true. Harley would give an arm for parents like that. Parents he could tell, parents who’d embrace him.

“But it’s complicated. With Larry…he was a man, and... you know.”

With Larry.

It hits Harley.

He springs away, feeling nauseous.

Peter pouts. “Don’t go,” he complains, “You’re all warm.”

“No, I just realised--I--I never asked you what you're okay with, with this, because-- I'm a man--"

Peter’s response is nothing like he expected. He just rolls his eyes. “Hardly.”

“I’m being serious. You’re being a meanie.”

“Come here.” Peter waves his hands about. There’s just a hint of pleading in his tone. “Come down here, alright?”

Harley won’t. He can’t.

Peter rights himself instead, seizes Harley’s drawn-in shoulders. “We haven’t done anything today that I didn’t like.”

“I just… I remember when you were with MJ, when you didn’t even know when you were going too far.” 

Now Harley gets to be that person to Peter, he cannot mess up. 

“Okay, I’m not always good at that,” concedes Peter. He kisses Harley, swiftly, before he can protest. “This is good. Kissing is good, it’s great.”

“What about, like…” God, this got awkward so quickly. It’s one thing to do the things, another to talk about them in detail. “When we were just lying down? Was that too much?”

Peter seizes his chin, forcing his gaze upwards. “Harls, can you see me getting upset? Can you see me dissociating? I know you’ve spent most of the last few hours looking at me, I saw you.”

“I’ve been looking at you for most of the last few years.”

Peter laughs, high and flustered. 

“I’m fine,” he says. “Kissing is amazing. I don’t want to stop doing it just because you’re scared of hurting me. That happens enough already. And--I don’t know--some time in the future, uh--um. If you want to…” Harley feels his eyes widening. “We can…” Peter blinks, hard. “You know.”

“I had a wet dream about you,” Harley exclaims, then promptly dies. 

“What?”

“No, I didn’t. I was--that’s not true. I don’t know why I said that.”

The grin on Peter’s face grows sly, almost gleeful. “Do you mean the time when you burst into the bathroom, when--”

“Nope,” says Harley quickly, making a fruitless attempt at squirming out of Peter’s octopus grip.

Peter tackles him, pinning him to the couch. “What happened in the dream, Harley?”

“We… made out.”

“And?”

“We made out!” 

Why does everyone expect there to be more?

Peter looks stupefied. “Making out with me in a dream took you all the way.”

“It was quite detailed…”

“I love you,” Peter says, and Harley doesn’t care that he’s just totally humiliated himself because now he is a thousand shards of sparkly glitter fluttering, euphoric, through endless air. “You’re so weird! Hey, I got a boner because of you!”

Harley is taken aback. 

“You. You did?”

Peter looks like he’s very much regretting saying that. Oh, this is fun. “I, uh--I mean--”

“When?” demands Harley.

“At the Rainbow, when we were dancing,” Peter rushes like he’s on truth serum. “Our, uh, crotches sort of, sort of brushed together? And it just happened.”

Harley lets the weird satisfaction of that admission wash over him.

Then he squeals, “Oh my God! You really do like me.”

“I do,” Peter says all sappy. They’re so cheesy. So gross. Disgusting. “I mean, I don’t know if impromptu boners are the best way of telling, but.”

Harley chokes out a laugh. Peter’s face crinkles in amusement above him. Harley darts up and pecks it, wanting to feel it against his lips, and Peter smiles wider still.

“You know I did that painting of you?” Peter says.

“The one you never showed me?”

“How about I show it to you now?”

Something about it feels momentous. Harley waits for him to retrieve it from his bedroom, pacing around the living area. It was in his bedroom the whole time?

Peter comes out with the canvas clutched to his chest like something secret and precious. “Don’t, like, laugh,” he says as he hands it to Harley. Something like anxiety has stirred in the set of his jaw. Why could he possibly be anxious about his painting skills, he’s a phenomenal--

There he is, lounging across the couch in the studio, pearls and skirt and cropped hoodie, but he looks… he looks beautiful. The weird little spray of hairs at the crown of his head is golden-tipped as if gilded. He’s not pasty, but porcelain. Not a boy in girl’s clothes, but a man of his own unique identity. Not fidgety, but bursting with life. Not irritating, but sweet. Lovely. Something to be worshipped, adored.

Harley flexes his fingers around the frame, overcome. He looks to Peter; he’s gnawing on his nails, watching Harley’s reaction intently.

“This is how I look to you?”

Peter looks caught off-guard. “Of course,” he says, as if it’s obvious.

“I look…” Harley doesn’t know what to say.

“I didn’t want anyone to see it before now, because… I feel like you can tell by looking at it how I feel. Right?”

No shit. Harley looks like an angel. Peter thinks he looks like an angel.

He responds by setting the canvas on the kitchen countertop, crossing the room, drawing Peter into his arms, and kissing him. Again.

“It’s the coolest painting ever. Let’s hang it up.”

And again. Peter rakes his hands through Harley’s hair, sending a chill through his scalp right to his toes. Yet more evidence of Peter Parker’s divine power over him. Harley spies glimpses of his eyes between kisses as they darken, wants to turn them pitch black. 

He presses close, letting every inch of them touch--thinks for a second about Larry, and wants to move away again--but Peter must be telepathic too, because he slips his hands under the hem of Harley’s t-shirt, effectively stopping him from leaving. His cool hands are electric on Harley’s skin. He doesn’t push them up, mindful of the dressings across Harley’s abdomen, just runs them over the skin of his hips, and Harley’s breath catches.

“We were gonna give your face a rest,” mumbles Peter.

Harley just snorts and kisses him more. More, more, more. Forever.

The front door swings open.

Harley jumps away from Peter, hands still frozen midair where they’d been wrapped around him. 

Peter blinks, stunned. “Ned.”

Ned wears a shit-eating grin. “Finally,” he says, doing a little cheering motion. “Thought you’d never work it out. Happy for you both. Hey, keep going, don’t let me stop you.”

Harley looks to Peter, who’s lost for words. Looks back at Ned, who seems to know what is going on more than either of them. “Why are you… here?” he manages.

Ned deposits a couple of plastic containers onto the countertop. Freshly washed, Harley notes dimly. Nice of him.

“Dropping off Tupperwares,” he says.

Harley’s hair is absolutely standing on end from where Peter had combed his hands through it. They must look like dumbasses, kids with their hands in the cookie jar, all kiss-dazed.

“Let’s get pizza tomorrow night,” Ned proposes, as if nothing is out of the ordinary.

“Yeah,” Peter squeaks. He coughs. “Sure.”

“Now, like I said--” Ned winks, actually winks-- ”Don’t stop being gay on my watch.”

He swings the door closed.

Harley turns to Peter.

“He has a key to the apartment now,” Peter tells him.

They look at each other.

And descend into peals of laughter.

And after the laughter, predictably, comes more kisses, then more still. More sappiness, for sure.

They don’t think of going to sleep until late into the night. Harley wonders if he’ll ever sleep again--not because his racing thoughts keep him awake, as they so often have in the past, but because the quiet Peter brings to his mind is something Harley never wants to be without. 

Pure peace. A settled sea after a storm. Clear and blue and ready to bear them away to great places.