Chapter Text
Peter and Harley had been dating for a while now. To be more specific, they’d been together for about three - nearly four - years. They never hid their relationship exactly, but none of the Avengers living in the Tower (or even those who came to visit, come to think of it) seemed to have noticed yet. Or caught them making out in one of their bedrooms. Or their lab. Or the common room. Or the kitchen. You name a room, they hadn’t been caught yet. They always thought that was strange - both boys expected someone to have walked in on them by now. Especially over the course of three years.
What was even stranger for them was that the Avengers kept trying to set them up. Clearly, they’d worked out that the two had a thing for each other, but they just hadn’t found out that they were already dating. Every time one of the Avengers approached either boy to try and get them to go on a ‘blind date’, said boy would immediately text the other.
Most weeks, they were asked about four or five times each - which they originally thought was a lot, but they quickly realised that, when the entire building was trying to set them up, wasn’t really that much. Both Peter and Harley thought that they’d get tired of being asked the same thing over and over, but both of them found it more funny than they did annoying. However, over the last few months, they began to notice that the Avengers seemed to have given up - Harley and Peter were being asked less and less.
“I think they might have got the gist that we’re just going to decline their offer every time now.” Peter suggested to Harley one day. They were sitting in Peter’s room, and they had made the realisation that no one had asked them to go on a ‘blind date’ that week.
“Probably.” Harley agreed, smiling slightly. “Took them a damn long time, though.”
Neither boy knew why they never told the Avengers. They supposed that they’d figure it out - they lived with super spies. Harley and Peter started dating when they were seventeen - a year after they met - and they graduated high school the year after. They went to MIT together, practically begging Tony to pull some strings so they could be roommates.
Originally, they had decided to say nothing about their relationship - they wanted to keep it to themselves at first, but also weren’t sure how every Avenger would react. What if one of them was homophobic? What if they moved Peter and his Aunt May out of the Tower, meaning that Harley and Peter would barely see each other outside of school?
That was understandable at first. But now, it was abundantly clear that the Avengers didn’t care about sexuality - many of the Young Avengers weren’t straight, and they were fine with it. They wouldn’t be any different towards Harley and Peter. However, the couple still hadn’t told the Avengers - they didn’t know why.
After they finished MIT, Harley bought his own apartment, not too far away from the Tower. Peter decided to still live in the Tower - he wasn’t ready to leave May alone, and he had figured it would be best to live in a building where he could be treated immediately when he was injured as Spider-Man. Additionally, it meant that he was almost always in the building when the Avengers were called out for a mission.
Some nights, Peter slept at Harley’s apartment, but no one ever really questioned it. It was never unusual for the boys to sleep in each other’s rooms when they both lived in the Tower - they would fall asleep together after they watched a movie even before they were dating.
Obviously, both boys were old enough to do what they wanted. Being twenty-two, the adults only cared when Peter went out as Spider-Man, or the boys wanted to do something that could get them banned from multiple states across the country. Which is why any experiments Harley wanted to try out had to be done in the Tower, not in the makeshift lab in his apartment.
All in all, the boys aren’t obvious about the fact they’re dating, but sometimes they wonder how the Avengers or any other members of their immediate families haven’t picked up on the fact that they’re dating.
If they were being honest, the main reason that they haven’t told any of the Avengers now is because they found it entertaining. Both boys found it funny that the Avengers and Aunt May kept trying to set them up when they were already together.
At the beginning, they’d planned to tell them all when they’d been dating for a year (they could move out much more easily if they were eighteen, in the situation that anything would go wrong), but they never got around to actually telling anyone.
When Peter turned eighteen (he was a few months younger than Harley), Aunt May really wanted him to ‘go out an explore the world’, as she had put it. Peter knew that meant that she wanted him to go out on dates and find himself a girlfriend or boyfriend - instead of spending his weekends with Tony, or building Lego sets with MJ and Ned. Peter had already come out to his Aunt as bisexual by the time he was twenty, but he just hadn’t told her that he was dating Harley.
She’d tried to get Peter to go on so many blind dates, or convince him to join dating apps, but her nephew had declined every single time.
Harley and Peter had found out that their parents wanted them to go on blind dates with each other when Peter went to Harley’s apartment and was told that Harley’s sister, Abby, had been texting her brother about a blind date that she wanted Harley to go on.
Peter had made fun of Harley for a bit, mentioning his own experiences with his Aunt, and, eventually, the Avengers, wanting him to go on a date with a random stranger (as far as he was aware at that point).
Eventually, after complaining at lengths about the situation, they managed to work out that they were consistently asked about going on these blind dates on roughly the same days. The boys joked about the situation being suspicious, but they didn’t really think anything of it.
Harley found proof of the situation when Abby had stayed over for a week in the summer. The boy had overheard his sister on the phone with their mother in the kitchen. It was pretty amusing - in Harley’s opinion, anyway.