Archive of Our Own

Harley was in class when it happened.

He had been working on his test for World History – you know, the one where you would have to identify as many countries as possible and the teacher acted like it might one day be relevant to your career when the truth was it actually wouldn’t.

Well. To some people it may have eventually been relevant.

Harley just doubted that was ever going to be true for any of his classmates.

Anyways, he had been working on his test for World History. He had just been about to label Tuvalu, in fact, when he heard one of his classmates let out the most blood-strangling scream he had ever heard.

Eyes widening, he looked up just in time to see said classmate turn into dust. And then another. And then another. And then another.

Before he knew it, five seconds had passed and three-fourths of the entire classroom, including his teacher, were gone.

Horror, a horror unlike anything he had ever felt before, flashed through him. His very soul seemed to scream at the fact that something was deeply, terribly wrong. Did he – did he just see three-fourths of his classroom die? Did they just die in front of him? Why? What the hell had just happened? Was it happening everywhere else in the school, as the screaming he was beginning to hear indicated? Was it happening everywhere else in Rose Hill, in Tennessee, in the entire world?

Did it happen to his mother?

Did it happen to his sister?

Harley felt the pencil that he had been holding drop from his hands.

“Abigail,” he whispered.

He scrambled to his feet. It wasn’t exactly easy, not with the metal prosthesis that served as his right leg, but he didn’t care about that as he ran out of the room and down the halls. He ran past his fellow students that were still screaming, past the baffled and terrified teachers who were trying to maintain order despite the fact they were barely maintaining themselves, and past the walls that had defined the entirety of his education. He ran like a man possessed down the stairs from the third floor to the first, not even bothering to take the elevator despite the mild discomfort it caused him, and was never more thankful in his entire life that all the grades of Rose Hill were taught in one building.

“Abigail!” he called out when he got to the first floor. It was even more chaotic than his own had been, full of crying, elementary-aged children who had even less of an understanding of what was going on than he did. “Abigail! Abigail, where the hell are you?”

“Harley!” a voice screamed out from behind him.

He spun around.

There was his ten-year-old sister, with her light brown hair and big blue eyes, eyes which were now leaking with tears. Relief the power of a thousand suns coursed through him at the sight of her. He ran after her, and she him; they met somewhere in the middle of their paths, colliding like trains, their arms wrapping around each other like they, too, were going to turn into dust at any second.

...Well, for all that they knew, they probably were.

“Harley, what’s going on?” his sister whimpered.

He stared at the spot just past her head, but he didn’t really see anything. He couldn’t.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

Then she said the one question that was inevitably going to define the rest of their lives, forever:

“Where’s Mom?”

~~~

Their mom was dead.

They didn’t find out until they got to the diner where she worked. Harley and his sister walked out of school, even though it was the middle of the day. Oh well. If he cared, he would’ve figured that the faculty had bigger issues to worry about than two of their students leaving. But he didn’t. All he could think about as he loaded up Abigail into his red pick-up truck was his mom, Evelyn Keener. With her blonde hair and blue eyes and the dark red lipstick she always wore.

It was one of her waitress friends that told them. Like at the school, the diner was in chaos. The manager was dead, as were half of the waitresses and the customers. There was dust everywhere, and Abigail looked like she was going to be sick when she realized it was covering them all and sticking to them like glitter.

“I was just talking to her,” the waitress friend said numbly, her eyes unseeing. “I was – we were – and she was gone. I’m sorry.”

His mom had only been thirty-four.

She had been the only person they had. Their dad had skipped out before Abigail had even been born. Their grandparents had died in a car crash a few months after her birth. They had no one. No one.

...Wait.

Maybe that wasn’t true.

“What are we going to do?” Abigail asked, drawing him out of his thoughts. They were standing outside the diner, and she was looking up at him with her wide eyes.

Harley swallowed. He thought about December 31st, 2012, when Tony Stark had snuck into his garage. He thought about the months after that, too, when his right leg had begun to hurt all the time for seemingly no reason, up until his mom took him to the doctor and they told him it was cancer. He thought about the amputation, and the chemotherapy, and talking to Tony about it. He thought about the feeling of the modified Extremis serum coursing through his body, and the robotic leg he and Tony built after it. The same prosthesis he now used.

He thought about a lot of things.

“I have an idea,” he said after what felt like an eternity. He grabbed his sister around the shoulders and steered her back towards where he had parked his truck. “Come on, we need to go home and pack. We’re going to New York.”

~~~

It took them three days to get to the Compound.

It should’ve only taken one, maybe two, but the entire world was in disarray. People were panicking, there were abandoned – he tried not to think about the reason for that – cars everywhere, and the dust continued to be everywhere. Harley made Abigail wrap a scarf around her nose and mouth to prevent her from breathing it in. She protested and pointed out he wasn’t wearing one, probably thinking she could convince him to not make her wear it, but instead he grabbed another scarf and wrapped it around his face as well.

Nobody really knew what was going on. All of the internet and cell towers across the entire country were down, so there was no looking up on his phone to see what had happened. The only information he could get was out of a couple of kids they picked up in Knoxville and dropped off to their miraculously still-alive grandparents in Philadelphia, who had been lucky enough to be at home sick and watching the news when it happened.

The Chitauri had invaded Earth, again, though this time their efforts seemed to have been centered around Wakanda. The Rogue Avengers had been spotted heading towards there. Iron Man had been spotted in New York, fighting off some other aliens. He had followed them up to their spaceship along with Spider-Man and a “weird wizard guy,” which had promptly left orbit. Nobody had seen or heard from them after that.

It kind of put a damper in Harley’s plans, but whatever. He fully believed Tony would come back eventually, and until then any of the Avengers that were at the Compound could put up with them. It wasn’t like they owned the place. They didn’t have a say-so.

When they got there, he parked the truck in the grass next to the gate and rung the bell, while Abigail waited patiently beside him. At first, there was no response, so he pressed again. Then again. Then another three times.

Finally, just when he was about to press the button for a seventh time, he heard the buzz.

“Who are you?” a vaguely familiar voice asked, sounding suspicious. “What do you want?”

He looked up towards the camera and waved. “The name’s Harley Keener. I’m a friend of Tony Stark’s,” he said. “If you don’t believe me, ask FRIDAY. She’ll confirm it. As for what I want...uh, our mom died. We have nowhere else to go. Can you please let us in?”

There was a moment of silence.

Several moments, in fact.

Then, the gate opened. The buzz didn’t happen again, but he took this as a sign that they were allowed in. Grabbing Abigail’s hand, he walked the two of them towards the main building and through its front doors, into the lobby.

When they got there, Black Widow herself was waiting for them, although it admittedly took Harley a second to realize that was who she was. Her hair, though still curly, was blonde, and she was dressed in sweats. It seemed very out-of-place for the former spy.

There was no one else around.

As if sensing his first impressions of her, Romanoff said, “Don’t get any funny ideas. I can still kick your ass in a heartbeat.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Harley said, before he paused. His eyes instinctively darted around the room, looking for other signs of life, of the other Avengers.

There were none.

“Where’s everyone else?”

Nothing visibly happened with Romanoff, not even a change in her eyes, but he had a feeling that she had a strong emotional reaction to what he said. She gestured towards one of the hallways with her head, before turning around.

“Follow me,” she said.

Not knowing what else to do, they did as they were told.

She led them to what looked to be one of the living areas in the Compound. It was nice, with clean white couches and a glass coffee table in the middle of them. On top of the coffee table was one of Tony’s hologram projectors, showcasing a series of images. Harley stared at them, confused, until he realized what they were for.

Then the horror he had felt three days ago, the horror which had never really left but he had forced into the farthest corners of his mind, returned tenfold.

Steve Rogers, alias Captain Rogers. Status: DEAD.

Bucky Barnes, alias the Winter Soldier. Status: DEAD.

Bruce Banner, alias Hulk. Status: DEAD.

Thor. Status: DEAD.

Wanda Maximoff, alias Scarlet Witch. Status: DEAD.

James Rhodes, alias War Machine. Status: MISSING.

Sam Wilson, alias the Falcon. Status: MISSING.

Clint Barton, alias Hawkeye. Status: MISSING.

Yelena Belova. Status: MISSING.

Pepper Potts. Status: MISSING.

“The missing are the ones I personally didn’t see,” Romanoff murmured from across the room. She was leaning against a pole. Her arms were crossed. “But they are dead. They’re all dead. Except...for me.”

“What the hell happened?” Harley asked, but he didn’t even realize he had spoken the question out loud until Romanoff turned her eyes from the projector back to him.

“He was – is called Thanos,” she said. “The Mad Titan. From what we were told, he had one goal: to eradicate half of all life in the universe. But he couldn’t do it without six objects called the Infinity Stones. As you can tell, he got them all. He succeeded.”

Harley tried to process that.

“So you mean...what happened here...has happened everywhere else? In the entire universe?”

Romanoff nodded. She fished something out of one of the pockets of her sweatpants and threw it at him. He caught it and looked down to inspect it.

It was a pager, albeit one the likes of which he had never seen before.

“Two days ago, one of my old boss’ contacts came here,” she said. “She’s...from Earth, but she hasn’t been here in a long time. Name’s Carol Danvers. Captain Marvel. She confirmed to me half of all life in the universe has vanished. I sent her out to look for Tony.”

Harley’s head snapped up. “You think he’s still alive?”

“I think there’s a chance he might be,” she corrected him, and for a second, he thought he saw her gaze go soft. “I don’t know how close you two were and you can stay here with your sister as long as you like, Harley, but I don’t want to get your hopes up. The Avengers are dead. And even if they weren’t...”

She trailed off, her eyes going back to the projector.

Harley followed them. He saw a picture of a boy about his age, with brown curls, dark brown eyes, and a slight smile.

Peter Parker, alias Spider-Man. Status: MISSING (?)

“...Tony would’ve had reasons for not coming back.”

~~~

That was how Harley learned Peter Parker was Tony’s kid. Biologically, though Tony apparently hadn’t been aware of it up until recently. He hadn’t even told Peter about it yet.

As a relative outsider, Harley was able to process this without much fuss. It made sense. Before he became Iron Man, Tony had been...well, he had been known for being a playboy. Parties, drugs, sex – he did it all. Realistically, he should have had one or two kids out there. And it figured said kid would be as reckless as him and become a superhero beloved by Queens and the rest of New York.

But just because he was able to process it didn’t mean he wanted to think about it, because he didn’t. Thinking about it meant thinking about the odds of either Tony or Peter, much less both of them, coming back. Odds which were dwindling more and more each day.

A week after he and Abigail arrived at the Compound, he approached Natasha, as she had insisted on them calling her, to get those thoughts off of his mind.

“I want to learn how to fight,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow.

“You have a metal leg.”

“So? Bucky Barnes had a metal arm and he still fought damn good,” he retorted. “Teach me to fight. I want to learn how to fight.”

She sighed, and put down the book she wanted to act like she was reading and not just staring at, but in the end he won her over. They went to the gym and Abigail trailed behind them; she sat on a raised platform about ten feet away from them, her legs dangling over the edge.

“Show me your fighting stance,” Natasha said.

He bent his knees and raised his arms, clenching his hands into fists.

She took one look at him, face indescribable, before she reached out and corrected his posture.

“Was it that bad?” he asked.

“No,” she said. It was a lie, though. He could hear the amusement in her voice. She backed up about six or so feet, but she didn’t get into a fighting stance herself. “Now, try to hit me.”

He hesitated.

“Hit me,” she repeated.

He did as he was told. He stepped forward, with an arm swinging –

– Only to be thrown down on his ass in a matter of seconds.

“Ow,” he groaned, causing Abigail let out a laugh, loud and musical. It was the first one he had heard from her ever since it happened.

“Not bad,” Natasha said from above him, a ghost of a smile appearing on her face. “For a beginner, anyways.”

She offered him a hand.

Begrudgingly, he accepted it.

For the next couple of weeks, they sparred daily. Natasha landed dozens of hits on him each time, leaving bruises mottled black and blue in her wake; Harley never even came close to hitting her. But it felt good. He could fight her and pretend his mom had taken up Tony’s offer to move to New York all those years ago when he had gotten diagnosed with cancer, could pretend he was Tony’s personal intern and not just a kid from Rose Hill who now had nothing but his sister to his name.

They were even sparring when Carol Danvers returned with the ship from Titan.

“Natasha, the Secretary of Defense is on the line,” FRIDAY announced. “A ship has just entered Earth’s atmosphere. He wants to know whether he should fire on it or not.”

Natasha, who had just been about to hit him again, stepped back. “Is Carol Danvers’ energy signature attached to it?”

“It is.”

“Then tell him to stand down.”

The three of them ran outside. It was dark out, with most of the stars obscured from view by the remnants of dust. Yet the glow of what he presumed to be Carol Danvers was still visible, and as he watched, it became closer and closer until he could see a vision of the woman herself and the spaceship she was carrying.

She set down the ship on the Compound lawn. He stared at it for what seemed like an eternity. This was it. This was the moment of truth. Were both Tony and Peter alive or was it just one of them? If so, which one was alive? Which one was dead?

“He’s in really bad shape,” Carol told Natasha, her voice quiet and her face full of sorrow. “Do you have any doctors around? He needs one.”

Harley felt his heart drop into his stomach.

So, too, did Natasha. He saw, for the first time in three weeks, how her face fell, the weight of what had happened finally seeking into her features. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. Her eyes flitted over to the ship.

She opened her mouth to say more, but no sound came out.

The question she was meaning to ask, however, was obvious.

“It’s Peter Parker,” Carol murmured. “I – I’ll let him talk to you about it.”

Tears filled Harley’s eyes.

Hurriedly, he wiped them away before Abigail could see.

The door to the ship opened then, lowering to the ground to act as a ramp to step off of. Harley saw the frame of Peter Parker appear, but it was not the one he had seen pictures of scattered around Tony’s living spaces inside. That Peter Parker had been happy, always with a smile on his face and sunshine in his eyes and a healthy weight and sun-kissed skin.

This Peter Parker was pale and gaunt, with hollow cheeks and dark bruises underneath his eyes. Eyes that were just about the most broken Harley had ever seen, and despite his own hurt, his chest couldn’t help but ache at the sight. He was small and thin, wearing a shirt and pair of jeans which looked like they had fit him once, but did no more.

More importantly, he was also missing his right arm.

As he walked down the ramp, he stumbled over his own feet. He moved to fall, and probably would’ve had Carol not caught him at the last second. She touched him gingerly, her blonde hair fanned about her head like a halo.

She walked him the rest of the way, until they were standing in front of Natasha.

Peter looked at her, eyes searching.

“They all died, didn’t they?” he whispered. “All of them?”

When she nodded, it was as if a dam broke. He crumpled, his eyes squeezing tight even as they spilled over with tears. “I’m sorry!” he cried. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”

Then, he promptly passed out.

~~~

The story came out a few days later, with Peter resting in a bed in the medical wing with an IV hooked up to his arm and Harley, Natasha, and Carol at his side. Abigail was in the living area, watching the Harry Potter movies which had been saved onto FRIDAY’s hard drive long ago. She wasn’t old enough to hear this kind of stuff yet.

Peter told them, haltingly at first, about fighting the aliens and getting beamed up onto their spaceship. He told them about how Tony had tried to get him back down to Earth, but had ultimately failed, and how angry he was at Peter for staying because “it was most likely going to be a one-way trip.” He told them about meeting the so-called Guardians of the Galaxy, about the fight with Thanos, about the Dr. Strange guy’s request to spare Tony’s life and Tony instead insisting on him sparing Peter’s. He told them about watching Tony and the rest dying in front of him, about scrambling to the Guardians’ ship and somehow working it, about drifting off in space with no fuel and dwindling resources, and about finding out Tony was his biological father from the Iron Man helmet he had brought with him at the last second.

He told them all these things, and none of them were even the worst of it.

“My arm started hurting a few days in,” he said. “I didn’t think much of it, at first. But then it started turning grey, so I looked it up in the ship’s database. It said I had an infection that required these antibiotics, but I didn’t have any of those. So, I – I did the next best thing and amputated it.”

Harley closed his eyes.

Losing a limb was a fate he wouldn’t wish on anybody – he knew what it was like. The loss of ability, the phantom pains...it was hard. It had taken him a while to adjust to losing his leg, even longer after he “got it back” again. But to hear that Peter had had to cut off his limb himself...

He thought he was going to be sick.

“...I don’t know what to do now,” Peter admitted. His voice was barely above a whisper. “I – my dad is dead. My aunt is dead. What do I do now? Where do I go?”

“You’ll stay here,” Natasha said. Her voice was firm. “It’s what Tony would’ve wanted. Your aunt too, probably. And you’ll have Harley and Abigail to keep you company.”

Harley cracked his eyes open. “You’re going somewhere?”

This was the first he was hearing about it.

Over Peter’s bed, she and Carol shared a look.

“We found a lead on Thanos,” she said at last. “Maybe even a way to undo all of this. We’ll be gone a few weeks.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Carol added. It was an eerie echo of Natasha’s own words three weeks before.

To himself, Harley thought it probably didn’t bode well for their chances.

And he was proven right two weeks later when the two superheroes came back to Earth, grim-faced and empty-handed.

~~~

Building a robotic prosthesis was a lot of work.

Harley knew this from experience. Of course he did. He and Tony had spent practically an entire summer building his, a summer full of frustration and anger and mostly limited success. It hadn’t been until August that they had actually made breakthroughs, and not until the week before Harley had been supposed to go back that he had actually got his metal leg permanently fitted to his thigh.

But two weeks after Carol and Natasha had returned, Peter had looked at him with wide eyes. They had talked about his metal leg before, back when they hadn’t been sure if the two of them were coming back or not. Peter had thought it was cool; the way he had gotten it, not so much.

“Please, Harley,” he had begged. “Help me get my arm back.”

So Harley had sighed, but ultimately relented.

Like with his leg, building the arm took them the entire summer. It was a little easier, because Tony still had the plans for his leg saved to FRIDAY’s (originally, he thought a little bittersweetly, it had been JARVIS’) hard drive, but only a little. There were differences between the arm and the leg that made trying to compare notes between them like trying to compare apples and oranges, especially when it came to the hand.

In the end, though, they were successful. Natasha helped him fit the arm onto Peter’s shoulder, and they all watched with bated breath as it clicked into the dock they had made with a hiss, before the blue lights on it began to blink.

“How does it feel?” Harley asked.

Experimentally, Peter clenched his fist, then unclenched it.

He grinned.

“Perfect.”

Harley and Peter went to Midtown a couple of weeks later. Natasha was insistent on it. She wanted them to be around kids their own age.

“Were you around kids your own age when you were our age?” Peter asked sullenly over breakfast on their first day of school.

Harley may or may not have made a face over his choice of words.

“No, but I was already an international spy and killing people by then,” she replied, not even looking up from her phone. “You’re going to school.”

At Midtown, Peter practically shrunk. He was already small, still not fully recovered from nearly starving to death and still not cleared for patrolling, but the way he pulled into himself made him seem even smaller. The long-sleeved shirt he wore to cover up his arm, along with the one black glove he wore on his hand, did nothing to help the matter.

Harley knew it was because all of his friends were dead. Ned Leeds was gone. Michelle Jones was gone. Even Flash Thompson, his bully, was gone. The only person he had left there from his former life besides the teachers was Cindy Moon, and she didn’t seem to want to do anything with him except smile and nod his way.

He did his best to help Peter adjust to it. He sat with him at lunch, although that would’ve happened regardless since they were living together and already friends. He partnered up with him for all projects and group-related activities. And he joined the Academic Decathlon team, where Cindy was now captain and Mr. Dell was the teacher leading it.

Mr. Dell, he thought, had no idea how to lead a team. He never said or did the right things. The only good thing he did, actually, was announce in November that he had put together a trip for them to Europe that summer.

“I’m not going,” Peter said in reaction to it that night. They were in his room, and he was walking up the walls and on the ceiling like it was something everyone should do. Harley thought it was kind of –

– No, stop that thought right there, Keener.

“I can’t go,” he continued. “I – Natasha said I can’t be Spider-Man again until the summer because of my bones, right? Do you know how much crime I won’t be able to stop until then? So I can’t go. I gotta be here to – to – ”

Angrily, he shook his head.

“You know you can’t stop all crime, right?” Harley asked softly.

“I can try,” Peter retorted.

He sighed.

“Peter.”

“Harley.”

Pushing himself up from Peter’s bed, he walked over to the other boy and grabbed him by the shoulders, stopping him before he could make another round up the walls again. Peter allowed him to with a sigh, though he buried his head into Harley’s shoulders to make up for it.

“You don’t have to go,” Harley said. “But I know the entire reason why you don’t is because you feel guilty about surviving – we all do, even though we shouldn’t – and the trip sounds like fun. I mean, I’ve never been to Europe before. It’ll be a first for me.”

“It’s not that great,” Peter said. “Believe me, I’ve been there.”

“One, you went there to fight. Two, you only went to Germany. You don’t actually know what it’s like. So, come see it.”

Peter remained silent.

“I’ll be lonely without you,” Harley sang, though there wasn’t any real threat to it. They both knew that.

“...Fine,” Peter finally allowed. “But I’m taking the suit with me.”

In the end, it was a good thing that he did.

~~~

“Spider-Man’s real name is Peter Parker, and he’s Tony Stark’s son!”

~~~

“I can’t sleep,” Peter said.

Harley looked up blearily from his pillow. Peter was standing in his doorway, his frame backlit by the light from the hallway. He was wearing the Spider-Man shirt Nat had gotten him for Christmas and a pair of red plaid pajama pants, with a blanket around his shoulder. His teeth were biting into his lower lip, worrying it nervously.

“Nightmare?” he guessed.

Those weren’t new, to any of them. Many nights since the Blip, Harley had dreamed of either himself or Abigail turning to dust. He had even dreamed of Peter, all alone on the Benatar, dying before Carol could ever get to him.

Peter coming to his bedroom directly after having a nightmare, though, that was new. His usual mode of style was to suffer in silence until the next morning, if he talked about his dreams at all. But it reminded him of what he used to do when he was a kid, before Abigail had been born. When Evelyn Keener had still been alive and not dust, long-vanished in the wind.

So when Peter nodded, he took another stab in the dark.

“Do you want to come sleep with me?”

For a moment, Peter gazed at him, uncertainty in his eyes.

He pulled back his comforter and patted the bed.

It seemed to be the encouragement Peter needed. All at once, he quickly walked over and scrambled into the bed. He burrowed into his side, his skin both deliciously hot and cold to the touch, and momentarily Harley forgot how to breathe.

“Thank you,” he murmured.

“N – not a problem,” Harley said. He pulled the cover back over the both of them and closed his eyes. “Night, Peter.”

“Night.”

~~~

Harley had an idea.

It was a Very Stupid™ idea, the kind of which his mother would’ve yelled the hell out of him for had she still been living. Tony probably would’ve yelled at him for it too. The man had been very good at yelling at people for things he himself had done.

But it had been a few months since the Mysterio incident, and Peter had gone back to being Spider-Man between their first semester at NYU. Most people didn’t seem to mind this, fully believing he was innocent, but the ones that did did their best to try and get him to stop being a superhero. They gave him broken ribs and grazed bullet wounds and a defeated attitude he tried to hide from everyone, including himself.

He was also still sleeping in Harley’s bed.

Now, Harley didn’t mind this. For all that he cared, Peter could’ve continued sleeping in his bed until they were both in their thirties, maybe even forever. But he didn’t want him to continue getting hurt. He didn’t want those sunny smiles that had just started appearing again to vanish entirely. Plus, it wasn’t like he had still been sparring with Nat after all this time or anything.

He showed his plans for his idea to Abigail first. His sister took one glance at them, then went back to playing games on her StarkPad.

“That’s cute,” she said. “When do I get one?”

“When you get a limb chopped off,” he joked in response, then paused. “I’m kidding. Don’t do that, because the actual answer is never.”

Next came Nat. She looked at his plans neutrally, and circled the spots she thought needed to be worked on.

“I’m not sure what you’re looking for here,” she admitted. “My approval?”

Images of her attending all of his and Peter’s Decathlon meets, along with their graduation, entered his mind.

“Something like that,” he said.

“It’s not going to be easy.”

“I know.”

“People are still going to get hurt, no matter what you do.”

“I know.”

“And once you start, you’re never going to be able to stop.”

“I know,” he repeated. “But I want to do it.”

She smiled; a rare, but beautiful sight. “Then you have my approval.”

Carol came next to last. She visited, sometimes. Not often. But she stopped by for a few days in September and caught sight of his notebook, left out because Peter was on patrol and wasn’t there to see it. She picked it up before he could stop her, ruffling through the pages until she caught sight of what he was working on.

“What, are you trying to be the next Iron Man or something?” she asked with a laugh.

“Not Iron Man,” he corrected. “Iron Lad.”

“That’s a cheesy name.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a cheesy guy. Now, give it back!”

Peter was last. Harley would’ve liked to say that was unintentional, but the only unintentional thing about it was how he found out.

“What are you doing?” Peter asked as he walked into the lab one day.

Harley blinked, before he looked up from the red-and-silver gauntlet that he was working on and at the ceiling. “FRIDAY, you traitor,” he said. “I told you to alert me if he was coming down here when I was working on this.”

“The Itsy Bitsy Protocol,” she replied. “I know. But my scanners seem to have suspiciously gone down.”

“Suspiciously, my ass.”

“I repeat,” Peter said. “What are you doing?”

Harley turned around. Peter was giving him a look, his face scrunched up. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

He debated his options.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“It looks like you’re building a suit.”

“And if I am?”

Peter’s face scrunched up even more. Still, he walked over and took the arm with the gauntlet on it in his hands, his flesh fingers ghosting over its metal. “You’re not doing this for me, are you?” he asked, voice quiet.

“Partially,” Harley lied. “But mostly, this world needs superheroes again. Besides you and Nat, I mean.”

“There’s those X-Men guys now,” Peter reminded him softly. “They seem like they’re getting a handle on things.”

He shook his head. “Not good enough.”

Silence lapsed between them.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Peter finally said.

Harley smiled. “That’s the thing. I want to.”

And it was the goddamn truth.

Their first mission came a few months later, in December. Natasha decided they were finally ready for it. The mission was reconnaissance on a HYDRA base, because with all of the Avengers except for two dead they were back in full-force, and maybe a little kicking of ass and getting back things of the Avengers they had apparently stolen after the Blip.

Probably a little kicking of ass and getting back things of the Avengers they had apparently stolen after the Blip.

“Don’t make me regret bringing you two along,” Nat warned them beforehand, as if the entire reason she was doing this in the first place wasn’t because she now had help.

They didn’t. They were as stealthy as she had taught them during the reconnaissance part, and then as good at fighting as they could be with her as a teacher during the fighting part. It felt good to actually fight. Good to shoot people with his blasters, which were actually more like the phasers from Star Trek and Stargate – they knocked the HYDRA agents out, but didn’t kill them.

God knows the planet had already dealt with more death than was conceivably imaginable.

“Peter, get into the storage room,” Natasha told them through the comms. She was somewhere else in the building, he didn’t quite know where.

“On it,” Peter said next to him. He flipped his body up onto the ceiling and began crawling along it, but not before he webbed two HYDRA agents up and slung them towards him.

Harley fired his blasters at them. They collapsed to the ground in seconds.

“Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals,” he snarked.

It continued on like that for God knows how long. He began humming the tune of Another One Bites the Dust by Queen to give his mind something to do. Blasting HYDRA agents became kind of repetitive, not to mention mind-numbing.

Suddenly, the comm switched on inside his ear.

“Guys, I think you should come and see this,” Peter said. He sounded shaky.

Harley cursed, before he did as he was told. Making his way through the building, he blasted another few handfuls of HYDRA agents, until he ended up outside of the open doorway to the storage room. Natasha was already there when he arrived. He could see her curly red and blonde hair, and her unnaturally stiff posture.

Inside the room, there was an assortment of Avengers paraphernalia that Harley honestly couldn’t believe HYDRA had managed to steal all of. Captain America’s shield rested on the wall, along with the axe Natasha had told him Thor had brought into battle on the day they had lost. He wasn’t quite sure how HYDRA had managed to drag it there all the way from Wakanda, but whatever. Also in the room where what looked to be Hawkeye’s bows and, resting on a table, was –

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “Is that – ?”

“Vision?” Natasha finished for him. “It is.”

She looked, for the second time since he had met her, like she was about to cry.

Harley didn’t blame her. He had never met Vision before, only his predecessor JARVIS, but that connection combined with the giant hole in his head and his sickly grey pallor was enough to make his knees weak. Tentatively, he reached out to touch him, only stopping when Peter grabbed his wrist gingerly. The tears in his eyes were already flowing; he had met the android before, on a number of occasions.

“How did they even get him?” he asked.

“When the battle happened, Wakanda had to bring down all of their shields,” she replied. “Then the royal family and all of the Dora Milaje died. One of T’Challa’s cousins, Ororo, claimed the throne, but by the time she did the damage was already done. I just – I didn’t – ”

She shook her head.

“We should bury him,” Peter murmured.

Harley stared at Vision’s body. His mind began to whir. Possibilities, endless possibilities, formed themselves inside his head, making promises he wasn’t quite sure he was going to be able to keep, but was going to do his damnedest to try.

“Let’s not,” he said. And when the two of them looked up sharply at him in response, he hastily added, “I have an idea.”

~~~

If Harley thought building a robotic prosthesis was difficult, then putting Vision back together was like climbing Mount Everest.

It was hard. There had never been anything like Vision before and never would be again, considering the fact that Helen Cho was dead. Additionally, even before Thanos had crushed in his skull, his neurons had been in the process of getting reassembled by Shuri, the princess of Wakanda. Harley had to go in and continue her work, which was a lot of effort and left him exhausted. But he had to do it for Natasha. He had to do it for Peter.

Call him a romantic, he didn’t care.

It was in May when he finally finished his work, only a few days away from the second anniversary of the Blip. He rubbed the oil on his hands onto his jeans as he reached out and grabbed the lever to power the Cradle, his eyes closing as adrenaline ran through his veins.

“Please work,” he said quietly. “Please, please work.”

Then, he pulled the lever.

Instantly, blue light shined through his eyelids. Energy coursed through the room, causing the hair on the back of his neck to stand on end. He breathed, and waited until FRIDAY told him it was time to turn it off. He did as she said, then spun around to see his results.

Vision was still laying in the Cradle, but now his color was back to the red it had once been. It contrasted brilliantly with the blue zircon gemstone now resting on his head, but Harley couldn’t really bring himself to care about that.

The android’s eyes were closed.

Stumbling forwards, he shakily opened up the Cradle. “Vision?” he asked.

There was no response.

He should be alive, he thought. His skin was red. It was grey before, when he was dead. But it was red now.

Slowly, he reached out with a hand. His fingers brushed up against cool metal.

Apparently, it was all the encouragement that Vision needed. His blue eyes snapped open. With a gasp, he sat up, those same eyes flitting wildly about the room, searching for something – no, someone – that wasn’t there.

“Wanda?” he breathed. “I – Wanda – ”

Harley smiled sadly. “Hey there, Tin Man.”

At the sound of his voice, the android turned to look at him. He paused for a moment, eyes calculating. Harley could practically see the wheels turning inside his head.

“Harley Keener,” he said at last. “I don’t believe we met, but somehow I know who you are.”

“Yeah, that’s the JARVIS in you talking,” Harley replied. “Now, tell me, what’s the last thing you remember?”

Vision hesitated. “I remember...the battle against the Chitauri, and Wakanda. Thanos had just arrived. Wanda and I, we were trying to escape. I told her...I told her to destroy the Stone.” He closed his eyes, and reached up for where the Soul Stone had been, where the blue zircon now was. Whatever he was thinking, he must have been satisfied to realize that a replacement occurred, because he opened his eyes again and looked back at him. “Where...where is Wanda?”

Harley sucked in a deep breath.

“Look, there’s no easy way to tell you this,” he said. “But Thanos won.”

Vision blinked. “Half of all life in the universe has been eradicated?”

“Yes.”

“Including...including Wanda?”

“Yes.”

Vision’s face didn’t crumple. It didn’t even fall. He merely looked away from Harley, towards the wall, his face carefully blank. “Oh.”

Nervously, Harley wrung his hands. “A lot of people died,” he said. “Well, I mean, obviously, but...a lot of people you know. The Avengers are pretty much dead. The only ones left are Nat and Peter. Spider-Man, I mean.”

“Tony’s son.”

“Yeah...wait, you knew?”

“Tony told myself, Pepper, Rhodey, Happy, and May Parker as soon as he found out, in the event that anything happened to him,” Vision revealed. “He was waiting for the right moment to tell Peter.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Tony,” Harley chuckled, despite himself. He sobered up quickly, though. “Look, I know it’s a lot. Even more than you know, honestly, because it’s been two years since it happened for us. But...we’re surviving. Maybe not living, but surviving. And I thought you deserved a chance to survive, too.”

“I’m...honestly not sure whether to thank you or not,” Vision admitted.

“That’s fair,” he said. Then he checked the time on his phone. It was nearly six. “Shit, it’s about time for dinner.”

He turned his eyes to the ceiling with a silent question. Unlike before with his arm, Peter hadn’t helped him out this time with Vision. He hadn’t wanted to, which was fair. Bringing Vision back was like bringing back a ghost of the past. It made even Harley wonder if he could bring back everyone else, though he knew it was impossible. He couldn’t imagine what it was doing to Peter and Nat, though they had said they were fine with his efforts.

“You can bring him upstairs,” FRIDAY answered him after a few moments. “Natasha and Peter said it is okay, and to say thank you.”

“Great,” Harley said with a grin. He got to his feet. “Come on, Vis. It’s time for dinner.”

Upstairs, the smell of shashlik was in the air. Both Nat and Peter were in the kitchen, Nat at the indoor grill and Peter at the counter, cutting up vegetables. Abigail was setting the table. She looked up as soon as she heard them, and her eyes widened and a grin spread across her face.

“Oh my God, you did it!” she squealed. She bounded over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, before she walked over to Vision and stuck out her hand. “Hi, I’m Abigail Keener! It’s nice to meet you!”

Bemused, he took her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Abigail. My name is Vision.”

She giggled. “Thanks, but you didn’t have to say that. I know who you are.”

From the kitchen, he heard a hiss of pain. Head snapping up, Harley saw Peter clutching his left hand with his metal one, blood running down his arm. Both he and Natasha were at his side in an instant, her with the first aid kit they kept suspended on the side of the fridge.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

Wordlessly, he held out his hand. The cut was...okay, it was bad, but his healing was already working on it. Quickly, she worked on cleaning up the wound and bandaging it, gesturing for Harley to take over at the grill as she did so. He did as he was told.

When she was done, she pushed him out towards the dining room. “Get out of my kitchen,” she said.

“I can still help!” Peter protested.

“You’ll just get blood on the vegetables. Now, out.”

Harley wound up taking his place at the counter. Which was fine, because it allowed him to see Peter approach Vision with a red face. “Glad you’re back, Vision,” he said quietly.

“Peter,” the android returned. He looked like he wanted to ask him about his metal arm.

He didn’t.

Dinner was a...weird affair. Of course, Vision didn’t eat, so he simply sat at the table and watched the dynamic the three of them had going on between them. Natasha asked questions about his and Peter’s finals, Peter talked about his ideas for his upgrades to the Iron Spider suit, Harley talked about his plans for the Mark IV of his own. And Abigail, naturally, babbled about her day at school, telling them all about her friends and what she was learning there.

When it was over, they all helped clean up. Then he, Peter, and Nat all gravitated back towards the dining room, where Vision was still sitting. Abigail, again naturally, trailed after them.

“Abigail, why don’t you go watch a movie?” Nat suggested.

His sister’s face scrunched up. “Aw, come on!” she protested. “I’m old enough to hear whatever it is you’re going to talk about!”

“You’re twelve. You’re not old enough yet.”

“I’m close enough!”

“You can watch WALL-E,” Peter offered. Usually, when he was in the house, she wasn’t allowed to, even though it was one of her favorite movies. It had to do with the fact that the beginning song in it was the one he had been listening to when he cut his arm off.

Predictably, Abigail turned to look at him skeptically. She squinted her eyes. “You promise you won’t tell me to turn it off later?”

“I promise,” he said.

“Fine,” she huffed. She stood up and headed out the hallway that led to the movie room. “But I’ll be old enough one day to listen to what you guys talk about!”

When she was gone, Natasha looked at Vision.

“You have questions,” she stated.

“Harley told me it has been two years since the battle,” Vision said with an incline of his head. “I would like to know...everything that has happened since then.”

So, they told him. Natasha told him about being the only survivor of the Avengers on Earth, of coming back to the Compound and doing her best to (mostly) single-handedly do all the work the entire team had once done. She also told him about her and Carol finding Thanos to undo the Snap, only to learn it couldn’t be undone because the Stones were destroyed. Peter told him about the battle on Titan, about almost dying on the Benatar alone and having to amputate his arm. And Harley told him about his becoming Iron Lad, but not much else. None of what he could say besides that was really relevant.

After they were done, Vision stared at them.

“...I must admit,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t tried to undo all of this.”

Natasha, Peter, and Harley all shared a look.

“We did, Vis,” Nat said. “The Stones were destroyed. There’s nothing more we can do.”

“Not with our Stones, no,” he agreed. “But what about the Stones of the past?”

Another look.

“You’re talking about time travel,” Peter said.

“Indeed.”

“It’s not possible.”

“If we were to use quantum physics – ”

“It’s. Not. Possible,” Peter repeated. “Believe me, we know. Harley and I ran the equations for it.”

Vision frowned. “You are not listening to what I have to say, Peter.”

Abruptly, Peter stood up. The chair he had been sitting on clattered to the ground. Natasha grabbed his hand comfortingly. “Peter,” she said.

He ignored her. “Even if you could find a way to get into the quantum realm, which you can’t, because Hank Pym is dead,” he said, glaring at Vision. “Quantum fluctuation messes with the Planck scale, which then triggers the Deutsch Proposition. In layman’s terms, it means you’re not coming home. It’s a suicide mission. Believe me, we know. It was one of the first simulations that Harley and I did in the labs at NYU. I get that it feels like it just happened for you, but it’s been two years for us. There is no going back from what happened. You just need to accept that.”

Then, before Vision could reply, he left the room.

Harley and Nat watched him go. At first, neither of them said anything.

With a sigh, Harley got to his feet. “I’ll go talk to him,” he told her. She nodded. He turned back to Vision. For the first time since he had been revived, the android had a visibly pained expression on his face. His heart twinged. “I’m sorry, Vision. Trust me, I am. I know what you’re going through. We all do. But it’s as Peter said: there’s no going back.”

Harley found Peter in his room, sitting on top of the bed they still shared. His back was to the door, but Harley didn’t care about that. He merely slid into the space his back provided and wrapped his arms around him, his head coming to a rest on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Peter sniffled. “Don’t be. You did the right thing. I just – I never got to call Tony Dad, you know? I never even got to call him Tony. He was always just Mr. Stark to me. My mentor, not my biological father. And I never got a chance to eat Thai food again with May, or say goodbye to Ned and MJ, or punch Flash in the face. I never got a chance to do any of those things.”

“I know.”

“And I – I get that Vision wants to see Wanda again, I do. But it’s never going to happen, and him acting like it can, like we can just snap our fingers and get them all back, is – it’s agony.”

“I know,” he repeated. There were tears falling down his cheeks. Hastily, he wiped them away. “Being the only ones to survive sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

~~~

“Boss, my scanners have detected some unusual lights coming from the building Peter went into about twenty minutes ago,” Harley’s AI, ROSE, told him months later in August, when he was out on patrol.

“Unusual lights?” he repeated. He was in the middle of blasting some members of the Tracksuit Mafia, because being the idiots that they were, they just kept on coming when provoked.

“The building has also collapsed.”

His blood ran cold in his veins.

“Jesus, ROSE, why didn’t you just lead with that?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll update my protocols.”

“You better,” he snarked.

Blasting out the nearest couple of the Tracksuit idiots, Harley fired up his repulsers and headed towards where the building was, silently cursing himself the whole time. He had known that trying to bring down Kingpin, the guy who had a finger in every pot of the crime syndicates of New York, had been a bad idea. Especially because, with the dusting of every other vigilante in New York City besides Spider-Man, he had been running unchecked for some time. And especially, especially because Nat and Vision were currently out on a mission.

But when Peter had turned those big, pleading eyes on him, he had been unable to say no.

And now, of course, Peter was paying the price for it.

When he got to the building five minutes later – five minutes too late – Harley very nearly had a heart attack then and there. The building wasn’t just collapsed, it was smoking and mostly burned to a cinder. Weird, nonsensical objects were strewn all about it too – things like a subway car even though the subway wasn’t anywhere nearby, or a mailbox with a series of Hi! My Name Is stickers stuck on it.

There was a girl about ten feet away from where he landed. She had black hair and dark eyes, but he was more focused on her purple suit and the quiver of arrows on her back. He knew what those meant. Nat had been keeping an eye on her ever since she had popped up a couple of months ago.

“What the fuck happened here?” he snarled as he stalked up to her.

“Oh my God, you’re Iron Lad,” Kate Bishop, otherwise known as Hawkeye 2.0, said. Her eyes were wide. “You’re an Avenger, just like Spider-Man!”

“The Avengers are dead,” he snapped back. “I repeat, what the fuck happened here?”

“I – I don’t know! I just – I saw Spider-Man go in there and – ”

“Did you see him come out?”

“I – I – ”

“Did you see him come out?”

“No!”

Harley pivoted his body and ran into the building. He didn’t need to hear anything else she could say; she was going to be useless.

Inside, the smell of smoke was in the air, prominent enough that he could smell it through his mask. He coughed slightly, told ROSE to enact the filters, then delved as deep as he could into the remnants of the building. It wasn’t easy. There was rubble everywhere, rebar everywhere, the ruins of what looked to have once been a giant machine everywhere.

Suddenly, he was reminded of the fact that Peter had been in this kind of situation once before.

His blood practically became ice.

“Peter?” he called out, while ROSE automatically activated her scanners again. “Peter? Peter, where the hell are you?”

From about ten feet away horizontally and two vertically, he heard a groan.

“I have detected approximately six signs of life,” ROSE said helpfully.

Harley barely paid attention to her as he hurried over the rubble, skirting over the dead body of what looked to be Kingpin. Well, at least he wasn’t going to be a problem anymore.

He saw a flash of red and blue.

“Oh, thank fuck,” he breathed.

But, of course, as soon as he finished saying the words, he wished he hadn’t said them.

The red and blue he had seen was not the red and blue metal of the Iron Spider suit. It wasn’t even the red and blue of Peter’s fabric suit. It was...different, somehow, and the body within it was too tall and too pudgy to be Peter’s. Nearby, there were an assortment of people and...something else in suits as well – one black-and-red, one white-and-pink, one black-and-white, and the else blue-and-red – along with a teenage girl and a giant robot.

Blearily, the original red-and-blue person sat up, rubbing a hand against his head. “Again, really?” he groaned, before he blinked and looked up at Harley. The eyes of his mask squinted. “Who the heck are you?”

“I’m Iron Lad,” he snarled, raising one of his blasters for good measure. “Now, where the hell is Peter Parker?”

~~~

“Alright, let’s do this one last time,” Nat said. She was pinching the bridge of her nose, and looking like she was about to murder him. Next to her, Vision was gazing at the six Spider-people in front of them, along with Kate Bishop, looking quite fascinated with the entire thing. “You and Peter decided to go and take out Kingpin while Vision and I were away on our mission, like idiots.”

“Yes.”

“You then split up, even though I explicitly told you not to when going out on missions.”

“Yes.”

“And something happened with the machine that was in that building, causing these Spider-people to appear...from the multiverse.”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“I raised you two better than this,” she finally decided.

Harley gaped at her. “Excuse me, you didn’t raise us at all!”

She ignored him. Turning back to look at the Spider-people, she appraised the pseudo-leader of them. “You said this has happened before,” she said. “Can you fix the machine and get our Peter back?”

Peter B. Parker scratched the back of his neck. “We should,” he said. “It could take a few days, though. Last time it wasn’t blown to complete smithereens.”

“But you can do it?”

“We can do it,” the black-and-red Spider-Man, Miles Morales, confirmed from his place right next to Peter B. Parker. “We’ll get you your Peter back, Ms. Black Widow, ma’am.”

“Just call me Natasha,” she snorted, before she turned to look at Kate Bishop appraisingly. “You. Hawkeye. I want to talk to you.”

(...And that was how Kate Bishop somehow winded up joining the totally dead Avengers and moving into the Compound. Although he wasn’t going to complain about that. Honestly, she may have been useless before, but one look at her scrappy clothes told him that the Snap had left her with nowhere else to go.)

~~~

Harley didn’t sleep.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t implied that he had no choice, that the reason he couldn’t sleep was because he was so used to Peter’s back up against his stomach he couldn’t sleep without it. It wasn’t. He did have a choice. And he was just choosing not to.

Instead, he worked on the collider. The parts of it had been moved to one of the warehouses on the Compound and, with some blueprints hastily drawn up by the Spider-people, he had a good idea of what he needed to do to make it work.

He spent all of his time in that warehouse. The only times he came out were when he needed to eat or shower, or when one of the Spider-people came in.

The sound of the doors opening interrupted his thoughts – or, at least, it would’ve, had he had any. Turning, he squinted his eyes at the door, the bright lights of the warehouse combined with his lack of sleep making it hard for him to see who was there.

“Harley Keener,” the voice of Gwen Stacy said.

He grunted, and turned back to his work. He was at least going to finish what he was working on before he left. Besides, it was just her. The other rambunctious members of her ragtag team weren’t around.

Gwen walked over to where he was working and leaned against the collider. She gave him a look.

“What?” he asked.

“You don’t like us very much, do you?”

“Gee, it took you that long to figure it out?”

She smiled at him in response.

Sighing, Harley set down his tools and rubbed at his eyes. He needed more coffee for this. He needed more kindness for this. The only people in life it felt like he could ever be willingly kind to anymore were Peter, Abigail, Nat, and Vision.

And wasn’t that a pretty short fucking list?

“It’s not that I don’t like you,” he said. “...Well, okay, that Peter Porker guy creeps me the fuck out, but the rest of you seem pretty okay. It’s just that...”

“You miss your Peter Parker?”

“Yeah.”

“He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”

He didn’t even have to think about it.

“The most,” he whispered, then coughed. “Besides Abigail, I mean.”

A pause.

“I...I can’t lose him.”

He felt her hand on his shoulder. Blinking, he looked up at her. Her smile was sad now. More wistful. “I know what that’s like,” she said. “Now, come on. Scoot over. Let’s get this collider finished before we all start glitching out again.”

“...Wait, what?”

~~~

Four days after they lost Peter, they got him back.

He was a little sad, to see the Spider-People go. The only one he had talked to was Gwen, but they seemed nice. He was even sadder at the fact that the collider broke as soon as they shut it off, this time irreparably, because for a brief moment he had allowed himself to hope that it wouldn’t. That it would continue to work, and continue to work until they could bring back the Stones from other universes and fix theirs.

But that didn’t matter, because the entire reason why they had fixed it in the first place was to bring Peter back.

And he was back.

“What the – ?” he heard Peter mutter as soon as he appeared. His back was to them and he was facing the collider. Shakily, he reached out with his hands and presumably touched his face. “Am I – ?”

He spun around.

“Harley! Nat! Abigail! Vision!” he breathed, then ran towards them. He attacked them in that order, first wrapping his arms around Harley, then pulling the others into the hug, one-by-one. “Oh my God, you fixed it! You brought me back!”

“What, did you really think we were gonna just let you die out there in the multiverse, all alone?” Harley asked. “Of course not.”

“I got turned into a cartoon,” Peter mumbled into his shoulder. “I didn’t know what to believe.”

“Could be worse. You could have had to deal with a talking pig,” Natasha quipped back.

He laughed.

Eventually, they broke apart. Peter’s eyes traveled around the room, then came to rest on where Kate Bishop was standing nervously a few feet away.

“Hi,” she said awkwardly.

He walked towards her, his face unusually serious. “Hawkeye. What are you doing here?”

“I – um – kind of live here now? At least, that’s what Natasha told me,” she said, biting her lip. “I suppose it’s – uh – kind of up to you, though?”

“And why is that?”

She blinked. “I mean, don't you own the place?”

Peter cracked a smile. Playfully, he punched her arm. “In name only. FRIDAY practically runs everything except for my free will,” he said. “And yeah, that’s cool. I’d say more, but I’m really hungry. Can we make some cheeseburgers now? The cartoon version of them sucks.”

That night, the two of them slipped into bed for the first time in four days. The feeling of Peter’s skin against his was magnetic; it was all he could do to not sigh in relief at it.

“I saw Aunt May,” Peter told him quietly.

Harley froze. “What?”

“It wasn’t actually my Aunt May,” Peter assured him. “She was old, and had blue eyes? I don’t know, it was weird. But she put some things into perspective for me.”

“Like what?”

He shuffled around until they were face-to-face. His big, brown eyes stared up into Harley’s own.

“We’ve been sharing a bed for a year,” he said. “You’ve been letting me sleep with you for a year. Most people don’t do that. Not unless...they love someone.”

Harley’s heart stopped being in his chest.

“Do you love me?”

“I...”

“Tell me,” Peter said. His eyes were pleading. “Please.”

How could Harley say no to him?

“I do,” he admitted. “I love you.”

It felt like a weight lifted off of his chest.

Because he did. Ever since he had first laid eyes on Peter, ever since he had first seen him small and frail, ever since his heart had twinged for him, he had loved him. It wasn’t hard; in fact, Peter made it easy. He was kind, and honest, and selfless. He was everything Harley was not and would never be, but desperately wanted to anyways.

He expected Peter to look at him in disgust, at his admission. He expected him to get out of the bed and run back to his own, never to come back again.

Instead, he reached out with his metal arm, the same one that they had made together two years ago, and cupped Harley’s face. The touch of the metal was cool. He resisted to lean into it.

“That’s good,” Peter murmured. “‘Cause I think I love you too. I’ve just been afraid all this time, because I don’t think it’s a love there’s a cure for.”

Harley blinked. “Did you seriously just quote The Partridge Family at me?”

He shrugged. “It was all the Aunt May from the cartoon universe would let me watch. Apparently, it’s a thing there, too.”

Laughing, Harley pulled him even closer than they were before and started peppering his face with kisses, all the kisses he had wanted to give him over the years. He didn’t stop until he placed one on his lips, which made both of them look at each other, blushes spreading across their faces.

“You’re a fucking dork, you know that, right?” Harley asked.

And then he went right back to kissing him.

Because yes, maybe pretty much everyone they had ever loved was dead. Maybe there was no way of getting them back. But as long as he had Peter, as long as he had Abigail, Harley would be alright.

They were all that he needed.

~~~

“Oh, uh, hi, is anyone home? This is Scott Lang! We met a few years ago at the airport, in Germany? I was the guy that had the mask on, I got really big...”