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“Tell me again why you’re putting yourself in danger?” Peter hollered, swinging himself over a burst of machine gun fire.
“Someone’s gotta keep an eye on your spider-butt!” Harley shouted back. The other boy then shot back at Machine Gun Dude, but using his specialty sci-fi potato gun. Hot, steaming hash browns splattered across the bad guy’s face mask, and while he flailed trying to wipe it off, Peter zipped in, yoinked the gun, and laid him out with one well-placed punch.
Incredibly dumb. But also, undeniably, fun. Probably the most fun Peter had gotten to enjoy since- well. Thanos. The Compound battle. Tony.
He shook his head, trying to ignore that thought. It helped that Harley came trotting down the street, both hands lifting his potato gun up and down in the air as he whooped. “And that is why we never underestimate the value of a good carbohydrate!”
Peter grinned under his mask. “Don’t you mean a good vegetable?”
“Now don’t start that again-”
They cheerfully bickered over wonky food categories while Peter webbed up Machine Gun Man and Harley disassembled said machine gun, and had just transitioned into quoting the ‘decay is an extant form of life, you can’t kill me in a way that matters’ mushroom meme when the first cop car pulled up.
Or at least, what Peter initially thought was a cop car.
Right in the middle of laughing with Harley, his Spidey Sense went off. And of course, of course, Peter first whipped his head around towards the prone bad guy. That made sense, right? But no, the alarm bells in his head went up a notch, because he turned his back to the vehicle with flashing lights, and a split second later something that did not sound like a regulation police pistol went off.
And a body tackled him.
Twisting instinctively, Peter got himself in-between Harley and the new problem - the other boy didn’t wear a proper suit, his pieces of armor and tech were all separate components instead of a cohesive whole. And underneath? Plain t-shirt and jeans.
Harley let out a deep oof when they hit the ground. Peter didn’t give himself time to apologize. Instead, he leapt and spun, hauling ass towards the cop-lookalike who’d tried to pull off an ambush. The big weapon she’d braced against the open door of her car went off a few more times, but he moved too fast to be hit. When Peter reached her, he slammed into the door feet-first, practically tearing it free from the rest of the vehicle.
From there, it was a short fight.
“Dude,” Harley called, staggering upright as Peter pretty much coated the woman in webs, “Overkill much?” Broken glass from the first fight crunched as he took a more winding path towards the imposter car. “Where are you hit?”
Peter blinked. “What?”
“Blood, dude - where’d you get hit?” Startled, Peter looked down, and sure enough, bright red marred the darker metallic material of his suit. Nothing hurt, though, and Karen would’ve come out of background functions to tell him if any of the bullets got through-
His head snapped back up towards Harley. “It- it’s not my blood.”
“Huh?” The other boy stumbled. “But that’s-”
“It’s not my blood,” Peter repeated, already lunging forward. He caught Harley just as the blonde started to topple over, also with blood splashed against his gear, but with the key difference that it was coming out of a hole in his side. “Harls!”
“Shit,” his friend mumbled. “That’s... not good.”
“Hang on, I’ve got you-” Peter swiped through different webshooter options and pulled up Bandage mode. “This is probably gonna hurt, but it’ll be okay, I promise!” Seal up the wound and stem the bleeding, check. Secure a web-harness to keep them pinned together, check. Send an SOS through Karen to May and Happy, check. “Just hang on, Harley.”
Whatever the other boy said back, Peter missed it, leaping off the ground and hurrying away even as real police sirens pulled onto the street.
Tell me again why you’re putting yourself in danger?
Someone’s gotta keep an eye on your spider-butt!
(If Harley ever tried to come out on patrol with him again, Peter wouldn’t agree unless he was wearing Hulk-Buster level armor, and maybe not even then.)