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Peter tried to have a little self-restraint, but, well, when Harley kisses him he sort of loses his mind.
That’s how they’ve ended up in the art closet. Yes, the art closet. Some sort of shelving is jutting into Peter’s back and he’s pretty sure he knocked some paints over a couple of seconds ago, but right now, with Harley all warm and tall and urgent against him, lips and hips and hands, he could care less.
“S--mm--one might c--mm in,” he mumbles half-heartedly.
Harley tugs his hands through Peter’s hair, making him shudder.
“Wanna stop?” he says, all low and shattered, and Peter wants nothing more than to break him further.
He shakes his head. Starts pulling Harley’s winter coat off, his sweater too. Eyes closed, the closet dark and stuffy, nothing but stars in his vision and the glow of Harley. He mouths along Harley’s jaw, finds his ear. Harley’s hand rushes to his back pocket as if on instinct and hovers over it for a moment.
“Please,” Peter whispers into his ear. Dutifully, Harley squeezes his ass, rocking their hips together. God, this is hot. Art class only finished five minutes ago.
Don’t worry, by the way. Peter’s been killing it at sex therapy. This stuff has been a long time in the making. It’s even sweeter to get it now, at last.
He needs more of Harley. He tugs at the hem of his t-shirt, wanting to tear it off, but Harley is hoisting his leg upwards to get better friction between their groins, and, oh my God, that feels good, but getting Harley’s shirt off would also be awesome, and his mind sort of fritzes out and he blinks back to life to see Harley’s t-shirt half over his head and half hanging off his arm.
It’ll do. His hands seek skin, the contours of Harley’s abdomen he’s eager to learn by heart, dragging over his nipples and making him gasp. Peter loves to make him gasp. He kisses him, sealing the sound.
And the door opens. And light floods in.
And there are Peter and Harley, paint tubes scattered about them, the carnage of their passion. Harley still holding Peter’s leg over his own hip. Chest-to-chest, groin-to-groin, panting like dogs and beetroot with embarrassment.
Peter’s first instinct is to human-shield Harley’s naked chest.
“Professor--” he coughs away the kiss-croakiness in his voice-- “Hayes.”
Professor Hayes says, “Oh.”
In his peripheral vision, Harley’s frantically trying to untangle the cat’s cradle that is his t-shirt. Peter whirls around, jams it onto him in one Herculean movement, and spins back towards Hayes.
“I’m so sorry--” he blurts.
“Not at all.” And, to his disbelief, Hayes breaks out into a chuckle. “I remember making out with many a fellow student in much stranger places than this.”
Now it’s Peter’s turn to say, “Oh.”
Harley says nothing. He’s too red to say anything, Peter thinks.
Hayes brandishes a stack of paper. “But I... do need to trace a few images with the projector.”
“Oh. Yeah, of course. Um. Sorry, that’s Harley’s coat-- take it, Harls-- and his sweater. Yeah, that’s his scarf. And that’s my coat. Oh, I’ll pick up those… paints... I think that’s it. Cool. Um. Thanks, prof. Sorry. No, we really are sorry. That was… we were just… yeah.”
---
Harley knows him and Peter are still a secret, but that doesn’t stop his monkey brain from wanting to either jump his bones or kiss him tenderly on the forehead--or both--any chance he gets.
He catches sight of the boxing ring as he rounds the corner of the gym floor and good God. It’s unfair that he has to endure the torture of watching Boxer Peter. Boxer Peter ripples with muscle and glistens with sweat and pants with breath. Boxer Peter’s exercise-brightened eyes rain sunlight. Boxer Peter’s tank top clings to his six pack. Put it away, Harley’s tempted to say, before anyone else gets hypnotised by it.
Boxer Peter throws out a wave to him with a gloved hand. That smile and those biceps and the damp waves of his hair--
And Harley’s ducking under the rope. Peter looks both pleased and confused. Harley honestly thinks he’s going to give Peter a bro-ish tap on the back. That’s what he plans to do.
What he ends up doing is decidedly not bro-ish. What he ends up doing is kissing Boxing Peter right on the mouth.
Peter pulls away with a croak like a freaked-out frog.
Wait, what did Harley just do? The boxing instructor is standing around, looking as confused as the both of them.
“Harley,” hisses Peter. “What the fuck.”
Harley’s jaw is unhinged and he can’t shut it. He tries to say something with his hands instead, but just ends up windmilling them around and very nearly karate-chopping Peter while he’s at it.
Peter’s lips had tasted like seasalt.
“Harley, MJ is right there.”
That wakes Harley up. He whips his gaze to where Peter’s jerked his head, and sure enough, MJ is running on a treadmill. Christ on rollerblades. She’s facing the other way, thank Jesus.
“OhmyGod,” Peter is saying. “I think I just had a heart attack.”
“We were pretty much finished with the session, Pete,” the instructor ventures.
“Yeah. Thanks for today, Fred.”
“I didn’t mean it,” Harley stammers to him as he unstraps his gloves, Fred running for the hills, probably. “I just--my brain was like--”
“Can you just go back to the apartment or something?”
The air rushes out of Harley.
“I really didn’t--”
“I know. I just need to, like, clean up. I still have to take a shower and stuff.”
Well. So much for sweeping him off his feet to a pizza place after boxing practice.
---
“Where are my trunks, Harls?”
“Babe, it’s November,” Harls says from behind a very interesting online article about the politicisation of bird names. Don’t ask him how he got to it, though.
It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, actually, which means Harley will have the apartment to himself while Peter goes home to the Starks. Yay. Harley’s planning to lie around and sleep, probably. Thanksgiving isn’t his favourite holiday. In fact, it’s never really been a holiday to him.
Peter’s flustered head pops round the doorway to the living area. “We’re going to the beach in California.” He points at Harley in a somewhat accusatory manner. “We’re going to the beach.”
“Okay, honey.”
“You’re going to the beach,” says Peter with much pointed nodding of his head.
“No?”
“Yeah?”
“Communication, Pete.”
“You’re coming with me, right?”
Oh.
Oh, man. Thanksgiving with the Starks? Thanksgiving with the Starks sounds both terrifyingly middle-class and exhilaratingly awesome.
Thanksgiving. A real Thanksgiving. A real family.
He shrugs. “I--am?”
“Well, why aren’t you packing?”
Harley has to clarify: “You’re paying for me to go to the beach in California?”
“Yeah? Duh?”
Peter disappears into his room again with a slew of muttered curses. Harley snickers at him, then dodges a sleeping Kobol on the floor and gets to work in his own room.
Looks like he’s doing Thanksgiving with the Starks.
Abruptly, Peter’s head pops round his bedroom doorway. “Did you think I was gonna run off and leave you sitting around here for the holidays?”
There’s nothing to do but shrug again.
Arms slide around his stomach from behind. Harley lets himself relax into Peter’s hold, the gentle, off-balance sway of his feet, the way he rests his chin atop Harley’s shoulder.
It’s murmured into his ear. “I’m not leaving you behind, okay? You’re my boyfriend. I’ll take care of you.”
It sends golden warmth pooling behind Harley’s ribs.
“Not officially,” he says.
“Yes, officially. Just not… publicly.”
Maybe Peter’s right. It just gets a little hard to feel like that sometimes when Peter slips all too easily into a pretense of nothing more than friendship around his parents, his friends, everyone except Ned, who is their safe haven. It’s hard to remember that that day in the ER really happened, that Peter really does want to be more than his friend.
“I know it sucks that we’re not out,” sighs Peter, wilting just slightly against him. “I’m--I’m sorry.”
“No sorrys. You don’t owe it to me to come out.”
“I know, it’s just… I know it would be better if we didn’t have to hide.”
The mood has shifted suddenly, to something uncomfortable. But Peter fixes it himself: he blows a whopper of a raspberry on Harley’s shoulder and darts out of the room before Harley can get him back.
“Bitch!” Harley shrieks.
A cackle of a laugh emanates from the room beside his.
Then: “Shit! We’ve only got twenty minutes to pack!”
---
November in the New York suburbs is cool, damp and quite depressingly grey. They sludge and slip through it in Harley’s pickup, Kobol pattering around in his crate in the backseat, until finally the driveway of the Stark house, wide and clean and unexpectedly imposing, stirs itself into view.
For some damn reason, Harley’s heart won’t stop hammering.
Peter is tracing swirls onto the condensation-y window with his longest nail, his pinky one that he accidentally nicked Harley’s face with yesterday. You can imagine what they were up to.
“I, for one, am looking forward to a decent meal,” Harley says with a laugh. There’s a lot of ready meals and sharing chip bags in their apartment cupboards. They’re students. It’s a natural instinct.
Peter nods, but Harley barely catches it in the corner of his eye. It’s subdued.
Then he says, “Um.”
Oh no. not the um. Harley’s hands brace for impact on the steering wheel.
“I know you’ve been trying really hard,” begins Peter, tracing on the window with tense abandon now, “Trying to keep us under wraps, but… here, it’s different. It’s not just…”
He drops his hands to his lap, head declined. Harley looks away, looks into the rear view mirror as he reverses into the drive and brakes.
At last, Peter gets to his point: “Try to be careful.”
Right. So, he doesn’t trust Harley. That’s cool. Nobody else seems to, so. Maybe they’re all right.
Thud, thud, thud!
Tony Stark raps at Peter’s window: not the cheesy excited parent so much as I’ll rip anyone’s face off who tries to stop me giving my son a bear hug right now. Probably kind of nice for the son, but terrifying for anyone in the immediate vicinity.
Peter springs out of the car and into Tony’s arms with a hum of delight. Pepper and Rhodey are hanging about by them, waiting for their turn. Harley figures he might as well go and start getting everything inside and leave the Starks to their reunion. He lets Kobol out of his crate and he pads right over to his family.
“And I brought Harley!” says Peter from the other side of the car.
Suddenly, Harley finds himself pinned to the spot by three people he’s pretty sure only just noticed his existence.
He smiles--really awkwardly.
Tony throws a look to Peter. Very quick, very subtle, but enough to tell Harley he wasn’t actually expected.
“Come over here,” Peter says, beckoning him, “Don’t run away yet. Let them hug you too.”
And God, it’s awkward. Pepper is alright; she gives him a polite little squeeze and a smile. Rhodey does what Peter says but keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek throughout. Tony? Tony must be being worked upon by a hidden torture device. He stiffens up like a board, making it very clear that Peter’s demand is the only reason he’s deigning to touch Harley. Harley just stands there. He half-expects to catch the scent of beer on his breath.
Someone else might muse on why Tony seems so set against Harley--why always Keener, why the demeaning jabs, why the stiffness and hostility and reluctance--but Harley knows this. It’s almost comforting.
Isn’t it obvious why?
---
“Oh, fuck…. shit, shit, shit! Goddamnit.”
Pepper from the kitchen. Peter steels himself for an event of a meal.
His and Harley’s bags are strewn about his old bedroom, his landslide of suitcases and cloth bags and Harley’s single beat-up holdall, and they’ve found their expectant seats at the dinner table after some hours of catching up. Rhodey’s fingers are twitching on the tablecloth, but Pepper swore she would complete tonight’s Thanksgiving meal without help.
Harley looks small in his seat. Like a badly-animated version of himself. Peter nudges him with a foot under the table, poking him with his socked toes, and watches a hint of a grin curl into his mouth. Harley bats him back. Peter rests his foot on top of his.
He just wants this to work. He wants all the weirdness between his family and Harley to smooth out in preparation of a seamless coming-out.
Although he’s already starting to chicken out, last night he’d almost convinced himself that today would be the day. There’s a precisely-edited note in his phone with everything he wants to say.
Maybe today should be the day. It’s just that, as unrealistic as it might be, Peter wants to wait until the perfect time.
“You’re not a vegetarian or anything, are you, Harley?” Rhodey asks, the first person who’s actually thought about that.
Harley huffs. “No, I eat pretty much anything.”
And he’s not lying. When the Cornish hens (yes, Cornish hens at Thanksgiving) are brought out smoking on top and pink on the bottom, the mashed potatoes suspiciously runny and the pumpkin pie pale and sagging, he shovels away his portion at an impressive rate, as if not noticing the general awfulness of it all.
There’s a lot Peter still doesn’t know about Harley.
“You’re a Film student, right?” Pepper asks Harley. She’s trying, but shouldn’t she already know what Harley’s studying?
Harley nods. “Really engaging course. Sets you up for a successful future.”
Something’s up. He says it all weird, all not Harley. Peter knows for a fact that he’d have called it stellar in any other company and enthused about the cool cameras they get to use.
“He made a Surrealist short film recently,” Peter prompts him, “Didn’t you? With people in a room full of taxidermy?”
That, he’s certain, demands an explanation from Harley that’ll brighten him up a little.
Harley says, “Yeah.”
Oh, boy. Time to pull some teeth.
Tony looks poised to kill. Peter shoots him a chiding look, but he doesn’t register it in the slightest. “And what’s the plan after studying film? Not exactly a secure career option.”
“Tony,” Peter huffs, “I’m taking Art. It’s the same thing. We’re both just really passionate, right?”
Harley won’t even speak. His face is turned resolutely to the salmonella-teeming underside of his Cornish hen.
“You both seem a little awkward,” Pepper says, laughing, unaware that she’s hit the nail right on the head. “The journey here can bring out the worst in us all. It’s--”
She stops to covertly spit a mouthful of mashed potatoes into her napkin.
Harley lifts his head. “We fell out,” he blurts.
“Oh?”
Peter stares at him, trying to figure out what’s going on, but there’s this blustery blankness to his expression.
“I took his… mug.”
If less hung on this conversation, Peter would be wheezing with laughter. What the ever-loving fuck, Harls?
Ever predictable and ever exasperating, Tony decides to genuinely take offense with this. “Not the personalised one I gave you?” he asks Peter.
Now all eyes are on Peter.
“No. Uh… The, uh, just, one we got from Target. It wasn’t that important.”
“But you kept it for yourself,” Harley interjects, and Peter starts to wonder if he’s talking about more than just a mug. “I get that it’s yours, but still… and you said so yourself, it would be better if you could just share. Better for everyone. To just get it out in the open. We share so much already.”
“Except we don’t. It feels like I share everything with you - I mean, like, beanbags and plants and plates and chips - but there’s still so much stuff you keep and don’t show me. Maybe it’s not nice stuff, but isn’t it better if we just share it all, good and bad?”
Tony sets his hands on the table, just slightly too loudly. “Don’t you have your own family to celebrate with, Keener?”
But now Harley’s shaken, shaken by what Peter had said to him, and Peter knows he doesn’t like to talk about his family. He shrugs once, then again. “Not really,” he mumbles.
“No parents?”
“I have parents,” Harley says with a frown.
Peter grips his fork. Pepper’s lips are tightly pursed. Rhodey just looks done with all of this shit. Do something, he wills them.
Peter’s never seen Tony dab his mouth with a napkin in such a condescending way. “No good, then? Maybe not as nice of a place as we’ve got.”
Peter’s about to refute that, but Harley tightens beside him. “Peter invited me here. And I’d appreciate it if you stopped making assumptions about my family.”
“I wasn’t assuming anything. Just interested in your life back in… where is it?”
“Tennessee.”
“Tennessee.” It rolls off Tony’s tongue like something slick and undesirable.
Why is he being like this? This isn’t the Tony that deals with smarmy CEOs, nor even the Tony that stood up to Larry. This is the most hateful form Peter’s ever seen him take.
Peter knows one thing: that Harley’s parents haven’t given him enough love to go around. He wanted his family to fill in the gaps for him, not cast him out further.
“You’re sounding kind of confrontational,” Peter chips in.
“Okay!” Tony raises his hands in mock-surrender. “I’m sorry! Lay off a minute.”
“We weren’t laying on,” Harley grits.
Beep!
“Shit,” Pepper says again, bolting for the kitchen. Rhodey joins her.
Harley stands too. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
When Peter stands with him, Tony opens his mouth to protest. Peter doesn’t need to explain to him. He levels him with a look.
---
Knock knock.
Knock knock.
Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock-knock--
“Okay! Come in already!”
Harley flips the latch of the bathroom door open and Peter quite literally falls in, as if he’d been leaning against it.
He inhales with a clogged-drain gasp, then bursts, “I’m-so-sorry-they’re-all-being-so-shitty-I-think-someone’s-possessed-them.”
Harley turns on the tap and starts washing his hands, just for something to do.
Peter shuts the door, leans all his weight against it.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, in that quiet, lost voice that makes Harley’s hands twitch to hold him even from the sink.
“Not your sorry to say,” he tells him.
“Then I’ll get them all to say it right to you.”
“Peter, it’s okay.”
Peter’s trouble is accepting that sometimes people just don’t like other people. He’s the sort of guy everyone automatically loves. It’s difficult for him to comprehend that Harley is not that guy. He’s usually the other way around.
A great sigh whooshes out of Peter. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just…” Harley dries his hands and reaches for Peter across the cramped space of the bathroom. “Just kiss me. Please.”
Drowning in Peter, he can sometimes convince him that he’s not himself, that he’s something better. Someone who deserves to be there.
Peter wanders close. “Okay,” he breathes. But still he lingers, brushing Harley’s hair from his forehead, finding something saddening in his expression, and it’s too tender and too exposing and Harley needs nothing more than lips on his.
He pulls Peter into him, opens his lips, feels them both soften against each other. This. This.
Nudging Peter up against the wall, Harley captures his face, the soft and hard of it, and lets his mouth open too. Peter’s breath gusts sharp across his cheeks, direct from his beating chest, and he bundles Harley up in his arms. Peter always makes him feel so held.
The sweetness of their tongues chases away the bitterness of that God-awful dinner.
Blearily, Harley mumbles, “Pete, did you lock the--”
The door swings open.
Behind it, Tony’s eyes crackle with lightning.
Harley freezes. He’s still pressing Peter into the wall, their lips an inch apart.
He doesn’t feel Tony grab him by the throat and slam him against the wall. It’s all a dream, surely. This is all too fucking absurd.
And now those stormy eyes are the ones inches from his, terrifying up close, terrifying enough to slap him back to reality. It’s a reality where he can’t breathe. He knows not to grab for the hand at his neck, though, because trying to resist only gets you into the ER with broken ribs, as humiliating as it is to stand and take it all.
“Faggot son,” he hears, a moment of prophecy for a fourth-grade Harley who didn’t quite know what the word even meant, only that it was bad. The alcohol-soaked words that quite possibly changed the course of his life, that make him doubt every day whether his identity is his own, or whether Dad took that, too.
But it’s not his dad shouting, it’s Peter. “What are you doing, Tony?” He’s hovering over them with clenched fists but not intervening, not becoming the tornado he was with the art kids. Because it’s Tony. Because, it’s clear to Harley now, Tony comes first.
And Harley is choking.
“You’re doing it to him too, aren’t you?” Tony yells.
It all clicks in Harley’s brain.
“You’re him too. You’re him too!”
“Tony! Stop!”
“It’s okay,” Harley wheezes. A matching look of surprise crosses father and son at the same instant. It’s almost entertaining.
Tony’s fist loosens a little on his throat.
“I’m used to it.”
He doesn’t know why he said that. Why did he say that. Why did he say that.
Tony backs away from him. Harley resists the urge to hold his sore neck.
“Harley?” Peter says. That voice again.
Shit. Where’s the eject button for this whole conversation?
Because this stuff? This stuff cannot touch Peter. It just can’t.
“I…” A hand is still at Harley’s throat somehow. He looks past the door for an escape, finds Rhodey and Pepper peering into the bathroom.
Peter reaches out a hand for him. “Harley--”
Harley can’t take it. He can’t think, he can’t breathe--he needs out.
“I, I have to--I’m sorry.”
He runs out. Pushes past Rhodey and Pepper and sprints.
---
Peter starts to run out after Harley, but Tony catches him by the shoulder.
“Kid, what the hell was all that?” he asks. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” Peter echoes, unable to keep the delirium out of his voice. “Of course I’m okay. Harley’s not. I need to go after him.”
“He was… was he coming on to you, Peter?”
“No!” Peter cries. “He’s my boyfriend, okay?”
The adults all fall silent.
Well, this wasn’t in Peter’s phone notes. In the bathroom after a cataclysmic misunderstanding and a reawakening of Harley’s apparent childhood trauma wasn’t Peter’s ideal coming-out scenario.
In the quiet he’s been offered by the dumbstruck Rhodey, Pepper and Tony, he makes his confession.
“We’re dating. We’ve been dating for months now. We’re… we’re really happy.” Emotion is encroaching fast. He blows out a stuttering breath. “And I’m--I think I’m bisexual.” He can’t watch their faces struggling to comprehend him any longer. He starts talking to the floor, to his wringing hands. “Which, I don’t know if you guys know what that means, but it means I like girls but I also like boys. And I like Harley.”
There it is. It feels… easy. After so many months labouring over speaking the truth, it slips out without effort.
He wrests his gaze upwards, because now he’s got some really important things to say. “But for some reason,” he says, “I don’t even know why, you don’t like him, and I was trying to get it all to work out today but it all went to shit and you’ve hurt him now. Pepper--” he looks at her-- “You looked like you tolerated him but nothing more. Rhodey, you need to stop making fun of him. And Tony?”
His anger at Tony had been put aside for a moment, but it flares to life again now. He gets real close, making up for what he lacks in height with hostility.
“You act like he’s some kind of nasty stain you need to scrub away. You just attacked him. I don’t appreciate that, because--I love him. And I want you all to treat him better in the future.” He swallows. “Yeah.” Now what happens?
“I’m going now,” he tells them all, “Because I need to go to him, I need to bring him back home. But that’s what went on. What’s been going on. I know that… I’m sorry if… I’m sorry.”
He elbows his way out to the doorway, heart an earthquake, wetness building in the corners of his eyes, but he’s stopped:
“Peter.”
Tony standing in the bathroom still with arms loose and regretful in their slightly-raised position by his sides. Tony has returned, Peter thinks. The real one. The one with compassion. He hopes.
Tony drags both his hands down his face and emerges a decade older. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything,” Peter says, but it comes out trembling. He pulls away again. This all feels like a tightrope, like a tug-of-war. Let him fix one thing before he falls. “I should go.”
He’s almost at the door, almost certain they’ll let him go and even ask him to never come back, when an arm catches him.
Rhodey hugs him.
Oh. That’s all Peter’s brain is saying right now. Oh? Oh. Oh, thank God.
He dissolves a bit.
Tony’s voice from the doorway of the bathroom is nothing but reassuring. “It’s okay. It’s okay, kid.”
“It is?” he asks, needing to know again, needing to be one hundred percent sure.
“It is,” Rhodey says, gripping him tight. “It’s totally cool. Very cool. Cool of you.”
Peter’s chuckling and crying and hiccupping when he says, “Okay.”
“C’mere, honey,” Pepper says to him and guides him into her own arms, safe and soft and faintly chicken-scented. “We love you, alright? We love you. This doesn’t change the way we feel about you.”
Peter blows out a breath against her that sort of turns into a relieved raspberry.
Then Tony’s there and Tony’s face says a million things Peter really needed to hear and Tony is drawing Peter into his arms with that fierceness Peter knows so well, that fierceness that tells Peter he’s loved, he’s protected, he’s adored.
“That was a brave thing, Pete,” Tony says into his hair, fervently. “And yes, of course we know what bisexual means.”
Peter, despite his own expectations, crumbles into a smile. He sniffs away his tears. “I just,” he starts, “I just wasn’t sure you’d…”
“You could come to me with a body to bury, kid, and I’d still adore you. And this is not that. This is just--an extra piece of you. Of course I’ll accept that. It’s you.”
Peter’s heart soars.
“I’m really sorry. About--”
“Tony, don’t be sorry.” Peter pulls away from him, fixes him with his eyes. “Just--fix this. You’re good at that.”
He’d stay in the relief of this moment forever, but Harley is still out there somewhere. So Peter says his goodbyes, throws on some sneakers, and goes running.
He’s got an idea of where Harley will be.
---
Nobody ever looks down, Harley once told him. Many times, actually. It’s a fascination of his. Go up to a high place, he said, a balcony or a roof or a bridge, and you can watch people from below like you’re their God. Or at least separate from them for a minute. He’d make movies in his mind with the passers-by below. The bridge in Chattanooga was his favourite of his home state, but the one he spent the most time at was the little crumbling-concrete thing over a half-dried river at the border of Rose Hill.
So Peter bends his steps towards the bridge at the edge of his own neighborhood.
Thud, thud, thud. He hopes, he prays, that a bridge isn’t a portent of something dark. That he’s right about Harley’s location, that he isn’t just--gone.
Thud, thud, thud. Because sometimes he goes. He gets out of bed or the apartment or class and drives and drives and drives and drives around and ignores his phone, ignores Peter’s gentle texts then frantic calls, then tears the fabric of the universe with his sudden and quiet reappearance, not fitting quite right in his skeleton for the next few days.
Thud, thud, thud, thud--
Peter can’t stand that. It feels too close to sitting helpless and alone in the Room.
Thud, thud--
That beaten-down pickup. Peter knows it well.
The empty path; the dull moonlit glint of a river below where the pickup is parked haphazardly. Harley is on top. Standing, arms out.
Peter trips into a sprint for him.
“HARLEY!”
Harley turns with hands flying over his ears as if Peter’s words were supersonic. Maybe they were. “Jesus! You scared me!”
Peter scrambles into the cargo bed, bashing his ankle, seeing stars.
“Alright, alright,” Harley says, “Hold your fucking horses.”
Peter grabs for him, all dazed from the run and the possibility of Harley jumping off that bridge. “Help me up, help me up.”
Harley takes his arms and hauls him on top of the car. The moment he’s steady, Peter flings himself into Harley’s arms.
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” he says. “God god god god god god.”
“Peter,” Harley says, chiding, amused, bewildered.
He’s fidgeting in Peter’s grip, but Peter holds him fast. Won’t let him go. Holds him for a long time.
“Harley,” he says.
Harley grabs at his back, fists a hand in his sweaty t-shirt. “I wasn’t gonna jump. You know that. Right? I wasn’t, I wouldn’t.”
“If--if you felt like you wanted to, I wouldn’t be mad, you know. We could figure that out. You should tell me if you do.”
“But I don’t. I promise you that, totally. I’d tell you, and I don’t.”
Peter pulls away, hauling breath through his lungs.
“You okay?” Harley asks him. Very funny.
Peter grips his arms in the moonlight. “I want you to tell me everything,” he says. “Now.”
Harley looks away. His neck is tinged purple.
“Harley,” Peter says, quieter, softer. Harley needs softness, he thinks. No, he knows.
He knows Harley. He knows the blue and red veins on the insides of his wrists. The grooves of his shoulder blades. His eyes, cornflower, squinting at times, at others round and guileless, but always devoted, always trustworthy, always loyal. His noodle arms, his great monster feet. This hopelessly knotted string lodged in his gut. The bad thoughts racing through his brain faster than Peter can knock them out.
Harley tries to slide Peter’s hands off of his arms. Squirms when Peter holds fast. “Pete,” he says, “Stop. Don’t be--you’re being all weird, you’re--”
“Harley.”
“Peter,” Harley says, eyes on him for half a moment then charging back to the roof of the pickup, but Peter still notices the dampness there.
“Tell me, Harley,” he says, soft but strong, waiting for the dam to break, dreading it, praying for it. Fishing for Harley’s gaze again.
“Fucking hell, Pete, what do you want me to do?”
And he’s balling his hands into fists and forcing them up between them, but Peter doesn’t stop holding him. Harley wouldn’t hurt him. He keeps holding him.
And then Harley laughs. A weird little breathy laugh. He looks at Peter, finally, and his eyes spill over and Peter doesn’t think he even notices, not at first.
He rounds his mouth as if to speak. But no words come out. Just a sob.
It’s like being punched out. It really is. Each stupid, tortured sound is a blow. Who from? Those asshat bullies cornering him after the bell? Dad with a bottle, bat, pistol swaying in his hand? His sister tearing at him in the aftermath, lost in a fit of panic, unable to tell him from his let-down of a father?
His boyfriend’s dad with a hand at his throat. And a million stares of disapproval--somehow worse.
Christ, it hurts. All these memories. They’re tearing at him, like plucking hairs from his head, viciously, one by one. He hadn’t even noticed that. Now it’s bashing in his goddamn skull and he needs someone to hold him up.
And Peter’s there.
Peter’s there, whispering into his ear, okay, Harls-- that sacred, weird-ass nickname, Peter’s and his, only Peter’s and his-- okay, Harls, let’s sit down, okay, let it out, baby, you’re with me, you’re good. Peter’s arms around him, Peter’s hands in his hair, clearing tears from his face, Peter’s head resting atop his juddering one.
It hurts less, with Peter. It’s less scary.
“My dad,” he tries, but it’s shattered eggshells. “Sorry--sorry, I’m--I’m wrecked.”
Peter squeezes him. “Not wrecked. And, hey, even if you are, I’ll buy some killer superglue, okay? That actually, that reminds me of that Japanese pottery thing--”
“Yuck, that every motivational speaker talks about?” Harley croaks. “Kintsugi?”
Peter huffs into his hair. The breath sings. If it had spoken, it would have whispered, safe. “Of course you know the name. It’s the sentiment, right?”
“You’re gonna glue me back together?”
“Metaphorically, dumbass. I’m gonna fix you.”
“You’d do that?”
“Give me one reason why I’d wanna not do that.”
“‘Cause maybe I’m just... not worth the gold.”
Palming Harley’s cheek tenderly, so tenderly, Peter says, “Fuck that. You’re worth all the gold in the world. No, more. All the gold in the sun.”
“Sun’s got gold?”
“2.5 trillion tons of it,” Peter tells him. “I’ve heard you, babe. I know you’re all about self-deprecation. Even more recently. Let’s… let’s make that better, okay? Let’s have you bring it up in therapy. Because you thinking you’re not worth anything, it’s, it just isn’t right. I don’t like it, you know?”
“I hate that your family is so great,” Harley chokes.
Because Peter has people to fall apart into. Peter’s got trillions of people who think he deserves all that gold and more. Harley carries a trail of people who think he doesn’t deserve shit. How’s he supposed to live with all that?
Because there’s a scar on Harley’s arm, not huge, but white and raised and in the jagged circle shape of a broken bottle. And Peter’s never asked him about it.
Because he thinks, even if Peter had asked, he wouldn’t have said.
“Harley,” says Peter, face bricked up all of a sudden, “I will get you into my family. I know that--Pepper and Tony can be nice to you, they will. You didn’t get a fair shot at them tonight. But you will. I had a talk with them. I actually… came out to them.”
“Oh. Oh, wow, that’s really cool.” Harley wishes he could lift his heart at the news. It stays resolutely hidden in its cavern. “They just accepted you?”
Peter catches his drift. He sighs down at him. “They did. And they’ll accept you. You need… you need good people.”
“Probably do,” Harley sniffs. He spits out a gross wad of mucus over the side of the pickup where they’re now sat, tangled together with legs swung out over the side.
Peter taps a pattern on Harley’s knee. “Do you think you can tell me about your dad?” he asks.
And, for the first time in his life, Harley can.
He tells Peter that he doesn’t remember a time before Dad became an alcoholic. That what happened, it was almost normal. Dads hit their sons down there. Not always, but sometimes. That his mother got some of it, his sister once in a while, but mostly Harley. Harley. Harley. Not son. No son of mine, actually. Not Harley either, not graced with a name. Just--nothing.
That the last Thanksgiving he celebrated ended with him pulling bottle-glass shards out of his arm.
That he stopped breathing once.
Then, Dad was scared. Then, he breathed Harley right back to life as if he hadn’t almost knocked him out of it.
But Harley didn’t get to see that part. He got another black eye and another cracked rib and another split cheekbone and another litany of bruises.
That he used to forget he wasn’t supposed to look black and blue.
And again, that it was just what happened. The father strikes the son; the son deludes himself that he’s grown away from the father; the son becomes the father.
Why he doesn’t drink. Why he thinks he could never have kids.
That it’s not the same as Tony in the Room at the hands of Larry, not Peter either, because it was just what happened. It wasn’t discussed. It wasn’t fought against, not by his mother, sister, friends.
That Dad got sober. For six months, Harley bruised only when he hit his knee against the dishwasher. Until the soberness proved a lie too.
That Harley hates Peter for having parents who fight for him, shower him with love, act like a real family. But he hates himself for hating that. Peter went through hell for his parents. Peter lost a mom and a dad, an aunt and an uncle. Peter more than deserves the Starks.
That Harley wants someone to tidy his hair and ask about his day and watch TV with him and rock him when he cries and sometimes he wants more than Peter. Sometimes, selfishly, he longs for parents instead. Just one. Half, even. A moment where someone wholeheartedly catches his troubles and can bear the weight of them.
“That’s not selfish,” Peter says to him emphatically. “Harley, that’s being a human. You got shitty parents and you want better ones. You’re allowed to want that. You’re allowed to demand that.”
“It doesn’t feel like it. I… can’t, really. I don’t know how.”
“It’s cool. I’ll do it for you, yeah? Deal?”
“Deal,” wavers Harley.
Peter drops a kiss on his forehead. Painfully compassionate. “Thank you for telling me that.”
“Thanks for getting me to say it,” Harley chuckles weakly.
“You have a, uh… there’s a scar.” Peter motions to it. “On the inside of your arm. I noticed it years ago. I should’ve brought it up, I felt wary…”
“Honestly,” says Harley, “I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about it. You’re right, though.” He shoves an arm out of his hoodie, bares the pale ring of crookedly-healed flesh. Mimes jamming the broken bottle against it. It’s old, he doesn’t much care.
“Oh,” Peter says quietly, sounding devastated.
“Can you hear me out? Because I know this sounds weird, but--I’m so glad you noticed it. The fact that it’s there… that’s been and gone, you know, that’s back in the past, that’s back in my hometown, and maybe it’s still important, and maybe I should talk about it and process it and stuff, but--you noticed it. You know? You noticed me.”
Peter takes the arm, gently. He presses his lips to the mark.
“Scars are cool,” he mumbles into Harley’s skin, making it rumble with the vibrations of his voice in this wondrous way.
“I thought I might get a tattoo over it,” Harley muses aloud. “I don’t know what of yet, but--yeah.”
Peter lifts his lips a little. “A tattoo would be cool, a tattoo would look awesome.”
Then, without preamble, he blows a fat raspberry on Harley’s arm.
Harley twists away, very nearly falling off the pickup, screeching.
---
Peter drives Harley home, kicks off his running shoes, gathers the Stark family in the living room, and announces to them all:
“Guys, Harley is gay.”
The silence that follows is more bemused than baffled.
“We… know,” says Rhodey.
Peter tsks at him. “Yeah, but we’re imagining it’s the first time, Rhodey. Be, like, happy.”
“I wasn’t clued in on this. Am I supposed to know what’s happening?”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Pepper adds.
“Me neither,” Harley says, cocking an eyebrow at Peter.
“Okay, well, you’re all gonna act like he’s coming out and be happy for him because I told you you were all gonna be nice and this is the first step, okay?” He searches the adults with a stern gaze. “
Okay?”
Okay is murmured all around.
Peter gestures to Harley.
“What?”
“Come out!” Peter tells him. Okay, maybe the plan wasn’t clear. But isn’t it obvious now, at least?
Harley, mystified, says, “I’m… gay?”
The adults rise, mostly out of fear of Peter, probably, but they do, and they smile, and Peter cheers and jostles Harley around, all bro-ish, and Harley grins, and then they’re all grinning and even laughing and Tony surprises them all by being the first to clap Harley on the back.
Peter sort of feels the need to stand guard over Harley.
“Kid,” Tony says, and Peter looks at him, thinking he’s talking to him, but no, he’s looking up at Harley. Harley’s beanpole stature takes him well above Tony.
Tony says, “We have a lot to talk about.”
“Guess so,” Harley says, shrinking into himself a little again.
“And I have a lot of apologies to make.”
“Oh?”
Tony nods. “Maybe tomorrow?”
Harley nods back.
Peter’s crossing all his fingers behind his back.
They all collapse onto the living room couches. They order pizza-- sorry, Pepper, but the food was kind of terrible --to which Pepper responds with a barking laugh of relief: it was! I am not a cook. I wanted to be, but I’m not. The kitchen is yours next year, James. Rhodey smirks, very much in agreement. He and Harley bicker fiercely over whether anchovies belong on pizza--Harley: no pizza is complete without them! Rhodey: a pizza isn’t a pizza with them. They end in stitches, and Peter’s grin threatens to fly right off his face.
When the night has drawn in and the TV burbles out some variety show nobody’s really watching, Peter finds himself curled up against Pepper’s side, blanket-wrapped. Harley is on her other side, and as he watches, his head starts to nod. Pepper shifts her shoulder just slightly so his face rests against it, tucking an overgrown lock of his hair out of his eyes.
It makes Harley look so young. It makes Peter’s heart swell, to see him cared for. To see other people seeing him the way Peter does.
It’s been draining, he realises, to be the one taking all of Harley’s weight. Relieving to let someone else carry it for a while. If he feels that way, he can’t imagine how many times more Harley feels it.
He turns his face into Pepper’s arm by way of thanks.
“You picked a good one, I think,” she whispers to him. “Pretty weird. Very tall and skinny. A huge nerd. But good.”
“Mm-hmm,” Peter says sleepily, contentedly.
She nudges him. “Very cute, too.”
“Pepper.”
---
The backyard of the Stark house is grey and dewy in the morning’s halfhearted light, delightfully murky. Tony sits down there with Harley and begins a long reel of an explanation, dating right back to Larry’s visits in the room.
“It was me,” he says. “I was the only person he had. And I was able to do so little in there. In the end, I was useless. Now we’re in a world with autonomy again, it’s hard not to grip that power with both hands.
“This isn’t a cry for forgiveness,” he adds. He’s looking out at the wilted grass, breath misty, hands rooted in the pockets of his jacket. “You… it’s your choice whether you want to forgive me, and I’m not playing the pity card. At least, I’m not trying to. Jesus, I’m tying myself in knots.”
Harley has his lips raised to a mug of coffee and finds himself huffing out a laugh that ripples the liquid.
Something in Tony eases at that reaction. He cracks a hint of a smile. Sits back. Glances at Harley a moment. No spike of panic climbs up Harley’s spine.
Tony chews at his lip, then darts forward and says, “You are Peter’s person now. Do you understand that? How much that means? I used to be his person. And I accept that things have to change, that it can’t be that way forever. I’m happy he’s finding his own people. That’s absolutely the way things should be. But it doesn’t stop me from being scared. Fucking petrified that he’ll pick the wrong person. Because he deserves the best, you know?”
Harley nods without thinking.
“God, that makes me sound like the most precious parent on earth. He… really needs good people.”
Harley thinks of what Peter himself had said to him last night. You need good people. Don’t we all.
“And he trusts so easily. I often feel like I’ve gotta be the bad cop for him, to protect him. So I think, in my head, I was hazing you in a sense. All this time, but particularly yesterday. Seeing how you’d react...under pressure? I think that was it. And that was… terrible of me. It was cruel, and irresponsible, and impolite, and--who am I kidding, let’s ditch the fancy words.”
Harley chuckles a little. “Good,” he mutters.
“It was bad of me. And as a parent--you’re just barely breaking into adulthood, and I’m… I have power. Over you. So rather than being this righteous barricade between you and Peter, I just became that person. I became… like Larry.”
“You’re not Larry. That wasn’t--”
“But it’s the principle of the thing. That I was using my power as an adult over you as a younger person, to belittle you. To…”
“It’s really okay, Tony.”
“Keener--Harley.” It’s the very first time that name has come out of Tony’s mouth. Something about it glows. “My dad was… the worst. I think we have that in common, right?”
“Right.”
“And for a moment there, with the goal of keeping away people like my dad, I started behaving just like him.”
The son becomes the father.
“I forgive you, Mister Stark,” Harley tells him. He meets his eyes. They’re not intimidating to him anymore. Their guardedness makes sense. “Totally. Even if, you know, it wasn’t to do with any stuff in the past, it would’ve made sense.”
“Made sense?”
“People generally… don’t like me.”
“Oh, screw that. That’s presumptuous on the part of people. And you can cut the Mister Stark bullshit and call me Tony.”
It’s so abrupt, so matter-of-fact, that Harley hasn’t got space to refute it. “Oh,” he says. He tries the name: “Tony.”
“You’re a good kid, Keener. You really are.” Then he halts, rewinds, and corrects himself: “Harley.”
And wow. Why does that feel like a gold-threaded punch to the chest?
Tony rests a hand on his shoulder. Doesn’t clap him so hard he stumbles, just puts it there. It’s a little weird, but then again it makes Harley feel like he’s dissolved into some kind of comfort-food soup, so he thinks it’s good. Really good.
“So,” Tony continues, “You’re into camera tech, if I’m not mistaken?”
Harley bolts upright. “I am,” he rushes. “I used to shoot films on my phone, so getting to use Red cameras and stuff at SVA is the coolest.”
“They have Reds?”
Harley’s grin threatens to set the house ablaze. “They do! The facilities are incredible, they’re just stellar.”
“I’m catching the next bus there,” Tony announces so seriously Harley half-expects him to get up then and there. “Get me in a room with a Red Dragon-X DSMC2 and I will forever know bliss.”
The laugh that bubbles forth from Harley’s chest is warm and gracious, a reprieve.
---
Ah, California.
FUCKING HOT.
Which calls for suncream! Copious suncream! Enough suncream to make Harley even whiter than he already is, whiter than he previously thought was possible. He keeps blinding himself when he checks to see if he’s tanned at all yet. Progress: none.
(He may have grown up in Tennessee, but he pretty much spent his childhood holed up inside, so: he’s pasty.)
Peter had been somewhere talking with Tony, Harley thinks. He doesn’t really know, to be honest, because the sun has pleasantly fried his brain. But now here he is, blotting out the sun, and Harley scowls at him--until he sees that Peter’s taken off his t-shirt, and boy, does that bring a smile to his face. He’s got his arms wrapped protectively around his stomach, but still shineth the sun on those glorious abs. Jesus, Peter’s shoulders are chunkier than he could ever imagine. He’s felt them, yes, in darkened rooms and backseats of cars and art supply closets, beneath shirts, but to see the whole picture is astounding.
“Uh,” Peter says, unearthing a bottle of suncream from beneath the prison of his arms, “Can you do my back?”
Harley needs a minute to process. He just splays out there on the blanket and tries to hide his delighted grin behind his sunnies.
“Harley,” Peter insists, chuckling furtively. Okay, okay.
Harley gets him sat between his knees. The position feels suddenly tender. He can see Peter’s forcefully measured breaths ballooning through his back. Rubs at it, to quell it: “Can I get you to not hunch over? And take away the arms?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.” Peter’s toes start to starfish in the sand the moment he removes his arms from around his stomach.
“You’re doing good, babe,” Harley murmurs to him.
He slaps a wet handful of cream across his back and Peter squawks in outrage.
“Harley!”
“Tough love, baby.”
“That’s not--that’s just mean. It’s cold.”
Harley’s kind of tuned out Peter’s whining already, occupied with the fact that Peter’s just given him permission to massage his muscles in public, his naked back, and wow! Harley’s almost nervous for some reason? Peter is taut and soft and round and sharp and everything, all at once. His spine starts to hunch, then unbends itself when he remembers not to slouch. That’s so crazy. He’s so--alive, all the time. Everything in him works so hard to make him Peter. It’s amazing.
He finishes on Peter’s back (regrettably, but he did stretch it out quite a bit anyway, and this is progress! Maybe there will be more of this kind of stuff!) and captures him before he can get away and squeezes him to death. Peter huffs, laughs, squirms in vain.
“I got you now,” Harley growls.
Peter mock-screams in defeat.
Harley thinks he’s achieved his goal: get Peter to chill out with silly distractions. One of his specialities. Still, not everything has to be silly. He buries his face in Peter’s shoulder and kisses him there, a well-done kiss, a you’re-beautiful kiss, an I-see-there’s-a-little-mole-on-that-shoulder-of-yours-so-I-must-kiss-it kiss.
What Harley hadn’t anticipated is that Peter’s just-creamed skin tastes gross.
He wipes at his lips, at the chemical-y taste, going blegh, and Peter whips around in a picture of indignance.
“So you think I’m gross.”
He dervishes around and tackles Harley to the towel. Harley bleats in surprise. That’s not to say that he’s upset by this turn of events, by Peter pinning him to the hot sand beneath the hot sun and still remaining inexplicably cool against Harley. He resists, trying to roll them back around, but, of course, Peter’s stronger than him. Just keeps him pinned there.
“Hey,” whines Harley.
“Take it back,” Peter mock-demands.
“Alright, you’re not gross.”
“You can do better than that!” cries Peter, breaking his role for a second.
“You’re a god on earth,” Harley proclaims a little too loudly. The neighbouring beachgoers raise eyebrows. More fool them. Peter Parker isn’t their boyfriend. “You’re so pretty, you make me want to throw up. I know. The opposite of gross, and you make me wanna do a gross thing. It’s the irony of the world.”
“Fucking idiot,” Peter beams, leaning towards him.
Harley leans away. He cranes his neck towards where Tony and Pepper have set up camp a few feet away. They’re looking at them, alright.
But Peter, once he’s caught Harley’s drift, just throws a smile towards them. Yet more proof that his smile fixes shit like magic. Tony and Pepper smile back, chuckle; Tony raises an eyebrow that says get in there, kid, and Pepper jams his cap down over his eyes in a show of scolding his scandalous behaviour.
Laughter swirls in Peter’s eyes as he brings them back to Harley, kisses him groundingly, dizzyingly, then scoops him up without preamble and charges towards the sea.
“We’re going swimming!” he shouts behind him. “Tony, come with?”
And in the split second before he drops Harley beneath the foamy surf, Harley sees Tony jogging out to join them both.